Ganeshotsav - A People's Party

Of all the gods worshipped in Maharashtra, Ganesha has to be the clear favorite by a long shot. Gods tend to induce reverence and piety in their devotees. They're usually distant, towering figures, inspiring awe, but not Ganesha. What Ganesha evokes in us is more familial. Adults are parental about him. To them he's a child, a mischievous cherub who befriends mice and devours modaks. Kids think of him as a friend or a peer with superpowers. His child-like persona is perhaps why Ganesha is the god of new beginnings: he allows a family to experience the joy of a newborn every year. It's no accident that there's a Bal Ganesha cartoon, though these days Bheem rules the action figure market. The "one of us" aspect of Ganesha allows us to take liberties with him that we wouldn't dream of taking with other gods.  Ganesha can be dressed up as Sachin Tendulkar or whoever else is the current Indian idol. He can be fashioned out of almost anything, including things that might be deemed ashuddh traditionally. Ganesha is the only god I know who has gone eco-friendly. That's also why it's perfectly alright to have Ganesha pandals and processions belt out Bollywood songs. If we're dancing to them, we'd like him to join in.

The Ganpari at Kesariwada, Pune. Kesariwada is named after Tilak's paper, Kesari. 

No other god enjoys such a hold on Maharashtrian public consciousness. Jejuri’s Khandoba, another avatar of Shiva, has had a renaissance of sorts, thanks to Jai Malhar, the Marathi television show about him. But Shiva is (unfairly, some might say) not half as popular as his son. The warkaris may walk days for Vitthoba but theirs seems more like a penance than a festivity. Ganesha alone is ushered in and out with the pomp of a carnival. Social scientists would do well to study how we’ve celebrated Ganeshotsav over the years. Thanks to Lokmanya Tilak’s brainwave of 1893, Ganesha became an integral part of the Indian freedom struggle in and around Maharashtra. For 80 years now, he’s ruled Lalbaug, where the mills have become malls. Today, advertisers fall over each other in using him to peddle their clients’ wares. Politicians, the dream merchants of the public sector, sponsor pandals and pose next to Ganesha on the ubiquitous flex banners flapping away in our cities.

Ganesha provides the perfect excuse for people to release their pent up energies.  Some of these energy emissions may not be to our liking, but that’s precisely the point: Ganesha is the god of individual as well as collective expression in Maharashtra. The din of the loudspeakers during Ganeshotsav bothers me as much as the next ‘civilized’ person, but the issue is complicated. Except for political rallies, religious festivals are the only times people living in cities have the opportunity to gather and express themselves – a fundamental democratic need. Sure, the decibel levels of loudspeakers and the spaces and times of their operation ought to be regulated, but I wouldn’t want to live in a society where public expression is muffled. As it is, urban spaces for public gatherings are few in number. Most of our people walk or pedal along the margins of urban roads. When they do get behind a wheel, they’re often ferrying someone else. The Ganpati procession is their Occupy movement. Tilak understood this. When they’re carrying Ganesha, people own the roads.

Ship Of Theseus: Sailing against the current

I’m one of those old-fashioned viewers / readers who expect a takeaway from a movie or a book. It’s fashionable these days to pooh-pooh “message cinema” but I think the movies (and books) that stick usually do have a strong, coherent message. I know art is supposed to be more about the “how” than the “what” but the “what”, I suspect, matters more than we’d like to admit.  But that’s just my bias. It isn’t an apology for Anand Gandhi’s Ship Of Theseus, which scores high on both the “what” and the “how”, and needs no apology. Gandhi’s movie is a remarkable achievement. Remarkable, because it breaks unwritten rules that Indian filmmakers (even the much feted new crop) have internalized.  In the best possible ways, SOT sails against the current: it is more loquacious than laconic; more wise than witty. It philosophizes unabashedly. It avoids becoming preachy by rooting these philosophical observations (and, yes, messages) in deeply personal contexts.

In the first segment, a blind photographer Aaliya (Aida El Kashef) gets her eye-sight back. But this forces her to undergo a painful sensory reconfiguration. The restored eye-sight doesn’t turn out to be quite the blessing she expected. Not surprisingly, this segment is the one most loaded with sensory delights. The lights (Pankaj Kumar’s camerawork is exquisite), sounds and textures are meticulously woven into the fabric of reality “seen” (a verb Aaliya matter-of-factly applies to herself even when she’s blind) by a blind person. In the final scene of the segment, the lens-cap of Aaliya’s camera falls off into a gorge, hinting at her readiness to lose her blindfolds.

In the second segment, Maitreya, an ailing monk, must choose between a slow, painful death and taking medication manufactured by a company that subjects animals to harsh experiments.  With his brisk walk, wiry frame, and avuncular mannerisms, Neeraj Kabi brings a Gandhian physicality to the Maitreya character, whose staunch  ahimsa and stoic embrace of suffering are also quite Gandhian. The interesting counterfoil is provided by a self-styled Charwak (Vinay Shukla), who plays Plato to Maitreya’s Socrates, indulging in banter and philosophical dialectic with the monk. Both Charwak and Maitreya, doppelgangers of the director Gandhi, are finely etched. Maitreya is as human as he is saintly (“Stay a bit longer”, he pleads disarmingly, as Charwak is about to leave after an unsuccessful attempt to convince him to take the medication); Charwak is as compassionate as he is a “nihilistic hedonist” (“We need you; we love you” is his heartfelt entreaty to Maitreya). Of the three segments, Anand Gandhi is most indulgent with this one. Mark, for instance, the shot of Maitreya walking across a bridge, flanked on both sides by the muck-infested Mahim creek – a lonely saint marching through a filthy world.

The third, and final, segment belongs to Navin (Sohum Shah), a stockbroker whose simple philosophy (“some money, some respect and compassion” – hard to argue with that) is the object of his artist-activist grandmother’s ridicule. Navin has recently undergone a successful kidney transplant. The possibility that his new kidney might be a stolen one pricks Navin’s conscience. He sets off seeking redemption through an act of kindness to Shankar, a slum-dweller whose kidney has been stolen.  (Gandhi’s use of the byzantine Mumbai slums is one instance where his wit shows: Navin’s huge car and his huge friend literally don’t fit in the slums.) Things don’t quite pan out per Navin’s plan, but his intervention does leave Shankar much better off. As Navin’s grandmother, an acts-of-kindness veteran of sorts, consoles him, “That’s the best you can hope for”. All the stories have similar pragmatic endings, rooting, as it were, for a qualified rather than an absolute idealism.

Despite its metaphysical leanings, SOT is a very physical film. It is almost obsessed with the biological universe in general and human bodily functions in particular: there are close-up shots of Aaliya’s eye and Maitreya’s sores. A sophisticated Darwinian worldview informs SOT. It isn’t the simplistic “nature red in tooth and claw” Darwinism, but a poetic Buddhist / Jain one. A shot of squabbling monkeys follows a scene involving a human altercation. But this isn’t so much a condemnation of human beings as “lowly animals”, as much as a reminder that the lines we draw separating species are quite arbitrary. Citing an extended phenotype, SOT points out that we don’t always know where our bodies end and “the environment begins” (Aaliya’s camera as an extension of her eye).

The SOT philosophy is also an impassioned political plea. Anand Gandhi seems to be arguing for a better understanding of our place in the universe, and asking us to recognize that our actions have consequences. The movie takes in nature as it comes – no anthropomorphic spins on it. In this ecumenical view of nature, even human waste can become a positive indicator of intimacy between people (Maitreya and his fellow monks; Navin and his grammy). I can’t think of a more evolved take on life.

(PS - I can’t help thinking that Bhansali would envy this film, given that bodily malfunction & disability have been his preoccupations, but he hasn’t quite been able to peel the layers of high drama and “prettiness” to get to the philosophical core).

Twins and our other selves

We’ve always been fascinated by the selves that we don’t ‘wear to work’. Ergo, many of the interesting films over the past few years have had split-personality protagonists. Take Vishal Bharadwaj’s Kaminey (2009), for instance. Guddu and Charlie can be seen as two sides of a young urban Indian – one, a social do-gooder and the other a crook who will stop at nothing to make a fast buck.

Twins have always been stand-ins for our other selves, one of the pair usually playing Hyde to the other’s Jeckyll, indulging in guilty pleasures on the other’s behalf. In the late-sixties / early-seventies, Dilip Kumar (Ram Aur Shyam, 1967) and Hema Malini (Seeta Aur Geeta, 1972) split into two so that one of them could bash up villainous family members. Back then, overbearing family members who were always around must’ve seemed like they could use a whipping. Since we couldn’t dream of doing it, why not let our less scrupulous twins out? Perhaps these movies were the early signs of an Indian middle class hankering for a nuclear family. But the villain now isn’t society – it’s one of our selves. Charlie, in Kaminey, is not on much higher moral ground than Bhope Bhau, the closest thing to a villain in the movie. This is why Kaminey speaks to our times.We are all part Guddu and part Charlie and the two fight within us, as they do in the movie.

In the year after Kaminey, came Vijay Lalwani’s Karthik Calling Karthik (2010). This one did not hide behind twins. Karthik has dissociative identity disorder, a split personality. Lalwani’s movie was an intelligent comment on, among other things, Indian men’s schizophrenic attitudes towards women. So, one Karthik loves to party with co-worker and love-interest Shonali, but the other one calls her names. The movie inverts the traditional Madonna-whore (or Paro-Chandramukhi) perspective and shows that the split really lies in the (usually male) eye of the beholder. Karthik also embodies our ambivalence towards what’s often called ‘corporate culture’.

Which brings me to Bharadwaj’s more recent Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013), an absurd (in the genre sense of the term) Shakespearean comedy about a landlord with split identities. Mandola is a ruthless land-grabbing lord by day, when he’s sober. At night, pour a few pegs down his hatch, and he fights his greedy self (Guddu v/s Charlie again) on behalf of the very hapless farmers he’s out to dupe. And, Matru, his man Friday by day, goes by ‘Mao’ at night, stoking revolutionary fires. Matru and Mandola are four people, not two. While Kaminey was more circumspect about the capitalist-socialist doublethink that is the urban Indian mind, Matru spells it out. After all, who needs twin siblings and bad family when there are demons within?