Arnab Ray's Blog, page 7

Why The Haunting of Hill House Is Horror At Its Finest

As an aficionado and someone who has written in the horror genre, I can safely say that nothing much there affects me any more. Jump scares, gore, the shock twist, the unreliable narrator, I hae become inured to it all, which is why my relationship with horror over the years has become one of perfunctory intellectualization, “they did this well” or “aah that was a clever take on an old trope”, rather than of visceral reaction.

Till I saw “Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix.

This is pretty much as perfect as horror can get, one that left me feeling uneasy days and now weeks after I watched it.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you do it. Now. Then come back and read this piece.

Because I am going spoiler-heavy. I have to. Because I want to deconstruct exactly I found Haunting of Hill House so terrifying.

No it’s not so much the Bent Necked Lady or the other ghouls and apparitions that walk not-so-silently in the shadows of Hill House or the way the narrative plays with time, because that part falls within the well-established tropes of the haunted house genre, not that they are not well-executed, they definitely are, but there is little there that latches on to the well-worn genre warrior.

It is the house that gets to me, or rather what the house says about the world we live in.

The House in the Haunting of Hill House is a breathing, if not living, monster that sustains itself by consuming the essence of those who dwell in it. Just like insect-eating plants immobilize their prey while they feast on it, the House keeps its prey stationary by giving it a safe place. That is the “Red Room”, which as we discover in the climax, is not “a room” but a role,every member of the Crain family has its own Red room, their own safe place, which though is nothing but an illusion to keep them anchored physically to a place the monster controls. The apparitions are also tools the House uses to consume its prey, one of them convinces the mother, Olivia Crane, to kill her twins, after showing her visions of their terrible future, a life of loss and addiction and betrayal, and if life outside the house will bring such pain, wouldn’t it better for the mother to ensure they never leave the house, and then for her to kill herself, so she can always be there for them? Then the House manages to save itself from being burned down by first creating the events that lead to the caretaker’s daughter to lose her life, and then offering her grief-striken parents the opportunity to see her ghost in exchange for them becoming the house’s protectors.

Which brings me to the real terror of the Haunting of Hill House, that being that the House is a metaphor for the world we live in. There is no safe space, no place in time and space called home, and what we think is safety is merely stasis induced by the world we live in so that it may consume our lives. Our hopes and dreams are mere chimeras, designed  to make us act in the way that suits the world, and its power of its evil is inexorable and we can do nothing but give in, which is what the father does at the end. After a lifetime of struggling with the house,  he finally surrenders, trading his death for the reprieve of his family, knowing well that the world will have them some day for its food, just not now, for it has been fed by his own death, gently embracing the comfort that he is now reunited with his dead wife and daughter. It is not a coincidence that of all the brothers and sisters, the dead daughter is the noblest and the most haunted (at one place, it is mentioned that he was the only child who prayed that her other siblings get gifts from Santa but she never ever asked one for herself), for the world eats up the best first, (it is not a coincidence that the selfish and self-absorbed elder brother comes out with the least amount of scars) and for those who have read the Mine you would know that one of its premises was that, and that evil is not in the shadows, but in the light, in the very nature of existence.

But what really got to me, as a parent, was the desperation of parents to protect their children from the evils of the House. While the mother tries to save her children, and by doing so, plunges them into greater peril, because that is what the House wants them to do, the father stands back, realizing that he cannot save his children from what shall come to pass, and that the small little joys they will get from time to time is the only relief from the inevitable darkness of the destination.

This hits home. As I see my daughter, now rapidly approaching six, coming home and telling us about the girl who constantly behaves rudely with her or cliques forming and of being left out, I know as a father, that she will, as I have done, face betrayal, loss of friends, the dashing of dreams, because that is the way of the world,  and I cannot do anything to protect her from that which is to come, no matter how much I want to. All that I can do, like the father in the story, is to take the blows so that I can buy her time and some comfort, because in the end, the House always wins. That is all.

Absolutely terrifying.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Durga Pujo Story

[Every year I try to write a Durga Pujo themed story. This is my attempt for 2018.]

“Are you open?”

Beni didn’t know when he had dozed off.

“Yes I am,” he said, quickly throwing on a friendly smile on his face. He had been up for almost two days now, and he hardly felt like smiling, but a customer was God, and God liked friendly.

“Thank goodness,” the lady said, “Everyone else seems to have closed shop, and we are hungry.”

It was four thirty in the morning on Nabami, and all the little shops in the Deshapriya Park maidan had closed down. These were the lull hours, when footfall fell off, and everyone curled up in whatever corner they could find, to get a few minutes of shuteye, before the crowds would surge again.

“Five egg-rolls, please.” She said, and it was then that Beni looked up at her. She was not alone. Back at a little distance away he could see a group sitting on the grass, talking among themselves.

“I am surprised you are not closed. Shouldn’t you be sleeping now?”

“Need every bit of business I can boudi.”

Beni said firing up the tawaa, and reaching for the eggs and onion. “We have been working here all day, but this is the only time I can sell without competition”.

“We? Who else?”

Beni pointed to the woman on the ground to the side, fast asleep her arms curled around a little girl.

“My wife and daughter. They have been working all day.”

It was quiet all around, and there was a slight chill in the air. He was worried about that nip, the last thing he wanted was her daughter to catch something. And yet there she was, fast asleep on the cold ground, protected only by a threadbare blanket.

“Do you do this all year?” She asked.

“Yes boudi. I run a small place on the footpath near Sealdah station, beguni and aloor chop. During pujo, I figured it would be better to shift to South Calcutta, you can charge more here.”

“So was it worth the move?”

“Hardly. The margins aren’t that much, after paying the pujo committee for license, and the cops for their mercy, and there is a lot of competition here. That’s why I am up now, trying to make whatever I can. But I won’t grudge, it’s better than what it used to be.”

The tawa was sizzling now with the eggs and the warmth soothed his tired bones.

“How bad was it before?”

“Pretty bad. The land dried up in our village, the crops died. We would still have stayed I guess but then my daughter developed that lump on her forehead. That’s when we decided to come to the city, get it looked at.”

“What lump?”

Beni didn’t want to go there. He couldn’t talk about it without breaking up, and the last thing he wanted was to get tears and snot in this lady’s egg rolls. But a chatty customer can’t be met with silence.

” It’s something that has grown on her head, it was small before, now you can see it clearly near the side. I am not an educated man, barely understand any of it, but the doctor at the hospital said there is nothing they can do there. I could try at the private hospitals, but that needs money. That’s why I am awake right now, making every rupee I can while my competition sleeps.”

“I am sure she will get well.”

“I don’t know boudi. It hurts her all the time, she feels dizzy and tired. The doctor said there is not much..but then I…”

Beni stopped talking, quickly wiping the side of his eye. The lady was silent now, she had lost interest he figured, and why not, no one wants a sob story on the happiest night of the year.

He handed her the egg-rolls, she gave a polite smile, handed him the money, and started walking to the group at the back.

Then she stopped, turned back, and said “Thank you”.

“Get up, get up.”

Beni had no idea when he had fallen asleep. The first rays of the morning were streaming down through the gaps in the buildings, as the city rumbled slowly up back to life.

He opened his eyes, and it was his wife, her hands clutched to the shoulder of his shirt.

“It’s Shampa.” She said, tears streaming down her cheeks, and Beni’s heart sunk. This was the nightmare he had been bracing himself for, every day for the last few years.

This was it.

“Her lump is gone.”

Beni sprang up, almost falling over himself. There was Shampa, awake, walking about, rubbing the side of her head where the bump had been. Beni ran across to her, dropped down to his knees.

It was true. There was no lump.

“My head does not hurt any more, Baba. I feel so light.”

Beni sat quietly, still on his knees, his mind racing. He closed his eyes, and now he saw what he hadn’t seen last time, the four people on the ground behind her—one heavy-set young man, one man with a strange peacock shirt, one lady reading a book, and one lady with a big purse.

Which meant the lady must have been…

No it couldn’t be, he thought.

This didn’t make any sense.

“Am I dreaming?” He asked his wife, and she shook her head, the words drying up from the force of her emotion.

I must have been dreaming then, he told himself.

Hugging her daughter close, he looked up at the sky, and once back towards the pandal.

Then he rose quietly and got back to work.

Where Have They Gone?

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Where have they gone?

The old singer, with the raspy broken voice and the dirty stubble, standing below our verandah, every Tuesday, the khol slung over his battered shoulder, singing “E abar uma ele, ar umaaye pathabo na” (This time when Durga comes home, wont let her go back) and “Kemone chili porer ghore, Uma amar jaabe nai’ (How did you stay at someone else’s house, this time you won’t go?).

The reams of shirt and trouser cloth, collecting in the back of the Godrej almirah, Pujo gifts from relatives who didn’t care enough to buy a boy the things he wanted, slips of paper inserted in their folds, as a reminder not to gift back to source.  As they say, if you don’t love a gift, let it go. If it comes back, no one loves you either.

Where is the tailor-man, who made Bharatnatyam and Kathak dresses and ladies’ blouses through the year, but turned into a tailor of men’s clothes for the Pujos? He would measure me up, with a sad shake of the head. “How can we deliver by Chaturthi, no no, madam, how much cloth should we leave at the waist, enough for a few more years of growth, no madam, this is unreasonable, I can’t deliver by Chaturthi, see there are so many blouses on my pile”, he would say in the same tone I use when I get yet another Webex invite at work. The only thing that would cheer him up would be the opportunity to upsell, pointing to his collection of labels of “Levis”, offering to stitch “American fashion” on any item of desi provenance, for a price of course.

Where are the privileged boys, them the sons of dads who worked in “private company”, with their ProLine Tshirts and Moustache jeans, premier ready-made, strutting about like peacocks outside Singhi Park, free of the curse of having to wear pleated trousers?

Where are the local toughs, who took a break from pasting Ganashakti at street corners and making home-made bombs for these sunny days in autumn, asking for “chanda” for “Four Friends Boys Club”? “I didn’t give chanda last year” you would say, and they would show you a receipt with your signature and you would point out that your signature has your name spelled wrong, and then they would would scratch your car if your dad worked in a “private company” or break your mailbox if your dad worked in gorment, because that’s all you had that they could damage.

Where is the music? Dekha Hai Paheli Baar blaring from pandals with no expectation of winning Asian Paints Sharod Shamman and anodyne cultured music from those that still held out hope? Where are the cap guns, the goat masks, the balloons, the little fake plastic TVs with a knob that could let you see pictures of Dharmanedra, Sridevi, Hema Malini, and Amitabh Bachchan in that order? Where are the oily egg rolls, the heat and the sizzle, the jaundice bait phuchka, the Campa Cola and Thums Up, and the saccharine heaven of kheerkodombos at Mahaprabhu Mistanna Bhandar?

Where is the taste of freedom, the smell of possibility, the sound of familiarity?

Where have they all gone?

I think I know.

The old singer is no more, the tailor’s shop replaced by one selling ‘lingerie”, perhaps made by the same people who tailored the shirts I once thought were high fashion, the local toughs have joined Trinamool and are now collecting parking tickets at Gariahat, the music is Honey Singh or Arijit Singh, first prem happens at Pantaloons, Mahaprabhu Mistanna Bhandar has now been replaced by a CCD, and those that pigged out on rajbhog and egg rolls now pour over their A1C and LDL cholesterol numbers.

Pujo is here. Again.

Where have I gone?

Is Bengali Dead?

In a video that has now gone viral in the Bengali interwebs, noted Bengali intellectual Chandril lets loose on the moribund state of the Bengali language. To sum up his arguments: Bengali as a language is progressing to its death. This is because speaking in English and Hindi has a premium feel to it, while Bengali, in its most traditional form, reeks of “I am sorry, I couldn’t do any better in life”. While recognizing the inevitability of a language changing, he draws a distinction between a type of change that is inevitable, like developing a bald spot, and the type of change that is death, like having the head cut off. Bengali, he posits, is on the latter path, and while one may have issues with his basic premise, one cannot but be amazed by the way he delivers it, the turn of phrase, the Bengali he himself uses, and the examples he digs out to support his contention.

For me personally, the change in Bengali is disquieting, in the way many other changes to Calcutta and Bengal are. I first started being aware of this change through the lyrics of Bengali movie songs like “Yeh haowa silky silky bole jaaye baatein dil ki, chalo na bheshe jaai jowaare, rubaro, masti maange dil maahi we” and “Ooh lala I love you my Soniye ooh lala” where the sheer number of Hindi words overpowered Bangla. And then I happened to watch some Bengali movies, and listen to Bengali celebrities talk, and it’s not just the words that hit me in the stomach, it was the effing pronunciation. For some strange reason, Bengalis born and brought up in Kolkata can’t seem to pronounce Bangla any more.

Where I disagree with Chandril is on the concept of death. A language does not die as long as it is used by people. Here his counterpoint is that just because a language is used by a lot of people does not mean it is alive, it matters only if it is used by rich people. This to me is elitist BS. Bangla has mutated, no doubt, and this makes many of us uncomfortable, but that does not de-legitimize what it has become.

And to me what’s important is not that Bengali has mutated, but why it has mutated. It is because the classical model of the pure tongue has failed, decades of Communism by name and now Communism by proxy, has led to flight of those who spoke in classical Bangla, to other states and to other shores. Calcutta, the bastion of the fair tongue whose demise Chandril laments, has been gutted of its middle class, leaving either the super-rich, many of whom non-Bengalis by birth, or the poor, immigrants from Bihar and UP and Bangladesh, and the mutations of Bangla, the influx of Hindi words and the twisting of the pronunciations, reflect that shift in the underlying demographics.

What Chandril ends up doing is articulating, in a very articulate way, the anger of the last vestiges of the intellectual middle class still in Calcutta, the reduction in prominence manifesting itself as rage at the change in what was once a comforting constant, the words they hear.

Which also explains why there is the strong whiff of persecution-mania that runs through this argument that Bengalis are ashamed of Bengali. As I had once said in a debate with the editor of Desh, the language you will find most Bengalis want to learn is Java, (and yes Java has all the characteristics of a language, there is good code and there is bad code and there are rules of grammar), and its not because they feel ashamed of the languages they know, but because Java is the language that affords them the most opportunities. Bengalis write in English because they want to be read by more people, not because they find it downmarket.

If there is something the Bengali intellectuals should be angry at is the manifestation of the mutation, but what caused it, and most importantly, their own continuing complicity in that very change. To put it simply, you can’t go on lobbying for Bongosommans by anointing Mamata Banerjee as Rabindranath Tagore reborn and then turn around and rue the fact that people use “keno ki” as a surrogate for “kyon ki”.

Sorry boss, it doesn’t work like that.

An Ode To the Bangla Bandh

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Some time after Mamata Banerjee became the Chief Minister of Bengal, she announced that there would be no more Bandhs in Bengal. Bandhs, we were told, were terrible losses for the state exchequer and no one was henceforth allowed to do them . Now critics of her (and I hope a bridge breaks on their head) said that now that the shoe was on the other foot, she was opposing the exact same thing that she had built her career on, the formidable Didi being to bandhs what Steffi Graf was to the forehand, while her supporters, aka “rent-an-intellectual” posited a counter-narrative, namely that she had evolved, that one can’t fault one for realizing the error of one’s ways, no matter how inappropriate the timing seemed otherwise.

And with that the history of the Bangla Bandh came to an end, yet another thing the new generation will never experience, like Suchitra Mitra singing live and ginormous rajbhogs priced at Re 1.

The expectation would start from the day the Bandh would be announced, either in the papers and in those days of single-channel TV, in a short 10 second clip of a press conference, of either a seasoned Communist like Biman Bose, his face fixed in the grimace of a man struggling with flatulence after eating too many oily papads, or the perennially outraged Didi. No one really knew why a Bandh was being called, it was usually rising prices, anti-people policies at the Center, computerization of government offices, craven capitulation to World Bank, and no one cared, as long as it was on a Monday or Friday and it was not during peak Pujo shopping season.

The key to enjoying a bandh, like sex, is in preparation. Seasoned bandh-upadhayas shopped a day or so early, the later you got, the more you were price-gouged. For us gamers, it was imperative to pool together money and buy 5 rubber or “cambees” balls for cricket on the morrow because you would be out of luck on the day of the bandh. If you had a VCP at home, or your dad worked in “private company” and you had a VCR, you would be scrambling to the video library.

There would be a zombie apocalypse there. First of all, you couldnt rent English movies because parents would be home.So Sea of Love and Bedroom Eyes and My Teacher’s Wife would be out of bounds. The rush would be for Hindi and Bengali titles.

“Do you have Benaam Badshah?”
“Sorry that’s been taken. Billoo Badshah is checked out too. How about Betaaj Badshah?”
“No thanks. What about Nagina?”
“Sorry the gentleman just walked out with it. Would you like Nigahen? Exact same story, same snakes, and same heroine?”
“Don’t tell me someone took Vishwatma?”
“The print is bad, I am warning you, camera print. Take Tridev, exact same story, we have original.”
“Any Madhuri movie I havent seen and you still have? Kishen Kanhaiya?”
[Superior laugh]: Kishen Kanhaiya? Haha. I have three copies and they are all out. They will all come damaged because people pause that video too many times, head damages the tape, anyways would you like Jamai Raja?”
Lady walks in, looks around and says tiredly “Sashuri is staying over for bandh, do you have something religious? How about that one—Ram Teri Ganga Maili?”
“No ma’m, oshob baaje jinish (It’s bad stuff). My copy of Jai Santoshi Ma is out, else I would have given it, very wholesome. Would you like something in Bangla? Chiranjeet? Prasenjeet? Ranjit Mullick’r action? Sukhen Das’s kanna (tears) maybe?”
“Excuse me sir, I am still waiting to be served.”
“Uff, why do you boys come at the last minute? Didnt you know before there is a Bandh tomorrow? Here take Umrao Jaan, phamily phlim.”

Then the day of the Bandh would arrive. A surprising calm would descend over the city. The party supporting the bandh would go around, checking to see if there were any shops open. Only things allowed were essential services like the ones that sold singara, jilipi, and chop: the official fuel of any proper Bandh. A state bus would be burned, as an offering to the Bandh gods.

With the roads free of traffic, cricket would start early. Somewhere around late mornings, relatives who lived within walking distance would saunter over, and conversations would start with “Ki Jyoti Babu ki kocche?” (What is Jyoti Babu doing) before converging to the usual things: the invasion of Marwaris and vegetarians, whose mother-in-law has been using the bed-pan, which uncle’s paykhana chara chara hocche (i.e. which uncle’s stool has the consistency of clouds), and the rising cost of fish and math tuition. Lunch would be a relaxed affair, usually taken late, followed by the highlight of the day, the video, and a late late afternoon nap if you were older or another round of cricket if you were not. With the city quieter than usual, the screechy closed-eyes head-swaying, harmonium-fidgeting Rabindransangeet singing of Bunti-di from next door would blare out louder and more oppressive, “ooooh rajanigandha tumi gondo sudha dhaalo, chaander haanshi baandh bhengecheeeeeee…” Oily Chanachur would signify the end of the day, and then in the evening news, one party would declare the bandh a failure and congratulate the people for rejecting it, while another party would declare the bandh a success and congratulate the people for spontaneously participating in it. Which meant you were congratulated twice for wasting a day in your life, which I found absolutely perfect.

And then as you rolled into bed after a long day of doing nothing, you would close your eyes and pray for the next Bandh, knowing that the politicians would oblige, they absolutely would.

I miss Bangla Bandhs. I miss them because nowadays no one seems to enjoy politics any more. They fight on social media, on Whatsapp groups, they unfriend, they screenshot, they send articles from the Wire. But it was not always like this. There was a time when politics brought us closer, and there was no better example of this than the Bandh. We visited each other’s homes, we drank tea and had biscuits, we played cricket together, and it didnt matter whether you wanted a Ram mandir or a statue of Marx or whether you prefered Raaj Kumar over Nana Patekar in Tirangaa, as long as we could bond over the things that really mattered: urinary tract infections, the black market in “gas cylinders”, outrage over baraatis being served tepid coffee and chicken necks in Nimai-da’s wedding, and Kapil Dev being dropped from the Eden Test.

I miss all that.

Some Thoughts on the Latest Arrests of “Urban Naxals”

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(Image coutesy: PTI and Firstpost)

The recent arrests of “human rights activists” or “urban Naxals”, depending on which channel you are tuned in to, shows again how difficult it is to deal with the Naxalism problem in India.

It is easy to make out those who provides the boots on the ground, wearing as they are military fatigues and carrying deadly automatic firearms, and deal with them as you do with enemy combatants.

Enabling though, which is what I believe defines the label “Urban Naxal”, is impossible to define, and even more impossible to legislate.

It is because short of carrying, storing, and distributing arms and making payments for direct procurement of said arms, much of what constitutes greater Naxalite activity is protected by law. Lawyers have every right to defend Naxalites in courts, doctors are oath-bound to provide them medical help, professors are allowed to challenge the existing order and provoke.

It is not illegal for the Roys to justify violence on the Indian state by calling Naxals as “Gandhiians with guns” or for the advancement of the good violence-bad violence argument—that the violence of the powerless is noble, the violence of those that are in power is not. It might be illegal, because of British era sedition era laws, to ask for the breakup for the country in so many words, but you can easily do the “wet sari move of 90s Bollywood”, that is do what you want to do, but after putting a white sari and water on it,  you can put Hindu patriarchial savarna hegemony as a placeholder for the Indian state, you can totally get creative, and legitimately side-step the law. This is incidentally why our favorite krantikaari Umar Khalid denies in every interview that he was part of the gang which raised “Bharat ke tukde honge” because he knows that’s illegal and could lead to jail time, which means less time in front of the media, promoting his personal brand. But then he praises Burhan Wani, a Kashmiri separatist and terrorist, which he knows is legal, the “Choli main dil hai mera” pullback, which then allows his supporters in the media to moan “Haaaaaaiiii” in that Ila Arun quarter-orgasm style, even though, if you think of it, supporting the dissolution of India and supporting a man who is working towards the dissolution of India is not much different.

Which brings me to the fundamental problem of fighting Naxalism. The people who want the destruction of the Constitution fight their battles under the protection of the same Constitution, those people who want to dismember India as a nation seek the protection afforded by the same nation. I know there is more iron in that irony than in Bailadila, but that is the price of being a democracy. “Screw the laws, screw due process, just throw the anti-nationals all into jail” might be a good talking point on your Whatsapp group, but just cannot be what drives law enforcement. Rounding up a few of those considered as enablers might provide good optics for a week, and one might even convince a lower court judge as to their culpability, but inevitably most of these cases get overturned at the higher courts, because law enforcement cannot make the connection between their legitimate activities and those that are demonstrably illegitimate.  And once that happens, the narrative of the oppressiveness of the Indian state is strengthened and further legitimized.

Take for example, the latest arrests. Take for example, one individual, Ms. Sudha Bharadwaj. And take for example, one of the accusations against her, of being part of a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. The sole evidence provided for this, so far, has been a handwritten letter, purportedly from her, asking for a Rajiv Gandhi-style assassination attempt on the Prime Minister, a letter that to my knowledge was first shown to the world by Republic TV, and then cited by Maharashtra Police, and not, again as far as I know, part of a NIA investigation, which it should be, if it indeed was such a conspiracy.

There is a lot going here that does not pass the smell test. Someone putting down in a letter “I want to kill the Prime Minister” is kind of like Shakti Kapoor as Batuknath, the confidence trickster, talking to the camera, while dancing in delight: “Main lakhpati banoonga, sab kuch mera, haan sab kuch mera”. Funny in Chaalbaaz, not so much as in evidence. Second, if Sudha Bharadwaj is the supreme mastermind as she is being claimed to be, she would know that killing the sitting Prime Minister, without doubt the politician in India today with the biggest personal brand, would give the same “Hindu fascist forces” that the people of her ideological persuasion so obviously despise, the 2019 election in a gift wrap, and the next one too, even with two demonetizations in the middle, given the sympathy wave that would be generated.

It just doesn’t make any sense. The extreme Left may be a lot of things, but they are not stupid.

But let’s turn it around. What if she was guilty, no matter how unlikely I personally believe that to be the case. The thing is that our law enforcement agencies are not able to make charges stick when it comes to “anti-national” acts. Geelani walked. Afzal Guru almost walked. Kasab was unlucky, he got caught on tape and with a gun in his hand.

They fail for two reasons. Firstly, their own lack of investigative competence. They have turf wars, they want to talk to the media first, they do bad detective work, then use strong arm to cover up bad detective work, they do not follow standard procedure during detention, and they neglect the small things, wrong names and wrong dates and inconsistent charge-sheets.  Needless to say, they get exposed on every one of them in court.

They get exposed that bad because of reason number two, the people representing those accused of “anti-national” violence, are pretty much the very best legal minds India has. If you think Chennai Super Kings has the most committed fans, well whistle podu to you. They can get Justices to get up at mid-night, they can get the courts to act with a speed that common people can only dream of, and when they stand in court, they bring the full authority of their personas and their reputations and the full power of their indignant outrage to bear.

If you are going to go up against this well-oiled machinery, the government has to have all their ducks in a row. Which they pretty much never do.

Now the counter-argument is that even the government knows that they cannot convict, that the punishment is the process. This is of course true for most of us working a nine to five job, armchair whatsapp activists at best, being arrested and having regular court dates would pretty much break us for good. But we are not talking about us, we are talking about activists, pretty extra-ordinary people, those who believe in something, for whom the cause is bigger than their own individual interests, which is why I, despite disagreeing vehemently with them politically, still respect their commitment.

Kejriwal they are not.

For these individuals, the process is not as much punishment, as it is the ultimate validation of their struggle. It also brings attention to their individual causes, Dr. Binayak Sen became an icon after he was arrested, and I am sure that many who had not heard of Sudha Bharadwaj before will know hear of her, and I am not just talking about Sharma uncle who lives in the corner house, but Sweden and Norway, and human rights bodies, and people with funds and influence.

While we remain, more than ever a nation divided, depending on whether you follow NDTV and The Wire vs Times Now and Republic, what I believe we should all agree on, in the political interests of all concerned, is to insist that our government have a coordinated investigative and media outreach policy when it does such high-profile arrests, that the government goes all out or not at all, that they move only after they have collected enough evidence using legally validated means, in a way that gives them a high chance of conviction, that they do their prep work before coming to the exam hall.

Again I may be proven wrong, but based on what I see, that does not seem to be the case.

 

The End of An Era

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It is too soon perhaps to evaluate the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s contribution to Indian history, and perhaps it is a task better left for better minds than mine. However, it perhaps can be said safely that he was one of the most significant figures of post-1947 India. By taking the decision to test a nuclear device, he permanently altered the geopolitical equations of the region. By creating India’s first and only national alternative to the Congress, he destroyed for good the Gandhi family’s TINA (There is no Alternative) argument. Through his partnership with Advani, he created something unique in Indian politics, a party that could legitimately speak with two voices, one targeted towards the right and one towards the center, one hard and one soft,  that contrasted sharply with Congress’s monolith-ism on one hand, and on the other, the inability of regional parties to talk in a language that those beyond their regions could comprehend. There was only one who could legitimately have taken on the political genius of Vajpayee on his own turf, and that was a certain PV Narasimha Rao, and Sonia Gandhi rightfully recognized him as her family’s biggest threat and dynamited him and his legacy, but in trying to make sure that little boy Rahul got his porridge, she snapped whatever spine the grand old party had.

Which brings me to what I found the most unique about Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His likeability.  Be it Babri or Graham Staines or Kandahar or Kargil or even 2002, which, and you would be forgiven for forgetting happened under his Prime Ministership, he always managed to escape the kind of toxic media and political fallout that would have buried lesser mortals. The likeability was not accidental, it was carefully cultivated. In order to contrast his party with that of the single-family DNA of the Congress, he allowed a significant number of leaders to flourish and develop their own identities within the party. While the Congress maintained an intricate network of favored and blacklisted journalists, Vajpayee had an open-door relation with the media, even those he knew were in the pocket of the Congress, because he always favored making a friend over deepening an enmity, and for that he gave access, the only currency accepted in Lutyens.

It was a rare gift, the ability to work in a deeply divisive environment with cut-throats in your own party and outside, and yet somehow not take it personal, to do what you wanted and yet not be judged too harshly for doing so.

Not too many politicians can do that.

Advani couldn’t. He inherited Vajpayee’s legacy, but then he tried to mimic Vajpayee, with terrible results, like a heavy metal fan trying to pass off for a Pankaj Udhas devotee. From hardline Hindu hawk to “Jinnah was a good person”, there was so much brand dilution and overall lack of vision that the very identity of the party came under threat. Advani wasn’t helped by those that had been groomed by Vajpayee to be the next generation of BJP leaders, middling project managers suddenly given responsibility for country-wide sales and being found out of depth in their new responsibilities.

For that matter, neither can Modi be Vajpayee. And he does not want to.

For Modi, politics is personal. And he chooses to embrace the fact that he is not going to be liked, for he knows that “they” will never accept him as part of “them”. He won’t ever be able to be a charmer like Vajpayee, with a clever turn of poetic phrase or a significantly ambiguous pause and he is smart enough not to even try.  The fundamental appeal of Modi to his base is his unyielding lack of Vajpayiety, he isn’t going to reach across the aisle, he is not going to try to bend backwards to mollify journalists who once scoffed at him but now run after him for access, he is not going to give consolation ministerships to the disgruntled old guard no matter how much they plead or sabotage, he is not going to let bygones be bygones, he is not going to wear the cap, he is not going to hug the Gandhis.

It’s not just Modi, the truth is that no Indian politician can become the next Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The nation has changed too much for that.

The day of the poet-politician is over.

 

 

 

The Last Of the Communists

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I had met Somnath Chatterjee a long time ago. My grandfather, who was one of the founders of CPIM in Birbhum district and a freedom fighter who served time in the Andamans, had been admitted to hospital with serious complications and Somnath Chatterjee, who represented Bolpur in Birbhum district, had come to pay his respects. He had no posse or hangers-on around, even though he was a VIP and the CPIM’s main man in Delhi, and he carried lightly his importance.

Somnath Chatterjee, who passed away recently, was an old world politician in the true sense of the term. While I am sure he made compromises, as any politician does, and anyone who claims they dont is Kejriwalling, he was also one who stood by principles, and nowhere was this more heroically evident than his stance during the Indo-US nuclear deal. which led to his expulsion and subsequent humiliation by the brutish partisan stooges who call the shots in the CPM today, the Karats and the Yechurys. If there was any problem with Somnath Chatterjee was that he was too patrician, too gentle, and his brand of old-world oratory could be disrupted, as it was once, by a then-unknown rabble-rouser, who aided by a massive sympathy wave and her own ability to speak the tongue of the masses, handed Somnath Chatterjee his only defeat in a long career.

One Mamata Banerjee.

And with that I suppose goes smaller as it trends towards extinction. The old-world Bengali intellectual Marxist. Unlike many of their millennial equivalents, they were consistent in their world views, if they considered religion to be the opium of the masses, they applied it to all, and not just to a few, they called out bigotry in every religion, with of course the exception of Marxism, which they never realized was a religion in itself. They engaged their opponents in debate, they were personally honest and upright, bar the odd study tour to New York or seminar at Taj Bengal on poverty or the free drinkie at the US Embassy before the anti-imperialism rally at the Brigade Parade grounds. And they were all universally well-read and erudite and intellectually curious. Agree with them or not, and I never did, they did not sway with the breeze, their beliefs and their principles were non-negotiable. Many of them actually became disillusioned over the years with the party that carried Communist in its title, of the self-serving faux-Communist that Jyoti Basu morphed into, lightweights with inordinate influence like Anil Biswas, and the Yechuries and Karats who took over the party, mediocre soldiers-of-fortune out for opportunities, subsisting like on the scraps that the Congress threw them and then beating hard with their beaks in the hope for more.

Yet they carried on, as Somnath Chatterjee did, maintaining fealty to a set of personal principles their party had moved away from.

You may find these fiery old boys still, black framed spectacles with glasses like the bottom of a bottle, reed thin emaciated, sitting on broken wooden chairs framed by dusty bookshelves with ancient tomes, yellow with age, phantom soldiers of a battle that has been lost, guarding the burning embers of an ideological castle that history has razed to the ground, steadfastly refusing to accept the inevitable.

You will find them. But not for long.

Because most of them, the opportunists and the realists, have found their peace with Mamata Banerjee, while the ideologically ossified remain like Somnath Chatterjee, in perpetual exile, Communists without a party, bitter to the point that Somnath Chatterjee’s family rejected the CPIM’s offer to give him a party farewell.

Marxism will survive, under a new name, under new management and with some aggressive mutations, morphed into the slanted, discriminate and strategic  “progressiveness” (please note the inverted commas) one that appropriates Marxist vocabulary to wage a partisan war against certain designated groups  and here the contrast between them and classical Marxists who were equal opportunities offenders is the most stark. And yet their current followers hesitate, with some exceptions, to self-declare as Marxists perhaps in order to spare themselves of having to defend the calumny of a cultural revolution or the killing fields of Cambodia or the economic pillaging of Bengal.

The “progressives” (please not the inverted commas) will survive, and flourish, enabled by their overwhelming control of platforms of mass reach: print and television and higher education, and their convenient disavowal of any responsibility for the radiation fallout of every Marxist implementation.

Just some of the old guard will be here no more. And I personally will miss them. The people.  Not so much their ideals.

All Satyajit Rays In 5 Words Each

Inspired by the Academy’s “Describe a movie in 5 words”, here are all the Satyajit Rays.

In 5 words.

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 Sister dies. Boy leaves village.

 

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Boy in city. Mother dies.

 

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Jaded clerk finds philosopher’ stone.

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Zamindar throws his last soirée.

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Boy loses girl, finds son.

 

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Woman believes she is God.

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Little girl tries to belong.

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Rich lady loves her jewelry.

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Girl grows to love geek.

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Family spends day in Darjeeling.

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Cab driver looks for redemption.

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Husband and wife lose jobs.

 

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Lonely wife falls in love.

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Godman cannot really cause sunrise.

 

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 Cowardly man regrets breaking up.

 

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Superstar is interviewed in train.

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Truth about murders is revealed.

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War is stopped through song.

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Friends find themselves in jungle.

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Man loses temper during interview.

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Corporate climber loses his soul.

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Famine destroys men and women.

 

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 Doctor makes a spelling mistake.

 

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In business souls are sold.

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Self-absorbed men quietly play chess.

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 Was Ganesha idol actually stolen?

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Tyrant is deposed through song.

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Boy discovers end of childhood.

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Upper caste priest loses privilege.

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Wife realizes the world outside.

 

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Evil men pollute the water.

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Old man discovers black money.

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Stranger claims to be uncle.

Imran Khan As We Didn’t Know Him

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For those of us who grew up at a time when Advani was seen as a future Prime Minister and Marc Zuber as a possible Bollywood-to-Hollywood break out star, Imran Khan was an enigma.

We knew he was very popular with Bollywood film ladies.  We knew his posters adored the walls of many a schoolgirl. We knew he used Cinthol. We knew he had Brooke Bond tea and he sipped Pepsi. We knew he had a lot of sex. We knew he played for Sussex. We knew he was very difficult to get out when he was batting, even more so if the umpires were Pakistanis. We knew he ended the career of Gundappa Viswanath. On some days, we knew he was practically unplayable. We knew he spoke little, and when he did, he did with a clipped British accent, and he pronounced Atul Bedade as Atul Bedaad. We knew he was aloof, in a patrician way, as if no one on this world deserved anything more from him than a condescending smirk. We knew he was born to lead, and even in the 92 World Cup when he himself did little of note (except play some really slow innings), he had became the center of all attention, and there was nothing even remotely unfair about that, because taking credit for the work of others, why that was his birthright. Ruling was his birthright, we knew that, because he was a Greek God in human form, and no man could hold his gaze, for he drank the elixir of mardaangi, and he sweated raw testosterone.

We knew all that. But not much else.

It took us many years, decades actually, to break the code. And all of that is due to the pathbreaking book written by his second official and now estranged wife, Reham Khan, in her book titled Reham Khan.

This is a brilliant book, for it humanizes the great Imran Khan, casting our idol in our very own image. It beats away at the marble and brings out the man inside.

And what a man he is.

He is obsessed about the electric bill, throws tantrums if he finds the AC on, complains about his sisters and every little thing, he is petty, he is insensitive, he is self-absorbed, he inswings and outswings, he loves recounting his romantic conquests to his wife, he loves gossiping about others including his past wives, he is violently jealous of everyone, he sexts to random women,  he is naam baare aur darshan chote when it comes to performance and package, he likes to get freebies, he has sown his seeds around, and he likes gardening.

Did I forget anything?

Oh yes. He massages his privates with black lentil.

Reham Khan is a great narrator too. When not taking great pains to show that she is a more devout Muslim than Imran Khan,  she repeats how disappointed she was with Imran’s continuous carping about his political contemporaries, his constant gossiping and innuendo, his absolute lack of respect for the privacy of his previous wife, and then, she goes and relays every detail of every gossip in the book.

Now, judge me, but this is the kind of stuff I like, like an old India-Pakistan game, not pretty, but always unforgettable.

A man becomes a man only when he is revealed in his fullness. And as Imran Khan becomes set to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the legacy of “Reham Khan” will be that perhaps the world know more about him than it knows about any world leader.

And if you still feel that “daal mein kuch kaala hai“, then I think you and Imran Khan will get along just fine.