Iraqi shoe-thrower’s last salute to Bush

Muntazeral Zaydi will now be enacted in Mahesh Bhatt’s play, The Last Salute.

MUMBAI:

Iraqi journalist Muntazeral Zaydi, who threw his shoes at former US president George W Bush at a press conference in Baghdad in 2008, will be in Delhi to watch actor Imran Zahid enact the protest in Mahesh Bhatt’s play titled The Last Salute.

The intrepid journalist Muntazeral Zaydi’s tryst with globally recorded shoe-throwing is now the theme of a stage play — The Last Salute to be produced by Bhatt and directed by well-known theatre personality Arvind Gaur. It will be staged on May 14 at the Sriram Centre.

Most interesting of all is the fact that the young actor Imran Zahid, who plays Zaydi, has been in constant touch with the journalist to understand the mind of a man who chose such a crude but effective way of political protest against Americanism.

For months, Zahid has been struggling to comprehend Zaydi’s Arabic emails.

“To play Muntazer, I needed to understand the man’s motivations as a human being, journalist and political individual. Though he speaks a smattering of English and we’ve conversed on the  phone many times, Muntazeral Zaydi writes only in Arabic. All his emails came in Arabic.

“I had to ask a lecturer-friend from Delhi University who specialises in Arabic to help translate our correspondence. She helped me unravel the enigma of Muntazer as contained in his emails. It’s only through his writing [on email] that I actually understood why he did what he did,” said Zahid.

The actor, who’s all set to play the Iraqi journalist in Delhi followed by one-off performances in Mumbai, Kolkata and Dubai in the same month, shares some of the unknown facts about Muntazeral Zaydi.

“Muntazer had been repeatedly warned by the Iraqi government of dire consequences because of his anti-establishment stance, but he remained defiantly pro-democracy. Not too many people know that he had gone to the Bush conference prepared to hurl the shoes, so it wasn’t a spontaneous display of outrage.

“He had, in fact, taken off his shoe before entering the Bush conference and then carefully placed the shoe under his chair. A woman saw him putting the shoe under his chair and asked him what he was doing with it,” he said.

Zaydi told Imran: “So many dog sniffers and metal detectors couldn’t decipher my true neeyat [intention] that day.”

Zahid’s most recent email from Zaydi said: “I am going to Tahir Square on Friday, March 4, even if they arrest or kill me, I’ll still protest.”

These incidents, anecdotes and statements that Zahid has collected through his enduring communication with Zaydi has now gone into playing the character on stage.

Zahid, who has also been selected to play the slain students’ leader Chandrashekhar Prasad in Mahesh Bhatt’s Chandu, is feeling nervous.

“I’m not allowing myself to think that I will be creating history when the real Muntazeral Zaydi will be sitting in the audience in Delhi watching me play him on stage. It’s a feeling I can’t describe in words,” he said.

Also expected at the historic play from Bollywood are Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan, Hema Malini, Shatrughan Sinha, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. Plus, of course, the entire Bhatt clan including Emraan Hashmi.

But Bollywood is not what Imran is excited about. After having interacted for so long with Zaydi, the actor is looking forward to meeting him.

“Not just that. Mahesh Bhatt saab will appear on stage in Delhi and the other three performances to read a letter that he wrote to George Bush in 2003. Bhatt saab will also moderate question and answer sessions with Muntazeral Zaydi after each stage performance. All in all I think we will be creating a kind of history,” said Imran Zahid.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2011.