By Jaideep Sarin, IANS
Chandigarh, Sep 30 (IANS) They have been successfully selling ‘nonsense’ for the last 25 years. Welcome to the mad world of the ‘Nonsense Club’ founded and run by satirist-actor-director-engineer Jaspal Bhatti and his band of faithful friends.
The unique thing about Bhatti’s Nonsense Club is that it has no building, no permanent or life members, no venue and does not even hold regular meetings. Yet it has done well in these 25 years, delivering social messages every few months to highlight the plight of the middle class through street shows.
The club, a brainchild of Bhatti when he was an electrical engineering student at the Punjab Engineering College (PEC), was born in 1982.
“We started on a small level with just a few friends to highlight social evils with a lot of satire. There has been no looking back,” Bhatti told IANS here.
Among the earliest street shows that he did was one to highlight the silting of Chandigarh’s famous Sukhna Lake in 1984 when the water level at the man-made lake went down so much that its bed starting showing.
Bhatti and his club members ran into the dry areas of the lake, pitched wickets on it quickly and started playing cricket.
“It was very interesting. People thought that we were running into the lake to commit suicide. They ran after us but we managed to put up our cricket show there. By that time, lens men had taken our pictures and the job was done,” recalls Vinod Sharma, a ‘nonsense’ compatriot of Bhatti.
The next day’s front-page picture in The Tribune and other newspapers about the plight of the lake and of Bhatti and others playing cricket on it woke up the local administration.
While many members of the club have come and gone, a few like Bhatti himself, wife Savita, friend Vinod Sharma and singer-actor Brajesh Ahuja have been associated with it throughout its 25-year journey.
Vivek Shauq, a local actor who was part of Bhatti’s famous TV shows “Ulta-Pulta” and “Flop Show” and has graduated to playing roles in Bollywood, continued to be part of the club for several years.
“It is 25 years of this unique club. We must celebrate its silver jubilee,” Bhatti said.
Among the issues Bhatti’s club has highlighted are bride-burning, bridegroom sale, fuel price hike, Diwali gifts, black-marketing of cinema tickets, adulterated food, high onion prices, heavy school bags and sycophancy.
“We were enacting a skit on bride burning at the students centre in the Panjab University campus in the mid-80s. The student audience was so touched by our satire that they started throwing money to help us,” said Sharma.
For doing all the things he does, Bhatti has had to ride horses, write and sing songs and even face criminal cases for hurting religious sentiments. But for the middle-class, Bhatti remains a real favourite, highlighting their everyday travails of life.