Love in the Guise of Turpentine

(First published at Desicritics)

The wife and I were in the windy city on Thanksgiving Day. After croissants and a jasmine tea by the river, we agreed to complete a romantic morning by watching a romantic matinee. I hadn't seen/read any previews on Love In The Time of Cholera, knowing only that it was about longing in love or some such. That's romantic, we figured, and it's based on a book by the Great Garcia who brilliantly allegorized the futility and tragedy of our species in his 'One Hundred Years...', so we can't go wrong, re. Alas, go wrong we did.


Florentino Ariza, the boy, is smitten by Fermina, the village belle, and half a century of sex with over six hundred women doesn’t make a man of him so that he still ‘loves’ and pines for Fermina. I know, it’s supposed to be Profound - a man looking for True Love, the Holy Grail that’s spiritual and loftier than all the physical relationships he has (the number of which would make Genghis Khan look like a monk). I know that his diary of sexual conquests isn’t a high school kid’s scorebook of chicks he laid; it’s a chronicle of his journey towards True Love. And when he paints, in turpentine, the letters “This is mine” along with an arrow pointing downward (to you know where) on the belly of a woman, leading to her husband discovering it and slashing her throat, it’s supposed to convey how possessiveness in love destroys (and how turpentine is hard to get off human skin).

Oh, and by the way, all this happens in the time of cholera. Don’t ask me why.Women undress like it’s an episode of Senoritas Gone Wild, and Florentino (Garcia?) seems to have a brazenly narcissistic “the chicks dig me” air about him. Fermina is the only character you sympathize with; she refers to Florentino as “empty”, which is true of the plot as much as the protagonist; she reconciles with real life with a dignity and charm bordering on poignancy. Our hero, on the other hand, writes business letters in rhyme because “all I can write is love” and such juvenile, lofty gobbledygook. The only redeeming moments are the unpretentiously real ones, like Fermina’s wedding night.


This is my problem with magic realism run amok: metaphors tend to lose their purpose as means to illuminating truth and become ends in themselves. Characters become, to quote Amitava Kumar, “walking-talking metaphors”. The narrative space is crowded by metaphors - often contrived, tenuous, and downright absurd – and meaning struggles to find a place in it.


So, unless you're a horny heterosexual male, a connoisseur of stretched metaphors, or interested in the chemical bonding of turpentine and the epidermis, avoid this one.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

(First published at Desicritics)

When Changez, the narrator-protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, returns to New York just after September 11, 2001 from a business assignment, he is stripped to his boxers by airport immigration authorities. There is a disarmingly clever little detail that Hamid works into this incident:

'...I had, rather embarrassingly, chosen to wear a pink pair patterned with teddy bears, but their revelation had no impact on the severe expressions of my inspectors'

Changez has bared himself to be the childlike, adorably dorky personality he is, but no one seems to recognize that. In post 9/11 America, he feels as though his external appearance defines him. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is largely a book about such prejudices. In a café in Lahore, Changez narrates his past to an American. There is constant tension between the two, obviously mirroring the uneasy love-hate relationship between the two nations. The book is a quasi-monologue; the American remains anonymous and peeks out of the pages only when Changez either repeats his casual questions (“Oh, you ask Why”? and suchlike), or reads his mind (“I see that you are alarmed”). This allows the story to come from Changez’s-and therefore Pakistan’s-perspective, it makes us-the readers-the intended anonymous audience, and heightens the sense of mystery surrounding the American.

The most powerful thing about the book is, not surprisingly, the love story. With some extraordinarily sensitive prose, Erica, Changez’s love, emerges as a brilliant personification of her country (whose name contains hers). Having lost Chris, her first and longtime love, Erica is only beginning to find life in Changez, when 9/11 happens. This pushes her into a depression-a heartbreaking vortex of longing for the dead Chris.
Hamid seems to warn us that this quest for a better future in an imagined past is not only Erica and Changez’s tragedy, but that of all fundamentalism. True to the novelist’s craft, he doesn’t directly condemn this backward looking ideology, but instead brings out the self-destructive tragedy of this outlook.
During their courtship, Erica responds to Changez sexually only when he pretends to be Chris. This is a poignant comment on the obliteration of identity that ‘fitting-in’ demands.

Religion, apart from a few oblique references, is conspicuously absent from the narrative. Hamid is more interested in the psychology of a fundamentalist. Changez’s inspirations are not in Islam; his angst is fuelled by his sense of wounded pride (he cannot bear the fact that even Manila has a swankier skyline than Lahore), his awareness of acute economic disparity, and his alienation-induced identity crisis-issues that all of us grapple with in this “World Is Flat” age.
The novel is the perfect medium to give these issues an identifiably human voice, and Hamid’s rich prose adds to the beauty of this endeavor. (A quibble: too many words are italicized for emphasis, often unnecessarily, sometimes jarringly.) The ending, too, is a slick comment on the perpetual mutual suspicion between the two cultures.

Stanley Kramer, Rama Sethu and The Inheritors of Wind

(First published at Desicritics)

A few weeks ago, I happened to watch two powerful Stanley Kramer courtroom dramas: Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg (they now join my all time favorite in this genre - Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men). What drove me to write about these films are the Ram-Sethu issue and the subsequent spate of arguments on Desicritics.

Inherit the Wind is based on the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where the legality of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution of humans was questioned by Biblical fundamentalists. Both the film and the real trial were star-studded affairs (the irascible H L Mencken reported on the real trial).
To be fair, much of the credit for the film’s grand fireworks goes to writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, on whose play the film is based. But lets give Stanley Kramer credit for those haunting close ups of the fundamentalist prosecutor-statesman Matthew Brady (Fredric March) on stage, shot from below, towering him in our eyes for the messianic sway he holds on the masses. It’s as though the camera were searching his face and inquiring, in an attempt to understand the ‘other’.
Equally memorable are the tense respect-disagree dynamic between Brady and the agnostic defense lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) captured on a quiet Tennessee night, the sweat oozing out of the film as a literal and metaphorical reminder of the heat in that state, and the theme song, “Gimme that ol’ time religion”, used to contrast the two forms of religion-the cacophonous public version sung by the village crowd versus the dulcet private version accompanying the last shot of Drummond.

Judgment At Nuremberg is a much more complex film. It is set in post-World War II Nuremberg, where judges were tried for the “justice” they meted out in the Third Reich. As Hans Rolfe, the German defense lawyer, Maximillian Schell deservedly won the Oscar for his powerhouse portrayal of German indignation. Here, too, it is he and the Hitler-hating German judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) whose close-ups and monologues seek to understand the ‘other’.
During the trial, Rolfe points out how Churchill and American businesses flirted with Hitler before the war, and asks, “Are they not to be blamed?” And as Stanley Kramer’s alter ego, Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy, who else?) concedes when sentencing the judges, “There is some truth in this”. Haywood doesn’t condone Ernst Janning; in fact, he denies Janning redemption by pointing out that the latter had lost moral ground the very first time he sentenced an innocent man to a concentration camp. But what is remarkable about Haywood is that this doesn’t blind him to the finer side of Ernst Janning.

Stanley Kramer’s strength lies in this very quality: He takes an almost egalitarian view of human flaws, and yet maintains an empathetic, noble worldview. His moral compass is a sensitive one; its needle surveys the entire moral dial, but always settles at the right position. He is tolerant of contradiction, but not of dishonesty. (Mani Ratnam’s “Is he a thug or a genius?”, “I think both” in Guru is the Indian example I can recall). His morality is not the hasty judgment of the preacher; it is the calm, dispassionate analysis of the philosopher. His camera is always zooming in on the ‘other’, always inquiring. And his only fierce commitment is to the relentless pursuit of truth-that often unpalatable, usually messy and almost always imperfect ideal.
This commitment is what makes the best in science and art score over judgmental doctrine. With its blind, algorithmic opportunism, science mainly ends up being a dispassionate description of how the universe is, not a passionate prescription of how it ought to be. And the best writing is always peopled with gray characters, it always appeals to empathy rather than moralistic judgment, it is always more feely than preachy. The Ramayana is such writing; reading it literally diminishes it. Those who do so have inherited nothing but wind.

To Be And Just To Be

First published at Desicritics

It’s impossible not to feel anything when independent India turns sixty. Given our conjoined-twins-like history, India’s freedom reminds me of two Pakistanis; specifically, it reminds me of two Urdu short stories by writers who, post-Partition, became Pakistanis.

No-land’s man Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is arguably the more famous one. The story is about the dangers of asserting demarcations - what Richard Dawkins calls the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. Freedom lies in freeing our minds from such arbitrary categorical boundaries.
But it is the other story-Ghulam Abbas’s Anandi that really gets to the heart of the freedom issue. The struggle between arbiters and freethinkers is a perpetual one, still being played out in India and everywhere else. As Faiz observed (with typical melancholy),

na apnii rasm nayii hai, na unkii riit nayii
na apnii haar nayii hai, na unkii jiit nayii

My prosaic translation:
Ours are the same old ways, as are theirs too
Our defeats and their wins, none of these are new

But Anandi ends on a note of irony, not melancholy. Years after a new, vibrant city has sprung up around the banished red-light district, its own council is ready to banish them again. No society can flourish without mirth, and there is mirth in the freedom to think. That is the freedom that Taslima Nasreen, Fehmida Riyaaz, and countless others have sought from the Indian state:

You’re sixty, O Great Referee
Retire, and let us be.

Pan's Labyrinth: A Tale of Two Worlds

All of us have seen movies and read books that we love despite our disagreements with them: Guillermo Del Toro’s exquisitely shot Pan’s Labyrinth is such a film for me. Actually, it isn’t as much of a disagreement as a childish demand on my part that such a beautiful movie would conform entirely to my worldview (I don’t buy that “objective” review stuff. I review movies because I’m passionate about them. I’d rather be fiercely subjective, as long as I’m completely honest).

The plot is ingenuous and quite extraordinary: Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother join her stepfather (Sergi Lopez), a Captain in Franco’s army. Ofelia is a die hard fairy-tale buff and lives in her own universe, hobnobbing with fauns and fairies. Like Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), the guerilla mole in the Captain’s labyrinth, Ofelia too is fighting for a better world; only her fight takes place in that world of fauns and fairies. She is, we are told, a princess who must undergo some tribulations to unite with the king and queen in the underworld-the faun’s labyrinth. Ofelia and the Captain are cleverly introduced: she extends her left hand for a handshake, he corrects her. What a way to pit the creative mind against convention! You can’t help but cheer the doctor who mocks the Captain, “Obeying for the sake of obeying is for men like you”. Ofelia’s assignments parallel those of Mercedes. Mercedes, too, holds the key to a better world, and has to destroy the greedy monster at the root of Spain, so her country can flower.
Del Toro’s execution is remarkable; for the most part, he leaves room for viewers like me who don’t want to read the obvious religious subtext. But walking the tightrope between the real and the imaginary is never easy. And the couple of occasions (the priest’s affirmation of God when Ofelia’s mother dies, or Ofelia eating the forbidden fruit and being denied paradise) when he trips stand out-like one color smudging into another across a fine boundary. (This is almost a mirror image of Vishal Bharadwaj’s Makdee, where the reality smudged onto the imagination.)
It is to Del Toro’s credit that I could still see Ofelia not as Jesus (or Uncle Tom), sacrificing herself for the world, but as a little girl who possessed that rare gift: the power to imagine. In that light, Ofelia looks like Azar Nafisi, desperately clutching her fiction to make sense of reality, and Pan’s Labyrinth becomes a wonderful paean to human imagination, the escape it offers from reality (Ofelia warning her unborn half-brother that it’s bad out here), and the possibilities it creates to improve reality.

Bandini: Of Human Bondage

(First published at Desicritics)

A new batch of female inmates is ushered into the zanaanah ward of a pre-independence prison. Among them is Kalyani (Nutan), our protagonist, serving time for poisoning a woman to death. One night, an old inmate is struck by tuberculosis, and Kalyani is the only one who volunteers to nurse her-and how!-she insists that the jailor sign her papers right now, in the middle of the night, lest he should forget the next day. That's Kalyani-an unshakable confidence under a demure exterior. Is it any wonder then, that the good prison doctor Devendra (Dharmendra) is smitten by her?
The genius of Jarasandha's script surfaces in the scene where Deven first touches Kalyani: soon as the good doctor places a loving hand on the convicted woman's shoulder, the prison warning bell sounds. A freedom-fighter-inmate, we are told, has just struck a blow to a cop. And we're immediately brought home to the reality of moral authority, which will sound warning bells whenever Kalyani is touched by love.
The juxtaposition of personal and political freedom struggles is a recurring motif in Bimal Roy's Bandini. Throughout the film, authorities continue to silence the voices of freedom, just as the warden whacks an inmate for singing. Beauty has no room in a world governed by strictures, a fact the Superintendent of police makes explicit by voicing his dislike for flowers in prison. Even the slightly self-indulgent night sequence of a freedom-fighter's hanging ends with a pithy, ironical scene - the prison guard crowing at dawn break, "sab theeeek haiii!" This is scriptwriting at its finest.

In the flashback that leads up to Kalyani's imprisonment, Nabendu Ghosh's screenplay cleverly reverses the customary male gaze upon the village girl; here, it is Kalyani whose eyes twinkle when she first sees rebel freedom-fighter Vikas (Ashok Kumar), even before she meets him ("He laughs funny", she says. It's doubly effective because it's Ashok Kumar she's talking about!) It is through her perspective that we see Vikas. In the only romantic scene the duo gets, Vikas praises Kalyani, and the way Nutan stays true to character, shying coquettishly without losing that spark of defiance, speaks volumes about her acting finesse.
In the end, once she is free, Kalyani must choose between Deven and Vikas (Mark how, in all the important scenes between Kalyani and her suitors, there's a barrier between her and them). The characterization of the men is deceptively clever; it plays upon all our preconceived notions. Deven is young, handsome, clean-shaven and a doctor; while Vikas is older, gaunt, unshaven and sickly (he always has a fever). The casting seduces us: surely, on the face of it, Ashok Kumar would attract fewer women than Dharmendra, so that the viewer ends up rooting for Devendra (admittedly, I did). Even their names-Deven(king of gods) and Vikas(progress)-heighten their contrasts.
But a closer look reveals why Kalyani chooses Vikas. The good doctor is conventional; were Kalyani to go with him, she'd be walking back into society-a place scarier than prison (remember her pleas to the jailor not to be released). Vikas, on the other hand, is a rebel. He comes with no baggage; he'd long declared Kalyani to be his wife without officially marrying her, convention be damned.
Freedom isn't always neat, easy and clean shaven; it is often unattractive and full of hardships. Deven would've meant a comfortable life, Vikas means a free life. This, then, is Bandini's sophisticated take on the nature of freedom: it may run against all conventional wisdom, but being free means being able to choose.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: God, Slave, America

(First published at Desicritics)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book about the lives of Tom and many other slaves in pre Civil War America. Through Tom’s fortunes, his various masters, and those of his other black friends, we get a sense of those terrible times in American history.
The best parts are those involving women and their kitchen politics. Clearly, the Southern kitchen is a world Stowe knew intimately and remembered fondly. The corn cakes, the “poetry” (Aunt Chloe’s pronunciation of “poultry”), the pies and the women are vivid and oddly cute. Stowe’s kitchen becomes a microcosm of the slavery-days America. The territorial conflict for kitchen dominion between Dinah, the disorderly black cook, and her master’s propriety-personified Northern cousin, Miss Ophelia, at once captures all the nuances of North-South, black-white, slave-master politics; and it does so with all the humor of a good old who-owns-the-kitchen feud.
But Stowe is too sharp a writer to leave it at that. A few pages down the line, after a stunningly perceptive tirade against slavery, the cynical St. Clare likens slavery to Dinah’s kitchen: you love what comes out of it, but you wouldn’t if you saw the mess inside. What a sophisticated, damning and clever observation!
Uncle Tom is a deeply religious book. Much before Stowe makes it explicit, you know that little Eva, the daughter of Tom’s new master, is divine. What starts out as a Christian undercurrent, gradually becomes a full blown Biblical allegory. The early references to Christian love are ennobling; they remind you of the humanist sense in which (of all people) Bertrand Russell advocated it. But somewhere down the line, Stowe’s missionary zeal gets the better of her. It is one thing to use a Christian allegory as a literary device, but when it usurps the human story, it can be troubling. Surely, Tom’s death and the subsequent gift of freedom to the other slaves is sufficient to tell us that Tom is the adult Christ who bears his country’s cross (the cherubic Eva is baby Jesus).
Left at that, this is a brilliant and daring (remember, Tom is black) characterization. At least, it lifts Tom above the “noble savage” image of slaves in American writing of the time. But Stowe wants more. She wants us to think that Tom’s heart wrenchingly tragic end is something to be celebrated as his union with God. The problem is that this, unwittingly, makes slavery a part of the Divine Plan and somewhat minimizes the serious human damage it did. It also takes some of the bite out of Stowe’s criticism of churches that assured divine sanction to slavery. So strong is Stowe’s agenda that the skeptical St. Clare and the freethinking George Harris must be hastily made to accept Christ, lest they come across as happy/good heathens. Even if we grant Tom’s divinity as an allegorical necessity, it’s a pity that, in her final strokes, Stowe paints the other human characters in one hue. Her bending over backwards to exalt the virtues of the “African race” is also quite unnecessary. The way Christianity morphs in the book-from an ennobling and humane philosophy into the absolute and only truth-eerily foreshadows the trajectory it has taken in American politics.
None of this takes away from the powerful pang of the story. We weep for Tom in his horrifying last days. But we weep because his story is far too achingly real to offer any redemption in an imagined afterlife. For collecting such histories and weaving them into a single, beautiful narrative, Stowe deserves to be read.

Manmohan 'Marquez' Desai

A high-brow critic once remarked how he was surprised by the use of an eagle on Amitabh's arm in Coolie. Apparently, this is an erudite Muslim symbolism, and janaab high-brow was surprised to find it in a 'trite' (that was the word he used) film like Coolie.

This best betrays our somewhat schizophrenic attitude to Manmohan Desai. As receptive children, we loved his movies; as cynical adults, we remember him with a mix of embarrassment and patronizing nostalgia-like we'd remember a Chandamama or a Chacha Chaudhary comic.
But, like those comics, his stories had morals and socio-political commentary. His cinema worked not because it was trite, but because we are a sophisticated audience. We understand, if only implicitly, the metaphor for a divided people in Amar, Akbar Anthony. MD had read a newspaper story about three brothers being separated from each other, which inspired him to make a movie about children of the same mother (India) who grow up with different faiths. If that isn't creative genius, what is? The father in Amar, Akbar Anthony reunites with his son by literally digging up a buried past they share: a gun. There is a message, here, for a country whose violent divisions are buried by official history. And mother India can only be literally blind not to see her own flesh and blood: after all, she survives because sons of all faiths literally give her their blood.

Divisive forces were MD's villains- the smuggler, Robert, in Amar, Akbar Anthony; and the jilted lover, Zafar in Coolie. Both were wealthy and drunk on power; they lusted after their desires and divided us, the people. MD's heroes were classic Davids who fought the Goliaths of their times. In Mard, a prince is reduced to a taangewaala and turned against his own father by the British. Father and son fight each other, as the sadistic outsider looks on. Here, mother India loses her voice after the British invade (What a telling metaphor!). But the father has left a proud, indelible mark upon his son's breast-the literary equivalent of DNA. This will help them discover both, their mutual kinship and their real enemy. If Mard taught us the strengths of biological kinship, Parwarish showed us its weakness. What better comment on caste than to show that your blood isn't always pure blood? In Shahenshah, a cop who is corrupt by day turns into a crime-fighting superhero by night, beating up the very goons who bribe him. MD saw the paradox in a corrupt society-the hand of the law being fed by the very forces it was supposed to crush-and turned it into a literary device. If this was his brilliantly original superhero, his earlier Saccha Jhuuta used the classic look-alikes device to make a 'Jekyll & Hyde'ish comment on human nature.

Manmohan Desai's work, like our best epics, was driven by imagination. With an innate acumen for metaphors, he created a magic real world of his own. Garcia Marquez would've been proud.
(Cool IMDB trivia:The line, "sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated with the exuberance of your own verbosity" that is spoken by Anthony when he emerges from the Easter egg is an almost exact quotation from a speech given by Benjamin Disraeli in 1878. Disraeli (who was referring to W.E. Gladstone) used the word "inebriated" rather than "intoxicated".Wonder of wonders!)

Movie Review: Kabul Express - Riding with the Enemy

(First published at Desicritics)

Kabir Khan's Kabul Express is the story of two Indian jouralists, Jai (Arshad Warsi) and Suhail (John Abraham), on a mission to interview the Taliban in Afghanistan's rugged deserts. Their chauffeur-cum-guide is the fiercely anti-Taliban Afghan, Khyber (Hanif Hum Ghum). Along the way, Jessica (Linda Aresenio), an American reporter latches on to them in search of a good story. The party is then hijacked by a Pakistani Pathan soldier (Salman Shahid), fighting disguised as a Talib, who forces them to take him to the border so he can escape to Pakistan. The film offers us vignettes of the region's politics through the goings on between these different characters.
Kabul Express was born of Khan's experiences filming documentaries in Afghanistan. The script is punctuated by some genuinely moving commentary on the absurdity and brutality of war. Take the scene, for example, when Suhail is doing his ritual push ups while a wide-eyed Afghani boy looks on, his back facing Suhail. Suhail playfully invites the boy to join him. When the child turns around, we see him holding crutches, having lost a leg to a landmine.

The comic exchanges between the characters over cricket (the Pakistani Pathan uses the pseudonym 'Imran Khan Afridi'!) and Bollywood - two facets that respectively divide and unite people of the region - offer us entertainment and a taste of identity politics. Khan succeeds in humanizing the warring parties, including the 'terrorist', making us refine some of our crude and simplistic stereotypes. Imran is the most author-backed character, with the track involving his daughter; his weary and defensive remarks, "I was just following my orders and doing my duty"; or his guilty twitches when Suhail mocks his militant version of Islam ("namaaz with a rifle by your side") and his warped sense of duty ("What sort of duty shames you in your own daughter's eyes?"). The scene where Imran is gunned down by soldiers of his own country beautifully captures his tragedy and the fickleness of politics (shades of Kubrick's Paths of Glory). How you wish the film had concluded with that scene instead of the wordy addendum.

Khan does not mince words in condemning shifty governments, and his fortitude is laudable. Unfortunately, the usually sharp commentary occasionally turns into filmy dialogue-such as Imran's mushy "we'll be friends in our next life" remark to Jai, or the narration at the end of the film. Also, the "Who started the war?" bitty between Khyber and Imran is straight out of Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land. And why does Jessica have so much make up on? Even Jai and Suhail sport spotless jackets and no signs of fatigue, while braving the dusty landscape for 48 non stop hours. The shot of Imran leering at Jessica's cleavage is, ironically, a cheap, distasteful stereotype in itself. All of this does somewhat dilute the film's impact.Salman Shahid brings a dignity and humanity to his character - no mean achievement if you're playing a terrorist. Hanif Hum Ghum too plays his part to perfection. Arshad Warsi's effortless dialogue delivery and his famous comic timing enthrall us as always. John Abraham is sincere, at best, and Linda Aresenio is somewhat better.

All said, Kabul Express is a brave, honest and intelligent comment on politics and war.
P.S. Do watch the making on the DVD; it has some informative, moving and funny stuff.

Movie Review: Namesake-The Shoes we walk in

(First published at Desicritics)

It all begins when a train to Jamshedpur meets with an accident, leaving few survivors. One such survivor is the young and bookish Ashok Ganguli (Irrfan Khan). Only minutes before the accident, while he is reading Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat, Ashok is advised by a fellow traveler to 'pack a pillow and see the world'. Once he recovers, he does just that and heads off to the 'land of opportunities'.
A few winters later, Ashok is in Calcutta to pick his bride. The first time we see Ashima (Tabu), she is blissfully lost in her riyaaz, singing to her heart's content. When Ashok and his clan are over to 'see' her, she secretly tries his shoes on-a metaphor that will recur throughout the story. Ashok's shoes fit Ashima beautifully, and she is more than willing to walk in them half way across the world to New York. Though the novel has Ashok studying at Harvard, Mira Nair uses New York. This is perhaps a calculated cinematic license that allows Ms Nair to use shots of the Brooklyn bridge (or was it Manhattan?) in NY and the Howrah bridge in Calcutta to bridge the two cultures. So many times in the film, we cut from one bridge to another and it takes us a split second to realize that we've crossed cultures: another effective metaphor. Before we move on, I must mention my favorite shot in the film: a close-up silhouette of Ashima's hand, waving goodbye through a window as Ashok fades away in the snow. The scene is a poignant pointer to what will follow.
Ashima and Ashok have two children: a son and a daughter. The son, Gogol aka Nikhil Ganguli (Kal Penn), grows up to be a much taunted teen, what with his namesake being a psychotic, suicidal writer. Despite his father's many attempts at connecting with him, Gogol is determined to shake this baggage off, and has his name changed to Nikhil. What he's really looking to shake off, of course, is his identity. But that's never easy. No matter how hard he tries to avoid his parents and blend with those of his all American girlfriend Maxine (Jacinda Barrett); no matter how hard he tries to be Nick, life (and Ashok, of course) will keep reminding him that he is Gogol.
The first such reminder is a touching one: Ashok tells him that the reason he named him Gogol is, in fact, that train accident. Ever since then, Gogol has been associated, in Ashok's mind, with the gift of life. Upon learning this, for the first time Nikhil appreciates why he is Gogol to Ashok. Alas, the second reminder is a rude shock. A few days into his semester at Ohio, Ashok suddenly dies of a heart attack. Nikhil walks into Ashok's empty hotel room in Cleveland, and steps gingerly into his dead father's shoes. And the meaning in the metaphor dawns upon us: Ashok, we realize, was always comfortable in his skin. Hence, to walk in his shoes is not to be him, but to be your self. Nikhil's transition, though, is not yet complete. Maxine now reminds him of everything he is not: she shows up in black in a house where all the Indian mourners are in white. And even though she takes off her shoes (metaphor intended) before stepping into an Indian house in mourning, Nikhil's own guilt pushes him to the other extreme. In true Hindu mourning fashion, he shaves his head off and breaks up with Maxine. But there is a silver lining: when performing his father's rites, he calls himself Gogol. Later, his marriage to the Bengali-British Maushami (Zuleikha Robinson) is destroyed by her infidelity (by contrast, his sister's American husband will continue to love her), making him see, at last, the true middle ground of his bi-cultural identity.
In life and in death, Ashok proves to be the guardian angel for Gogol and, of course, for Ashima. He protects them in the best possible way: by forcing them to be independent. Note Ashima's post facto rationalization that Ashok went to Ohio just to teach her how to live alone; when, in fact, we saw him a few scenes back, urging Ashima to accompany him. Ashima, walking in Ashok's shoes, lets go of Gogol and moves back to Calcutta. And the film's concluding scene rhymes with Ashima's opening scene: we leave her, as we first met her, blissfully singing her heart out in Calcutta.
Irrfan Khan pours his heart into the character, managing to move you to tears and make you smile; so that when he is gone, we, too, miss him. Kal Penn is a protagonist for all seasons. From snubbing his father as a head banging teenager; to breaking down at his dead father's empty, crumpled hotel bed; and everywhere in between-he is at ease and in character. Tabu graces Ashima's role, effortlessly growing from the playful lass to the restrained woman(note her shock when she hears of Ashok's death).
Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's book works because she captures that elusive Holy Grail of adaptations: the book's spirit. The languor of the film sits well with the large canvas and the setting (who ever heard of a fast-paced Bengali life?) The metaphors and lyrical touches (note the classic boatman's song in the Ganges) give the story a poetic feel. The seamless interspersing of shots between India and the US, and the evocative, intimate flashbacks capture the immigrant experience wonderfully.
Throughout the film, Nair sprinkles the vagaries of both cultures with humor: note the red chili powder in Rice Krispies, or the funky wedding night song ditty between Maushami and Gogol. The skin show in their first sexual encounter, however, is gratuitous. Nair and cinematographer Frederick Elmes don't paint the two cultures in strikingly different hues, thus preserving the seamlessness of cultures and the universality of the story (Ashima, we're reminded, means one without boundaries). Nitin Sawhney's background score is rich with ragas. But above all, Nair's actors stand out for their authenticity in costume, make up and mannerisms (note how Ashima hums, as singers often do). True to their particular milieu, they tell us the universal story of finding peace in the face of tragedy.

Honeymoon Travels: Six Degrees of Togetherness

(First published at DesiCritics)

Reema Kagti's Honeymoon Travels is a comedy about six couples taking the eponymous tourist bus to Goa. All the stories are told with youthful, irreverent and yet insightful humor.
Kagti's literary devices - a radio jockey as the narrator and his Hindi film songs to convey her character's flashbacks - are narrative masterstrokes. This treatment makes the stories comic without trivializing their message. So let's, to quote the movie's tour guide Sunil, "introduce ourselves to ourselves".
Meet then, the jazzy Gujarati newlyweds Shilpa (Diya Mirza) "forcefully" married to Hitesh Patel (Ranvir Shorey) while secretly having the hearts for mysterious motorcycle man. Early on in the film, the resolution to this conflict - Shilpa eloping with her lover and freeing herself - sets the tone for the remaining stories.
Diya Mirza is aptly weepy and funny, while Ranvir Shorey fits the flamboyant Gujarati businessman to a tee: accent, body language, et al. Note his excellent performance when licking his wounded ego after Shilpa elopes.
Meet also, the dignified, lovable fifty-something Naheed (Shabana Azmi) just married to a Goan Christian, Oscar (Boman Irani). Both have gone through terrible tragedies and have found love in each other. Oscar's quick and often self-deprecating wit (he announces them as "Mr. and Mrs. 55", mocking those who constantly patronize them for being newlyweds at their age) and his bad Urdu diction are qualities that endear him to Naheed and to us.
Note also, the scene where he concocts a fantastically improbable plane crash story when telling a tourist how he met Naheed. Again, the story is comic but its message is serious: he and Naheed are survivors. And Bollywood, take a lesson from Ms Kagti, Ms Azmi and Mr Irani: this is how lovers kiss.
No change in light, no mushy close ups and soft focus, nothing: just a simple, sweet and heart-warming kiss. Naheed helps Oscar reconcile with his troubled teenage daughter, giving us our second happy ending. Boman Irani is excellent as the laugh-at-life Goan and Shabana Azmi is, of course, the dignified Urdu-speaking woman: a casting masterstroke, this.
Next, the garrulous, Bollywood-smitten Punjab di Pinky (Ameesha Patel) and her forced-to-be-quiet hubby Vicky (Karan Khanna). Their conflict is tied to our next couple: the bold and sassy Madhu (Sandhya Mridul) and the shy American-Indian Bunty (Vikram Chatwal).
Madhu, too, has a painful past which beautifully explains her present persona. In Bunty, Ms Kagti scores another first for Hindi cinema: she confidently and path-breakingly creates a perfectly normal and believable gay man. You can't help remarking that it had to be a woman director who did that. Again: Bollywood, this is how it's done.
Unfortunately, the resolution to this conflict (and therefore Pinky and Vicky's too) seems more to the writer's convenience than the two couples'. Fortunately, this is the only flaw in the entire film. Sandhya Mridul is expressive and spirited as always and Ameesha Patel as the Bollywood Barbie is perfect.
Our next couple is, in effect, Kagti's trump card: the comically made for each other Aspi (Abhay Deol) and Zara (Minnisha Lamba). They have identical tastes, quirks, mannerisms and movements. They are every couple's envy and have never, ever fought. They are literally - thanks to a childhood accident involving the Haley's comet - a super couple. And after sixteen super blissful years, they fight.
And give us the wonderful moral of Kagti's story, "Only Supercouples don't fight for sixteen years". Kudos to Kagti; using Superman and Superwoman is another masterstroke!
At the heart of the film, however, is the story of Milly Sen (Raima Sen), a young-at-heart, middle class and mildly rebellious woman betrothed to a quintessentially bhadralok Bengali Partho Sen (Kay Kay Menon).
Milly and Partho, we are told, are in a supremacy race with each other. Each one wants to be on the top: yes, in bed and in life. We laugh at them and ourselves when Kagti cuts from the duel in bed to a shot showing them in a boxing ring packing punches at each other, egged on by their villainous mothers. We feel Milli's pain at being wronged, as she lies down in the ring and concedes the title.
Kagti's brilliance lies in the fact that she uses this absurd humor to bring out, and make us laugh at, our own absurdities. Milly boggie-woogies a bit at the evening party and the uptight babu bhadralok is apologetic, "My wife has become a hippie in Goa". But the turning point comes when Partho must prove to a swimsuit clad Madhu that Milly can damn well parasail in a saree.
Alas, his eyes are opened when the saree comes off in the sky. He is down below, embarrassedly cursing everyone like a knight guarding his lady's honor. But Milly is up in the sky, carefree and flying. Milly is, at long last, free. "No, I don't want to wear the saree", she matter-of-factly but firmly tells Partho upon landing. The tide has turned for the better.
Partho, by the end of the film, accepts Milly's independent spirit. And, with a little help from free-spirited Goa's party potions, he changes by the end of the film; he is ready to move out of his parents' house. He, too, is free. The transition of both these characters is Kagti's pointer to the transition in the Indian middle class.
Partho and Milly's story is also, by and large, our story. Kay Kay Menon is one of the finest actors around today. He internalizes and embodies the conflict between the old and the new that Partho represents. Raima Sen is a class act and a delight to watch. Note her expressions walking around in a blouse and petticoat with a twinkle in her eyes on the beach. In that one scene, she becomes the heroine of the film.
Anurag Kashyap's dialogue is full of colloquial wit and is amazingly in tune with the characters' backgrounds (note Madhu's Bambaiyyaa Hindi when she snaps at the auto-rickshaw driver, "Mere ko nahiiN sun ne kaa hai"). He is one of the best things to have happened to Bollywood. Vishal-Shekhar's background score is peppy and in keeping with the film's mood.
But we doff our hats to Madame Kagti. First, comedies and stories-within-a-story films are two of the hardest genres to write and direct. Full marks to a first time director for scoring a double whammy! Far as my memory goes, this is the very first Hindi film to succeed at this Love Actually/Crash format.
Second, Reema Kagti's film has a celebratory, endearing feminist undercurrent that refreshingly breaks away from the usual damsel-in-distress woman-centric films such as Tanuja Chandra's Dushman, Kalpana Lajmi's Rudaali, Daman and Chingaari, Mahesh Manjrekar's Astitva or Madhur Bhandarkar's Satta. That is another first for Hindi cinema (even the great Hrishida's Mili was dying, remember?).
Kagti's woman is comfortable with herself; her own identity and her commitment to the man in her life (captured by the song, 'Sajnaa jii waarii waarii jaauuN jii maiN') don't compromise each other. On a related note, though, surely lyricist Javed Akhtar and/or Kagti could've avoided 'charanoN meN tere jagah paauuN'? There's always the heart, you know.
All this is not to slot Kagti as a 'female' director, or the film as a feminist film. The feminism is an undercurrent; the film is a one-of-a-kind hilarious and paisaa-wasool human comedy.