‘Our tapestry of friendship was woven by the magic of Byculla’

Cinematographer-film director Rafeeq Ellias and global head-hunter Ramgopal Rao on mid-city roots and madness

Rafeeq Ellias, 72, photographer and filmmaker 

Ramgopal Rao, 71, executive search consultant 

Byculla boys Rafeeq Ellias and Ramgopal Rao rib each other relentlessly, quipping and teasing whenever they meet. This time is no exception, when Rao has come visiting from Pune, where he lives presently.    

Copywriter to photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker, Ellias has over 40 awards to his credit, including an Emmy for UNICEF TV commercials, two National Awards and an Asian Broadcast Award for his BBC World documentary, The Legend of Fat Mama. His documentaries feature the Chinese Indian community incarcerated after 1962, The Kumbh Mela for Britain’s Channel Four, two films for Microsoft on India’s unique ability to create software engineers, The Ninety First Symphony about Western classical music aficionado Homi Dastoor and What Man, Joe about a Bandra funeral trumpeter. The recent film, If Memory Serves Me Right, screened in more than 10 festivals around the world, has won Best Cinematography and the Satyajit Ray Gold Award. 

Ramgopal Rao and Rafeeq Ellias

A reputed global head-hunter, Ramgopal Rao is Chairman of the Pune chapter of the British Business Group, a UK-India Bilateral Trade Platform. He is in the process of setting up the Pune chapter of the Federation of Indo-Israel Chamber of Commerce, of which he is the Chairman designate. On the Governing Council of the private Spicer Adventist University, as a representative from the industry, he is also a passionate Rotarian and bibliophile with a personal collection of well over 10,000 books. 

With a keen interest in exploring the city, the friends explain why it will always be Byculla meri jaan for them. 
...
Ramgopal Rao: I met Rafeeq at the YMCA in Byculla, where we used to play table tennis. I was in Class VI at St Mary’s, he a year ahead in Christ Church School.

Rafeeq Ellias: Ramgopal has an embarrassingly uncanny memory. He must be right about us meeting, conducting “ping pong” diplomacy with both genders. 

RR: Right from schooldays, Rafeeq was a confident person. My role model when it came to articulation, dress sense and sheer bravado. 

RE: More bluster than confidence really. My pals were car mechanics and footballers. Getting bullied a fair bit, I figured the best thing to do was watch Hindi movies, Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali. The transformative moment was fully Chaplinesque. With three sisters to defend, in a moment of recklessness, I punched a local dada’s jaw. He fell to the ground. We splashed cold water on his prostrate ego. I was hailed his successor for 24 hours. 

RR: I lived on Byculla’s Club 
Road, he on Club Back Road. Rafeeq was a foodie, I’m vegetarian. He loves tucking into kheema pao and brun maska at places like Sarvi in Nagpada.  

RE: Ramgopal’s father worked for the Reserve Bank in a very senior position, but voiced his own take on politics and the economy with considerable irony and terrific humour. I saw lifts in buildings first in the RBI staff quarters. We routinely rode up and down in them, ringing doorbells and running off.

RR: I admired Rafeeq’s panache, the style with which he wore bright shirts, yellow, red and blue. On asking where he got them from, he promptly took me to Smart & Hollywood at Esplanade Mansion in Kala Ghoda. 

RE: Wow, Smart & Hollywood. They’re history now with Esplanade Mansion in a freeze. The colours Ramgopal remembers sound pretty lurid. But those were Rajesh Khanna days. 

RR: Rafeeq is a born wordsmith. No wonder he gravitated to advertising. I wanted to follow suit and managed an interview in the mid-’70s with Clarion McCann. I was given a copy test by creative director Syeda Imam. Which, apparently, I flunked because she never got back to me. Immediately after, I stepped into business.

RE: My dad read me to bed Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man monologue, Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and Neville Cardus’ exquisite cricket writing. He loved the language. 
Advertising equally demands street sense. I was the gully boy who understood the larger public, the consumer’s mind. Let’s just say I sent my “evil other” to work in advertising—Clarion McCann and J Walter Thompson here, and Ketchum MacLeod & Grove in Tokyo. Ramgopal was too decent, too honourable for that. 

RR: My strong views on religion are opposite of Rafeeq who’s quite irreverent of religious practices. We manage to co-exist. 

RE: Not a word of advice works in either direction. We exchange spirited banter about each other’s beliefs (or lack of), in jest. We have in common the ability to laugh at ourselves, over beer and limbu paani respectively, of course.

RR: Rafeeq sure strings along a prank. He shot photos of me posing extensively, only much later confessing the camera had no film in it. Sadistic streak! 

RE: The wonderful tapestry of our friendship was woven by the magic of Byculla, an area with the quintessentially “intricate ballet of streets” as the urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs says. 

We shared all the rhythms of life with different communities. Ramgopal is a Seventh-Day Adventist. There was a Methodist Church around the corner too. A Chinese school and a Chinese newspaper. A synagogue, mills, mosques, several temples. Even a communist party office with a picture of Marx presiding. 

RR: I respect Rafeeq’s principled stand. He has been extremely firm with clients, getting his way for professional fees. The sense of understanding money may be from his Memon roots.

RE: Ramgopal is the ultimate archivist. We look back to the days you could sell cigarettes even to young adults. Swing with Simla was a weekly promo I compered for a few months, with music and dancing on Sunday mornings at Slip Disc, a handshake away from Radio Club in Colaba. That was probably Bombay’s first disco where bands like Brief Encounter played. It’s where Led Zeppelin strolled in and bashed around with a bit of music in 1972. 

Seriously, the bonds of early life leave an indelible imprint. A childhood in our kind of neighbourhood is the great marinade that defines us forever.

Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes monthly on city friendships. You can reach her at meher.marfatia@mid-day.com/www.meher marfatia.com

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