A jumbo-special Holi! Vidyut Jammwal bonds and makes a splash with elephants in Jaipur

'Junglee' star Vidyut Jammwal celebrated Holi by bonding with elephants and being endlessly sprayed with pond water by them. He tells us why, despite having the best time of his life during the film’s shoot, he was always respectful.

For elephants, a rollick in the water is just a regular day. But for most of us who don’t live in #waterbaby-style Instagrammable locations, Holi presents the perfect opportunity. So when Vidyut Jammwal found out about Jaipur’s Haathi Gaon, a safe stomping ground for pachyderms, he knew that’s where he was celebrating Holi this year. The star of the upcoming film 'Junglee' spent his day bonding with the elephants, lovingly applying a touch of gulal to their foreheads, wading into ponds on elephant-back and being sprayed endlessly by his bearer with pond water. But Vidyut didn’t mind; it was a warm day and the elephants wanted to keep their backs cool, he just happened to be in the way.

That’s exactly what he learnt during the shoot of 'Junglee' – the elephants decide, not the humans. “Whenever I was with the elephants, I had to be feeling a hundred percent. Like earlier, when I tried to get on top of one of these elephants, I knew she didn’t want me up. So I was aware and I knew she’d topple me down, which she did. I just landed on my feet because I was careful. On 'Junglee’s set too, every time I was with the elephants I was having a lot of fun. But if I didn’t feel it from them, I didn’t go there. They’re as moody as human beings,” Vidyut tells us.

'GATHER AROUND, CHILDREN’: Lakshmi, Gomti, Shakuntala, Muskan and Tara graciously spent their day with Vidyut and schoolkids at Jaipur’s Haathi Gaon. The kids, of course, couldn’t take their eyes off the majestic elephants

When he was a kid, Vidyut says his mom told him, “Agar tum haathi ke neeche se nikal jaao toh tumhari sau saal umar ho jati hai.” Then with a grin, he adds, “So I shot a video in Chiang Mai, where I crossed from under the elephant five times. Greedy me! Mom was happy with the first one only. She didn’t care, ‘kahin dab mat jaana’. She was just, ‘very good!’.” That and 'Junglee’s promos might give you the impression that Vidyut was perfectly at ease around his mammoth co-stars, but what he says next surprises you – “I’m always scared around them. Always.” The actor explains why that fear is essential. “Hence they get the respect they ought to,” he says, “Fear keeps you on the edge. When I was standing on the elephant, it’s petrifying, by the way. It does scare you but being scared makes you more careful. Respect the being. You don’t fool around with them. You have to respect boundaries with them.”

It was that respect that helped Vidyut not be lulled by the myth of the ‘gentle giants’ and always be aware of their power. “You just keep hearing it, ‘They’re very gentle’. Gentle? Have you seen them angry? You’ll be surprised,” says Vidyut. That’s the dilemma conservation has faced often – people are driven by their fear to harm animals, or by misguided love or arrogance to get too close to them, which gets them, and often, the animal, killed. “Honestly, we should start with respect rather than love,” says Vidyut, “My relationship with my mother is more of respect, and then love comes second. There’s no first and second, but respect is the first thing – that gets the love. We need to respect these creatures, not only for their size, but for what we don’t know about them. We know nothing about them.”

Vidyut explains that the ‘gentle’ branding fails to recognise something far deeper in the elephant. “We just say, oh they’re gentle. But it’s actually that they’re so aware. They will never bump into a human being. You put five people in a small space, we’ll be pushing each other. But on set, you have 20-30 elephants, they don’t bump into each other, it’s amazing. So much awareness of this huge size of theirs. Their awareness is superior, far more superior.”

Vidyut has also nailed some killer Kalaripayattu moves in the movie, and he says the martial art helped him understand that awareness better. “What can’t be noticed by the common eye is that when they stand, their weight is not on their legs, it’s in their centre. In the Vedic science of Kalaripayattu, they say that if you start imbibing what you can from any creature – it could be a monkey, squirrel, giraffe, elephant – you can experience many lives in just one. We move like every animal. So what we imbibe from elephants is not their size, it’s how they keep themselves glued to the ground. And it’s not because of their weight, it’s because they keep themselves centred, grounded,” he says. To give a demo, he digs his feet into the ground in a warrior pose and asks two guys to try to tip him over. As intended, they fail. “What Kalaripayattu does, it explains to you everything you need to imbibe from them,” says Vidyut.

What Vidyut is hoping 'Junglee' achieves is a greater awareness about elephants and what they need to survive today. The film deals with poaching and the immediate danger they face of extinction. “Yes, in general, I don’t think they’re meant to interact with humans. But the ones we worked with in Thailand were domesticated. Their survival depends on learning how to deal with us. And that for me is a tragedy. That to protect them, we first have to tame them out of their natural habitat. But 'Junglee' is trying to show them at their most natural. We’re not making a song and dance about it, not preaching. We’ve not ‘taught’ anything, but people, especially children, will learn so much. I’ve realised that education, if it’s fun, will teach you. 'Junglee' expresses this fun.”

However, Vidyut’s idea of ‘fun’ during our shoot was still about educating, we realise, when he says, “One of the things that were running in my head when I was on top of the elephant was that we need to do this more in our country. We had to shoot the film in Thailand, but spending my day here, playing Holi with them, I felt so good that I’m doing this in my country. I felt so good that people will know about this place where they can come and really enjoy the elephants. That was my idea of fun (laughs).”

Our shoot started with five pachyderms, but once in the water, three of them just decided to roll onto their side and kick around in the pond. Like Vidyut told us, the elephants decide the day, not us!

And as you plan to have your fun today, Vidyut wants to leave you with this one thought: “With the elephants, I was always having a lot of fun. But it always came with being respectful of what they wanted, how they felt about me being around. I couldn’t cross any lines with them. That’s exactly how you ought to play your Holi too.”

Put that on your pichkaari!

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