Kaustav's Arden

‘The Descendants’: Paradise Lost and Regained

2012-02-12T08:19:00.000-08:00

In The Descendants, Alexander Payne treads the beaten track and doesn’t once pretend to be different. Yet, The Descendants strikes you as oddly different, even if you can very well predict the end. As in case of any popular film, you stay on to witness ‘how’ the already known ‘end’ happens.

Set in the Hawaiian archipelago, the film goes beyond the 'showcase' beauty of the land to tell the story of a troubled paradise. This paradise is not just geographical, but also domestic. An extended family glued together by a covetous interest in the land it owns in Hawaii, a few acres that would fetch a fortune in the face of the burgeoning tourist interest in the place. Matthew King is back to settle a deal, while he is faced with an unforeseen misfortune. His wife has a terrible accident and goes into coma. The doctors see no hope of her coming back to life. King soon realizes that he has a bigger deal to settle: two growing daughters who he barely knows and the harsher reality of an adulterous wife, whose days, incidentally, are numbered. In short, the personal paradise of a happy family is lost to King. The rest of the film is an emotional odyssey to restore the lost paradise.

Family as an ‘affective unit’ has gained tremendous importance with the rise of capitalist economy. In fact, the family has constantly acted as a buffer countering the profound brutality of capitalism. As a source of love, affection and emotional security, the family has moved from strength to strength cushioning out, as it were, the insecurity capitalist economy has bred. In the era of late capitalism, the family continues to play a similar role, given that mobility across the globe has increased extraordinarily in the past three decades. Where there is no possibility of taking refuge in the family as such, communities of like-minded people (defined in terms of race, religion, sexual orientation, or even a homeland left behind) are being formed. Family narratives, therefore, naturally dominate popular culture everywhere. In fact, since 1994, the International Year of the Family, films and novels dealing with and actually rejoicing the ‘familial’ have been produced in considerable numbers across the globe. The Descendants belongs to this very genre rooted in the tousled matrix of personal relationships and ownership of private property. The final mission is to save the family, for that matter the monogamous heteronormative family.

The film is a tad too long; but the very lackadaisical pace goes very well with the holiday mood of the place. Mostly shot indoors, the film barely tries to cash-in on the picturesque beauty of the archipelago, sufficiently commoditized by now. And that’s a surprise. On the other hand, by almost glorifying monogamy the film also manages to deconstruct the myths of libidinous excess associated with Hawaii in the popular imagination. However, sexual debauchery seems acceptable only when it is simply physical and not romantic. King would come to terms with his wife’s sexual escapade only if he is ensured that there was no love involved in it. There is indeed sufficient moralising which, however, does not grate on your nerves, for it is not done the preachy way. All of it seems real and identifiable. The Descendants is not an iconoclastic film at all; at times it does seem regressive. But, it’s difficult to walk out midway.

If not for anything else, watch the film for George Clooney’s father-act. He enacts his vulnerabilities with so much grace that they seem natural to him. Shailene Woodley as the angry daughter, exhibiting prominent Electra-complex, does impress despite Clooney’s magnetic presence. Amara Miller provides much of the humour and how!
In fact, the casting, overall, is brilliant.

The Descendants may not create a stir at the Oscars, although it has bagged quite a few nominations. But yes, for a one-time watch, it’s highly recommended. Given that Bollywood is only churning out trash currently, The Descendants might end up conquering the Indian box-office.

'Aparajita Tumi': Storyboard of pretty images?

2012-01-25T05:19:00.000-08:00

Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury had certainly raised our expectations post Antaheen, but Aparajita Tumi has thrown some considerable volumes of cold water on those expectations: a beautiful storyboard of perfect frames, but little substance. We’ve seen several films based on this theme in the recent past: the Indian diaspora in the United States and confused and unsorted relationships of the modern urban folk. Sounds familiar? The treatment of this already done-to-death story is also much too familiar. It’s undeniable that each one of us inhabits the emotional vacuum the film rues about. Yet, the film fails to draw sympathy for the characters. Therefore, the alienation.

I thought I should not give out the storyline. But, why not? In fact, it’s so thin it will take no more than a sentence. Here’s the bare outline: First, second and even a third (they’re still kids) generation Bengali diaspora in the United States…nostalgia for the homeland (ilish maachh and chingrir malaikari anyone?)…frustrated middle-aged men inextricably caught in the money-making machine…alcohol…deep sense of rootlessness…beautiful wives…paralytic boredom…shopping…weekend ghetto (read Bengali community) parties…extra-marital affairs…erstwhile boyfriends…estranged couples…confusion, confusion…sickness…loads of tears...back to un-happiness. Now join the dots in your mind. Got the story? But, no sentimental garbage on failed relationships: no relationship is bonded labour, after all. Right?

The following equation would be interpretative enough of what’s actually going on in Aparajita Tumi:

Diasporic anxiety + mindless materialism + meaningless emotional investment =
Existential anguish!

And don’t tell me: ‘Spare me the crap. I hate jargons’.

Well, no more of that. Let’s turn to the actors now: Padmapriya as Kuhu delivers a stunning performance; she has a magnetic screen presence, and more often than not reminds of Tabu. Seriously. How is Kamalinee as Usashie? Well, the film is self-referential: Kuhu tells Ushasie who’s bragging about a lead role she had almost bagged back home: ‘A pretty face and an hour-glass figure are not sufficient for acting. You need to have talent too!’ There you are! Prasenjit has aged remarkably ungracefully and that’s a downer enough; less we talk about his performance the better. Yawn. But Indraneil Sengupta has pulled off Yusuf with panache. His salt-and-pepper hair and that Bangladeshi accent…two thumbs up! Chandan Ray Sanyal is quite believable as someone caught in the money-making game. His low-key deliverance compensates for Prasenjit’s ‘over-the-top’ forced ‘subtlety’. Oxymoronic? Watch the film, and you would know.

Santanu Moitra’s music is something to look forward to. But he has failed to raise the bar. The Roopkatha track is beautiful, indeed! And yes, the cinematography! As I said at the very outset it is a collage of very well-shot moments. Mind-blowing visuals!

P.S: Can you tell me who is Arindam? I mean the person Anis (Kalyan Roy) is still searching for. I could somehow make out Anis’ connection with the Durgapur Steel Plant, but the Arindam factor still eludes me. Anyone?

‘My worldview has been wide from the very beginning’: In conversation with Omar Rahim

2012-01-13T20:19:00.000-08:00

Omar Rahim impressed us significantly with his performance in Rubaiyat Hossain’s debut film Meherjaan which created quite a stir in the International Kolkata Film Festival 2011. With quite an illustrious background and a keen sense of cinema, Omar has arrived to stay. He is a rare combination of looks and talent. The sheer sensitivity with which he has essayed the role of the Pakistani soldier Wasim Khan in Meherjaan is evidence enough of his potential as an actor. Here is a candid conversation I had with him over e-mail a few days back.

Tell us something about your childhood.

I’m fortunate to have had both a desi as well as cosmopolitan childhood. I was born in Karachi. My family left for Abu Dhabi when I was two-and-a-half where we lived until I was ten. After a six-month stay in Karachi, we moved to New York, where I attended middle school and high school. While the atmosphere at home was quite grounded in South Asian culture – Urdu spoken at home, poetry, cinema and lots of inter-generational socializing – I learned to interact with people from different countries and cultures very early on. My classmates in primary school were from all over the world and even my middle school and high schools, despite being in the US, were very ethnically diverse. I think that has been a great gift. My world-view has been wide from the very beginning.

Apart from acting, what are the things that interest you?

I have had a career as a contemporary dancer and choreographer in the US and in Pakistan. I was a principal in a New York-based postmodern dance company by the name of Susan Marshall and Company right out of university. I have also enjoyed telling stories through movement as a choreographer. These days I am writing a screenplay – a contemporary story about creative artists trying to stay true to their voices in the face of commercialism in the arts/media space. Other than that, I like gardening, cooking, reading and staying active.

How did you get into acting?

I had been interested in the arts for as long as I can remember. I’ve acted in plays throughout my school days. In university I sharpened my focus on dance, and ironically, it was through the dance community that I was recommended for a cameo in a Universal Studios comedy called the Guru starring Kimi Mistry, Heather Graham and Marisa Tomei. My next major role came to me again due to my dance work – this time the music video for Zeb and Haniya’s Aitebar. I had choreographed and featured in the project and a classmate of Haniya Aslam’s from Smith College in Massachusetts was casting for Meherjaan. She sent me the treatment and I accepted the film on the basis of the film’s theme and point of view.

Did you take acting classes? How did you train yourself?

I did all sorts of arts, music, drama classes in primary school. In high school, I auditioned for a Performing Arts/Video production company – not unlike the program immortalized by the TV show Fame. I took classes in vocal singing, acting and even dance from New York City professionals through high school and also learned the basics of film-making – from writing and story-boarding to acting and directing for the camera, to editing and post-production. I have since taken acting classes in New York City and watch films and theatre as much as possible.

How was the experience on the sets on the first day?

Meherjaan was a first film for many of us. Although I had had a cameo in The Guru, Wasim Khan was my first principal role. It was also Rubaiyat’s first film as a director. As a result, the first few days of shooting were exciting if a bit loosely structured. Samiran Dutta, the very talented cinematographer of Meherjaan, sensitively led us through when we encountered a block.

Tell us about the films that you have done so far.

I played the Indian Prince in The Guru many years ago and most recently Wasim Khan in Meherjaan. I have acted in some shorts in the States and made a guest appearance in a Pakistani dramatic serial called Neeyat.

What kind of roles do you prefer the most?

I like complex roles that provide room to explore shades of grey in a character. That said, I have yet to do a comical role, which I think would be great fun!

Are you more into mainstream/commercial cinema or art-house cinema?

I have a great respect for mainstream/commercial cinema although I am probably more an art-house cinema person by temperament.

Tell us something about your fitness regime and grooming.

I stretch and do yoga quite regularly and also try to work out and swim at least once a week.

Do you have any aspirations of working in the Indian film industry, say in Mumbai? If so, name the filmmakers you would love to work with.

I would like to work in Mumbai. I have been to the magical metropolis twice and managed to meet some of the industry’s preeminent directors such as Vishal Bharadwaj, Imtiaz Ali, Nikhil Advani, and Vinay Shukla. I like their work as well the work of Zoya and Farhan Akhtar, Ayan Mukherjee, Dibaker Banerjee and Anusha Rizvi. There is great dynamism in the Mumbai-based industry and I would love to get involved.

Are you aware of the scene in Tollywood (Bengali film industry) at present?

I have seen some excellent Tollywood films and wish that I had learned Bangla/Bengali so that I might have been able to work in the industry! From Satyajit Ray, to Aparna Sen, to Rituparno Ghosh, I have always been deeply moved by the Bengali cinema.

Do you have any filmmaker in mind who you want to work with?

There are so many terrific filmmakers in India and I would be overjoyed to work in India!

"Diaries of Transformation": Delightfully In-between

2011-12-22T22:01:00.000-08:00

Title: Diaries of Transformation: Work in Progress
Produced and directed by Anirban Ghosh
Camera: Farah Ghedra, Anirban Ghosh
Music: Satchit-Paulose
Distribution funded by Pratyay Gender Trust
Screened at: Dialogues: The Fifth Kolkata LGBT Film Festival, 2011
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Academic debate rages over the fact whether the subaltern can represent herself or is always represented by the bourgeois intellectual. However, Anirban Ghosh’s Diaries of Transformation: Work in Progress attributes sufficient agency to the gender subaltern, although the fact remains that Ghosh does represent the bourgeois intellectual. Interestingly, Ghosh is careful enough to address the issue in the film itself. Oishik Sircar, Human Rights Activist, talks at length on the English-educated bourgeois leadership in queer activism and the inaccessibility of many gendered subalterns to the discourses of contemporary queer politics. However, I felt that Diaries is interesting because it does not treat the sexual subaltern as a subaltern; in fact, the film is appealing because it narrates tales of victory, rather than victimization. True, both Rai and Suman have been maltreated by an insensitive employer and callous Kolkata police respectively; but, eventually, they emerge victorious. Raju, Bini and Pinky also have their share of misgivings; Sabir’s situation is even more interesting; for him it is quite difficult to reconcile his religious and sexual identities. Tista and Sudeb appear comparatively more enlightened, and talk at length on the politics of trans-identities and assimilation. But all of them are unpretentiously candid. Especially, Bini and Pinky impress with their warmth and their humorous, no-holds-barred derision of the hypocritical ‘straight’ population.
As one story effortlessly flows into and mixes with another, shots of the various nooks and corners of the metropolis act as means of transition, as it were. Kolkata is overwhelmingly present in the film. The gender margins are physically located at its centre: the Kalighat temple, the Howrah Bridge, the Book Fair, railway stations, markets and pedestrian alleys occupied by gully-cricketers. The hijra and the transsexual man are very much a part of everyday reality, yet invisible. Of course, the invisibility is not literal, but metaphorical: they are deliberately not seen. A shot of an elderly man, probably chewing pan, with a nonchalant expression on his face speaks volumes. He is standing on the veranda, the space that connects the home with the world, but is significantly indifferent to the world, as it were. Another marvellous shot is that of a little girl making an attempt to fly a kite, while the voice-over (Sudeb) talks about irrational gender construction.
Diaries is not only confined to the issue of transexuality; it also focuses on prostitution at length. Without this, the film would have been incomplete. While it sufficiently challenges the received notion of the transsexual as sexually promiscuous, it also treats prostitution as any other trade, dismantling the moral reservation associated with it. Raju, Bini and Pinky talk about their profession, the occupational hazards, and their aspirations with remarkable forthrightness, sometimes shocking the audience, sometimes drawing hearty laughs.
Family remains an important issue all through. Acceptance by the near and dear ones is at the end of the day important to each of them. Raju and Bini are particularly concerned about keeping their mothers happy, while Sudeb and Sabir are at pains to find acceptability within the family. Social humiliation is integral to their everyday existence, but none of them have given up. I would like to mention Suman’s mother in particular: delightfully simple, yet uncompromising when it comes to supporting her transgender son. Gender liminality is celebrated without any inhibitions, throwing to the winds the puckered brow of the moral police.
Technically too the film is quite brilliant. Ghosh has a keen sense of editing and of course a very clear cinematic vision. In association with Farah Gherda, he has done a commendable job with the camera. And finally, kudos to Pratyay Gender Trust and particularly, Anindya Hazra for promoting such a film!

"The Dirty Picture": What’s not so dirty about it?

2011-12-06T22:15:00.000-08:00

I watched The Dirty Picture sitting in the rear stall of Roxy Cinema amongst a raunchy, unsophisticated crowd whistling suggestively at every drop of the pallu and every hard-hitting dialogue! The 80s were exuberantly revived in the theatre as well as a marvellously uninhibited Vidya Balan bosom-thrust the narrative forward in a believably recreated well-known and often disparaged cinematic garishness of that decade. I was too small to have been to the theatre in the 80s; my first-hand experiences of the cinema hall had begun after the mid-90s, when multiplex comfort could not be even dreamt of. In the 80s, till the late 90s in fact, the educated middle class, especially Bengalis, had strong reservations against Hindi cinema, its mindless violence, titillating choreography and awfully ear-splitting cacophonies that posed as songs. Silk Smitha, the Southern siren, was as tabooed as pornography, or perhaps a moral sin! In fact, I clearly remember I was not allowed to see an otherwise ‘clean’ Sadma on Doordarshan, simply because of Silk Smitha’s erotic cameo! I guess more than the issue of clothes or rather the lack of it, Silk Smitha posed a major threat to the bourgeois hypocrisy about sexuality and sexual desire, by her totally no-holds-barred gestures and parade of socially ‘hidden’ body parts. The Dirty Picture self-reflexively satirizes this moral pretension by exposing the bawdy reality that lies underneath.
The most interesting aspect of the film is the format: reviving the 80s format to tell a 80s story is rather commendable. The sets, the costumes, the choreography, the songs, and the dialogues are all moving intertexts of what we have seen in the 1980s blockbusters. The dialogue gets as cheesy as Bahuton ne touch kiya hai, lekin kisi ne chhuya nahi, yet is so compellingly appropriated by the over-the-top narrative that you really feel drawn in. Vidya Balan makes it all sound and appear so convincing, as she almost effortlessly moves from cleavage-revealing, navel-flaunting raunchiness to sentimental vulnerability.
The film is commendable because it deconstructs what it seeks to construct almost in the same breath: while cashing-in on the female body as the most marketable commodity, it turns upon itself to satirize the practice with credibility you can’t help marvelling at. However, the film is rather weak in several points: especially, Silk’s acceptance speech at the awards function stand out like a sore thumb. The second-half of the film sufficiently loses the punch of the first, for Silk’s downfall is much too drastic and somewhat unexplained. Yet, what is interesting is that, the film could make appear the downfall tragic rather than engaging in moral judgement. But again, despite her boldness and unpretentiousness, Silk somewhat disappoints in death. Why that red sari and the vermillion? I mean the bridal makeup? She could have thrown conventional desires to the wind in the end as well! The film had not prepared us for this.
If not for anything else, watch the film for Vidya Balan: she has cautiously toed the line between the vulgar and the sexy, mouthed the mushy sentimental lines with tremendous credibility, and moved from the compulsively naughty to the lovingly vulnerable with so much sincerity that you can’t help ask yourself whether she is the same demure Lalitha. Naseeruddin Shah has given lechery a new meaning altogether. Emran Hashmi has definitely improved as an actor. But Tusshar is an eyesore! Had he not been there!
Well ‘dirtiness’ gets a makeover in this Milan Lutharia venture: remember it is not a biopic of sorts. It is perhaps the story of several so-called B-grade female actors who rise and fall without perhaps making any difference to the industry, but whose stories need to be told.

Gangor

2011-11-17T08:12:00.000-08:00

Director: Italo Spinelli

I remember reading Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Choli Ke Pechhe’ (‘Behind the Bodice’) some ten years back, when the memory of the rage this Khalnayak song had stirred up was still quite fresh. It was amazing, and excruciatingly painful, to experience how this Bollywood song was ironically used to bring home the unspeakable plight of a tribal woman. The sexual titillation of the seductively choreographed song with a voluptuous Madhuri Dixit gyrating with occasional bosom-thrusts was frowned upon by the censor board; but the way in which Mahasweta Devi used it gave a complete new meaning to the sensation the song had created. The story not only obliquely questions the shameless parade of female sexuality for public consumption; it also unravels the woman’s vulnerability in a society where beastly sexual hunger for the female body lurks in every corner. Reading Gangor with reference to the hardcore commercial flick Khalnayak is extremely important. While Khalnayak puts the modern day Sita (renamed Ganga) through the fire-test of keeping her chastity inviolate in a defenceless world of lustful men, and makes her emerge victorious, Gangor hammers home the reality of the powerlessness of the woman, doubly marginalized.
However, the Italian-Indian production Gangor, based on the short story, reverses the irony, to some extent, as it were. The story was about how the picture Gangor’s exposed breasts (a journalist from the city captures her feeding her child and publishes the picture in the papers) spells disaster for her; how she is raped multiple times and is transformed into a prostitute. The film has to a great extent ameliorated the grotesqueness of the story, the effect of which was mind-boggling. But, nonetheless, the message is more or less the same. However, the irony is reversed in the sense that the film by literally exposing the bosom of the protagonist cashes in on the same thing it goes out to critique. What a literary text can do without being sexually titillating, the film cannot afford to.
I agree that there wasn’t any pretension in what the director was aiming at. Priyanka Bose, as Gangor, has dropped all inhibition and has believably animated the character. Yet I am sure the film would never be released in India. The censor board would certainly step in and recommend several cuts. The irony is that even when a song like Choli ke Peeche can play uncut on national television with all its licentious suggestiveness which is more objectionable (as regards to the representation of women in films), the ruthless reality of a woman’s sexual vulnerability would come under the censor-scissors.
However, I thank KFF for showcasing this film. I am not sure about its fate, though.

"Meherjaan"

2011-11-17T08:07:00.000-08:00

Director: Rubaiyat Hossain

Meherjaan, primarily a love story, is bitingly political; the setting of the film, the 1971 war involving East and West Pakistan, is a terrible historical milieu etched in blood in the collective consciousness of the people on both the sides. The film unearths those painful experiences amidst a lyrical rendition of a beautiful love story.
Meherjaan is saved by a Khan soldier of West Pakistan; and the latter, in turn, is given shelter by the girl. Caught in the dilemma of whether to betray her own nation by falling in love with the enemy, Meherjaan holds her emotion back for a long time. But, she does fall in love eventually: Wasim’s humanitarian world-view that calls into question the grand narrative of aggressive nationalism wins her over. The greater part of the rest of the film is devoted to help Wasim return to his country safely.
While Meherjaan’s personal world unwittingly merges with the political, the war grows more intense with each passing day. A new nation is about to be born, but the political vision of its makers is seriously challenged. Feudalism is soon to be replaced by a new social order that anticipates communism; but, the positive dimensions of feudalism cannot be totally ruled out. An affectionate zamindar, the father-figure of the unnamed village in the interiors of East Pakistan, becomes the principal target of the Peace Committee. Eventually, he is murdered, and the village is set afire. A new country is on the verge of birth, but the bloodbath that precedes it is grotesque.

And, of course, interspersed is the tale of the woman who loses her lover to partisan animosity, and is raped by the soldiers. These tales have been often deliberately evaded by history; nobody has ever bothered to record the trauma and the unspeakable suffering of these women molested brutally during the war. Neela’s daughter born out of rape comes back to Dhaka to research on these women to find very little.
Then there is Salma. Her world is confined to a huge wooden almirah; her fantasies, her dreams and all her idiosyncrasies play themselves out there. She is looking for her knight in shining armour, who, eventually, comes. One good thing is the film, despite the agonies and pains, it portrays is not too awfully dark.
One drawback of the film is that the screenplay is a tad convoluted. It could have been slicker. However, Meherjaan, like Guerrilla, deserves to be released commercially in Kolkata. Bangladesh art-house cinema is certainly going places. It’s time they got wider international recognition.

'Sahib, Biwi aur Gangster': Love, Sex and Politics

2011-10-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

Tigmanshu Dhulia transposes Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Biwi aur Gulam (a Guru Dutt production) to contemporary Uttar Pradesh, precisely to the realm of a decadent Raja (Jimmy Shergill as Sahib), unable to outgrow his faded feudal glory and cope up with the rise of the common people, once their subject. Set in the bleak backdrop of dirty politics, Sahib, Biwi aur Gangster is a nerve-racking tale of crime and passion told with a spine-chilling honesty. The film in many ways recalls Vishal Bharadwaj’s classic Maqbool, especially in the love/power nexus in which the three main characters are caught.

Chhoti Rani (Mahie Gill) is way too modern and remarkably less passive compared to Chhoti Bahu of Sahib Biwi aur Gulam. In the game of power that unfolds Chhoti Rani plays a pioneering role that is almost destructive. Enigmatic and whimsical, Chhoti Rani has fallen from grace in Sahib’s eyes for having harbouring amorous feelings for a certain Lalit; the details of the love story, however, is left undisclosed. Under no circumstances is she ready to transgress class boundaries, even though she falls in love all over again with her ex-lover’s namesake, incidentally her chauffer (Randeep Hooda). A clandestine steamy love affair ensues whereby Lalit is ensnared by Chhoti Rani into acting the way she wants him to. Lalit too is no simpleton; madly in love, he throws morality to the winds and embarks on a vicious mission of overthrowing the Sahib and usurping his throne. What he realizes with a fatal blow is that he, despite his cunning and daredevilry, cannot outgrow his class. Class remains central to the narrative; and every human emotion subservient to the necessity of preserving the hierarchy.

The world of Sahib, Biwi Aur Gangster is not very unfamiliar to us. Besides Maqbool, we are also reminded of Anurag Kashyap’s Gulal, one of his finest films till date. In terms of storytelling the film scores the most for it keeps you glued to the screen as endless surprises await you till the end. The film is also worth a watch for the powerhouse of performances it delivers: Randeep Hooda is reinvented as the macho Lalit (alias Babloo); equally credible as a passionate lover and a compulsive evil-doer, Hooda steals the show almost effortlessly. Jimmy Shergill dons the turban of royalty with dignity, and delivers with aplomb. Mahie Gill is good, but needs more experience, it seems.

I am somewhat enjoying this new trend of reworking classics that have crazily caught up with Hindi filmmakers, and interestingly, most of them are doing justice to it. This is a very postmodern phenomenon, which not only offers a reinterpretation of the classics, but also calls into question the sanctimony of authorship and originality. Thanks to the emergence of the multiplexes, again a very late capitalist event, that films such as Sahib, Biwi aur Gangster, are finding producers and of course a doting audience.

'Baishey Shrabon': Death of Poetry and a Deadly ‘System’!

2011-10-04T23:23:00.000-07:00

It’s extremely difficult to review a thriller, for you often tend to give out the plot, which, of course, is commercially murderous for the film. Srijit Mukherjee’s Baishe Shrabon is primarily a thriller, but it is much more than that. The very title of the film, I believe, underscores the hegemony of the poet who has of late become so literally omnipresent (thanks to the farce the new government has made of him) that all other Bengali poets have been swept into oblivion. Sukanta, Sukumar, Binay, Shakti, Joy Goswami, and others are still esoteric property while Tagore has found access to the popular domain: none can deny Tagore’s superlative potentials as a poet; but this is also irrefutable that a politics of canonization can be discerned in analysing Tagore’s massive popularity and the comparatively lesser recognition the other poets have received. The climactic moment of the film therefore coincides with 'Baishe Shrabon', the day Tagore breathed his last. Interestingly, both Abhijeet and Prabir have to take the assistance of Google to find out the days on which the ‘lesser known’ poets have passed away.

On the other hand, the film is also about the death of poetry. A mad poet, who had set fire to the Calcutta Book Fair for publishers had time and again refused to publish his poetry, is at the centre of the narrative. Baishe Shrabon is different from other thrillers because it is not just about finding out with bated breath ‘whodunit’; it also engages the audience in working out the clue that may be hidden in the poetic lines found in the chits beside every victim. Interestingly, the victims are all from the lowest stratum of society, and the verses found next to them are predominantly proletariat in nature. Although the film does not clarify the choice of such verses, the silence speaks volumes. In fact, there is no criminal in Baishe Shrabon! It is the system! The reference to the anti-Establishment poetic movement (Hungry Movement) of the 60s is of special significance here.

Baishe Shrabon has adroitly blended the esoteric and the populist to a marvellous effect. The handling of the camera, especially in the narrow alleyways of the slum and in the last scene, is simply brilliant. Anupam Ray has not been able to recreate the Autograph magic though. However, Gobhire jao, profoundly rendered by Rupankar, stays with you long after the film is over.

The most promising performance is offered by Parambrata: it is his best, till date. He emotes perfectly, almost flawless; his comic timing is enviable; his accent, recalling his ‘Bengali medium’ background, is awesome. Prasenjit does not disappoint either, as was expected, although the character he plays has affiliation with several suspended police officers we have seen in numerous Hindi films; but, nonetheless, he is good. Raima Sen is effortless and Abir is loveable. The surprise package, however, is Goutam Ghosh. He animates Nibaran Chakraborty with so much life that you do feel your eyes moisten at his death.

Big Cinemas had a considerable number of viewers on Ashtami morning, and that speaks for the success the film is already enjoying. Wishing Baishey Shrabon a long run at the box-office! And a request: Those of you who have already watched the film, please do not give out the end! It does not deserve to be given out, really. People must go and find out for themselves, and believe me, it’s worth it.

'Rang Milanti': Queen of Hearts: Polyamory to Compulsory Monogamy?

2011-10-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

Kaushik Ganguly’s Rang Milanti returns to the age-old theme of the woman’s search for the right mate, vaguely recalling innumerable Bernard Shaw plays, particularly Man and Superman, minus the Shavian concept of the woman’s duty of creating higher beings and preserving them. However, the biological primacy of the woman over the man is certainly assumed. Kamalika is in love with four of her very close friends (Rik, a computer engineer; Tito, an aspiring filmmaker; DJ, a DJ; Laden, a clothes supplier), but cannot make up her mind. Deeply despaired of the separation her sister goes through, Kamalika does not want to take any hasty decision in settling on her partner, lest she too ends up in an unhappy marriage.
The interesting part is that film does not moralise about Kamalika’s polyamorous disposition; rather it approves of it jubilantly. The rest of the film is a delightful journey whereby Kamalika puts her four lovers through a series of tests, assisted by an equally delightful fake psychiatrist, suggestively named Anu Ghatak (which translates into catalyst). Kamalika’s brother-in-law (Saswata Chatterjee in an amazingly fun-filled role), lovingly patronizing as he is, doubles up as the psychiatrist to help her choose the right partner. The ten tests he designs for her lovers have names drawn from film titles: Kapurush Mahapurush (test for bravery), Bajimaat (test for presence of mind), Saheb (test for fluency in English), Father (test for baby-sitting), Kori Diye Kinlam (test for financial standing), Amanush (test for sanity in a drunken state), Ashukh (test for fitness), Abhijaan (test for adventurousness), Apanjan (test for love for family), and Lathi (test for respect for old people). Surprisingly, there is no test for sexual compatibility. Either the assumption is that the woman has no sexual desire, or the director did not have the guts to shock his middle class Bengali audience by making the heroine sleep with all the four lovers. The question of sex arises only when Kamalika has decided upon her partner and is thoroughly disappointed by his approach to sex. Then again, she accepts him for the message is that nobody is perfect. It’s disappointing that sex features last in Kamalika’s search for the ideal partner. The search is interestingly more class-conscious and value-oriented: actually, in order to survive happily in the upper/middle class bracket the woman is compelled to judge her partner on the basis of his social functionality rather than sexual prowess. Therefore, sex takes a backseat in the quest for the ideal mate, and practically so.
The four men surprisingly do not fight over the girl; they rather exhibit an incredible sanity in this whole affair, accepting gladly the girl’s agency in deciding upon her partner. They are too careful not to fall out with each other, notwithstanding who Kamalika eventually chooses. I was wondering when men became so civilized and rational. Ganguly’s men have finally come of age, at least on screen. It’s a tad difficult to believe that none of the four men really protest having to play a remarkably passive role.
The final message is that nobody is perfect, and one has to settle on the best out of this imperfect lot. Kamalika is ultimately not agential in this whole affair of making up her mind for the right partner. Her brother-in-law directs her through this utter confusion: the woman does not get the opportunity to consider her own priorities. Her final choice is conspicuously conditioned by the demands patriarchy makes upon women. Her desire for the right partner is given free play so as not to disrupt an existing social structure. The man eventually wins, all over again.
Nonetheless, Rang Milanti is an amusing watch. It is a fun-filled journey, thanks to Saswata’s amazing performance, Churni’s sophisticated demeanour, Ridhima’s vivacity and the credibility of the four men, Gaurab Chakraborty, Gaurab Chatterjee, Tanaji and Indrashish. Ringo as the snobbish Prakash is also praiseworthy. The music is a downer though. What is after all important is unalloyed entertainment, and Rang Milanti does not disappoint you to that end. A packed Star Theatre on Panchami evening was frequently breaking into splits and cheery claps, and that’s all a director wants.

Iti Mrinalini: Love, Life and…

2011-08-05T05:42:00.000-07:00

I was actually expecting to see something like Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963) as the curtains went up on Iti Mrinalini, the latest Aparna Sen venture. Well, the Williams play and the Aparna Sen film do have similarities; but, of course, I gave up on the comparison much too soon. Any story of a successful commercial actor would have some parameters in common. In fact, Marilyn Monroe’s portrait that hangs in Mrinalini’s (Konkona Sensharma) room and is conspicuously focused on all through the film, speaks volumes to this end.
In a television interview, a few days before the release of the film, Sen said that she has never tried to convey any message through her films consciously; perhaps, no good artiste ever does that. But, somehow, Iti Mrinalini does send out a message, loud and clear; but, without being preachy or didactic, of course. I’ll come back to that later. In fact, not a single message; rather messages.
It’s not very difficult to see why Sen claims that Iti Mrinalini is the most commercial of all her films. Because the film is based on the life of some fictitious mainstream actor of Bengali films of the 1970s, it demanded a commercial treatment, no doubt. But, at the level of the plot too, the commercial aspect is much too evident. Actually too much happens in Mrinalini’s life. In fact, too many tragedies befall her, which, in a way, weaken the plot, as there is a prominent tendency to sentimentalizing. If good cinema refrains from being sentimental, this is definitely a flaw. But, seasoned audience of mainstream Bengali cinema of the 1970s, would be generous enough to give Sen the license to sentimentality; and I am sure I need not explain what I imply here. May be the screen life and the real life of the actor gets curiously mixed up. One may recall the unending series of trials and tribulations, a female protagonist of mainstream Bengali cinema generally underwent in those days, assisting a marvelous exercise of the lachrymose glands of the overly soft-hearted Bengali mothers and aunts (a construct, mind you) who poured into the theatres foregoing their usual afternoon nap. But yes, Sen has nowhere crossed the limits, for her Mrinalini is an apparently strong person.
The film has the structure of a bildungsroman: Mrinalini’s journey from the margins to the center. Although she accomplishes a lot in her professional field, she loses out on the personal front. Actually, more than anything else, Iti Mrinalini, is a love story. It’s the story of a woman who seeks love all through her life; but, it’s not that she doesn’t find any. May be she doesn’t find the kind of love she hankers for. Although Chintan Nair (Kaushik Sen) counsels her saying that she has never realized that love is of different kinds, Mrinalini does not seem convinced. A daughter out of wedlock, a non-committal lover who is inextricably tied to her family and who keeps on telling her that he would come to her one day…Mrinalini does not get the social recognition as a wife or a mother. She acts aunt to her daughter and keeps hoping that Siddhartha (Rajat Kapoor) would legally tie the knot one day. Exasperated she eventually breaks the relationship (“It’s over between us”), but it takes her long to arrive at the realization (assisted by Chintan, of course) that he too might have loved her in his own flawed way. It was love, nonetheless. Chintan becomes her friend, philosopher and guide, and defines for her another kind of love altogether. In fact, it’s a two-word message from him “Ami aschhi” (I am coming) that saves her from taking her life. The ‘message’ is that love may not only happen within socially approved structures of relationships only; love mostly transcends such constrictions. Although Mrinalini seems to accept what Chintan says, her reaction to Imtiaz’s (Priyanshu Chatterjee) betrayal appears a tad too immature. Why does she contemplate suicide? Hasn’t she seen enough so far as not to succumb to such duplicity?
Anyways, the film reaches a different level altogether in the end. Mrinalini is notorious for trying to control everything in her life. In fact, her young daughter calls her a control-freak. When she contemplates suicide, she says that entry on the stage of life was not in her hand, but she can certainly time the exit. But, little did she know that life was more absurd than it appeared to be. When thoughts of death finally desert her, and she goes out to walk her dog with a renewed enthusiasm for life, she is shot dead by a bullet targeting a young boy (Saheb Chattopadhyay) on the run. This very arbitrariness of life which Sen beautifully represents sends a chill down your spine. What you simultaneously realize is that you have come a long way off from the Naxalite 1970s Calcutta to dwell in a city where crime has become the order of the day. It’s difficult to guess who this boy is. But, the doubling of Mrinalini’s boyfriend Abhi does trace a journey of the city and the changing ideology of its young denizens.
I was absolutely overwhelmed by Konkona Senshrama’s mind-blowing performance; Rajat Kapoor does a decent job, and Anjan Dutt’s voice-over matches his personality well. The voice does not seem lent. Kaushik Sen imitates the South Indian accent really well, and delivers with aplomb. Even Saheb Chatterjee gives a believable performance. Kudos to Ananya Banerjee as Sohini, Mrinalini’s daughter. And last, but not the least, Aparna Sen herself. She is as glamorous as ever but she could have been a little more careful in imitating Konkona’s mannerisms.
And, of course, the songs! Am still humming Ajana Kono Golpo…I can’t really get over the magical spell of Bishe Bishe Neel…Debojyoti Mishra has done a fantastic job! The songs would stay on with us forever…and may be enough reason to go back to the theatre.

Delhi Belly: Belly-ticklingly boisterous

2011-07-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

Delhi Belly is a test in how much you can laugh; in fact, it’s a laugh riot that may stand-in for a 96-minute VLCC abdominal work-out, of course without the perspiration! Your belly would literally undergo so many vibrations, you may emerge from the theatre trimmer than before! Delhi Belly is indubitably the best stress-buster to come in a long time. An adult comedy need not always bank upon double-entendre, slapstick and crass humour to draw the guffaws, and thanks to Aamir Khan, Abhinay Deo and Akshat Verma (the story and scriptwriter), the likes of Golmaal, Double Dhamaal, Dhol, etc. would perhaps run for cover now, out of shame. With Delhi Belly, the adult comedy in Bollywood finally comes of age.
Well, it’s a comedy of errors, and what an error to begin with, I swear! It’s gross, but, nonetheless, hilarious, for the whole thing remains so close to reality. Priceless diamonds get exchanged with dung ‘erroneously’, which in turn gets delivered to the devilish don who, of course, is not particularly pleased. And what follows is a roller-coaster ride of bhaag bhaag that barely gives you the opportunity to recover from your splits! The ensemble cast is a clique of men and women extremely identifiable, only that, they are caught up in a funny situation, which is not particularly funny to any of them, really! I believe that is indeed the hallmark of a good comedy. To add to that, like all good comedies, Delhi Belly does make you think, too. May be afterwards. The show ends in several deaths, break-ups and other unpleasant things underlining the darkness that looms large at the heart (read, belly) of the city.
The film begins with a familiar background score from the late 70s which soon reveals its source: the television at the airport airing a Rishi Kapoor track. This very song acts as an intertextual tool that refers back to the movies of the 70s, where the villains were inevitably smugglers. A clichéd theme is taken, given a make-over, and transmuted into a truly contemporary comedy. The tragic underbelly is however hard not to recognize. Violence, lust, covetousness, opportunism, distrust, blackmail, heartbreak, all these are woven into a rich comic texture, but, with a tragic undertone. The film’s greatness lies in operating on black humour without giving an overwhelming feel of it. Therefore, it’s hard not to laugh, but on second thoughts, the darkness does make its presence felt.
Imran Khan, Kunaal Roy Kapoor, and Vir Das make an awesome threesome! Specially, Kunaal as Nitin is unforgettable, given his believable struggle with an upset tummy through the roller-coaster ride. Vir as Arup is remarkably subtle, sometimes lost, and marvellously funny. Imran Khan is good, but certainly is overshadowed by his two other friends. The quirky Poorna Jagannathan as Maneka is ‘queerly’ loveable, and it’s hard to forget the scene where she shoos away an elderly couple by pretending to ‘ride’ Imran, when the latter gets a real hard-on! Vijay Raaz as the merciless don is full-on entertainment, and I wondered how he did all that with a straight face. Even Shehnaaz Treasury as Sonia performs.
Ram Sampath’s music is another plus. The disappointing thing is that the coolest track of the year Bhaag DK Bose Bhaag only comes in bits and parts, but somehow lends the film its marathon mood. The end credits roll with the extremely funny I hate you (like I love you) with Aamir Khan dressed in a way to remind you of Shotgun Murugan. I have rarely seen the audience sitting through an end-credit song so patiently and enjoying it too. And please note, the T-shirt Imran Khan wears for the greater part of the movie has ‘Stylish Rajnikanth Sunglasses’ written on it on a tag on the left side of his chest. Well, if that too means something to you!

Noukadubi: Beyond Rabindranath

2011-05-21T01:42:00.000-07:00

This review would be a little different from the ones I have been posting so far; in case of Noukadubi (The Boatwreck) I cannot really afford to share a review which is entirely my own. For, I must give respectable space to my friend Dheeman, the person I love to have as company when it comes to watching sensible movies. We have gone for innumerable such films before; but yesterday, it was a different story altogether. We were remarkably engrossed, yet we were having little conversations in between, which, in a way, facilitated my appreciation of the film. Initially, both of us were rather apprehensive of Noukadubi, for we both considerably disliked the novel. Although the theme is interesting, the very institution of marriage called into question, the execution is not enough artistic. The plot which turns on too many glaring coincidences had put us off completely. Again, the later part of the novel where Kamala almost mushily sentimentalizes her situation grated on our nerves. At times, it seemed we were reading not Rabindranath but a more populist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. I had been cribbing to Dheeman why Rituparno Ghosh chose Noukadubi of all other novels, but was, of course, eager to find out what novelty Ghosh brought to the text in his cinematic rendition. Hence, I got for us two tickets on the very first day of its release, and Dheeman came with a bulging bag carrying that part of Rabindrarachanabali that contained Noukadubi. He had kind of rushed through the final pages, I guess. Many of you might feel that it isn’t always necessary to read a novel before going for its film version. But in case of Rituaparno Ghosh’s Noukadubi, I would personally suggest that if you have not read the novel, it would be difficult for you to appreciate the spectacular departures the director makes from the original story. Re-narrating a novel frame by frame on celluloid is not desirable at all; Ghosh steers clear of that brilliantly and very interestingly renders one of Rabindranath’s not-so-good-novels rather watchable.

What Dheeman and I could not stop marvelling about is the little play on authorship that Rituparno introduces. From the very beginning of the film, Rabindranath enters the narrative as a character whom Hemnalini (Raima Sen) adores, and when asked by Annada, her father (Dhritiman Chatterjee) whether she has developed amorous interest in someone, she says that her obvious choice is the poet. Next, Ramesh (Jishu Sengupta) while shifting to his new house and setting it up, admits that Rabindranath has become an indispensable part of his reality and demand a special corner in his house. I guess he even uses the word bojha (or burden) that the cultural phenomenon called Rabindarnath Thakur has become in the educated middle class Bengali household. The picture of the poet is used quite frequently; particularly the positioning of the picture in the scene where Nalikakshya (Prasenjit Chatterjee) sings Tori amar hothath dubey jai (My canoe sinks all of a sudden) is rather suggestive. The camera moves from Nalikakshya seated on one side of the room to a tearful Hemnalini sitting on the other side. The picture sits royally in-between the two, almost, overseeing, as it were, the proceedings. While he is the primary inspiration behind the story we see on celluloid, the director good-humouredly calls into question the very sanctity of his authorship by moulding the existing text to serve his cinematic purposes, right under his nose, as it were. This in turn deconstructs the whole notion of author-as-God, and also perhaps rescues Rabindranath from the unquestionable divine status many have attributed to the poet. Ironically, the picture is shown to be ritualistically worshipped. The introduction of this picture leaves you wondering endlessly what happens when the author himself finds access into his own fictional world. Then again, whose fictional world is this? Rituparno’s or Rabindranath’s?

What Dheeman has been raving about since we watched the film, is the intelligent use of Intertextuality. And I completely agree with him. The Bhawal-Sanyasi case forms the subtext of the film and quite understandably so; Shakuntala too is an important inter-text. The story of the wife’s predicament when she finds that her husband has completely lost all memories of her acts as an elaborate dramatic irony in Kamala’s (Riya Sen) narrative. In one occasion there is a delightful reference to Tennyson as well. In the novel both Ramesh and Akshaye gift the same hard-bound copy of Tennyson to Hemnalini. The suggestion could be that Tennyson, the pioneer of mainstream Victorianism, was an important vehicle of cultural colonization in colonial Bengal. One may recall in ‘The Lady of Shallot’, there appears a couple walking hand-in-hand in the moonlit night, when Tennyson almost with a sense of urgency quickly adds that they are lately married. Love or sex outside wedlock was regarded sacrilegious by the Victorian moral police. Therefore, Tennyson as a gift resonates with political implications. Ironically, however, the very inviolability of the institution of marriage is sufficiently challenged by the novel (and the film).

The use of Rabindrasangeet is extremely intelligent and the songs selected meaningfully contribute to the plot. Khelaghar bandhte legechhi amar moner bhitore (In the core of my heart, I have started building a doll’s house brick by brick) with which the film begins acts a dramatic irony introducing Hemnalini’s vulnerability in love. The heart-rending Tori amar dubey jaye literally takes on the title, while adequately expressing the misgivings of estrangement. Tomar ashimey (In the eternity that you are) comes at the right moment when a lovelorn Hemnalini fights with herself to come to terms with her reality. And all ends well with Anandalok e mangalaloke birajo satya sundar!

Both Dheeman and I felt that Noukadubi has to be enjoyed not only on the level of the narrative, but in terms of its execution. Since we were both sceptical of the novel per se, the film came to us a pleasant surprise. And yes, once again, Rituparno Ghosh has proved he can really make his actors act: Raima is believable, Jishu is sublte, Prasenjit is almost perfect. The astonishing part is that Riya Sen has actually acted! Yes, you heard it right. But Monali Thakur’s voice-over has done a lot to accentuate her performance.

Overall an enjoyable film. But the film coukd have gained a little more complexity had Ghosh shown a developing physical relationship between Kamala and Ramesh before the latter comes to discover Kamala’s real identity. The novel had given clear indications of that. But for some unknown reason Rituparno has refrained from it. However, Dheeman disagrees with me on this point: he thinks that much is not lost even though Rituparno has not hinted at any sexual interaction between the husband and the mistaken wife. He hasn’t told me why, though.

The King Must ‘Perform’!

2011-04-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech is apparently a heart-warming tale of how King George VI overcomes his speech impediment with the assistance of an Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue. But the film has larger political implications: it is not just about conquering a disability, it is also about the public role of the King, and that too the British King in the 1930s who must put up a majestic performance on the world stage, a performance that would have well-meaning impact not only in England but the numerous colonies to which he was the ultimate symbol of power.

The film at one level offers a common man’s story, the Duke of York (who later becomes George VI) stripped of the royal aura that circumscribes him; at another level, it unravels the pressures of becoming the King of England, the obligation of performing as a King must conventionally perform so as to keep inviolate the notion of the Protector and perhaps also the hallowed image God’s anointed and appointed representative on Earth. In the face of the Nazi uprising in Germany, on the eve of World War II, the King cannot afford not to perform according to the expectations of his millions of subjects scattered across the globe. The personal and the political come into a major conflict which the King must resolve. He must overcome his speech impediment or tarnish his kingly image irredeemably. The film captures the psychological struggle of the disabled King with remarkable intensity without being preachy. Colin Firth carries off the role with panache and so much credibility that you fall in love with him.

It’s a story of the marginalized, ironically indeed. The King of England and marginal? The sublimity of The King’s Speech perhaps lies in its making this absolutely credible. The King is stripped off the aura that makes him King and the film imagines his private life with amazing sincerity. While probing into the psychological roots that may be the cause of the fumble, Lionel discovers how the young prince was forced to give up his left-handedness; how he suffered the painful treatment for his knock-knees; how his nanny hated him and pinched him in the presence of his parents so that he wailed to the disgruntlement of the latter. From early childhood, he was thrust into role-playing, and no form of disability or unconventional behaviour was encouraged in him; in fact, was mercilessly repressed. Here the King’s tale coincides with that of any unfortunate child who has gone through traumatic experiences for not being ‘normal’. This is exactly where the audience connects with the King’s story, and partakes his grief.

David Seidler’s screenplay which is a product of several years’ serious research is near flawless. However, the ensemble cast is perhaps something one should look forward to. Geoffrey Rush as the unrelenting speech therapist with an excellent sense of humour is a treat. Helena Bonham Carter as the King’s wife (I would not say queen and you would know why when you watch the film) is marvellous. She shares her husband’s insecurities with so much affection that she almost unknowingly ends up playing a caring mother to a helpless child. The rest of the cast is equally believable.

The King’s Speech is a must watch; it takes you within the walls of the imposing Buckingham Palace and reveals to you the emotional odyssey of a man beyond the grandiloquent mask of Your Highness that he wears and how!

Memories in March: Bonding and Beyond

2011-04-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

Aar Ekti Premer Golpo has paved the path for the issue of alternative sexuality find access to the arena of popular Bengali cinema. But Bengali cinema is yet to come of age when in comes to representing alternative sexuality; for, it’s high time that queerness was rescued from being an issue and represented as ‘normal’. Whether it’s Aar Ekti Premer Golpo or the present film Memories in March (Dir: Sanjay Nag), the endeavour to ‘normalize’ queerness is more than honest; but the very fact that it’s an ‘issue’ is something none of these films have been able to transcend. Perhaps, because Bengali cinema is still at a very immature stage of representing queerness, that it tends to get preachy documentary-style whenever queerness is discussed. Therefore when a disconcerted Mrs. Mishra (Deepti Naval) innocently asks Ornab (Rituparno Ghosh) that whether her negligence or her inability to spend quality time with her son Siddharth has anything to do with the ‘abnormality’ in him, Ornab is infuriated and tells her to have herself examined by a psychiatrist. Bengali cinema is still at a stage when a queer relationship cannot be represented like any other heterosexual relationship without the weighty baggage of justification. Many would argue the very concept of being queer is rather ‘new’ to India; in fact, the heteronormative/queer binary has entered the popular consciousness of the country after the economic liberalization in the early 90s. Therefore, it is impossible not to address the question of associating abnormality with queerness even at this stage. But I believe that queer cinema comes of age only when it represents same-sex relationships as natural, and not as something deviant which demands to be integrated into the mainstream. Memories in March has failed to achieve that maturity.

Coming to the film proper: Memories in March is not a merely a film about a gay relationship; it is something more than that. In fact, like many other Rituparno Ghosh films, it is about human bonding, about the genesis of new relationships between strangers despite apparent differences. However, things seem to happen too fast. Mrs. Mishra arrives in Kolkata to collect the ashes of her deceased son when she shockingly discovers that he was gay. She learns from Shahana (Raima Sen) that he was in a relationship with his boss Ornab, whom she accuses of having seduced her son. Ornab loses his cool and enters into a verbal tirade with Mrs. Mishra which ends in an emotional calamity. However, Mrs. Mishra gradually comes to terms with her son’s being gay and accepts Ornab and the fact of his being an integral part of her son’s life.

What strikes us as unnatural is how amazingly composed the characters are! Be it Ornab, be it Shahana, or be it the bereaved mother herself − all of them a remarkably controlled. Although Ornab breaks into tears sitting in the car at the place of the accident, the way he dresses up the very next day in office does not carry any mark of what he is going through. Shahana claims to be in love with Siddharth; but she too is exceptionally unperturbed. Mrs. Mishra too seems to rise above the trauma much too soon. Perhaps none of the characters believe in public display of private emotions. But somehow Siddharth’s sudden death does not seem to be a harrowing affair. There’s too much of an economy of emotions which at times appears incredible. However, I must admit that the songs penned by Rituparno Ghosh with their melancholy notes compensate for the emotions that seem to be lacking.

The film may appear a bit stifling for most of it happens in a poorly-lit apartment; perhaps the apartment contributes to the dark mood of the film, but somehow it appears a tad claustrophobic. Even the rains which come in the end only slant into the balcony of the flat drenching the clay ash-container. Besides that, too many television-style close-ups grate on the nerves at times; there’s barely a long shot in the entire film. Sometimes it seems that you are watching a telefilm.

Veteran actor Deepti Naval is simply outstanding; she is never over-the-top. Although remarkably composed, her eyes speak volumes. She does not act; she behaves and that too with an amazing dignity that suits her personality to a T. Rituparno Ghosh was comparatively better in Aar Ekti Premer Golpo; however, he tries his best to deliver. But his English is slightly strained. Raima Sen is extremely unimpressive as Shahana, although expectations were higher this time.

Memories in March is nonetheless sensible and demands a one-time watch at least. And let me tell you it does not appear to be a Rituparno Ghosh film as many had anticipated it would. Although the look-and-feel is reminiscent of many a Ghosh flick, none can deny that it has been made by someone else. It’s a Sanjay Nag film, after all. Despite Ghosh’s script, it certainly lacks the fine emotional touch that is the hallmark of an out-and-out Ghosh film.

N.B: I have one fear though: Rituparno Ghosh should not become the face of gayness per se. All gay people are not like Rituparno Ghosh. Perhaps this could have been better established had the film shown Siddharth over whom girls too used to drool and with whom Shahana fell in love, head-over-heels. That too would have contributed to breaking the stereotype even more!

'Dhobi Ghat': Intertwined lives and a city

2011-01-29T06:12:00.000-08:00

In his non-fiction narrative on Bombay, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta writes:

If you are late for work in Bombay, and reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and you will find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train like petals.

Kiran Rao captures through her lenses a Bombay which generates a new meaning for everyone who visits the city. What Arun (Aamir Khan) feels about the city ---“Mumbai my muse, my whore, my beloved’ ----- is Kiran’s feelings too, or else she could not have shot Bombay so romantically, yet realistically. The film opens on the rain-drenched Marine Drive through Yasmine’s (Kriti Malhotra) amateurishly held video-camera, and soon moves to other people and other stories inextricably connected with each other. Arun’s painting exhibition is a tribute to all the people coming from different states of the country, people who have made Bombay what it is today. Arun makes a dig at those whose political agenda is to officially provincialize the city. The film cutting across class and community borders is actually an answer to the drive towards such provincialization.

Shai (Monica Dogra) who flies to the city from New York on a sabbatical falls in love with Arun, while the slum-dweller washer-boy Munna (Prateik Babbar) gradually falls in love with her. The film effortlessly moves amongst the world of art, the dark underworld of the city, the posh high-rises and cramped slums, and breathes into the city the freshness of the sea breeze and the infinite mystery of the ocean itself, the mystery of how human relationships are sustained overcoming so many differences.

Arun’s discovery of Yasmine’s video-tapes reveals for him a new perspective of looking at the city. Yasmine, the newly-wed girl from Uttar Pradesh, captures every nook and cranny of the city, every single activity that forms a part of her Bombay life to send to her brother Imran in the village. Arun starts living Yasmine’s life through the tapes and is absolutely shattered when he conjectures that Yasmine had taken her own life in the very room where her videos have been playing day and night.

Pratieik’s dhobi is perfect in body language and in dialogue delivery. His awareness of his class when he visits his customers, his shyness when Shai offers him to be her city-guide and when he gradually falls in love with her, and his anger at his brother’s murder − all these emotions are in the right place. He doesn’t act, but behave. The same is true of Monica Dogra and Kriti Malhotra.

The camera within the camera technique is simply brilliant, for often you do not realize whose narrative you are listening to (read watching)? Is it Yasmine’s or is it the omniscient director’s? Tushar Kanti Ray has done a commendable job! Gustavo Santaolalla’s background score is so very much in tune with the scenes, that you barely recognize it as background score separately.

Lastly, a good piece of art is many things roped into one.. But quite significantly it reestablishes faith in the essential goodness of human beings. Perhaps this is what Dhobi Ghat does and how! A single visit to this ghat is not enough…you would feel like going back.

'Aar Ekti Premer Golpo': Shall we say ‘a good start’?

2010-12-24T21:04:00.000-08:00

Rituparno Ghosh’s Roop asks Indraneil Sengupta’s Basu if they are invited to appear at the Habitat together at the same time when his pregnant wife Rani (Churni Ganguly) wishes to go out for biriyani at Karim’s, who is he going to choose. Basu does not have an answer; in fact, he cannot have. For, both Roop and Rani are equally important and indispensable to him. Kaushik Ganguly captures with subtlety the tragedy of the bisexual man who oscillates and exhausts himself in maintaining the balancing act between his wife and boyfriend. While the whole world has labeled Aar Ekti Premer Golpo as the first Bengali ‘gay’ feature film, and in its review seems to tilt more towards delineating the vulnerability of the films two gay characters − Roop, the film director and Chapal Bhaduri, the veteran folk theatre actor, the vulnerability of Basu, the bisexual cinematographer is almost elided, as if he did not exist. What is remarkable is that the film does not stereotype Roop’s lover as exploitative or manipulative, but sensitively handles his character which, commendably enough, does not verge on the perverse. Basu’s tragedy is that he is caught between two relationships, one, socially approved, the other not; but the emotional quotient involved in both is equal. The last scene where Roop and Basu kiss and cry before they separate the reality of this in-between-ness and the very impossibility of finding a remedy to it becomes all the more conspicuous; and perhaps, it is here the film scores the most, notwithstanding its sensitive handling of the homosexual men as well.

So, let’s not call Aar Ekti Premer Golpo, a gay love story; let’s be a little more term-sensitive, and call it, a queer love story. However, the irony is, while the title of the film makes a laudable endeavour to dispense of with the sexual identity of its protagonists (underscored by the words aar ekti translated as ‘just another’), terms such as ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, or ‘queer’ cannot be done away with in interpreting the film. At one point Roop is questioned by a media-person whether the focus of his film is on Chapal Bhaduri’s sexual life; he annoyingly retorts that had he been making a film on Amitabh Bachchan, would he have asked him the same question. Do we refer to say, You’ve Got Mail or say Saptapadi as a heterosexual or straight love story? We don’t. But in case of a film dealing with same-sex relationships say, Brokeback Mountain, some branding such as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ or ‘bisexual’ is found almost indispensable. Can we stop being queer or feminist, and just be humanist? Perhaps labeling is indeed necessary to advance an identity politics in a world which is essentially sympathetic only to heteronormativity. The debate may continue endlessly, as to whether labeling of alternative sexual inclinations is necessary or not, but I am going to leave it to that, and turn on Aar Ekti Premer Golpo as of now.

Roop, the self-proclaimed liberated gay film director from Delhi who effortlessly cross-dresses and is very assertive about it, is, in a way, the alter-ego of Chapal Rani, the yesteryear folk-theatre actor of Bengal, who impersonated female characters on stage. At one point in the film, Momo (Raima Sen) tells Basu that Roop is using the story of Chapal Rani’s life as a peg to hang his own story. Such an observation, though refuted by Basu, is, I feel, true; for, Chapal Bhaduri has all of a sudden drawn much attention from filmmakers and cultural commentators in the wake of LGBTQ studies becoming ‘fashionable’ in India. He has, almost overnight, graduated into an object of study, owing to his sexual fluidity. Then again, his story is also needed to be told, and yes, the focus is severely upon his sexual life. No matter how vehemently Roop denies (in a penchant to be politically correct) that he would not highlight the actor’s sexuality, he ends up, childishly demanding Chapal Rani to be honest with his sexual life. The ambivalence in Roop becomes most palpable if one juxtaposes two scenes:

(1) At the very beginning of the film, Roop compassionately tells Chapal to stop telling his tale if he finds it very painful.

(2) In the end, Roop flares up with anger when Chapal refuses to expose some very private details of his life.

The undercurrent of exploitation is there, no matter, how much Roop and Chapal Bhaduri connect with each other. Or shall we say, queer people do hunt out stories (and it is necessary) that reflect their own lives in order to empower the rebellion against heteronormativity?

What is interesting is that, though Roop may appear as Chapal’s alter ego in the film (an observation that is strengthened by the film-with-the-film), both are different. While Chapal feels like a woman trapped within a man’s body, Roop celebrates his sexual fluidity. Both are gay, but not in the same way. Besides, locating the characters in history is also very important. The reality of having alternative sexual inclinations is not same for an English-educated, financially liberated, urban film director of the new millennium and a closeted, uneducated, economically handicapped folk-theatre actor of rural Bengal. Momo is right when she says that although Roop doesn’t admit to himself, he is as closeted as Chapal deep within. But superficially at least, Roop is considerably liberated, although he, like Chapal, remains lonely till the end.

Some of my friends were skeptical that the film might end up leaving the wrong message that gay people are essentially effeminate and are always victimized. The suggestive gayness in Jisshu Sengupta’s Uday who gradually falls in love with Roop perhaps saves the film from reasserting the stereotype. Many queer activists might find ridiculous how a young Chapal is always inclined to emulate heterosexual marital bonds in his relationship with his lovers. He cooks, washes clothes, looks after the house and the kids, and acts passive in bed. But it should be borne in mind Chapal could not have been otherwise, given his spatio-temporal location, and his lack of ‘community’.

Rituparno Ghosh’s acting debut is just about okay; someone younger could have been better, perhaps. Indraneil Sengupta is as usual mind-blowing, especially in the film-with-the-film. Jisshu Sengupta with a characteristic nonchalance would definitely take the cake. Raima Sen with her sheer effortlessness is gradually emerging as a good actor. Churni is fantastic as paraplegic in the film-with-the-film.

Aar Ekti Premer Golpo is definitely a good start; though not iconoclastic in the true sense of the term, it does open up new avenues for future directors to experiment on the same lines.

PS: The scene where Chapal and the paraplegic Gopa dance to Pran bhoriye trisha bhoriye would stay with you forever.

"Moner Manush": Where’s this Arshinagar?

2010-12-18T23:01:00.000-08:00

None can deny the indispensability of Lalan Fakir today. In the wake of communal violence that is ripping and tearing our country into uncountable pieces, Lalan’s philosophy of life and his world-view seem all the more relevant. While the Bengal Renaissance was bringing about unprecedented cultural transformation in the city, Lalan with his simplistic songs had brought in a revolution in the remote villages of Bangladesh, invalidating the caste-system and calling into question communal differences, especially between Hindus and Muslims, the two religious communities operating almost as binary opposites in the cultural consciousness of Bangladesh. Born into an orthodox Hindu family, and rescued and rejuvenated by a Muslim woman, Lalan graduated into a visionary who could not differentiate between communities. His utopian village in the heart of the forest turned out to be the Arshinagar (city of mirrors) of his song, where communal and gender differences were dissolved into an Anandabazar. However, his quest for Moner Manush (the man of the soul) continued till the very end of his life. It’s a union all great poets have always craved for, but have always felt a few yards short of achieving it: Milan hobe koto dine, amar moner manusher sone? was to be soon complemented by the heart-rending melody of Dariye achho tumi amar gaaner oparey/Amar sur guli paye charan, ami pai ne tomare…

Goutam Ghosh’s choice of subject is indeed remarkable. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel (or shall I say biopic?) on Lalan Fakir’s life, if read and understood, can act as a remedy to the contemporary disease of communal fundamentalism and associated violence from which our country has still not found respite. Structured like a bildungsroman (it may also be read as a kuntsleroman), the film traces Lalan’s journey from a simple village boy to a cultural icon of colonial Bengal. Because films are audio-visual, a lot could be said without the use of dialogues. The biggest flaw of the film is that more is told than shown, although the director’s expertise as a cinematographer shows itself in every single frame. Sticking too close to the written narrative, at 160 minutes the film seems to be testing your patience. Had it been a good 40 minutes shorter, Moner Manush would have been a classic piece of cinema. Sometimes, the film resorts to didacticism: the ‘preachiness’ of the dialogues could have been avoided by a smarter script. For instance, when Lalan comes back to his family as a Fakir, the conservative Hindu mother and his wife face a terrible crisis. They can neither give up on him, nor give up their jaat, for he has been nurtured by a Muslim family. The scene could have been made poignant had less been said; the pathos of the scene is totally marred by the in-the-face dialogues on caste and religion.

I am not too happy with Prasenjit’s performance; but, I do admit, he has tried to give his best. The vocal intonations were quite forced, and the voice-over (the songs) did not quite match with Prasenjit’s original voice. Paoli Dam is average, and looks funny in her first song, where she appears more like a lifeless puppet who dances as some unseen string is maneuvered from somewhere to help her make the moves. Indeed, the acting department is awfully poor. The songs are good, but not always used at the right sequence. The cinematography, as I already mentioned, is brilliant…the verdure green, the blue rivers of Bangladesh are brought to life by the camera that caresses them affectionately.

On the whole, Moner Manush is not bad; good for a one-time watch. But it does not leave any indelible impression as the expectation had been. No matter, how very much the Bengali film industry is raving about it, do not trust them. Or else, you would be disappointed. For, the film has not been able to leave the aftertaste of having truly visited Arshinagar.

The Varanasi Blast

2010-12-07T20:40:00.000-08:00

I could not imagine myself ranting about a blast that apparently blew up the Ganga-aarti on Sitala Ghat in Varanasi about which I was going gaga even a week ago. Today’s newspaper headline left me practically paralyzed. Who engineered the blast is not important to me, but what plagues me is the utter intolerance that is prevailing unmitigated in our country. The papers are juxtaposing the 2006 blast in Varanasi and the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition with yesterday’s terrorist attack in order to place this blast in history. Such an attempt is a painful reminder of several unspeakable incidents of communal violence that have torned our country asunder and have left deep incurable scars on our souls. No communal violence can be treated as an isolated affair; and I am inevitably reminded of Paul R. Brass who observes: “It is not possible to develop a casual theory of ethnic riots separate from the discusses which encompass them free from the pressures of the prevailing ideologies and social scientific paradigms and the master narrative into which they are so often placed” (Riots and Pogroms, p.11).

Every time these terror attacks, these ethnic riots take innocent lives, I wonder whether we are not too far away from regressing into complete barbarism. The irony of our hi-tech society is that the more we have advanced technological, the more reactionary have we become in terms of humanitarianism. If “eye for an eye” is the philosophy which rules the worldview of several ethnic groups that constitute this nation, the very idea of the Indian nation would collapse very soon, if it practically hasn’t already. Let’s delete such terms as democracy, republic, etc. from our constitution, which barely have anything to do with our present-day reality. The grand narrative of nationalism has already seen its demise in the wake of global postmodernism…only that, we are learning it the hard way. This is, however, not to suggest that any alternative to the democratic framework of the nation is desirable; we do not want India to emulate Burma or Sri Lanka. But what lies ahead is utter darkness. I feel sorry for myself that I cannot afford to be optimistic any more. Is there anyone out there who can see a silver lining anywhere on the fringes of this dark dismal cloud that has covered us?

Varansi: What's not so holy about it!

2010-11-12T23:39:00.000-08:00

Well…my nine-day work and play in India’s supposedly holiest city has left me craving for Dettol which would have turned into an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder had I stayed there for even a week more! My heart had already filled with misgivings the moment I had stepped on the platform which, incidentally turned out to be abnormally shorter than the length of the train, causing us to jump and tripping over our luggage which we had literally thrown down beside the track. This was followed by the usual hazards of finding the right kind of transport, and once it was eventually found, we were ushered into pandemonium as it were. Milton would have certainly found more epic similes appropriate to describe hell, had he ever experienced the Varanasi traffic. There were barely any signals, and almost no traffic police (the one we saw at a crossing was busy checking out clothes on the roadside stand), and what we witnessed on the streets was ten times less disciplined than the post-Tsunami chaos one encountered in the South Asian islands. Thankfully there were no buses; the smaller vehicles bumped into each other, rubbed against each other, shoved people (and the ubiquitous oxen) out of their way, yet, nobody complained, as if, chaos was the order! And I better not talk about the pedestrian! I found it difficult to apply even ‘downmarket’ to them; that was discovered to be a serious understatement. In fact, there are no adjectives in the English dictionary to sufficiently describe the crowd which famously or infamously resembled our Canning/Diamond Harbour counterpart. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! What struck me in the midst of the chaos was that the city was terribly dirty! I doubt whether there is at all any sanitary system, or may be a different meaning of sanitation is in vogue there! By the time we reached our hotel, we were imagining dirt trickling down our bodies, which no ablution ceremony could purge.

The Dashwamedh Road, where we stayed, could even give our Chandni Chowk a run for its money, for a never-ending stream of humanity floated over it, as perennially as the Ganga herself. And this part of the city was a curious mixture of tradition and modernity! Signs of globalization existed side by side with the past which made itself heard rather stridently. Global travellers strolled on the streets taking in the chaotic oriental holiness, overwhelmed by the spirituality which was rather palpable. The Kashi Viswhanath Temple and the Annapurna Temple were only two of the several holy abodes that housed around 84 lakh gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. Spirituality was literally in the air, but depressingly undercut by a feeling of nausea that never seemed to desert me. The only time, I felt sufficiently removed from the calamity that reigned was at the time of the Ganga-Aarti, a ritualistic performance with several props. Holy songs accompanied the dance-like movements of the priests (might not be priests, actually) who carefully performed the Aarti in remarkable harmony with each other in front of an awestruck audience. The scene appeared heavenly from the boat floating on the river.

The famous alleyways were remarkably adventurous, giving you the feel of getting lost in a maze, with old intimidating houses augmenting the feeling of claustrophobia with every step that was taken. You would be invariably reminded of Jatayu who had felt that every single house lining the alleyways was haunted. Yes, true enough! They were haunted by the past, overburdened by the histories they carried with them. In certain places, it seemed as if history was caught in a time-warp and had not been allowed to flow on. And as we took the boat-ride, we were taken back in time, for the scene on the shore appeared to belong to another era altogether. In the boatman’s narrative myth and history effortlessly slipped into each other: it was difficult to filter out myth from history. While it seemed that this journey had brought us closer to the mythological figures of Shiva, Parvati or such epic characters like Rama and Sita, we also seemed to be in dialogue with such recent historical figures like Munshi Premchand. The feeling that time had flown uninterrupted with the perennially flowing river made us feel a ripple flowing down the spine…! We too were an important part in the everlasting river of human history.

P.S: The cuisine: if you cannot do without non-veg, well, Varanasi is not a place for you. But, if you know how to spot the right eating-place, then, even veg dishes could be mouth-watering. We doted on Shree Café, behind the Dashwamedh Lodge, which we accidentally discovered for the restaurant recommended to us was closed. Punjabi, Chinese and Israeli dishes that comprised the menu were marvellous. My insatiable lust for flesh (read chicken, mutton, etc) was to a great extent appeased by the food Shree Café served. And then, there were traditional Varanasi items to taste. First, rabri and then, of course, a huge spectrum of sweets. Although, I am not too much of a sweet-person, I could not really resist the temptation of tasting a few. The rabri was awesome, and it’s a different experience to have it while it was being made. And not to forget the kauchoris and samosas! I believe Varanasi is perhaps most traditional here: the people are simply not bothered about calorie-gain! No matter how many global clothes the roadside stands that have gobbled up half the roads display, the food habit seems to have remained unchanged!

Two recent television ads and ‘gay’ sites of sexual ambivalence

2010-10-31T09:30:00.000-07:00

Still from the Wild Stone Ad

The Wild Stone Talc for Men ad pleads with the men: DO NOT SMELL LIKE A WOMAN…SMELL LIKE A MAN. The very constructed nature of gender becomes more than apparent in the plea. The ad begins with images of men who the hypermasculine voice-over (speaking grammatically incorrect English) points out as effeminate and therefore ‘wrong’: a man with long hair, a metrosexual man in a parlour and an overweight man who cries and expresses joy in an effeminate way. However, in the ad, the male body is offered as an object of desire; the man, so far used to using women’s talcum powder makes seductive ‘feminine’ gestures…his muscular body does not quite match with his ‘imposed’ effeminate movements (this is made clearly evident)…thereby underlining the gap between masculinity associated with a well-built body and effeminacy which is ‘other’ to the muscular body. The simple equation that is thereby generated between the muscular body and manliness in turn generates an essentialization of the structure of the body and sexual behaviouralism. This essentialization is dangerous and unfortunately enough this has entered the popular consciousness. In fact, this notion by extension misinterprets effeminacy as gayness in most cases. (Also note the man in the ad is wearing baby pink) That there is no absolute connection between homosexuality and effeminacy is barely focussed upon in popular culture. As a result, incorrect ideas about masculinity, homosexuality, etc continue to circulate and get embedded in the popular unconscious.

However, the question of gaze becomes important here. Who does the camera assume as audience? Certainly, it intends to draw a loathsome reaction from the homophobic crowd, both male and female or those who do not believe in sexual ambivalence. But, by exhibiting the male body as spectacle doesn’t it also open up space to accommodate the heterosexual female as well as gay, bisexual and transsexual audiences as well?

A still from the Pepsi Ad

The second ad I would like to draw attention to is the latest Pepsi Youngistan ad featuring Ranbir Kapoor. The situation is rather funny: a guy has come to see a girl, and Pepsi is served; a marriage negotiation is on the cards. The girl is rather reluctant to marry. Suddenly Ranbir materializes from nowhere and kisses the would-be-groom on the cheeks. The guy is flabbergasted, the parents shocked, and the girl is delighted. The guy really does not know Ranbir and he says so; immediately another guy materializes from an adjacent room and asks the would-be-groom sadly whether he would also deny knowing him. The negotiation is broken off immediately and the girl thanks the boys for the drama. But they say they are there for the Pepsi; not to help her.

The little drama that Ranbir conjures up is surprisingly without any hidden mockery at gayness per se. The theme of the ad is totally in tune with the pranks Ranbir is usually seen to play on others in these ads with a characteristic naughtiness. Somehow one is bound to feel that after all some kind of naturalness is attributed to the possibility of homosexual affairs. However, the appearance of the second guy who also claims to be in a relationship with the would-be-groom underscores the polygamous nature of homosexual people. This is a kind of essentialization, no doubt. But, in a way, it also underscores the positive possibility of being in more than one relationship at the same time. The morality associated with heterosexual marriage and monogamy is overturned very subtly. However, the interpretation of this may vary. Some may look upon the introduction of the second guy as a disapproving commentary on the promiscuous nature of gay men. However, this may be read down by drawing attention to the fact that Youngistan wants more and still more…their desires are insatiable. Such desire is not only confined to the material realm of gadgets, food or fashion, but also effortlessly extends to the emotional world. So promiscuity or multiple affairs have become the order of the day, and are not specific only to same-sex relationships.

"Autograph": Signature of Love

2010-10-21T22:54:00.000-07:00

The film sets in to usher you into wondering how many narrative frames are actually at work. It’s not confusing, but thrilling to note that the extra-diegetic circumstances leading to the making of Autograph itself may be at work here: I mean, a debutant director approaching a veteran actor to do his film. Is Subho (Indraneil Sengupta), Srijit Mukherjee himself? Are the initial scenes a direct one-on-one take on what happened in real life? And, then, there’s this film within the film. So, what you have is a Chinese box narrative, facilitating a complex layering that does not confuse but please with all its intricacies.

Intertextuality is a trope that is ardently adopted by postmodern artists, for no work of art can claim to be original. Either overtly or covertly, subtexts of already written texts are present in every work of art is produced, and therefore, the heavy subtext of Nayak that underlies (or overlies, perhaps) Autograph fascinate as the audience is sort of engaged almost compulsively into a mind game whereby he/she delightfully recognizes the similarities with the Ray classic and of course, the departures from them. What is praiseworthy is that despite being ambitious (the ambition being as monumental as remaking Nayak), the film is completely unpretentious and somewhat humble in its treatment of the subject. Srijit Mukherjee would never invite the kind of criticism that Sanjay Leela Bhansali had to face in his attempt to remake Devdas; for very intelligently this debutant director somehow does not leave any space for comparison. Autograph is a new film, in the true sense of the term.

The love that blossoms between Arun (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and Srinandita (Nandana Deb Sen) is something that we had desirously expected to bud between the debonair Uttam Kumar and the coy Sharmila Tagore in Nayak. The suggestion of a developing soft corner was there, but that never matured. Autograph sort of compeletes, yet leaves incomplete that seemingly infinitely postponed romance in the beautiful emotional drama that shapes up involving the veteran actor and the debutant heroine. The film does send out a moral lesson, but so subtly that if you are not to alert you may just miss out on it. Subho’s transformation is the key to the moral: juxtapose the two scenes: Subho smilingly putting a coin on the beggar-boy’s plate and Subho rolling up the cab window as the beggar-boy expectantly peers in, towards the end of the film. Nothing great apparently: but do note Indraneil Sengupta’s expressions in both scenes. Mute, but they speak volumes. Indraneil would take you by storms. He is the discovery of the millennium, as far as Bengali cinema is concerned. He has effortlessly overshadowed Prosenjit who seems a bit strained. He does not really have the charisma of Uttam Kumar and he struggles to look believable. Nonetheless, he has tried --- a far cry from what he does in other films, generally.( I would like to point out that whatever Prosenjit did after his remarkably intense performance in Dosor, seemed to lack in something. It would be difficult for him to outperform himself. The intended irony was towards Konkona, but ironically enough, it was Prosenjit who drew all our tears by his sheer helplessness!) Nandana puts up a believable performance…a good choice!

The songs are marvellous! I am still revelling in the rhythms “Amake aamar moto thakte dao”…kudos to Debojyoti Mishra! Soumik Halder’s camera credibly enlivens the very urbanity of Calcutta and the depth of melancholia that resides in the interstices of the city. Note the scene where a flock of white birds fly over the vast expanse of the city at daybreak. It’s heart-warming! Srijit Mukherjee is certainly the new director on the block we can now look up to! The good news is that perhaps Bengali cinema is once again coming of age!

"Do Dooni Char": Value for money happily redefined

2010-10-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

Walt Disney’s foray into Bollywood could not have been more delightful; having tickled the funny bone of millions across the globe, Walt Disney stays true to its favourite genre in Habib Faizal’s Do Dooni Char, only that the latter conflates the tragic and the comic with a light-heartedness that brings it close to black humour, but the angst is more of an undertone than overtly felt. What touches most is the palpable reality of middle-class-ness and its irresistible consumerist aspirations: the Duggal family becomes a metonymy of the middle class and its perpetual monetary constraints. The furniture, the bedcovers, the stained chopping board, the clothes…in fact, everything is quintessentially middle class, yet the ‘feel good’ factor is never missed. For, the extraordinary couple Rishi and Neetu Kapoor bring effortless warmth into the family which grows more real with every passing minute. The main action of the film concentrates on the transition which the Duggal family almost challengingly undertakes from an almost dilapidated scooter to a four-wheeler. What follows is a crazy but highly identifiable drama with all its middle class nuances, ending up in the victory of the Duggal family. I consciously use the term ‘victory’ here, for the film does end up celebrating fundamental middle class values of honesty and perhaps the sheer happiness that comes from achieving goals through hard work, and a general deprecation of dishonest shortcut to easy money.

The film comes at a time when inflation has reached one of its rare heights, terribly affecting the middle-class. The disadvantages of globalization are perhaps felt a little more intensely now that the cultural capital of the middle-class has considerably increased, but the sustenance of the same seems difficult. The new consumerist generation feels no qualms to bid farewell to old moral values, for the only ethos available to them is money. Recalling the simplicity of folklores, Do Dooni Char primarily addressing GenY, tells an everyday story finally ending with a moral. The victory of the father lies not only in his success in buying a small car for the family, but in his success in being able to convert his children to his own world-view. I highly recommend this film to everyone. It’s truly value for money redefined; it fact, literally. You would get the intended pun in the last sentence only when you watch the film.

P.S: The Neetu-Rishi chemistry sizzles with a dignity that perfectly suits their age. Pity that son Ranbeer is trying hard to draw audiences to his Aanjana Aanjani at the same time. The parents have won over the son, hands down.

Food Soulful!

2010-09-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Paneer makhani

My microwave tales have been almost verging on the irritating for my dear colleagues were not getting to taste anything…so theoretical renditions of fabulous microwave yields were simply grating on their nerves, and all my valorous culinary experiments were, perhaps, becoming suspicious. Finally, however, I promised them to bring something, microwaved to college. I thought of several things: chicken fry, chicken butter masala, paneer butter masala, etc…but finally zeroed in on paneer makhani. And to compliment that asked Ma to make alu ka paratha. Pure North Indian cuisine from a middle class Bengali kitchen. However, my colleagues (barring Samata) are barely bothered about the origin of a dish…they generally do not mind anything as long as it is chewably digestible.

Alu ka paratha

My text-messages started spreading the news of a hatke Monday lunch as I shopped for paneer makhani. Paneer, tomatoes, ginger, garam masala, tomato ketchup, kasuri methi, cashew nuts, butter, and milk. I was specifically worried about the kasuri methi; it was an unavoidable ingredient but Sujan is psychologically allergic to anything green. So, I had to message him in advance that he should not mistake kasuri methi for dhone pata, the latter being a major turn-off for him. Suman has already gone onomatoepic in his messages, expressing lustful anticipation for a superb Monday lunch, thereby augmenting my tension manifold. I did not inform Krishnendu, the food-freak hard to match in enthusiasm, for I wished to surprise him on Monday. And, Sujan had almost compelled me to add another guest on the list: Kinsuk. It’s not that I did not wish to invite him; but it was Sujan who had almost made me call him up injecting in me a fear that I might die repenting later if I had not.

A sumptuous amount of paneer cooked in butter base was not good for Sujan, at least. Samata and I have been advising him on resorting to a healthy diet (which meant sufficient amount of vegetables and items containing fibre), for Sujan is one big (literally too) carnivorous guy who has never known the taste of green vegetables. I was feeling a tad guilty, for inviting him to eat something I had been sagaciously advising him against having. Anyways…

Sauteed Vegetables

We had fixed 1o’clock as our lunchtime, and all five of us gathered around the table of our department. Now, Samata had a surprise. She did not tell me that she had cooked something ‘really’ Chinese for us. Samata often saves us from the atrocious canteen offerings by her delicious cheese spreads, and sometimes something from Bobby di’s kitchen. This was the first time she had actually cooked something. What? Vegetables, mushrooms and paneer sautéed in soya-sauce. It smelt so Chinese, and it tasted so as well. The recipe was unostentatious, but amazing. Well, Samata had not flouted the health rules we were trying to impose on Sujan: she had him have a purely veggie dish for the first time; and that too cooked in negligible amount of oil. Sujan’s first step to healthy eating!

The fusion spread on the table (North Indian alu ka paratha and paneer makhani with Chinese-style sautéed vegetables) looked just as odd as chalk-and-cheese, but the whole thing reminded me of the inexpert charuibhatis (picnic) we used to have years back! The ambience was actualized by the juvenile excitement of Sujan, Suman and Krishnendu…all three made it a day for us, simply by praising our effort.

I also surprised myself. The paneer predominantly tasting of kasuri methi simply melted into asking for more while the alu ka paratha rocked. I am not sure whether the food was really that good! But all of us were happy. Perhaps that seasoned the spread generously.

Image Courtesy: Sujan Chandra

Peepli [Live]: All is not so well!

2010-08-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

The news of Jitu Bagdi’s suicide is what I woke up to today in the morning...the 28-year old sharecropper, a resident of Karotia village in the Burdwan district, poisoned himself to death, unable to payback a loan of Rs. 10,000 (approximately US $ 200), as the crops failed due to scanty rainfall. Five kilometres away, in the village of Basantapur, another suicide was reported a few days ago…Yunus Sheikh another peasant had met with the same fate having failed to repay a loan of Rs. 22,000 (approximately US $ 440). Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli [Live] delves into this grim reality, and commendably so, but despite the sincere efforts, remains somehow detached from the real tragedy. By resorting to the comic mode, it manages to be sporadically entertaining, but the way the narrative is designed is quite predictable. In fact, Rizvi makes too much of the media, and at times, the audience ends up feeling confused whether it’s a lampoon on the media or satire on a major social problem. Actually by taking the satire on the media to an irritating, unbearable extreme, the director often loses focus.

However, the film does have its sunshine moments, thanks to the ensemble cast of non-stars, each of whom delivers power-packed performances. The difficult-to-pacify, half-paralysed, petulant mother who half-rises from her shabby khatia to abuse her daughter-in-law or shout at her good-for-nothing sons and the misfortune they have brought upon the family, is someone you would look forward to as one scene fades into another. The peasant brothers are brilliant too: especially Nattha who turns into a hero overnight having declared that he would commit suicide. The scene where the two brothers fight with fraternal affection against each other as to who would commit suicide is perhaps the most comical of all the scenes, most of the others verging precariously on the slapstick. Little did Nattha know that his life would be transformed in a twinkling of an eye, and all the media attention he gets thereafter makes his life hellish. The government officials, the ministers, the local political leaders are unsparingly satirised, and much of what they do to save the peasants makes for a laughing circus, which, as it goes without saying, does not yield any results. The ending of the film is certainly a telling commentary on how peasants are forced to migrate from the villages in search of asylums in cities, where they are thrust into life-long anguish and pain, no better than the life they have left behind. The poor peasant who quietly drags his loaded bicycle past the media-mela (carrying sacks of soil he digs out from his land), and dies in the end, but does not get any media attention, is another character one may look forward to.

Now friends, a word of caution: Do not rave about Peepli [Live] because everybody is raving about it. If you do not call the film good, your capacity to sympathise with the subaltern would not be called into question. Judge the film from the point-of-view of a film critic and not a social reformer, and you would surely find it wanting. The film is entertaining stuff…and by the virtue (or vice) of being so, the film becomes a typical bourgeoisie take on a serious peasant issue, for both eyes of the business-minded producer (read Aamir Khan) were on the box-office. Yes, the subaltern really cannot speak, and that’s why the bourgeoisie can gleefully sentimentalise on their issues…and when they really speak out…well, our government is already having sleepless nights, no?

P.S: The film may also be judged as a deliberate exercise in lightening the whole issue of peasant suicides for that's what the government has been doing so far. From this point of view, the film may appear a little more appealing.

"Once Upon a Time in Mumbai": Retelling a Postmodern Myth

2010-08-13T09:58:00.000-07:00

Are myths really timeless? Yes, they are. Is it impossible to trace the origin of a myth? No, not really. For, myths do not always belong to prehistoric times. Myths can be created every day. In fact, the myths surrounding the Mumbai underworld are perhaps the most recent, and created and perpetuated by the Hindi film industry. Beginning in the late 60s, throughout the 70s and well into the 80s, this myth has been repeated so many times that for a Hindi film-buff the villain had become synonymous with the smuggler, who lived in a palatial mansion with an underground den having electrocuted entrances and where money, jewellery and all sorts of desirable things were hidden in chambers with password protected doors and blinking red-lights. This is magic realism at its best. Postmodern fictional representation often uses a trope which is referred to as ‘literalization of metaphor’. These fantastical garish films of the 70s and 80s did not ever use the world underworld. Rather they literally situated the villain (or the don) in a den that was underground. The best example would be Mogembo’s hi-tech den in Mr. India.

The Hindi film villain was always a diabolical smuggler, who also became a tragic hero in Don. Although the villain was finally killed, and all was set aright, the glamour surrounding the underworld and the easy road to money it ensured was difficult to overlook. The city of Bombay, apart from being the epicentre of the film industry and the associated glamour, also catapulted into a much desirable destination, thanks to the rumours (sometimes truths) about how its underworld was a utopia where fame, money, glamorous women and every other pleasure was easily accessible. Milan Lutharia’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, traces the reality behind the origin of the myth. ‘Once upon a time’− the very title resorts to the oft-repeated first line of fairy tales, thereby cleverly juxtaposing legend and reality, for it squarely locates the myth in a real space − the city of Mumbai. Although the disclaimer denies any relation to the lives of Haji Mastan and Daud Imbrahim, the story as it unfolds, speaks otherwise. One may argue that Once Upon a Time in Mumbai is nothing new, for Ram Gopal Varma has already told the same story in his critically acclaimed Company years ago. But the novelty of this film is that it not only reveals the myth which has so far served as the main source of plot material for numerous Hindi movies of the 70s, it also goes commendably in the retro mode to tell it in the 70s way! The sets, the costumes, the high-strung acting, the power-packed punch lines, the loud background score…everything is so very 70s, after all. Ram Gopal Varma’s Company was in the realistic mode; but Once Upon a Time, true to its title, recreates the fantastically over-the-top glam-world of the 70s. The departure from the stock 70s plot is made where the film refuses to draw the line between good and bad, and explores the grey area. That a lot of research has gone into the making is clearly visible. However, my approach to the film may send out the wrong signal that I was rather impressed by the movie. Actually I wasn’t. For, after all, the plot and execution is pretty average.

Of the performances, I would rate Emraan Hasmi and Prachi Desai quite high. Ajay Devgn is quite believable in the role he plays. I did not like Kangana Ranaut, for I do not like her, generally. Thank god, she did not sit precariously forlorn on the window sill or attempt suicide in her favourite hang-out, that is, the washroom. The supporting cast does not impress for the focus is so squarely on the two heroes that they almost sleep-walk through the film, it seems. By the way, Randeep Hooda makes a surprise come-back as the tough cop and puts up a praiseworthy show, as slick as his waistline.

I do not really recommend this film, but a one-time watch, when you have nothing to waste money on, is not discouraged.

"Inception": Maya and all that?

2010-08-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I am still very unsure of my surroundings, although I am already four days away from the curtains closing in upon the end-titles of Christopher Nolan’s path-breaking Inception. No amount of Freud or Jung or any other psychoanalyst can really provide a clue to the narrative that very often crosses the thin line between dream and reality. It’s difficult to make the distinction; a one-time watch is certainly not sufficient to unravel the several levels of dream and reality on which the narrative operates. True, some explanation is given at regular intervals…but following the visuals and interpreting them on your own requires you to be rather alert all the time…on your toes, literally. But it’s fun! It’s like solving a jig-saw puzzle which eternally expands to become more confounding.

And inception…the title…well, it’s a dangerous thing indeed! The film claims that it is possible to implant an idea in someone’s mind and make that person believe in it so deeply that he or she loses individual ways to seeing the world. The very thought is spine-chilling. The colonization of the human mind! Shall we say this is technological imperialism taken to its furthest limit?

And, there is this incredible machine that helps one visit someone else’s dream! Just come to think of it! And once again, this machine is used to visit the dream of a business tycoon…a marvellous game is played to incept in his brains the disastrous idea of splitting up his business empire for the benefit of his competitor who pays for the whole thing. This competitor is a South-east Asian. Does the film anticipate the rise of some other world power in the near future that might jeopardize the American sway across the globe?

Whatever it is, I highly recommend Inception. It’s a must-watch for that awesome mind-spinning experience and the associated pleasurable discomfort that stays with you for a long time.

"Udaan": Up, up, up!

2010-07-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan could have been lost in oblivion had not the Cannes breakthrough happened. It’s a very small film, and every frame, though shot commendably, shows how little money might have gone into its making. Money, in this case, did not matter. The Cannes recognition did not come just like that; though not completely flawless, Udaan struck gold at Cannes by a theme which has barely found focus in Indian films. It’s a very simple yet vehement critique of gender construction, an uncompromising unravelling of the deeply flawed conception of masculinity that has often wrought political havoc. The nerve-racking conflict between Rohan (Rajat Bamacheri, quite good as a debutant…not brilliant though) and his father (Ronit Roy in his Bandini avatar) and the latter’s triumph in the end dismantle a long history of a heteronormative patriarchal hegemony. The insensitive, militant and almost bestial father is apparently the villain and Rohan and his half-brother’s monumental struggle is to free themselves from his strangling control. In fact, while the audience’s full sympathy is directed towards the helpless boys, the sensitive makers (the trio of Motwane, Anurag Kashyap and Sanjay Singh) did not allow the audience to miss the helplessness of the father as well. The father rock-hard on the outside is not butter-soft in the inside − now that would have been an unforgivable cliché. If you are sensitive enough, you would certainly feel the father’s tragic predicament in his failure to understand how inextricably he has been interpellated in a system which so strongly demands hard-heartedness, militancy and a sheer sense of utilitarianism from a man that he has altogether lost his emotional self. Two of his wives are dead (the clear implication is that they were victims of his lust or his unearthly anger), he cannot relate to his sons, and he harbours a profound hatred for his brother who, he believes, is not manly enough for he has not been able to father a child. Surprisingly, however, he refrains from meeting Rohan in school fearing that he may spoil his fun. He is aware of his failure, yet cannot comprehend the reason behind it. In an emotionally charged moment, he confesses that he is simply tired of compromising with others, a compromise that had begun with his father. He is just another generation in a long lineage of patriarchal Fathers faced with a son who challenges his fixated notions of being and becoming a Man.

Rohan’s ambition of becoming a writer is totally alien to this father who only believes in the undaunted pursuit of worldly-ends. As Rohan operates the monstrous machine in the factory, his dream seems to be ground to death, every time the machine comes thumping down. His father in a drunken state teases him about his girl-like features and his ‘feminine’ ambition. Rohan’s subalternity in the household is also shared by his six-year-old half-brother Arjun whose childhood seems to have been robbed off. But Rohan learns to speak; in a dramatic altercation with the father, he ends up physically retaliating him. He literally runs away from the house, with the father chasing him. But this time he wins the race, and the exhausted father finally gives up on him. He, however, comes back to take away with him little Arjun. They are both freed from the prison, and they head for the dream city of Mumbai.

The ending is a tad utopian, but, nonetheless necessary. Although all fathers are not usually like Rohan’s, the model of aggressive hypermasculinity is more often than not the only compulsive model available to male children. Any digression from it is met with disdain and insult, often compelling children to forsake their true selves. Rohan’s father is a hyperbolic representation of many fathers who often impose upon their male children their own image. Rohan’s protest and final abandonment of the house is a telling act that steals the sanctity associated with the figure of the father and the mute submission he demands of his wards. Udaan, therefore, is not merely a coming-of-age story as the publicity campaigns call it. It’s much more than that. Indeed, while watching the film, I felt a bit uncanny that last week only I had been cribbing about the relationship between gender constructs and being adept in Mathematics on my blog. Udaan gives an aesthetic expression to my essay on “What’s there in Mathematics?” I hope you understand what I mean.

What’s there in Mathematics?

2010-07-03T01:07:00.000-07:00

How many of you out there have suffered unspeakable heart-wrenching humiliation for not being good in Maths? I guess quite a handful of you, indeed! Even those who have somehow managed to become engineers and doctors! Well, all of a sudden, this morning I felt like retaliating for the endless insults naïve children have suffered in school, at home, among so-called sharper friends for having arithmophobia!

Now I was quite good in Maths, but somehow, I suffered from a constant fear that if I fail to cross that 80% bar this year, I shall fall in the eyes of my parents, teachers and classmates. Not only that, today, in retrospection, have I felt that proficiency in Maths has a lot to do with your maleness too. If you are not good in Maths, you are not a man…you are a sissy. Alarming indeed and that too in a country where a Sankuntala Devi was born! I remember that my parents were always more bothered about my marks in Maths, notwithstanding the fact that I was scaling heights in the Humanities. I almost ruefully recall that I could not even happily pronounce high scores in, say, Geography, if the marks in Maths were not up to the expectation. I knew what would follow was an awful humiliation…intimidating anticipations about my future when I would surely be left jobless. Such terrible scolding often left me dejected for days, and spent midnight oil apprehending a beggar’s future. I had seriously started believing that everything, even your life and of course, death, totally depended on your potential of solving Maths problems. My belief was strengthened as the years passed, for I witnessed a huge population of children suffering under the auspices of not being able to make out what was the use of the information that the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was greater in length than the two other sides.

Nobody bothers to teach children the philosophy of Maths; instead, they have attached with the subject a baggage of materialism: If you can’t be an expert in Maths, life will reject you forever! Isn’t that a criminal offence? I strongly think it is. Name one Maths teacher who can make you fall in love with Maths. Can you? Perhaps, no. For, most Maths teachers do not know how to relate those problems in the textbook with life. Now please do not take this at face value! Connecting Maths textbook problems with life doesn’t imply that knowing how to measure a line correctly can help you draw the plan of a house perfectly in the future. That’s useless knowledge! All of us do not turn into architects or goddamn civil engineers. I mean a more universal knowledge, knowledge of life! Surely, Maths can do that! But is that the way school textbooks teach the subject? Do they at all do anything rather than throwing many of us in the Darsheel Safary syndrome with its endless rubbish on numbers? Do these text books and for that matter the dolts that teach these books ever try to play with the magic of numbers and erase the fear from the little heads?

And to the parents: Do not feel at a loss when your child cannot score well in Maths. You know, that’s a good sign. At least, he or she would not degenerate into a machine. Celebrate if he or she excels in the Humanities…that would make them real human beings. I had deliberately given up on Maths in spite of a good score at the JEE. Instead I chose to study English Literature. Nothing catastrophic has happened to me, you see! I am quite successful in life, in my own little way, and thank God, calculations do not plague my peaceful slumber!

"Rajneeti": It’s for Ranbir only!

2010-06-26T23:53:00.000-07:00

There is a famous Bengali proverb: Jaha nei (Maha)bharat e taha nei bharat e. There is nothing in India that has not found mention in the Mahabharata. Therefore, many Indian narratives, if read closely, would reveal some connection with this marvellous epic. One need not deliberately device a plot recalling the epic. Rajneeti as a re-telling of the Mahabharata, therefore, does not appeal in the first place. It would appear in even poorer light to those who have seen Shyam Benegal’s masterpiece Kaliyug. Although Anjum Rajabali, the co-script writer, claims that he has not seen this Benegal magnum opus, the film speaks otherwise. There are actually too many similarities. Benegal’s film based on the story of a business empire split into two had intelligently used tropes from the Mahabharata to apply to a capitalist post-industrial world, establishing the timelessness of myths. But Rajneeti cannot claim such artistic excellence, for one does not really need a conscious revoking of the Mahabharata myth to interpret the current political scenario of India.

What keeps you glued to the chair in Rajneeti is not the story; it’s much too predictable…it’s actually Ranbir Kapoor’s astounding Samar! You witness open-mouthed as this apparently ‘good’ boy pursuing his PhD in “Subtextual Violence in Nineteenth Century Victorian Poetry” in a foreign university graduates cold-bloodedly into a diabolic schemer at the onset of the epical tragedy that overtakes his family’s political career when his father is brutally murdered by his cousin’s men. Ranbir speaks through his eyes; his body language is so articulate that he does not need dialogues. His metamorphosis is so sudden but so believable only because this awesome actor carries off such transformation with an unmatchable aplomb. When he proposes to Indu (Katrina Kaif) he manages to emulate genuine emotions in his voice, although he does not love her. Simultaneously, he also manages to send a shiver down the audience’s spine for he is able to send the message across that he is making this compromise only to win over Indu’s father’s financial support of his party. The undertone of the satanic schemer does not once mar the ingenuous tone of the proposal, but compliment each other. Ranbir takes a very large slice of the cake in the acting department indeed leaving a very small portion for the others to lay claims on.

However, Nana Patekar impresses with his subtle performance. Arjun Rampal has managed to gather a little more than the infamous two-n-a-half expressions that hang on his face all the time. Ajay Devgn and Manoj Bajpai irritate. And Katrina Kaif? Would someone please show her the exit door? She has all kinds of weird expressions on her face which she mistakes as ‘acting’…expressions murderous (literally!) enough to compel you to leave the theatre. Thanks heavens, her presence is rather negligible compared to the huge retinue of male actors. And the hype and hoopla surrounding her Sonia Gandhi act is a wonderfully misleading publicity stunt. She appears in that famous cotton saree for two-n-a-half scenes, much to your relief, of course, and that too at the fag end of the movie. And what acting! O my God! Her eyes and her lips (and whatever comes of it in atrocious Hindi) are so out-of-tune with each other that the scene appears to be one of those American Teleshopping advertisements dubbed in Hindi. All Katrina Kaif films must henceforth carry with them in no ambiguous terms a statutory warning: Watching Katrina Kaif act may be injurious to your psychic well-being. Come at your own risk!

Well, Rajneeti has been declared a box-office hit and the Jha camp is going gaga over it. But it’s not a good film; an average venture in all sense of the term. Due to lack of other solid competitors it has managed to draw the audiences to the theatres, the failure of Ravaan, for example, adding more to its success! I would contend here that Prakash Jha is more in his elements on a smaller canvas. He is a good filmmaker; no two ways about that. But in Rajneeti, under the compulsion of generating a full-fledged entertainer, he had to do away with attention to details. It’s true that Indian politics has undergone a remarkable degeneration, and the film fittingly captures it; but it should have been more specific and individualistic. It seems to be a rather long sweeping statement on the degeneration of politics at large. The director does not even bother to locate the film. The map of the state often shown is a vague simulacrum of the state of Madhya Pradesh. But contemporary cinema has come a long way to be bold enough to be specific about its setting. Had the film been made in some other mode, apart from the realistic one, it could have afforded to be that fuzzy. But not in a realistic mode, no matter how melodramatic it may be! It cannot afford to be “Once upon a time somewhere in India…” story. Nonetheless, it’s a good one-time watch; only blind yourself of Katrina’s catastrophic presence.

Note: I have even chosen a poster without Katrina in it!

"Mahanagar@Kolkata": Postmodern City Blues

2010-06-06T00:27:00.000-07:00

Michael de Certeau in his renowned piece “Walking in the City” writes:

Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinaesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In this respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city’.

This is so true of Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Mahanagar@Kolkata: it captures contemporary Kolkata by collecting singularities and merging them together in a dramatic mingling of three short stories by Nabarun Bhattacharyya recalling an outstanding Bollywood flick Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (See review below). The title unambiguously alludes to the 1964 Satyajit Ray classic Mahanagar, the new codicil @Kolkata underlining the city’s ushering into the globalized e-world. Certainly the city has made a long journey since Ray’s Mahanagar; the skyscrapers harbouring offices and commercial centres that crowd the final scene of the film have now become the abodes of estranged relationships, of suicidal men and women, an existentialist angst having crept into their very being. Promoters, an MBA-holder, a night-club regular proficient in Marx, a modern day wife unable to connect with her husband, a corporation officer, a tea-stall owner living in the slum, a superstitious father, and a dark gang having clear connection with political parties: their paths intertwine to make the city and how!

Manmotho (Anjan Dutta) and Jagadish (Biplab Chatterjee) meet on the premises of a government-run hospital and witness a brutal political murder. The hospital has by that time turned into a den where party-backed goondas hide, pretending to be ill, and taking in prostitutes every night. Jagadish’s weird belief that nothing can go wrong with him for he carries with himself a piece of rope used by a maid to hang herself unsettles Manmotho visibly. In a surreal night of wind and the rain, while Jagadish narrates his intriguing story of how he got hold of this exclusive piece of rope, an imbecile murder is committed. Jagadish continuously appeals to Manmotho to blind himself: “Don’t look!” It’s a kind of blindness which all the city-dwellers have voluntarily adopted, for that is the only survival strategy. But the irony of it all strikes in the next story when Biren (Arun Mukherjee), a poor man who thrives on others’ favour, is deeply perturbed by a murder in his locality, apprehending an-eye-for-an-eye war to follow soon. His belittled status makes him a laughing stock. His continuous exercise at acquiring assurance by asking all and sundry “Amar kono bhoy nei to?” (“Should I have anything to fear?”), encapsulates the very absurd condition in which every dweller of the postmodern city is caught. Biren’s character recalls so many others of black comedies. When Biren is really killed in a prank played on him by a party-backed goonda of the locality, the latter reiterates the question − Amar kono bhoy nei to? − which makes you feel a shiver run down the spine. You suddenly feel so terribly insecure, for the well-known city is frighteningly defamiliarized! What danger is waiting for you round that corner, so apparently familiar and safe? Do you really have anything to fear? Certainly you have. Only that you do not know it’s nature. Something continues to haunt you from this point on, and stays with you even after you have safely returned home.

Satyajit Ray wished to call his Mahanagar, A Woman’s Place, in English. But that did not happen (The official English title turned out to be as unimaginative as The Big City). But in the gendered space of the city, the woman has always been treated as the subaltern. Ray’s heroine gave up her career protesting against the injustice done to an Anglo-Indian woman. That’s the best she could have done in the face of patriarchal butchery of a woman’s honour. The women in Mahanagar@Kolkata are apparently more liberated, perhaps more empowered. But Suman Mukhopadhyay locates them in history, revoking the unspeakable injustice done to them in the past in public: the vicious Sati. The modern day woman, though liberated, has in her unconscious the terrible memories of the inhuman act deeply embedded. So, in a surreal sequence, we find Rongili (Rituparna Sengupta) undergoing the paraphernalia surrounding the bride to be sacrificed at her husband’s funeral pyre. Incidentally, she is on the verge of separation from her husband Rohit (Chandan Roy Sanyal) who suspects that she is sleeping with some other guy. In the surreal sequence Rongili’s constant companion is Kamalini (Sreelekha Mitra), the night-club queen, least prejudiced about sex and relationships, and someone who dabbles with Marx. Yet, she too is a victim of the patriarchal system, and undergoes the experience related to Sati, although indirectly.

The open-sky economy has opened up immense job opportunities for the educated middle class. We have come a long way from the 1960s, when Ray’s hero, having lost his job, sulks at home. In E-Kolkata, MBA degree-holders float like sewers beneath the roads everywhere, and are barely out of job, no matter what inhuman slavery they are compellingly a part of. Rohit is one such new age hero, although there is nothing heroic about him. For, there are no heroes any more. Suspicious of his wife’s adultery and unprepared for beginning a family, he undergoes tremendous stress, characteristic of the Genex crowd of the metropolis. As in a moment of crisis he takes off his clothes one by one, and madly breaks into a song with his guitar, he screams out his soul as it were…perhaps some emotional protest against what he exactly can’t figure out. Chandan Roy Sanyal is simply brilliant in this particular scene.

Mahanagar@Kolkata is a cult film in its own right…a new way of looking at our city. Although the cinematography is a bit too dull, an excellent script is its strength. Rupam Islam’s music does justice to the theme, and on the acting front all have delivered satisfactorily. Mostly claustrophobic, the film somehow inspires the need to feel this claustrophobia deeply. Squarely located in contemporary West Bengal and its turbulent political atmosphere, Mahanagar@Kolkata mutely apprehends an apocalypse. Suicide, death, violence, corruption and above all the death of compassion shock us…we can no longer afford not to look at things. The voluntary blindness we all have adopted cannot really help us keep that unknowable FEAR at bay.

You’re standing beyond the reaches of my song…

2010-05-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

That’s what the great maestro ruefully sung. His intense urge to unite with the Infinite has found expression in song after song. The union has sometimes seemed almost complete, sometimes impossible…but the appeal never stopped. Ironically enough, while composing such songs, the poet had ended up creating another order of that Infinite. And today, on his sesquicentennial anniversary, we, the lesser mortals have found for ourselves the definition of that Infinite: it’s the Poet himself! Every composition, how insignificant it may be, aspires to attain to that order of the Soulful Infinite. Tagore, for us, has turned into that Shelleyan skylark, the symbol of uncontaminated joy and unpremeditated art, albeit his sweetest songs tell of our saddest thoughts, they have all reached that unreachable: a perpetually flowing river of happiness, where we all stand, wishing to realize that Infinity in our humble attempts at giving expression to life! The craving to merge with the poet would be and has always been a life-long quest for all of us…a quest which is never-ending, but, certainly, worth pursuing.

From Che to Mickey Mouse: Everyday Signs of American Imperialism

2010-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today while reading a light-hearted article on how Mickey Mouse images abound everywhere, from the walls of parks to advertisement hoardings in Kolkata, I suddenly realised that the same is also true of Che, or Ernest Guevara, who, in the past few years, has become the most favourite T-shirt graphic. These ‘Che’ T-shirts have become somewhat ubiquitous, although teenagers sporting these are seldom aware as to why the man really deserves to be inscribed close to their hearts. Brought into fashion by an American company, these ‘Che’ T-shirts have now flooded the market, having been infinitely reproduced by local companies, and being available at an exceptionally cheap rate. It’s difficult not to spot one ‘Che’ T-shirt on the streets of Kolkata on any given day, as it is difficult not to spot a Mickey Mouse featuring on everyday objects. In fact, both Che T-shirts and the Disney cartoon have become so commonplace that we hardly notice them as staring out of T-shirts or even from bath towels or pillow covers. Yet, if both these figures are remarkably oppositional in the discourses they remind us of.

Although ‘Che’ is more often than not worn for he has a marvellously handsome face which may easily pass as a rock-star’s, his face recalls for many his unyielding struggle against American imperialism in Cuba, Congo or Bolivia, where he died fighting the monster, single-handedly. His very demeanour, the tales surrounding his political career as a revolutionist have gone into the making of a romantic image in the popular imagination, the romantic face of socialist revolution. On the other hand, this apparently innocent Mickey Mouse who enters our classrooms and our moments of fancy has undergone several mutations in its representation, every time cunningly adjusting itself to the changing cultural climates, always keeping intact the supremacy of the United States of America and propagating its invulnerability in the face of the apparently insurmountable economic or political challenges. For instance, the comic strips of the Mickey Mouse and the Three Little Pigs acted as appropriate symbols for the Americans during the Great Depression: these characters epitomized courageous optimism at the time of great crisis. Again, during World War II, particularly during the Holocaust, Mickey Mouse was used to damn Hitler. After the war, the Mouse became the policeman to the world; as a comic he was replaced by Donald Duck who appropriately turned into an apogee of the age of capitalism. The commonest critique of Walt Disney cartoons holds that he promulgates an American way of life as the only possible way of life. Any culturally conscious person should be able to recognize that my interpretation of the Mickey Mouse comic strips is nothing original, but a mere reiteration of what appeared in the hugely famous book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, two Latin American writers. This book was banned in the United States, for it tellingly deconstructed the cultural function of the Disney comics.

While it’s therefore understandable why Mickey Mouse-s abound everywhere, it may be a little baffling to read the abundance of ‘Che’ T-shirts on the same lines. But it should not be so. For, the most popular face rivalling the neo-imperialist must also be repeated infinitely and anxiously. The neo-imperialist is smart enough to acknowledge his enemies, for in the tales of their defeat are contained stories of his own sustenance. The discourse of imperialism can never be unidirectional: the subject of imperialism is as much responsible in shaping the discourse. Every time, the ‘Che’ image is repeated, the imperialist’s ego is gratified. It also constantly reminds the imperialist that his project is not without contest, and therefore, it needs to be always watchful of threatening elements. May be the ‘Che’ T-shirt on a South Asian teenager who is at the receiving end of American imperialism may still resonate with a different meaning altogether! But, who actually cares?

Culinary Chores

2010-05-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

My culinary expertise, I believe, has been transmitted to me through my genes, for my Mom is a great cook and so was my Grand-mom! Now that’s nothing new, for everybody feels that they have behind them an interminably long ancestry of cooking proficiency…specially boys who never really stop comparing their moms’ kitchen skilfulness to their wives’ cookery callousness, and no matter, how well their wives cook, they cannot really extricate themselves from this Oedipal Gustatory Complex! But, the wives never question their husbands’ sloppiness in cooking, and continue to bear the burden of inferiority all through their lives, although with ear-splitting protests. The question, they should ask their husbands at the very outset is that, instead of being so sadly nostalgic about their mom’s culinary potentials, why didn’t they, anticipating such cooking catastrophe, had not already learnt from their mom’s the trade secret? For, culinary expertise is also very well transmitted through genes, and it surely does not have gender bias! So, the mother can very well continue to live on in the son, and the poor wife may be spared of her kitchen duties, and relax!

However, I have no such problems, for I am happily single, till date! Yet, I have of late, began to exercise my cooking skills, much to the surprise of my mom, who is rather disconcerted that her monopoly over the kitchen is being considerably usurped. Every time I decide to cook something, my mother goes out of her way to help me with the paraphernalia of chopping and cutting vegetables, pasting spices and arranging the utensils, everything! Therefore, the credit of cooking a dish does not wholly goes to me! A strange battle is fought on the kitchen table, a battle which my Mom does not realise she is actually fighting. I have never pointed that out to her, and I shall never…for, I completely understand that the only space which she can claim to be her own (like countless other women of her country) is perhaps the kitchen. That does not mean that the other spaces are not available to her; but she is most surely the master of this particular space of the house. Hence her involvement. Of course, she does have other concerns that I might cut myself or burn my fingers…but nonetheless, I can feel her anxiety!

But I am an awfully lazy person! I would have barely braved the kitchen so frequently, had not there been a tech-revolution. My new enthusiasm in cooking solely rests on the Microwave which has invaded and colonized our kitchen a few months back. Although, I boast of carrying forward excellent cookery genes to make my entire maternal ancestry proud (for my paternal grandmother is anything but a cook), it is the Microwave and its several heat-adjusting buttons which really create the magic. A Sanjeev Kapoor recipe book remains open on my table from the very beginning to the end, and I follow each step rather punctiliously. And, what emerges out of the oven is generally edible. This, in fact, has become my favourite pastime of late, for the Microwave never-endingly fascinates me with its computerized culinary adroitness. Yet, at the end of every cooking expedition, I do feel a little morose, although the taste may be quite appealing to the gustatory sensations. The cause is something else: it’s like feeling objectified by the very object I have tried to create. Sounds complex? This is because the Microwave seems to smile back at me almost mockingly after I have finished cooking a dish: What have you done? The credit is mine! You know, it is this Microwave, which practically taught me what Marx meant by ‘alienation’ some one and half centuries ago.

The New World Cup Teaser and Fossilization of Africa

2010-04-23T23:03:00.000-07:00

Incidentally, while re-reading Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, my eyes fell on a television teaser of the upcoming FIFA World Cup sponsored by Castrol GTX. Ngugi, as many of you would know, in his drive at decolonizing the African mind, vehemently rejects European languages as means of expression; he even opposes Africanization of the colonizer’s language. While delving into the paradox of the postcolonial continent, he observes that the neo-colonial ‘comprador ruling cliques are…quite happy to have the peasantry and the working class all to themselves: distortions, dictatorial directives, decrees, museum-type fossils paraded as African culture…all these and more are communicated to the backward masses in their own languages without any challenges from those with alternative visions of tomorrow who have deliberately cocooned themselves in English, French and Portuguese.” While at home, the colonization of the lower classes continues, the images which have become associated with Africa, through the cultural discourse of colonialism, have not really changed. The Castrol teaser shows two young men accidentally falling through an empty Castrol container to emerge in the middle of a dense forest with two lions staring at them; next, they materialize inside a cauldron carried by two native African men in the midst of a tribal procession (made slightly comic…note the expression on the faces of the native men, and how the two boys are appalled by the prospective of being sacrificed; obviously, hinting that the tribe is unambiguously cannibalistic), and finally they pop up in a the middle of the stadium when John Abraham lifts them up. The motive of the ad is to convey to the world that the next World Cup Football is going to take place in Africa. What is painful is that Africa still conjures up in the minds of people across the globe wild animals and weird nocturnal rituals at the heart of the forest! This is, no doubt, an African reality. But, the approach to it is one of comic condescension…a sense of cultural superiority making itself visible in the expression of the two men, incidentally South Asians. And, besides, isn’t Africa something else too? You can’t blame the ad-maker, for he/she has correctly tapped on the popular imagination of the world, when it comes to Africa. What we may ponder over is the immense power of Western cultural imperialism and its tremendous capacity of image-creation! What flustered me is that whether decolonization of the mind is ever possible. Ironically, when such a global phenomenon (that is World Cup Football) is to take place in the continent, age-old fossilized images of the continent continue to act as its identity! It’s undeniable that even before the ad ends, all of us know it has something to do with Africa. For, in our collective unconscious we have always imagined Africa like that only. Who is going to erase such an image…an image that was culturally made current by the European colonizer to justify his imperialistic project in the unsuspecting continent? No academic appeal to reject the language of the master can really affect any overnight transformation. It’s not possible. The disease is too profound to be remedied.

A Disaster called "The Japanese Wife"

2010-04-15T23:23:00.000-07:00

The infamously destructive Matla cannot ever cause as much destruction to the Sunderbans as The Japanese Wife has caused to the entire oeuvre of Aparna Sen films and by connection to the entire canon of Bengali art-house cinema. And I have been fuming like the Matla at the height of the monsoons ever since I saw this film, and feel like bashing up Sen for not only frustrating our expectations but also having lost in the process everything she had achieved in her 30 years of filmmaking career. It’s hard to believe that the same person has gifted us with such gems as 36 Chowringhee Lane, Parama, Yuganta, Mr. & Mrs. Iyer, and 15 Park Avenue. The ambitious claim that she made in the publicity of the film, calling it a love poem, adds, in retrospect, insult to injury that the film has caused to her audience. One more person deserves a sound beating: that’s Parambrata Chatterjee. What profound sublimity he discovered in a shit of a film like this! He found poetry oozing out in the kite-flying sequence, which however, is so shoddily executed that you feel that it would have been better had it not been there at all. And how juvenile a fight! Kharaj Mukherjee appears in the worst role of his career to deliver an irritating performance in his militant nationalism, pitting India against Japan, which robs a lot of the scene. The character causes profound damage to the plot, and till the end, even when he no longer appears, you cannot forget his obnoxiousness! The Telegraph review of the film made by Chatterjee also robs the esteemed English daily of its credibility. I wonder whether Aparna Sen paid the self-importantly aspiring filmmaker and an average actor to write this review!

Kunal Basu’s only readable work is this short story “The Japanese Wife”, an unconventional love story of a Sunderban schoolmaster and a Japanese girl living in Yokohama. The story is extremely appealing for it seems to work itself out in the space between reality and illusion, the Sunderbans, the furious, yet picturesque Matla providing a sort of surreal backdrop. The very unconventionality of the love story is what keeps you hooked: Miyagi, the girl, never once appears and the omniscient narrator too seems a bit unaware of her reality. Told from Snehamoy’s point-of-view, the story sometimes succeeds to instigate a suspicion in the reader as to the reality of such long-distance romance. The story manages to capture a kind of twilight zone which really exudes poetry. So do the letters. Finally, when she arrives after Snehamoy’s death, the reader finds it difficult to restrain his emotions. For this is the first time he sees her: so far she was only known to him through her letters. That she would really materialize, from the abstract zone of writing from a distance, was not expected. Hence the pleasant shock and the poetic exuberance…

But the poetry was totally lost on Sen: she makes the grave mistake of taking the film to Japan and showing the girl from the very beginning. The absent-yet-present Miyagi who brings poetry to an otherwise plain narrative is thereby destroyed and hence, the catastrophe. Surprisingly enough, the director does not put to good use the language of celluloid and in a servile manner imitates the linear narrative of the story. The film therefore falls flat, and the very unconventionality of the love story upon which the appeal of “The Japanese Wife” is contingent is totally lost. The very fact that a naïve schoolmaster of the Sunderbans has a Japanese wife is something which the villagers celebrate, or are in perpetual awe of! This ‘awe’ is glaringly missing in the film. The strangeness of the romance is the backbone of the story, which is irreparably broken by the very mundane-ness of the treatment.

Moushumi Chatterjee is the only saving grace of the film: she acts through her eyes, unlike the other members of the cast who are more physical. Rahul Bose is certainly miscast. At least the people of West Bengal, much too aware of the lack of sophistication and rusticity of schoolmasters, and that too of the Suderbans, would not be able to accept him, with all his urbaneness, which he tries hard to cover up, but in vain. Another sore thumb is Raima Sen. I don’t understand what makes her such a favourite with the art-house filmmakers of Tollywood! Neither can she emote nor can she speak; and, just like her award-winning biswhanyaka mother, she has no control over her body language. She cannot really make the cultural difference between Ballygunge Circular Road and Goshaba marketplace: there is subsequently no effort on her part to imitate the walk of a rustic girl. Chingusa Takaku is as amateurish as amateurish could afford to be.

The film essentially fails to capture the beauty of the Sunderbans in which the beauty of the love story could have well mingled. The narrative and the setting do not merge into each other. The editing is horrible; it’s one of the exemplary instances of bad editing damaging a film altogether. The director has also dared to underestimate her audience by making Rudranil Sengupta dub for Rahul in one particular scene. What a terrible inconsistency! Unforgivable!

Lots of Bengalis had been sympathizing with Aparna Sen ever since the tabloids exposed how Kajol had insulted her and walked out of the middle of a script-reading session without even bothering to come back. I guess Kajol has foresight: this is the treatment you would feel like giving Aparna Sen after watching The Japanese Wife, notwithstanding what great works she might have presented to us in the past!!!

Love, Sex aur Dokha: Experimental at its best!

2010-03-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

It’s been really long since we have seen such an experimental film. It’s claustrophobic in the sense that it gives you a terrible feeling that you are under the constant vigilance of an unseen eye! Kind of a Foucauldian panopticon syndrome…the very watchfulness of an unknown pair of eyes that would make you feel imprisoned when you are apparently free! The entire film is shot in a hand-held camera that triples up as the camera of an amateurish filmmaker, the spy-cam of a departmental store, and the hidden camera of sting operation. All three are love stories…the first inspired by the iconic DDLJ, a deglamourised intertext of the same working in and out of the narrative underscoring the remarkable difference between the dream-like romantic world of Bollywood and the murkiness of the real world. The second draws from several MMS scandals that have flooded the internet! The third is based on a sting operation…the project of a news channel to unmask a pop-star, by revealing to the world his casting couch. The film does not resort to any kind of commentary for its difficult to even feel the presence of a director…for in all three stories the camera is controlled by the characters. We see what the characters within the film wish us to show. It is difficult to recall any film where the director is so completely absent. By absenting himself, the director seems to have put the responsibility of telling their own stories to the characters. ‘Mind-blowing’ would be an understatement. It’s brilliant, it’s awesome! In spite of all the experiments, the film does not bore you even for a minute. I had fallen in love with Dibakar Banerjee when he had gifted us with his awesome Khosla ka Ghosla…the respect for him has increased manifold after Love, Sex aur Dhokha! The Indian film industry has really matured…no doubts about that! Three cheers for Indian films! And one more thing...You need no stars to make a good film!!!

The Great Famine: Middle Class Bengali Men and the S-Word Mania

2010-03-12T20:05:00.000-08:00

Let me warn you at the very outset: this post is not meant for hypermasculine, militant, sexist, insensitive men!

Have you ever stayed with a bunch of young catastrophically middle class (not to say LS) Bengali men in the same room? If not in the same room, you have certainly shared space with this species in some point of your life. But staying in the same room is a different ballgame altogether. Provided you are sensitive, intelligent, insightful, basically tolerant by nature, and not sexually starved, and of course, do not subscribe to the Victorian morality and taboo associated with the s-word, you are sure to sense some kind of claustrophobia growing into your soul and threatening to eat you up. I have never experienced a real famine; but my stay with a bunch of these men (hypermasculine and sexist at its worst) has given me a fair idea how insufferable it is! It’s a suffering which these people do not recognize as suffering, for they have pitifully become used to fantasizing about s-related things, in the most crudest way possible for the ‘real thing’ is a taboo to them, and bask in the pleasure of having ventured into ‘forbidden territory’ by watching downmarket pornography and discussing aloud the power of the male organ, at their mother’s, girlfriend’s or wife’s back! Hey, they are that regressive, believe me! They still believe that power resides in that protruding tool, the fantasies and meditations on the dimensions of which occupy many many important moments of their life.

Let me describe a typical evening, well morning…no night…actually anytime of the day, how does it matter? What you would immediately recognize is that, that is if you are that insightful and objective, that no matter what time of the day it is, they, at the slightest opportunity, plunge into lewd jokes and juvenile puns which might not have interested you even when you were in school, almost effortlessly. These jokes often give way to the narration of other peoples’ experiences on bed. These tales mostly work themselves out through the binary of the strong man and weak woman. The man in these stories could well replace Jackie Shroff in the Musli-Xtra Power ads, and is enviously appreciated by the narrator and his intent listeners. Sometimes the binary is reversed: these stories have Circe-like women who really know how to dominate over the men. If you closely follow the expression of the narrator and the reaction of his listeners, you may notice a thin streak of fear and of course, disgust for the heroine who dared to…you know what! All this is of course drowned in unthinking laughter, for they have been interpellated into this convention that once a lewd joke is said, you need to laugh, no matter how terribly stupid it may be! And when, they are not cracking these mind-boggling and suicide-inspiring jokes, they watch pornography. Most of them use their newly purchased laptops to this much celebrated noble end of watching porn, and their degree of popularity is contingent upon their ability to provide the starved population with endless supply of nudity. See logic in this: which neta wins the election? Of course, the one who can meet demand with supply! In this case, the supply is usually measured in Gigabytes…the more Gigabytes of porn the more popular you tend to be! And you cynics out there blame Rakhi Sawant for her endless stunts for cheap popularity! See, what you are missing out! Well, ironically, these Gigabytes also measure out the depth of their sexual frustration, mind it! It's a different thing, that they do not realise this.

And one of my very nice female colleagues who has no choice but to participate in this male homosocial group, most often than not, finds herself at the receiving end of several bawdy jokes…but has a big heart to laugh them away, only lamenting that she can’t believe that she is, by default, the chosen site for the ‘libido sublimation’ of these famine-stricken guys! And she says that aloud! But the impact of such humour is lost on them! For, most of these guys do not understand English, and let me tell you, they are college teachers! Ha ha ha! Shocked? You are in West Bengal, my dear, which was officially de-English-ed some two and half decades ago.

And, once in a while, when pornography does not interest them, they watch heroic films such as Troy, appreciating the hypermasculinity of Achilles and the brotherly affection of Hector (now and then, rewinding and pausing to ogle at Helen’s exposed parts), or World War movies, imbued with belligerent violence. This female colleague of mine, aware of my interest in Gender Studies, has asked me to turn my gaze away from books and focus on this reality I am an unfortunate part of. And, she is right! Very right! Well, I surely would, provided I survive the painful claustrophobia of having to live through this great famine in which these men are caught up for life!

"My Name is Khan": Fighting Terrorism the Bollywood Way

2010-03-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

Interestingly, at Fame, My Name is Khan is preceded by or intercepted by trailers of films having titles such as Lahore and Tere Bin Laden. All of a sudden, and perhaps, deservingly so, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Al-Qaida, and terrorism have entered the Bollywood scriptwriter’s favourite-list. There’s nothing to believe, of course, that these scriptwriters are dying to fight a social cause; for, Bollywood is far too commercial to do art for art’s sake, or address a social cause out of a sense of necessity. The eye is always on the box-office and these days themes related to terrorism are fetching money. For a hardcore commercial filmmaker like Karan Johar, My Name is Khan is just another project that he thought would set the box-office bells ringing. To the theme of terrorism, he adds another crowd-pulling formula: a diseased protagonist. Taare Zameen Par had made dyslexia an upmarket disease; and Paa had projeria raising the expectation bars. Now you have Asperger’s Syndrome! And why do you think actors like Amitabh Bachachan and Shah Rukh Khan enthusiastically take up these roles? For, they all of a sudden realize that they need to act seriously. Portraying a diseased character gives ample opportunity to act, really. So, the preoccupation with rare diseases and the filmmaker’s show of social awareness should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Everything is fixatedly focussed on the box-office return. While sympathizing with SRK and wiping your tears with the edge of your handkerchief, do not overlook the economic side of it all. By the way, let me clarify at the very outset that SRK is extremely loveable in MNIK. I haven’t seen anyone suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome; I guess very few people have. But, somehow SRK makes it look convincing, although a reality-check on it is a little difficult.

Postmodern history is best understood through stories of the individual who not always makes to the headlines, but has the historical moment inscribed in him, in his body or his psyche. So, postmodern literature and cinema turn to the individual and relate history through narrating the personal. My Name is Khan captures the historical moment of a paradigm shift in world history, the fateful 9/11 incident that divided the world into “us” and the “Muslims”. Rizwan Khan goes out into the world to destroy this binary, having lost his stepson in a racial fight on the soccer field, post-9/11. The odyssey he undertakes across America to meet the President takes him across ethnic cultures that shape the American multicultural melting pot. This odyssey is for the sake of love; for, his emotionally shattered wife asks him to visit the President and tell him that “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.” Deeply hurt, almost insane with grief, Mandira holds her marriage to a Muslim man responsible for his son’s predicament. As she continues to fight for justice, Rizwan tours the US seeking an opportunity to meet the President and ends up in jail while he is mistaken for a terrorist at a meeting in which George Bush is the chief speaker. Assisted by the media, Rizwan is freed, but he refuses to return to Mandira who has by this time realised her mistake. A terrible hurricane strikes Wilhelmina and Rizwan braves all odds to save Mama Jenny and her son, a black American family that had given him shelter. He becomes famous overnight and moves all and sundry into playing the Good Samaritan. American history sees a remarkable turn with an African American President coming to power. The television channels splash headlines such as the “Victory of Democracy” while Rizwan recovers from a serious injury caused by a Muslim fundamentalist. He finally meets the President, and announces that he is not a terrorist. He emerges as the spokesperson of a community which has been suffering since 9/11, for wrongs which they were never responsible for. Several emotionally charged moments add up to a sentimental climax, a la KJo films, and suddenly all seems well in the classic Hindi film style ending. This is where the film loses the audience’s sympathy.

It’s commendable that the filmmaker tells the story from both sides as evident in the loss of Rizwan-Mandira’s white journalist friend who is sent to cover the war in Afghanistan. Rizwan weaves his story of loss in the insufferable story of the Black Americans, those who lost their near and dear ones in the Iraq war. Again, the 1983 Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay appear in the flashback. The film cuts across borders, national, ethnic or otherwise, by telling the whole story through the eyes of a man who sees the world as divided into two kinds of people: good and evil. Rizwan’s simplicity is that of a child, so is his innocence. Perhaps the film advocates a return to the lost days of innocence when labels hardly matter.

SRK as Rizwanur is simply loveable. The moment of the film is that when Mandira proposes to him in the backdrop of the high rises of San Francisco bathed in the halo of dawn and he acts coy, covers his face demurely. Kajol looks rather fatigued; kind of disinterested in what she is doing. The chemistry does not work! No, it doesn’t. Gone are the days of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai! The other actors are more or less okay. The music with a heavy doze of Sufism sets the right kind of mood. Sajda really rocks!

My Name is Khan is good; but not great. The film in a way reassures that the Bollywood hero is still alive. So what if he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome! He is still the braveheart, the Good Samaritan. In this sense, the film is rather traditional. The hero does not fight petty villains anymore; he is saddled with a larger responsibility of fighting a global war of love and hate and he emerges successful in the conventional Bollywood style. MNIK could have been a landmark film had it not been so traditionally Bollywoodish after all! Go for it; it deserves a one-time watch despite numerous loopholes in the plot.

Rituparno Ghosh’s Abohoman: Men, Women and Love

2010-01-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

Rituparno Ghosh’s latest venture Abohoman (Since Time Immemorial) raised storms as many found similarities with Satyajit Ray’s scandalous affair with actor Madhabi Mukhopadhyay, a claim Ghosh has been rejecting with a straight face in every interview. Ray’s differences, due to this alleged affair with the actor, with his wife and son had come under media scanner, and were widely speculated upon by the Bengali middle class. This affair has till date remained a juicy Tollywood scandal. A film based on the scandal, or as it has been publicized by the media would definitely draw the crowd, especially middle-aged middle class Bengalis. It would be wrong to say that the protagonist, an art film director (Aniket, played by Dipankar De), does not have any resemblances with Ray. He has. In fact, his study invariably reminds us of Ray’s. In fact, Ray seated in an armchair surrounded by an ocean of books in his study is quite a familiar image to Bengalis. Shrimati alias Shikha’s (Ananya Chatterjee) arrival at his funeral in full makeup could not help reminding you of Madhabi and her glaringly kohl-lined eyes with which she arrived at Ray’s cremation and which drew severe criticism. Apart from these two easily recognizable similarities, the film travels beyond the biography of a well-known filmmaker to narrate the tale of a director and his muse, an age-old story, as attested by the title of the film.

The film within the film tells the story of Binodini Dashi, the legendary nineteenth century Bengali theatre actor, and the many ups and downs of her life. Ghosh infuses life into Binodini: her self-pride, her pains, her seductiveness, her deprivations − all work in perfect rhythm to unravel the personal life of a female actor on the public stage, and behind it. Essentially the film turns out to be an artistic take on the position of women in the world of entertainment, a dreaded public space where they are most vulnerable. Actually, the patriarchal system is such that it interpellates women into believing that they are sex objects and nothing else; even if there is a recognition of their talents (in case of Binodini as well as Shrimati), they are never real actors, but passive recipients. Ironically, the film’s title, while alluding to the eternal romantic bonding between the director and his muse, also alludes to the broader man-woman relationship which has not quite changed, not even in the new globalized world. It’s the same power equation: the man the agency and the woman the passive performer. The age-old binaries of the rational/irrational, active/passive, or intelligent/emotional do not seem to have changed. Yet, no one is blamed for anything. Actually, it’s the perpetuation of a system which cannot be altered. The housewife (played by Mamata Sankar) complains of betrayal; so does the actor of the nineteenth century as well as the present day. The complaint, I guess, is less against an individual; rather it is against a system so deep-rooted that it’s impossible to overthrow it. Interestingly, even if we assume that the complaint is against an individual, say director Aniket or theatre-magnet of Renaissance Bengal Girish Ghosh, both these individuals are much too aware of the plight of women. Aniket, for instance, reads out to Shrimati tales of prostitutes: “Hinger Kochuri”, “Barbodhu”, and others. Tales of the ‘other’ woman, an eternal outlaw inhabiting the fringes; yet without whom the centre cannot function. Actually, the tales of these prostitutes in a way become commentaries on the eternally marginalized position of women: the prostitute’s ‘otherness’ is visible; the housewife’s isn’t. But both are equally dominated. And this story is really really old…as old as eternity: abohoman.

The film offers three very powerful performances. Ananya Chatterjee steals the show with her freshness. Though she imitates Madhuri Dixit quite visibly, she does live up to her character, rather characters. Mamata Sankar emotes as effortlessly as she breathes. Dipankar De is extremely believable. The others are just about okay. The background score and the music would score really high. Ghosh’s attention to details is hardly questionable. However, I felt that the film within the film telling Binodini’s story could have been shot in black and white or sepia tone. That would have made it more enjoyable. After two debacles (Khela and The Last Lear) and an average attempt (Sab Choritro Kalponik), Rituparno Ghosh seems back to his elements. He would not disappoint you this time.

Wrapping up a devastating decade!

2010-01-02T19:13:00.000-08:00

What pains me most when I look back on the decade that was, is the changing nature of global terrorism. No other decade perhaps has been so fraught with paradoxes: on the one hand, the world was condensed into a small global village, thanks to the revolution in information technology; on the other hand, distances between communities, residing side by side, increased beyond measurement. While multiculturalism officially entered the state parlance, mad rush at ethnic cleansing reached a hitherto unforeseen level. In India, nobody seemed to have learned any lesson from the Babri Masjid demolition riots! The Godhra riots in Gujarat, the Malegaon blasts, the unprecedented rise of Hindutva, violence against religious minorities − all of these introduced the most dehumanizing chapters in the history of humanity. The 26/11 Taj Hotel massacre in Mumbai brought the drama of man slaughter to a climax, which, as things are, would never see a denouement. The decade closed under the dark clouds of the Telengana demand for a state separate from Andhra Pradesh, once again throwing into dismal relief the drama of fragmentation of the country that began after the independence and is still going strong. On the other hand, the demand for a Gorkhaland, separate from West Bengal, had been making headlines for quite a few months now! And to top it all, there was the unspeakably inhuman Nandigram debacle that marked a turn to the barbaric age. Amidst this entire hullabaloo for a separate state, religious purity, communal violence, emerged the Maoist rebellion, giving sleepless nights to the government. May be one good thing was the state recognition of same-sex desire as natural. But what was ridiculously ironic was the whole tragicomic drama that was played out by the media in the ‘highly saleable’ hype of legalizing (!) something that was always already natural.

While we were happy that we have finally arrived with high-end technologies entering the middle class home, none of was really bothered about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. All seemed hunky-dory, for the media represented it as such. No one really cared what happened in the remotest areas, miles away from the globalizing urban centres. The new Indian middle class were blissfully unaware of the world beyond McDonald’s, KFC, Shopping Malls, Coke and Pepsi. It took a Slumdog Millionaire to uncover the murky reality that co-existed with the glam and glitz of the country’s economic capital. And in remote villages of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, etc., people still starved to death. The impact of global warming was felt the hard way: in lots of villages the ground water level decreased considerably, super-cyclones hit eastern India time and again taking innumerable lives, and above all a remarkable change in the climate was felt across the country. And not to forget the colossal tsunamis that hit South Asia, almost giving signals of an apocalypse. The great Copenhagen Summit on environmental issues that closed the decade did not really predict a very bright future. However, we hope to live on! All we need are love, patience and a bit of selflessness. May the new decade ring out all that was depressing and ring in life, in true sense of the term!

Paa: Emotional Extravaganza

2009-12-11T22:45:00.000-08:00

Now melodrama is not always a bad word. Avant garde cinema has always been at wars with it, for that is the stuff popular cinema is made of. Of late, however, the dividing line between ‘art’ and ‘popular’ has thinned down, as far as Indian cinema is concerned. What we have today is something ‘middle of the road’: emotional melodrama weaved into technical brilliance; everyday reality stirred into the larger than life. R. Balki’s Paa is one such film. You would surely fumble a few times before calling it brilliant; but there’s definitely something that stays with you long after you have left the theatre.

Interestingly Paa is not about progeria, as all the promotional media hype surrounding it focused on. It’s a love story between a father and a son, where the son is incidentally a progeric baby. He could have been perfectly normal. Paa reminded me of a very well-made but not so popular film, starring Pallavi Joshi, Neena Gupta and Paresh Rawal, called Woh Chhokri (That Girl Out There). In this film, Pallavi Joshi estranged from her father (Paresh Rawal) at a very young age goes through several ups and downs and lands up in a railway yard slum, dirty, slightly deranged and often vulnerable to sexual advances of roadside tramps and railway coolies. Parallely, Rawal rises meteorically in his political career, and becomes an MP. Completely unaware of such a development, Pallavi recognizes her father on the television one day. She visits one of his meetings in the city, hoping a reunion, when her father remarried and popular refuses to recognize her, for he wants to keep his past strictly undercover, fearing a downfall in his political career. Pallavi returns to her slum, emotionally shattered. Paa apparently seems to retell this story, but from a different perspective. The ending, however, is not tragic; but rather hopeful. Amol Arte’s (Abhishek Bachchan) recognition of Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) at the expense of putting his own successful political career in jeopardy has lot to do with the popular notion of a changing India. Though the reality may be totally at odds with such popular narration of the nation as rising to be the next superpower, Paa sort of compels you into believing a definite change in the political scenario, with educated youngsters entering the picture.

The film also concerns itself with the establishment of the picture of the new Indian woman, independent, yet carrying within her certain old values. I do not want to sound judgemental in this: but I did not understand why a doctor, foreign-educated and powerfully independent, gets down explaining to a female patient the pleasures of motherhood. She seems to claim that motherhood is a natural necessity. Is that so? In this sense, the film appears a little regressive: putting motherhood above careers, the home above the world. This scene somewhat sticks out as a sore thumb even after you have been sufficiently involved emotionally with the naughty Auro.

And Auro! Yes, Mr. Bachchan scores spectacularly high. He almost literally enacts the metaphor ‘Old age is the second childhood’. He talks like a boy of thirteen, he emotes like one. He is naughty; he is loveable; yet, more mature than the age he plays. Your extra-diegetic awareness of the real age of the actor enables you to appreciate him more. He is the hero, sans heroism: his excellent comic timing, his expressive eyes, and his awesome co-ordination with the other actors in the frame win him the battle. All the best actor awards are waiting to populate his already overcrowded mantelpiece. All the actors are simply brilliant. Vidya Balan as the single mother is so natural that her star status is often forgotten. Abhishek’s character is a bit amateurishly drawn; but he does excel as a father. One fine discovery is Anuradha Nag. As ‘bum’, Auro’s grandma, hers is perhaps the second most powerful performance. The character is extremely consistent and therefore least flawed.

It’s laudable that Balki does not make a documentary on projeria. Unlike Taare Zameen Par where dyslexia was a major cause behind the marginalization of the protagonist, Paa does not make progeria a cause of humiliation of Auro. He is treated like every other child in school, and he is the hero of his group. Though Paa is not a great film, it’s worth a watch. Full-on entertainment, the film caters to every emotional nook and corner of your soul; be there, to be with Auro! He makes a great company.

“Perhaps, you are scared of conventional happiness”

2009-11-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

This year, 15th Kolkata International Film Festival, had in its kitty a number of French films of which I got to watch two: The Day God Walked Away and The Frontier of Dawn. The first one is an extremely realistic portrayal of the Rwanda genocide, sometimes stomach-wrenchingly grotesque, and the second is a love story of a photographer. None of these are great films so to speak; yet, the second film did manage to impress me. This photographer (he would constantly remind you of the handsome photographer of Aparna Sen’s Parama who compelled the demure Rakhee to rediscover herself beyond the confines of her home) falls in love with a married actress who dies shortly after. Though it was a steamy affair, the guy, devastatingly debonair, falls in love again. However, none of the two affairs seems to move beyond carnal desires, and the bindaas photographer does not really seem involved in any of the affairs emotionally. But the second affair transpires into responsibilities, as the girl suddenly announces that she is pregnant and wishes to keep the baby. Though reluctant, the photographer relents and they are about to tie the knot. Once the wedding day is fixed, whenever the would-be-groom stands in front of the mirror, he sees his former girl friend, the dead actress, appearing in his place and inviting him to be with her. Anxious and awfully perplexed, the photographer seeks his friends’ counsel: while one blandly puts it as his subconscious surfacing in form of the dead actress, the other points towards something more profound, and perhaps a bit spine-chilling. Terribly sceptical of marriage and the social rituals associated with it, this loveable friend tells him “Perhaps you are scared of conventional happiness”. The dead actress rises from the dead to incarnate his fears. Careless, mobile, completely in love with life, and revelling in carnality, this photographer is wild, and cannot be bound within domestic circles. Although he has agreed to marry and raise his baby, for that is exactly what society demands of him, he is scared of being harnessed. Usually (and more often because you are expected to, for that is what it has been), people are expected to rejoice at the prospects of having a baby and a family. But there’s no harm in thinking otherwise. It’s like Camus’ Outsider who does not feel like weeping at his mother’s funeral.

This photographer listens intently to his friend’s explanation and the night before the wedding commits suicide. He was indeed scared of conventional happiness. Many of us are! And I sympathised with him, completely. Why can’t we have our very own ways of being happy?

Mammon turns God: Contemporary Bombay Cinema’s Penchant for New Money

2009-11-11T23:20:00.000-08:00

It’s already a cliché to link up everything Bollywood does today with the economic liberalization in India, a project kicked off by Rajiv Gandhi, realized by the finance minister Manmohan Singh, the fruits of which were reaped by the BJP. While n-number of articles have been already churned out on the changed look and import of the family drama and candy floss romance, much has not been yet written on a new genre which emerged in the late nineties and is still alive and kicking — a new form of slapstick comedy related to the worship of Mammon (or pursuit of cash), and a variation on that, a neo-picaresque comedy of the cop and the crook.

While rags-to-riches stories in the earlier days had a morale associated with them, the morale of hard work and perseverance, the new flapdoodles (most of them are barely comedy in true sense of the term) celebrate the short cuts to easy money and associated comfort. Most of these films end in happiness, with a few exceptions. The pursuit of money is the dominant instinct that drives the plot, and all age-old values connected with friendship and kinship ties, honesty, hard work, etc are unsentimentally shoved aside. No moral compunctions are any longer associated with hera-pheri, for the consumerist impulse is so overwhelming that it almost instinctively destroys any obstacle on the road to the riches. And while we were thinking that such a phenomenon is remarkably urban and bourgeois, Priyadarshan, a pioneer of this genre, came up with Malamaal Weekly where an apparently primitive village with a local feudal system still going strong, is incurably caught in the whirlpool of easy money-making. Here the road to easy money is the age-old lottery; but what is interesting is the comic euphoria in which the entire village participates, as each of them lusts for a share of the one crore won by some Anthony who incidentally dies before the money is encashed. This late capitalist craziness for cash, interestingly, ends with the collapse of the local feudal system, when the tyrannical village thakurain drowns in the river. The highly over-the-top comic chase sequence in which the entire village follows an enraged thakurain determined to convey to the lottery inspector the elaborate lie the villagers had resorted to, ends in the death of the feudal lady, when her motorcycle accidentally suffers a head-on collision with the lottery-inspector’s Ambassador. A distraught cowardly inspector is assured safety by the cunning villagers, for they promise him to keep the whole incident under cover, provided he never ever returned to that village. The poor lottery inspector agrees, and the villagers breathe a sigh of relief for that one crore is now safely in their custody, no matter how many shares are to be given out. The film thereby ends in the triumph of capitalism over feudalism, which also brings in its wake a remarkable transformation of the mythical Indian village associated with honesty, simplicity, naivety, and love. The country/city binary thus disintegrates, opening up the space of the village to the corruption which was so far a special character of the city.

Such changing nature of the country, the small town and the suburbs are seen in other films as well. The dream of good life has certainly caught up with almost everyone across the country, as small-town boys and girls have become adventurous and abandon conventional roads to happiness. The Yash-Raj blockbuster Bunty aur Bablee tells such a story, where a small town boy leaves his hometown dumping a secure government job and his female counterpart sneaks out of her home to become Miss India, throwing away a prospective marriage proposal. When things do not work out the way they imagined it to be, they both join hands to become the all-time famous rogues, almost turning into youth icons. They effortlessly hoodwink the cop, and make interesting headlines with their innovative ways of burglary. The same picaresque narrative is repeated in Dhoom 1 and Dhoom 2 where the crook turns burglary into a glamorous profession, thereby emerging as the hero, in comparison to whom the cop appears in rather poor light. These neo-picaresque films are a significant departure from older stories where the heroic cop won accolades in the end, while remaining deeply rooted in the idealism of the oath he had taken on the very first day of work. Interestingly, in these films, where money is the only driving force, the cops appear clownish, figures to be laughed at or even pitied, every time they are masterfully outdone by the intelligent crooks. This remarkable role reversal of the cop and the crook is an interesting marker of the changing times. The law of the land however remains unchanged; but seems to have become inadequate to impose obstacles on the path of these super-crooks who care a damn for morals. Virtue and vice seem to gather new connotations as the global dream of a good life, or in other words the worship of the hidden God of late capitalism (read, Mammon), catches up with the Indians, changing their lives forever; however, we still do not whether this change is for the better or the worse!

Epic Life: In the memory of Rama

2009-10-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

In his famous ‘foreword’ to Kanthapura, an early Indian English novel, Raja Rao writes: “There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana, or legendary history, of its own. Some god or god-like hero has passed by the village — Rama might have rested under this papal-tree, Sita might have dried her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow stone…In this way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your grandmother always bright.” In Kanthapura, Rao narrates the story of a fictional South Indian village deeply rooted in Hindu myths and tradition. My recent visit to Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu 10 days back made me feel that I had suddenly arrived in one such village.

Rameswaram, as the name suggests, lives in and out of the legends associated with Rama, Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman. The people of the village (now a developing small town) seem to relive the great epic day-in and day-out; and every nook and corner of the place is steeped in epical legends. The central temple has two lingams of Lord Shiva, one of sand and the other of stone. The local legend has it that when Rama, after having killed Ravana and rescuing Sita, landed in India, he met a group of sages in the forests of Rameswaram. The sages told him that killing human beings (brahma-hatya) was an abominable sin and Rama must expiate by offering puja to Lord Shiva. Rama immediately sent Hanuman to Kailash to bring a Shiva-lingam. However, Hanuman was delayed, and Rama ordered Sita to build a lingam of sand. When Hanuman arrived, he was infuriated to see that the lingam was already set up. Rama asked him to destroy the lingam and replace by the one he had brought from Kailash. Hanuman could not break the sand lingam in spite of all his strength; Rama, in order to appease him, said that his lingam would be worshipped before the one Sita had consecrated. Since then, the temple has two lingams; and the rituals are followed as instructed by Rama some millions of years ago. A look around the place would reveal several kundas or wells, named after the legendary gods and goddesses, and a bath in the wells is still considered holy. The sea is unnaturally quiet, and the water a perfect blue. At a point from the coast, called Dhanushkoti, Sri Lanka can be seen on a very bright sunny day. It is also the point from which the famous bridge that Rama had built to reach Lanka is supposed to start.

The place has a primordial look, somewhat spoilt by greedy pandas and priests who are always hankering after money. This lust for wealth is perhaps the most manifest indication of modernization which has crept into this legendary village on the beach. It’s so ironical that a place like Rameswaram in a Dravidian-dominated place has such a deep-rooted myth associated with an Aryan hero. Rameswaram by the virtue of its geographical location stands as a living example of cultural and political hegemony of a foreign race that infiltrated an old civilization and almost wiped out its indigenousness by interpellating the people in its own myths and legends. Ramayana was definitely a powerful cultural tool that was necessary for consolidating Aryan rule. Today, after so many years, it’s really spine-chilling to think how politically charged the Ramayana was. What outstanding political vision had gone into its making! So much so that it has replaced all other realities to become a reality itself.

Kaustav's Arden: Wake up call

2009-10-22T22:02:00.000-07:00

Kaustav's Arden: Wake up Sid-

Wake up call

2009-10-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

What do I write about Wake Up Sid? I do not really want to dissect it critically; it’s so innocently brilliant that you feel like sparing it of the critic’s weapons. Well, to put it simply, Wake Up Sid is like coming home to love. It is a wake up call to all those who create a mayhem about falling in love, who rake up a melodrama more often than not...for, love may also happen, just like that! The film gives you a feel that such love can perhaps only happen in Bombay, our very own Bombay. The disclaimer in the very beginning of the film apologizes for referring to the city as Bombay more often than as Mumbai recalling the agonizing history of the riots that had tore the most tolerant city into shreds. At the same time, it overwrites that history of hatred with a simple tale of love between a Calcutta girl who comes to the city to become independent and a Bombay boy who refuses to grow up. The Chor Bazaar, the Marine Lines, the Bandra housing complexes, and several nooks and corners of the city feature in a big-small way to consolidate the foundation of the lover’s nest the film builds brick by brick.

Sid (Ranbir Kapoor) and Ayesha (Konkona Sen Sharma) are both familiar to us: they are with us in college, in our office, on the roads we travel everyday, in the cafes we often visit. It’s the era of the middle class youth: self-respect, independence, open-mindedness, and responsibility. The film celebrates the spirit of the Generation X, but without moralising, without sounding didactic. Like all good art, it shows; doesn’t tell. Sid’s mother (Supriya Pathak) with her flawed English and awfully middle class dress sense is absolutely loveable. She has never been to school, but has grown up into a modern mother who doesn’t shed buckets of tears at the prospect of her only son living in with a single woman. Her foray into the upper class (because of her husband’s rise in social status) has left her slightly uncomfortable; yet, the film is much too subtle in representing her comic discomfiture. No hullabaloo, no melodrama! It’s just there for you to see.

Konkana looks awesome; and Ranbir impersonalizes Sid, as if he was born to play this character. Sid’s friends are brilliant too, reminding you often of the not-so-good-looking group of Jaane Tu Yaa Jane Na. It’s not that we have not heard this Wake Up Sid story before. It’s not that we did not anticipate the ending at the very beginning. But you stay on, as if by some emotional compulsion, to see how it all happens. And it happens the right way. As you leave the theatre, the iktara continues to hum in the cores of your heart, and it never seems to stop!

NB: Those who are interested in home décor, please note how Ayesha does up her flat.

One Big Reason for Not Rejoicing Dashami

2009-09-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

It’s time again to go knee-deep in flood of sweets; it’s time again to don an artificial smile and wish Subho Bijaya to every Tom, Dick and Harry, whether you like them or not; it’s time again to feel customary grief for Devi Durga is retreating to her Himalayan abode for a year, even if you actually feel delighted for life will return to normal and people would, hopefully, recoup their sanity which they usually lose in these carnivalesque madness. Do I sound like Malvolio? Yes, I do. But I care a damn!

How many of us actually remember that Dashami is the fateful day on which Ravana lost it to Ram? Any ‘mythologically’ conscious Hindu remembers that quite vividly, and, in fact, draws from such memory more energy to celebrate Dashami or Dasera with all its paraphernalia. Any politically conscious ‘normal’ human being should however hesitate to participate in this euphoria. For, doesn’t this day mark the official beginning of a very long era of colonization, whereby the Dravidians, once and for all, were demonized in the popular imagination to be culturally, socially, economically, and politically ruled over by the fairer and better looking Aryans? Doesn’t this day celebrate awful racist tendencies whereby an entire tribe was constructed as sub-human or demonic in order to consolidate the hegemony of a foreign race? And, unfortunately, this racist drama that saw its climax in the killing of Ravana, never saw a dénouement. The buzzword across borders and within nations has been ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! For, they are not us.” Racism, fundamentalism, religious bigotry, nationalism, purity — the endless list of words that have now entered common parlance and are often pronounced with disgust, was always, already there.

Let’s shove aside our misti doi, rasgolla, and all that! Let’s hold hand and shed some tears, for it was on Dashami, that such fashionably ‘great’ terms as tolerance, love and brotherhood had already been immersed into the river. So all those viswa-nyaka Bengalis who dance to the beatings of the dhaak, and drape themselves in red-bordered saris to play with vermillion, turn your heads (the women are especially requested to recall that soon after the Dashami celebrations, came the notorious fire-trial or the agnipariksha that underscored the beginning of a patriarchal, anti-feminist discourse, in which women have been interpellated to accept an eternally subordinate status)…it’s high time, you actually, ‘thought’!

Ashura and the sexy six-pack

2009-09-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

Today a blown-up picture of the Herculean Ashur in

a newspaper supplementary struck me in an odd way: hey, doesn’t he bear a resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger? The fiercely destructive Terminator? A minute later, he seemed to look a lot like a shirtless Salman Khan, of course, a beefier avatar of the actor. His bulging biceps, well-toned triceps, concave chest-muscles, enviably lean waistline and most importantly his six-pack were always, already there, but hitherto have gone unnoticed, until, of course, the Bollywood hero endorsed them, and made them highly desirable.

It was in the late 90s that the six-pack abs and a well-toned body won unprecedented fan-following, thanks, to the likes of Salman Khan, Akshaye Kumar, John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan and the new old man on the block, Shah Rukh Khan who went shirtless at the drop of a hat, and the sexist, homophobic camera, once and for all, changed its lens to lovingly caress the male body. The female/gay gaze was hitherto treated as sacrilegious or non-existent (for Indian women were pious asexual creatures and homosexual men did not exist), and therefore, the male body had never attracted as much limelight it did thereafter. While Shah Rukh Khan set the sets on fire by his macho Darde-disco act, a steaming hot John Abraham overshadowed a petite Priyanka Chopra, emerging half-nude from the blue oceans; a beautifully muscular Hrithik Roshan fought the elephant to the demurring yet lustful gaze of a coy Aishwarya Rai, while a tattooed Aamir Khan fixed everyone’s gaze on his awesome muscles by turning his body into a notepad.

It may be recalled that in older Hindi films (as late as the late-80s) it was the villain and his cohorts who were well-built as against the comparatively average looking hero, thoroughly unconscious of his bulging tummy and flaccid hips. Interestingly, the villain was very often shown shirtless in the vicinity of swimming pools or even in spas, locations considered as impure Western spaces invading the pure Indian space of piety, sacrifice, asceticism, and self-effacement. Consequently, the practice of going shirtless, frolicking in the swimming pool, and self-indulgent spa expeditions were associated with the corrupt and the visibly westernized, who was, therefore, the villain. And this image of the bad man was compatible with the mythological muscle-man, that is, Ashur, the anti-God, the Hindu counterpart of the abominable Satan.

But things have changed. Ganesh with his enormous tummy and Kartik with his good boy looks are no longer desirable. In fact, they appear in a poor pitiable light compared to the heavy-hipped and toned and tanned Ashura. While Martyolok has shifted its allegiances, the market economy has undergone a sea-change. Women and metrosexual men are the new customers high on the target list. Ashur would be gaining more popularity amongst both men and women, for he would become increasingly desirable. Gym-chains have spread across the country to offer the Ashur-look, while the shopping malls are ready with all the accessories that make you look good. All you need to do is to plunge in the Ashur-mania! The slogan of the biggest festival of the unassuming Bengalis is about to change: Jai Ashur ki Jai!

We Are They!

2009-09-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

We stay on the extreme borders of South Kolkata, and all through I have friends and enemies teasing me that Garia (that’s precisely the name of the place) is barely Kolkata, and I might as well accept myself as a rustic! However, very recently, the place has shot into metropolitan stardom, thanks to the extension of the Metro Railways! Even before this metro revolution, Garia had been becoming remarkably cosmopolitan for quite sometime now, with people from various states making the place their home. However, the locality, or ‘para’ in the vernacular parlance, where we stay is particularly interesting. Though Hindu dominated, there are a considerable number of Christian families residing in the Christian ‘para’ and even larger number of Muslim families. There are no separate quarters, of course: in other words, people of all these religions are kind of spatially interspersed with one another. We have hardly felt any we/they feeling ever, and have happily co-existed, even during the unspeakable catastrophe of the Babri Masjid. We have not felt even a slight ripple of the pogrom that was tearing the nation (especially Bombay) apart, and our experience of the political cataclysm was solely contingent upon televised images of the violence.

This year Eid comes after the official inception of Devipaksha (the period in which Durga Puja is celebrated). Today in the morning I woke up to a song commemorating Ibrahim playing from a Muslim ‘para’. What interested me is that the song was in Bengali, and not in Urdu. Many songs played all through the day, and now as I am writing this blog-entry I hear a song celebrating Durga Puja playing from the same quarters. I guess it’s from some Bengali film. Whatever it is, I suddenly feel like asking what is the real basis of all these incidents of communal violence that are jeopardizing our very existence? If the common people are mostly not so violently racist, what leads to such brutal cases of communal riots, butchering of innocent lives and cross-border terrorism? Who is the mastermind behind all these? Is it the State and its exclusivist nationalism that ignores the feelings and emotions of the common people? What is it? As I experience at this very moment how the spirit of the Durga Puja melts into the euphoria of Eid, I feel like getting into a self-trial…it’s high time we enquired ourselves of our shortcomings. What exactly is going wrong?
Eid Mubarak and Subho Durga Pujo!

Sab Choritro Kalponik: Grand Conception, Faulty Execution

2009-09-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

The pre-release hype that made us feel Sab Choritro Kalponik was Rituparno’s artistic comeback with a bang, after such odious let-downs as The Last Lear and Khela, died into a whim, not long after the curtains went up. A worldly-wise corporate wife (Bipasha Basu as Rai), a heedless husband lost in his world of poetry (Prosenjit Chatterjee as Indranil), a surrogate mother-stereotype of a housemaid (Sohag Sen as Priyabala alias Nandor Ma), and the wife’s apparently caring male colleague (Jishu Sengupta as Sekhar) set up a familiar quadrilateral. However, I can’t recall any Bengali film that has a poet as its protagonist, and that way, Sab Choritro Kalponik had set high hopes of doing something novel. But as the narrative unfolds in leaps and jumps (there’s no story apparently; the director opts for the stream-of-consciousness technique, thereby doing away with the linearity of time — the abrupt fade-out and fade-in of short scenes gives the impression of a collage), the film seems to be more about the same-old problem: marital differences, and an eternally whining distraught wife, and a pacifying colleague acting happily as a stand-in for the husband absent in her emotional space. The only saving grace in these otherwise painful moments is a vibrant Bipasha Basu (perfectly done-up in awesome designer sarees, and perfectly complementary accessories). However, Sohini Sengupta’s voice-over irredeemably damages Bipasha’s performance which is, believe me, quite good. Prosenjit looks anything but a poet, though he tries hard. But, sorry dear! You do not have the intellectual demeanour to carry the image of a ‘frenzied’ poet with panache, no matter, how much you refrain from make-up or sport stubble. In fact, his wrinkles (in this deglamourized avatar) so conspicuously stare into your face that Bispasha with all her youthful vivacity seems to be his balika badhu (courtesy: a witty friend of mine). Jishu is awful. Sohag Sen pumps life into Priyabala, but her bangal bhasha appears a bit too contrived.

Back to the narrative: in the second half, after Indranil’s sudden demise, the film takes an unexpected turn. Though the pre-release promotional of the film constantly harps on the fact that Rai falls in love with her husband through his poetry after his death, I believe the film is more about Rai’s discovery of her own poetic self, which in turn, emotionally connects her with her husband. Clearly, the film is about journeys, as underscored by the repeated use of the train-motif. If one the one hand, it talks about the Partition and the forced migration from the other side of the border, of rootlessness, of the pain of un-belonging, on the other hand, it charts an internal journey into the soul. While Priyabala does not know where her ‘desh’ is and the mad man in the streets of Kolkata still hunts for a vehicle that will take him back to Dhaka-Bikrampur, Rai too suffers from an intense sense of un-belonging in the domestic space where the emotional distance between her and Indranil is insurmountably immense. Rai’s journey is essentially a journey into the inner most recesses of her soul whereby she discovers her poetic self, which eventually erases that distance. Reality effortlessly blends into the imaginative in the dream sequences, where Rai meets Kajari (Pauli Daam), her husband’s muse. Interestingly, however, Kajari turns out to be her second self, her alter-ego, the hidden poetry in her heart. She had once asked Indranil, “Who is Kajari? Me?” Indranil had said “No”. Since then, Rai has been wondering who this woman is who recurs in his poetry. She gets the answer towards the end: it’s her poetic self, which could translate Tagore’s “Amader chhoto nodi/ Chole anke-banke/Boishakh mashe tar haantu jal thake”, which could compose an almost ethereal poem about a woman whose husband returns to her after a long time, insane and almost unrecognizable! May be Indranil has always celebrated the poet-Rai in poem after poem, the poet who got buried under worldly pursuits.

When retold, as I have attempted to, Sab Choritro Kalponik, may appear to be a brilliant film. In fact, Rituparno had a grand conception; but the execution is faulty. It’s the same problem that destroyed Sanjay Leela Bansali’s Sawaariya. Although poetry plays a very important role in the narrative, the film is far from poetic. Emotions do overflow, but the flow isn’t spontaneous enough. Sab Choritro Kalponik, nonetheless, would not be forgotten easily; for, in spite of several shortcomings, it makes a different attempt; an attempt at reinstating the importance of poetry in an overwhelmingly consumerist world, where softer feelings often get lost in mad materialism.

Of Shopping

2009-08-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

No, Bacon could not have written anything about this! Even his much-read ‘Of Travel’ bypasses the issue. While we can barely separate travel from shopping, Bacon makes an oblique reference to it, telling his readers that it isn’t desirable to pick anything or everything that comes his way while travelling…picking up foreign culture demands some degree of pragmatism on part of the traveller. But for us, the lesser mortals (I mean the presumably morally corrupt, with no admirable respect for tradition, and that’s what the brooding vanguards of Victorian morality think), the ‘foreign-bred’ is dearer to the ‘home-grown’, and we really believe, at times, ‘Ghar ka murgi dal barabar’. Therefore, with shopping malls mushrooming faster than monsoon-enthused mushrooms and driving us crazy with a gigantic spectrum of brand-names, our path to consumerist salvation seems to have been carved out.

Believe me, I’m not here to write about the evils of shopping; I’m very much in favour of the great economic liberalization, which has, at least, if not anything else, truly liberated us from the trauma of wearing unimaginative apparels and of having no sense of accessories. (Let me stop here and share something with you: In spite of such tsunamic revolution in the attire arena, I more often than not suffer visual strokes on having to watch my irredeemably middle class colleagues sporting prehistoric clothes and bags which should have received honourable awards in the dumping grounds for being so characteristically ‘dumpable’). Anyways, DKNY, Lacosté, Bare, Levi’s, Reebok, Adidas, Westside, Zodiac, John Miller, and so on and so forth have joined hands to make Gardens of Eden of the Shopping Malls…the only difference in this Paradise is that covetousness here is no sin. In fact, the “Dil Maange More” slogan popularized by Pepsi is the driving mantra!

My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, if I do not have too much in my wallet to spend in the shopping malls. Oftentimes, I feel that I may even forego my honesty and heed Iago’s culpable advice “Put money in thy purse”, if that means endless shopping. My friend U and I never tire of lamenting our proletariat status every time we lay our eyes on diamond-studded watches and designer furniture that hang like forbidden fruits right under our nose. My friend D vows to himself that he would never come to shopping malls again, for these are evil enticements that drain his bank balance like flood streams, but has never been able to keep that promise. Nothing on the display windows fails to astonish him, and very often than not, he strips unsuspecting mannequins to sheer nakedness, for he usually falls in love with them (I mean, their clothes). Another friend of mine P (who is also like an elder sister) blames it all on her zodiac-sign (Libra) for loving all the ‘good things of life’ and shops till she drops believing that her birth-hour had already predetermined her fate as a compulsive shopper. I am an equally powerful Libran who never feels tired of accompanying P when it comes to shopping, be it here in the city or as far away as Rajasthan. And U keeps on updating me on discounts, and our social network dotted with award-winning shoppers pass on the news with electrifying speed across the city and very often than not we find our friends having an unwitting get-together at these Shopping Elysiums. My abhorrence towards buying vegetables and fish has also evaporated ever since Spencer’s and Big Bazaar have come into the neighbourhood, replacing the nightmarish walk through the odiously smelly, muddy, blood-stained alleys of downmarket bazaars with dream ambling on marble floors in air-conditioned comfort. My mom rails at me for the vegetables are mostly stale and tasteless; but, I choose to overlook such demerits for I believe shopping malls can do no wrong!

We know that shopping malls swindle us into buying things at much higher prices, and the discounts they offer are but a eye-wash. For, the discounted price is the real price of the goods, and the seller is never at a loss. Yet, we love to indulge in them…it’s like gorging on chocolate brownie when you know you must be on a diet. There’s no end to it. Macbeth had murdered Duncan believing that’s it, only one, just one murder, would settle his life as a monarch forever. Well, let’s kill Banquo as well! Just two…then, my position is secured! O no! The poor man had turned into a serial killer by the time the realization dawns upon him that “Life is but a walking shadow…Full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing”. So, beware! Once you step into a shopping mall, believing “O this is just my first time…who’s going to come here again? It’s so expensive, my God!” You are wrong, my dear! The last time never comes. I would say come back, as many times as you wish. Don’t take it so seriously…what if, even when I have alluded to something as serious as Macbeth?

Why I suddenly hated "Dil to Pagal Hai" after a decade of loving it

2009-07-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

Dil to Pagal Hai was released when I was still a school kid, naïve, unassuming, easily impressed by fairy tales from Bollywood, understanding everything with the heart and not with the head, and was unnaturally enamoured by the mesmerizing Madhuri Dixit, revelling in the post-Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! hangover that had eclipsed all other existing women, reel-life or real-life! Dil to Pagal Hai arrived at the theatres with a bang and set the box-office bells ringing from Day 1, sucking the audience into the whirlpool of ‘good life’ it celebrated, transposing them to a world levitating much above the ‘ground-reality’. Nursery-rhyme-inspired sets, pageants of abundance in the form of food, clothes, and money, extravagant shaadi ka rasm, dream-like dances, and a naïve heroine, clad in semi-transparent designer apparels, gyrating in lush European meadows, and inhabiting a world so formidably immune from the reality around it, coalesced together to create magic that took in its folds innocent kids like us, almost effortlessly. The impression the film had left on me, ‘I bore in my heart’ for a decade or so, almost deliberately overlooking the substantial hollowness at the very core of it; for, every time I have watched it, I have seen nothing beyond Madhuri Dixit who almost looked ethereal, lolling in the verdurous meadows, lip-syncing to romantic songs in milk-white designer salwar kameezes (the Manish Malhotra kind, which no one had seen ever before)! Her romantic philosophies, the platitudes she uttered were music to our ears, and we hardly ever thought how regressive those were!

Yesterday, I again glued myself to the sofa to watch Dil to Pagal Hai for the 192nd time, when, I was kind of shaken out of a waking dream, and realised, as if in an epiphanic moment, that “fled is that music”, and am really, wide awake now. A thing of beauty cannot be joy forever…Keats was wrong! I suddenly started hating Madhuri Dixit and all her designer nyakami (believe me ‘affectation’ is not a good translation of this adjective…), when it occurred to me that she actually DOES NOTHING in the film. I mean nothing meaningful! Her job is to look good, buy clothes from shopping malls, dance around the trees in the meadows without any sense of time, and LOOK FOR A LOVER! This last thing preoccupies every single moment of her day, like those 24*7 news channels which refuse to stop. How idiotic, my God! She behaves as if people are born to get married, and nothing else is meaningful in life, even if you’re a NASA astronomer, exploring the outer space. Everyday is Valentine’s celebration for her, and she is intolerable enough to Indianize this remarkably western festival (read, Archie’s one more excuse to sell cards and accessories and bamboozle unsuspecting emotionally downmarket lovers) by linking it up with Puranmashi! Sounds like one of those B-grade supernatural thrillers? Yes, it does! For, it’s indeed supernatural, for the even more irritating Shah Rukh Khan really bumps into her over the phone in a wrong connection, on that momentous night of Puranmashi melting into Valentine’s Day. Even more irritating is Aruna Irani, the veteran Godmother of lessons in love, who distributes designer Ganesha idols once things seem to have gone for a toss. And why forget the hideous Farida Jalal? The most excruciatingly painful scene is the one where Akshay Kumar tells her over the phone that he is tying the knot with Madhuri, and she walks into the latter’s room shedding a bucket of tears, and carrying with her an elaborate shaadi ka joda, and god knows, what other stupid accessories on a tray! I wonder did she have an instant-supply of these shaadi ka accessories. Like those instant-noodles and instant-coffee? May be! The world of Dil to Pagal Hai is clinically and incurably mad about getting married, and there’s every possibility that these mother-figures churn out marriage uniforms at the drop of a hat. How retro! How regressive! Awful! O my god, I had never imagined that I would view Dil to Pagal Hai with so much hatred and loathing! I almost surprised myself. I did not ever imagine that I was actually capable of such reactions to the film, which I have loved so much! Finally, I have grown up, I guess. Better late than never, what say?

‘Summer of ’42’: A Prequel to ‘The Reader’?

2009-07-18T01:06:00.000-07:00

While watching Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42, I was struck by its similarity to The Reader, released in 2008. It’s again a younger boy, the 15-year old Hermie falling in love with the 22-year Dorothy, in the backdrop of the World War II. The Holocaust, if you recall, is the major historical event informing The Reader. Summer of ’42 is as poetic as its title, bringing home to its viewers a tangible feel of a New England beach colony, a summer about which Shakespeare wouldn’t have cribbed! This summer does have a short lease too, but it’s the kind of summer every beloved would have loved himself (or herself) to be compared to. It’s so beautiful, so lyrical and so vibrantly lively. Three young boys, the ‘terrible trio’ as they call themselves, mature from childhood to adolescence through a pedantic knowledge of sex, followed by real life experiences. While these boys literally come of age, their crossing the threshold of innocence culminates in the loss of Hermie’s beloved, Dorothy. Having lost her husband in the war, she finds solace in the arms of Hermie, much to the boy’s surprise. He suddenly matures that night: a casual call turns into an experience of a lifetime when Dorothy melts into him, feeling the intense need of human touch, the very human soul which seems to have been buried beneath the humdrum of the global battle for power. But the next day she leaves, leaving a letter for Hermie, now an adult, overnight. Although he does not understand why she deserts him, the voice-over, the older Hermie seems to have comprehended her sudden disappearance.
The World War II was so cataclysmic that it had battered faith in humanity to death. The bonds of love had become fragile, and summers had turned bloodier than beautiful. Summer of ’42, or for that matter, The Reader, are few of those great sublime works of art that makes an attempt to re-establish faith in humanity, and celebrate love, the fundamental driving principle of life. When the real world is eating and sleeping violence, the responsibility of reaffirming life lies with the world of fiction. And once that responsibility is responsibly taken, you have such gems as Summer of ’42 or The Reader. Though, both the films end on a sad note, it is worth living each and every moment of the film. The war is always happening for us civilians in some place else…we needn’t bother. But every war changes our lives forever. Sometimes we realize it, sometimes we don’t. These films make you realise that in a beautiful way. It’s not just about leaning against the coppice gate and watching…it’s something more than that!

Of Loneliness

2009-07-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

Had Francis Bacon been living at this hour, he would have certainly added to his long list of Essays, another having the same title. With the world becoming more and more crowded, loneliness has caught up like an incurable disease which has of late taken the proportion of an epidemic. However, the focus has been more or less on those who are visibly lonely: old people abandoned by their children, widows, a single child, a single man or woman, an expatriate (sometimes nuclear diasporic families), etc. And because people are usually afraid of being lonely, they have, in desperation, found ways to ward off their loneliness. For, frail old people we have old age homes; widows sometimes choose to remarry; a single child is sent to the playschool very early; single men or women are urged on to tie the knot; an expatriate takes no time in joining or sometimes forming communities abroad, and so on and so forth. We are all too ready to hold hands and form a sacred circle to keep away the demon called LONELINESS. But do we really overpower loneliness through bonding? Do we? Understandably, if we do not have anyone to share our deepest sorrows, or our biggest achievements, nothing could be more depressing than that. Remember Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner? Doesn’t his tragedy lie in being alienated from human community for an unforgivable sin? And doesn’t he desperately try to get himself reintegrated to the community by performing the act of penance through sharing his story with the wedding guest? That’s what everyone does. A criminal was often sent on exile or outlawed. The most heinous punishment one can think of! More terrifying, perhaps, than death! Remember Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim? We needn’t go that far! Consider Ramayana: Sita’s exile to the forest is perhaps the most severe punishment a husband has ever meted out to his wife. The punishment of being alone! Yet, isn’t it more depressing, even tragic, to realise one fine day that you are really alone in spite of company? Like Sita, who supposedly had the most adorable husband in the world (and therefore, she was conventionally, not lonely), we all come to realise some day or the other that we are really really lonely. No loyal friends, no doting lover, no loving relatives, no sympathetic colleagues, no caring spouse can ever embalm that pain, even if they are lying on the same bed with you or are just a phone call away.

Yet, we look for company! Recall those splendidly poetical line: Is ajnabi se seher me jana-pehchana dhunndta hai... (In this strange city, the lonesome soul keeps looknig for an acquaintance) It's so sadly true for all of us! We all need to talk. The moment we start talking, we barely realise, that the medium of conversation, that is language, is a construction, which more often than not fails to communicate the right kind of feelings or emotions, or has a very different or no impact on the listener, for its import is mostly lost on him. Hold on! Tell me, who would actually lend an ear to you? It’s easier to convert coal into diamond than to find a sympathetic listener. We do feel a heavy abhiman (No English synonym can actually bring out the implication of this very beautiful Sanskrit word) unbearably shrouding our hearts…for, friends appear selfish, spouses seem nonchalant, children too busy to pay attention, colleagues too competitive to feel for you…but, we are helpless. We are like Shelley’s Moon whose eyes are perpetually joyless, for she has not yet found a worthy companion who would love her forever. But don’t we feel secured at times by starting off a family? And initially it appears to us that we have found that worthy companion in our spouses? I mean, that’s what people generally do! But such illusion of security is short-lived…however, pitifully permanent for those who unwittingly turn such a relationship into a habit, and refuse to admit that they’ve actually become lonely all over again. May be such delusion saves one from facing a harsh reality head-on. But is that desirable? We continue to play this game until life teaches us the hard way that there is no other way to be than to be alone on the day we leave this world. So, my point is let’s not bewail being lonely…for, that is the norm. And let’s not be afraid…for, we can be gracefully lonely. For, hasn’t the veteran poet said, Jodi tor daak shune keu na ashe, tobey ekla cholo re (If no one answers your call, carry on with the journey, alone)?

Kaustav's Arden: Beyond Barriers: The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Show Gathers Unprecedented Momentum

2009-06-23T22:20:00.000-07:00

Kaustav's Arden: Beyond Barriers: The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Show Gathers Unprecedented Momentum

Beyond Barriers: The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Show Gathers Unprecedented Momentum

2009-06-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

I exchanged amorous glances with my beloved.

Let the women and girls say what they like---

I exchanged amorous glances with my beloved.

His beautiful face, his charming form

I absorbed into my innermost heart.

----Amir Khusro

The three days (June 12-June 14) at Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata saw a proud assertion of sexuality, generally dubbed ‘abnormal’ by a silly ‘normal’ majority, through films and videos from across the globe. The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Festival smugly entered its third year, throwing to the winds anxieties, hatred, denial, rejection, shame and all other ‘constructed’ negativities associated with alternate sexualities. The films the festival featured were a mixed bag of good and bad flicks, judged by cinematic standards, but each of them has a historically momentous role in representing or giving voice to people mostly overlooked or made fun of in popular culture. Each of these films effectively and unpretentiously narrates the story of ‘invisible’ men and women, and gives them a place in human history.
The turn-out was amazing! Both heterosexual people and people of alternative sexualities gathered in considerable numbers in the premises of Max Mueller Bhavan. The film festival opened up a rather comfortable space to all those who are very often than not jibed at, made butts of laughter, and often brutally humiliated and even ravished in the world outside. ‘Dialogues’ organized by Sappho and Pratyay Gender Trust is kind of an eventful homecoming for all those who are never at home in the big bad world. I could overhear conversations amongst gay men who have come out to their parents and friends; some of them have been accepted, while some have faced downright rejection. Yet they all shone out in resplendent glory and beamed with glee in this public event which is so blissfully open! If the big bad world makes this dismal demand to conform to heteronormativity and any kind of digression is treated with unspeakable malice, Sappho and Pratyay have conquered an honourable space for all those who are treated or maltreated thus. ‘Dialogues’ is one of the many events that seeks to make the presence of those who have been so far treated as non-existent or diseased strongly felt. The festival opened to a full-house with director Onir (My Brother Nikhil) and fashion designer Nil (Dev R Nil) sharing the stage. Next in line was the inaugural film A Jihad for Love, a docufeature narrating ‘coming-out’ stories of men and women from across the globe. Interestingly, many of the films showcased in the festival linked up minority anxieties, religious fundamentalism, apartheid, racism, and the hoax associated with multiculturalism with sexual othering. Both All My Life (set in a conservative Muslim community of Egypt) and The World Unseen (set in an Indian community of South Africa) situate the sexual minority in a world of religious orthodoxy and homophobia, and fierce apartheid respectively. All these films question democracy (if it at all exists), the right of the individual, and the right to assert one’s sexual needs, which are perhaps the most fundamental reality of human life. Harvey Milk’s clarion call — “My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you” — is perhaps the major inspiration behind all these films which seek to recruit people of alternative sexualities in mainstream politics and naturalize homosexuality. Although the murky cloud covering the issue of homosexuality has just started to be lined with silver, it’s really long before the sun shines forth in its full glory. But the journey has begun…certainly it has!

‘The Reader’: Emancipation through reading

2009-05-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

The 33-year old Hannah (Kate Winslet) chances upon the 15-year old Michael (David Cross), sick with symptoms of scarlet fever, on her doorsteps one rainy afternoon and the foundation stone of a breezy love affair is set. A love affair set in motion by carnal desires, a young boy’s ecstatic initiation into the world of sex, his sudden realization of his own manliness, takes a ‘literary’ turn as Hannah lays the condition that he has to read to her first before he could bed her. An extraordinary condition indeed, which, Michael does not find difficult to comply with! Their prelude to passionate love-making becomes emotional journeys through literary texts of Homer, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, and many others. Constantly referred to as ‘kid’ both lovingly and condescendingly by the woman, Michael soon realizes that this affair is solely and rather dominantly steered by Hannah’s own will, sometimes whimsical and incomprehensible. His male ego is profoundly hurt by Hannah’s quirky behaviour, her shifting moods, and her maturity. And one fine day, Hannah abandons the apartment without even leaving a note for him. The entire story is told in flashback, when a middle-aged Michael (Ralph Finesse) is now a well-established lawyer in Germany.
The narrative moves to and fro in time, covering several decades, especially the years of the Holocaust. The tagline of the film “How far would you go to protect a secret?” is complemented by a class lecture in which the professor says that most literatures are about keeping a secret really well and he cites the example of Odysseus. Hannah who laughs and cries through the reading sessions also has a deep secret, which she protects with an unimaginable zeal, stretching to an unthinkable extent. Accused of having deliberately locked six hundred Jews in a church on fire, she could have escaped life sentence had she told the court that she could not read or write. Ashamed of her illiteracy, she embraces the punishment with a stoical calm.
The film takes an unusually lovely turn, when Michael who had really fallen in love with Hannah starts sending her recorded books of literary classics, realizing that she cannot read or write. Hannah’s inflated ego had prevented her from telling the court that she was illiterate. The same indomitable ego sees her turning her days behind the bars into the fruitful activity of learning to read and write. She borrows books from the prison library and learns to read by matching the sound (of the recorded text) and the written word. Michael’s love for her comes across as the sustaining quality of the human community which has already seen something as monstrous as the Holocaust. Set against the background of the Holocaust that was inhumanly exclusionary in nature, an irremovable blot on human history, Michael’s pure love for Hannah gathers especial significance. Imprisoned by illiteracy, Hannah’s real emancipation comes, ironically, in the prison where through reading literary classics she emerges as a better human being. She commits suicide in the end, for she has nothing to go back to in the world outside. The freedom she got in the fictional world of literature within the four walls of the prison perhaps seems to her to be marred by her recourse to the real world. She leaves behind all her money to the little girl (now a grown-up woman) who had by a stroke of luck survived the church incident.
Based on a book by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader leaves you mesmerised. Kate Winslet effortless performance, David Cross’ freshness, and Ralph Finesse’s dignified demeanour would stay with you for long. A must watch!

N.B: I have not written a review, really! I only felt like sharing the story with you…it has moved me immensely.

Tagore Woes!

2009-05-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

Who’s the biggest Bengali celebrity? No prizes for guessing. It’s Goddess Durga. Who comes next to her? Of course, our very own property - the Kobiguru! Bengalis are melodramatically sentimental about the poet, most of the time, not realizing who they are worshipping and why is he worthy of being worshipped. This year, I was awfully perturbed on my visit to Jorasanko Thakurbari. The place was mindlessly populated (this happens every year) mostly by people who were there to habitually join the bandwagon of Bengali euphoria for Tagore, people who are euphoric about anything on earth, from a lucrative discount at a shopping mall to Aishwarya Rai’s shooting spree on the ghats of the Ganges! There’s nothing wrong in being zestful about everything; but my point is that this overwhelming zest should have some purpose. For instance, there is an understandable purpose in running after a discount, say, at Zodiac or Westside! There is also a purpose behind making a beeline around the shooting spot of an Abhishek-Aishwarya starrer! What is the purpose, you may ask. The purpose is as simple and as unostentatious as taking a look at the stars. Sounds ridiculous? It does! But, that’s the truth, and there’s nothing beyond it. But the purpose of visiting Jorasanko or Rabindra Sadan on ‘25 Baisakh’ (and that too in a red-bordered white sari or designer dhoti-kurta) should have some deeper purpose than just ‘for the sake of remembering Tagore’.
Ironically, and very very unfortunately, most of these Jorasanko and Rabindra Sadan crowd is highly conservative about Tagore. But of course, all of them can at least sing a few lines of “Hare re re amaye chhere de re de re” or “Purano shei diner kotha”! That does not of course make them qualified enough to celebrate Tagore’s birthday. For, most of them do not know that the man they revere or worship as God is someone who has been the most carefree of conservative norms, someone who has always tried to break free of the conventional! Closely read, Tagore is capable of shaking the Bengali middle class out of their traditionalist Elysium (read Pandemonium) of fixed notions of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, of ‘black’ and ‘white’, of ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’. Whether a novel or a poem, a play or a song, an average Bengali has mostly enjoyed it at the surface level, without understanding its real import (of course, there are exceptions; or else, this article would not be written at all). Tagore has time and again questioned norms, problematized conventional notions of the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’, and in a way, he is one of the first postmodernists to give voice to all the concerns that occupy today’s thinkers. His Ghare Baire voices the anxiety of the hypermasculine discourse of nationalism, while his Chokher Bali unleashes unabashedly the socially forbidden passions of a widow. How many Tagore fans know that the novelist was compelled to change the ending of Chokher Bali where his Binodini was not apologetic at all? And hello! How many of us go gaga over Chandalika? Most remembers it for its awesome songs, right? But isn’t this dance-drama one of the very first truly ‘subaltern’ stuffs? Chandalika’s woes have a lot to do with her subaltern position, and her painful realization that how her personal emotions are regulated by an overarching caste system. Chitrangada is a marvel! Everybody agrees to it! Because it has spectacular songs: ‘Bandhu kon alo laglo chokhe’, ‘Rodon bhara e basanta’, and many more! But isn’t the play dealing with the anxieties regarding sexuality? Chintrangada’s transformation from ‘kurupa’ to ‘surupa’ has lot to do with the construction of feminine sexuality as petite, delicate and soft! Does not the play remind us of the endlessly irritating beauty cream ads that promote physical beauty as the only powerful weapon? Tagore’s play problematizes brilliantly the set notions of female sexuality. Though it does not digress from its main source (i.e. The Mahabharata), it was, in a way, ahead of its time. I was in fact reminded of Chitrangada’s discomfiture while watching Kajol in Karan Johar’s postmodern candy-floss romance Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

Now, such a list is endless. I am not writing a eulogy of Tagore. What I wish to point out is that let’s not be sentimental about this great poet. It’s high time we recognized that his greatness lies in breaking rules, not in constructing them. His works are sublime by the virtue of their aesthetic quality; but all of these works are also open to political reading. I’m saying nothing new. At least, some elitists would think so. But my target audience is the pitifully downmarket crowd at Rabindra Sadan and Jorasanko Thakurbari who celebrate Ponchishe Boishakh without knowing why they are doing so. They barely know that they are almost sinfully tying up the poet who has been iconoclastic in myriad ways in thousands of meaninglessly conservative knots. Tagore has been given a godly status; I have no objection to that. But I’m sure the poet would have himself objected to such a rendition of his image, as one who is out there, at a Height, the Other, who needs to be posited always against the Self. Even if we believe in the ‘death of the author’, the works that are available to us are enough evidence to break-free from any orthodoxy. True, by celebrating Tagore’s birthday, we do pay homage to that great creative principle that keeps the world going; but, there’s no need to associate notions of pseudo-sanctity with that.

'Milk': Democracy versus the Gay ‘Other’

2009-05-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

Gus Van Sant’s Milk is another life-affirming film, and comes just in time when it is absolutely necessary to recall the heroic struggle of a community of men and women who are denied human rights, and are treated as if non-existent.
In fact, the film by recalling incidents of gay bashing, through video clips and newspaper cuttings, seems to retell another story of savages versus civilians. The methods of repression applied by the whites in treating the so-called savages are applied to put down gay people as well. The word ‘savage’ here has nothing to do with barbarians; rather, in postmodern discourse of otherness, the word ‘savage’ may well apply to all those who do not belong to the centre. In fact, the western notion of the savage as other, as belonging to some place else, (say, aboriginals, wolfboys, cannibals, etc.) is subverted by Milk, which shows that one need not look at the fringes or periphery (please note that these words are used with a nagging awareness of what these denote in postmodern academic parlance) to seek out the other, but otherness exists at the very centre, a centre like San Francisco, that threatens the very roots of American democracy. In other words, the 1970s Gay Movement that ceremoniously opens up the closet and encourages gay people to ‘come out’, unravels the brittleness of the very foundations of democracy so far celebrated as avowing the rights of the individual.
Harvey Milk (played by the incredibly brilliant Sean Penn), the unputdownable leader of the 1970s Gay Movement, very often connected with the straight crowd by the now famous opening line: “My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you.” This is a highly significant line, for Harvey’s mission was to recruit gay people into the democratic politics, by releasing them from the tortuous prison of a dominantly heterosexual society. It was extremely important to recognize and situate the cause of the gay people within the realm of democratic politics. And ironically enough, the vanguards of democracy claim that gayness is a sickness that can be medically cured, and if they cannot be cured of their strangeness, they have no right to come out, for they would have a negative effect on children and their very existence would threaten the very base of American economy, for a gay couple can never have children. Milk keeps on linking the trauma of the gay community with those of the immigrants in America, the ethnic minorities, thus calling into question the very notion of the melting pot. Milk is no melodrama, but an important politico-historical document which deals with a sensitive cause without sentimentalizing it. The film exhibits the right kind of emotions, always on the alert of not going over the top.
The most memorable moment is perhaps the one when a terribly tensed Milk gets a call from a gay teenager from Minnesota who tells him that ‘they’ are taking him away to fix him up next morning, for ‘they’ believe he is sick. Milk assures him that nothing is wrong with him, he is perfectly ‘normal’, and asks him to take a bus to San Francisco immediately. The camera zooms out gradually to reveal that the caller is actually sitting on a wheel chair; he can’t walk. The line gets disconnected. Months later, it is the same boy who calls up Milk to inform him of his triumph: proposition 6 has been repealed. He is now in Los Angeles, self-assured, and away from those who thought he needed treatment. That one phone call had changed his life forever…perhaps in this moment of glory, it is this boy who spells out for Milk in concrete terms the meaning of victory.
It deserves to be pointed out that the film does not get into the complexities of queer identities; such plethora of identities, designated in the acronym LGBTQ…, is beyond the scope of the film; for, it narrates the initial stages of the Gay Movement, its main concern being establishing the gay identity as ‘natural’. From there, the movement has come a long way today. Sean Penn’s Oscar-winning performance is one of its kinds; to say the least, it’s brilliant. Subtle, confident, and effortless, Penn could not have made Milk more believable. Emile Hirsch is loveable; so is James Franco. Unfortunately, in India, at least, Milk would be open to a niche audience only. Actually, the film should have been accessible to all and sundry to dismantle the Dostana joke. It’s a pity that our mainstream cinema has not yet matured enough to move beyond it.

Regressive progress: A curiously “Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

2009-03-11T01:01:00.000-07:00

Sitting through David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at times you can’t help wondering whether the filmmaker has intentions of equating the internal time of the narrative with the external time, for it seems remarkably slow-paced, every slice of Benjamin’s life almost literally making you suffer or enjoy with him. And curiously enough, you do not realise when the old, frail, almost half-human Benjamin grows down into the trendy, well-sculpted, jaw-droppingly handsome Brad Pitt, lovingly frolicking with an even lovelier Cate Blanchett. In other words, the reverse ageing of Benjamin has been so effortlessly naturalised that it does not seem to happen in celluloid but in real life. Please note that the credit of enacting Benjamin Button does not go to Brad Pitt alone: Peter Donald Badalamenti, Robert Towers and Tom Everett also have a good share in it. Kudos to the casting director (Laray Mayfield) and make-up artistes (Peter Abrahamson, Martin Astles, Jean Ann Black, and others)!
The film begins with the birth of Benjamin Button and that too at a historically momentous moment − the end of World War I. The famous clock with which the film opens ticks backwards, for its maker wishes a replay of the past to get back his son lost in the war. Benjamin’s birth at the moment of celebration of disaster is highly significant for his physical agedness at birth seems to signify the irredeemable loss of innocence. For a modernist writer like Fitzgerald, working under the influence of the likes of Bergson, time ticked off by the clock is not real time; but it’s the time of the mind that is all-important. Therefore, modernist tales were often non-linear, adhering to mental time than physical time. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button challenges the forward flow of time itself, reversing the very process of natural growth, for the two world wars had left such wounds and opened up such terribly unspeakable secrets of the human soul that children are born with knowledge so scary that they are born old.
The film leaves with an impression that we perpetually live under the illusion that we are always moving forward, and the past is always history. The first-half of the twentieth century threw people out of such complacent thinking. The two world wars charted a steady regress backwards to the barbaric ages. The Euro-American concept of civilization and progress received a serious blow, when the world wars confirmed that civilization and the ideologies that hold it together are but a garb, or a veneer, beneath which lurk the bestial instincts that defined human beings at the beginning of times. Benjamin’s progress from birth to death, from physical adulthood to physical childhood, acts as a metaphor to the regressive progression of the world.
Yet in spite of such depressing realizations the film dawns upon us, it throbs with a life-force necessary to surmount all odds and live life on its own terms. Benjamin’s sense of un-belonging is lifelong, for he is perhaps never at ease with the soul inside him and the changes the world outside undergoes. Daisy’s love for him is just the kind of love one needs to survive. On the other hand, Daisy sees herself slipping from a friend to a wife to a mother to Benjamin. And she plays each role with perfect womanly instincts. Cate Blanchett is simply brilliant, both as a vivacious ballet dancer as well as the ageing wife of a husband gradually progressing towards childhood. Benjamin’s memory loss as he grows into a child is natural; but it also points towards the world dissociating itself from the knowledge of the right kind that is required to sustain civilization.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a must watch, and definitely not with the mindset of finding out whether it is better than Slumdog Millionaire. A comparison does not stand; the films are essentially different and there’s no need to mourn for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. For Slumdog is definitely no less deserving.

Billu Barber’s ‘atyachar’: Shah Rukh at its narcissistic worst, ‘incidentally’!

2009-02-24T05:41:00.000-08:00

Billu Barber, to make an understatement, is a bad film with a SICK climax. The ‘Barber’ was clipped from the title for the people of the same profession (read politicians) objected to it, for they found it insulting. What was so discourteous to name a profession is beyond my understanding, but our 'Lotos-eating' politicians are always in the look-out for ‘sensitive’ issues (read vote-bank saving agendas) which nonetheless unveil the potential hypocrisy that define them all. In any case, if ‘Barber’ was dropped, it could have been very well substituted by ‘barbaric’, an adjective that describes not Billu, but Shah Rukh Khan, the narcissistic producer of the film, who has ended up endorsing an ode to himself, rather than making a movie. His biggest mistake was perhaps to cast Irrfan Khan in the lead role, for it is Irrfan’s presence which ‘incidentally’ by contrast highlights in vivid details Shah Rukh’s shortcomings as an actor. Even Priyadarshan could not save the film! He strings up a series of predictable comic sequences which ‘incidentally’ have a tragic impact on the viewers, and even veteran actors like Rajpal Yadav and Asrani get on your nerves with banal lines and predictable reflex actions.
Budbuda, an unknown village in one of the remotest corners of the country, sees its biggest ever carnival when Sahir Khan comes to shoot his technological thriller. Billu, the barber, gains popularity overnight as Khan’s childhood friend. The underdog rises in prestige much to his own embarrassment, for he believes he would not be able to keep the requests of his neighbours who want to get personal with the megastar through his contact. It is revealed later in the film that Sahir Khan was born and brought up in the village, before he migrated to Mumbai. Isn’t it strange that with the media flashing every single detail of a star’s life at the drop of a hat, the villagers did not know that Khan belonged to Budbuda only? Nobody raises that question, unfortunately.
Many other things about this film are unfortunate indeed. Is Shah Rukh suffering from some strange inferiority complex that he had to celebrate himself so blatantly, so as to reassure himself that his throne is still intact? Budbuda’s going berserk over his arrival is realistic; no two ways about that. It could have happened at the arrival of any star. But, the level of madness the villagers show is completely unbelievable. Only Billu keeps his cool in the midst of such midsummer madness, and his detached participation in the euphoria is perhaps the only credible thing in this movie.
Badly scripted, Billu becomes intolerably shoddier every time the ageing Shah Rukh breaks into unmusically boring item numbers with the divas, none of whom leave any lasting impression. Roping in Deepika, Priyanka and Kareena is another way of proving to the world that the best in the industry are sycophantically at SRK’s beck and call. Too much of SRK is what makes Billu so hideous! His cutting irony in “The film industry is like a family and the actors are like brothers” (recall his falling out with the other two leading Khans and his growing insecurity with Akshaye Kumar mounting the ladder of success too fast) leaves him hilariously hateful.
The film ends with the most awful climax ever seen in the last few decades. It is literally ‘emotional atyachar’. You feel like banging your head against the wall or whatever solid object is in the vicinity for the climax leaves you in the climax of your painful realization that you could not have wasted your money in a worse way. I guess SRK has also realized that his romantic hero image is now history, and it’s time he made way for the Youngistan crowd. The termination of his Pepsi contract bears testimony to the truth which SRK refuses to admit.

The long and short of it all is that avoid Billu, for good. O! By the way, do not forget to notice Lara Dutta’s blouses…which village tailor is so fashionably conscious, I wonder?

Kaustav's Arden: It is so Bollywoodish after all: Slumdog Millionaire, British rearing of an Indian heart

2009-01-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

Kaustav's Arden: It is so Bollywoodish after all: Slumdog Millionaire, British rearing of an Indian heart

It is so Bollywoodish after all: Slumdog Millionaire, British rearing of an Indian heart

2009-01-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

One point of contention which seems to drive critics and commentators berserk at the present moment is how Indian is Slumdog Millionaire. Based on Swarup’s novel Q & A, Slumdog is not really India seen through the British eye as one critic chose to analyze it in a recent television talk show. It is India as India is. It is purely Bollywoodish, and could have been made by an Anurag Kashyap, a Dibakar Banerjee, an Ashutosh Gowarikar, an Abhishek Kapoor, a Madhur Bhandarkar, or a Ram Gopal Varma in his more sensible days! It’s difficult to make out the difference.
Slumdog is at one level a postmodern bildungsroman; at another level it’s a docu-fiction on Mumbai slum life and its infamous underbelly (one is unavoidably reminded of Salaam Bombay, Dharavi and Traffic Signal); but it’s above all a love story, a true Bollywood love story. Interestingly, the narrative is built on a number of familiar tropes, tropes Indians are so well-acquainted with that they fail to realise that the maker is British.
Jamal Malik participates in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire not to win money, but to win back his lost childhood sweetheart Latika. The answer to every single question asked on the show is coincidentally related to some incident or the other of Jamal’s life. The narrative moves seamlessly between the past and the present, taking us through spine-chilling slices of Jamal’s life whereby we experience the brutality of the Bombay riots of 1992-1993, the awfully wicked beggarmasters of the city, as well as some light-hearted moments of Jamal’s meeting with Latika on a rainy night and his incredible obsession with Mr. Bachchan! As the story progresses, the film employs one familiar trope after the other: the good brother versus the bad brother with a big heart (recall Dewaar), the same brothers estranged in childhood to be reunited again (recall Amar Akbar Anthony, Yaadon Ki Baraat, etc), childhood lovers separated by a stroke of bad luck (recall Parinda), discovery of the lost lover in a brothel (recall Ram Lakhan, where Anil Kapoor taken captive by the villains returns to find his childhood beloved Madhuri Dixit dancing to the tunes of ‘Bekadar, bekhabar, bewafa, balmaa’, and many other films), taking revenge on the vicious villain (several 1970s Hindi films have sufficiently invulnerable heroes returning to avenge the wrongs done to them in their childhood, when they were helpless and powerless), two brothers falling for the same girl (There’s no need to provide an example of an older Hindi film here; there are far too many, and exhaustively so), and so on and so forth. However, unlike the 70s Hindi films, Slumdog does not see the world in black and white. It problematizes the constructs of goodness and badness, and leaves several loose ends, not ensuring a really happy ending. Apparently, the film ends happily, but it does not have a proper closure.
The last few moments of the film deserve special attention. The last question asked is: “Who is the third musketeer in Alexander Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers?” Ironically, Jamal was introduced to the names of the two musketeers in school, but he did not know the name of the third one. He is left with one lifeline: Phone-a-friend. Jamal dials his brother’s number, the only number he has. But it is Latika who had run away from her captor who picks up the phone. Jamal’s mission is fulfilled. He had come on the show so that Latika saw him. He does not care anymore whether he wins or loses. He casually selects A, and hits on the correct the answer. Pages can be written on this one moment of the film.
It’s difficult to explain rationally how Jamal hits on the right answer! Like several romantic Hindi films, the director places the heart above the head. The power of real love is such it can help surmount the most redoubtable problems. We have seen this happening in myriad Hindi films; in fact, an Indian audience has time and again revelled in the victory of the heart over the head, and knows that in a love story Reason is secondary to Emotion. Indian popular culture, celebrating the nation and ideas of Indian nationalism, since the days of the struggle for freedom, has always given more importance to emotions than reasons. This was in consonance with the nationalist idea of using the weapon of emotion against the overwhelming importance given to reason by the western Enlightenment project. This was a method of resistance to cultural colonization. A re-invoking of the same trope in Slumdog is very significant, for in the era of globalization, when the drive to homogenize the world is soaring, every nation is anxious to construct its own ‘difference’ from the others. Here again, celebration of romantic love as capable of making possible the impossible is highly remarkable. In this sense Slumdog is truly Indian. Wishing a very happy ending to Slumdog at the Oscars this year…!

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: Death of the Bollywood Romantic Hero?

2008-12-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is no path-breaking venture. Neither is it a blockbuster. Yet it is of immense interest to those who eat and sleep Bollywood. It is not simply about a simple middle class man’s desperate attempt to make his bubbly wife fall in love with him. It is actually an attempt at deconstructing the image of the Bollywood romantic hero constructed through the past five decades. The super-dynamic hero such as Raj of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge or Rahul of Dil to Pagal Hai has been so far an object of desire. I consciously use the word “object”; for a human being cannot have all the qualities he possesses. Even the epics could not create such a character; so why Draupadi had to marry five men. The qualities she asked for in a husband could not possibly converge in one man. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is the story of a human being who endeavours to appropriate the qualities of that “object” to woo his wife who says that she would never be able to love him, and ends up proving to himself and to his wife that true love perhaps has no connection with an outwardly romantic “image”. Surinder is Raj and Raj is Surinder; both sides of the same coin, literally. The conflict between the two selves of the protagonist is actually a conflict between reality and illusion. For Tani, Surinder is a reality which she shies away from; on the other hand, Raj is an apparent reality of the image of several Bollywood heroes she has so far worshipped, and therefore highly desirable. However, it is Surinder she finally falls in love with. The film becomes her bildungsroman whereby she rediscovers her husband and falls in love with him, him who she thought she would never be able to love. Her refusal to elope with Raj underlines her maturing into a woman who learns to separate true love from the filmy paraphernalia surrounding it. Consequently, the unfashionable middle class man who used to envy the Bollywood hero and feel belittled by his unmatchable zing and irresistible sex appeal, breathes a sigh of relief. For, the SRK who had created this hero now deconstructs the same. The film demands a willing suspension of disbelief; but such suspension is worthwhile. The film would remind of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee blockbuster Golmaal; but thematically it is closer to another SRK flick Paheli. And most interestingly, the film also marks a journey of Aditya Chopra, the filmmaker: he seems to engage in dialogue with the Yash Raj films released so far, and his new hero Surinder seems disruptive in the light of the other Chopra films. This disruptive hero however would give Bollywood commercial cinema a new mileage, whereby it might abandon its self-constructed romantic realm to live closer to reality!

Why Label Terrorism?

2008-12-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

The word “terrorist”, like the word “alien”, has come to represent a special category: and in labelling terrorists as terrorists, we tend to alienate them from the human community. They are “they” as against “us”, the “normal” human beings. This they/us binary is the sole cause behind the catastrophic terror attacks that took so many innocent lives in Mumbai. More dangerously, these terrorists again are identified as having particular religious affiliations! Incidentally, all the attackers have been found to belong to the Muslim community, a revelation that catapulted the media into labelling the attack on Mumbai as another example of Muslim terrorism, engineered by the infamous LeT. There is no harm in disclosing correct information to the public; but what is objectionable is the relentless labelling of this terror attack as Muslim. It is a current trend in the media to associate religion with violence. True, the Hindutva pogroms in Mumbai and Godhra have left deep sores in the soul of the subcontinent; but which Hindu script, which Hindu God teaches violence? The ideology of Hindutva is a new ideology which has nothing to do with traditional Hinduism, which is spectacularly tolerant. So, when the media identifies a Sadhvi Pragya as the new emerging face of Hindu militancy, it unwittingly paves path for other kinds of militancy in the name of religion. How fair is it to label a particular form of militancy as belonging to a particular religious community? If Sadhvi Pragya is the mastermind behind the Malegaon blasts in September 2008, it is not her religion which taught her to kill 31 innocent people. Similarly, if Muslim terrorists had infiltrated into the Taj Hotel and took several lives, it is not their religion which pleaded with them to do so! Therefore, what is the point in labelling a particular form of violence as Muslim, Hindu and Christian? Even if the offenders claim that they are indulging in riots, pogroms and terror attacks in the name of religion, it must be kept in mind there is no religion, neither Hindu nor Muslim, which endorses such inhuman acts. There is a particular group of people who are incidentally Hindu or incidentally Muslim who have a predilection to proclaim their supremacy in this world, at any expense whatsoever. Terror attacks or riots are nothing but power pageants in which innocent people are butchered. And since we never stop dissociating religion from these pogroms or terror attacks, all efforts to unite fall apart. If LeT incidentally belongs to Pakistan, there is no point in hating the country as a whole. If a saffron-clad group plans organized violence against people of the Muslim community, there is no point in thinking that all of India is hell-bent on wiping out the Muslims. Since the real originators of violence are never identified properly, and even if they are, their religious allegiance is so conspicuously highlighted, that anger of the common mass is directed towards a religious community as a whole or a country as a whole. This causes more alienation and fragmentation and of course, more violence. For how long would we continue to believe in divide and rule? It is not a Hindu that is a Muslim is sceptical of and vice-versa; it is a constructed image of a Hindu or a constructed image of a Muslim which is the source of fear. Let’s dissociate religion from terrorism once and forever!

Kaustav's Arden: Mainstreaming the Gay? : The old-new romantic comedy of "Dostana"

2008-11-22T04:54:00.000-08:00

Kaustav's Arden: Mainstreaming the Gay? : The old-new romantic comedy of "Dostana"

Mainstreaming the Gay? : The old-new romantic comedy of "Dostana"

2008-11-22T04:44:00.000-08:00

Has the angelic Karan Johar really shown guts to overcome fear to tread forbidden zones? This was one thought that continued to plague me until I really got to watch his Dostana. I was apprehensive that it might turn out to be another sexist take on gayness that Bollywood very often than not notoriously indulge in. Well, there was a My Brother Nikhil which is still date a nonpareil example of a gay-themed film ever made in India. But, then again, it was targeted at a niche audience, and was not definitely mainstream. Almost every masala flick has till date treated the idea of being gay as immoral, and most importantly un-Indian. In fact, heterosexuality as ‘normal’ has been very often used as a tool to combat homosexuality as belonging to the Other, a degenerate western culture. Even Kal Ho Na Ho with Kanta Ben as the prototype homophobic had left gayness at the periphery. However, there was at least a recognition of the existence of a sexual identity other than the heterosexual, and that the latter is not a norm. Dostana, thankfully, does not carry forward the Kal Ho Na Ho joke. I would not say that the film is a quantum leap from what Kal Ho Na Ho was, but it has certainly taken the gay issue a few miles ahead in its treatment. Dostana is not as smart as The Bird Cage or Brokeback Mountain, but it may be treated as prelude to more progressive films that may be in the pipeline. The anxiety regarding gayness is very much palpable, but the resistance to it seemed to have been allayed to a remarkable extent.
Kirron Kher is aghast on discovering his son’s alleged gayness and comes running all the way to Miami to witness the most hilarious of scenes with Abhishek Bachchan and the ‘visibly’ gay Boman Irani in a sexy “Beedi jalayee le” act at Priyanka Chopra’s apartment. The “Ma ka ladla bigar gaya” (“Bigaad jana” can be roughly translated into English as “becoming corrupt”: from Kirron’s perspective being gay is some kind of moral degeneration that needs to be purged; similar to a popular feeling that being gay is a disease that can be cured) number that follows shows Kirron shocked and shattered on experiencing by-chance apparently sexually intimate moments between Abhishek and John Abraham. Her heart-rending lamentation fills the screen and she even goes to the extent of trying jaadu-tona to exorcise the gay-ghost that has taken possession of her son. Kirron’s anxiety draws quite a few laughs, but the film does not seem clear on its standpoint…what are we laughing at? First, we, as audience, have superior knowledge that John and Abhishek are only pretending to be gay. Now, it is a rule of comedy that by attributing superior knowledge to its audience, it creates situations that appear funny. Again, the same situations that make us laugh also make us think what exactly we are laughing at. What do we exactly do in Dostana? Are we laughing at Kirron’s anxiety? Or are we laughing at the John-Abhishek gay act which, because, we know it is put up, keeps us perpetually in a relieved state of mind? Does this relieved state of mind (the feeling that well, they are just pretending and are not really gay, which could be a real cause of anxiety) help us laugh through? Do we accept Boman Irani as normal? Or do we laugh at his overt effeminacy and his readily falling prey to Abhishek’s charms? And the immigration officer? He too is gay, and says that he would henceforth keep an eye on John. Shall we say that all gay people are that promiscuous? That they fall for anyone and everyone who cross their way? Or is it a commentary on the nature of the gay community that because there are no social laws binding them, they can be liberally licentious? What is it, after all? At the expense of being naïve, shall we say that because homosexual urges are fiercely suppressed, and still treated as ‘abnormal’, sexual licentiousness amongst gay people is quite ‘normal’? But what is the film’s take on that? It has left both Boman and the immigration officer as butts of ridicule! Or would Karan and Tarun Mansukhani would defend themselves by saying that Boman and the immigration officer are just a type; all gays are not like that! But, in any form of narrative (whether textual or cinematic), drawing two characters in the same line points towards universalization. Dostana has been able to raise a number of issues of this kind, and has left them open.
Yet, Dostana steers safely past severe criticism, for in the very next sequence it goes to the extent of flexing the formula of the age-old Bollywood romantic comedy to accommodate gay love. Priyanka Chopra, the least homophobic of the cast, plays the moderator. In a famously well-known romantic comedy sequence, Priyanka convinces Kirron into accepting her son’s sexual orientation for the sake of his happiness. This scene recalls numerous other films where strong patriarchal resistance to a romantic union is softened through such emotional dialogues. Nowhere does Priyanka sound artificial and for a while the film seems to suspend its light mood and turn serious. Kirron relents, but this time the audience surely does not laugh. For, Priyanka’s rationalization of the supposed relationship between Abhishek and John has no comic undertones. But what follows is hilarious. Kirron accepts John (she does not know as son-in-law or a daughter-in-law), but she accepts her in the most melodramatic filmy way one can imagine of. She performs all the rites of welcoming a new bride to the family with a straight face, much to the exasperation of Abhishek who had never anticipated such a twist in the tale. John is totally cool and Priyanka revels in the triumph of having been able to convert Kirron. Both Priyanka and her aunt Sushmita Mukherjee accept the union as the most natural thing that could have ever happened. This was however anticipated by their demand of a narration of how Abhishek and John had fallen in love. The comically cooked up melodramatic story, again drawn on the lines of familiar Bollywood romances, leaves Priyanka in tears. And, please note, that Priyanka is genuinely moved! It is here that Dostana turns out to be more accepting than Kal Ho Na Ho. In spite of all the issues discussed above, Dostana does try to mainstream gay love by appropriating the formula of the romantic comedy. This mainstreaming was necessary. Since Bollywood has a major role to play in moulding popular psyche, Dostana’s attempt at bringing gayness into the broad sunlight and sheltering it in a Sindhi household would surely work positively.
Returning to the basic premise, we see that this very idea of pretending to be gay occurs to Abhishek when both he and John fail to find a house in Miami. The pretension of being gay finally wins them a home. In this the film speaks loads about the collapse of fixed sexual categories due to globalization. Free movement across the globe has allowed people to come out of the closet and assert their sexual orientation in public. Though in admission forms, passports, or certificates, gender identity is only recognized, these days, online community websites, such as Orkut, clearly ask its subscribers to tick off their sexual identities – gay, straight or bisexual. That the recognition of a sexual identity is necessary besides a gender identity has been urged on by Dostana. The separate queues for gay couples, straight couples or singles at the Miami immigration office underline this. Given the basic premise of the story, Dostana could not have been set in India. Outside the country, gayness is shown to be accepted, and interestingly, the people who do so come of conservative Punjabi or Sindhi families which have emigrated from the country. Could a story like Dostana be ever set in India itself? Or shall we say you can conveniently afford to be gay somewhere out there, but not in India? Dostana could have been really iconoclastic had it been set in the country. Again, the film in a subtle way becomes a commentary on the anxiety of the diasporic communities. In order to belong, one may need to forego his/her sexual identity. The anxiety and high-handedness with which the host country often treats the immigrants is accentuated by John and Abhishek’s becoming officially gay.
Finally, Dostana does win kudos for having a unisex camera. Laura Mulvey would definitely applaud Ayanank Bose for this. The camera gives equal space to the male and the female body and lovingly caresses both. The sexual orientation of the voyeur (read viewer) has not been, thankfully, taken for granted as “heterosexual male”. While John’s perfectly chiselled body and naughty inner wear moments leave you breathless, Priyanka’s vivacity supported by perfectly designed outfits catalyse the barometer into rising really high. John had never looked so irresistibly hot and Priyanka till date seemed to have never discovered her innocently sexy self! And yes, Abhishek also has his share in inspiring gay fantasy with his highly sensitive performance, not deterred by his bulging tummy.
Mind you, Dostana is open-ended. Priyanka asks the couple that whether there was not even a single moment when they had actually felt something for each other. Neither of the boys replies but goes different ways, leaving the audience wondering as to what the real answer could be.

Kaustav's Arden: The Last Lear: Has Rituparno Lost His “Art to Enchant”?

2008-10-04T00:39:00.000-07:00

Kaustav's Arden: The Last Lear: Has Rituparno Lost His “Art to Enchant”?

The Last Lear: Has Rituparno Lost His “Art to Enchant”?

2008-10-04T00:24:00.000-07:00

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,
With this special observance, that you o’er step not the modesty of
Nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of
playing, whose end, both at first and now, was and is to
hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature…

Generally, Rituparno Ghosh impresses by strictly adhering to Hamlet’s advice to the first player. The Last Lear is no exception, at least apparently. Yet, the story of bringing out an old stage actor out of his cloister required a lot more passion. One keeps on wondering what Ghosh’s real aim is. Is it to prove to the world that he can cast Amitabh Bachchan in a hatke role? Is Harry’s characterization pre-conditioned by the fact that Bachchan would play it? So, does Bachchan play Harry or does Harry play Bachchan?

Harry, after quitting stage, confines himself to an outwardly dilapidated house, where in a well-furnished room, he seems to exist in the imagined grandeur of a Shakespearean stage. Clothed in long-flowing robes, revelling in the opulence of Shakespeare’s poetry, Harry with his baritone voice and King Lear/Prospero-like looks seems not to have outgrown the stage characters he had been passionately playing all these years. Harry could have been a more believable character had the place not been Kolkata. How feasible is it for Harry to have portrayed one Shakespearean character after another on some stage of Kolkata in the 60s and 70s, and that too in English? Who were his audience? If Harry happened to be an immensely successful Shakespearean actor, did Kolkata really have a credible audience for English plays of the Elizabethan age in the 60s and 70s? This is a major anomaly which is not clarified in the film. Utpal Dutt is the primary influence behind the film; but weren’t his plays predominantly in Bengali? Ghosh should have been more careful. Or else, he should have made it clear whether Harry was a popular actor or was a good actor who had never been recognized by the populace. The impression he gives, of course, is that Harry was a popular actor who had left the stage when he was at the pinnacle of success, all of a sudden. One more thing which immensely perturbs us is the reason behind Harry’s quitting the stage. Capricious as he is, Harry could have a more eccentric reason of not returning to the stage than a flimsy reason like someone saying “something bad” about his live-in partner.

When Siddharth Kumar approaches Harry for the role of a clown, he immediately connects with him by responding unwittingly to one of his whimsicalities. He happens to call on Harry by ringing the assortment of broken tin containers acting as a bell. To Harry’s pleasant surprise Siddharth also happens to recognize the Shakespearean quote he passionately delivers at the entrance. Harry welcomes him upstairs and what follows is a long conversation on the differences between the two performing arts — cinema and theatre. But unfortunately the conflict does not take a proper shape and seems to find a resolution with that one conversation. Hardly any such conflict arises when they actually work. Harry is given the role of a circus clown, which is definitely different from the clowns of Shakespeare. So, do we have to believe that no argument arose between the new age director and the old theatre personality immersed in Shakespearean plays in the process of filming the movie? Is it that easy to get an erratic theatre actor conform to the method of film-acting which is presumably more restrained and subdued? Some arguments did arise about trivial things like the real time of the shoot and the time mentioned in the script which, in a way, seemed ridiculous. It was unnecessary to point out that Hamlet used to begin in broad daylight in England, though the opening scene starts at midnight. Harry is intelligent enough to understand that time on screen can be well manipulated by advance cameras and manoeuvring of the lights. The focus of the argument should have been somewhere else. However, it’s understandable that given his dedication to acting, Harry vehemently objects to taking a body-double even for the riskiest of scenes. But somehow, the film fails to impress as Bachchan does not really outgrow his image of a megastar. His refusal to take a body-double seems to have been inspired by the image of Bachchan, the hero. Therefore, the audience fails to live through the pains of an actor whose art is gradually losing its relevance. Black was bad; but The Last Lear is worse. I deliberately brought in the comparison; for Ghosh seemed too preoccupied with showing Bhansali that he could have made Bachchan “act” better. And true, Bachchan does “act” here; he does not “behave”. And it is here that the film loses the fine Rituparno Ghosh touch.

And then there is an awful subplot of the three women bonding: Shabnam, Bandana and Ivy come together on a Diwali night and happen to find a confidant in each other. But alas! None of the characters are well-developed and therefore the audience fail to sympathize with them. Both Shabnam and Ivy have clichéd love stories to tell and the problems discussed have been so often repeated in Ghosh’s films that they simply get on the nerves. Men are always so very un-understanding types in Rituparno Ghosh films, and women keep on complaining. How very boring! And what the audience do not simple get of hang of is why Harry rails against some veteran stage director’s (Neeraj Patel) homosexuality. How stupid of him to call Neeraj Patel a “she” because of his homosexuality! How does a man’s love for another man change his gender? Ghosh must be aware of this; but he does not really establish why Patel’s homosexuality disturbs Harry so much. Then what was the purpose of giving the audience a glimpse of Harry’s homophobia? Or, did Harry find Patel’s practice of sleeping with different men an immoral practice? Would he have been fine if Patel had one steady relationship? What is it, damn it?

The Last Lear has amazing sets, astounding cinematography and some touching moments, such as Harry’s going down the stairs without his glasses. Arjun Rampal’s intense acting is something to watch out for; but Shefali Shah’s role, as she claims, is certainly not the best till date. Preity Zinta is not much different from what she is usually good at doing. Jisshu Sengupta is drab and Prasenjit Chatterjee is irritatingly drabber. I didn’t know he can’t speak English. For, Ghosh has got his voice dubbed. On the whole, the film fails to impress. Actually no one had expected so much “Sound and fury” that was associated with the making and release of the film would so definitively and literally end up “signifying nothing”.

Kaustav's Arden: Humane Images of Human Emotions: How Rituparno Ghosh Tells Our Tales

2008-06-22T23:31:00.000-07:00

Kaustav's Arden: Humane Images of Human Emotions: How Rituparno Ghosh Tells Our Tales

Kaustav's Arden: Kalpurush: Mystifying memories and the present-day world

2008-06-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

Kaustav's Arden: Kalpurush: Mystifying memories and the present-day world

Family, By Chance: Recreating a Single Community across Differences in Chalo-Let’s Go

2008-06-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Ramchandra Guha’s much celebrated book "India After Gandhi" that attempts to retell the history of the world’s largest democracy begins with extensive and insightful recapitulation of views on India by its former colonisers. Of these, Sir John Strachey’s Cambridge lectures later collected in a volume, unostentatiously titled "India", are of particular significance; for, Strachey’s prediction of the future of democracy in India has come true. Interestingly, Strachey sees India as a composition of countries, not as a single nation. No Indian nation ever existed in the past, nor would one emerge in the future. Strachey holds that “national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries”, but “they should never extend to India generally, that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of various nations of Europe.” Again, Winston Churchill in a speech delivered in London in December 1930, declared that if the British left India, then “an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindus.” Ironically, at that time, the likes of Nehru were dreaming of a secular democratic India. That both Strachey and Churchill were absolutely correct has been proved many times over. A democracy called India has existed theoretically or constitutionally, but the reality is at variance with the idea. The recent controversy raging in the hills over the possible creation of Gorkhaland, separated from West Bengal is a case in point. Several other examples can also be cited from history: beginning with the nightmarish Partition, the Indian state has seen itself breaking up along linguistic borders, suffering in the darkness of the Emergency, and combating constantly recurring communal violence. The unspeakable violence unleashed by the Hindus on the Sikhs, following the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, the demolition of Babri Mashjid, followed by the most brutal Hindu-Muslim riots of all times, the shameful Godhra incident — all of these posed serious and almost fatal threats to the democracy. The four axes of conflict — caste, religion, class and language — operating singly and in tandem only promise a divided India, impossible to be united.
Indian popular culture, mostly cinema, has more often than not stuck to the representation of India that gives a constitutionally approved picture of the nation. While addressing the differences that exist between castes, religions, classes and linguistic groups, Indian films end in the “they lived happily ever after” syndrome, eradicating differences and reinstating the democratic state. The dream of a democratic nation has been, more or less, sustained in the fictional world of mainstream cinema. And to address the diversity of the country, filmmakers have often chosen the journey motif as the prime movers of their plots: the train or the bus, the modern means of transport, has more often than not provided a perfect setting for these films. The train or the bus can be easily transformed into the microcosm of the Indian nation, a site harbouring temporarily people from different walks of life. These films celebrate plurality and differences, mostly giving the impression of a possibility of uniting diverse individuals, of creating a united India.
From "Bombay to Goa" to "Chalo-Let’s Go", the same trope — a group of people meeting each other on a journey and forming an accidental family — has been used. In fact, in the last few years, this particular genre of films has flourished considerably. The most celebrated of these films is Aparna Sen’s "Mr. & Mrs. Iyer", a poignant commentary on communal violence and human bondage. Other lesser known films are "Jungle", "Honeymoon Travels", "Just Married", etc. The necessity of recreating the community is felt more intensely with increasing individualization, owing to globalization and rapid growth of urban culture. Parents are estranged from their children, spouses hardly meet, and the neighbourhood has become more alien than the land across the seas. Real communities are being speedily replaced by cyber communities; communal bonding has been redefined in terms of exchanging electronic mails or sending Archie’s Cards. Under such circumstances, films such as "Chalo-Let’s Go" appeal to everybody.
Anjan Dutta’s "Bong Connection" and "Bow Barracks Forever" had already created the grounds for "Chalo". Both these films dealt with much-debated issues of diasporic identities, the real homeland, marginalization, minority culture and stuff. Chalo is a return to the more familiar Bengali activity of “beratey jawa” (going for an outing). The film is in tune with the new venture of the Indian government of marketing “Incredible India” — the tourism project. Bengalis are, in any case, well-known for their wanderlust. With the mushrooming of travel and tourism agencies in every nook and corner of the city, this age-old wanderlust has found an easy and affordable outlet. The film revolves around such a travel agency “Ghoroa” run by four amateur and terribly inexperienced men — Ashim (Saswata), Sanjay (Parambrata), Shekhar (Ritwick) and Hari (Rudraneel). Ashim has given up on his medical profession, Sanjay has left his promising job of a journalist, and Sekhar has sworn not to see his father’s face, a well-to-do businessman of North Calcutta. Hari has no illustrious past, apart from having a long history of being ditched in love. The foursome takes a group of Bengali tourists to North Bengal — a man-watching detective novelist, a Chemistry professor all to ready to berate the Bengali ‘jati’, an NRI doctor and his wife having the bizarre ability of telling people’s future by holding their hands during special moments, a librarian with a heart of gold and his irritated and peevish wife, a middle-aged Casanova and his young arm-candy, and a lovelorn woman who accidentally becomes a part of the group. A sweet love triangle is created between this woman, Hari and Sanjay, occasioning many a humorous situation capable of drawing spontaneous laughs from the audience.
The narrative moves slowly with the inexperienced travel agents being bombarded with complaints and whinges from the tourists. In this drama of entangled lives, humour is the prime mover. The dislocated narrative moving between past, present and future has a special appeal. The camera affectionately captures the Elysium beauty of North Bengal, the natural beauty providing a contrasting backdrop to the human problems, petty and limiting.
The film strives to recreate a community, but here too democracy is sacrificed to selfish needs. Everybody fights for their rights — the right kind of room, the right kind of seat, the right kind of breakfast, etc. While some get it, others don’t. The detective points out that some of the tourists who are getting what they want in spite of the difficulties are those who are bribing the agents. The petty politics of the state seems to be repeated here. One is reminded how handsomely one has to bribe an agent for an emergency cooking gas connection, for admission in a good school, or even for a telephone connection. Perhaps, democracy has so severely suffered and proved to be such a big failure that even the fictional world can no longer afford to give an illusion that it exists. We are a long way off from the 1970s when the hopes were still alive. In the 21st century, the realization that democracy is only an ideal has become more intense and persuasive.
Bidipta Chakraborty and Kaushik Ganguly make the most interesting couple, and perhaps the most familiar of characters. Kaushik’s goodness and his unnaturally unassuming nature irritate Bidipta who never lets go a single opportunity of rebuking him. Kaushik never complains and tries in his own clumsy way to keep her happy. Open-minded and jovial, Kaushik is blissfully nonchalant to the material needs of life, much to Bidipta’s exasperation. She repents that she had unthinkingly agreed to the match as some holy man had assured her that a prince was coming into her life. She confides to Koneenica who reminds her of the frog-prince. Interestingly, look-wise too Kaushik is far from princely. And then one evening, as Kaushik sits in the mall and sings in “full-throated ease” the Tagore verse “Achhe dukkho, achhe mrityu”, Bidipta all of a sudden remembers the story of the frog-prince. She sits beside him, and asks him to hold her hand.
The intertext of the film is, as evident to any conscious viewer, is Ray’s classic Kanchenjungha. Here however, several loose ends remain. Everything is not righted in the end. The tourism business proves to be a failure. Shekhar goes back as his father dies of a massive heart attack, and later becomes a singer. Ashim renounces the material world to find his true calling in looking after the destitute at a Christian home in the hills. Hari gets married to that lovelorn woman visibly demoralising Sanjay, and lives through the wind and the rain. Sanjay is on the look for a proper break as a filmmaker. And the story that he tells as the narrator is a rough draft of the screenplay he is presently writing.
"Chalo-Let’s Go" is not a great film. But it does have the power to pull upper middle class Bengali film audience back to the theatres. More of these films should be made, so that the monsters of Bengali cinema, the likes of Swapan Saha and Haranath Chakraborty cannot push the industry towards the deeper end of perdition.

Humane Images of Human Emotions: How Rituparno Ghosh Tells Our Tales

2008-06-07T10:56:00.000-07:00

Part One: Unishe April

1995: Satellite channels and global network were beginning to make a home in middle-class households, though the revolution in the entertainment world that was to come in the new millennium was still beyond the imagination of the common man. The filmy khabar had not yet made its way to the headlines of news channels, and was still supplementary stuff. Yet news of Unishe April (April 19th) winning a few important national awards, amongst Best Film and Best Actor (Female), was quite a buzz in the town. Nobody knew who this Rituparno Ghosh was. However, the unusual title signalled a different film.
Films were still a strict “no, no” in our family. The latter looked upon films as low art, and the very act of watching them, if not blasphemous, certainly disparaging. I am a born film-buff, the ‘different’ thinker in an otherwise traditional and orthodox Bengali middle-class family. My family have always appreciated watching sports as a favourable pastime, while I have never been able to show them reason as to why both games and films are not really different from each other, both being different forms of ‘play’. There is essentially no difference between cheering Sachin Tendulkar or Shah Rukh Khan, both being entertainers (read ‘players’) in their own right. My family refused to understand. Under such circumstances cajoling my parents to take me for a movie was a Herculean task. But I was dying to watch the film.
In those days (Though I am not talking of prehistoric times, the revolution that has occurred in the sphere of entertainment was completely unforeseen even 10 years back; therefore, in that sense, the mid-1990s may be referred to as ‘those days’, lost days of innocence.), there was no way in which we could know anything about a film before its release. As I said earlier Indian media had not yet grown so proactively crazy about collecting news about films at that time. That Om Shanti Om was a potential hit and Sawaariya was to doze off at the box-office were known to the world within half-an-hour after the first shows of the two movies were over, thanks to the hyperactive news channels. In 1995, we had to wait for a week or even more to get a review of a film. But my enthusiasm for Unishe April was triggered off by an interview of Rituparno Ghosh that was aired on HMV-FM. Listening to Ghosh, I discovered I had never heard a man speak so sensitively or even for that matter so informally in a public space. Ghosh’s mild voice, his effeminate accents, punctuated remarkably the thoughts he shared. I found myself meeting a very different man. He was not like the other filmmakers. I had heard Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen before, and was awed by their wisdom. But I never struck a chord with them. Rituparno’s emotionally charged talk (not verging on the sentimental, mind you) almost seduced me into admiring him. The interview revealed that Unishe April was not his first film. He had stepped into the industry, almost unnoticed, with Hirer Angti (The Diamond Ring), a few years back. I at once recalled that I had seen the film on Television in Chhuti Chhuti (Holiday Fun), a programme that used to be aired on Kolkata Doordarshan for children during the vacation. I remembered that I liked the movie a lot. Unfortunately, I had not seen the name of the director, for I switched on the film after the title cards had been shown. The very making of the film underscored the fact (please note I was only 15 at that time, and had not sufficiently developed an eye for good movies) that it was made by someone who knew how to naturalise films, and use camera-angles which were not seen in the run-of-the-mill Bengali films of that time. The memories of Hirer Angti catalyzed my interest in Unishe April even more. I had to see the film!
Somehow, thank god, I convinced my mother to get tickets for Unishe April, assuring her that it was a good film, there were no explicit love-making scenes, and it had got the seal of our finicky (add ‘irritatingly’ before finicky) government in form of the national award. Interestingly, much later when Rituparno had become a household name, in a programme called Ebong Rituparno (With Rituparno), a talk-show aired on E-TV Bangla (long before Koffee with Karan became a chartbuster), he told Aparna Sen how he coaxed his aunt into taking him for Jay Jayanti (a Bengali film inspired by Sound of Music), convincing her that though it featured ‘adult’ movie stars Uttam Kumar and Aparna Sen, it was an out-and-out children’s film, and most of his classmates had seen it. I had to apply a different tactic (as mentioned above), for Unishe was in no way a children’s film.
Unishe was released at Minar, Bijali and Chhobighar, three of the oldest and bug-infested theatres of Kolkata. In spite of the bugs that worried us constantly, we could not really lose our concentration, once the curtains were up. Unishe tells the story of Sarojini (Aparna Sen) and Aditi alias Mithu (Debasree Roy), mother and daughter respectively. April 19 is the day on which Aditi’s beloved father (Boddhisatya Majumdar) had passed away. The story-line is a considerably unusual, for no Bengali film has ever dealt so poignantly with the tension between mother and daughter. Aditi’s oedipal hostility towards her mother is concretized when her dad passes away while Sarojini is away in Madras for a dance show. Aditi, a seven year old, continues to mourn her father’s death for 19 years, unable to erase from her mind the fact that mother was away when dad breathed his last. Fiendishly busy with her career, Sarojini can hardly spend quality time with Aditi who is left in the care of her dad, a not-so-successful doctor. Aditi develops abhorrence for her mother who she misses terribly as a child. The palpable absence of her mother fills her days while Bela (Chitra Sen), the house-maid, turns into her confidant, almost a surrogate mother. Sarojini barely makes an attempt to ‘know’ her daughter well, though this does not imply that she is nonchalant about her. The root of the problem lies in Sarojini’s refusal to give up her career as a dancer. Growing up with a chauvinistic father, Aditi fails to see the necessity of retaining the career, the necessity of trying to look at things from her mother’s perspective as well.
Sarojini’s predicament is akin to many women around us. Most of them are expected to strike a proper balance between the home and the world, failing which they are unthinkingly dubbed irresponsible. Aditi realises that towards the end of the film; by then, she had already decided upon giving up her career as a doctor, by burning the letterheads. She had almost spontaneously started defining herself with respect to Sudeep, her boyfriend (Prasenjit Chatterjee), a Mama’s boy. Sudeep’s refusal to tie the knot with her on the pretext of her mother’s being a dancer, prompts Aditi to attempt suicide. Aditi who had looked upon Sudeep as taking the place of her father in her affection, is terminally shattered, as it were.
Most of the time, we expect the person we love to return the love in the same manner. That’s human nature. What most of us forget is that love is not just an emotion, as some of us wish it were so, but a social relationship that is conditioned by everything we feel is not linked to love. Love is no sublime emotion, lifted out of normal processes of life. Unishe remains open-ended. It does not tell us whether Aditi accepts Sudeep or not. In fact, that is immaterial. Even if Aditi accepted Sudeep, and everything ended in the “they lived happily ever after” syndrome, what we know that Aditi has already loved and lost. She is into a lifelong compromise, a compromise most of us often willingly opt for as we continue to believe in this construct called love. Unishe, therefore, did not just tell the story of a temperamental doctor and her mother, but the story we write ourselves everyday through our actions. I saw myself in every frame of the film.
What made Unishe April a fresh breath of air is Rituparno’s attention to details, which is the hallmark of all his films. Aditi, interestingly, calls Bela, Boya. I can relate to this completely. My childhood inability to pronounce names correctly has lovingly stayed on, and I still call some of my closed ones by those names, even after I became fluent in two other languages apart from my mother tongue. Sudeep so closely resembles a friend of mine that when I saw the film for the first time I felt that he was lifted directly out of my own life. The way Sudeep talks, his concerns, his nonchalance — everything matched so miraculously with this friend of mine, it seemed that I was experiencing everything in a stupor. I vividly remember that after watching the film, my dad had commented that my temperamental and introverted nature matched Aditi’s. He had related to Aditi as he related to me in real life. There was one poignant scene where Sarojini tells her husband quite enthusiastically that she would like to replace a depressing calendar featuring a cat by their photographs. Her sense of interior décor is definitely better than her husband, but the latter dismisses her proposal almost insultingly. Indifferent to her tastes, he finds it embarrassing to have his photograph displayed for he is not as famous as his wife; and in any case, a calendar need not be removed simply because it featured a cat; for the cat hardly matters: calendars are meant for dates. I can completely relate to this. I have had enough quarrels with friends and colleagues who refused to see a possible marriage between utilitarianism and aestheticism. I have failed to reason out many who do not feel garnishing a dish is a necessity.
I saw Unishe April when I was in Class X. Today I teach in a college…it’s been almost 13 years! Yet, the impact of the film is still fresh. In fact, I have an emotional attachment with every Rituparno Ghosh film…for same, yet different reasons. Next comes Dahan.

Celeb-Blogs: New Technique of Cyber Space Business!

2008-05-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

What happened all of a sudden that actors turned into bloggers? Do they really have the time (writing skill too) to blog? Of all people Salman Khan? Hard to digest! True, he is Saleem Khan’s son…but Salman and the pen (read keyboard)….grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…well, I don’t know. I wonder when he would finally wake up to a painful realization: “Maine Blog Kyun Khola?” Perhaps, he never needs to wake up; for, you never know how many ghost-writers he has employed! Why he? The organization which has made a writer of him, at least apparently, must have good humble writers who do not seek fame but money. A prospective job is on the cards for all you literature people…ghost-writers for celebs!
Aamir Khan is still okay. The man has some sensibilities. But this doggish dog story (which is SRK’s namesake) does not really suit Aamir’s personality. He does not need to name his pet after SRK to prove his own superiority. The world already knows the truth. Aamir is definitely a better actor, any day. So why sacrifice one’s dignity? And the media which seems to have run out of important news is filling quality hours on news channels and considerable columns of the newspaper with such bull-shit!
Too much is being made of the Bachchan Blog too! The whole world (as the media portrays it) seems to have gone cyber-nuts to take a look at what Big B is writing. The reality is too simple to be revealed. The “Big Adda” guys (you-know-who) are paying the star (don’t ask in what digits or in which currency) to pen-lash at his colleagues and go vocal on controversial issues that sell well. In the big bad Bolly-world Big B’s bigness is always up for sale for the right amount of money, no matter how low he may have to stoop, sarcastic derision of SRK being a low-end example. Let SRK take a few days break from the IPL euphoria, some other organization would approach him to write what the media wants him to. So celeb-blogging has nothing to do with pouring out the heart; it is irredeemably conditioned by the demands of the media. Therefore, Big B’s upcoming website, a sequel to his blog it seems, (which would again top in receiving media attention) should focus on the following:
1. Why do we see Amar Singh as his or his wife’s arm-candy in all the award functions and related programmes? Has the Samajwadhi Party leader nothing more to do for the samaj that he spends so much quality time hobnobbing with the Bachchans? What are the political implications of such camaraderie?
2. Was Abhishek really in love with Aishwarya, or was the marriage another lucrative business deal, just like his blog?
3. Why does Jaya Bachchan always look so terribly irritated when things around her seem to shine in full glory? Is she eternally apprehensive of Rekha’s comeback?
4. Given that Rekha is still sufficiently young and beautiful, and Jaya old and flabby, does Big B regret that he did not marry the former?

5. How did he manage to act so terribly in Ramgopal Varma ki Aag? Does a good actor's bad acting is representative of acting skills as well?

The list may just go on and on. The website to be a hit requires a proper marketing manger with a research experience in the controversies and curiosities surrounding the Bachchans.

How many more new ways of media monstrosity are we have to bear with? Let’s not even dare imagine!