Arnab Ray's Blog, page 14

Fan–The Review

There are two Fans.

One, if you look a bit closely, is about the relationship between the devotee and the God (and no I am not talking about the Sachin biopic), of the blurred lines between devotion and fanaticism.

Gaurav Chandna, a small-time superstar impersonator and obsessive mega-fan of Aryan Khanna, the in-film surrogate of Shahrukh Khan, takes a pilgrimage to Mumbai, hoping to get “five minutes” from the object of his devotion. But once there, he realizes that his God is not interested in giving “even five seconds of his life” to him, and that his over-the-top gestures of devotion are not only not appreciated but leads to his idol pulling strings and getting him beaten up in jail. The rejection leads him to turn on Aryan Khanna, as he embarks on a journey to destroy his God and at the same time, seek his acceptance.

This Fan goes to places most conventional mainstream fare from the Hindi film industry does not. First of all, it takes love, obsessive love, away from the man-woman sexual dynamic, and transposes to another context, as addictive, and potentially as destructive.

Faith.

Once you realize that most modern religions began with the establishment of this kind of intense collective faith in one person, and that religions and cults and star-fan-clubs all subsist on this emotional compact between the individual, the fan, and a God, be it a man or just an abstract ideal, you wonder why we don’t have most explorations of this, one of the most basic and yet inscrutable of our instincts.

Without going too deep, for after all this is not art-house. Fan skates around some deep questions.

Does God care for our love? Does He understand it?  Do we really lose faith in our God, even when we say we do, or are we just trying harder for his attention?

And then there is the other Fan.

A lazily-plotted, childishly-written modern Bollywood star-vehicle, and this happens mostly post-interval, which requires not just the suspension but the obliteration of disbelief, straight out of the Rohit Shetty school of film-making.

That Fan works, despite this cinematic schizophrenia, is because of Shahrukh Khan. He plays the character rather than Shahrukh Khan, ironically in a film where one of the characters is Shahurkh Khan. Returning in many ways to the edginess of his origins, he reminds us that there is no one in Bollywood that does obsession better than him. What though could have degenerated into the boilerplate nostril-shaking and eyelid-quivering, mercifully does not. He makes Gaurav Chandna sympathetic and sad and relatable, and one wonders why he does not play the “every-man” more, as opposed to the hands-extended hammy romantic Rahul  caricature that he has reduced himself to over the years, and through this playing-the-character-and-not-the-persona, Shahrukh Khan reminds me why I was once his fan.

Yes I was. And I have said this before, on this blog and elsewhere. Not a fan in that I had his cut-outs all over my wall, but a fan in that I dressed up as his character in Ramjaane. Like Gaurav Chandna, I too lost my faith, and no not because Shahrukh Khan would not take five minutes of his life to give me a hug, but because he made Duplicate. And then Ashoka. And then everything that followed.

The fact that an obviously-talented actor would lock himself up in a creative strait-jacket, just for the sake of more and more money, was for me, too big a sell-out.

But with Fan, the Fan in me wants to believes he has said “sorry”. In a way. Not a perfect apology, not even close. But at least something. I know there will be more Dilwales and Happy New Years, and I understand why that will be, but as long as there is something like Fan, once in a while, I will be quite happy.

And maybe, consider being a fan once again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaving Maryland

Eleven years ago, I moved to Maryland. In that eleven years, a lot has happened. I had a little daughter. I wrote five books (three published, two in the pipeline), This blog became big. I learned a lot and grew, as a Computer Scientist and as a human being.

And now, I am leaving Maryland. The bags have been packed, the house is empty, and all we need now is to surrender the keys, and take the plane out.

It’s shocking to discover new things about yourself, specially when you are forty years old, but the whole experience of moving from one state to another has left me emotionally drained in a way I could never have imagined.

When I left “home” to do my PhD in ’99, to be honest, I didn’t feel this sad. There was of course tears when my parents waved me away, but when you are leaving the shadow of the great Indian family to make it on your own in a foreign land, the sadness is but fleeting, overwhelmed as you are by this sensation of nervous excitement. And honestly, at that age, you don’t think that much.

Now I do. The first time it struck me, this sadness, was when I we had gone to Chicago (that’s where I am moving to) with my wife and daughter to look for places to stay. It’s when we finalized the place, that it became “real”, that the “red house” as my daughter calls where we used to stay, was now going to be someone else’s. Once back, everything became different, and the heart seemed to be getting squeezed in that invisible vise ever so often—the last time at the park where we went for eleven years, the last time at the grocery store, small places that I never realized I had become attached to, places and things that I had taken for granted as just being mundane elements of my mundane little life. Then when on the last day of my daughter’s pre-school, all her cute little friends all gave her hugs, and drew little pictures, and her teacher, got teary-eyed and made a most lovely little file by which to remember this last year, just for her (by the way how must it be for teachers to say goodbye at the end of every year?), I finally accepted it.

I am going to miss Maryland, more than any place I have before.

One main reason for this is of course my daughter. It’s here that we brought her home from hospital, it’s here that all her memories reside, and though I have Gigs full of pictures, they haven’t yet created technology to store the happiness, the exact sensation-map of the moment. I know that there will be many more such moments, but still, if you are a parent, and even not, you will know what I mean.

But it’s more. It’s as if, and I know this is a cliche, that I am leaving a part of myself behind. You realize that when we say “I”, we don’t just mean that which is in the physical space constrained by our bodies. We are something more. We are the comfort of sinking into your favorite chair in your favorite corner of the house. We are going to the grocery store, and knowing what’s where as an instinct, and the comfort (not that you consider that at the time) it provides. We are the good doctor who we trust, a cab driver who becomes a friend, a barber who knows exactly how to cut my hair.

And then when you move out to another place, it’s as if you have been ejected from this comforting sense of “the greater self” . You are not as whole as you were. You can of course tell yourself “I will be back one day” but, even if you do, it will increase your sadness, and not just because of what Bob Marley once said “The good times of today are the sad times of tomorrow”, but because you will discover that the place you once called home is no longer your home, that it has moved along (as have you).

So yeah. I am going to miss Maryland. I am going to miss this house. I am going to miss myself.

But I will have my memories. I will have that.

So far I used to live in Maryland.

Now Maryland will live in me.

Farewell.

Thank you Virat Kohli

An India-Pakistan cricket match is not like every other game. Cricketers say that all the time “It’s just another game”, and I understand why they do. But we know it’s not true.

It’s like saying your first kiss is the same as the ones that came after it. No one is buying it.

Because like a first kiss, an India-Pakistan cricket match is an anchor-point in your life. Not all games, but definitely some.

As time passes and one day merges into the other, like an endless march of India-Sri Lanka matches, it becomes difficult to find yourself in your own past. It’s then that you need these little anchor points, to which you can fly back at a moment’s notice when you feel the need to be nostalgic, and this need, as any forty-year old will tell you, increases as you grow older.

At least for me, so many of these anchor-points are cricket matches and out of them so many India-Pakistan encounters.  What exams was I preparing for (or not) when Sohail taunted Prasad? Who did I watch that game with, you know the one with Rajesh Chauhan? How did I dance when Dada defeated the Pakistanis in Toronto?  How did I jump up, in that mixed crowd of Indian and Pakistani fans at Stony Brook,  that first Shoaib Akthar over in 2003? What went through my head when time froze and Misbah turned his bat around for that scoop shot?

That’s what makes India-Pakistan cricket so special. It’s not the humiliation of a country or a settling of long-standing political scores, and I just hate when the media frames it in those terms, but those little moments that make sense, not in just in your life, but in the lives of others. It’s as if the lines of millions of Indians meet at those anchor-points, and then hurry along their respective trajectories. It’s what makes them so powerful, so emotionally intense, this resonance, for only at these anchor-points that we the millions become one, running the exact same gamut of emotions, asking the same questions (“Why isn’t Dhoni playing Bhajji on a spinning Eden pitch”) and making the same jokes about AB Junior.

The Eden game between India and Pakistan had a few of these anchor-points. Mohammed Sami, Pakistan’s version of Ashish Nehra, an old-war-horse trying to prove his best days might be his last, running in full-steam and ripping out India’s top order. Shoaib Malik celebrating an early Jamai Shashti. Didi finally bringing Pakistan to the border of Bangladesh. This little story I made up in my head of Sachin Tendulkar saying “Ek thanda Dasani la” and hospitality then sending Aftab Shivdasani who says, with that smile of his, ‘Sir main Dasani hoon aur kya cool hai hum 3.’ Yuvraj Singh, for a ball or two, pushing back the years and the cobwebs of the mind.

No. Who am I kidding?

All the moments will be owned by Virat Kohli. I will be honest. I have never liked him much as a sportsman. There is no way I cannot but acknowledge his skills, the data does not lie. But a legendary sportsman isn’t just about “skills”, it’s his ability to transcend his sport, a Sachin or a Bjorg or a Pele. And in that respect, Kohli is just too much lost in the reeds of maa-behen and of arrogance and of running forward, chest extended at every provocation, for that high road the truly great take.

But then perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps you don’t need to take the high road. Perhaps all you need to do to be truly legendary, is to go to a place no one has gone before.

And Kohli went there today. He became India’s Ponting, the champion batsman who can consistently and single-handedly win crucial encounters. Something we have never had before. A Sachin yes, but no Ponting.

With further progress in the World Cup on the line, with the weight of the expectations of a volatile 65,000 in the ground and billions outside, against historic rivals, on a spit-fire of a pitch, with the top order gone and in company of someone who inspires confidence in flashes, he played the innings that anchor-points are made of. Like Sachin and Sehwag at their prime (and only them in the Indian team), Kohli has that rare ability to take the pitch and match condition out of the match, being able to play the exact same way, and you realize only how bad the pitch is when you see the other batsman trying to handle the same situation.

Like Sachin and Sanjay Manjrekar in that hell-hole of 96 World Cup Eden pitch, one batting with consummate ease, other flaying around like a cockroach turned on its back.

Like Kohli in that hell-hole of a 2016 World Cup Eden pitch.

And when at the end, Kohli bowed down to the pavilion and the camera went to Sachin’s beaming face, I felt as if a connect had been made, from the anchor-points of my past to those of the future, and I knew, that I would be visiting this moment again.

In the future.

So thank you Virat Kohli. Thank you for the memories made. And even more, for those to come.

The Cliched Cow Joke Redux

[Something I posted on FB]

Congress: You have two cows. They take both, sell one to Italy, put the money in a Swiss bank and name the other Rahul.

BJP: You have two cows. They force you to worship both.

AAP: You have two cows. They steal the cows at night, blame Modi in the morning, and then milk one on even days and the other on odd days.

TMC: You have two cows. They run away to Gujarat.

RJD: You have two cows. They eat the fodder and then demand ransom for them.

JDU: You have two cows. They dub the cows Mahacows & then demand ransom for them.

AIADMK: You have two cows. If they don’t say “Amma” instead of “Hamba”, they get you in trouble.

BSP: You have two cows. They make you sell the cows, and use the money to pay for one more Mayawati statue.

Samajwadi Party: You have two cows. They become Azam Khan’s.

CPM: You have two cows. They make you milk the cows, then they take away the milk, kill the cows and call you an oppressor.

Delhi Daredevils: You have two cows. They buy both for a million dollars, and sell them for 100 rupees a year later

 

 

 

A Birthday Story: The Sequel

[On December 30, 2005, when I turned thirty, I had written a post called “A Birthday Story”, an imaginary conversation between a 20 and a 30-year old me. Now, exactly ten years later when I turn forty, is the sequel. A Birthday Story-Part 2]

Late night. A glass of diet coke and rum by my side, because I no longer have normal Coke. Not because it is better for my health, but because it is better for my conscience.Surfing the net when all of a sudden my messenger window pops up. There’s a message:

BirthdayBoy_at_30: Hi. I know this sounds kind of weird. I am you , when you were 30. I just wanted to see if you are online….had some questions to ask you.

BirthdayBoy_at_40: I think we did this before. And nothing much good came from it.

BB30: Whoa. I sure turned out to be a cranky old man.

BB40: I just turned forty. Of course I am a bit….emotional.

BB30: What’s there to be emotional about? I mean life begins at forty they say, and you are still forty years too young to join the Youth Congress. So cheer up grandpa, there is a lot of jaan still left in those arms of yours.

BB40: Enough juvenile Bollywood-reference wisecracks. What are the questions? Ask them and be off with you. Someone’s trolling me on Twitter and I need to send this kick-ass comeback.

BB30: What’s Twitter?

BB40: Never mind. Questions?

BB30: You know the question, how did I turn out?

BB40: Several kilos heavier. Next question

BB30: Oh come on. You know what I mean.

BB40: You are a father now. Of a beautiful beautiful daughter.

BB30: Oh wow. So do finally take the plunge. You know how conflicted I am about this whole “becoming-a-father-business”, I have got so many doubts…

BB40: I remember. I do remember that. And it’s perfectly all right to have doubts. That means you are thinking. And I can tell you, with the benefit of hindsight, that my worst decisions have been taken when I havent thought things through, just done them, because someone else was doing it.

BB30: So am I a good father?

BB40: I don’t think I know the answer to that yet. I don’t think I ever will.

BB30: I meant to say, how am I? As a father? How does it feel?

BB40: Like discovering a new color in the rainbow, like wandering into a beautiful room in your house that you didnt know existed before. It opens the full range of your emotional spectrum, making you feel things you never thought could be felt before.

BB30: Like discovering an Easter Egg in a game, a hidden level.

BB40: I suppose.

BB30: You seem kind of moved by it.

BB40: It ties you up with bed-times, feeding-times, and dropping-off-at-pre-schools. But it also liberates you. Your life, at forty, is like a library book approaching a due-date. A child then becomes a renewal on that loan, an extension if you will, that will transcend yourself even when you are no longer yourself.

BB30: Hello? Is this me I am talking to? Or have I mistakenly opened a communication channel with Deepak Chopra?

BB40: You won’t understand, not yet.

BB30: I do.  The primary genetic urge to make transmit your genes forward, to become immortal that way. You forgot I read.

BB40: And you do not anticipate that I feel. But that is okay. You haven’t looked into the face of your daughter yet. When you do, this will all make sense.

BB30: You sound like my dad.

BB40: All dads sound the same.

BB30: Have I made lots of money?

BB40: What do you think?

BB30: I don’t think I like that tone.

BB40: Don’t blame me. The choices that have led to my bank balance have already been taken. By you.

BB30: That bad huh?

BB40: No you did it right. You took the right choice. For me. For us. I may not have made as much money as those friends who fly off to vacations twice a year to Cancun and Paris, and post their pictures for people like us to turn green over, but, and I don’t say this in a “sour grapes” way, I have consciously traded stock options for something as precious. Time. You see, Birthday Boy at 30, time and money are like matter and energy, there is a conservation of them together, and you get one at the expense of the other. Overall, I believe I have made the best trade I could have made between time and money, one that suits me being the person I am. I have money to be comfortable but not lavish, to relax but not to rest…

BB30: Wait…wait. No first class. No business class even? Not even at forty?

BB40: I have chosen waiting in boarding line instead. Remember the time-money tradeoff?

BB30: Ure baba. What the use of that time?

BB40: With that time, I have made a blog that has done better than I ever thought it would. I have written three books, and a fourth one on the way next year, and if anyone had told me at 30, I would be here, I would have taken it.

BB30: Oh no this is not Deepak Chopra. It’s Ravi Shastri with the cliches.  “If someone had given Ganguly 260 on this pitch he would have taken it”? What now? Set cats among the pigeons.

BB40: In the end, life is the winner.

BB30: I am impressed, you seem fairly contented. I am glad that’s the case. I am so….I don’t know…conflicted in every way.

BB40: Contented? Hardly.

I am scared. I am scared for my daughter, every time I strap her into the baby-seat and get behind the wheel, because, you know, my life is now extended. In two bodies. The evil of the world, now that I am a father, affects me in a more powerful, more visceral way than ever before. So does its randomness.

I feel powerless. When I see my daughter fall, hurt her head, I feel powerless. I want to take her pain, every bit, and I sound like Alok Nath when I say it, but it is true. But I cannot. I can only hug and soothe her and let her cry.  I feel even more powerless when I realize that she will get hurt more as she moves on in life, not just from sharp edges and falls from the edge of the bed, but from people and circumstances.  I want to be there for her forever, telling her what to do and what not to do, but then I realize I won’t be there and I shouldn’t be there, that I have to let her make her own mistakes and let her fall and let her learn and that’s how she will become a person. I know that is the way of the world, and that is how it has been always, not that it will break my heart any less.

I am sad. There are so many things I will not be any more. I will not be a professional cricket player. I will not be an IAS officer. And so many other things. And this list is going to get longer, every day I live.

I am happy. I am happy to be reasonably alive and reasonably healthy. This may not seem much at 30, but as you become older, you will realize what a big deal that is. I also reasonably financially secure, reasonably successful as a family-man, reasonably successful as a professional computer scientist, and reasonably successful as an author and public commentator. I sometimes wish, no make it more than sometimes, wish, things would be better on all fronts, that I would be India’s biggest author and have my own current affairs program, and then realize, as you no doubt do, that things could always have been worse.

BB30: I agree. I agree with that. Things can always be much much worse. There is much to feel thankful for

BB40: That there is.

BB30: So overall, ok? Something to look forward to. The big four.

BB40: Yes I would think so.

BB30: Any final words of advice?

BB40: I suppose what I always tell myself. Play on the front-foot, and never be afraid to step outside the crease, but always be ready to keep a bit of your back foot behind the crease. The wicketkeeper of life is a crafty bugger, he never misses a stumping. Swerve as much as you want, but the bouncer will hit you, and you will feel your mouth filling with blood, and the world will get dark, and you will want to stay there on the turf, and call for the stretcher. But it is then that you have to get up, and even though your head will be reeling from the impact, and your nose will hurt like hell,  you will adjust the helmet, breathe in, take guard again, and when the next ball comes, you will move your front foot forward as if nothing has happened, and try to put it back, back into the stands.

I sit back, contented. I know I should not do it. But I do it nonetheless, because that was how it was supposed to end anyways.

BB40: Hi, Birthday_Boy_at_50, I know this sounds kind of weird. I am you , when you were 40. I just wanted to see if you are online….had some questions to ask you.

The Hateful Eight–the Review

The “program” handed out at special roadshow engagement that I attended

The word “self indulgent” is often used to describe Tarantino, and whether that “fuck you I will do movies the way I want” is actually Quentin or a carefully-cultivated counter-culture-pandering persona I know not, because I have heard compelling arguments on both sides. I am a big fan of QT myself, because high art or not, his movies are always enormously enjoyable in the most unconventional of ways(I mean who would ever think that a conversation about “Royale with cheese” would be that memorable?) and though he has spawned an army of followers and me-toos (some of them in our Hindi film industry), he has remained pretty much un-inimitable.

I correct that. He is now imitated. By himself. The Hateful Eight, which I was fortunate to watch in 70mm as part of the limited release “roadshow”, is like a greatest hits of Quentin Tarantino recorded on bad-quality tape. You have seen everything in this film before, from Quentin Tarantino himself. Except he has done it better before. The exact same sequences. In order to keep this review spoiler-free, I am deliberately not going into the details, but for any QT fan, you can almost take every significant sequence and theme and narrative “trick” of the Hateful Eight and map it back to a previous QT film, and every time you would feel (at least I did) that it was done way better before. The quirks are all there, and the sudden surprises, and the bursts of action, interspersed with deliberation, but this being the eighth Tarantino(a point he announces in his trademark grandiloquent manner straight at the beginning),  the extreme-shock devices, both dialog and action, have been blunted through over-use. Even the politics, and Hateful Eight often has the subtlety of a propaganda video, is regurgitated from “Django Unchained” and, even there, Django does a better, more entertaining job, of getting the point across.

One of the main problems, I felt, was the cast. I know Quentin Tarantino likes to repeat his actors, but there is only so many times that Samuel L Jackson can play the goddamn same role. Much of the deja vu of the Hateful Eight is because of him, and I so wish that QT had, instead of playing safe and going back to his tried-and-tested, tried someone new, like Idris Elba. That would have been something different at least. As a matter of fact, the only successful casting here are of those new to the QT world, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Walter Goggins.  Leigh is the stand-out performance in the movie, the only one I would characterize as memorable, with Goggins a close second. The others, including old QT favorite Madsen fade into the background noise, with Tim Roth trying to mimic Christoph Waltz being particularly difficult to watch.

As an old QT fan, I am afraid that he is now dangerously close to the Shahrukh-Salman “strait-jacketed by his image” territory, if he is already not inside it, and while the Hateful Eight is definitely watchable and, to an extent, enjoyable, it will remain one of the lesser films of his stellar career.

 

Star Wars The Force Awakens—The Review

When you are given the responsibility of re-energizing one of the world’s most famous movie franchises, they aren’t going to be happy with something that just makes millions at the box office. No. They want you to set the foundation of something much bigger, much more long-term. They want you to engineer a perpetual motion cash-cow that can be milked for a series of million and billion grossers, and then even more revenue through sale of T-shirts and toys and video games and official cheese snacks and theme-park-rides.

It’s easy for very smart people, and JJ is one of the smartest people in the industry today, to get this wrong. I might eat my words later and I hope I do but he and his team have taken the Star Trek franchise, particularly after that horrendous second installment, in the wrong direction. In trying to make Star Trek reach out to a global audience that goes beyond nerds who live in their parent’s bedrooms, they have put in a lot of explosions and space-battles, and, for some strange reason, lens flairs. That has ruined the experience for older fans like me, who cannot get over the abandonment of the deep themes that were the hallmark of the original series, the lack of chemistry between the protagonists, and, worst of all, the canon-busting re-imaginings of iconic characters. It is like someone taking a dump on my childhood, watching Spock and Uhura kiss on the bridge of the Enterprise. To the generation of movie-goers not connected with the original lore to the extent we are this might seem quite cool, but the problem for them is that Star Trek is not sufficiently differentiated from the Avengers, Transformers or any of the other similar franchises that pack movie screens during the summer.

But this time, with Disney and Star Wars, JJ gets it bang perfect. This is about as perfect a franchise product as can be engineered. It targets the classical Star Wars nostalgia generation, the ones with the wallets, and bridges it to the new, the ones that drive the consumption.

As any parent would tell you, they are ready to pay for that. The force connection. And to mix my franchise metaphors, the mind meld.

Imagine this. Dad and Daughter walk out of the movie theater together, Dad nostalgic and Daughter overwhelming him with questions. They talk and talk and end up buying matching XXLarge and Small Star Wars official licensed Tshirts (each Tshirt twice the cost of the Imax ticket) and she gets a new Star Wars video game (the game four times the cost of the Imax ticket), and he picks up retro Star Wars figures from Amazon (again a few multipliers of the original ticket) and remembers fondly, summer afternoons in the 80s, making voices for Han Solo and Leia and Darth Vader, and then Dad and Daughter have another conversation. And then Daughter grows up with this generation of Star Wars, till Daughter has a Son, and rinse and repeat and, through all these years, Disney collects every time.

This is indeed a feat of epic engineering. It is to be seen how the engineering is sustained, but the beginning is pitch perfect. The secret sauce is that JJ makes Star Wars the Force Awakens almost exactly the same film as the first Star Wars (New Hope). I could deconstruct this further, but for the sake of keeping this spoiler-free, I am not. Suffice to say that, the plot points are almost the same, the locations extremely familiar,references to the past fly thick and fast, and the central conflict is identical. This isn’t lazy plotting, but deliberately done to be comfortingly familiar to the old fogeys in the way that warm home-cooked food is, and they are, as Disney knows, the ones with the most purchasing power today.

At the same time, JJ brings forth new characters and puts into motion story arcs that can be built independently of the past, to ensnare those with the most purchasing power a few years down the road. These plot decisions free the new from persistent comparison with the old, while, at the same time, making the new characters surrogates of those that we remember (it’s almost elementary to discover the new Skywalker, the new Solo, the new Vader, the new Emperor, the new Death Star, and the new Obi-Wan). Sufficiently new and racially and gender diverse to meet the standards of today’s world and yet sufficiently old so that the connect between generations is not broken, it is not easy to do both these effectively, and JJ does exactly that.

It also uses, and again I believe this is not accidental,  a narrative device, that works extremely well with today’s generation. The game narrative. An outsider is put into a new environment, learns the moves, escapes from somewhere, picks up party-members and gradually levels up his character. For those who have played Knights of the Old Republic (which still remains the greatest Star Wars story ever told) and several other role-playing games, this structure will appear extremely familiar.

Of course that’s where its deepest weakness is. The new Star Wars is an extremely derivative film, from a cinematic point of view, familiar on multiple axes, but as software developers would say, it is not a bug but a feature, engineered as it is to consume pay-cheques in the way the Death Star does planets, many years into the future.

We in Bollywood have a name for this. Phormula. And JJ is now the Manmohan Desai of the West.

This one is going to break the records. I am sure of it.

Star Wars the Franchise has awakened.

 

 

Of Indian Media And Words That End With “Tutes”

Walking Hindu (For Representational Purpose Only)

Scroll.in, which for some mysterious reason my phone keeps auto-correcting to Troll.in, recently had an article written by Mr. Rahul Pandita in which he exhorts Modi-supporters to stop calling “us” , and by “us” he means the august members of the media community, presstitutes.

I apologize for any nuance lost in my synopsis, but what he says is roughly this. A number of his friends of the author were once “reasonable” people. However they have recently been transformed into the “Walking Hindu” (a mythical tribe of the undead who bleed saffron and bite into anyone who they believe has not been Modified yet) who have, as a result, taken to calling Mr. Pandita and his band of truth-juice-dispensers as “presstitutes”, and he wants to tell them it is his job, and of warriors like him, to hold up an impartial, PR-free mirror to society, and if what they see is not to their liking, then why spit on the mirror?

There is also a quotation from Camus.

The problem with Mr. Pandita’s article is that it is based on a fundamentally erroneous premise. Namely that the only people who believe that the media is compromised are those that are Modi-supporters and the pejorative “presstitute” is being thrown around by that group only. If one goes through the tweets of Mr. Kejriwal and filters out the movie reviews, and then goes through the tweets of Ashutosh and filters out the exclamation marks and other war-crimes against the English language, what comes out is a coherent narrative of media-bias-accusations. Putting it simply, AAP finds media conspiracies against them every day, either they are being covered too much or too little, and this we are told are being done at the behest of forces aligned with the “Walking Hindu”s. What makes this particularly, and I use the word “poignant” instead of “ironic”, is that much finger-pointing originate from two ex-journalists who should know what goes on:1) Numero 83b, once a prominent member of a major media house who ultimately got sick of pretending to be impartial and joined a political party, and 2) Numero Uno an independent media-maverick famous for his targeting of one particular party throughout his career as an independent journalist till he too got sick of the ruse and put on his cap, and who, and this where I use the word “ironic”, has been accused of being in the tank for a major industrial house, by a disgruntled ex-member of said party. The Trinamool Congress, yet another party with impeccably secular credentials, regularly accuses a major media house of hatching conspiracies against them, along with sinister forces in North Korea, Venezuela and Hungary.  I could go on but you do get the point. Allegations of media bias, media compromise, and media conspiracies are made by everyone against everyone else, and while the word “presstitute” may have originated from someone who is now a BJP minister, the thought behind it has been around for quite some time, in many many minds, not all of whom have been rendered brain-dead through Modi-fication, as the article claims.

By focusing his ire on only one color in the political spectrum, and Mr. Pandita is not alone in this, many of our media mavens only end up validating accusations of bias against a particular ideology. It’s as if they are nose-blind to the other accusations, made often by media-insiders (who should know)  belonging to more “secular” strains of thought, and one can only assume that to be the case because one becomes inured to the scent of one’s own biases. The same words, depending on whether they come from the Modified or those that are not, become tagged “vitriolic zombie-breath’ or the “gentle rain of truth” and this egregious display of bias undermines their premise of being not-biased, which, is kind of self-defeating.

Now I am an outsider, a consumer of media. My take on media-compromise is roughly this.

Media-compromise in India has three inter-dependent and yet distinct facets.

The first one can be characterized as “managerial”. Corporate media is a multi-multi crore behemoth, financed by individuals and groups, whose holdings extend beyond media. Their media ownerships are, as much as about profits, as it is about owning instruments of strategic manipulation of public opinion. In this respect, media organizations are not, as naively thought, pro-BJP or anti-Congress. They work at much higher and smarter resolutions, being “pro-minister-so-and-so-at-certain-point-of-time-before-this-legislation-passes” and “let’s-take-this-angle-because-we-need-to-bury-this-guy-for-this-totally-different-reason”. Stringed along by extremely powerful puppet-masters (shameless plug: My forthcoming novel “Sultan of Delhi: Ascension” from Hachette, coming out this summer, is about one such fictitious character), news becomes a quiver of honey and poison-tipped arrows, to be used as a part of a larger game, much of which we never understand because we don’t even know the context.

The second is pay-to-play. Also called “Paid News“, where the space between advertising and opinion is blurred, where PR and news-desks and opinion-pieces and features all getting together to form a happy cash-soup, where “promotion packages”  guarantee you, not just advertisement space, but legitimate coverage in the main pages, favorable reviews, and appropriately adulatory references,  It works the other way too, no pay and you get badly reviewed and mentioned, and perhaps the easiest and the most damning, ignored.

The third, and this typically raises the most heckles, are the media celebrities, the blue-ticks, the opinion-makers, the pundits, of varying follower-count, influence, and troll attention. Following the model of personality-driven punditry of the US market, TV channels in India have built up a cabal of “talking heads”, who have, over the years, built personal brands that transcend the channel that they are on. They suffer from the problem that people suffer from: they are people. They bring their own biases, their own personalities, their Zeus-like arrogance,  their own interests, and their own politics. It is again, a gross over-simplification, to call them pro-BJP or pro-Congress or pro-AAP. While individual crushes remain for particular people and ideologies, because hey they are people, their collective bias remains towards “the circle”, a cabal of power-brokers in the rarefied social circle of Lutyens Delhi, also referred to as “the establishment” or “people who appreciate fine wine and Sufi gazals and the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil”, who collectively form an oligarchy of influence. That is why they close ranks against outsiders and philistines and “the natives”, till they are appropriately absorbed or appropriated,  their hold on the national conversation maintained through an intricate give-and-take of favors and privileges, softball interviews exchanged for leaks and gossip, a system that can be summarized in one excellent sentence.

Krantikari, bahoot ki krantikaari.

Of the three headed hydra, the media celebrities are the ones that get the most attention and the most #presstitute abuse on social media, though on the stage of malignancy, they are the least harmful. With a minimum of common sense, one can identify their biases and calibrate the trust one should place in their reporting, and while they perhaps may not be ignored if they are shaking you by the collar in Times Square, their pronouncements can be observed in the way one would  WWE or the fifteenth viewing of Gunda, with detachment and an appreciation of the “so bad it’s good”. Not so easy to parse are disembodied narratives, that do not come from individuals but from systems. They drive our biases, our prejudices, and our political behavior and our consumption patterns, while it is easy to get into conspiracy theory mode and find whispers behind everything, a healthy amount of skepticism and multiple samples of the media-stream (so that narrative balances counter-narrative or in other words, read Scroll as well as Op-India, follow English, as well as Hindi news) our only compasses through the darkness.

However in all this storm of social media opprobrium and RTs of praise and blocking of trolls , what is often forgotten is that the “press” are not just the faces on TV or the serial-RT-ers of praise on Twitter. There are hundreds of men and women working with courage, conviction and belief, doing original reporting and producing compelling content everyday. They are men and women in small cities and villages, endeavoring to uncover truth at great physical peril, an universe apart from the entitled bunch of pundits with their VIP all-access-passes and their tedious lives of wining and dining in luxury. People like Jagendra Singh, burnt to death in Uttar Pradesh, and if you think that is heart-breaking, you haven’t read this.

Soon afterwards, a video appeared on the internet which a badly burned Singh lying on his hospital bed talking to the camera. He could be heard saying, “Why did they have to burn me? If the ministers and his goondas had a grudge, they could have beaten me instead of pouring kerosene and burning me.”

And this is precisely I find labels like pressstitute useless. Not only do such labels vitiate healthy discourse, (I mean do you seriously expect a member of the media community to engage with you if you call him a presstitute), they plaster over nuance, in the same way that labels like Internet Hindu and Bhakts do, dumbing down public conversation,  to Rediff message board level.

The “Intolerant” Indian

It’s easy to attack Aamir Khan. Bring up Mela or Love Love Love or his crore-a-pop Satyameva Jayate technicolor tears. But we shouldn’t. That would be petty. Such attacks, we are told, are fine for the Gajendras and the Nihalanis and, by current account, the Khers and the Tandons.

So let’s look at what he has been saying. And so many other countless award-returnees.

Rising intolerance under Modi.

As we have seen, the data does not support the claim. The “intolerance” level has remained the same. But then we are told, that the data does not matter. What matters is perception. Of course the same logic (perception trumps data) could be used to justify the invasion of Iraq (no data about weapons of mass destruction but hey this Saddam is a shifty guy, he could gas his people, so surely we perceive he may have new-killer weapons to use on US), or that the sun moves around the earth (I don’t care what the data says, I look at the damn thing, and I see it move, from east to west) or any kind of prejudice (my perception is that Bengalis are lazy).

Okay. That last one is actually supported by data. But moving on.

India does have a problem. A huge problem. And it’s not new. It pre-dates Modi and will be there long after he has visited every country in the world and every planet in the solar system.

So what is that mitron?

The law does not apply to the strong.

Which is why you can kill someone while drunk-driving and blame it on the driver. Which is why you can steal crores, hundreds of crores, without any sanction. Which is why you can openly exhort men to riot, and then be cremated with state honors.

For the strong, there is always a setting, a jugaad, a phone-call.

Now most of us are weak. We run scared of income tax, we stand in line to get onto buses, we get fleeced by everyone–from policemen to men-behind-desks-in-government-offices. The only time when we get to be strong is when we become part of the mob.

Kill someone alone, and you get jail.

Kill someone in a group, and you stay home.

We as common Indian individuals are susceptible to violence from a group. Any group. Any group with a cause. Khap Panchayat. Lynch mobs. Beef vigilantes. Caste armies with detergent-like names (Sunlight Sena). Moral police. Union workers. Manoos Sena. Kashmiri “Azaadi” folks.

In a moderately ideal society, the law provides the individual the power of the group—a police force, a legal system, and the assurance that if you are in the right, the group will stand behind you.

In India that system has been broken. For ages.

Which is why every political party harnesses the power of the mob from Mamata to Modi, from Amma to the Gandhis. It is the easiest way to make their constituents feel “powerful”, supply them a narrative around which they may coalesce to form a violent swarm. This narrative may be “beef” or “love jihaad” or “Tasleema Nasreen” or “cell-phone carrying bar-going women” or “CPM cadres” or “Bhaiyyas taking our jobs” or “Africans doing things not done in decent localities”. All that changes is the context, the rest remains the same.

This is the basic problem. The rest is all politics. Every political group creates its own prism, lights up the part that is aligned with its philosophy and darkens the rest. So the “seculars” would concentrate on one form of violence and ignore the other (or provide a justification citing “context” and yes you know who I am talking about), while the “Bhakts” would do exactly the opposite, and each would then accuse the other of “selective memory” or “whataboutery”.

What makes Kiran Rao’s statement particularly Dhoom-3 (could not resist that) is that she knows, as well as more or less everyone, that she has nothing to fear. She can eat beef, have a rave party, do pretty much anything she wants to, and her privilege will protect her. By making this about herself (when it is not), she actually trivializes the fear of those who actually have reason to fear the mob.

People like me. I remember years ago, a gunda in a bike rammed into our car, and then started threatening my father that he and his friends would break our car if we did not pay him. There was no one to protect us. Not the police. Not the administration. Nothing. We were not politically connected, nor particularly rich, and that made us fair game.

In this particular case, what protected us was, miraculously, the father of the gunda, who was at that time getting on a bus at the bus stand near to which this was happening. He dragged his son away, and apologized to my father.

Almost like a scene out of an Aamir Khan movie.

This is the malaise. Now if we can recognize this, without the ideological blinkers, maybe just maybe someday we might be able to do something about this.

But till that happens, you know who to blame.

 

Goodbye Viru

Rebels mellow. They adjust, they compromise. They buy a house, settle down, change diapers, drive below the speed limit, nod along at work to whatever the boss says, and score excruciatingly-painful-to-watch double centuries without driving through off.

Not Virender Sehwag. He started a rebel and signed off as one.

“I also want to thank everyone for all the cricketing advice given to me over the years and apologise for not accepting most of it! I had a reason for not following it; I did it my way.” [Link]

Yes he did. He did it his way. Day in and day out. He played cricket the way a schoolboy played it, pahele ball ko chauka marenge, century ko sixer maarke layenge, and he did this at the highest level, against the best of opposition, over years, on hard foreign pitches and on domestic dustbowls, all without losing a beat. Coaches grabbed him by the collar, experts urged watchfulness, and yet he never listened, he never toned it down. Some may argue that the backup provided by the greatest batting middle-order India has ever seen gave him the license to be Sehwag, but something tells me, that he would have been the same, either way.

I am going to miss the man. I am going to miss that cavalier devil-may-care-attitude, those rattling shots through the off-side, the four to start and the six to finish, the mumbling to self, and the every-shot-can-be-the-last unpredictability. I am going to miss that excitement at the pit of the stomach as he walks out to the field, sauntering in slowly, like an employee at the department of motor vehicles, back to work after a satisfying lunch. And I am going to miss swearing at him as he throws his wicket to the most bizarre of shots just when he has the opposition on their knees and then walks off the square, with nary a show of disappointment or anguish.

So thank you old boy. Thank you for the runs. Thank you for the artistry.  And thank you for your badassery.

You made us feel alive.