Arnab Ray's Blog, page 9

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

1. Dheere Dheere Se

Aashiqui (1990) is the granddaddy of all 90s musicals. This one set the trend, bringing together a dream team of 90s romanticism, Kumar Sanu, Anuradha Paudwal, Gulshan Kumar, Nadeem-Shravan, and there was so much “luwe” here that one of the team (allegedly) took out a supari on another and then ran away to England, but then isnt that what happens to love anyways, once you start farting in bed together.

But I am getting ahead of myself here.

The Aashiqui album is like the Australian team of the late 90s, every song is a match-winner, but for me, the absolute Adam Gilchrist is “Dheere Dheere Se”. It edges out “Tu Meri Zindagi Hai” perhaps because of Rahul Roy’s speedos, but mostly because of the duality of the song—it is about as much as the chemistry between workout-bros Deepak Tijori and Rahul Roy as it is between the Roy and the Agarwal.

Things of course would never stay this pure. Under the pressure of my future, Anu Agarwal would be replaced in my mind by  Physics problems from an IIT coaching brand with the same last name. The Roy would go on to join Big Boss and later the party under Big Boss. Honey Singh, the Sauron of good music, would do to this song what the Taliban did to the Bamiyan Buddhas, and Shakti Kapoor’s daughter would reboot the Aashiqui franchise.

But for now, just listen, enjoy, and contemplate on what could have been.

2.  Tum Hi Hamari Manzil My Love

Yaara Dildara (1991) brought together another dream team of the 90s, Udit Narayan and Jatin Lalit, and while the film mostly sank without a trace, its music could not pass unnoticed. “Bin Tere Sanam” is the most famous song from this film, one that many have heard but don’t know which film it is from, but “Tum Hi Hamari” is my favorite of the two, by far, not just because it has Aasif Sheikh in a cowboy hat and carrying a rake, but because of that gentle drop of melancholia that soaks through, the one that hits home on rum-drenched evenings, the sadness of not getting to our “manzil”-s. Aasif Sheikh would go from hero roles to villain side-kick, mostly remembered for Karan Arjun, and then to TV, and Jatin Pandit, the Jatin of Jatin Lalit, would go from the heights of fame to entreating a half-interested crowd at Banga Sammelan Houston to get their cholesterol and BP tested, as a powerpoint presentation played behind him to remind the crowd of what he had done.

Seeing him that day brought a lump to my throat. As does this song.

3. Ho Jata Hai Kaise Pyaar

I know, I might be in a club of one, but for me, this IS the song of the 90s. Yalgaar is a legendary film, with Mukesh Khanna, of Bheesma and Shaktimaan fame, playing the father of Feroz Khan, a casting decision that rivals the twist at the end of Usual Suspects. The song that became famous from Yalgaar was “Aakhir Tumhe Aana Hai Zyada Der Laagegi” primarily because of Nagma’s sensuous writhings in a purple sari that would then go on to provide the uniform of Kolkata Knight Riders, but I have never found that to be particularly romantic, more a song for constipated mornings when you want to tell your gut that “you will come, I know, it is just taking some time.”

Not that I didn’t rewind the VCR from time to time when Nagma pranced on to the screen, that I will accept.

After all I am a Dada fan. What can I do?

What however went criminally un-noticed in Yalgaar was “Ho Jata Hai Kaise Pyar”. One reason for loving this song is Manisha Koirala, and what I want written on my gravestone, is that she once stood besides me bargaining for shoes, this was during the shoot of “Saudagaar” in Manali, but really it is the tune, oh this tune, the kind that makes Danny Morrison says “Put your dancing shoes on”, even for the world-weary tired traveler like me.

The dance steps from the lead are amazing, and no one remembers who his name is (IMDB tells me Vicky Arora), and there are other gems scattered throughout, one hand movement that stands out, the random friend of Manisha on whom the camera lingers for no good reason, and the fact that they would use exactly this same locale to shoot “Dheere dheere nazar laadne de” from Pehchaan.

Don’t judge me. This is the best.

4. Saat Samundar Paar

No song list of the times can be complete without at least one entry from Divya Bharti.

Divya Bharti. The Maryln Monroe of the 90s. Ethereally beautiful and tragically gone.

As a matter of fact, I could fill my mix tape with just Divya Bharti songs. The gentle pain of “Tujhe na dekhoon to Chain” from Rang. The beats of “Ho Abhi To Hui Jawaan” from Dil Aashna Hain. Anything from Dil Ka Kya Kasoor.

But then how can I not have “Saat Samundar Paar” from Vishwatma? How can I not? How can I not have a song whose lyrics contain “Tu upaar na aaya toh main khud he neeche aa gayee”, the meaning of which I would like to think I have not understood till now? How can I not have a song which forms such a vital part of a pivotal scene in my novel “Sultan of Delhi: Ascension?”

How can I not?

5. Abhi Zinda Hoon

This is not song.

It is whisky-sozzled liquid angst. Of life, love and that which shall never come to be.

“Abhi Zinda Hoon” from the eminently forgettable Najayaaz, is a song that I have come to appreciate the older I have become, the kind that hits hard when you have had  a bad day at work, when you just want to loosen your tie, drink straight from the bottle and tell the world “Mujhe tukdo mein naheen jeena hai”.

For those millennials, who make fun of Kumar Sanu and worship at the shrine of the guy who swears at the mic (you know who I am talking about), wait for another twenty years, listen to this, and come back.

Please.

 

6. Sanam Oh Sanam Aise Hi Pyar Karte Rahena

For those who have read my blog since 2004, you knew, didn’t you, that a Shilpa Shirodhkar song is coming up?

But did you think it would be this, one of the very rare ones where not even a drop of rain falls on her?

Why do I just love this song? The copied sequence of the noodles from Hot Shot? Saif Ali Khan walking with an egg on a spoon? Sunil Shetty trying to act? Sunil Shetty doing a jig? Pigeons? Avtar Gill?

Naah.

It is just that perfect cocktail of romance, melody, melancholia and the 90s.

Just perfect.

 

7. Chand Se Parda Ki Jiye

Many reasons why this makes my list. For one the melody. For two, the lyrics “Paalke jo jhunki kaheen jhuk jaaye asmaan.”

And did I forget anything?

Oh yes. I sung this for a girl in college.

Years and kilos later, while in Calcutta on one of my visits, my uber driver, out of nowhere, started playing this.

I told him I loved the song.

All he said was “They don’t make them like this any more.”

I gave him a 5 star rating.

8. Main Tujhe Chhod Ke Kahaan

Once you get over the uncomfortable spelling of “Chhod” in the video title, (Main Tujhe Chod Ke Kahaan Jayoonga) and  the fact that I have bowled a doosra by including a song from a Shilpa Shirodhkar movie that does not have her in it, you would realize this is yet another classic 90s Kumar Sanu song. In Trinetra, this song comes thrice–once sung by Dharmendra which starts with Bye Bye but Kumar Sanu pronounces it as Baah Baah Baah Baah, which gives that rendition a certain goaty as opposed to a throaty feel, once sung here by Prabhuji (the best one) and the third a distinctive trippy fast version, in which Amrish Puri plays an ash-faced tantrik monster.

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In the movie, Dharmendra is a reality show singing aspirant who goes to sing in front of Amrish Puri, and if anything that “Dance Dance” had taught us, is that bad things happen to those who perform songs in front of Amrish Puri. So after he sings “Main tujhe”, Dharmendra never comes back, and bad things happen to his wife Deepa Sahi, and pretty much everything goes into the shit basket.

Given the context of the film, this song is actually one of farewell and forgetting, though not immediately obvious from the lyrics. As a result, I have always found this plays well into a sensation of nostalgic melancholia, as you remember the past, with some fondness and with some regret,  sitting with your glass and then toss your head back on the couch, of things that you once loved which will never come back.

9. Baadalon Mein Chup Raha Chand Kyon

Between Pooja Bhatt songs from the 90s, and she has quite a few lovely ones, the battle is between songs from “Phir Teri Kahani Yaad Aayi” and “Sir,” and the only reason “Sir” loses is that for a Bengali like me, a song which goes “Yeh Ujli Chandni Jab Hasratoon Ko Gudgudaayegi”, cannot just be listened to without breaking into giggles at the…you know what I am talking about.

Phir Teri Kahaani Yaadi Aayi is one of the strongest albums of the 90s, Anu Malik’s, the same man who also gave us “Baarish ho raha hai, it is raining raining, Mera Dil Ro Raha Hain, it is paining paining”, best work.

By far.

Yet another attempt by Mahesh Bhatt to monetize his life experiences, oh sorry, capture in art his own pain, the movie made for Zee sank without a trace, but the songs have attained a kind of timeless immortality.

Pick any. One is as good as the other.

10. In The Night No Control

Before Akshay Kumar became Padman and a new age Manoj Kumar, he was dancing-in-skimpy-chaddis Khiladi Kumar, gracing the inside gossip pages of Stardust and Filmfare, those that I would read religiously at my hair cutting saloon while going on Sunday to maximize my wait time, moving from heroine to heroine with the regularity of Delhi Daredevils reconstituting their team.

And then there was Madam Rekha.

By the 90s came along, the most fascinating Rekha had jettisoned her “traditional good Hindi heroine” image to play a slew of edgy, sexually confident characters, coming to a culmination in “Khiladiyon Ki Khiladi”‘s “In the Night No Control”, in all its mud-wrestling, clothes-ripping, and showering-together glory.

This song is epic, blowing out of the water more traditional 90s fare like “Dekha Teri Mast Nigahon Mein” from Khiladi. Borrowing liberally from multiple sources without attribution,  whether it be sequences from 9 1/2 weeks, or from Madonna songs, after all this is Anu Malik, “In the Night” is not, unlike most songs of the decade, about love and loss and non-corporeal romance.

It is about what the gaana leads to.  The bajaana. And it does not need double entendres to make the point.

Such directness, you would have trouble in finding even today.

Perhaps because in 2018, if someone went “In the night, no control, Kya karoon kuch to bol”,  Kejriwal would say ” Aam Aadmi ka sawaal hai, Modiji must answer”.

Maybe that explains everything.

[Side B coming up]

 

 

 

 

Inside Edge–the Review

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If you are one of those who think that the professional T20 Indian league is all about spot-fixing, white lines of cocaine snorted through five hundred rupees, players humping cheerleaders just before they go out to bat, threesomes, egregious sleeping around with the wives of others,  greed with a gazillion zeroes, murder, mayhem and very little cricket, then boy, Amazon India’s much-hyped and greatly-reviewed web-series “Inside Edge” is here to confirm all your biases.

Bigly.

Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “nothing succeeds like excess”, “Inside Edge” believes in amping up the volume to eleven. In that spirit of garish excess, of gnashing teeth and thrusting cleavage, it captures perhaps very closely the league it is based on, christened Powerplay Professional League, for obvious legal reasons.  Real people are winked at, and that perhaps is where “Inside Edge” is the most fun when you try to make the connections,  a fading female star partially owning a franchise, cheering her team on energetically, a “mother-sister-sprouting” tatooed handsome bearded star, with a liking for the ladies but a heart of gold, who is the next best thing to happen to Indian batting, an evil franchise owner with cricket enthusiasm in his heart, but even there the fun quickly vanishes because of how inauthentic everything is otherwise.  Just when you think this might actually be enjoyable, you are assaulted by yet another cliche that is so cliche so as to make 90s porn look original, or another twist as predictably disastrous as a Yusuf Pathan over, with the only accurate bit of actual cricket is the Kolkata franchise being shown consistently as being second to last.

There are good bits. A casteist Uttar Pradesh spinner with some good raw Hindi lines. Angad Bedi as Alok Nath you wouldnt mind sharing a bed with.  Rohan Gavaskar putting in his NREGA days playing a commentator.

But they are all consumed by the black hole of acting talent that is Vivek (he has dropped the “i”) Oberoi.

It is difficult to describe Vivek Oberoi’s performance as evil fixer Vikrant Dhawan in words.

It is very difficult.

I am tempted to bring, as a point of comparison, Rahul Roy in “Naughty Boy”, but that would be like comparing Anghshuman Gaekwad’s hitting power with Chris Gayle’s. Vivek Oberoi does not chew scenery, he gulps them down in ravenous bites. He is either holding a whisky glass or fishing out a handcuff from his pocket, either devilishly arching his eyebrows or grinning maniacally throwing his head back, either greedy or horny and usually both at the same time. Sometimes he is sensually stroking a pepper shaker to suggest a sexual act to a lady, sometimes he is asking the lady to “open wide” as he stuffs  wagyu steak into her mouth while bragging about his “temperature-controlled grill”, all the while involuntarily channeling Austin Powers through lines like “Would you like a drink or shall we just fuck?”

It is a memorable performance, I will give him that, in the way that Kolkata Knight Riders can never forget the franchise paying $670K for Mashrafe Mortaza for him to play a single game where he gave away 21 runs to Rohit Sharma.

A second season seems to be in the offing, and I might be tempted to come back, but only if Mr. Oberoi is there, because in today’s day and age, it is very difficult to get gentle pleasures like “Inside Edge”, unselfconscious in its delightful campiness.

 

 

 

Justice League—the Review

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“Oh mere sanam, oh mere sanam,

Jal gayee duniya, ek huye hum,

Ek naheen, do naheen, suraksha karo mere saato janam

Suraksha, Suraksha, Teri karenge saato janam.

In the Saif-starrer ‘Surakshaa” (not to be confused with the Gunmaster G9 one), the  climax brings together a spectacular team of hitherto antagonistic protagonists and they signal their alliance by singing and dancing.

Justice League, the second greatest Justice film after Jeetendra’s Justice Chowdhury (havent seen the Mithun one), builds off this basic premise, with Sheeba of the muscular Sachin Tendulkar shoulders becoming Batman, Monica Bedi becoming Aquaman (both Aquaman and Monica Bedi have a propensity to stay wet), Aditya Pancholi the dour Cyborg, Kader Khan Flash, and Saif Ali Khan being a dead ringer for Wonder Woman.

Superman is dead. And naturally if your last boyfriend is Superman, it is difficult for anyone after that to measure up. So Lois Lane looks on the world with Nirupa Roy “Aaj woh hote” eyes and bonds with her saasu-ma, Martha Lane, who has been made be-ghar and who, if you recall, had been at the center of the “Oh my mother name is Martha too” resolution of Superman v Batman, a resolution that was very Rajendra Kumar vs Pradeep Kumar.

Batman is not doing well either. In the opening shots, he is shown fighting a giant mosquito, of the kind that would be found near Dunlop at Bon Hoogly stop, living in the kochuri paana (water hyacinth) covered dirty bowls of stagnant ground water. Even though he squashes the mosquito like an uncle at Binapani Mistanna Bhandar would do with a rolled up copy of Ganashakti, things are only getting worse. Wolf Blitzer’s evil CGI twin, Steppenwolf, who looks like a bouncer at a German S&M club with headgear bought from the bargain counter at Partycity, seizes an ancient box from Amazon without being a member of Prime, unleashing mayhem with his Dengue army of evil flying minions, who we are told smell fear, as any self-respecting mosquito from Naihati to Barrackpore does. There are three such boxes we are told, very Infinity Stones like, which if put together will allow Steppenwolf to destroy the world and why does he want to do that well because he is evil.

Ho-hum.

With Amazon broken into, Batman and Wondewoman try to recruit superheroes to his team, a task they find out is as easy as a TCS recruiter looking for mainframe programmers who want to work in Fortran-77. Aquaman, who I presume is shown to be Bengali based on his love for fishes and his buff body, flips him off. Wonderwoman tries to recruit Cyborg, who seems to have become genetically fused into a tin foil, and who seems to always be angry, as if he is getting a bill from Fortis every day. Batman has better luck with Flash, but he comes quick and is desperate for anything. Then Steppenwolf and his Dengue army attack Atlantis, seize the second box, pulling Aquaman into action, but he finds out he has been fired by Mamata Banerjee for acknowledging the existence of the said mosquitoes, and so he has no option but to join the Justice League. Other bad things happen, and a dangerous plot is made to bring Superman back in from the dead, and if you want to know if they succeed, watch Justice League in theaters this week.

Or better not. Justice League is constructed with less care than a Rohit Shetty movie, who truth be told, handles multistarrers much better than Synder and Wheldon. Justice League seemed to have been made by studio executives sitting together, barking commands like “Thoda comedy daalo yaar, bahoot serious ho gya” and “Thoda intensity yahaan”, and “Action chahiye, kya yaar, aur CGI daalo behenchod”. What comes out is a mess, characters having an intense conversation and then suddenly there is humor, and everyone seems unhappy but no one knows why, a miasma of fraud angst hangs around every frame, and just when Flash builds up a bit of watchability, in comes the terrible Steppenwolf with his plans of universe destruction, and an army of mosquitoes.

And so spoiler is this. It happens. The universe is destroyed but the DC one. And as one disastrous entry follows another in this franchise, no one it seems can save this.

Not Superman, or Kejriwal or Modi or Rahul Gandhi or  Sunil Shetty (he was the Superman in Surakshaa).

No one.

 

 

On Padmavati and Selective Outrage

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Simple things first.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali is a great interior decorator but a terrible film-maker and I am offended every time he makes a movie, as it offends my religion, namely “good taste”. Which is why I stopped watching what he made after having tortured myself through “Saawariya” (review here), a blue film just because of the way it was lit, and ten years have passed since then, and I am still to recover from the trauma.

However as a firm believer in freedom of speech, I also stand with him in his right to make piles of excreta. In this case Padmavati.

If Padmavati offends you, and you don’t have to tell me why, then please don’t see it, just don’t prevent other people from seeing it, and definitely do not make calls for removing of body parts of actors and directors associated with the movie. If someone feels the movie is libelous, they are free to go to court, but then again Padmavati is fiction, so the characters aren’t real people, but the Indian courts are very sympathetic to “offense” because our Constitution does not give its citizens unqualified free speech in the way the First Amendment does, so it is is not as if those offended do not have legal recourse, and a good enough chance to win, and this sentence has gone on for long, but I will still say nothing justifies exhortations for violence. Nothing.

Of course, there is an outrage factory that keep Padmavati on the front-pages. Peripheral characters get their ten seconds of fame by upping the ante on outrageousness, news channels and their fog-horn anchors provide the padded sound-chamber for hateful voices to amplify, the movie gets priceless PR, our media mavens find that it all fits into their narrative of “intolerance” and “Hindu Taliban”, as if ISIS/Al Qaeda/global Jihad and “random Sena” are equivalent in their malignancy, and this is all a virtuous cycle for all concerned. So in a way all good, as long as all the stakeholders cash out.

But then what about the quiet replacement of “Ya Mustafa Ya Mustafa” in Aatish with “Ya Dilruba Ya Dilruba” in the released version because of “religious sentiment hurting?” What about Viswaroopam? Satanic Verses? Da Vinci Code? What about a comedy collective apologizing to the church for the content of their stand up routine? What about the fact that Taslima Nasreen was not allowed to release her book “Nirbasan” in Bengal  and is not allowed to reside in the state because it would offend “certain communities” and the Bengal government still gets to maintain its “secular credentials”. What about Ms. Nasreen denied entry to Aurangabad by Owaisi’s henchmen,  the same Owaisi who is provided unfettered platforms to peddle his agenda by mainstream media  ?

At this point most of our garden-variety liberals, of the Sardesai persuasion, would refuse to answer your question citing “Whataboutery”, which is the “secular” get-out-of-tight-situation-shot (others are “moral compass”, “tyranny of distance” and “2002”) when there is no logical riposte . But they should, because it is this selective outrage of theirs that fuels competitive intolerance, if only a few people’s sentiments matter, then why should not everyone else’s? In the liberal tool box, some communities are the aggressors—“Zionists”, “Hindu patriarchs”, “Brahminism” and some are victims, and the narrative must be maintained through selective silence, gratuitous generalizations, and massive oversimplifications.

So some films are offensive and some films are not. Some topics absolutely fine, some topics “Oh no you did not say that”.

This happens because those who have appropriated the word “liberal” are about as fundamentalist as those they call fundamentalist. Sure, they dont do death threats, I will give them that. But they affix pejorative labels and attack in bunches and by virtue of their owning academic institutions and media, shut down, through shaming and exclusion and unfair assessments of work, anyone who they want to silence.

I know. It has happened to me.

In that respect, again minus the threats of physical violence, they are no different from the assorted Senas that occupy the headlines today. Since they own the platforms of expression, publishing houses and editorial desks and channels, they can shut out opinion they consider “offensive” silently, while those outside the circle of privilege have to resort to flaying their arms and threatening and making a spectacle of themselves.

As an example, consider Ms. Azmi. Ms. Azmi is supposedly not a member of the Owaisi camp, she I believe identifies as a Leftist.

Majidi & AR cannot make a movie that is inflammatory and would hurt sentiments of the Muslim community @AzmiShabana http://t.co/nlvm6cdqwS

— Rahul Kanwal (@rahulkanwal) September 17, 2015

In the context of a movie supposedly offensive to Muslims, the logic that Ms. Azmi gives is that the music director is a devout Muslim and the director is from Iran, an Islamic country, and so the movie cannot hurt the sentiments of Muslims. Read that again. Her statement does not say, as it should have, that it does not matter if sentiments are hurt, the movie must not be banned or fatwa-ed, instead it implies, that it might have been offensive if the music director had somebody not a devout Muslim, like  Laxmikant Pyarelal, or was made in a country that is not Islamic, like India, and even more dangerously, then in that case, well it is as it is, people could justifiably take offense.

And what is the same person saying today about Padmavati?

Yep.

This is precisely what has led to what the insanity we have today. There was a time when songs like “Chal sanyasi mandir mein” were being made, at a time when the country should have been more religious, and yet “the intolerants” were not offended. And then over the years, the message that has been conveyed is that some people have the right to be offended, and take action, and some people don’t, some sentiments need to be respected, and some not, some violence is terrorism, some violence is “Gandhism with guns”, sometimes terror has no religion, and then again sometimes it does, some people are allowed “trigger warnings” and “safe places”, while some others are “told to deal with it like adults”.

Sorry, madams and sirs, things don’t work like that. I am sorry, they just don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It—the Review

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Movies based on Stephen King’s horror novels usually suck. As you can see I have used the modifier “horror” to sidestep Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption.  Based on one very publicly chronicled bad experience King had with a certain director, it seems that he always strives to maintain a tight control of cinematic adaptations, ensuring that any film made on his writings remains true to the source. Unfortunately King’s prose is verbose, his stories start after five hundred pages (okay I am exaggerating a bit), and sometimes he totally goes off the rails, which is why more or less literal translations to screen have consistently lead to poor cinema, as a number of less than stellar adaptations of King’s works have demonstrated over the years.

Which brings me to that one bad experience that King had.

Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

Because the way King saw it, Kubrick took perhaps his most literary of novels,  about addiction, desolation and the malignancy of failed dreams, and turned it into a monotone shlock fest—-creepy twin girls, rivers of blood, and Jack Nicholson’s running around with an axe. He was right of course. Kubrick, notoriously cold and ruthless (he would drive actors to the edge of nervous breakdown to get the exact expression) was merciless with the source material, scooping out much of what made “The Shining” a great novel, the nuance and the ambiguity. In Kubrick’s film, Jack Torrance is a pretty nasty man when he arrives, unlike the more sympathetic Jack Torrance of King, and the next two hours is  a linear story of what happens when a violent man falls prey to his demons, with the layers in the original story flattened out, in a way that would make any author, and I absolutely understand this, livid.

And yet, and here is the supreme irony,  Kubrick’s “The Shining” is arguably the best English language horror film ever made. What works on a page does not necessarily work on screen, what impacts a man comfortably reclining on his bed with a book in hand is different from what would one sitting in a theater with a fixed time-horizon, and the creative choices of “The Shining” are perfect in that respect.

Which makes “The Shining” that unique beast—a great book, and a great movie, both, and yet so very different from each other.

Which brings me to “It”.

“It” (Chapter one), helmed by Andy Muschietti, is that even rarer beast, one where the cinematic adaptation is arguably better than the source material.

“It”, the novel, is a 1500 page behemoth, often considered as one of the most iconic American novels of the 80s. Even if you haven’t read it, or not finished it (a lot of people claim to have read it when they haven’t), it is likely you have seen something inspired by it, be it “Stranger Things” or a scary clown costume in a Halloween store. Told through a series of interleaving flashbacks and forwards,  “It” follows a group of misfits and social outcasts, once as children and once as adults, as they try to defeat an unspeakably terrifying, extra-terrestrial monster that preys on the vulnerable, both young and the old, in the town of Derry.

The monster, manifested usually as the excessively cheerful clown Pennywise, is a metaphor for the evil of the adult world, one that each of the children in “It” experience in different ways, one  through the unwelcome advances of her father, one through racism, one through Munchhausen by proxy, one by awareness of his lack of desirability. Pennywise is an inspired creation, malignancy inside a shell of welcoming friendliness, that thing in the shadows which children always know exist, but no adult can see, and when they turn on the light and say “See there is no one here”, the child knows it is still there.

This is King at his finest.

And also at his worst.

“It”is, without doubt, a grossly uneven piece of work. Some places are genuinely unsettling, some tragically beautiful especially the part at the end about forgetting, But large parts are downright weird, in a bad way, including the exposition of the extra-terrestrial origins of the monster, which ends up subverting “It”s own metaphors. And no I have not forgotten; the widely reviled group-sex situation involving teenagers, which makes you question what King was on, when he wrote that sequence.

Andy Muschietti’s “It” papers over many of the bumps in the narrative. For one, the manifestation of “It” in the movie follows directly from the personal experience of evil that each of these children encounter. For the hypochondriac, it is through a boil-covered leper,  for the girl going through sexual abuse, it is through the flood of menstrual blood, for the boy who blames himself for the loss of his brother, it is through the ghoulish re-animation of his dead brother. In King’s version, the manifestation was much more random—through a statue, through a bird, and you always wondered why.

Muschietti sharpens the metaphors. True, he cuts out much of what King fans would carp at, namely the building of the fellowship between these group of boys and girls, but then that is the thing about cinematic adaptations. Parts must go. He does fall back on conventional horror tropes, jump-scares and CGI gore, after all this is commercial horror, and it mostly works, except in an overtly protracted climax, and it works because he never loses sight of the overarching significance of “It”, the lurker in the shadows and the hunter of the innocent. He is helped in his atmosphere-building by a prefect casting of the gang of misfits, the color palette of the shots, the deep single tone reds and yellows, and the slow deliberate movement of objects, specially the balloons.

A meaner, leaner version of King’s original, this is one of the best horror films I have seen in a while.

 

 

 

 

RaGa and Leaked Transcript of AI Speech

[Work of fiction. Any resemblance to real speech is merely coincidental. Context]

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Good morning bhaiyon and behenon and my mother.

I am RaGa and I am here to talk about AI.

As you all know, Congress gave the world AI. Also IA. Air India. Indian Airlines. Great achievements as those of have ever had the fortune of flying these two carriers would know.

But today I am here to talk about artificial intelligence, the ability to mimic human like intelligence without possessing a brain and as someone who has been doing this for the last 45 years or so, I guess I am uniquely qualified to talk about AI.

AI is in my shirt, it is in my pants.

The Gandhi family understands the concept of decision trees. We always take the path that is weighted by the highest incentives for us, and our edges are weighted by Bofors, Augusta Westland as experts will no doubt note. More details are available in our paper on Minimal Reduced Edge Graph Algorithm or MREGA

This follows from the work the Gandhi-Nehrus did in developing object oriented languages where we practically defined the concepts of inheritance and inner classes which we initially called Lutyens. Also do take a look at our agent based system which we call Quattrocchi.

I personally use supervised learning, supervised by my mother and Digvijay Singhji and I operate from a neural network, and yes the bandwidth on that network is available, please contact Mr Raja for further conversation. We impose invariants like “A Gandhi shall always lead the Congress” during operations and we have developed proprietary data mining routines that produce vast quantities of copper and iron and coal and natural gas.

It is worth noting that we at Congress virtually invented adaptive systems, the Congress party being secular or communal or self righteous or corrupt, adapting fast and adjusting behavior depending on sensor stimulus.

Unfortunately some people like Elon Modi are creating fear uncertainty doubt regarding AI. AI is benign, and follows Asimov’s principle of never harming its masters. If you have any doubt, look at us, we never ever harm our masters, even when they harm us and you may ask Union Carbide. When faced with obstacles, we just change our goals and shift our goalposts.

Ultimately you have to realize that human intelligence is fallible. Just look at our 2014 election results.

But when you put your trust in artificial intelligence, you embrace perfection.

So come and hug me.

Thoughts on this season of Game of Thrones

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[HAS SPOILERS]

One of the great things about A Song of Ice and Fire was that anyone could die. No one was safe.

In this season on Game of Thrones, we saw a surprising though not unexpected death.

That of George R R Martin. And pretty much everything that made The Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones an unique narrative experience.

What makes GRRM unique is that his writing is firmly character-driven. Most books you read follow the classic Greek three-act plot structure: things get bad, things get worse, things sort themselves out. The primary driver is the plot, things move from A to B, then from B to C, and if the author went to a writing class, the characters also have arcs, but these are pretty much always secondary to the story.

GRRM threw this style out of the window from his first book itself, just like Jamie did Bran. Told through multiple perspectives, A Song of Ice and Fire follows characters, like billiard balls on a table, as GRRM taps them this direction and then that, as they roll around, hit each other, and fly off in unexpected directions, creating a world that is alive with  fantasy and reality in equal measure, dragons flying and zombies walking, and yet people reacting as people do, and happenstance changing the best laid plans, as they do in this world. The story grows from these hits and rebounds, but is never allowed to drive the narrative. This sometimes leads to meandering threads that lead nowhere (Psst…book 4) but most often to absolute brilliance—Catelyn Stark taking the decision to take Tyrion hostage, Arya and the Hound’s journey together, Jamie riding back to save Brienne of Tarth, and I could go on and on.

As the show has gone on, it has deviated more and more from the books. Initially, that was actually good, because it allowed the show’s creators Beinoff & Weiss to tighten up some of the loose stitching, like eliminating the absolutely redundant story of Jeyne Poole, effectively a much-needed re-edit of GRRMs last two books. Then, I guess the suits at HBO realized that they needed to stop this leisurely world-building, tapping their watches like an angry examination invigilator, and B&W took over, and I guess also this is the time GRRM just stepped back, and in the hands of more conventional artists, Game of Thrones fell back to becoming yet another plot-based saga, where people are shoehorned to behave in certain ways, so that the story moves forward, the sprawling real world shrunk to an over-engineered story-board, the gentle joys of characters playing off each other reduced to Marvel-and-DC-like set-piece spectacles.

In the rush to put the baby to bed in two seasons, the first thing to go this season has been the notion of time. Journeys that took seasons now are over in a transition. The Net has pointed out to the ridiculousness of the Westeros Expendables standing surrounded by wights and white walkers all the while a raven flew back to the Entitled Dragon Queen and she flew back on a dragon. It’s like the guy who wrote Batman’s escape from the Lazarus Pit has started writing for the Game of Thrones.

The thing about world creation is you get to make the rules once—-dragons, zombies, magical schools and whatever the else you want, but then you got to stick to it, changing the rules midway just to make the story move forward is lazy story-telling.

As lazy as it is to have Bran, the three-eyed raven, as the all-knowing living Deus Ex Machina.

We need people to know Jon’s parentage so that the story moves forward. But everyone who was there when Jon was born is dead. So what do we do? Idea ! Bran just knows.

But because it would be inconvenient for Bran to tell his sisters that their half brother is not who he thinks he is, he keeps this vital bit of information to himself. Yet he quickly reveals it to Samwell Tarly, because that would be a cool thing to voice over when nephew and aunt make love.

Wait there is more.

We need the Stark sisters to know about Littlefinger’s betrayal. But how? Oh yes idea. Bran just knows. But since we also need to give Littlefinger a crowd-pleasing death in the last episode, we won’t let Bran say this the first day he meets his sister, that the man hanging around her killed their father, and he should immediately be dispatched. Oh no, that would be too easy. So instead we let him go on creepily about her nightmarish wedding night and save that important bit to the end. If only for the expression on Littlefinger’s face.

Personally, I didn’t quite mind much the bird-brained scheme to go up North to capture a wight. I know it was done to provide  a set-piece to kill a dragon, because how else would the dragon get killed, but again in GGRM’s universe, men were allowed to do stupid things.

What however was not allowed was linear predictability. Randomness was always a part of the world, as it is in ours, and yet in the counting down to the end, all of that is lost in favor of oppressive story advancement.

Consider the dragon pit summit. Everything pretty much happens linearly. Old friends give looks. Old enemies give their five second challenges. Kneel before me mother of dragons makes a late entrance on dragon. There is a carefully engineered aura of danger, a sense of impending doom, but given that no one gets killed nowadays, except extras and Littlefinger, we pretty much know nothing Westeros shaking is going to happen. Now the GRRM we know, I am sure he would have done things differently. That over-inquisitive guard walking past the imprisoned wight would have opened the door thinking there is treasure inside, gotten bitten, and now just as all the grand poobahs sit down for a world summit, they would realize that there is a wight and a freshly infected running through King’s Landing, and the White Walkers have arrived, without really arriving, and all the best laid plans of men and dragons have suddenly gone for the proverbial toss.

For me personally, the most frustrating thing about this season is how it is set on reducing to insignificance some of the series’s most poignant sequences. The moment when Jamie and Brienne, my favorite “couple” of the show, bid goodbye silently knowing they would be on opposite sides of the fence the next time they meet, if they meet at all, is now retroactively ruined knowing they are going to meet, not be on opposing sides, and then have the most mundane of interactions. Realistic perhaps, but still. And a personal gripe, given my favorite character is Jamie, is that I cannot think of a better way for him to go out than charging a dragon, the grandest exit for the last of the noble knights. But then again, either because the prophecy of Cersei’s death must come true, or Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has contracted himself into the last season, that does not happen. Everyone is alive, even Mr. Friendzone, whose character arc has finished seasons ago, and frankly I was not expecting him coming back from his psoriasis. But even he has.

Because no one really moderately important seems to die in GoT any more.

Still not all doom and gloom though, of course. There are some lovely vintage moments here and there. Nymeria turning away from Arya.  The two Stark sisters on the  ramparts remembering their father. Olenna Tyrell’s last scene, five minutes of awesomeness that elevates that whole episode to one of the best ever. And the pacing, I have no problem with the pacing per se, just with the subversion of everything that defined the uniqueness of GRRM’s story-telling.

Here is wishing that the metaphorically dead George Martin comes back in the last few episodes that are left.

For in his world, death is not an end.

Being predictable is.

 

 

 

 

 

The Legacy of the Lovecharger Baba

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The first time I encountered the phenomenon of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Insaan was when a suggested video on my Youtube video feed pointed me to the song “You are my Love Charger“. It was an experience like something never before, and this coming from someone who watched pretty much every trashy Hindi film in the late 90s. A middle-aged, flabby man, with curly hair covering his forearms like the Amazon rainforests in the 1800s, wearing a psychedelic tight-fitting costume with the picture of a lion on his back, moving like Mick Jagger (or thinking he is), in front of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands perhaps even more, screaming in ecstasy like fourteen-year-old girls at a Bieber concert, as multi-colored balloons rise in the air. Soon the Lovercharger Baba, as Arnab Goswami called him on TV, became huge on social media, aided by an army of “Insaan” accounts, that only tweeted praise about the Baba, and RT-ed his tweets, to the extent that you could not help wondering what the budget was for the “organic” social media campaign.

Then came the movies. I watched the first, MSG: Messenger of God, a work of celluloid narcissism of the kind that would make Kim Jong Un scream “Bas kar beti” and reviewed it here. He would go on to make more, but there was only so much of tacky bargain basement graphics, and Baba fighting Pakistan and Godzilla together while driving purple bikes wearing a floral body-suit, that even I could take. It was obvious the movies were targeted to the followers of his Dera, and they lapped it up like the second and third and fourth coming of God, and it was all kind of subversively fun to shake your head and laugh at the antics of this gentleman who said he invented T20 cricket and taught Virat Kohli to bat and done wondrous things that would make Leonardo Da Vinci and Newton’s parents complain of having underachieving sons.

Then finally came the verdict. The stories of his “gufa” and army of castrated men and his forced harem where he dispensed “maafi”  seemed out of the Delhi Sultanate, horrific and evil, though not surprising. When you have unquestioned authority, and a place where your writ runs large, and politicians kiss your ring because of the support you bring, and you are the kind of person who has the secret of mass manipulation down pat, it is not surprising that something like this would happen. Nor is it surprising to see the armies of his devotees rioting through three states. Mental programming is this strong. The faith-addled mind, when faced with the alternative between “I put my faith in something wrong’ and “This is a conspiracy against my faith” will go for the easier option.

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Just like the Nigerian scammers misspell their letters and provide promises of absolutely unreal rewards, because they know it will self-select the gullible out from the billions, Guruji’s carefully calibrated narcissism and claims of having done fantastic things had similarly winnowed out everyone from his flock but the supremely credulous. If you believe that the supreme leader is a messenger of God who has mastered every sport (32 to be exact) and every skill (cooking, singing, automobile engineering, water and sanitation, technology developer) known to man and actually did 42 roles in a film (read this)  you will pretty much believe everything he tells you. Then there were the carefully publicized  acts of public good, planted stories of miracles, political endorsements and implied quid pro quos, truisms presented as profundity, a core group of violent handlers to keep those losing faith within the group and to get rid of pesky whistleblowers and journalists, and, in this age, a robust social media strategy through scripted and coordinated tweeting.

If there is anything that this Gurmeet Ram Rahim incident leaves us with is this.

Fascinating insights into the tools of trade of the modern cultist.

And the realization that as long as there are armies of the gullible, and men with the brains to take advantage of it, the Baba will remain the Baba.

 

 

 

When Harry Met Sejal—The Review

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A few posts ago, I had done the jurrat of putting Imtiaz Ali in the same group of directors as Karan Johar only to be sternly rebuked by an auteur commentator, with a passion for cinema, who opined that the moment I clubbed Imtiaz Ali with Karan Johar, I had displayed my lack of knowledge of cinema.

I agree. I now stand corrected.

Imtiaz Ali is in a class of his own.

“When Harry Met Sejal”, his latest film, is a masterpiece.

On one hand, it has all the Imtiazian motifs that the refined audience love, which in the hands of a less awesome director would be called cliches.

The philanderer who carnally pursues women to fill the emptiness in his heart. The freewheeling bubbly female whose sole reason for existence is to fill the aforementioned hole. Two and a half hours of sarson da saag and chak de phatte and European locales and music till finally the rudderless man finds himself into the safe confines of monogamy.

But, and here it is where it reaches another level, this film is a beautiful, heartfelt tribute to late-career Dev Anand films.

The hero, Harry (the similarity to Hari Mohan from Swami Dada is not an accident) is a guide. Yes a Guide. The fact that he is being played by Shahrukh Khan, whose romantic salad days dried out decades ago, is also not a co-incidence, solidifying as it does the connect between late-career Dev Anand and the hero in the movie. Just like Dev Anand in his later movies, Harry is irresistible to women, European Caucasian women, young women, who swoon the moment he passes, and Shahrukh Khan plays him as Dev Anand too, bringing out his stock expressions and romantic ticks from the time that L K Advani had a future.

Sejal, played with a cute Amit Shah accent, by Anushka Sharma, is looking for an engagement ring. Apparently Sauron forged, in the fires of,…sorry wrong film….but, any ways, that ring is so important that she gets down from her plane, and forces the Guide to tag along with her across Europe to find it. Why does the guide tag along, despite apparently not wanting to and despite not feeling any carnal attraction for the lady? How much does the tour guide, otherwise so concerned about his employment, make to drive a convertible? Why does Sejal want a man who claims to be a “characterless” person to accompany her, and why does she offer to draft an indemnification bond should they sleep together? Why does she want Harry to regard her as sexually attractive? Why does she do a pole dance for him? Why did Dev Anand compose a rap song about peanuts? Why is there a film in a film in Dev Anand’s Censor ? Why is Cindy Crawford playing Dev Anand’s mother in Awwal Number? How did Dev Anand cane an Al Qaeda terrorist into confessing his sins?

What Imtiaz Ali is saying, “Don’t ask questions about characters, plot and motivation”, just enjoy the ride. Like you did in Love at Times Square.

Shahrukh Khan gives it his all, using his bit-more-than-a-stubble-bit-less-than-a-beard like Rishi Kapoor used his sweater, the best protection against the ravages of time. Anushka Sharma is bubbly enough to give Priety Zinta a complex, but the star of the show is the long-haired director, whose genius I have struggled to understand over the years, but now slowly am coming around to acknowledge.

The only fear I have is the Indian audience might not appreciate how visionary “Harry Met Sejal” is, in the way they did not understand “Mr. Prime Minister” and “Gangster”, and some of the early reviews confirm my apprehension.

Final verdict. Yet another film I would strongly recommend to those who do not buy my books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Old Picture

One of my friends passed away yesterday. In deference to his family’s absolute right to control how they wish to share their grief, I do not name him here. So the pronoun it will be.

I haven’t been in touch with him for years. He was not on social media. Every time I went to Calcutta, I met a few of my college friends, but for some reason, he was never in the group. I also never made an effort to reach out to him, and yesterday when I heard the news, I deeply regretted not having made the effort.

So I dug up an old picture. This was the late 90s, no smart-phones, pictures were rare, and even the ones that were taken, were almost never scanned. This one though was. Taken around the last few days of our graduating class, near the red chairs of the Computer Science building, pretty much everyone in our batch is there.

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As I look upon the smiling faces, full of life, collectively with kilos less in fat, and grams more in hair, I cannot help but wonder the thought furthest away from their minds.

Death.

And yet it is here. It is there in the picture now. And there it will stay, and replicate, till one day it will be all that is left.

Death.

And the suffocating sepia sadness of old group photos.

For time always feels infinite. Specially when you are twenty-something.

So we let things slip. There is always other things to do, other places to be, other roads to walk. And why shouldn’t there be? There is always next time.

Except one day there isn’t.

And all that is left are memories, memories of sitting on those chairs, watching the girls from Arts pass by, and swearing at professors for their tyrannical class tests, and worrying about placements and GRE, and debating if Shahrukh Khan should have chosen Karishma Kapoor and not Madhuri Dixit, and fighting for who gets the first chance to bat, the setting sun of October on our shoulders, and the cricket field in front, and if at all  an inkling expressed on the impermanence of it, a gruff dismissal with a “Duh sala, senti hocchish keno?” (Why getting sentimental?)

Goodbye old friend. Happy friendship day.