Arnab Ray's Blog, page 8

Of Azhar and Sanju and Hagiographies

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I get it. I really get it. Now stop beating me over the head with that.

Azhar never fixed matches. Or rather, as the film Azhar tells us, he pretended to fix matches so that he could catch the real match fixers.

And Sanjay Dutt was never a terrorist.

And that car was self-driven.

I have often wondered why some of our flawed heroes, and let us all agree, Bhakts and Sickulars, that Azhar and Sanjay Dutt are as flawed as they come, have this obsessive need to establish that they are innocent.

Whether they got away lightly or took more than their share of punishment, the truth is that they have done their time. They don’t need to sway public opinion just to get a good verdict.

Sure, Azhar might have a political career and Sanjay Dutt may be contemplating embarking on one, given that his salad days of flexing muscles and Ey Shivani-ing is almost all but over, and that might seem to be reason enough to go all heavy with the PR.

But I don’t think that is the reason “Azhar” exists. Or “Sanju”.

They exist because the enormous egos that have their names in the titles of the films actually, really, deeply want you to believe they are good people.

And only when you do, only then, can they themselves believe they are.

In a way this is human nature. Our sense of identity is affected by the way our environment perceives us, we fish for Likes and RTs on social media, because we are never really happy till people know we are, and we get off on envy too, which is why we post about our checkins to First Class lounges and share pictures of our vacation in the Bahamas. We feel obligated, in this age of “always-on” social media, to project an aura of success, because if there is anything that amplifies the misery of failure it is when people are made aware of that failure.

Of course the richer and more famous you get, the less you need to worry about bills and project deadlines, and more time you have to obsess about how others perceive you.

So Amitabh Bachchan, pretty much the greatest superstar of Hindi movies ever and who you would think should be above and beyond this all, has a public meltdown on Twitter because they removed some of his followers, it affected his state of well-being so deeply.

And then there is Donald Trump. Here is the most powerful man in the world, who watches only news programs that praise him, and hires sycophants and removes them the moment they do something he thinks is less than loyal, and whose single point of concern, and this has been confirmed by multiple sources, is what the headline are saying about him. Trump’s actions are driven  by an obsessive need for continuous validation of his awesomeness, and you would have thought being a President and being surrounded by yes-men and women would have satiated that drive but no. Here is a grown man, the President of a country, who has to repeat in speech after speech “ I am very smart”, “I am very rich”, “I am very successful”, “I beat Hillary Clinton”, and “More people came to my inauguration than they did for Obama’s”, the last being a demonstrable lie,   but he says it because it makes him happy, and when you are the President of the USA with the nuclear button, even the truth trembles.

Azhar and Sanjay Dutt are not Donald Trumps. To feel better about themselves, they can only get hagiographies made.

Of course, in order to make their audience believe the central premise “I did not fix matches” and “I am not a terrorist”, the heroes have to fess up to lesser crimes. Otherwise how will they establish their fundamental honesty, their desire to “say it as it happened”?

In Azhar, the lesser crime is being disloyal to his first wife. Even here, the film tries its best to maintain Azhar’s halo, and in trying to do so, it degenerates into unintentional hilarity. [Link]

There is a scene in Azhar where Azhar has gone to watch a film with Naureen, his first wife. As Nargis Fakhri playing Sangeeta comes onto screen, her lips swollen like she walked into an Ambrose bouncer, it is Naureen who almost gets aroused, commenting to Azhar “kya khoobsoorat aankhein hai uski” and for those who have grown up in Bollywood,  we know that”aankhein”is often an euphemism for some other components of a woman’s body. While wife getting turned on by another woman is a long-standing fantasy among Indian men, and by this time you should be thinking of Khulbhushan Kharbanda’s spontaneous eruption in front of bottles of “Crush”  after stumbling upon his wife Shabana Azmi writing sensuously with Nandita Das in Fire, Azhar is immensely distraught by the licentiousness of the dance, and looks uncomfortably from side to side, like he did when the ball was bouncing near his head on fast tracks.

Yes that’s how innocent and honorable Azhar is, in his approved eponymous hagiography. Why did he take money from bookies? So that he bankrupts them, and prevents them from offering the same money to other players. Yes. You read that right. That’s the final reveal. Why was his career finished? Because some player suspiciously called “Manoj”, himself suspect in his loyalties, resented Azhar being the boss, and carried a grudge of having been seen nude in the dressing room. Why the extramarital affair? Because the first wife was unavailable, and how do we know that? Azhar sits down to a dinner with Naureen, asks her about the biriyani, she says “it’s good”, and Azhar asks “What about it is good? The rice? The spices? The flavor?” and Naureen says “It’s all good”, and Azhar loses his cool because no husband likes a wife who can’t deconstruct biriyani and the next thing you know he is in the arms of his mistress. Not convinced that he is an amazing person? Here is more. Azhar wants to tell his wife the marriage is over, but there are people at the house, so what can the poor man do except announce it on TV, leaving his wife not just heartbroken but also embarrassed?

Because you see Azhar did nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing. Everyone around him was bad, a resentful “Manoj”, a philandering “Ravi”, a difficult “Navjot”. And if throwing mud at everyone else in order to make him look good isn’t bad enough, there are bare-faced lies. Matches Azhar was accused of having fixed, are mixed with other matches, like the one in Bangalore where he got a bad decision, so that unless you lived through the Azhar era or read Cricinfo while others go to Pornhub, you would not realize that the game that started was not the one that finished.

 

Now Sanjay Dutt is no Azhar. He is way more influential, the archetype of Bollywood royalty, and for him nothing but the best will do.

So he gets Rajkumar Hirani, the one Bollywood director who has never made a flop film, and who understands, perhaps more than anybody else, how to package a product. And he gets arguably the best actor of the new generation to play him.

So yes, there is the lesser crime angle here too—that Sanju was a drug-addict and a philanderer, but even here, this is not a genuine mea culpa. Sanjay Dutt took to drugs because he is a sensitive man. He bought arms because he was impulsive and because he loved his parents. He slept with women in the hundreds, but that was just to fill the hole in his heart. Sure, he made some questionable calls, but he has suffered for that. Sure, he displayed lack of judgement, but then he is a big affection-seeking man-baby, he didn’t mean any harm. Sure, you may have heard some bad things about him, but the media made it up to sell magazines. Any incident in his life that does not feed the narrative Hirani just doesn’t go there. In the same way he never went into the uncomfortable aspects of Gandhi-ism in the Munnabhai series, instead choosing to present an antiseptic happy-touchy-feely adaptation called Gandhigiri.

This is a way more sophisticated narrative than the one in Azhar, also because it lets you take whatever you want from it.

If you want to see it as the story of a misunderstood man, cursed by fate, who took a wrong turn in his life, and paid the price for it, you can do that.

If you want to see it as the story of the uber-macho man who lived a life that would be the envy of a rockstar, gun and drugs and booze and seedy places and luxurious living, and more women than anyone can reasonably be expected to remember, a life to aspire to rather than run from, well, nudge nudge wink wink, you can do that too.

Whatever it is, just remember, that one thing.

He didn’t do that.

 

 

 

 

 

On the Sadness of Moving

[image error] The first time I moved in my life was when I left Calcutta to come to the US to do my PhD, having spent almost all of my life in the same house in the same city. I know I should have been sad, leaving home and family, but I was not . I was excited, deliriously so, for I was looking forward to staying on my own, of not having to answer to a million watchful eyes, of breaking free of a strait jacketed Bengali middle class upbringing, and at the very least, for not having to hide my Pamela Anderson pictures in the C-prog-files directory renamed as P0001.dat.

Now almost twenty years later, I am aware of what I lost that day I stepped onto the British Airways flight. I lost my friends, sure we would meet again off and on and talk, but friendship comes in a context and once that is gone, histories diverge, and all you have are strangers with familiar names and weird forwards on Whatsapp. I also lost my connection with much of what had made me, Bedwin biriyani and mahabprabhu mistanna bhandar and cricket on the streets on bandh days (BBC or Big Bandh cricket), and they all changed too, without me in them, leaving behind husks of what once was known.

I have moved a lot since then, after my PhD to Detroit and then to Maryland and I was in my late 20s and never in all this did I feel a sense of loss, for I was too busy moving ahead, too preoccupied with the next big thing: my first job, my first non-shared place of residence, my first car that wasn’t second hand.

But as thirties moved into the forties, you change. You realize that defining happiness through the prism of attaining the next big thing is not only damned by definition but also doomed by reality, at least in my case, since I fail way more often than I succeed. Faced with the possibility of a permanent affliction of middle aged angst, I have come to recast happiness as the maintenance of familiarity, the comfort of routine, of shopping at the same place, knowing which aisle the produce is, the same drive every day, of familiar faces at work and familiar responsibilities, of an inoffensive social circle and anodyne conversations. I have detached from individuals, for people betray and change and move on, but I connect to the collective, because places are not as fickle, and change slowly and even when they do, not without reason.

Which is why the disruption of a move is unsettling,  being uprooted is to me now like the first few minutes of Up and the last few of Coco. Seeing my daughter embracing her friends and promising to keep in touch breaks my heart because I know it won’t happen, she will move on and so will they, not that she feels any deep sense of loss, that is the blessing of being but five, but I do, in a strange reflected way because it reminds me of what I have lost, the places I will never see again, the part of me I have left behind at various places, hopes and dreams and USB drives.

Of course I know I will settle down in a few months, for time heals broken hearts and amputated limbs and a move is but a trifle in comparison.

But for now, I miss them all, all the places that I used to live in now live in me, as I stumble forward in search of the quiet comfort of the predicted life.

IPL Epic XI 2018

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1. D Arcy Short: Not only won’t he score runs, he will run you out if you try to.

2. Gambhir: Seen better times, now fallen on dark days. Bengal’s jute factories.

3. Maxwell: Used to play well under UPA, now destroyed by intolerance.

4. Yuvraj Singh: Looked grumpy throughout, whether it be on the field or on the bench. There are bad times and then there are worse times and then there are times when Manoj Tiwary takes your place.

5. Stokes: When they called him today’s Flintoff, they weren’t off the mark. Ties with Flintoff and Lord Clive as the Britishers who took the most of Indian resources and gave the least in return.



6. Rinku Singh (captain): Bargain basement Raina, he was a standout performer on KKRs YouTube video channel.

7. Sarfaraz Khan: Rather than retain KL Rahul, Bangalore chose to retain him. Every time he scored a four, he would look up to the sky and thank God, because for others what a fifty was was to him surviving a ball. Since he wasn’t doing too much running in the field, also our keeper.

8. Stuart Binny: When he played for KKR, Rohan Gavaskar would not bowl and bat after the bowlers. That and being the son of a better cricketer, there was much of Rohan in Binny.

9. Washington Sundar: Two words. What happened?

10. Vinay Kumar: Vinay Kumar was about as threatening to batsmen as A K Hangal would have been in a MMA ring. Showed more aggression on Twitter than on the field.

11. Unadkat: As a return on investment, Unadkat was like stock in a pager company. Today.

12, 13th and 14th man:  Javon Philip Ramon Scantlebury-Searles: To give him his full name, this man is more than one man, enough to make Neil Nitin Mukesh suffer from an inferiority complex. While everyone else was playing IPL, this gentleman was playing CPL (where KKR owns a team), and that is the only explanation I can give for his presence, given that even when he was in the playing eleven, he hardly bowled or batted.

Coach: Shane Warne.  Rivaling Kejriwal for apologizing (he apologized to the fans for losing to CSK), and then rivaling Kejriwal for throwing shade at his opponents (he called Dinesh Kartik annoying), the great leg spinner was better with his tweets than with his mentoring.

 

Goodbye ABDV

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Sitting in the middle benches where the chemistry teacher does not look, as he drones on like the ancient fan overhead , on the arcane art of balancing equations, and sweat drips down the side of his forehead, you look outside, through the window at the burnt sky, and imagine.

You imagine cricket. You imagine hitting sixes of the kind that only a young boys mind may think of, packed houses calling out your name, you imagine swiveling, dancing out, hooking, pulling, playing the game with the boring parts rubbed out.

ABDV lived that imagination. The kind of batting that should not be and yet was, domination of not only of the full 360 degree of scoring, but also of the full 360 of batting, equally at ease scoring 90 off 45 balls and 45 off 90 overs, equally comfortable at Cuttack and Perth, subtle one moment and the beast the next.

Was he the greatest all game batsman of the modern era? I don’t know but I do know he was the nicest, he was not only the one that you wanted to be, but the one that you should be, who played the game the way it should be played, hard but without rancor, confident yet without arrogance.

Goodnight ABDV. Goodbye old summer dreams.

Avengers Infinity War—the Review

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[Minor spoilers]

So it seems that Amitabh Bachchan took out time from counting his Twitter followers to watch “Avengers: Infinity War” and he came away puzzled, as “tajub hai” as Thanos would have been had he stumbled upon Ajooba.

Of all the things you can blame Big B for, be it a relentless desire for validation through social-media or his obsessive following up on unanswered communication or him endorsing every product under the sun, being bewildered by the latest Avengers film is not one of them. Avengers Infinity Wars is a culmination of eighteen films of universe building, and to be asked to make sense of this off-the-bat is like being dropped, without context, into the final episodes of “Pavitra Rishtaa… Tere Mere Mann Ka”, and trying to make out why mothers look younger than daughters, how many characters are being played by the same actor, who exactly is Archana and what history does she have with Manav.

For Avengers Infinity War is truly epic, and I say it being infinitely aware of how overused this word is, not just in terms of its “”Mera Naam Joker” running time, but in terms of how it plays out, it is sufficiently familiar in that those invested in the world get what they want. and yet surprising enough that the last twenty minutes leave you gasping for breath, and wondrously, and I cannot believe I am saying this for a Marvel franchise product, moved.

This is a stupendous feat. Because with Marvel, you are not just dealing with stories and characters. No, that would be way too prosaic. You are working through lawsuits, rights disputes, contracts,  focus groups, studio executives, merchandizing, branding, comic book continuity, retcons, spinoff TV series, new sub-franchises, reboots, and that something this good comes out from the ceaseless whirring of the Infinity Stones of uber-capitalism is, for the want of a better word, a marvel of product engineering.

To truly appreciate the scale of what Marvel pulled off, it is instructive to look at how others, equally smart producers of infinite revenue machines, got it wrong.

Exhibit one. Transformers. A mash of CGI fighting with another mash of CGI.  No emotional investment, no distinct characters, poor acting, sophomoric script, predictable endings, in short, cinematic turdball, the Rinku Singh of popcorn entertainment.

Exhibit two. Star Wars. Better than Transformers, but that is like saying a politician is more honest than Laloo Yadav. While some missteps are but natural in such grand cross-film narrative building, where it went off the rails, especially in the Last Jedi, was that it did not give the audience what they expected, leaving at least a substantial portion of the fan-base, feeling cheated. Familiarity is the hallmark of a franchise product, when you go to McDonalds and order fries you expect them to taste like how you remember them to taste, and if instead the server gives you sushi and then says, “But this is gourmet !”  you are still going to feel like you got played. Now personally I liked the ending of the Last Jedi, the conflict between dogma and humanity appeals to the aantel in me, but that’s not why people go to see a Star Wars movie, try explaining that to your seven year old, why Yoda is setting fire to the Jedi canon, or how Skywalker is a tortured soul going through a crisis of faith, and you will realize why the Star Wars franchise just cut off its own legs with a double edged lightsaber.

Exhibit three. DC. Like the CPM in Bengal now, an unmitigated disaster. Like the CPM, they had it good once. They wanted stand-alone movies, so they got one of the world’s best directors on their payroll, a director committed not to the world of comics, as Joss Whedon was, but to good cinema. And good cinema is what Nolan made, dark, deep, angsty cult classics, at least the first two Batman films, where the superhero trope was used to explore the nature of evil, and he was spectacularly successful in what he set out to do. Spinning off the DC universe though was not his brief.

But then Marvel happened. No deep rumination on the nature of chaos or of existence, they went for color, Hulk Smash, and flying shields, red skulls, thunderous hammers, and a structure that was built like a TV series, except that every episode was a major motion picture. The money flowed in, and DC, like the man whose neighbor just bought a color TV, said “We want that”. People went to work. But as anyone who has ever built a significant software product knows, trying to add features that the core architecture was not designed for is a path to the darkest recesses of hell. What makes it worse are impossible project deadlines.  What took Marvel eighteen films to get to, DC tried to get it in four or five. They took the darkness of Nolan and transformed into darkly lit scenes, leading to the coup de grace that was last summer’s Justice League, a hot mess that Joss Whedon was finally called in to save,  but not even he could pull it off given the advanced state of putrefaction.

And yet when you think of it, in Justice League, we got pretty much the same story as Infinity War, a cosmic villain bent on universe destruction, out to possess certain macguffins, and a group of superheroes, with deep-rooted trust issues, uniting to stop them.

But that is exactly where the similarity ends.

Because Justice League, despite the superficial similarity, is pretty much everything that Infinity Wars is not, in the way Harman Baweja is somewhat like Hrithik Roshan but not really.

For one, audience connect. By the time we get to Infinity Wars, most of the major characters have their own dedicated film, some like Iron Man and Captain America and Spiderman have had multiple, and even the minor ones like Vision and Scarlett Witch have been around for years. That is why the audience cares as to what happens to them. In Justice League, most of the League members like Cyborg, Aqua Man and even Flash, yes Flash, get barely three minutes of exposition, which is why when the big bad Steppenwolf shows up, with his band of mosquitoes straight out of the swamps of Barrackpore, you don’t care if the band of superheroes get obliterated, develop malaria, or end up joining the Aam Aadmi Party. You don’t care, unless you grew up reading DC comics that is, but the whole point of the franchise is to extend the universe beyond its traditional consumers, isnt it?

Which brings me to the biggest dud of Justice League. Steppenwolf. He is no Joker or Penguin or Luthor, with name-recall, not even Brainiac or Darkseid, far less the Anti Monitor. DC does nothing to build his menace up in the previous franchise entries, and the first time we encounter him is in Justice League. What is his problem? Who knows? Do we care for him? Of course, we do, in the same way we care for a bunch of triangles being rendered through a graphics card.

This is where, I believe, Infinity War makes its master move. It fixes one of the biggest problems in the Marvel cinematic myth, that it never really, in not one of its eighteen movies, has managed to create a compelling villain.  Without Thanos, Infinity Wars falls, and Marvel knows that, which is why they give him a hell of an arc. He is not a CGI Blue Hulk, but a fully realized character, not just a genocidal maniac of epic galactic strength but also one who is capable of emotion, and it is this dichotomy that establishes his humanity, giving the conflict the kind of emotional resonance that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve. Great story-telling is everywhere in Infinity War, nowhere more so than in the last act, when even though you know, in the way you know that Rahul Gandhi will be elected Congress president, that nothing of great permanence will happen to superheroes, especially those to be played by superstars who have signed three-movie contacts,  you still feel sucker punched after it is all over.

A winner. Through and through.

Delete Facebook Not

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A few days ago, I came across a picture courtesy NDTV,  of a PETA protest somewhere in a metropolis of privilege, where we have a tiger carrying a sign that says “eating meat contributes to species extinction”. Before I could wrap my head around the irony of that image, I see, floating on my facebook news feed, #DeleteFacebook, yes on my Facebook feed, people using Facebook asking people to not use Facebook, and suddenly there is too much iron in my life.

Now of course all this talk of boycotting Facebook comes from the whole Cambridge Analytica revelations, CA being a data analytics company that allegedly “illegitimately” used data scraped off from Facebook users to micro-target key demographics in the US elections,

I am sorry, but what part of the recent “scandal” about Cambridge Analytica is the scandal? That Facebook sells your data? I am sorry, but have you not heard of the first commandment of modern business—that if you do not pay for a product, you are the product?

Who do you think pays for Facebook’s valuation, their stock prices, and the salary of that friend you are jealous about because he works in Facebook?

You ! Your data, your preferences. That is where Facebook’s core value proposition is, the ability to provide “hooks” for analytics engines, of course if you cross Facebook’s palms with silver.

Surely, you cannot expect them to provide you a platform for sharing your brain-droppings, totally gratis, now do you?

This is Facebook we are talking about. Not NREGA.

But privacy settings, you say. Privacy settings…yes so what? In case you havent figured this out, the privacy settings on Facebook exist to protect your data from other users, like your ex sneaking through your album, or those that havent paid the ticketmaster from getting a free “dekho”.

Privacy settings, and repeat after me, do not exist to protect you from Facebook. I know Facebook says otherwise, but bear with me.

And here is the thing. If you really cared for privacy of your opinions, you would not be on Facebook in the first place, desperately fishing for Likes and Shares. As a matter of fact, the reason why you are on social media is because you want the publicity, for what you think, for how happy your life is, which airport lounge you are currently checked in to, because you want your cousin to know you are flying business, and for people to know what political figure in history are you, even though that questionnaire you went through is pretty plainly eliciting your politics, in an analysis-friendly way.

Okay but personal data? You don’t really care for that either. You will pretty happily part with your address, phone number, email and the circumference of the mole on your left shoulder, for a store loyalty card, platinum level please, that promises 5% discount on purchases above Rs 10,000 and parking validation. You will happily post your vacation pictures while you are on vacation, telling every burglar on social media that your house is currently unoccupied. Your shock and condemnation is only when you find people actually using that data, either by sending you customized “Buy this” or “Vote for this” or by breaking in to your house.

No, no, the problem is the way Cambridge Analytica used that data, to give us Donald Trump. Well first of all, welcome to the world of statistics. It used to be unsexy when I was growing up, Goongupta Das Gupta statistics book being even less popular than Poonam Dasgupta, but now with massive computational power, algorithm parallelization, and the rebranding of statistics as “Big Data”, this is all back in fashion, and Cambridge Analytica is just one in a long line of companies which are selling analytics services,  and there really is nothing much different between selling you Cheetos and selling you a guy who looks like Cheetos.

And here is the bigger thing. It is not even clear that such microtargeting works, in a statistically significant way, in the field of political science, in this specific case whether Trump or whoever else hired CA, *actually* obtained any insights from their analytics that they would not have obtained elsewhere, for example through voter lists or door to door canvassing. There is a lot of literature, written by academics in history and political science,  immensely skeptical of the ability of such analytics to find “Oh my God I never thought of that before” insights when it comes to political behavior. By thinking of the quants at Cambridge Analytica as voodoo doctors who can alter elections by changing a configuration file, the only narrative you end up strengthening is that of Cambridge Analytica itself, and when I said I was drowning in irony, I was not kidding, because every hate post about Cambridge Analytica is an advertisement for them, and their ilk, and every overstatement about the power of the data Facebook owns makes them stronger than they are.

So best of luck, #DeleteFacebook. And well done.

Now sensationalism in science reporting is not new, I mean without the sensation, you get research papers, and who reads those? But some of the moral indignation here stems from an insecurity in the mainstream corporate media, at the possibility of them losing their role as the primary influencer of customer behavior, both in terms of buying products and voting for candidates. What a nightmare would it be if a data owner (Facebook), a data analyzer (Cambridge Analytica) and a targeter (the guy selling the product) short-circuited them out of the business they have had for hundreds of years. Of course much of the fear is unfounded, which is why Fox News and Republic TV and The Wire and the Hindu still exist, but not all of it is blind panic, because change has already started happening, as media platforms, both generic (e.g. Facebook) or specific (e.g. Breitbart) provide greater targeting capabilities than conventional TV or pageviews, not that we are, I repeat, in the mind-control apocalypse that many claim we already are in. And won’t be in, any time soon.

Putting it all together, targetting-at-scale is not black magic, and companies like Cambridge Analytica havent suddenly gotten their hands on The Half Blood Prince’s secret spell book, no matter how much they would like you to believe they have. Now intelligence that alters elections may still be provided through hacked emails, and other privileged communications, but now we are moving away from the supposed civilizational crisis posed by Big Data, machine learning or Facebook into the domain of profiting from pure criminal activity, which is as old as humankind itself.

So, please let us not panic, let us not delete Facebook, and let us obey the signs in the picture at the top, and vow not to eat zebra, tiger or giraffe meat.

Please.

Darkest Hour at the Oscars

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Whether for good or bad, the Oscars have, over the last few years, become super political. What used to be a few jokes, a few reaction shots, a few fashion flaws, and gush talk about movies that people claim to have seen but really haven’t, has now become almost political theater, with issues of representation, racism, colonialism, police brutality, sexism, harassment, front and center in glittering marquee lights. Some may say that by moving away from being an anodyne apolitical platform, the Oscars have somehow recaptured its relevance, its mind space, that the Oscars are water cooler talk again, even by people who have never seen or will see the Shape of Water, a love story of a human and a fish, one you can see for free at any Bengali lunch.

But I digress.

Given how woke the Academy has become, their decision to recognize, with one of its premiere awards, “Darkest Hour”, a hagiography of British war-time Prime Minister and unapologetic South Asian killer Sir Winston Churchill, is beyond reprehensible. Maybe in the 80s and the 90s, when no one cared, I would not have batted an eyelid, but now, now given the widely tomtommed sensitivity on the part of the Academy to the recognition of marginalized narratives, the fact that the Committee chose to reward a movie that airbrushes Churchill’s role in the genocide of 2 million official (some say it is close to 4 million) in India and Bangladesh, just goes to show that not all marginalized are treated equal,  and that Churchill being the savior of Europe still gives his reputation the immunity from having to answer for his crimes in India.

So what exactly did Churchill do? The sad thing is not many in India know this, far less those outside it. I will spare you the history lesson, but in brief, he made sure that all the food and clothes produced in Bengal  got sent away to feed and clothe European soldiers during World War II (yes the same war for which “Darkest Hour” presents him as the messiah) leaving the natives to starve. If that was not bad enough, he actively prevented humanitarian aid from reaching Bengal once millions had started dying. This was as much due to his desire to scorch-earth Bengal before it fell to the Japanese (that never ultimately happened) as well as the fact that he hated brown-skinned Indians, and considered them sub-human.

This is not conjecture. This is documented.

Churchill’s only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet. (Tharoor, Time magazine)

“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.” (Tharoor, Time Magazine)

The prime minister believed that Indians were the next worst people in the world after the Germans. Their treachery had been plain in the Quit India movement. The Germans he was prepared to bomb into the ground. The Indians would starve to death as a result of their own folly and viciousness.(Harper and Bayley, Forgotten Armies: Brittan’s Asian Empire and War with Japan)

There is very little, once you think about it, to distinguish Churchill and Hitler in this respect. Both suffered from intense pathological hatred of certain races, and both put into places policies whose ultimate result was mass genocide. Now imagine Hollywood recognizing a movie about Hitler that just shows him as a Bohemian artist in Austria, and just stops there. That wouldnt happen, but still, might fly because  it’s not as if something is being hidden, pretty much everyone knows what Hitler did.

The problem is very few know the same about Churchill.

Or at the very least the guy winning the Best Actor playing Hitler would not have saluted Hitler, in the way Oldman saluted Sir Winston Churchill in his Oscar acceptance speech.

I think we can all at least agree on that.

Which brings me back to “Darkest Hour”. What it really is is the latest installment of the colonial project to cast Churchill, the high priest of colonialism, as a savior of freedom, the man who stood between Europe and tyranny. In order to avoid diluting the narrative, it is imperative on the part of the apologists and the standard-bearers to keep hidden the small matter of  4 million people dying through starvation so that Hitler could be fought.

I would hide it too myself. After all, the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” rhetoric doesn’t sound all that inspiring once you realize that those body fluids were extracted from little children lying dead in the gutters of Calcutta, from men and women fighting with dogs for scraps of rotten food, from zombie like armies of the unfed walking the streets chanting in unison “Phyan chai” (Some water of rice please).

Lest I be misunderstood, my problem isn’t in making a film on Churchill.

My problem is telling only part of the story. My problem is showing Churchill as a knight in shining armor.

Now I understand that a European white life was “more” than non-white Asian and African lives was a fairly common and accepted sentiment for the times, and I am not one to judge people of old by the standards of today. Charles Dickens thought pretty much the same about Indians (“I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India …. I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested … proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth”). But he just thought, he was never in a position to do anything.

Churchill was. That deserves mention. That truth deserves consideration in the myth that is being propagated.

The counter-argument to this would be that the Oscars are recognizing excellence in cinema, and that Oldman’s performance as Churchill is what is being recognized, not Churchill per se. That I would have accepted if this was ten years ago, because the Academy was then an equal opportunities offender. Now it is not. Now the powerplayers in Hollywood and the Academy are rebranding cinema, the most impactful of all popular art forms, and with it the definition of excellence. A film is evaluated not just by the standards of acting and cinematography and all the stuff you thought you understood in film studies, but also critically by the standards of representation, justice, how well they represent narratives of the marginalized, in how they change opinion, in how they influence the creation of a so-called better world.

Given that this is now the standard, and I am not getting into whether it should be, there is no excuse for ” Darkest Hour” to make the cut. It retreads the same old colonial Eurocentric narrative,  anything that happens in Europe is significant, anything that happens in the other continents is not,  and that lives lost elsewhere, even four million of them, in the pursuit of saving Europe, should not be considered worthy enough to sully the heroism of Sir Winston Churchill.

Disappointing.

 

 

Pari–The Review

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I really wanted to like Pari. Any Hindi movie of the horror genre that does not have Emran Hashmi’s pout, random Miss Universe/World contest winners fluttering eyelids while strategically covered by satin sheets, a song by Atif Aslam or Arijit Singh and then its remix, the word Bhatt associated with any part of it, a What Lies Beneath rip off, and Jackie Shroff playing evil girl child Samarah from the Ring ( yes that happened) deserves my support. Add to it a reigning A lister venturing into a non phemily genre, a Kolkata setting, a hero named Arnab,  a heroine named Ruksana ( name of the protagonist of the Mahabharata Murders) and  Ritabhari playing the Barrackpore Bombshell and you can understand how desperately I wanted to love it.

And yet Pari just did not work for me. It just did not.

Pari is very atmospheric, gets its pacing right, and most of the jump scares land well. But somehow, and I am going to charitably put it down to the commercial pressure to keep things  “light”, it ends with a fizzle. I like my horror dark and bloody, but while Pari does give a good bit of blood, the promise of darkness evaporates like an Amit Shah jumla.

Maybe again it is just me but I want a good movie or book to go beyond the mechanics of the narrative and say something about the horror of the human condition. That to me is the real horror. I have tried, and how successful I have been I cannot say, to end both the Mine as well as the Mahabharata Murders with this bleakness, and this is what I have to come expect from the horror I consume. A last shattering blow to the solar plexus.

And yet Pari pulls its punches (and I am trying to be vague to not give spoilers) when it really matters, generating into maudlin sentimentality at just the point at which it should have doubling down on the terror, leaving me, walking out of the theater, kind of cold, and not in a good way.

Ok cross that. There are some enduringly terrifying moments like the copious gulping down of rice, the egregious usage of Boroline, which to Bengalis is the second most effective solution to the problems of the world, the first being Communism, and the mangling of the pronunciation of my name not just by Anushka but also by the Bengali Ritabhari.

Aahrab. Aahrnab. Aahrnab.

Yes that did scare me. That I will accept.

Yeh Lamhe Yeh Pal Hum

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It doesn’t make sense, this feeling of loss.  It really doesn’t. I didn’t know the person, though God knows I tried, leafing through film glossies, and flicking away the strands of hair that found its way into its pages, at the barber shop, waiting for a haircut when it was most crowded.

But perhaps it does. Perhaps it does make sense. The sadness.

Because we do know our celebrities, or rather their projections,  the characters and the books and the matches they played,  because of the way they imprint themselves on our lives, our likes, on the very fabric of who we are and become.

So it is with Sridevi. So it is. Waiting in sweaty lines for “Sridebi-r peekchar”, jostling and shoving, protecting my wallet from the pickpockets and pushing forward. Of her cavorting in that blue sari in Mr India and me being overpowered by the first stirrings of feelings whose truth I would come to realize only later. Of the salt of tears at the end of Sadma. Of her clutching the picture and sensuously writhing into a snake in Nagina. Of me walking into half yearly exams, holding my clipboard and pencil box, strains of “Are you ready? Are you ready” from Nakabandi playing in my head. Of stepping into the teens, with my voice cracking, and pimples erupting, trying to scratch at the surface of the truth of love and loss in Chandni, and then slightly older, and considering myself much more mature and worldly-wise, of repeating that exercise in Lamhe, and coming out of the theater, as clueless but as immensely moved as before.

There will be time later to contemplate her legacy,  how she could seamlessly transition between comedy, sensuality and action, demure one second, leather whip dominant in another, smiling and winking this moment, and throwing kicks the next, elevating often middling material to pop-culture art,  how effortlessly she broke the fourth wall at a time when we didn’t even know what that was, of her being Govinda before Govinda became Govinda, dancing as much with her body as her face, of having the ability to blot out, time and time again, her male stars in a Bollywood that was and still mostly remains a vehicle for male machismo, out-Rajnikanting a movie that had Rajanikant, and out-Kamaling a movie that had Kamal Hassan.

There will be time later for all that intellectualizing. But for now, let us lean back and reflect on that which is gone.

The Chandni.

The Chaalbaaz.

The Lamhe.

And a bit of ourselves.

 

Valentine Day Post: The GreatBong 90s Songs Mixtape Side B

[Side A here]
Tu Chahat Hai

If Side A began with Rahul Roy so must Side B. That is the law.

According to legend, the Roy signed 47 films in just 11 days after Aashiqui (link), in the way a frog lays eggs, and so it was only natural that the 90s would be flooded with his tadpoles.

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One such Roy classic is Pyaar Ka Saaya. Pronounced by Bengalis as Pyar ka Shaaya (The Love Petticoat), was a rip off from “Ghost”, with Patrick Swayze replaced by Rahul Roy, Whoopie Goldberg by Amrita Singh, and Demi Moore by Sheeba. If Amish has popularized Shiva in the 2010s, Sheeba popularized Niramish (non-vegetarian) in the 1990s.  While I am fine with you judging me for it, I was a fan to the extent that I tolerated Ravi Behl in “Boyfriend” just for her, was possibly the only person in the world who saw “Hum Hai Kamaal Ke”, had the song “Main Naheen Kaheta” from Salman Khan’s Suryavangshi on a mixtape (okay I love the song just for the song) and went to the theater to see “Suraksha”.

But this song, “Tu Chahat Hai”, like the concept of “Chahat” is so much than the sum of its parts. Rahul Roy as the 90s Hairy Potter, as he shows an abundance of growth on his chest while doing pottery with Sheeba,  frames like the one above, the genius of the composition, as you can see, the smoothly romantic notes, and then of course the lady herself.

Sheeba.

I have and always shall be madam, your Pradhan Sheebak.

Honton Pe Bas Tera

From the second Kajol keeps the cup down and leans forward and then back, the explosions would begin in my head, back when I was young, and then when she snaps her fingers, all I would contemplate was the loneliness of my existence. This is perhaps the most sensual of 90s songs, because of how it builds up, slow and deliberate, with none of the “Tip Tip Barsa Paani” hyperactive prancing about, then flows to Saif Ali Khan taking off earrings with his mouth, and transitions to a subtle mellow sadness, especially the tune between the two antaras, sadness because the truth of the most perfect moment is that everything else after it will be, in comparison, a disappointment.

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And yes all you Priya Prakash Varrier fans. This is my wink.

This is my moment.

Maine Yeh Dil Tumko Diya

Jaan Tere Naam, starring Ronit Roy and what-Harman-Baweja-was-to-Hrithik-she-was-to-Madhuri Farheen is one of those quintessentially 90s albums, out of place in any other day and age, and the kind of music that would make millennials scratch their heads as to what is so intensely moving about all this. Jaan Tere Naam has many hit songs—“Yeh Aakha India Jaanta Hai”, very popular with “band parties” because Ronit Roy plays a band party boy here,  “Tum Lakh Chupaaye Pyar Magar”, “Rone Na Dijiyega”, ” Kal College Bandha Ho Jayega”, and the Kanhaiya theme song “Maana ke college mein padna chahiye, likhna chahiye, par Revolution ka bhi ek lecture hona chahiye” (Ok it was Romance ka bhi ek lecture).

But the one I still love to play, whenever I wade into my 90s world of nostalgia, is “Maine Yeh Dil Tumko Diya”.

That tune.

That place where “Dheere Dheere Se” was recorded.

And  “Tum bhi karo kuch faisla”, which reminds me, even now, of the decisions I have had to take in the 90s, Computer Science or Economics, PhD or MBA, to say what was in my heart or to stay quiet, as I came to many an uneasy crossroad in my life.

The lead couple did it too. Take decisions.

Ronit Roy went on to become one of the best actors working in Mumbai today.

Farheen quit films and married Manoj Prabhakar.

Ae Kash Ke Hum

The greatest Shahrukh film. Period.

The biggest risk SRK ever took was not to play the villain with the thumping lines, trembling lips and guaranteed audience sympathy, but to do, in the beginning of his career, the role of a shifty cowardly loser.

So here it is. To every lie. To every half-truth.

To all of you, who have done something less than honorable to get a half shot at love.

Here is your song.

Adayein Bhi Hain

If Maine Pyar Kiya gave us caps with “Friend” written on them,  Dil Hai Ki Manta Naheen made sailor caps the rage during that year’s Pujo.

That influential.

Lifted from “It Happened One Night”, this is a throwback to the days when Aamir Khan took himself a little less seriously, or at least that’s what we thought, and was not flooding China with “Made in Aamir” products.

There are three songs, I had to choose between: “Tu Pyar Hai Kisi Aur Ka”, the typical 90s situation of someone else getting the girl and extras dancing lock step in party while hero/heroine sings sad songs, and “Dil Tujpe Aa Gaya”, the typical 90s song that was added after the movie was released, to get people to watch it again.

And then this.

Why “Adayein Bhi Hain” won over the two is not just because it is a super song, but that it captures that other stock 90s trope, of telling a girl you like her, but using a non-existent third person to convey that little fact, so as to hedge against rejection.

I say 90s trope, not just a 90s movie trope.

Baaki, you figure out.

Tum To Dhokebaaz Ho

How can you have romance without two Yahoo chat windows open at the same time?

Or the 90s without Govinda?

That would be like the Congress party without some DNA from Nehru.

“Tum toh Dhokebaaz Ho” is classic Govinda-Dhawan. Colors of the kind you get only from color bar in a Sonodyne TV. Govinda dancing with his expressions. One shot cutting to another perfectly, in sync with the rhythm.

Memory isolation between two processes, context switching, multi tasking, busy waiting, redudancy—all here. And more.

This is Computer Science. In song.

I owe my living to this. I really do.

Paheli Baar Mile Hain

You could not go to a Puja pandal in 1991 without “Dekha Hai Paheli Baar” blaring from the “mic”, so ubiquitous was Saajan in my times. But it was not my favorite song from the film, not “Jiye toh jeeya kaise” nor “Mera dil bhi kitna paagal hai”, I found them a bit too maudlin and rather generic, and there are parts of “Tu shayar hai” and “Tumse milne ki tamanna hai” I love, but “Paheli Baar Mile Hai” is pretty much the package.

A song about serial monogamy with some overlap, this captures the spirit of Salman Khan in so many ways, and S P Balasubramanium as the voice of Bhai just gives it the poignancy needed to make this list.

That and the fact that this is a song I used to sing from memory.

Perhaps still can.

Yeh Dua Hai Meri Rab Se

From time to time, the playback singers of the 90s would come out from the back to the front. Anu Malik and Vinod Rathod in “Chupana Bhi Naheen Aata” from Baazigar. Kumar Sanu and Alka Yagnik in “Saapne Saajan Ke”, Lawrence D’Souza’s spiritual sequel to “Saajan”, which flopped badly, despite Rahul Roy’s animal magnetism.

This is the song for when, on the last day of high school, you slip in a note to that special person you have been wanting to say something to, and that person comes to you and says “Oh but I always thought of you as a friend”.

“Yeh dua hai mera rab se,

Tujhe doston main sab se,

Meri dosti pasand aaye.”

This song is for that time. This song is for those quiet tears.

Tera Bemar Mera Dil

This one.

Hot. Hot. Hot.

Why is Rohini Hattangadi breathing heavy? What exactly has she seen through the keyhole?

A much better take on the Sita-Geeta twin story than the original, this is Sridevi at her very best, so awesome that she out-Rajanikants Rajanikant.

But we are talking about the song. We have to. Else I will have to write about Shakti Kapoor and the magic that is Chaalbaaz.

This is the first song I start hearing on Friday evenings.

The very first.

Hum Jante Hai Tum

It is unfair to make a 90s love songs mix tape without the mafia. And no I am not talking about the Usha Uthup song Mamafia, from the movie Mafia.

Khilona is on my mind.

Visionary producer of the 90s, Mukesh Duggal, visionary because he produced Gopi Kishan (“Mera do do baap” and “SODA” from Gopi Kishan are two of 90s greatest Tshirt fronts) as well as Khilona, was gunned down right after this movie came out. The heroine, and this was her first and perhaps only major marquee film, on whom this rather dolorous song is picturized, is none other than the legendary Monica Bedi, later to become famous as the wife of mafia hitman, Abu Salem, accused to be the man behind the murder of Gulshan Kumar, the czar of T-series and the pioneer of the 90s music genre.

And of course there is Aditya Pancholi.

While the more famous song from Khilona is “Panditji panditji”, rumored to be playing on a loop in the walkman of Nehru-fan Ramchandra Guha from the 90s, there is nothing more soulfully appropriate than the tragic notes of “Hum jaante hai tum hume barbaad karoge” to capture the essence of the mafia era and the ultimate fate of the people associated with it all.

Deewana Main Tera Deewana

Originally, I thought I would have only one SRK song. In the interest of fairness.

But I would claim I still do.

Because this is pretty much only Sonali Bendre.

And how can you have lived through the 90s if you had not had a crush on her? Or on anyone who remotely, even remotely, looked like her?

A straight shoot-out between “Aankhon Main Base Ho Tum”, and “Deewana Main Tera Deewana”, this wins out, because this is more classically 90s in its arrangement,  has that little touch of melancholia which makes it perfect for rum-coke nostalgia, and perhaps most importantly, Kumar Sanu, who you would have figured out by now I am a huge fan of, at his absolute best.

Aap Ka Aana

Everything comes to an end.

Youth. Innocence. The 90s. This virtual cassette.

And all that is left is sadness.

For the decisions not taken, the songs not selected, the words not said, or not at the right time, the futures not lived.

So here it is. The last song.

From Kurukshetra, released in 2000.

“Aap Ka Aana”. Arguably Kejriwal’s favorite and one of the last songs of the 90s genre, the others all being from Dhadkan.

Why do I love it, love it enough to have it in a sequence in Sultan of Delhi Part 2: Resurrection?

Why do I?

I really don’t know. Nor does it really matter.

Because if there is anything that the 90s has taught us, it is that love cannot be rationalized.

Or explained.

It can only, and only be, lived.