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?

Bombay Talkies: To the Four Fathers

At last, we get the real Karan Johar. Constrained only by time and not by seven figure ROI concerns, Johar finds his voice. Sure, there are flaws. Take the openly gay Avinash (Saquib Salim). He is refreshingly different in some respects. He isn’t effeminate. He doesn’t want to be tagged by his surname. “Avinash what?” , his boss enquires. “It’s the what that screws things up”, he responds. And yet, so often does he flash his sexuality-badge that it overshadows his other selves.  In effect, he has simply swapped surnames, not shunned them. He might as well go by “Avinash Gay”. Also, maverick irreverence is all very well, but an openly gay man who relentlessly hits upon his love-interest with scant regard for time and place simply reinforces the “despo” stereotype. This is a recurring theme in Johar’s minority characters (Kurbaan’s Muslims come to mind); they come across more as projections on a single, defining axis rather than as multi-dimensional characters.

That being said, Johar’s film is richly layered elsewhere. The hollowed out marriage between Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) and Dev (Randeep Hooda, outstanding) and Dev’s trapped, tormented sexuality are handled with an adult sensibility that is rare in Hindi cinema. The looks that Gayatri and Dev give each other convey a mutual exasperation beyond repair. In interviews, Johar has often expressed his dissatisfaction with marriage as an institution; he at last puts his movie where his mouth is.

Cinema isn’t central to Johar’s plot, the way it is to the other three. And yet, it circles Johar’s film in interesting ways. Gayatri’s last line, “I hate lies” is loaded with irony given that she edits a film tabloid. And it is the street urchin’s rendition of a film song that finally forces Dev to come to terms with himself.  Johar finds new meaning in “kisii ke itne paas ho, k Khud se duur ho gaye”.  Above all, he seems to remind us that we cannot dismiss cinema as lies; its truths can often expose us to the lies we live.

For a variety of reasons, Dibakar Banerjee’s segment is the finest of the four. First, by choosing to base his film on a Satyajit Ray short story, Banerjee reminds us of the huge Bengali influence on Hindi cinema. Second, the story revolves around an ordinary man’s (literal) brush with stardom. He is the protagonist, not the star. Purandar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) doesn’t have much going for him. He’s looking for a job (but has entrepreneurial ambitions based on eggs from a pet emu he keeps) and some dignity, eager to shine in the eyes of his wife and sick daughter. By happy accident, he’s chosen to appear – ever so fleetingly - in a movie. All he has to do is bump into the hero, exclaim “aye!” and walk out of the frame. But for Purandar, this is his to be or not to be moment.

In the pivotal scene where Purandar rehearses for his big moment, Banerjee pays homage to theatre (Kusumagraj’s Natasamrat). Facing his Hamlet-like existential dilemma, Purandar is visited by an apparition (Sadashiv Amrapurkar) of his father figure (a la Paresh Rawal in Oye, Lucky!). He must now face his failings and his ambitions (represented by the emu mulling about). Purandar’s memorable cameo in the movie-within-the-movie is not only an ode to an everyman’s resilience, it is also a bow to the countless theatrewallas who have enriched Hindi cinema in ways that stars could not have done.

 Banerjee’s film is the only one that alludes to the non-Hindi (Bengali and Marathi) cultural influences of Hindi cinema. It plays out as a classic Chaplinesque tragicomedy:  In his eagerness to share his moment of glory with his daughter, Purandar forgets to collect his fees for the cameo.  We know how much he needs the dough; he is too high to care. Nawazzudin Siddiqui sinks his teeth deep into the part, using body language and dialogue delivery to perfection. This one makes you smile, cry, feel and think. What more could you ask for?

Zoya Akhtar’s tale is less ambitious but equally heart-warming. A brother and sister help each other fulfil their little dreams, outsmarting their simple-minded father. The little guy (Naman Jain, delight to watch) wants to grow up to be Sheela (she, of Sheela kii jawaanii) and dresses himself up in his sister’s clothes and mother’s makeup, earning a slap from his father. Akhtar’s silent scenes capture the pain of a childhood dream denied, as when the dance instructor shoos the little hanger-on away.

Anurag Kashyap’s short has its strong flavors, but is overcooked in parts. A young man, Vijay (Vineet Kumar Singh) from the dusty hinterland is seeking an audience with Amitabh Bachchan for his sick father’s sake. Kashyap’s greatest success lies in mapping out the huge distance between a star and his worshipper. How inaccessible Amitabh is to a man who has a lot in common with the star (his looks, his hometown and his most famous screen name)!  Alas, Kashyap overshoots too often. The opening pee-jokes seem forced, a self-conscious peddling of brand-Kashyap bawdiness.  Still, with notable help from Vineet Kumar Singh, he makes our heart go out to the “outsiders” eking out a living in Mumbai.

The coda, “apnaa Bombay Talkies”, with a battery of stars obliging us with their presence in a lazily written and composed track is jarringly out of character for a film that looks at cinema from our perspective. And the merrily penned title track (Swanand Kirkire, I guess?) “yeh khilaaRi nah buuRhaa huwaa”  is anyway a hard act to follow. Blame this one on the promo designers.

It’s interesting that a common thread running through the four films is fathers disappointed in their children. Consciously or not, these four children of Hindi cinema have given us their takes on the generational shifts that have characterized Hindi cinema – each generation of filmmakers imbibing and rejecting various traits of the previous one.  Vive l'evolution!

Ishqiya: Sex and Sensibilities

(First published at Desicritics)

Abhishek Chaubey's Ishqiya opens with a shot that will rank among the most sensuous ones in Hindi cinema. The camera zooms in on a half asleep Krishna (Vidya Balan), as Rekha Bharadwaj's husky voice breaks into a couplet on the end of longing. The aesthetic here, as in much of Vishal Bharadwaj's work, is that of the finest Urdu poetry and literature. Indeed, the two male perspectives on love, personified by Babban (Arshad Warsi) and his Khaalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah), respectively mirror the majaazii (figurative/sensual) and haqiiqii (real/spiritual) layers of meaning in Urdu poetry, the name Krishna underscoring the bhakti element.
Babban's sexuality, then, is overtly carnal - he reads Hindi soft-porn, likes catchy numbers, frequents whorehouses, and plays peeping Tom on Krishna (though she knows this, and is simply seducing him). A line in word-czar Gulzar's penned to perfection ibn-e-Batuta could well be a description of the fly-by-night playfulness of Babban: "uR uR aawe, daane chuge, uR jaawe chiRiyaa phurr". It takes an actor of Arshad Warsi's cool and acumen to endear such a character to the audience.

Babban's Khalujaan, by contrast, is a man of refined sensibilities, an old-school romantic who cherishes the Hindi film melodies of Jaidev and Hemant Kumar. The closest he comes to voyeurism is listening in on Krishna's riyaaz. Krishna is something of a goddess to Khaalujaan; he even refers to her as "Krishnajii". His song is "dil to bacchaa hai jii", excellent in its composition (Bharadwaj's use of the accordion gives it that old world charm), its poetry ("saaree jawaanii qatraa ke kaaTii, peerii meN Takraa gaye haiN") and its picturization (Chaubey's camera seeks out the beauty in simplicity, the girl on a bus, the cook chopping almonds in a dhaabaa - just the sort of imagery that proves that the Hindi film song can be a thing of beauty when it's done right). So when Khalujaan sees Krishna boogie woogie with Babban to a Mika Singh number, in Babban's clothes at that, it isn't just jealousy he feels; it's also the inevitable disillusionment of a romantic who has seen his ideals in tatters - Krishna's sacrilegious fall from grace. Naseeruddin Shah's finesse as an actor comes through in the expression of this disillusionment and loss on his face. How fitting that the very same tragedy of a hopeless romantic was writ large on the very same face, two mentor-generations ago, in the climax of Gulzar's Ijaazat!

This tug-of-war of sexualities, and its result, are reminiscent of a Manto short, wherein a civil servant's bourgeois double standards on sex prevent him from meeting the advances of a village belle, who is eventually whisked away for a roll in the hay by a truck driver with no such qualms. Like Manto, Chaubey, Bharadwaj and co-writer Sabrina Dhawan subvert Khalujaan's romanticism to expose his attraction to Krishna. "So your love is love, while mine is lust?" asks a justifiably indignant Babban - the haqiiqii is the majaazii, and attraction is attraction even when it's dressed up as poetry. Neither are the writer-trio content with fitting Krishna into one of the male moulds of Eros or Agape - she's a woman with a bit of both and some. When Khalujaan complains, "You can never tell if a woman is a houri or a whore", Krishna shoots back, "Who are you to call me names?"; and later quips to Babban, "(Khaalujaan) can't swallow the truth; it's stuck in his throat". From an iron-willed urban mother in Balki's Paa to an earthy seductress here, Vidya Balan emerges as the most intelligent actress in present day Hindi cinema.

The sexual politics play out in the UP hinterland where politics of another kind are prevalent. In a clever shift of perspective, we're shown how the city world must appear to those outside its privileges. "In the city, you pelt a mongrel with a stone, and hits a crorepati", we're told. Here, too, there is the Mantoesque use of sex (the S&M kind, no less) to expose the seamier side of respectable society. I've said this before but it bears repeating. Bharadwaj's cinema, and Chaubey's in his footsteps, is centered on characters who don't usually figure in the urban viewer's main stream of consciousness. That the proceedings are peppered with top notch humour is simply a result of the meticulous craftsmanship of Chaubey's team of writers. They're well aware of the serious business that comedy is. Sure, the idiomatic wit and the foul language get our laughs, but they also serve to evoke empathy. Thus, unlike most Hindi films, here we're laughing with the characters not at them. In Ishqiya, Bhopalis with kohl-lined eyes aren't comic garnish (who can forget Jagdeep as Soormaa Bhopali ?); they're the dish itself.

In his production house, Vishal Bharadwaj has created an ecosystem where stories of the dusty landscapes of villages and small towns tend to flourish. To tell such stories is, in itself, a political act. But to do so in a manner that the viewer also gets her money's worth of entertainment takes genius. The Hindi film viewer has for too long been held captive to the mindset that films are either meaningful or entertaining. Ishqiya reminds her that they can be both.

A Radically Skeptical Ramayana

(First published at Desicritics)

An epic has something to offer to everyone. Its spectacular range of characters, situations and emotions allows for a multitude of interpretations. Its tragedy, of course, is that blind men will insist on what the elephant looks like. A radically skeptical Ramayana, which is what Aubrey Menen imagines Valmiki to have written, is not for those who insist upon the One Authentic Version of the epic. The Valmiki Menen imagines is the voice of an Indian Enlightenment whose skeptical realism is nothing short of shocking (even to yours truly godless). Here's how Menen thinks Valmiki's ilk would address us:

“We have nothing against this elaborate toy you call civilization. It is very pretty, especially when all parts are in working order. We do not suggest for a moment that you pull it to pieces and start anew. We do not suggest you do anything at all. So far as we are concerned, our only wish is, with the greatest good will, never to see your face again. If you are curious to know what we propose to do, we shall endeavor to explain, but not very often. We intend to set about the proper business of a human being, which is the improvement of his own soul. In this you cannot join us because you cannot call your souls your own. Since you depend every minute of your existence on everybody, you yourself are nobody. However, we will agree, in parting, that you are a jolly good fellow."

(At one point, Valmiki likens our habit of building societies to a gnat-like insect's act of creating beautiful and elaborate stones in the sea - a likeness that evolutionary psychology would bear out, I think.)

In Menen's view, the Valmiki Ramayana was written in this irreverent vein but Brahmins later sanitized it, depriving it of its piquancy in the hope of making it palatable. (In the following, read "Valmiki as imagined by Menen" for "Valmiki". Of course, I could just write "Menen" but I'm much more intrigued by the Valmiki that Menen wants to resurrect.). The Brahmins' version of Valmiki is that he was a brigand who stole and killed, and was outlawed for these crimes. But, Menen warns us, this could also be because Valmiki's "verses scanned better than anything the Brahmins could ever write."

The entire Ramayana that ensues is garnished with such delightful jabs at propriety, both in its prose and in its narrative elements. Thus Dashratha is described as a rotund, unattractive, hedonistic king who "was loved by all his subjects, and he loved certain of them in return, especially if they were women". Being such a king, he naturally spends most of his time in his harem, leaving the administration of the kingdom to the Brahmins. Ayodhya, as described here, comes pretty close to a liberal-democratic monarchy, warts and all. Thus, the king is a functional head and the Brahmins hold the strings tied to this head. (I don't think Valmiki would be surprised to learn that in our time, the people get to choose their functional head as well.) Valmiki's satire attacks the hypocrisy that is the hallmark of political rhetoric. For instance, Ayodhya’s impartial judges are described as men who have proven their expertise in manipulation of the law; or just before Rama’s army attacks Lanka, both Rama and Ravana propose “peace treaties” that are tantamount to the subjugation of the other side. And there are sexual politics too. Manthara, the woman who poisons Kaikeyi's ears, is Dashratha's spurned concubine; and Kaikeyi extracts Dashratha's promise to send Rama away on an exile through blackmail: she threatens to go public about the king's non-performance on their wedding night.

This emasculation of power is very much in keeping with Valmiki's brand of iconoclasm and it returns even more provocatively when Ravana enters the scene. In this account, when Rama, Laxman and Sita are camped at Valmiki's hermitage, Sita takes long walks and meets up with Ravana a couple of times before she's taken to Lanka. Her reason? She's bored by the intellectual Rama and all the philosophizing at the hermitage. "He loves me", she tells Laxmana matter-of-factly about Ravana, and wistfully wonders if anyone would notice if she never returned from her walks. We understand, as Laxman does, her alienation and the hint of attraction she feels towards Ravana, if only because he is everything Rama isn't.

Laxman is a born fighter - the brawn to Rama's brain, he's always baying for a battle, and is himself not too happy with the daily doze of discourse at Valmiki's hermitage. So, seeking a skirmish in the woods, he chances upon Ravana and picks a fight with him. Ravana retaliates by attacking the hermitage. The odds are naturally in Ravana's favor; he has soldiers and all Rama and Laxman have are hermits. Seeing this, Sita, ever the smartest of the trio, walks up to Ravana and agrees to accompany him to Lanka if Rama and Laxman are spared. As she later explains her decision to Laxman,

"I made up my mind when your bowstring snapped...You looked around and I saw your face and I said to myself, 'Laxman's getting ready to die'...It wasn't very difficult to make up my mind, but I had no time to explain - especially to Rama. He was never an easy man to explain things to."

Valmiki's Sita isn't a sacrificial sati; she's much more - a woman who knows exactly what the need of the hour is. She does save Rama from imminent death and defeat at Ravana's hand, but she is human and all the more admirable, accessible and venerable for it. It is fitting then, that in this account, she is seduced by Ravana. There's remarkable candor and clarity of mind in her confessional dialogue with Laxman:

Sita: "I'd have been a heroine. I meant to be. I meant to kill myself rather than keep my promise [to Ravana]. I think I would've killed myself if he'd come at me as I expected, all drunk and brutal. But I hadn't allowed for one thing."
Laxman: "He played a trick on you, eh?"
Sita: "Yes, Laxman, the oldest trick of them all. He just said that he loved me above everything else in the world and that he would never force me to do anything I did not want. I was pleased at first. Then I was sorry for him. Then he kissed me. Then I wasn't a heroine any more."

The friendship between Laxman and Sita is a tender and true one. As seen above, some of the most personal and disarmingly human lines in the book are the ones uttered by Sita when she confides in Laxman. It's Laxman who makes Rama realize that Rama has wronged Sita and not the other way round.

If Sita is Valmiki's heroine, Rama is very much his hero. On the eve of his exile, Rama is a naïve, cerebral prince. The general opinion of him is that he is "generous, warmhearted, loyal, well-meaning, intellectually brilliant, idealistic, and a damn fool". Valmiki's skeptical realism turns out to be the perfect philosophical antidote to Rama's jejune idealism. In true storytelling spirit, the narrative is interspersed with pithy parables that Valmiki narrates to Rama. My favorite is the one with a locust who insists on reading all the important scriptures; his guru agrees to educate him provided he gives up eating leaves. After a while, the locust is naturally unable to keep his end of the bargain. (The locust is a clever choice because reading voraciously is to gorge on the leaves of a book.) The parable directly attacks Rama's quest for the meaning of life in books, reminding him (and us in these Twittering times) that information isn't knowledge, and knowledge isn't wisdom. Here's Rama acknowledging his debt to Valmiki upon returning to Ayodhya from his exile:

"Looking at the city of my birth again brings back to me something of my youth - the time that is, before I had the melancholy advantage of your wisdom."

And here's this "melancholy advantage" at work:

"[Rama] next thought that he might make a great study of the laws of his country and produce a code which would endure for a thousand years, the Code of Rama the Wise: but he remembered the locust and tempered his ambitions."

This is a matured man indeed. The trial-by-fire he holds for Sita is just a theatrical act of political appeasement, a charade where the fire is a fake "Egyptian fire" that looks like fire but doesn't burn at all; all it manages to do is to put out the wildfires of gossip. And this is the only possible trial that would be fair to Sita, vindicating her innocence; anything else would be a de facto guilty plea.

The most important lesson Rama learns from his hardships in exile and under Valmiki's tutelage is the sobering lesson - it could be said - of all good literature: we are fallible and imperfect. Seen as such, the Ramayana (literally, "the travels of Rama") is a wonderful coming-of-age journey, a Making of the Mahatma of sorts. (At some level, it is also a deeply satisfying classical comedy). This ripening of Rama also redeems the Ramayana from Valmiki’s bleak cynicism; the book rises above wisecracking political satire to become an epic story of human triumph. Valmiki’s literary genius is that he is able to give his narrative an ending that is not only happy but also profound because it turns his skepticism inward. After all, Rama’s return to Ayodhya as its king is a man’s return to the messy business of civilization (at its helm, at that) – a graduation, a leap of faith - and by granting Rama the possibility of redemption within the framework of civilization, Valmiki is, like all seasoned skeptics, acknowledging the limitations of his own outlook.

One wonders if such a Ramayana could be published in today's zeitgeist. Exploiting our desperate yearning for a Ram-rajya, militia crop up in Rama's name and large cut-outs in political processions portray him as a fiery, blue superhero with a bow and arrow. But that wasn't Valmiki's hero. Valmiki's hero was a man who was great because he learnt that he was imperfect and chose to step back into life with this wisdom - a humble skepticism diametrically opposed to the proud certitude of his self-proclaimed champions. Sita's tryst with Ravana may offend the machismo of those who created the warrior-god in their image, but Rama was far more sentient than they are. He knew better than to mistake Sita's independence for her dissolution, and would never place the burden of her character on her chastity. How could he be threatened by Sita's individuality when that was what saved him? A man who first nearly lost his life, then nearly lost the love of his life, and in the end emerged humbled by the experience, is certainly worthy of worship - as is the woman who saved him. The real richness of Indian culture lies in the multi-layered texture of stories like theirs. Let's preserve it, shall we?

Shock and Aww

(First published at Desicritics)

zaraa mulk ke raahbaroN ko bulaao

yeh kuucheh, yeh galiyaaN, yeh manzar dikhaao

jinheN naaz hai Hind par un ko laao

jinheN naaz hai Hind par woh kahaaN haiN?

Summon the nation's leaders,

Show 'em these lanes and quarters,

Summon the nation's proud flag-bearers,

Where are the nation's proud flag-bearers?

- Sahir Ludhianvi.

Years ago, on an Indian talk show, a lady in the audience fumed about Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen, "Do you have to parade a woman naked in front of the camera just to be realistic?" On the discussion panel was Gulzar, whose apt - if equivocal - reply was, "It depends on your aesthetic sensibilities." And suddenly, I became aware of a fundamental disconnect: being male, I hadn't seen how gratuitous and humiliating the scene might have seemed to a woman.

In Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the thematic equivalent of parading a woman naked before the camera is the sequence where little Jamal, plastered from head to toe in shit, jostles through a crowd, all for an autograph of Amitabh Bachchan. Perhaps there is an aesthetic sensibility here; it just doesn't overlap with mine. To me, some subjects - sexual and economic exploitation certainly rank high among them - just don't lend themselves to flippancy. (That's one reason why I hated Anthony Burgess's gratuitous Clockwork Orange and, despite being a Kubrick fan, haven't cared to watch the film.) It would be one thing if an astute director (of any nationality, for the record) were to make a film that questioned the dominant India shining/poised narrative or exposed the systemic morass of corruption and exploitation in Indian society; Slumdog Millionaire is not that film, and Danny Boyle is not that director. (In recent times, Dibakar Banerjee's Khosla ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky, and Shaad Ali's Bunty Aur Babli are much more up to that task). To me, the shit and autograph scene is an in-your-face, shock-the-hell-out-of-them intro to Jamal's tenacity and the rich - poor divide. And speaking of Gulzar, let me point to how it's done: the scene in Hu Tu Tu where Suneil Shetty and Tabu land their private jet on a road, upending a hapless bicycle-rider.

To be sure, Boyle is clever enough not to attempt anything approaching social commentary - at least not on the face of it. Thus, ostensibly, the film is a filmier-than-thou imitation of those Hindi films of yore (as evinced by shots of Coolie and Zanjeer). But, mirroring the malaise that affects Hindi film makers who ape Hollywood, the imitation is all in form and schema, not in spirit. Jamal Malik is not the angry anti-establishment hero that Bacchan (or Kamal Hassan in Mani Ratnam's Nayakan) was; he is far too bourgeois for that - what subversive hero would exact his revenge on the system by getting rich on Kaun Banegaa Crorepati? Even Salim, his brother on the dark side, ends up mouthing such platitudes as, "India is at the center of the world", reinforcing the cherished delusions of grandeur instead of challenging them. Surely the romanticized urban common man fared far better in the folklores of Manmohan Desai (Mard, Coolie, Amar Akbar Anthony, Shahenshah), Prakash Mehra (Zanjeer) and Yash Chopra (Trishul, Deewaar); or in the socio-political commentaries of Guru Dutt (from whose Pyaasa comes the above verse of a de-Persianized version of Sahir's scathing poem), early Raj Kapoor (Sri 420), Bimal Roy (Do Beegha Zameen) and Aziz Mirza (Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Yes Boss).

As a fairy tale, too, the film isn't engaging enough. In narrating a story that is, to quote the inspector (Irrfan Khan), "bizzarely plausible", Boyle resorts to such gimmicks as jump-cutting to flashbacks in case you didn't connect the all too obvious dots. Even the badness of the baddies is exaggerated; Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar) growls, scowls and throws things around, looking more like a brat than a brute. And Jamal must face obstacles at every step; getting sheathed in shit isn't enough – his mother must be hacked to death in a communal carnage, his girl must be pimped out, and the quiz show host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) must thwart his attempts at making the millions. My wife put it best when she quipped, "It's like (Sanjay Leela Bhansali's) Black", where every conceivable ailment and impediment, and a stylized storytelling stifle any possibility of a human connection between the viewer and the characters.

You don't really know what to make of Jamal, for instance. Setting aside the leap of imagination it requires to see any Ayush Khedekar growing up to be a Dev Patel, it isn't clear who Jamal is. Even if you accept the story as allegorical, Boyle is too self-conscious (or perhaps too conscious of the poverty that just won't recede to become a mere backdrop) to paint a large, magic-real canvas in the unapologetic way that, say, Forrest Gump or the more recent Benjamin Button do. Unlike his counterparts from the American South, Jamal never quite becomes the everyman's voice of his period in Indian history; we never hear him telling us other people's interesting stories from his vantage point as an 'outsider' (h/t Amrita's post on Button).

All this makes Slumdog a half-hearted, comme ci, comme ca endeavor that wants to both be a fairy-tale and capture urban poverty but falters on both counts. I, for one, can’t see how you can hide abject poverty behind a “feel good” façade any more than you can hide rape. Can you imagine a sexually abused Cinderella finding her Prince Charming? Wouldn't it end up being a glossier version of a B-grade flick? (Indeed, Seema Biswas once joked about how many such roles she was approached for, post Bandit Queen). As the talk show lady’s gripe with Bandit Queen shows, a sentient film maker would create a film Phoolan Devi could watch and experience something of a catharsis, without feeling like a prop. Sometimes, the artist had better not be a predator. Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay was a stark but empathetic and grounded ode to Bombay’s slum dwellers (and the characters were complex, recognizable human beings. How childlike Chillum was; how Oedipal Chai-pau's rescue of Rekha!).

Reading reviews of Slumdog, you’d think the movie had some unique, far-reaching significance. Here’s a mis-reading by Anand Giridharadas from the NY Times: “It channels to them [Americans] their own Gatsbyesque fantasy of self-invention, and yet places it far enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy”. Gatsby, the writer forgets, ended up being shot dead in a pool, not kissing his childhood sweetheart in a triumphant “aww” moment. To that extent, Bacchan in Deewar and the protagonists in Satya and Johnny Gaddar were much more Gatsbyesque.

Slumdog, then, is at best an attempt to cook a saccharine dish in a bitter sauce. Unfortunately, when it comes to the hardships of the disadvantaged, I have no palate for bittersweet. If you have a sweet tooth, Karan Johar's your chef (in whose films, hardship is conspicuous by absence). Me? I'm sticking to Sahir's talKhiyaaN - that's Urdu for bitterness.

On Sameh Zoabi's Be Quiet

The best movies are the simplest. And what could be simpler than a nineteen minute film about a little boy and his father in a car, on their way from his uncle's funeral to their field. Except that the father and the child are Palestinians with Israeli license plates, the funeral was in the West Bank, and they have to cross the infamous checkpoints, the field in question being in Nazareth.

Sameh Zoabi's pithily titled Be Quiet is about submittal to authority as a way of survival. For that is the way in these parts; the journey of the father-and-son duo may be simple, but it is far from ordinary. Indeed, life and its little chores can seldom be ordinary under a watchful eye. How can a child endure the humiliation of seeing his father held down by guards at the checkpoints? It can only wound his pride, rubbing in the salt of his father's impotence. Nothing untoward happens in the film, but one can constantly sense how lives teeter on the brink of death (a point cleverly made by a truck almost running over the little boy) in these parts.

Be Quiet is a truly subversive film, challenging the paternalistic authority that power seeks to acquire, whilst recognizing the varieties of paternalism worth having. It reminds us why art is so much about refusing to grow up and resisting cynicism of the sort that perpetuates the violence in these and other parts of the world.

The Benefits of Doubt

One of the many remarkable things about John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is its ability to capture on film that unmistakable pall of melancholy that hangs over Catholic churches and schools. Adding to this somberness are the denizens of the Bronx circa 1964, sporting dull shades of black, gray, brown and white. In fact the first streak of colored garment you notice is the gold rim on Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)'s cassock. This befitting introduction instantly marks him out as being of a somewhat different feather than his flock, igniting in us the mistrust that he will go on to ignite in his antagonist, Sister Beauvier (Meryl Streep). She too is similarly introduced: Towering over her lot, atop a flight of stairs, Sister Beauvier reprimands William London, the most evidently pubescent of the boys, for addressing a timid Sister James (Amy Adams) by gently patting her on the arm. "She's thirsty for blood", Father Flynn quips to Sister James. This little exchange at once maps out the strict boundaries defining Catholic institutions of the day, points to the politics among the characters, and hints at Sister B's hyper-sensitivity to sex - all important motifs in the film.

Between the two nuns and the priest, the skillfully etched out characters span the continuum from free-spiritedness to orthodoxy. Father Flynn is all jokes and bonhomie, a perfect counterfoil not just to Sister Beauvier but also to the weighty seriousness of his institution. A couple of odd incidents cause Sister James to suspect that Father Flynn's fondness for Donald Miller, the only black boy in the school, may be more than avuncular. Her expression of this doubt to Sister Beauvier is enough to convince the latter of the priest's sin. As if to tease us into judgment, there are suggestions that somewhat strengthen Beauvier's point of view, but upon closer examination they merely expose us to our own biases – especially in light of the brilliantly written exchange between Sister Beauvier and Donald’s mother (Viola Davis in a heart-wrenching cameo).
While Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep could never be anything but super, to my mind the performance to watch out for is that of Amy Adams. It’s as though her tentative, virginal and torn Sister James were living the did-he-or-didn't-he dilemma, precariously straddling the opposing certitudes of Flynn and Beauvier.

Writers, like their readers, are often tempted to tie up all their loose ends but John Patrick Shanley does well to respect and engage his viewer's intelligence by not spelling out a verdict.
His use of everyday incidents - someone barging into a room in the midst of a delicate conversation, or a jarring telephone ring - is very effective in heightening the tension. Equally effective are those picturesquely shot, notorious New York seasons. There is one thunderstorm too many, though, unnecessarily emphasizing the tempest within the church. The thunder soundtrack in the background during the showdown between Flynn and Beauvier seems particularly out of place in a film that only alludes and never tells, its very title alluding to the blurry lines between doubt and faith. Mercifully, Shanley doesn’t give us any confrontational high-drama during Flynn’s goodbyes, leaving it to our imaginations.

Sister B's final confessional breakdown, too, merely hints at the real doubts she harbors (via a subtle close-up of her fingers clutching her cross), turning her steely certitude inside out to reveal a vulnerable, tormented soul. And that’s the irony of it all: Father Flynn, the open-minded priest who nearly embraces doubt in a sermon, surely harbors no doubts about his actions; while the seemingly conservative Beauvier, it turns out, has been plagued by that greatest of all doubts. In strange soils, indeed, these seeds of doubt do grow.

(First published at Desicritics)

Mumbai Attacks: Terror as a Religion

This placard from the Mumbai peace march struck a chord with me. It's probably meant to be an insinuation about Islam but inadvertently ends up asking an important question about the role that religion plays in politics.

I first felt uneasy about the religion and politics connection when my ninth grade English teacher asked the class if Gandhi thought religion to be separate from politics. I zealously replied, "Yes". "Wrong", she shot back, and went on to quote Gandhi: "Those who think religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means". As the year drew to a close, the Babri masjid was demolished. For many of us midnight's grandchildren that time will forever be a point of reference, an origin from which we map out our political selves. Like Americans who map themselves to the Kennedy assassination, Mumbaikars of my generation recount their personal histories of the '93-'94 days. We all knew someone who was killed, injured, or had barely escaped death. Those who lived through the Partition doubtless feel the same way about '47.

But the mix of religion and politics is as old as history itself. Today's religions are, after all, yesterday's politics.
Terrorism has a myriad of causes, perhaps none of them generally more powerful than another. First, there is the undeniable socio-economic angle; pernicious ideology is likely to find fewer takers in societies with greater general well-being. If the account given by the captured Mumbai attacker is to be believed, he was stuck at a dead-end job that paid him 200 rupees a day and desperately wanted to rob a bank.

Then there is that nagging sense of the victim hood and oppression of one's people - whether real or imagined - and the urge to lash out against it. I'm thinking not just of the 9/11 perpetrators and extremist groups in the Middle East (where Western powers have cynically exploited extremism to their advantage, exacerbating the violence) but also of extremist Hindus. Many Mumbaikars who support the two Senas feel hapless and victimized by some imaginary other; a typical complaint is that "they" take up all the state government jobs.

Having said that, I think it's important not to discount the role religion plays in terrorism. The captured Mumbai attacker's frustrations found a perfect expression in LeT, where he was reportedly shown videos of "atrocities on Muslims in India". This, in his case,was enough to turn a prospective bank-robbing dog-day-afternoon kid into a terrorist.

I'm not suggesting that religion is solely responsible for violence, nor am I saying that it's more bad than good. There's some evidence, for instance, that religious people are more likely to be altruistic. And in some ways, we're all religious. All of us have pet peeves, blind spots and noble passions. Who in their right mind can be against poetry, art, ethical behavior and a sense of awe about the universe and our place in it? But religion isn't all bhajans, qawwalis and Christmas carols. It does provide legitimacy and righteousness to actions and ideas that the moral instinct might otherwise find indefensible - if only in its skewed interpretations. As Steve Weinberg has said, "For a good person to do a bad thing, it takes religion". What would the rath yatra be without the powerful symbolism of those larger-than-life, Adonis-like Rama cutouts? Gandhi understood this symbolism very well; he tried to use this inseparability of religion from politics constructively - Vaishnav jana to is an eloquent ode to empathy. But just as religion may turn out to be inseparable from politics, within religion it may be impossible to pick the good and leave out the bad. Even Gandhi, after all, wasn't above tainting his politics with bad religion. At a conference presided over by Jinnah, Gandhi introduced him as "a learned Muslim gentleman .... an eminent lawyer and not only a member of the Legislature but also president of the biggest Islamic association in India". If a religious Gandhi was capable of being divisive, so was a secular Jinnah. That's another thing about religion - it can creep up in unexpected places. It's a common discriminatory marker of people, and leaders time and again exploit that.

I don't know if there is a solution to this; I hope there is but I don't know. I don't have any answers. I'm just another angry Mumbaikar trying to make sense of terror. Perhaps we'll always have people who turn an ideology into a religion and fight over it. Carl Sagan saw this (rightly, I think) as an innate conflict between the destructive and creative impulses within homo heirarchicus. I just can't help thinking that if we as a species want to survive we'd better root for the creative side.

Farewell, Faraz

(First at Desicritics)

Ahmed Faraz succumbed to kidney failure on August 25th in Islamabad. My first Urdu book ever was his "Be Aawaaz Galii KuuchoN meN" (In Voiceless Lanes and Quarters). But that's just one of those trivia you think of and smile wistfully when you learn of the passing of a writer you've admired.

Faraz was admired by many. Along with Faiz and Parveen Shakir (whom he graciously referred to as the most read poet after Faiz in Pakistan), he formed the holy trinity of Urdu poetry in Pakistan. Much like a Hindu god, he had many titles bestowed on him - progressive, communist, traitor, rebel, non-conformist and what not. Both India and Pakistan heaped their highest literary awards on him. But labels never do justice to an artist. So we may call him a Pakistani but he has said,
ab kis ke geet sunaate ho, woh mulk ke jo taqsiim huwaa

What nation do you sing of now, the one that broke?

With Akhtar Shirani, he penned the most eloquent paean to the country he left behind, "O des se aane waale bataa" (Tell me, o visitor from my country). Despite the Persian slant in its diction, Faraz's poetry had an earthy, colloquial quality about it. He could be scathing when, for instance, speaking of the hypocrisy of the religious. Here he notes how after the pious return from Mecca, they're back to their deceiving ways.

bazm-e-hareefaaN phir sajtii hai
kizb-o-riyaa kii daf bajtii hai

the wily craftsmen meet again
and drums of falsehood beat again

And here's an unflinching introspection:

merii bastii se pare bhii mere dushman hoNge

par yahaaN kab koii aGhyaar kaa lashkar utraa

aashnaa haath hii aksar merii jaanib lapke

mere siine meN meraa apnaa hi Khanjar utraa

I may have foes outside, indeed
But no army besieged us from without
Familiar hands sought to kill me
My own blade tears my breast, no doubt

Of course these laments against the hypocrisy of the pious and self destructive politics are particularly relevant to Pakistan, but good poetry is never prisoner to its context.
Faraz often displayed a deft satirical genius. In a single sher, perhaps my personal favorite, he could pull the rug from under all civilization:

raftah raftah yeh hii zindaaN meN badal jaate haiN
phir kisii shah'r kii buniyaad na Daalii jaaye
eventually, they become prisons
lets never build cities again

His 'Kaneez' is the only Urdu poem I know which speaks of the sexual abuse of servant-women by the feudal gentry. And, in keeping with the golden rule of speaking for the oppressed, the poem comes from the victim's point of view; the narrator, the kaneez, is pleading to a drunken master at her doorstep to leave.
Faraaz wasn't content with lament and demanded that we act.

shikwah-e-zulmat-e-shab se to kahiiN behtar thaa
apne hisseh kii koii sham'a jalaate jaate

Rather than complain of the night's darkness
Wish you'd've lit your share of lamps

The beloved in his poems was often the country he lost to the Partition - famously in ranjish hii sahiih - but he could be playful and optimistic about this troubled romance of nations.

awwal awwal kii dostii hai abhii
ik Ghazal hai k ho rahii hai abhii

Its a new and budding romance.
A Ghazal being formed, per chance

Note the clever use of "Ghazal" in its traditional sense, as a conversation between lovers.

It's a cliche, but it’s true: the passing of Faraz is the passing of an era. Here's a poet who has seen his country go from Jinnah to Musharraf via Zia, and on every occasion spoken against the injustice and questioned the prevailing absurdity of the day. He will be missed, no doubt, but the huge body of work he leaves behind is fertile ground for more of his ilk.

dil giraftah hii sahiih, bazm sajaa lii jaaye
yaad-e-jaanaaN se koii shaam na Khaalii jaaye

Meet and sing, O poets! sad though the heart may be
No evening should pass without her memory

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.

An Idiot's Guide to His Politics

(First published at Desicritics)

An uncle once teased me that at some point in time, the word 'idiot' used to refer to one who does not vote. I'm going to be thirty and have never voted. I did try once. On a typically sweaty Mumbai morning, I diligently queued up at a municipal school to get my voter's ID. As luck would have it, I was fourth from the counter when they shut shop. Since then, laziness and a strong dislike of queues have prevented me from exercising adult franchise.
The recent US primaries and the nomination of prime ministerial candidates in India have made me feel terribly left out. In true spirit of active citizenry, therefore, I decided to voice my opinions. Idiots are people too, and a minority at that, so I wanted to speak on their behalf.
Since politics is about rationalization of one’s preconceived biases, here are my cop-outs for being an idiot.

Sensitivity:
The simpleton narrator in Pu La Deshpande’s Asa Mee Asaamee confesses to being equally convinced by opposing ideologies. This is often true of me. I find myself agreeing with both the Left and the Right on many fundamental issues.
Take capitalism, for instance. It is both ruthlessly opportunistic and (hence?) extremely effective. People fall on the political spectrum depending on which of these two aspects they emphasize. Arundhati Roy’s rhetoric sometimes moves me as much as that of [fill in your favorite libertarian blogger here]. I don’t disagree with either, the respectable word for which position is ‘centrist’, I guess. But ‘centrist’ suggests an equanimity that I am far from. Instead, this confusion disturbs me no end and makes it nearly impossible for me to take sides. It’s a bit like being the dyslexic agnostic insomniac (with due politically correct respect to all of the above) who stays up all night worrying if there is a dog. Besides, one good book is worth a lot more than all political ideologies combined.

Individualism:
Behaviorists must attribute this one to me being the only child. Having no siblings left me with a lot of time that I spent looking out of the window daydreaming. As a result, I am not too big on the communal thing. I have never understood why I must choose or form a clan to belong to, and then defend its every action to death; it is tiresome and evidently dishonest, and yet most political discourse revolves around justifying one’s own group and condemning the other.
It’s not that I don’t have group loyalty; I fire up my communal passion for the Indian cricket team (and the advantage there is that the more we love our team, the more we criticize it), but no political party has seemed that important to me.

I prefer voters who have immediate, self-centered reasons to choose their candidates - like a friend who voted for his local BJP MLA because the guy kept roads in his neighborhood free of potholes. Now there’s a concrete reason. To me, such voters seem less self-deceptive and far more sensible than ideologues.
I read somewhere that more Americans voted for American Idol than for their President. Is it any surprise they did? I mean, if the satisfaction of one’s opinion being counted for something (and that is what most of us are after in democracies) can be had for a musical contest, why vote for a cacophonous one whose outcome will inevitably leave you feeling more powerless?
The only idealistic voter whose convictions I understood (and frankly envied) was another friend who always voted for the Humanist Party in Mumbai- a front floated by working middle class people without big money or campaign. His sagely response to the mockery of my BJP/Congress loyalist friends was, “I know they’ll never win.” This irony made him a tragic hero in my eyes.

Skepticism:
This is perhaps the biggest reason I have never sworn allegiance to any side and it may have something to do with the fact that the first novel I remember reading is Orwell’s Animal Farm. For one thing, I’m not too fond of words with capitalized beginnings-President, Prime Minister, God, names of countries and states, corporate titles, Party, Communism and Capitalism - they seem to beg uncritical reverence.

Another thing that makes me uneasy is people flaunting their pride in some or another purely accidental fact. Are you proud to be [fill in identity of choice]? Well, that’s a moot question if there ever was one. Pride in oneself is best earned. Of course, one can’t discount her birth in a certain place and station in life. In my case, however, that makes me humble, not proud, for I know that I owe much of what I have to where, when and to whom I was born.
Perhaps a better question is if I like being [identity of choice here]. Mostly, yes. In any case, this whole pride thing is just posturing and chest thumping of the sort that our cousins in the animal kingdom indulge in; it’s a pity they don’t have language to give it a righteous spin.Another capitalized word is ‘I’, and I’m too skeptical to take myself so seriously as to passionately advocate anything. Bert Russell comes to the rescue, “I would never die for any cause. What if I am wrong?” These days, however, bookstores and blogs are packed with everything from passionate pleas for one’s own ideology to brazen browbeating of another, and most of them speak in an in your face, doctrinal tone. Skepticism and the humility it brings are no longer in vogue.

These, then, are an idiot’s justifications of his politics: I don’t vote not because I’m uninterested, but because I can’t bring myself to: it’s just not in my constitution.
The human drama in politics fascinates me as much as the next guy, but to my film and fiction fed mind, real politics seems too much like loud theater to suspend my disbelief. To quote Woody Allen, “Life doesn’t imitate art; it imitates bad television.”

Who knows? Someday, this idiot might just wisen up, get off his high horse and get used to voting for the lesser of two evils. My constitution, after all, is open to change. It isn’t spelt with a capital ‘C’.