At around ten on a December morning, I accompanied a 58-year-old man on an inspection of his organic cheese farm in Coonoor—a small hill station in Tamil Nadu’s Nilgiri hills. Cows, mostly Jersey and Holstein, grazed languidly in nearby pastures. He stopped for a moment to examine the grass feed, which is grown organically on the farm, and we headed towards one of the cottages that he leases out to tourists. There, he instructed his staff on preparations for the next guests’ arrival. This man who was arranging for bed covers to be changed was once one of Bollywood’s biggest filmmakers—Mansoor Khan.
Our last stop was the “Cheese Cottage,” where the farm’s famous artisanal cheese is made and aged. Inside, Mansoor’s wife, Tina, was teaching a guest how to make cream cheese. “Processed cheese does not count for aficionados,” Mansoor quipped. Stacks of different cheeses—gouda, gruyère and cheddar—lay ageing on the ground. The milk for the cheese comes from a cow shed a hundred metres from the cottage. A gobar-gas plant under the shed uses methane from cow dung to produce the energy used in making cheese, and also in cooking in Mansoor’s home.
Mansoor’s farm, called Acres Wild, is the key to the ideological beliefs that have shaped his life. He traded an incredibly successful film career for what he calls an “ecologically sustainable” and “socially just” way of living. After making some of the most memorable Hindi movies of the 1980s and the 1990s—starring his cousin, the actor Aamir Khan—whose career he launched in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, he not only quit Bollywood but also urban life itself. He bought 22 acres of land in Coonoor, where he built a self-sustaining cheese-making farm. At the same time, he studied the relationship between the environment and economics, and started giving lectures on the topic at several universities, including the Indian Institutes of Management and the Energy and Resources Institute in Delhi. By 2011, Mansoor had written a book on the subject. Bollywood, now, is not much more than a blip in his life’s trajectory. “I was more of an incidental filmmaker,” Mansoor told me. “I was more of a vagabond with too many things going on in my head.”
In 1977, Mansoor left for the United States and studied computer engineering at Cornell University. In 1979, he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but dropped out within a year, never finishing his bachelor’s degree. “My mind started shifting,” he told me. “I couldn’t see myself working in a regular nine-to-five job.” He said that when he dropped out of MIT, he knew there was just one more year to go, but he had made up his mind. When he returned to India, in the 1980s, he started making short films, with Aamir helping out. His father, Nasir Hussain, who produced massive hits such as Teesri Manzil and Yaadon ki Baarat, urged Mansoor to join his production house.
In 1988, Mansoor decided to direct a film using a script his father wrote—Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. At the same time, he was writing the script for what would become one of Bollywood’s most iconic sports movies—Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar. Mansoor described it as the film that best reflected his own mental state. The main character, Sanjay Lal, played by Aamir, undergoes a transformation while facing overwhelming circumstances. Although he made two more feature films, Mansoor was never entirely comfortable in Bollywood. His thoughts were drifting away from cinema.
In 1997, a piece of land Mansoor owned in Alibaug came under the threat of acquisition for a proposed international airport outside Mumbai. He started reading up on land acquisition, dispossession and development. Somewhere during this extensive research, he chanced upon the field of energetics—a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding energy, that combines disciplines as diverse as thermodynamics, chemistry and economics. Mansoor started reading voraciously on energy, resources and growth, and, at the same time, wanting to get out of Mumbai. His ideas on these subjects developed over the last two decades—a process he calls his “awakening.” His book, The Third Curve, which he published himself in 2011, was a product of this research.
“Growth is a subject I am obsessed about,” he told me, “because it’s the cause of so much damage.” The over-arching argument in his book is that the belief in perpetual economic growth is at odds with the finiteness of energy and resources on the planet. He told me that it’s an idea which is bound to cause disquiet in quarters that treat growth as a religion.
Mansoor started researching cheese-making around 2005, and persuaded his wife to join him in starting a farm. Though his farm is located amid an ocean of tea estates, Mansoor didn’t want to grow tea commercially because he found the activity ecologically unsustainable. Now, guests at the farm are served his ideas along with the meals. It is an integral part of the Acres Wild experience. Copies of Mansoor’s book are stacked up in the dining area, along with books about ecology and environment.
Visitors to Acres Wild can also take a cheese-making course. The farm’s gourmet cheese is sold under the Acres Wild brand at select outlets in Ooty and Coonoor. Tourists visit his cottage to unwind, and are drawn as much by Mansoor’s present views as by his colourful past life. Apart from domesticated hens and cows, wild animals such as boars, elephants and deer walk through the estate, and are also a tourist attraction. Mansoor even sighted a leopard once.
Over breakfast one day, Mansoor told me he still gets inquiries from script-writers and producers. When I asked him if he missed his years in tinsel town, though, he just smiled and shook his head.