Rustic Bond

(First published at DesiCritics)

The Blue Umbrella opens with a telling sequence: when you’ve taken in the snowflakes and the pine trees synonymous with a Himachal winter, you squint to notice a little girl with an umbrella, camouflaged in the scenery. And it’s a telling sequence because in presenting little Biniya (Shreya Sharma) as completely one with the region she belongs to, Vishal Bharadwaj is simply mirroring Ruskin Bond’s idyllic vision of a pahaaRii people seeped into their surroundings.

An interesting dualism emerges from Bharadwaj’s work so far. The films he’s made with child protagonists (Makdee, The Blue Umbrella) are infused with the innocence that adult nostalgia projects onto childhood, and his adult films (Maqbool, Omkara) are unmistakably dark. In this film, the nutty Nandkishore Khatri (Pankaj Kapur) embodies this conflict between childhood and growing up. His coveting the blue umbrella – Biniya’s little piece of heaven with clouds sprinkled on its canopy – is after all an adult's longing for a lost childhood.
Having spent a calculating life in pursuit of profit, Nandu sees his possessing the umbrella as his one shot at redemption – priceless precisely because it offers no real advantage, like “watching a sunset”. And this is what gives the plot its bite: Having grown up, we too have robbed childhood of its gay innocence and coated our worldly concerns on it. We too have, as it were, stolen and painted the umbrella red.

The film is a visual delight - the use of the blue and yellow tinted night scenes, a toy scarecrow, a woman sieving wheat, a Ferris wheel in a tizzy, and the picturesque Himachal hamlet with its motley characters - all make the quotidian seem quaint.
Mark the swooshing shot of the umbrella’s descent, as if it were an angel seeking Biniya out. Bharadwaj’s background score and the gifted Gulzar’s lyrics add an adorable touch to the proceedings. There’s a lot to laugh about: the idiomatic dialogue; Nandu swaying his head religiously to a bhajan set to the tune of “You are my Sonia” from Kabhie Khushii Kabhii Gham; or a Beatrix Kiddo-esque montage of Biniya wielding the umbrella followed by a remark emphasizing what “khilbil” (mayhem) she caused!

The only false note is the morphing of Ravana’s heads into Nandu’s; the cut from Nandu’s speech to the Ravana-burning shot is enough to convey Nandu’s villany; spelling it out robs it of its subtlety.

Pankaj Kapur deserves a hundred hat-tips for his comical, childlike, neurotic and vulnerable rendition of Nandu. Here is an actor for all seasons: quirky carrot-loving detective (Karamchand), tormented cop (Raakh), tragic scientist (Ek Doctor Kii Maut), harassed teacher (Zabaan Sambhaalke) and Marlon Maqbool Brando. Clearly, the man is no Phateechar when it comes to acting.

In some ways, Vishal Bharadwaj is the most Indian of mainstream Hindi filmmakers. He seeks out the rugged, rustic, forgotten-by-Bollywood India – a decadent Urdu speaking Mumbai mafia, a political fiefdom in the cow-belt heartland, and a tiny Himachal hamlet. And he’s at home in this ‘other’ India; he isn’t the voyeuristic urban outsider (think Swades). Instead, he revels in becoming and making us become one with them. That is what makes his cinema refreshing and real.

A Purely Natural Theology

(First published at Desicritics)

As soon as I finished reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience – A Personal View of the Search for God, an anthology of Carl Sagan’s 1985 Gifford lectures in Natural Theology, I wanted to grab every person on this ‘pale blue dot’ planet by the shoulders, and ask him/her to read it. Sagan was a man who, per Ann Duryan, the book’s editor, “spoke extemporaneously in nearly perfect paragraphs”. Here’s a typical passage.

‘By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night…every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion. Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of worship. And Einstein said, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” So if Carlyle and Einstein agree on something, it has a modest possibility of even being right.’

This is about as poetic as Kabir, Meera and Bulle Shah will ever get.

Sagan’s tone in these lectures is benign and almost avuncular; only the patently prissy would accuse him of disrespect. His gifts as a science writer are many. He has a keen eye for the beauty in every facet of human inquiry-literature, art, science of course, and even religion. He has the sort of wit that pokes to tickle, not to hurt. For instance, when pointing out the obviously anthropocentric view of the afterlife, he recites Rupert Brooke’s Heaven. And here’s a snippet from a post-lecture Q&A session.

Q: What is your opinion on the nature of the origins of intelligent life in the universe?

A: I’m for it!

The book is rich in poetry (that of rhyme as well as reason), artists’ depictions of astronomical phenomena, and of course those breathtakingly wondrous NASA photographs. Sagan dazzles us even when citing numbers - a couple of hundred thousand million suns in the Milky Way, ten to hundred times as many galaxies in the universe, and an equation attempting to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. Above all, his clear yet sophisticated ethics give these talks a halo of nobility. For instance, he rejects miracles not because they’re absurd but because, following Democritus and Hume, the likelihood of nature changing its course is much smaller than that of a person lying. Or consider his nuanced take on the preserve-destroy conflict innate in civilizations.

‘ [It is] a conflict within the human heart…between the bureaucratic, hierarchical, aggressive parts of our nature, which in a neurophysiological sense we share with our reptilian ancestors, and the other parts of our nature, the generalized capacity for love, for compassion, for identification with others, who may superficially not look or talk or dress exactly like us, the ability to figure the world out that is focused and concentrated in our cerebral cortex.’

Note the “superficial” and “exactly”, implying that the similarities among different peoples far outweigh the differences; and the references to “reptilian ancestors” and “cerebral cortex”, as evidence of his commitment to a purely natural theology.

Speaking in 1985, the heyday of Reagan and the Star Wars, Sagan constantly returns to the nuclear threat and warns us that we have (still true, I gather) nuclear weapons capable of destroying our species many times over. And this is a scientist’s warning, so he duly backs it up with some morbid math on how many warheads it’d take to get to doomsday. Here he is championing the ethical legacy of such heavyweights as Spinoza, Einstein and Russell - not just in their espousal of laws of nature as the only plausible god, but also in their compassion and pacifism.

By itself, atheism is a negative and that very fact weakens its sales pitch. It’s no co-incidence that the word consists of a negating prefix followed by two harsh syllables; it is supposed to signify a rejection of something. What we want is something we can embrace, something positive. Sagan offers a recipe for that. Take what is best in religion: the deep questions it seeks to answer, the compassion it seeks to advocate, and the poetry it touches upon. Add what is best in science: the persistent chipping away at the wall of ignorance; the humility and awe of knowing that we live on a planet of a sun in the ‘boondocks’ of a galaxy (to use Sagan’s imaginative expression) that is itself a miniscule part of the universe. Cook this mixture in Sagan’s funny, lucid and lyrical prose, and what you get is a literary feast of a book.

On Jodhaa Akbar and Dismissive Reviews

I like Ashutosh Gowarikar. He stands out among contemporaries because of his commitment to a forgotten fact about cinema: technique must give in to the story. (Ingmar Bergman : "People don't see a picture, people see people"). His cinema is old school-it relies mostly on its cast, dialogues, intense close-ups and suchlike. It's more theater than cinema.

Granted, Jodhaa Akbar is longer than necessary and editing is not Gowarikar's forte. But the movie has a lot going for it.

Take Gowarikar's vision, for instance. Here is a director who uses a poilitical marriage between two people in history to reflect on the political marriage between two religions. Mark the bold interruption of a Maulanah's harangue on Islamic purity by a Krishna bhajan; Akbar's constant snides to said Maulanah, insisting upon the separation of huquumat from mazhab;and the use of semi-transparent curtains depicting the known-yet-unknown "other", with whom one happens to be welded by history. Show me one Bollywood film in the last decade to so depict the Hindu-Muslim equation.

Much of Gowarikar's screen spacetime is occupied by his actors. The characters get to speak through their dialogues, faces and their bodies. Which is why Ila Arun leaves a riveting impact, Aishwarya Rai is poise personified, and as Gowarkiar's center-of-most-frames-muse, Hrithik is simply outstanding. He embodies his director's vision of Akbar: a virile, romantic, individualistic emperor.

A truly perceptive criticism comes from Amrita Rajan, who wishes (as I do) that the darker side of power had made Akbar grayer than he is in the movie. One line (again, note how theatrical it is - Hrithik moves closer to the camera, occupying centrestage, and delivers this monologue), "Why do my near and dear ones fall under my sword's shadow?", just isn't enough.

Here, for completeness, is the brilliant Baradwaj Rangan's characteristically insightful review.

Jodhaa Akbar has all the grandeur and pomp of a Bollywood historical romance. Perhaps we, the audience, have moved away from such theater. Gowarikar's film is perhaps too much like the theatrical Mughal-e-A'azam, and our sensibilities are too multiplexed to appreciate that. It's way too easy to be dismissive of commercial Bollywood romances; engaging a filmmaker on his own terms, however, takes something else-something that our supposedly cinema illiterate (and therefore more egalitarian) audience seems to have.