Ishqiya - A few thoughts, if I may

For once, I am not here to pontificate. Rather, I would like to comment on Ishqiya which I happened to see over the weekend. And no, I will not rake up the topic of incomprehensibility of its title; after all I belong to a generation that has grown up with titles like “Phoonk” and “Badal”. The movie name, as I realize, is at best to keep up the suspense regarding the substance of the movie and at worst to misguide the audience of the movie’s intent and story (if it has one.)

Vishal Bharadwaj, for reasons best known to himself, prefers to work in the greys amonst the travesty of colours of life; preferring to differentiate within various shades of grey in human character. How else can you characterize each of the lead roles, they are the protagonists and at the same time antagonists. But I am digressing, pedagogy is a tough habit to break.

The movie is a twisting and turning strand that is tightly woven to the culture of the Hindi hinterland. Thus things that made no noticeable impact on me, a southerner had the northern audience in their grip. The twist that was devious to me struck a chord and tugged at their heart. The ending that seemed incomplete to me merged seamlessly with their experiences; I left feeling a bit confused, they were fully satiated. And the gaalis, if mouthed by any southerner of 5 less than 20 age (sic), would have resulted in a whipping of the delicate portion of posterior and a brisk mouth wash using Surf or Rin (or whatever is the current washing powder fad) thrown in as a bonus. The dialogues that left me dumbstruck had the northern audience in splits (of course in time I adjusted and then joined in the hilarity).

Then there was Vidya Balan – who says eloquence is only for words? There is an instance in the movie her look speaks a thousand page novel while her mouth utters but a single word. Oh, if only my writing was as eloquent; this essay, nay the entire spectrum of my thoughts would be conveyed in an instant. And to those of you women who confuse being “hot” to dressing up with 2 inch cloth in the upper torso and another 2 inch cloth in the lower, please watch Vidya. And learn. Please.

And Naseeruddin Shah, well my task keeps getting tougher. His forte is understatement, but can any amount of sunshade eclipse the sun? Mr. Naseeruddin, you epitomize theatrical art, there is no greater praise that can be given. And what can I, a person whom people prefer to see backstage or front stage but not onstage, say any further?

To Arshad Warsi and the rest of 20 odd cast (can you imagine, the entire cast wouldn’t have exceeded that number!!) you have rocked. I hate to use any word the second time in my article; my vocabulary (or the lack of it) prevents me from writing anymore. Feel free to take any and all the compliments that you have come across, you deserve it. And Arshad, thanks for retaining a little bit of Circuit in the performance; you proved that one can never have too much of a good thing.

PS: One thing I hate about people like me; we take the funniest of the jokes and make it look like a sermon at the graveside. In summary, here is what I would like to say – you don’t need to clear your calendar to make time to watch the movie; but if you find you have 3 hours slipping through your hands without anything to show for them, then go ahead and watch it. If nothing else, watch it for Vidya Balan; in her, the memories of timeless beauties of yesteryears have been actualized.

Forget Not the Other Companions

And so did it come about that there was this mountain that they had to cross. There was no way around, no way to skirt the obstacle. So they began exploring possible ways of surmounting the mountain. “Let’s mine through it, after all what’s a mountain to a rat?”said one. “No, is there a better route than the aerial one? Let’s take to wings and prove that insurmountability is a matter of perspective” said the second. Countered the third “Say what you may but I prefer my legs – short though they are, over many a rough mile they have carried me.” And so they parted, each his own way, the destination being the same nonetheless. No doubts need be harboured, all of them homed onto their destination and met up at their favourite watering hole.
Ask me then, which was a better path? The rat bit its way through the underbelly of the earth – a lot of mud shifting and pain it involved, for the earth at least. The dog trudged along, burdening the hills and dales with his not inconsiderable weight. And as for the aerial companion, oh what a glorious flight; but what if the mountain was too tall? Rarified atmospheric conditions would have meant that the glorious flight ended in doom. So ask again, which was a better path? Or was there a better path? The rat couldn’t have flown, how much so ever he wanted to abjure from injury. The dog couldn’t have burrowed inspite of its best intentions and the bird would have to fly, no matter what.
The destination was the same – Independent India, each took to it as was in him – be it hurting the opponents underbelly, trudging over his mighty head or soaring high above. There were, and neither are, no comparatives amongst the paths taken; to claim one glorious and other ignominious is but a display of dull wit. “Different folks, Different strokes” I would say. Don’t mistake the metaphor; for rat, dog and bird are but examples and it is with greatest respect I take the names of our founding fathers. Yet why is it that Gandhiji is glorified, Nehru remembered and Subhas Chandra Bose is but consigned to a footnote in the memory of the nation? Refuse to believe this? How many of us honoured his memory on his birthday (23 Jan) with atleast a passing thought of gratitude? Of course, many of us would be hard pressed to explain the reason behind Dry Day on Oct 2nd; scarcity of alcohol due to increasing acceptance of drinking by the majority of our huge numbers would figure as the logical reason.
So what’s your take, you might ask? Why do you turn into an eternal didactic bore of maniacal proportions at the drop of a hat, you ask me. I have this to say, that maybe we are forgetting Bose because when, as Bomi Irani aptly put it in 3 Idiots “No one remembers who came the second” in today’s world, would we remember he who almost, but couldn’t make it?; that his was a fell choice, but choose he did, and against all odds strove to mine the roots of the earth to ensure that sun sets over the Empire; that we have to honour his memory; we cannot afford to turn a blind eye – if we forget our nation’s best sons, maybe our sons will find no reason to scale the peak of superlatives and we would be cursed with mediocrity, forever.
We don’t require another holiday; no we do not desire one. What we require is that his memory is held sacred, his ideals followed and his bravery emulated. We require that his dream is realized and he is talked about, for when darkness engulfed, he rode out in glory, stood tall in wrecked battlefields, all to keep his promises.

Destination Silence ... via Twitter

Silence…………… And then it began. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Time went by, words multiplied, separated, divorced and groups of them set up nuclear families. The Word was split, God and His glorious wisdom were fragmented and we had the babel of languages; a shard wisdom being a coveted piecemeal of each language.
Aeons passed and millions of tmcft of water has flowed down each of your favorite rivers but the wisdom remained in silos. Then came the noble English conquerors – come on give the devils their due, it was they who gave almost the whole world a single language to communicate in (although Indian English and American English are as different as radish and cauliflower). And all of a (gradual) sudden, wisdom had a chance to coalesce, albeit in varied dialects.
Cometh the hour, cometh the idea. The time was ripe and the need reached a tipping point; hey presto, sms language made its grand entrance. A new universal language was born, and oh boy, did it take the world by storm!!
Yet the cycle was not complete. When the entire wisdom was initially a single word, don’t multiple words convey abridged, sullied form of wisdom? The obstacles in the journey towards perfect wisdom seemed insurmountable when Messers Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey made their grand entrée. With Tweeter appealing to popular imagination, wisdom was pressurized to distill itself of the impurities and fit into 140 characters, an unimaginable feat one second post the tower of babel debacle.
We are still far, but 140 characters is pretty close to one (big) word. The next goal then ….. Silence once again; journey towards total Silence being the ultimate objective. But I fear that this time around, the little devils who call themselves Google engineers would find ways of placing ad even in silence.
Something like ….silence…. silence sponsored by Silent Gas Cutters….. silence….

All for a smile

During a lull in activity yesterday, I took up an endevour to look for the most famous smiles in India. I expected the obvious answer would be Mona Lisa, with the second, third and other places going to Ms Chops, Ms Kaif and the other motley crowd of modern day dolls (Ms Pinto et al). For those of you who live in Mars, find the famous Mona Lisa pic (a copy of course courtesy google image search) below

Imagine my consternation when I found the top result gives me, believe it or not, the picture of Mr. SPS Rathore. Remember the line to the effect “The smile has been wiped off” appearing in all news channels in over the past few days? Somehow I felt that the news creators (that’s the best name I can think of for the various news channels) were more annoyed that he was smiling than the fact that he got away lightly; that if he had appeared morose and defeated, he would have been pardoned and offered a shoulder to weep on. The congratulatory tone the channels took up when he appeared glum (remember his sentence is no more or less than what it was when he was smiling) was laughable at best. No worse social conscience keepers could I have imagined that these guys.

Another fad of the “responsible” media that is catching up the “candle vigils” that they give call for every now and then. A vigil for every case that is in and out of court, for any and every issue, and sometimes in memory of events (if there is no news worth talking for a whole week). The most paradoxical “candle light vigil” I have heard is one to spread awareness regarding global warming. Come on guys, you think you are reducing emissions by switching off lights but what about the smoke from your vigils. At one candle per person, it is a huge waste of “candle resources”. And if I have to draw the argument to a point of irrelevance (like you guys usually do), then as this wax is from petroleum extraction, did you mean to replace a less polluting source of energy (petrol/coal used for power generation would be used more efficiently and would pollute less) by a more polluting one? And to top it all you will have self-styled experts (aka self styled commanders of the J&K insurgency fame) from various channels sitting in midst of these candles with a righteous grin, almost expecting a Pulitzer or a Padma Shree. Thanks guys but no thanks. Give us news, we can form our own views.

An aside: One of my friends pointed out that Mr Rathore looks like Grinch. I found the resemblance striking. Find a pic for the ease of comparision

All images are courtesy google images (this is to meet the copyright obligations or whatever)

Anti-Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

Got you!!! I know you just made a grab for your dictionary. Or at least you attempted to do so but your inherent inertia stopped you:). Yes, yes, yes!!! You do not know the extent of my mirth. If you can imagine, I was almost in the striking distance of nirvana. To be honest, I googled up the word, its not a part of my vocabulary (if that is any relief to you). But the satisfaction of using a “bombastic” word, however archaic or just concocted, is to be experienced rather than described.
The practice of using high flowing words is especially obvious in the so called “third world” countries; countries where the English language was imposed, where an alternate “mother tongue” exists (there is no reason why Britons would ever mug up “Word Power made Easy”). In such a scenario, the use of English language becomes a status symbol, a sort of new-age caste system. A Brahmin of olden days, however impoverished, could look at the richest man in the village with scorn and disdain, all cause of his standing in the social order. In the modern context, when caste system has lost its relevance, we have, thanks to the munificent Britons, another differentiator; a new excuse for the even the poor to feel superior to the richest in the land. Thanks grandiloquent English, thou art a perfect equalizer.
I remember a particular incident during my college days when a set of boisterous guys amongst us pulled off a particularly amusing/embarrassing (depending on the side you are in) prank. That they were punished is a different matter; prior to the punishment however, there was a public notice to inform all the hostel inmates of their misdemeanor (the intention being public humiliation). The notice was composed by an ardent lover of the English language and when it was put up, half of us weren’t sure if the notice was complimentary or accusatory. The substance of the notice took three readings to discern; the deduction of the tone was left to the reader (you cannot have a teacher appreciating a particularly severe breach in rule right).
Someone (I am not sure who (s)he is; I presume someone with wisdom to state the following would be great) said “Words are like leaves; in places where they abound, the fruit of wisdom of hardly ever found”. I call the person great not because he has recommended the sparse use of words; rather he has given the reason why we (me in particular) use too numerous a word. God intended language to be an effective tool to communicate ideas, thoughts and feelings. Symbols and sounds were meant to bridge the gap between minds. Try applying this definition to a legal document – all the structures of the language are used to such optimum extent that, within the first line, you lose yourself. Words were meant to be magnifying glass; we have turned them into iron curtains, protecting the flimsiest of our thought. Some of the diplomatic and corporate communications would put even the famed Enigma cipher to shame.
This post is proof enough that this is not a dying phenomenon - the post is verbose enough, yet the article has not added anything to what the title said. And for those of you who have not yet garnered energy to look up the meaning of the title, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words and anti-hippo…blahblah is the opposite of that, i.e., love for long words. As even google couldn’t find a single word for love for long words, I got creative:).

Art(?) of the Modern Indian Male(?)

Of late I have noticed that there has been a disgusting rise in a uniquely male phenomenon, akin to the sight of relieving oneself in public. Whether it is a universal male behavior or is restricted to the Indian male is something I cannot comment on; take it that it has been rise in India at least. I am talking about defacing public spaces with obscene graffiti, with special focus on female anatomy.
Get into any of the railway coaches (especially the sleeper class) and have a look in the washrooms. You would be surprised at the artistic skill we men have developed. The artwork ranges from factual, accurate work to a “modern art” kind with words and phrases to ensure comprehension. While the scribbling on the restroom walls has somehow gained some sort of acceptance (indifference would be the right word, I would say), the “creative heads” have become more daring.
Recently, while using the elevator, one of my friends pointed out an etching on the display panel of the elevator. This elevator is a 1500 kg capacity regular Mitsubishi elevator made of reinforced steel. I would categorize it as a graffiti enthusiast’s nightmare; no scope to etch/scratch/scribble anything remotely long-lasting on its surface. And yet you have these corporate “hooligans” who put on their best creative hats to record their ideas and feelings to their colleagues and posterity. I would imagine that people moving in elevators in an office building would have more important stuff to ruminate over.
This distressing phenomenon has moved to our home spaces too. One look around in the apartment lifts (you are spared a lot of suffering if you do not stay in apartments) and you would get uncomfortable every time you are sharing the lift with a member of the opposite sex. No amount of repainting gives the lift a makeover, it just provides the “art” lover to engage his skills over a new canvas, to his great glee. That the graffiti appears overnight is astounding; I cannot imagine a higher sense of commitment, if only it was for a higher purpose …..
While there can be no justification for this sort of behavior, the reasons are not hard to deduce. The Indian male is in doldrums, a sort of teenage phenomenon for the Indian male society. While he is exposed to free sexual thought and expression of the west (thanks to the manifold channels dotting our entertainment landscape), his conservative upbringing counsels him abeyance. Thus unable to cut asunder the links to the past culture and at the same time being prodded by pure primal instinct, he resorts to one form of expression that is both anonymous and rebellious.
The solution to this problem, like the solution to any other Indian problem, is necessarily complex. While legal means (Graffiti would be punishable under law) would be a recipe for sure failure, regulatory means (Control over content in various media) would make the government the favorite punching bag of all and sundry, and social means (remember the old days when any “uncle” in the street could rap you on your knuckles for smoking? And your parents would stoutly support him and thank him?) unacceptable to modern India, innovative approaches must be adopted to eradicate this scrooge. And this must be done at the earliest or India would add another title to its list of sobriquets, that of being the world’s capital for Graffiti.
PS: While I do not have the figures to prove it either way, I have called it a male phenomenon purely for political and diplomatic reasons. I do not want to risk hurting the last of the sentiments of the better half of the population with the charge of mental harassment being punishable with 5 yrs imprisonment or more.