Arnab Ray's Blog, page 10

Dunkirk—the Review

[image error]

The Bangla colloquial for a movie is “boi” or book. It is not hard to figure out why, the appreciation of a film, for most, is predicated upon the story. Unless you are the film-school type, you are not really watching for shot composition, camera angle, scene transitions, lighting, and even though you often say “The film should have been better edited” to look wise on social media, without really understanding what film-editing is, what you actually mean is that the story didn’t catch you.

Christopher Nolan’s reputation as a superstar director is built upon his consistent mastery over the narrative. Whether it be putting the elements out-of-sequence (Memento), or nesting elements (Inception), or playing with time (Interstellar), or working on audience assumptions (Prestige), Nolan understands the power of the twist, the pace, the lines, and the character. You remember the beginning (or is it the end) of Memento, you wonder what happens to the totem in Inception, you shake your head at the resolution of the Prestige, and you definitely want to be the Joker.

In Dunkirk he does something strange even by Nolan’s standards. He lets the story go. That is the biggest and only twist of Dunkirk, and you realize that within minutes of the film opening. Unlike the war stories you have grown up to love, be it “Saving Private Ryan” or “Apocalypse Now” or “Platoon”, Dunkirk has very little story and a whole lot of war. You are dropped into the war zone, like a first-person-shooter, and then it is nothing but pure cinema, sights, sounds, and music, with very little in the way of narrative support. No characters to root for, no back-stories, just the screech of torpedoes, the roaring of Spitfires, the boom of ordinance, and huddled masses, waiting for deliverance or destruction. There is conflict though, a lot of it, but it is not the standard dramatic conflict, because no story remember, but between war, of steel and mortar and fire, and humanity, not bravery so much, but of humanity, in ways that are subtle and yet immensely poignant. There are characters, and people, of course, but nameless, without a past or a future, props for the story without a story, floating, flying and fighting in a cocoon of cold Kubrikian terror.

Which is why this is a film which will have widely varying reactions. For those whose enjoyment of a film depends on them anchoring to a story and a character arc, there is nothing to hang on to. No Marlon Brando, no Tom Hanks, no rousing tale of redemption or bravery, no politics, no love. Instead Dunkirk is directorial bravura , almost arrogant in its disdain for conventionalities, which depending on the way you swing, could either be taken to be self-indulgent hubris or supreme confidence in ability.

For me though this works. Spectacularly. Nolan redeems himself after the less than stellar “Interstellar”,  establishing himself as one of the most visionary directors alive.

Dunkirk was a miracle. So is this movie.

 

 

 

Mob Violence–India at 70

[image error]

[Want to do a series of posts on India@70. This is the first]

The problem in our country is mob violence.

It has been a problem since we became a country.

While the individual is powerless in front of the law, unless you have privilege like Mallya or Meira Kumar, the group isn’t. That’s why Indians intrinsically know that they can do pretty much anything as long as they attach themselves to the right group.

Growing up a student in Jadavpur University, I knew this too. Bunk class alone, and you lose attendance. Bunk class en masse, and the professor walks back. Not prepared for an exam, and you are in deep shit. No one prepared for an exam, why you can call a strike.

The victim in this country is always the individual who cannot form a group fast enough.  If you are a pickpocket working alone and you get caught, be prepared to have the daylights thrashed out of you by the crowd. However if you are a pickpocket working in a group, and a man catches you just when you are reaching into a pocket, your fellow pickpockets will accuse the victim of being a pickpocket and thrash him up.

Driving a car through a crowded road. A man on a bike, without a helmet, comes crazily from the side and hits you. He assembles a mob and you are forced to pay him money. Or your car gets vandalized.

Get into a scuffle over seats, and before you know it, you have been knifed.

Protest against public molestation, and the group throws you from the running train.

Unfortunately rather than calling out this problem universally, our liberal media and their consumers like to close their eyes to mob justice when it happens counter to their narrative. So if a Muslim man is lynched by a crowd which is Hindu, it is a national emergency. If a Muslim man is lynched by a crowd which is Muslim, next please.

If it is Gujarat, then 2002 is always current affairs. If it is Kashmir,  Pandit genocide is “bringing up that same old issue”.  

A recent incident. A number of people were lynched on suspicion of being child abductors. Media figures quickly expressed outrage because based on the information available then, the victims were all Muslim. When it became known that some of the dead were Hindu too, the act became yet another statistic, consigned to the dark hole of media silence.

Which reminded me of something that had happened many years ago. In the 80s, a number of Ananda Margis, members of a Hindu religious monastic order, were lynched to death in Kolkata on the exact same suspicion of child abduction. However not one Calcutta paper put a communal tone to that crime. Not one Bengali intellectual gave back an award, not one. No one was ever convicted or tried for that, even though it occurred in broad daylight on Bijon Setu.

No problem can be solved unless we recognize it for what it is. Unfortunately that never happens.

Mob violence is always couched as a party or a person problem (“Oh those Hindu patriarchal cow-loving fascists” or “Didi wants to turn Bengal into Bangladesh”) rather than as a systemic malaise that cuts across party and state lines, the manifestations met through alternate bursts of  selective outrage and strategic silence.

Which is why it festers. Through regimes and over time.

And the common Indian remains, by default, in a minority of one.

 

When Did We Lose The Game?

[image error]

When did we lose the game to Pakistan?

No not when Ravindra Jadeja ran Hardik Pandya out. Not when Kohli got a leading edge to gully. Not when Dhoni tamely hoiked the ball down square leg’s throat. Not when Bumrah, who has made it a habit to dismiss people off no-balls, got Fakhar Zaman out for three.

We lost to Pakistan when we decided to mimic our neighbors in smashing TV sets.  We lost to Pakistan when we forwarded the message on Whatsapp that the match was fixed, or some other outrageous conspiracy yarn, or blamed IPL for making the players not care, or when we, not this has happened yet but has occurred before, decided to burn effigies of players or garland them with shoes or, worst of all, tried to vandalize their property.

We lose when we let the world know that we care enough to bother to break even an old TV set. Care enough to turn on the TV set in order to see someone else breaking a TV set. Care enough to elevate a single defeat to the level of a national loss of face.

Confident nations don’t do this. Because they know, or should, that their pride as a people is not defined or determined by the outcome of a game.

Of course, just like in Pakistan, they are not actually working TV sets, but dusty old cathode-ray tube dinosaurs that lost their last flicker some time in the last decade, whose last few moments on this earth before entering analog oblivion was exhausted in giving its owners a few seconds of time on a TV channel. But be as it may, the headlines of “Nation angry at humiliating defeat” to recorded clips of people hurling TV sets is the real humiliation, that channels know that people will watch this and boost their TRPs.

That does not mean that we fans cannot have a civil cricketing discussion on why India lost. Sure we can. As long as the discussion does not have these people only play for money” or “This is the result of a secret pact between Modi and Sharif” or “My friend’s brother-in-law has a friend who knows this bookie who told him yesterday, and I have proof, that…”

India lost, in my opinion, because they went face to face against a team that played a very high-risk high-reward game and, on this day, the high risk paid off. On other days, it wouldn’t have. The first time India and Pakistan played in the tournament, Pakistan went for a conservative, avoid-mistakes gameplan. Against a superior team, which let me dispassionately say India still is, this is usually not the best of tactics for the underdogs. The better team will usually make less mistakes than you. That is exactly what happened in the first game.

After that thumping defeat, Pakistan reversed the tactic. Let’s look at the final. Fakhar Zaman took insane risks while batting. Mohammed Amir bowled an attacking full length with an attacking field at the risk of the Indian openers getting off to a flier on a flat-bed pitch. The spinner came back for another over even after being pasted by Hardik Pandya.

In a post match press conference, here is what Kohli said.

When a guy like Azhar Ali, who is a conventional batsman, plays his shots, you can still have a plan,” said Kohli to reporters after the match. “But for a guy like Zaman, it becomes really difficult to stop players like him, because I think 80 per cent of his shots were high-risk and they were all coming off.

“So you can only do so much, as I said, as a bowler and as a captain when that is happening. Sometimes, you have to sit and say, the guy is good enough on the day to tackle anything,” Kohli continued.

“As I said, you can do little to control when people are going well like that, and we certainly tried to make them hit in areas that we felt it would be uncomfortable, but we just didn’t have anything going our way in that partnership (Zaman-Azhar). We tried our best to hit good areas but they just batted really well today,” he further said.

Again, to remember, it did not “all” come off. Zaman was out off a no-ball. He did not look back. Kolhi got a reprieve. He got out the next ball.

India  played its conventional, “avoid mistakes” game, as it has done throughout the tournament, buying bonds and investing in index funds and pouring over annual earnings statements, but if the opponent is putting it all on the blackjack table and winning pretty much every hand, there is no way you can match his RoI.

Pakistan today played the game they are born to play, high-risk and instinctive and aggressive, backing the raw talent of their players, and by the time India adapted to the craziness of the day with an all-out “every ball goes out of the ground” assault from Hardik Pandya, it was already too late.

In conclusion, there should no be denying that as a cricketing nation, in the limited overs games, we have gotten better. Our current crop of Indian players are fitter, win games more consistently than the generations we grew up idolizing, and while they are not and may never be Australia under Waugh and Ponting, and Windies under Clive Llyod and Richards, this have established themselves, over the past few years and over all kinds of surfaces, as one of the world’s top-ranked cricketing nations.

Now waiting for some of the fans to catch up to that standard.

 

 

 

Sachin Tendulkar A Billion Dreams—the Review

[image error]

Sachin Tendulkar, it is conjectured frequently, is God. Like God, he is seldom heard, on issues of importance, or seen, at least in Rajya Sabha, and like God, when we really really  need him, he is busy answering someone else’s prayers, or at least so say those who claim that he could never perform in the really critical games of his career. It is thus to no one’s surprise that the documentary based on his life, Sachin a Billion Dreams, goes beyond being an uncritical eulogy, beyond being a hagiography, to become a religious film, a “Jai Santoshi Ma” of the times, with acted out sections featuring a cherubic boy doing naughty things, lot of Anjali, and even a Putna, played by The Chappell who feeds the Indian team poisoned milk from his sinister teats by demoting Sachin from his opening spot.  At the same time, what’s missing is the Ferrari, the ball tampering, the Monkey Gate, and the many valid arguments for his retiring a few years before he did.  Match-fixing is touched upon, but it comes and goes before you can say Aillaaa.

But that is only to be expected. Biographies in India are always backed by the person whose biography it is, which means they are never ever going to ask the tough questions, but at least this, being a documentary, spares us scenes like  that one in Azhar where his wife is getting turned on by watching Sangeeta Bijlani while Azhar, the absolutely innocent lamb that he is, sits hiding his face,  scandalized by the wanton dance moves. But even as far as non-controversial information goes, there is nothing here that you haven’t seen or heard before, especially if, like me, you have labored through Boria Majumdar’s Bore-kiya biography of Sachin, whose official title I think was “Cricinfo scoreboards transcribed in sentences”.

And yet, and yet, when the documentary finished, I found myself moist-eyed. It’s because Sachin Tendulkar, a Billion Dreams, is like an old song playing on the radio. It untangles the strands from the spaghetti ball of a forty-plus-man’s memories, and as the events tick by, like an action flicker, the debut, the Qadir, the England tour, the Pakistan game, the semi-final at Eden, Warne in the rough, Desert Storm, the dismemberment of Wasim and Akthar in that World Cup game, I am on an emotional roller-coaster and they all come back, the memories, of a younger and lighter me banging T-squares on the canteen table, or standing tiptoe in front of an electronic shop trying to catch a glimpse from the back, grainy TV sets, sweaty heat from bodies packed in tighter than is appropriate, shouting, swearing, putting hand on face, and agreeing with a man I have never met before that Nayan Mongia is a certified leora-choda.

Believing.

Believing that one man can do it no matter what the heart tells me and no matter what the odds are, even when it is Sunil Joshi batting at the other end, a belief shared by a billion people, across every schism, across every division, of this most divided nation of ours.

And though I am cynical now, about most things and definitely about Sachin the person, and I come out of the theater thinking “How much did Sachin pocket from all this?”, for two hours, I was among the rank of the faithful, united in the joyous rising crescendo of “Sachin Sachin”, the Omkara of our times, wanting desperately, to once again, believe.

In the idea that was Sachin Tendulkar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praktan—the Review

[image error]

I had avoided watching Praktan,  Nandita-Shibprasad’s 2016 hit, because I had heard it was  quaint to the point of being regressive, moralizing mashima-bait in the way that Bangla TV serials are, and having wasted a few hours of my life watching the supposedly sensual Khwato that turned out to be as erotic as a speech by Rajnath Singh, I was understandably hesitant to wade into yet another Bumba-da  film about relationships, arguably not my favorite genre, unless Paoli Dam was showing off her back and shoulders or Mimi Chakraborty was doing some nyakamo.

Praktan had neither, except a recommendation from Baba and Ma, and so I finally got around watching it, almost after a year it was released.

For those who haven’t seen Praktan, it has multiple sub-plots, all united by the theme of broken relationships, all developed in the closed physical space of a train compartment.

There is a group of musicians, played by actual musicians,  going through the break up of a band, and just when you think this is developing into something interesting, the director-duo seem to lose interest in that story-strand and use them for an interminably long antakshari sequence, which, unlike the famous one in Aranyer Din Ratri, does nothing to develop the characters. That and a number of songs, which they could have just put in the damned sound track, and been done with it.

There is a newly wed couple, a fat husband and a hot wife, and that subplot is milked for physical comedy of the bhnaramo type. Once again, the directors scratch the surface of  something interesting, of the fat husband’s insecurity in measuring up to his new wife’s ex-lover, but that development too is hastily abandoned, like a single by Inzamam.

There is an aged couple, played by Soumitro and Sabitri, praktan as in “old”. I presume they exist so that Sabitri Chatterjee could do a mildly amusing “Bangali talking Hindi” routine and Soumitro could recite Tagore’s “Hotath Dekha”, the movie’s leomotif, which of course he does spectacularly well, Soumitro being the last Bangali who can pronounce Bangla properly.

Which brings me to the central story, of Prasenjit and Rituparna. Rituparna plays a “modern” career woman, an architect (i.e. she wears glasses and as is revealed later smokes) who finds herself in a compartment with a very “traditional” lady (i.e. overweight, dresses like she is in the 50s, watches Bengali serials, talks loudly, folksy to the point of being a rustic) played by Aparajita Adhya and her daughter. Rituparna realizes, soon enough, that this is the wife of her ex-husband, played by Prasenjit, an intellectual like her, and nothing cries out Bangali intellectual than one who wears Shakti Chattopadhay poem lines on his Tshirt. As the new wife pours out details of her happy married life, with superanimated mashima gestures, it triggers flashbacks in Rituparna, and we get front row seats into the dissolution of her marriage.  Prasenjit gets on the train at Nagpur to surprise his wife on her birthday and is surprised in turn to find his ex-wife there too. What follows is nothing that you would not be able to predict, even the revelation at the end,  unless you are at that time  not already distracted by the regressiveness of the central premise.

Praktan seems to show that the reason Prasenjit’s marriage breaks down is because his wife, Rituparna, is a modern woman, a “bitch” who demands continuous attention, who works late into the night not caring for her husband’s suspicions, who is not even discreet about the fact that she makes more than her husband, who wants her husband to break away from the joint family. And that the new traditional wife succeeds because she gives Prasenjit his independence, demands very little of his attention, and because she does not, she actually gets more attention and love than Rituparna did.

Most people who hated Praktan think this.

But that was not what I saw.

Through the flashbacks, we get to see that it is not Rituparna but Prasenjit who is the dick. He is small-minded, petty, self-pitying, immature, and suspicious. His male ego hurts at the income difference between him and his wife, and yet he lacks the drive to change his financial situation. He rebuffs Rituparna’s suggestion to start a tourism business, content to do poorly paid “Calcutta walks” because it allows him to show-off his knowledge and play the “intellectual”. He forgets her birthday. He does not show up when Rituparna expects him to.

And yet as Rituparna listens to his new wife tell her about her husband, she realizes her ex has changed in the way she had hoped he would. He has his own business, he is there for his wife without being told to, and here is where my take on Praktan differs from the general.

It is not because of his new wife that Prasenjit has changed, but because of the old.

That is the crux of what makes a broken relationship special. It teaches us what not to be, and what not to expect, and we, at least some of us, become better persons for it. So Prasenjit becoming a more sensitive husband and a more mature human being has very little to do with “modernity” in the old wife or the lack of it in his new, and everything to do with his own journey of self-realization

Which brings me to the Tagore poem which is the movie’s motif.

Hotath Dekha.

In it, exactly like in Praktan, the poet meets an “ex” in a train compartment, and they have a small conversation. I apologize for the English translation, for it is impossible for me to capture the beauty of the original lines, but here is the critical part.

We sit on the same bench, buried inside the sound of the train,

She says quietly “Please don’t mind, but where is the time to waste time?

I will get down at the next station, you will go  far, and we shall never meet again.

So the question that I have kept for so long, I shall ask you that.

Will you be truthful?”

I say, “I will”

She looks away to the sky outside and asks,

“The days that are gone, are they really gone? Isn’t there even a little bit left?”

I fall silent.

Then I say “  All the stars of the night live in the depths of the day’s light”

This is where I believe, and I realize I may be over-analyzing this, where Praktan is different from movies like Saath Pake Bandha or Jotugriha.

It does not ponder over why relationships dissolve, but what we take forward from them.

It celebrates, in the spirit of Hotath Dekha, the days that are gone and yet they are not, because they live hidden within us, like stars in the light of day.

Poignant. Despite its limitations.

 

 

 

 

 

Sonu Spanking Once Again

[image error]

In 2007, Sonu Nigam, in a massive missive to the Times of India, introduced a new phrase or what linguists call a neologism to India’s cultural lexicon.

Sonu Spanking.

From here.

By presenting my case in front of you. I leave in your worthy hands the task of presenting my case in front of the world who is witnessing Sonu-spanking for last 3 months.

And then, over the years, more important things happened: Arijit Singh sung the same song a hundred times, Neil N Nikki was remade as Befuckre, the dark lord Modi and his army of Hindu savarna gaurakshak patriarchs descended from Mordor, intolerance swept the land, Rohit Sharma and Rahul Gandhi came to represent the latent talent of the country, and Kangana Ranaut took on Karan Johar and Hrithik Roshan.

Then one day, at five in the morning, Sonu Nigam woke up to some loud sound from outside, a loud persistent sound and like most people woken up at five he got mad and tweeted about it.

The sound that he heard was from a jagrata ceremony. Cranky and sleepy, he tweeted about the disturbance caused by loud singing of hymns during Hindu festivals. Then when he finally woke up in the morning, he found that he had been invited to back to back panels on NDTV and, then for good measure, to Troll Hunter and the Bane of NRI Sanghis Sardesai’s baithaak, topic of discussion being the repressiveness of Hindu festivals, environmentally unsustainable and sexist and classist, covering everything from Jallikattu to Diwali and Holi,  and by the morrow being feted by the Under Wires and the Karavans of the world, only to take his place among the pantheon of media heroes like Twinkle and Diya Mirza and Shruti Seth and Kanhaiya Kumar and D J Khaleed, brave cultural voices against the cultural Hindukritz of the current government.

Actually that was not what happened.

It was not music from a jagrata, or the sound of crackers on Diwali that had disturbed the Sonu.

It was Azaan.

What he should have done was sung “Meri Neend Jaane Laagi Hai” from Chal Mere Bhai and gone to sleep.

But he did not. He tweeted.

So when he woke up the next morning, it was to a totally different reality.

First liberal intellectual outlets pointed out that Sonu Nigam, one of India’s biggest names in playback, whose last hit had been in 2003, had done this for publicity.

If you search Sonu Nigam on YouTube, the most-watched video of all time with his name on it is the title track of Kal Ho Na Ho, a movie released in 2003. Sonu Nigam posts a few tweets about being disturbed by the morning prayer call to Muslims from his neighborhood mosque, and Indian liberals decide to resurrect Sonu Nigam in the public sphere. Nigam’s publicist must be laughing his way to the bank.

 Maybe it wasn’t a well thought out conspiracy. Maybe Nigam genuinely felt what he wrote and didn’t expect it to blow up and see Sonu Nigam trending. Even so, Nigam must be very happy with the opportunity to become the Anupam Kher of 2017, a celebrity spokesperson of the Islamophobic agenda.

In one fell sweep, Sonu Nigam had become an Islamophobe and a publicity-seeking has-been, even though when you think of it, the law was on his side, and he was not,let’s say, critiquing someone’s personal religious choice

 

[image error]

Like that.

Then Sanjay Jha, who in this context can be called Jha-2 (remember Sonu Spanking was originally done by another Jha, i.e. Jha-1) and the patron saint of losers and has-beens, put Sonu Nigam in the category of failures, together with a two-time World Cup winner.

[image error]

If that was not bad enough, Sonu Sood, whose only crime was to share a first name with Sonu Nigam, was severely Sonu-spanked on social media, in the way Iraq was invaded for what Afghanistan did.

[image error]

Then an Islamic cleric,  one Syed Sha Atef Ali Al Quaderi, vice president, West Bengal Minority United Council, announced a reward of 10 lacs for someone who could shave Sonu Nigam’s head, a cash for kesh scheme if there was one, and not just that, but also put a garland of shoes around him, and make him tour the country.

This apparently, if we follow the logic put forward by our knowledgeable liberals, was exactly what Sonu Nigam wanted, to  revive his career through the simple expedient of being threatened by Islamic fundamentalists, and that too from Bengal, of which this is now a sunshine industry.

What happened next was stunning.

Sonu Nigam shaved his head, and demanded 10 lacs from the cleric.

Now some say he did it out of fear, because if there is anything that Sonu Nigam likes it is his hair.

[image error] [image error] [image error]

Some others, following the logic put forward by the media, say this is nothing but a scheme to earn 10 lacs, so desperately Sonu Nigam needs every help he can get.

Not that he even got the 10 lacs, because the wise Quaderi pointed out, that he was yet to fulfill the other two conditions for full payment. I hope Sonu Nigam goes on a tour around the country, though it might be difficult to procure a garland of old shoes, given that almost all of them have already been thrown at Kejriwal and can be found in the AAP’s asset vault. And if all this sounds funny and kind of silly, please do remember that a man was stabbed for supporting Sonu Nigam, an incident which if Sonu Nigam had only criticized a different religion, which would have flipped the religion of the stabbed and the stabber, would have led to awaardwaapsi and intolerance and Washington Post op-eds and demands for Narendra Modi to condemn the incident, but now will pass quietly into the white media noise, as it is goes contrary to ze narrative.

If there is anything this incident highlights, it is the ability of organized mobs, be it gaurakshaks or Didi’s fan club, to threaten and often execute violence with impunity, and the selective bias of a blighted media in supporting one side, and not the other, a world where a Gautam Gambhir or a Sonu Nigam or a Anupam Kher are failures whose opinions are desperate attempts to get attention, whereas a Sirish Kunder or a Shruti Seth or a Twinkle Khanna…I think you know where I am going with this.

And the other take-home from this.

The very real existence of the problem of spanking your Sonu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YYY: The Arrival of Yogi Adityanath

[image error]

One of the tropes of limited over cricket commentary is that a good partnership is one where one batsman “milks the bowling” and “rotates the strike” while the other batsman throws “the kitchen sink”(phrases copyrighted Ravi Shastri). Then once the attacking batsman gets out, the one who was playing sheet anchor (this phrase copyrighted Sunil Gavaskar) would start attacking. If however the more moderate batsman gets dismissed, the attacking batsman would then sink in to the low-risk role, letting the new arrival score aggressively. This is done to minimize the risk that both set batsmen get out very close to each other, leaving two totally new batsmen at the crease which, we are told, is not good.

For decades, the BJP has followed this principle of good partnership building.  Vajpayee and Advani started it off. Vajpayee was the moderate presence, with his long pauses and deft flick of the wrist poetry, stroking the ball into the gap and passing the strike to the more aggressive Advani. Now LK Advani, that gentleman was all about clearing his front foot, and unleashing powerful “ek dhakka aur do”s while taking quick raths over a volatile pitch. Then once Vajpayee went back to the pavilion, Advani retreated into a defensive shell, becoming the polite opposition to the Congress, content to attend events in Lutyens Delhi, and express his love for Jinnah, in the way even Beliebers may find to be mildly off-putting. The mantle of the aggressor was then taken over by one Narendra Damodar Modi. So ferocious his strokes and such unerring ability to get the ball to the stands, that the bowlers began to pine for the gentle days of Vajpayee and Advani. With Modi going full-blast though, Advani found himself starved of the strike, and even though he tried to run Modi out a few times, he just could not, till he was made to retire hurt, leaving Modi alone at the crease.

And then Modi slowed down. If anything, since 2014, the BJP government at the center has been, on the core issues of the Hindu right, strategically silent. One wouldn’t know that from the English language media, who kept up their narrative of genocide enabling and intolerance, even though, on the ground, nothing could be further from the truth, demonetization, GST, foreign policy dominating the government agenda over gau-raksha and mandir-nirmaan.

With Modi now firmly in sheet-anchor centrist mode, someone though needed to hit the ropes with regularity, and keep the base cheering in the stands.

Enter Yogi Adityanath. With switch hits, ramp shots, and good old fashioned heaves to mid-wicket, Yogi Adityanath kept the required run rate up in the most important state of Uttar Pradesh, and galvanized the hard-core Right on social media and in living rooms, till finally, come UP election time, he unleashed an Yuvi on Broad, which made it impossible for the BJP central leadership to ignore his claim to become Chief Minister.

In order to deconstruct the phenomenon of Yogi Adityanath, one needs to split the analysis into three parts—1) What he means for Modi 2) What he means for BJP’s near future prospects and 3) What he means for the “idea of India”, that favorite arrow of the liberal quiver.

Let us go step by step.

There is a school of thought, to which his fiercest fans and paradoxically even his most trenchant critics belong to, which believes Modi is an omnipotent genius, and everything that happens fits into his grand scheme of things. Or to quote Akshay Kumar in Ajnabee, “Everything is planned”. So according to them, Yogi Adityanath as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister was Modi’s brilliant/evil plan all along, and with this move of installing him as the CM, Modi has consolidated his hold over India in a way that is absolute, which depending on which side you belong to, either implies the advent of Ramrajya or a vision of fascist Mordor.

Allow me to, dear sirs and madams, to posit an alternative, which I believe more closely reflects reality. As a satrap firing up the base, Yogi Adityanath’s hard Hindutva was undoubtedly useful for Modi, given his own move to the center. But as the Chief Minister of India’s most populous and most politically significant state, right in the heartland of BJP’s core constituency, Yogi Adityanath has the potential to become for Modi what he became for Advani.

Potential mind you. Not that he is there yet, but potential.

The similarities between a younger, brasher Modi to the Yogi of today are striking. Both of them know how to work the crowd, both have the image of being austere workaholics, who do not settle for compromise. Their single “no family” status marks a sharp contrast to the Gandhis and the Yadavs, enabling them to make a strong case that whatever they are doing, they are not looking after their current, previous and next generation. Yogi has cultivated a parallel base in his stronghold, which while broadly aligned with the BJP, still has sufficient independence, and that rebellion of Yogi’s organization,  Hindu Yuva Vahini which he quelled before the elections, no matter how it was spun, was a carefully calibrated show of what could happen if Yogi Adityanath was not made Chief Minister. And while Yogi Adityanath talks about Modi with suitable respect, it is obvious that he is very much carving out an image and creating a direct line to the throne on his own, and if he keeps delivering Uttar Pradesh on a regular basis, and that is a big if, his claims to Delhi will only increase.

This emergence of a largely independent, harder Hindutva alternative to Modi, in the heartland of BJP’s power, is not aligned with the greater scheme of Modi-Shah, whose vision of BJP moving forward is of a center-right party with Modi as the undisputed leader, surrounded by a number of malleable leaders, who draw their power from the leader, and not from the base, and who can easily replaced should they overstep their brief.

Now as to how Yogi Adityanath’s prominence would affects BJP’s prospects in the elections moving forward, I would not be so bold as to definitely conjecture, but here is what I can say. If BJP’s strategy is to not only hold Uttar Pradesh, which it very well might with a Yogi at the helm, but to increase its influence in places they have traditionally never been a player, the North-East and Bengal for instance, their messaging needs to be “centrist Modi” on a “development platform” rather than “hard right Yogi Adityanath” on a “back to Hindu basics” one.

Let me talk about Bengal, a state I have some knowledge of. Over the last few years, because of Mamata Banerjee’s aggressively unapologetic policy of minority appeasement, blatant enough to have actually created a blowback even in this, the most liberal of states, and the absorption of the erstwhile CPM and Congress into the TMC, the BJP has emerged as Bengal’s opposition party. A few decades ago, this would have been considered impossible, principally because the BJP was seen as a party of “Hindustanis” and “Marwari”s, the Bengali word for Hindi-speaking heartlanders, whose core constituents were businessmen, a class of people Bengalis are predisposed to despise, and whose perceived ethos of temples, ghee, Hindi, and suddh vegetarian food was considered to be too “non-Bengali” for Bengali tastes. For the first time though, Modi, and again depending on who you ask this is because of his excellent PR skills or his record of achievements, has forged an identity that has transcended the party he belongs to.

In the middle of this comes Yogi Adityanath, reinforcing every stereotype of BJP, of militant vegetarianism and bovine purity, notions that Bengalis have been uncomfortable with. In a widely circulated Whatsappable, which I sincerely hope is a false flag operation, Rabindranath Tagore is insulted as a namby-pamby anti-national and consumption of fish dubbed anti-Hindu, and if someone seriously thinks that this is going to make Bengal get under the saffron flag, well, would you like to buy Mashrafa Mortaza for your franchise for $600,000? Now according to extreme right elements, “Bongolis” can join Bangladesh for all they care, and that is a fine stance to take on social media and in online comment spaces, or that degenerate Bengalis can be brought around to become true Hindus, and that is also a fine objective to work towards, but given that, for now, the state has a large number of seats in Parliament and Bengal is unlike to join Bangladesh or undergo a sea change, any time soon, no political party with pan-India ambitions can ignore ground realities.

Not that the BJP does not get it. From promising quality beef in Kerala, to its campaigning in the North-East, the BJP central leadership is mature enough to realize that how hard they go with Hindutva needs to be calibrated based on state. However the risk of Yogi Adityanath’s strong messaging, and trust sections of the media to strategically amplify it, is that it may drown out moderate center-right narratives Modi-Shah may want to establish, pushing people into the familiar arms of a Trinamool Congress, the devil they know, who might not deliver on their promises of turning Kolkata into London, but will at least deliver quail biriyani and gandharaj turkey.

Now Yogi Adityanath supporters would say, with some justification, that he has targeted illegal meatshops, not the consumption of meat in general, and eve-teasing, and not consensual public displays of affection, but it is also true, that for his supporters on the ground, such distinctions are lost, and any political leader in India, be it Modi or Kejriwal or Mamata Banerjee or Yogi, will give their base some leeway. Just the way things work.

But does this mean that we are finally on the path to Hindu radicalization of India, that cataclysm promised to us by the Sardesais of the world in Drinkfests all over the day Modi took power, but one that has yet to be realized, except outside the speculative fiction of what passes for mainstream political commentary?

The answer is no. The “idea of India” is not under threat. The difference between Yogi Adityanath, the chief ministerial candidate, and Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister, is almost immediately obvious. In the span of a few weeks, he has chided his supporters for moral policing, and re-iterated his drive against “illegal slaughterhouses”, in the finger-wagging way that leaders in India deal with their core constituents. Such is the electoral exigencies of a diverse population and a first-past-the-post system, that even the most extreme of ideologues have to move to the center in order to rule, and so what ends up happening is that the system moderates the individual, rather than the individual subverting the system, as it happens in many other countries.

Will Yogi Adityanath be a Nehruvian secular? Of course not. He has the mandate not to be. The people elected him on his current platform, on a socially conservative and economically populist (aka loan waivers), in the same way they elected Mamata Banerjee on a diametrically opposite social platform and similarly economically populist platform. And while Mamata Banerjee’s extreme vision of secularism might meet the approval of the “idea of India” crowd, she is no different, and that they invoke different reactions from the mainstream media, is purely because for them democracy is democracy when their guy gets elected, and fascist theocracy when their guy does not, a vindication of the “idea of India” when one side wins, and ‘Hindu patriarchy Nazism’ when the other side does.

Would I have voted Yogi? No definitely not.

I am just not his type. He is not mine.

However, as a liberal in the way I understand the term, I would not endeavor to de-legitimize him or his mandate or the issues that he and his electorate hold dear to their heart, just because their world-view does not align with mine.

For now though I will be watching. Interesting times lie ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Five Stages of Grief Once Again

[image error]

There were times during NDTV’s vote-counting coverage that I wanted to reach inside my TV and give the panelists a hug. While Prannoy Roy sat throughout with the expression of Casey Affleck in the police-station scene of “Manchester By the Sea”,  Srinivasan Jain and others went through a range of emotions from Suniel Shetty’s “Naaaaiinnn” from Dhadkan to Nargis’s tear-drenched lip-trembling when she sings Raja ki Aayegi Baraat in “Aah”. Not that there was something particularly novel about this, we had seen similar during the 2014 general elections, but then watching grown men and women, on the verge of an emotional breakdown on live TV,  is somewhat sad.

Ok all right. Who am I kidding?

It was actually fun.

After India’s surgical strikes against Pakistan, I had introduced the Kübler-Ross model to readers of the blog. To repeat.

The Kübler-Ross model, or the five stages of grief, postulates a series of emotions experienced by survivors of an intimate’s death, where in the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. [Wiki].

The reason why sections of the Indian media, the NDTVs and the Wires, are throwing tantrums that even a three year would consider excessive, is because they have yet to complete all stages of grief from 2014.

Let’s look at this in a bit of detail.

First phase of grief is denial.  This phase starts even before the elections. In 2014, it was “Modi will lose” and “Modi will lose in Varanasi itself”, and in 2016, it was that Kejriwal would win Punjab and Goa, in a canter, and that Akhilesh Yadav and even Mayawati (depending on which expert you were listening to) would make surprisingly solid performances. Demonetization would be an election-breaker for BJP, Rahul Gandhi would finally, after fifteen hundred similar headlines over the past ten years, take charge of Congress’s destiny, and Kejriwal would emerge as the leader of the resistance. This was not just opinion, it was packaged as fact, through pre-poll data analysis, no less. Of course this is what happens when you first fix your conclusion and then massage the facts to establish that, and any of us who have ever tried to “verify” Ohm’s Law by measuring current and resistance in the Physics lab knows what that is,  the data says “1 mA,” and you put “12.5 mA” in your lab note-book so that the plot looks straight.

The next stage, anger, they also live through. When Omar Abdullah, yet another darling of the “NDTVs and the Wires” of the world, says that the opposition should give up on 2019, and concentrate on 2024, he is lashing out in anger, and this impotent rage is reflected in a cross-section of sentiments. that come floating on my social media feed.

Like this, which is to be read in Bob Christo “Tum sala Indian log” accent.

[image error]

In other words, Indian democracy would be functioning properly if there were no Indians in it. Yeah, figure that one out.

Then there is bargaining, like Srinivasan Jain, trying to convince everyone, but mostly himself, that even though the BJP had crosses 300 seats, people in UP really love Akhilesh Yadav.

Like Rajdeep Sardesai, who actually did call UP for BJP before the elections, maybe to reverse-jinx but I am not sure, whose narrative is that Modi’s appeal great as it is, is that of the conman, done achieved through smoke and mirrors and rad communication skills, as opposed to any tangible record of achievement.

Second, it appears that Narendra Modi has successfully bridged the Delhi-Lucknow divide in a state election. His opposition may label him an ‘outsider’ fighting the ‘UP ke ladke’, but the fact is, Modi has struck a chord in the Indo-Gangetic plain. In his adopted village of Jayapur near Varanasi, the road has been washed away, the solar panel batteries have been stolen, the toilets don’t have water supply, and yet, every villager one meets, including in Dalit bastis, says they will vote for ‘Modiji’. In Varanasi’s paan bhandar, traders admit demonetisation has hurt them, but they still chant ‘Har Har Modi’. And on the banks of the Ganga at Assi Ghat, a mahant says the Namami Gange project is eyewash but he will still vote for the PM.

 As to politicians, not named Modi, here is what the narrative is.

Again, the attempt to draw a comparison with Bihar doesn’t quite work. In Bihar, a Nitish Kumar had addressed core issues: Roads, electricity, and crucially, law and order and women’s empowerment. In UP, Akhilesh Yadav¹s ‘kaam bolta hai’ slogan resonates only in pockets: There is a bit of a ‘UP Shining’ trap in the glossy advertisements that showcase the Gomti riverbank in Lucknow but you can’t ignore the darkness in a Gorakhpur village. And while his emergency crime helpline is a laudable initiative, the image of the Samajwadi Party ‘rowdies’ still haunts the party. Akhilesh could still be the future of UP with a strong youth connect, but may not be its present: “We’ve tried Maya and Yadavs, ek baar Modiji ko bhee chance dete hain!’ is an often-heard refrain.

Nitish Kumar. Super-achiever. Akhilesh Yadav, youth icon, haunted by “the image of Samajwadi Party as a part of rowdies”. Note dear readers, it’s the image of them as a party of rowdies that is to blame, not that they actually may still be a party of rowdies.

So summarizing. Modi is evil but gives impression of good.

He wins.

Akhilesh is good but gives impression of evil.

He loses.

Want more bargaining? Here is one more, ladies and gentlemen, from the Bane of NRIs again. [Link]

It is this constant hunger and desire for success that separates Modi from star politicians before him. Indira Gandhi was just as popular and authoritarian but maybe less driven (she actually had interests beyond politics!). The BJP’s original Lucknow poster boy, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was charismatic and arguably a much finer public speaker; but he clearly lacked the ruthlessness that is part of the Modi persona. The Atal-Advani era was a gentler one and the BJP was still an exclusivist party struggling to shed its Brahmin-Bania upper caste image.

The Atal-Advani era, lest you forget, was when a mosque was destroyed in UP with one of Atal-Advani standing there, and riots took place all over the state and the country because of that act, and yet the art of bargaining has reached such a stage, that we are asked to remember them as “gentle”, in comparison to Modi, whose violence has been shown in the last two years only on old denominations of notes. Yeah Jogai-kaku in fish market has no bargaining skills compared to this level of moral maneuvering.

Then depression. I don’t think I need to give any examples on this one. If you saw election results night, you know exactly what I mean.

[image error]

Which brings us to the last stage. Acceptance. And here lies the problem with India’s so-called “liberal” (liberal in “” because they are anything but what the word means in the English dictionary) media.

They skip going through this phase every time Modi wins.

In 2014, Modi’s victory was sought to be de-legitimized by calling into question the very nature of the Indian democratic “first-past-the-post” system, which these same people had been perfectly fine all these years. And now, Modi’s victory is being de-legitimized by providing a platform for and amplifying the fantastic theory of tampering of EVM machines, the same EVM machines that led to embarrassing losses for BJP in politically important states like Delhi and Bihar not so long ago.

Reminds one of Rakhi Sawant, minus none of what makes her endearing.

[image error]

And because they skip going through acceptance, their wounds never heal, and they suffer multiple rounds of false-predictions, false-hopes, meltdowns, and blame-everyones.

Trying to trivialize the enemy, or to blame the system of democracy or the people who inhabit it, is just not a winning strategy. If the “liberal” media wants to defeat their enemy, namely Modi and Amit Shah, the first thing they need to do is to understand how they do it, how they have cobbled together a caste-alliance in UP, beyond repeating the “communalization of Jat votes” micro-narrative, and how the hell, did they make such a strong play in a place like Manipur, so far away from their traditional world of Hindi-heartland Hindu nationalism. To understand, they need to collect data with an open mind, as opposed to what they do now, which is to look at data that supports their world-view, and pretend that the other facts will go away if they don’t report it or deny that it exists.

They can, of course, keep trying to create media martyr heroes, from Kejriwal to Nitish Kumar to Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid, hoping that one of them will stick, and provide them platforms on their channels, their conclaves and thinkfests, and run campaigns like “intolerance” and “awaardwapsi”. The danger starts when they start to believe in their own messaging, or to quote Scarface “get high on your own supply”, because then they react to election results as a fan does when their team loses, as opposed to supposedly neutral arbiters and interpreters of facts.

Till the time they come to accept this, large sections of the media will continue to appear as they do now—angry, petulant, and partisan.

And what they should realize is that this only makes their dreaded and hated Modi look even stronger.

 

 

 

 

Unbelievably Believer

[image error]

Reza Aslan, sir, you do not know me, nor should you ever, but I have been following your work for a while. You come often on television, and whenever you do, I envy your well-accented English and how beautifully you handle questions, and always, and I mean always, I maintain a running count of how many times you declare “I am an expert on world religions”. Your shtick is that no religion should not be treated as a monolith, that we should consider nuance and the overlaying of culture and national identity on the practice of a religion before criticizing it, and that Islam, the subject you are most asked to comment on, is misinterpreted by evil men for their own ends, it is not a fault of the religion or of the concept of religion itself that global Islamic terrorism and ISIS and Al Qaeda exist, and most importantly, anyone who suggests anything else, is an Islamophobe, a bigot, and a Bill Maher.

I am writing to tell you, sir, that there is someone who has stolen your face and even your name, and doing a show on CNN called Believer, that “believer” with a “v” not a “b”. In the first episode, in case you have not seen the show, this impostor goes to India to understand the Aghori sect within Hinduism. Unlike you, though, you being a scholar of religion for twenty years, this man seems to have even his basic facts wrong, which, as any PhD knows (I am a PhD myself), is a no-no for our clan.

For instance, he mis-translates “Ghats” as “crematorium” where, in real, it means steps that go down to the water. Also, when he stands in front of a picture of Shiva, Parvati, Ganesh and Kartik, he seems unable to identify Kartik in the picture, and we know this because he does not refer to him while talking about Shiva’s family. Maybe he thought Kartik was photobombing this nice family picture, I don’t know. Given that he is doing a show on Aghoris, and claiming to be a religious scholar himself, he does not point out the distinction between the Left hand and the Right hand of the Aghori way, so fundamental to their teachings, and which would have helped a Western audience understand why some stay in “Ghats” and do apparently crazy things and others don’t. If he was who he claimed, he would also perhaps have tried to explain that Aghori doing taboo stuff stems from their radical skepticism, they believe that breaking the most accepted of rules is the only way up the plane of transcendence, and that human flesh is full of the “life-force” that pervades the universe and thus consuming it,  is imbibing life force.

Or as another scholar said in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, which if you think of it explains Aghori principles better than the show on CNN.

My ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force flow around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, yes, even between the land and the ship.

If he really was a scholar of religion, that man in the CNN show, he should also have known that no true Aghori would give him a gurumantra in exchange of a skull-full of cheap liquor,  that something as powerful as a true mantra can only be given after years of following the path. And if as nothing else, but as a PhD, this professed easy shortcut to supreme knowledge should have set off his BS meter in the way it does when we get an email assuring us of an accredited PhD, without submitting a dissertation, using purely our life experiences as a basis. As a man with common sense, not that a PhD necessarily implies that and I should know,  this impostor of you should have known that he is being made a fool of, in the way Japanese tourists are by the guide who sells them a post-card of Rani Mukherjee in Aiyya with “Sir, here is genuine Kamasutra queen of India, hundred dollars only please”.

Or maybe this impostor wanted to be duped, because it made for great optics, a naked Hindu man with his pubes out, peeing into his palm and throwing excreta, surrounded by the worst kind of filth imaginable, crystallizing in a moment of must-see TV, pretty much all the Western audience will remember about this program, perhaps because it affirms their worst stereotypes about Hinduism

What though absolutely convinced me that that man was not you, was that he was doing the exact opposite of what you advocate others do to religion. While you usually say “The religion is good, men interpret it badly, and that too a few people”, this man’s message was “The religion does something really bad (treats Dalits badly), men interpret it rightly, and some people, despite the religion, do the good thing, and thus redeem the religion.” And maybe I totally misunderstood, but I was not the only one, but how can a scholar, who talks about respecting religion, wear a saffron holy garb, with the air of someone going to a Halloween party and then say “Fuck let’s do it” before engaging in, what he would like us to believe, a serious effort to understand a religion by  immersing oneself in it, using the same tone of a college frat boy downing 10 shots in a minute. I am absolutely positive, that someone like you, who keeps on talking about respecting religion, would never even consider treating a world religion with such disdain, of making a mockery of traditions, that which while seeming strange and weird to the TV audience for whom this is targeted at, do have some significance for those who believe in it. Those people that were made fun of were not forcing anyone to adopt their practices, they were not pushing it down at the end of a gun or a bomb, yet that man in the documentary thought fit to essentially take one extreme example, and use that extreme example to mock a centuries-old belief system.

Now I would normally not have warned you sir about this person. After all, as the saying goes, who watches CNN, except in hospitals, airport waiting rooms, or when you have misplaced your remote? But the reason I had to let you know, sir, is because given the promos about the show, extensively shown, there is a high chance a few people just might see it. A few of them will love it too. because it will confirm all their biases about Hinduism, these people who have come and taken their jobs and their way of life, and they will recommend this on message boards, and then some others will see, and then some more. Nothing wrong here again still, except that thousands of Hindu children, who go to schools in the US, already facing ,some say, an elevated level of racism, will now have to put up with bullying of the sort “Hey take off your pants and do as Hindus do”, and “Hey does your dad eat human flesh?” because those two minutes in your program, the part that was on in all the promos, will get shared and shared extensively, and one may say that the reason that footage even exists is because of that purpose.

Now of course the person in that documentary (not you) would argue that his message was different, and “please see the end 5 minutes” but unfortunately the way the show is promoted and structured, the message conveyed at the end is blasted out of the water by what comes before it. It’s like the soft core porn movies I would see when I was a teenager, sir, where at the end there would be a message of “Porn is not good” after 86 minutes of assorted sexual situations designed to titillate. Under the guise of religious research and understanding, the show as it stands, is nothing but an attempt to gain eyeballs through sensationalism and mockery of one particular religion, one to which I belong.

I am absolutely certain that you are as shocked by this as I am, and will spare no effort in hunting this impostor down, and getting back your name and face.

Till next time we meet again on my TV screen.

Logan—The Review

[image error]

In the year 2000, Bryan Singer made XMen. It still holds up well after all these years, specially the set-piece at Grand Central though perhaps not Storm vs Toad, but the significance of the original XMen goes well beyond as a well-done off. It launched the age of the modern superhero franchise, multiple interconnected movies, A-list actors, A-list directors, revenues in the billions, and guaranteed summer blockbusterdom. And the worldwide phenomenon of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Over the years, the XMen franchise has spawned multiple movies, some good, most bad, and Hugh Jackman has been through most of it all, and before you know it a whole seventeen years have passed, and a generation has grown up, watching this one actor play this one character. And so when Hugh Jackman announced his decision to hang up his claws, it was like a favorite player announcing his retirement, you wanted him to have a great send-off, a film worthy of a career.

Logan is that. And more. It ties with The Dark Knight as the greatest superhero movie ever. There are no God-like beings having universes for lunch, gigantic drills changing the earth’s polarity, hundred story buildings being split apart by a laser beam, no endless armies of superheros, each having two minutes of dialogues and three scenes, no greenscreen assault of CGI jiggerypokery, and most importantly, no feeling of having paid good money to watch a trailer for forthcoming attractions, all of which would then, in turn, be trailers for the next set. In Logan, the violence is scaled down,  the action set pieces scaled back, and the focus is on the effects of the violence, the wounds and the hurt, and this makes it all so much more real and effective. In that it is a cowboy movie with mutants, using the trope of the washed out gunslinger and the brash evil sheriff and the final redemption of the flawed hero, and with locales in cowboy country and sun-washed frames, so reminiscent of the world of Eastwood, Fonda and Leone.

But it is also a movie about people, an old man taking care of an even older man, betrayed by his own body, alone and bitter, trying to find some meaning behind whatever is left of his life. Wolverine and Dr. Xavier are fighting time, like all of us, and the fight becomes the fight of our lives, the closer we get to death. Wolverine’s wounds don’t heal as quick as they used to, his body is no longer as he remembers it to be, he moves slower, he struggles for breath, and punks that he could have ripped through in a moment now can cause him serious hurt. Francis Xavier is older still, struggling to control his ability to manipulate minds in the way that old men struggle to control their bowels. It is the small things about old age that James Mangold gets right in Logan, the scenes of Xavier arguing about medicines and the lucidity of his mind and then lashing out at his caregivers, or when he is frustrated of having to be lowered on the toilet seat, or when Wolverine gets angry at the failings of his once perfect, self-healing body, leaving far more emotional punch-in-the-gut impact than the combined ten films of the X Men franchise.

Be warned about taking children to Logan though.

The violence is raw , the language intense, the wounds dig deep, and the blood runs dark.

This is not your  father’s men-in-tights. This is bare-knuckles visceral cinema, of broken men trying to piece together their minds and bodies and find relevance in a world that has no more use of them.

An adamantine claw straight through the heart. This one will stay with me for a long, long time.