On the Star's Gesture...

A youtube clip of Rajnikanth's iconic cigarette toss/move (Hindi film viewers probably know this only in its elaborate form from Giraftaar (begin watching at the 1:43 mark here); followed by Satyam's comment in the context of what Shankar has made/is making of Rajni, led to the following musings:

"…and the scene illustrates the nature, and hence the limits, of gesture. That is, the gesture — which, unlike the pose, is purely itself; that is, it expresses personality, unlike the pose, which seeks to express someone else’s personality and is merely a kind of imitation — operates at the level of “as if.” We are charmed by the gesture inasmuch as it is able to be enacted as if no one were watching. This is of course not true — on film, by definition someone is watching — but for the spell onscreen to be compelling the performer must be able to enact it as if it were true. (The becomes less and less true as the gesture is transformed into the star's stock move, and, as in the scene from Giraftaar, filmmakers will often try to disguise the staleness by rendering it ever more elaborate.) This scene from Ninaithaale Inikkum (a film I haven’t seen, by the way) demonstrates that even the most gestural of stars, Rajnikanth (in the sense that no other star seems so conflatable with his gestures), is undone if the illusion is undone. The “as if” element cannot be present, because, in this scene, people are literally watching him. Also, the purity of the gesture is explicitly compromised, because, instead of existing in and of itself as it does at the beginning of the scene, the cigarette trick is impressed into the service of a goal: winning the car. The gesture, in short, is undone, and all pleasure and delight drained from it, when it is transformed into a task."

I'm falling in love with a stranger...(actually, did so back in 1975)

I just love this song (the scene from the film is here)...it just grooves...hadn't thought about it in years... in fact the lyrics mimic (anticipate?) the homo-erotic -- or at least erotic -- investment of the audience in Amitabh...he is the stranger we are falling in love with. That is, his outsider-status, his strangeness, is why we fall in love with him (very different to why "we" might have fallen in love with Rajesh Khanna, SRK, or Rajendra Kumar -- those were loved because they were familiar). When Amitabh ceases to be strange, when he becomes familiar, in the way a kindly old uncle is, he continues to be held in great esteem and affection, and is perhaps even loved, but simultaneously one scorns him, loathing the betrayal...

[Related discussion at Satyamshot here.]

Lapata on Daniyal Mueenuddin (via Chapati Mystery)

A great post by lapata on Daniyal Mueenuddin, Manto, Pakistani (as opposed to Indian) fiction, and representations of women. Check the comments thread out; one of my responses is pasted below:

"A superb post, one of the best on this blog in recent times. Since Dalrymple and others (I remember Amit Chaudhuri wrote a lengthy essay in the last year or so that touched upon the difference between Indian and Pakistani writing (the complete piece is not available online; here's a link to the abstract); more specifically, it was in large part about what he felt was the desiccation of Indian art — classical music was exhibit A — by state patronage; even the Indian novel-in-English was thoroughly implicated in the Indian national project on Chaudhuri’s reading, and thus condemned to a bland liberalism (unlike Dalrymple and Mishra, then, Chaudhuri’s criticism is not based on the writer’s “inauthenticity” as on the fact that his/her artistic vision is, perhaps despite himself/herself, compromised by the Nehruvian project, pursuant to which illiberalism becomes a kind of cardinal sin)) have used Daniyal Mueenuddin as a kind of representative of “Pakistaniness”, it is a troubling omission on Dalrymple’s part that he does not acknowledge or recognize that Mueenuddin’s stories could be said to reflect the almost untouchable privilege of the z– “farm manager.” In fact, lapata’s post is the only thing on him that I have read that seems to raise questions based on Mueenuddin’s position. Not that that position prevents one from creating great art, but lapata hones in on the fact that it is a particular kind of art — no less particular than the sort of art a well-heeled urban person, whether in Pakistan or India (see the novels of Mohsin Hamid; Kamila Shamsie; and Uzma Aslam Khan) might be said to write. One can certainly say that one kind of writing is less bland, less expected, less common to English-language readers — but I must confess I am a bit uncomfortable with the idea that the latter kind of writing incarnates a “truth” about Pakistan whereas those others don’t (about pakistan or india). i.e. Mueenuddin can be considered a very good/great writer without the burden that the “third world” writer always seems to have, namely the obligation to be authentic. [Not exactly sure why, but writing this comment reminded of a funny quote from Foucault's "History of Sexuality" (Vol. 1), where he says something to the effect that women once upon a time struggled for the right to have an orgasm, and now are condemned to live under the obligation to have one.]"

While searching for a link to the Chaudhuri piece, I found a second one by him that touches upon some of these issues.

A CM thread on Indian history...

I haven't had a blog post of late, but I have been busy commenting on a discussion thread at Chapati Mystery...

My Paul-the-Octopus Moment (in Dubai)

I leave New York for a week and the Yankees win seven straight. Maybe I need to stay in Dubai...

A Note on RAAVANAN (Tamil; 2010)

A post-script to my review of Raavan, in light of last night's trip to New Jersey to watch Raavanan (the Tamil half of this bi-lingual):

The dialogues in the Tamil version are the biggest surprise -- and offer the most intriguing glimpse into director Mani Rathnam's vision. Several dialogues offering glimpses of the "backstory" are absent in the Hindi version, ranging from details (Veeraiya's brother Singarasan (Prabhu) suggesting that since Ragini's 14-hour absence has driven husband Dev (Prithviraj) to distraction, a 14-day absence might be even better; Hemanth's punishment seems more clearly spelled out in the Tamil version, replete with a eunuch who appears when Ragini (Aishwariya Rai) tries to free him (in Hindi the analogous figure is Veera's brother Mangal; and when Veeraiya (Vikram) says his jealousy of Ragini's husband makes him feel all-powerful, the Tamil version makes clear this is so because this is the one emotion her husband does not feel (he is wrong)); to political subtext ("Are your girls flowers, and ours gravel?", one song asks, foreshadowing the trauma at the core of Veeraiya's revenge; although, all references to "Delhi" are absent from the Tamil lyrics); to characterization (Ragini knows her husband is an "encounter specialist", underscoring her own complicity). The cumulative effect is of a more explained, and hence more explicable, darkness, a world that -- despite the geographic displacements of locale -- seems more at home in the history of Tamil cinema than in the world of myth where the Hindi Raavan takes place. The Tamil version is, in short, a shade more worldly, more political than the Hindi film; the latter is a shade more mysterious, with meaning vouchsafed more by glimpses than piquant dialogue.

Two differences redound entirely to the Tamil version's advantage however: almost from the very outset, the dialog has a sexual subtext, underscoring the real core of Dev's anxiety at his wife's abduction. "Not all women," Gnanapraksh (Kartik, the "Hanuman" of this film) uneasily says when a villager tells Dev that women love Veeraiya. The Hindi Dev tortures Veera's brother-in-law because he's a brutal, violent character; the Tamil Dev does so because he thinks Veeraiya is sending him a message by tying up the young man in Ragini's clothes (in both versions, the man infiltrates Veera's/Veeraiya's sister's house dressed in drag). By cutting off this man's arm, the Raavan of this epic signals that he can unman Ram. The difference is one of nuance rather than kind, but manifests a fraught, carnal, current that is perhaps too obscure in the Hindi version.

Second, there are Vairamuthu's lyrics. Even filtered through sub-titles, the master's simple, powerful words are better suited to the action on-screen. For insance, when Ragini first picks up a weapon to try and kill her abductor, instead of the wonderful but somewhat incongrous "Ranjha Ranjha" lyrics (with their provenance in the work of the Sufi master Bulleh Shah) testifying to a Heer who has so subsumed her identity in her lover Ranjha that she can only go by his name, the Tamil version of the song asks whether she now belongs to the forest, or is fated to vanish like an illusion or even dream ("maya"). Rahman's haunting vocals at film's end croon not about the loss of passage, but about a loss that is also a promise to return.

The above notwithstanding, the two versions are so close the difference is most manifest in the cast, anchored around the female constants of Aishwariya Rai's Ragini and Priyamani's Jamuniya (Hindi)/Vennila (Tamil). Among the supporting cast, Karthik's Hanuman is markedly better than Govinda's in wit, timing, and humor -- but looks a bit too well for a man stuck for the last 28 years in a dead-end job as forest officer, and liberal with the booze to boot. As the bandit's brother, Prabhu isn't bad, but his physicality betrays the role: he is, to put it bluntly, more Jell-O than brigand, his wobbles speaking a language all their own. Prithviraj's Dev does not offer the foil to "Raavan" that Vikram did in the Hindi version, although there is something to be said for his restless creepiness. It's just as well the Tamil film (unlike the Hindi version)announces that his marriage to Ragini was arranged -- it's hard to imagine her choosing him in the first instance (an intuition that might add to Dev's anxiety).

Ultimately, of course, the film rises or falls with the man at the eye of the storm. On this terrain, playing this sort of character, it is perhaps impossible for Vikram to disappoint. He nevertheless manages to surprise by incarnating a tortured soul who seems at once driven and world-weary. Abhishek Bachchan's Veera was stranger, as is more appropriate for the stuff of myth; but Vikram's older Veeraiya has seen more, has endured more. And for me was more convincing in love; or rather, Veeraiya's love is an affliction; Veera's is a sentiment. With respect to their physicalitly, Rathnam plays with both actors with great precision: In the Hindi version, Abhishek's greater height, framed against the cliffs and drops, is highlighted to great effect (Vikram does not have the same advantage, most noticeably when he is framed against the sun in the abduction scene; in his first encounter with Ragini atop a cliff; and when he turns towards her at the end). On the other hand, Vikram's greater brawn, his sheer breadth, means Rathnam has him crouch quite a bit more than his Hindi counterpart. Veeraiya is literally closer to the earth than Veera is, one might even say his distinguishing element is earth as opposed to sky (fire and water are common to both). More crucially, Vikram's frame renders him the more immediate presence in the character's close-ups with Ragini, and whatever one's preference, he is undeniably the more carnal presence. One can almost smell the sweat.

While the Tamil version, and its central performance, are etched a shade more vividly in my viewing experience, choosing between these gems is not a dilemma one needs to face: both films make for essential viewings, and represent different refractions of Rathnam's vision. Commercial Hindi/Tamil cinema does not get much better.

RAAVAN (Hindi; 2010)

It doesn't begin at the beginning, but, like a Greek epic, in the thick of things, by way of a jumble of images, from a serene Beera (Abhishek Bachchan) atop a cliff to policemen facing a road-block, to lust and ambush at a village fair, leading to a shocking image of men being burned alive, to, of course, to Ragini (Aishwariya Rai) in a boat, under threat from a larger vessel manned by Beera -- framed against the sun, more silhouette than man. The cycle begins with Beera, and ends with him, and involves his contact with three of the traditional elements: earth, air, and water. As for the fourth -- fire -- that is Beera himself, as he himself suggests later on in the film when he is consumed and confused by his desire for Ragini. The succession of images, colors, and characters is determinedly non-linear: we all know the Ramayana, and so we know what must happen here, but the order (or lack thereof) unsettles our expectations. After five or more minutes of ravishment, its compression unequalled by any other sequence in director Mani Rathnam's illustrious career (just about every principal theme is introduced in this overture, that must surely rank among Hindi cinema's most memorable), the camera finds itself below the surface of the water, gazing up at the two boats nearing each other. At the moment of collision, debris (or is it blood?) drips onto the now black screen, as backdrop to the word "Raavan", even as A.R. Rahman's addictive "Beera" song navigates the darkness, illuminated only by print-like images of the title character.

Those first few minutes are worth the price of admission. The concision extends on either side of the titles: what has gone before has introduced us to Beera and Ragini; immediately after, we encounter the proud Dev (Vikram), and Sanjeevani (Govinda), a drunk forest-officer comically showing us he is the Hanuman of this tale. The opening frames certainly set the tone for what is to follow, a visual feast even Rathnam's and cinematographer Santosh Sivan's careers have not fully prepared us for. The two have long been associated with striking imagery, and indeed, as Baradwaj Rangan demonstrates in his insightful review, many images in the film are drawn from Rathnam's own oeuvre. When Rathnam and Sivan are at their best, however, as in the opening portions of the masterpiece Iruvar (1997) or the singular Dil Se (1998), the experience of watching their work does not so much boil down to handsome images so much as to a certain visual texture, woven by virtue of rapid succession into a dense tapestry where almost nothing happens because someone says it is, but only because the filmmaker shows that it is. This is no "poetry" of expression, as more than one film critic has termed it, except insofar as it, like poetry, is economical. Rathnam achieves it by removing from cinema almost all that is not cinema.

That, in a nutshell, is what makes this retelling of The Ramayana ultimately worth watching: we get no new insight into the epic by virtue of its contemporary setting, but simply -- and wonderfully -- get a Ramayana for our cinema (as opposed to for our ears, or readers, or for devotion). Which made writing about this film a bit difficult for me, so wedded is Raavan to the succession of images that constitute it. Especially earlier on in the film, when even the linearity of individual sequences is disturbed by re-arrangement of the expected order -- we see an unconscious body before we see the fall, and by that point we aren't surprised: that's how things are in the world of this film. Conversely, the film's descent into linearity as it moves toward the climax is a bit disappointing. There's nothing "wrong" with what the film does there, one simply misses the magic that has come before. Although, even at the end, there are consolations: an effective bridge fight between Beera and Dev (a follow-up to the one from Yuva/Aayitha Ezhuthu), and, best of all, a closing scene that mirrors the opening one -- with a very different result.

Raavan is more focused than many Rathnam scripts, but even it suffers from some poor writing. Beera's central motivation for revenge -- his sister's humiliation at the hands of the police, depicted in searing fashion by Rathnam's refusal to show anything at all; it is Priyamani's words (describing the harrowing events) that make the audience uncomfortable -- doesn't seem to figure much in the latter portions of the film. Indeed, the flashback sequence with Priyamani -- superb in every scene she is in -- not only makes the later effacement of her memory from the film bizarre, it casts a shadow over what has gone before. Why does Beera only think about killing Ragini? Doesn't the thought that he could rape her ever cross his mind? Doesn't it cross Mangal's? One cannot help but feel that what Baradwaj Rangan has characterized as Rathnam's "resolutely middle class" ethos is his undoing: he simply won't have Beera engaging in something too distasteful on screen. Or, as everyone knows: the odd hacked arm is OK (although, why on earth would Beera spare the policeman who has raped his sister?), but sexual misconduct is just Beyond The Pale. This imaginative failure casts a shadow over Beera; that it does not cripple him is due to the efforts of Abhishek Bachchan, who is memorable in a role where his most common props are stance and gesture, framed against the elements or the wilderness, that look Rathnam's eye captures -- not dialogs and high drama. This must have been a difficult role to essay, given the juxtaposition of sparseness and signification in Rathnam's Beera, and the younger Bachchan deserves credit for giving memorable form to the film's least developed character, and most developed iconic presence. But he cannot forestall a certain unevenness in tone, and whether that is due to an acting limitation or a directorial failure, the result is occasionally labored. Not to mention that in a film darker and more intense than any Rathnam has previously made, by the end Beera's character reflects one ray of sunshine too many. I did not get the sense he had been anywhere as bleak as Yuva's Lallan.

The rest of the cast gets to play more natural characters, and does not disappoint. Beginning with Ravi Kissen (as Beera's brother Mangal) and Nikhil Dwivedi (as police officer Hemant). But not ending with them: apart from Priyamani, even the children who appear in the odd scene or two, or the police-man cowed into cooperating with Beera, as well as the extras, appear to have been cast with care. And then there's Govinda; that it took Rathnam to remind us that long before David Dhawan, the man could act, speaks volumes about the utter disinterest so many filmmakers display towards non-lead roles.

Even an epic called "Raavan" needs a Ram, and Vikram's Dev is unforgettable. A tough cop with his own violent darkness, Vikram's domineering screen presence is a perfect fit for the role, as is his superciliousness. One never really likes this Ram, or even sees that he is virtuous. One simply accepts the inevitable, that this man will not be denied in his quest for his wife. It is, all things considered, a relatively small role -- yet Vikram's charisma means he never feels far from the action. Aishwariya Rai's role is at the other end of the spectrum: her Ragini has more screen time than any other character in the film, and provides the female center that this film needs. The characterization is quintessential Rathnam: Ragini is tough and gutsy in captivity; and, in the flashback sequences, the sort of domestic sari-clad goddess who would make even confirmed bachelors sign up for marriage. (The fact that Rathnam himself appears to be married to just such a deity in the form of Suhashini probably justifies the happy husband peddling such felicity in his films.) That bourgeois ideal is established by a seductive Khili Re video, all the more welcome given how rare it is for classical dance to be married to overt sexiness in Hindi films -- watch out for Ragini playfully snapping at Dev's nose, in a room featuring one mirror too many. That sort of assertiveness goes well with the Ragini we see in Beera's clutches: for much of the film, she is never still, periodically trying to escape, kill Beera, and even rescue another captive. In fact, Rathnam shrewdly compensates for Rai's limited dramatic range by giving her the most active role in the film, as she falls, jumps, slides, laments, and snarls her way through the jungles, her beauty unnerving despite -- or perhaps because of -- the wringer her director puts her through. To the extent Ragini's character has an aesthetic has an undoing, it is her own confused desire for Beera. Rai lacks the expressive range to adequately convey her growing attraction to Beera, but Rathnam doesn't help by having Ragini's desire manifest itself as a kind of passivity (until, at the very end, this film's equivalent of the Agni-pariksha ("trial by fire") enables her to wrest the initiative once again).



I've reviewed the music elsewhere, but would be remiss if I didn't add here that the film's visuals cannot be "thought" without Rahman's accompanying soundtrack, so seamlessly integrated here that (unlike in, for instance, Guru), it is only after the film that one remarks upon the absence of a favorite song or interlude. The one, brave, exception is "Ranjha Ranjha", where the album's lush yet troubling and unsettled number is replaced with a radically different version, almost a cross between the song from the album and "Raasaathi" (Thiruda Thiruda). The film's version only works because it reminds us of the album's version, and hence of the road not taken. Rathnam intends to deny his audience the easy pleasure of familiarity, even in this most familiar of stories. Rahman's background score is less uniformly felicitous, alternating between magic worthy of the visuals (that is to say unobtrusive and inextricable from the visuals; at its best this is one of Rahman's most accomplished background scores); and some awful interludes that try and announce how momentous the scene is by their sheer loudness. No-one, and least of all Rahman, can be forgiven such vulgarity.

Ultimately, with any re-telling, the question one has to ask is "why?" And despite the fact that if one can do what Rathnam and Sivan do here, perhaps the only answer is "because we can", Raavan goes a long way toward providing a more substantive answer. The charge of superficiality often laid at Rathnam's door when it comes to politics will not work here: as in Dil Se, this is a film about individuals caught in the eye of a storm, and in both films, freed from the burden of having to chronicle cause and effect (the burden, that is to say, of providing an origin story), the director can paint the storm as he sees it. The result is an impressionistic world, well suited to the realm of myth, where meaning is manifested strangely and without explanation: the beauty of a body falling down; cigarettes burning holes in a newspaper photograph; a caped figure looming at the entrance of a cave, or dimly visible atop a bike through the haze; or framed by the sun in the midst of water. Those who cavil at the lack of cultural specificity -- Orchcha pops up as a backdrop to one song; Mangal's bhaiyya dialect seems incongruous in these jungles, especially given no-one else speaks like him -- miss the point: this is not a film about a particular place, but a myth re-imagined for our times. The pseudo-Naxal backdrop is not meant to provide an insight into the insurgency so much as it is to provide the stage on which the epic may be re-enacted. It might be an all too easy way out, but it is deliberate: we are not told the name of the state, the district, or any place at all, except that Beera lives in "Laal Maati" ("Red Earth"); Rathnam dispenses with authenticity in representation, and, as in Dil Se (where too, we were never told what cause was at issue, or even what region, which appeared to alternate between Kashmir and India's North-East), does so aggressively.

There is certainly politics here -- Beera and his men mutter more than once (not to mention sing) about "upper caste" and state oppression -- but it is only there by way of explanation: it's why everyone is where they are. In the wider sense (i.e. not limited to statecraft), of course, there is a lot of gender politics here, and Rathnam isn't shy of taking sides: the male ethos, of both Ram and Raavan, is glamorous, violent, destructive -- and fragile. The female ethos -- incarnated in Ragini -- is strength. Not necessarily so (Beera's sister is crushed), and perhaps not unproblematically so (to what extent is Ragini's opposite fate a function of her greater social privilege?), but there it is. Most interesting of all, female strength invokes anxiety and weakness in the men around the women, whether in the form of desire (Beera's for Ragini); or of the vigilance demanded by a purity fetish (Dev's, after Ragini's rescue); or of honor (all too easily lost when a woman is raped, as close to an originary trauma as this film will give us). The film isn't called "Raavan" simply because it is the venerable epic's double. Rathnam's addiction to the trope of two is subtler here: the film's title doesn't indicate that Rathnam's sympathies are always with the women, but it does announce that Ram isn't the hero of this epic. Raavan is not a woman, but he is more child than man, and is certainly not the man Dev's Ram is. That deity, for Rathnam, wears a uniform -- that is, he belongs to the official world, to the mainstream discourse, to the world of men. (The director is uninterested in Ram's especial traditional resonance for North India's "little people," most notably the Dalits, a silence that might well limit the extent to which many audiences are able to relate to their beloved epic's cinematic imagining.) The downtrodden and marginalized of this version demand a different hero.

The 1947 Matrix

I was recently commissioned to write a personal, "NRI"-type piece for The Asian Age (Delhi), at no more than ~1,000 words. It appeared today; I was surprised to learn that the Deccan Chronicle is under the same management, and the editor told me they were using the same piece for that paper as well. Yenjoy. I disclaim all responsibility for the titles.

The Hatred of Democracy: RAJNEETI (Hindi; 2010)

Yes, the title of this review is borrowed from the book by the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere. And no, this isn't overkill. Not when you consider that Rajneeti is only the latest in the line of films set in the world of Indian politics, mostly distinguished only by their suspicion of democracy (masquerading as skepticism of politicians), and by their refusal to engage with any politics. Almost as if the mere fact of representing politicians on screen liberates one from ever having to talk about politics (even as the films themselves advance a subversive form of politics that is neither progressive nor practical). The director only needs to show the jockeying of various more-or-less villainous characters, pillaging and murdering their way across the landscape with abandon. Don't believe me? Watch Madhur Bhandarkar's Satta (2003). Or watch director Prakash Jha's Rajneeti, which, despite an impressive star cast, a much larger canvas, and the (for Bollywood) previously virgin locales of Bhopal, manages to muddle its way through "politics" with what I can only call cretinous irresponsibility.

Rajneeti is set in the world of Madhya Pradesh politics, and by the time the film hits its stride we know that its principal characters are cousins jockeying for power and control of a local political outfit, the Rashtrawadi ("nationalist") party. On one side are Chandra Pratap (Chetan Pandit) and his sons Prithvi (Arjun Rampal) and Samar (Ranbir Kapoor). When Chandra Pratap's older brother and party patriarch Bhanu Pratap has a stroke, he basically hands over the party to Chandra and Prithvi, inflaming his own son Veerendra Pratap (Manoj Bajpai), who decides to wrest the party from his cousins one way or another. And one of those ways is by championing the cause of Sooraj Kumar (Ajay Devgan), a local Dalit youth who's determined to make sure the shanty-towns of Azad Nagar finally get to decide who their assembly representative will be. Guess who's the long lost, out-of-wedlock son of Bharti Rai (Nikhila Trikha), youthful leftie activist-turned doormat mother of the Pratap family? (If you think that's a spoiler, you shouldn't be watching Hindi films.) Somewhere in the middle is Indu Sakseria (Katrina Kaif) daughter of an unscrupulous business man and in love with Samar. This last chap is a grad student in the USA, and wants nothing to do with politics -- until, that is, Rajneeti turns into The Godfather, and Samar realizes that Victorian poetry cannot provide as much satisfaction as can Michael Corleone.

If this film were called "Inteqaam", the above would be pretty unexceptionable, perhaps even loads of fun. But this film was hyped to death as presenting a relatively realistic take on Indian politics, and is shot through with the sort of faux-gravitas that comes when a frivolous film takes itself too seriously. When a relatively gripping revenge saga is shoehorned into a narrative that claims to speak the truth about power, the stakes are high enough to make certain kinds of masala licence dangerous. Case in point: once the first twenty or so minutes are over, no one seems to have any kind of political program. Jha doesn't even have his characters promising anything to any particular constituency and then reneging -- his politicians don't even bother indulging in public lies. For them, merely showing up on a podium is enough to get crowds cheering, waving, and generally throbbing with excitement. Rajneeti, in short, is not about politics per se so much as it is a representation of a politics premised on nothing more (or less) than personality. And while the film is depressingly on the money in its depiction of a regional party that essentially functions as an extension of one clan (far too many Indian political parties fit this description), it apparently cannot bear to think that the clan itself might stand for something, might represent something in the eyes of the public -- Rajneeti empties the clan of all political content, which ends up standing for nothing other than itself.

Juxtaposed with the endless shots of "the public", represented so passively one is reminded of a sitcom's laugh track, I could not escape the conclusion that "the people" were only here to reinforce urbane prejudices about the great unwashed, as a mass of voters undifferentiated by anything except for traditional cleavages of caste and communal affiliation, unable to master its destiny, and eternally fixed in its lack of meaningful agency. (As in his earlier Apharan, Jha reserves an especial cheap shot for the "Muslim vote bank", reinforcing the prejudice that its constituents vote en bloc and at the direction of clerics; years of research have been unable to substantiate this bugbear, except in the limited sense that Muslims are -- quite reasonably -- likely to vote against parties the politics of which are imbued with an anti-Muslim charge; but Jha is not one to be confused by facts.) This film isn't about Indian politics, it's about the politics of certain Bollywood audiences, a fantasy of what "we" think "they" are like, out there in India's dusty heartland. By film's end, the fantasy's arc has been achieved, as the urbane, English-medium types take over the state (both "down market"-types have been dispatched, while the film's only authentically Dalit major character has decided to return to being the driver of the family that has killed his son; that's what you get for being uppity). If the likes of Mayawati, Laloo Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Shivnath Singh Chouhan are watching, I imagine them scratching their heads and wishing for Yash Raj's Switzerland all over again -- if the country's got to be unrecognizably foreign, at least that one was pretty. All of which is to say that at the level of politics, Rajneeti does only one thing effectively: it panders.

The film doesn't even leave us with a morality play: for all the pre-release hype about the film being an adaptation of The Mahabharata, the film's characters lack any moral center or even any reticence, anxiety, or hesitation. And in Samar, far from the coming of age-tale of a reluctant prince (one might have re-titled The Godfather "The Education of Michael Corleone"), Rajneeti gives us a character who exhibits so little development as to seem inert. He never has to learn how to fend for himself, kill, and protect his family -- he knows how to do all these things the moment the opportunity presents itself. Heck, he might have delved into this stuff much sooner, had Victorian poetry not been distracting him. This film's Krishna (Brij Gopal, played by Nana Patekar) doesn't need to urge Arjuna to take up arms against his family in order to fulfill his dharma -- Samar's only dharma is to take up arms on behalf of his family, an inversion that speaks volumes about Jha's bourgeois ethos. And speaking of ethos, let's not forget the women: virtually every one of the principal female characters is so passive one might mistake them for scenery. That includes Indu, who displays initiative only in declaring her love for Samar -- once this is done, she is content to be led this way or that. The two exceptions are telling: one is an American, and the other an aspiring politician who will sleep with anyone who can get her a ticket. Need I say more?

As for the rest, Rajneeti isn't bad, and probably better than most Hindi films, especially in the film's first half, never less than gripping. Much of this is due to enthusiastic acting by Bajpai and Rampal, who decide to treat their roles as masala romps, to great effect. Bajpai in particular is a delight, rolling around dialogs with the air of a man who enjoys the sound of Hindi on his tongue -- harried by Hinglish, I was grateful to him (and to the writers Jha and Anjum Rajabali). As in Om Shanti Om, Rampal shows he can indulge a villainous streak to great effect, and was easily more memorable than Ranbir Kapoor, determined to play Samar earnestly straight. Which isn't to say that Ranbir is incompetent -- far from it -- merely that he is no more than competent, and isn't what this film needed. That's doubly true of Katrina Kaif; Jha should be embarrassed for casting her in this part, and for not unraveling the great mystery: if Samar is America-returned and Indu has long been Bhopal-bound, why is it her who has the accent? Devgan's Sooraj could have been the most interesting character, but the writers didn't know what to do with him. The fact that he and Veerendra spend the entire second half stumbling from one defeat to the next, reduced to standing around TV screens brooding or throwing tantrums -- Sooraj only the former; Veerendra only the latter -- is a large part of why the film degenerates post-interval. (That is a more general problem: I lost count of the number of scenes featuring cars pulling up to the palatial residence of this or that Pratap; or of crowds thronging the streets. Jha has never been the most visually interesting of filmmakers, but his staid style is all the more exposed given the size of the canvas.) But weak characterization aside, Devgan delivers possibly his most jaded performance, listless and un-compelling, a far cry indeed from Rajabali's other Devgan role in The Legend of Bhagat Singh. Nana Patekar's Brij Gopal is a pleasant surprise, a sign that years of bombastic roles have not buried the actor in him: his cunning politician is economical (with words, with gestures), and commands the attention of every room he is in -- in a Bhopal-full of hammers and pouters, Patekar enjoys acting, thereby elevating a weakly-written part. After the film has ended, it is his aura that lingers.

VINNAITHAANDI VARUVAAYA (Tamil; 2010)

Gautham Menon isn't my favorite director. Although I hugely enjoyed his Minnale (2001), that film didn't have much of what later became recognizable as his style, a post-Mukull Anand, post-Agni Natchitharam chic marked by neo-Hollywood technical slickness and crisp lighting, whether in the service of police procedurals that began better than they ended (Kaakha...Kaakha (2003) or Vettiayadu Vilaiyaadu (2006)), or more domestic genres (Pachaikili Muthucharam (2007); Vaaranam Aayiram (2008). So I was hardly enthused when I heard Gautham was making a love story with Trisha Krishnan and Silambarasan in the lead (if there's a hero I like less in Tamil cinema, I haven't seen him). Until I heard Gautham had jettisioned long-time musical collaborator Harris Jayaraj in favor of working with A.R. Rahman. And saw stills from the film, featuring a hero I was assured was "Simbu", but who looked nothing like him. Clearly, Gautham was returning to the love story genre of his first film from 2001, but didn't want to tread old ground.

Well, sort of. Like Minnale, Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya involves a Hindu-Christian love story. But whereas communal difference didn't matter much in the earlier film; here it is one of the main reasons why Karthik (Silambarasan ("Simbu")) and Jessie (Trisha Krishnan) find that the course of their true love does not run smooth. Nor is it the only one: Jessie is not only Malayalee Christian to Karthik's Tamilian Hindu, she is -- gasp! -- a year older than him. Karthik is also, for the umpteenth time where a Tamil film hero is concerned, an aspiring film director -- and as such doesn't have any real job prospects as far as Jessie's tyrannical father is concerned. We know what to expect from here on: after some hand-wringing by the female protagonist, the lovers will proceed along their clandestine way, until they are caught out by this or that parent, followed by a hastily arranged betrothal of the girl to some other guy. The only open question is whether the wrong marriage will be conducted. Um, do you really have to ask?

Gautham doesn't completely depart from this script for most of the film, but he does mix it up. The skeletal plot above, which could be expected to take up an entire film, only takes up half of this one, with most of the couple's romance actually following Jessie leaving the Other Guy high and dry at the altar. After the interval, the furtive romance blossoms, although Jessie is adamant that she won't be eloping with Karthik: she will bring her father around -- but seems not to make the slightest attempt to broach the topic with him). Even when the ultimate end is not in doubt, but Gautham plays enough with the conventions of the genre to ensure that the film's twists and turns aren't very predictable. That is, they all occur, just not when one expects them to. The final, and somewhat clumsily executed, twist takes the film to some place rather different from love stories, although it's an open question as to whether the film is better as a result.

The film's strength lies in the fact that Gautham does a better job of capturing the mood of young love than the carefree ambience favored by far too many Hindi film love stories. Such carefreeness is implicitly, in the context of a society riven with social distinctions and largely predicated on arranged marriages, a marker for a certain kind of privilege: for instance, nothing stands in the way of Saif's and Deepika's urbane love in Love Aaj Kal except their own wishy-washiness. Apart from that, there would be no issue with the eligible pair: no communal or class distinction could intrude. The same holds true for the Aamir-Preity Zinta pair in Dil Chahta Hai. (Instructively, in Love Aaj Kal, such conflict is relegated to the 1960s, a depressing reminder of the yuppiedom that has overtaken the Hindi film audience; in the Present Day, it seems, we don't worry about these things -- odd given the sorts of news stories that are never far from the front pages.) Even the exceptions actually reinforce the rule; these days, it takes something truly cosmic, like the India-Pakistan border in Veer-Zaara, for the world to intrude. I don't mean to dismiss these sorts of films out of hand -- it is possible that the flight they represent is part of their charm -- but merely note that they trade on fantasies of escape, not on catharsis. Gautham knows better, and the Karthik-Jessie relationship knows no dopey gallivanting around fantasy landscapes (the one exception, the "Anbil Avan" video, is in fact a fantasy) -- it is always fraught, and menaced by the world.

Along the way, there is much fresh dialog in Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya ("When I saw you on the terrace, I wanted to touch your face," Jessie tells Karthik in one scene; such directness is a far cry from the saccharine falsity of most Bollywood love stories), along with some wannabe stiltedness ("You're hot," Karthik tells Jessie; the only surprise is Karthik's belief that this line might work; later on he mentions a "one-way ticket to heartbreak city"); gorgeous Kerala locales; and an unobtrusive attitude. This film's determination to evoke a youthful, more contemporary vibe is manifested in its laid back feel, its post-Mani Rathnam, (relatively) naturalistic dialog, and in the sleek visual texture Gautham's films tend to have -- not in its theatrical attempt to tear up the script (a la Dev D (2009)). Nor is this love story embarrassed by its sappiness; nevertheless, the film's biggest drawback is possibly that it sacrifices a little too much romantic intensity at the altar of Gautham's "contemporary" vibe. But all in all, Vinaithaandi Varuvaaya seeks to update a cinematic tradition, not up-end it; as such, it feels less of a one-off than the Dev D's of the world; and more of a pointer to a possible way forward for big budget, star-driven commercial cinema. Leaving aside the odd false step (the odd twist at the end; plus, Gautham recycles an old stereotype about intransigent minorities in making Jessie's Christian father appalled at the thought of a Hindu son-in-law; while communal difference doesn't even register with either Karthik or his parents), Gautham gets enough right to make Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya worth watching. Stated differently: if you don't think this makes the cut, you're probably not watching too many Tamil or Hindi films.

Tamil films aren't known for strong characterization of women, and for the film's first half it seems that Trisha Krishnan's Jessie is not going to re-invent that paradigm. But even in the first half Gautham does steer clear of the infantilism that is often the lot of female lead roles in major Tamil films: Jessie is always a young adult, and for that Gautham has to be commended (that he has to be speaks volumes about what the rest of the industry is doing on this front, but that's a different story). Trisha Krishnan has never been the most expressive of actresses, nor is this role especially taxing, but she is seamless here as, quite literally, the girl upstairs. Her trademark gestures -- the furrowed brow, the quizzical look, the half-smile -- have never been used to better effect. Not that the glamor quotient is absent: there's no getting around the fact that Ms. Krishnan is bewitching here, in the way of one's first crush, an unattainable neighbor -- that is, if one's neighbor were a major movie star. Especially in the array of saris she wears, like a woman who knows the dress is sexy as is, and does not need much tarting up (or down, as the crotch-level saris of the Priyanka Chopras and Deepika Padukones show). The actress really comes into her own around the film's half-way mark, as Jessie begins to take charge of her own love story: post-interval, Jessie is assertive and sexy in way not enough lead roles in Tamil films have been (I couldn't help but wonder whether the fact that Jessie isn't Tamilian freed Gautham of the burden of having her serve as guardian of "Tamilness"; the inextricable link between Tamil cinema and cultural politics means that not many can rise above such turgidity). I do wish that the screenplay had allowed her point of view more scope: her inner voice is so absent that when we do hear it in a couple of scenes in the film's second half, we are startled, and forced to acknowledge that it has been missing all along.

And then there's Simbu. The film's leading man shows that the most drastic make-overs do not always need the most make-up or prosthetics: shorn of his facial hair and the jerky mannerisms that made something like Saravanaa both parodic and unbearable, I barely recognized the man on screen, looking more like a cross between Abhay Deol and Madhavan (the latter also called Karthik in his first hit, Alai Payuthey), than his own former avatar. Simbu is patchy but effective in his best moments, combining intensity with awkwardness like any kid head over heels in love. Even with respect to the unevenness, I wasn't sure if Gautham's screenplay wasn't just as much to blame, and to Simbu's credit he does well enough. Most important, he is completely fresh in this role, and is an appropriate vehicle for Gautham's aim of re-imagining the rather well-worn love story genre. He's no Madhavan, but how many are?

On the CD inlay, A.R. Rahman wrote that "[s]coring music for this film was like a peaceful homecoming," as good a summary of the score as any. This will never be considered one of Rahman's major works, and while the combination here of the later Rahman's slick production values with the sparse bent of some of his albums from the early 1990s produces a curiously un-Rahman effect at times, the mood lingers. This is Rahman's most consistently mellow album (and background score) in quite a while, with a personality as charming as Ms. Krishnan's. ("Kannukkul Kanne" typifies this: never has the Tamil tapori vibe seemed so laid back -- but then, it likely has never previously been set amidst waltzy strains and a soaring refrain of the sort that Rahman has made his own.) And one of his more situational: for the first time since Rang de Basanti, I had to watch the film to fall for Rahman's music. Curiously, it is the music videos that seem visually "off" at times: both "Kannukkul Kanne" and "Hosanna" are visually pitched a shade higher than the music, although Rahman himself errs (not for the first time) with Blaaze's faux-reggae vocals in "Hosanna." But these are cavils: on the whole, Gautham does justice to the music by making sure the film is suffused by the same breezy yet lovelorn mood throughout, and not just when the music videos are on -- if any part of Kerala has ever been captured more joyously than Allapazhu is here by cinematographer Manoj Paramahamsa, I don't know it. One cannot help but think of Kaadal Virus -- what would that superb album have come to mean, if Gautham had directed the film?

Book Review: India: The Rise of an Asian Giant (2008)

My review of Deitmar Rothermund's India: The Rise of an Asian Giant is up on H-Net...a big thank you to Prof. Sumit Guha for commissioning it.

[May 26, 2010 Update: Unfortunately, a couple of typos/errors crept in over the course of the process. In particular, the published version includes the following: "The book contains no more than a couple of stray references to Muslim Indians (let alone to other religious minorities, B. R. Ambedkar’s protest-Buddhism for the “untouchables” aside)--remarkable given the centrality of Muslims to Indian politics, both by exclusion. It largely omits discussion of the Hindu-nationalist Right--and by ideological inclusion--the secular Left, as well as smaller Northern Indian caste-based parties, the success of each of which depends on particular caste-groups voting in tandem with Muslim voters."

...which should read:

"The book contains no more than a couple of stray references to Muslim Indians (let alone to other religious minorities, Ambedkar’s protest-Buddhism for the “untouchables” aside) – remarkable given the centrality of the Muslim to Indian politics, both by exclusion – on the Hindu-nationalist right – and by ideological inclusion – on the secular left (not to mention for the smaller Nothern Indian caste-based parties, the success of each of which depends upon particular caste-groups voting in tandem with Muslim voters). "]

Lazy Sunday on Twitter...

From my twitterfeed: On We The People: Do young politicians have old ideas? From Khap panchayats to Fatwas why doesnt Gen Next take a position?

My tweets in response (all questions below are rhetorical):
Perhaps because nothing is older and staler than the idea that "the young" will begin politics anew (remember the Rajiv Gandhi-brigade?) How can "the young" be expected to stand apart from/transcend the very society that has shaped them? Especially when it comes to politics, where "GenNext" all too often consists of the privileged scions of dynasties. How can an Omar Abdullah or Pilot change the system? Perhaps only this system makes them possible... My take: only ideology and political commitment can reliably determine the nature of one's politics; mere urbanity/youth does not...

What happens in Minneapolis when you're bored in a hotel room...

In response to this piece (check this discussion (specifically Satyam's comment) out as well), a stray thought:

What is fascinating — despite the fact that the current generation of hindi filmmakers is so steeped in American global pop culture, has traveled there so often, and in many cases has even studied there — is that Bollywood’s depictions of the USA are so “off.” It isn’t about whether these representations are good/bad/positive/negative, but about how “off” they are. No less so than India in Octopussy (1983) or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Apparently, decades of globalization and cross-cultural exchange and commercial interactions haven’t made an iota of difference (think of Hindi films from decades ago, like Purab aur Paschim (1970) or Des Pardes (1978); compare with Namaste London (2007), and you'll see what I mean).

At one level that demonstration of how difficult cross-cultural communication is, depresses me. But there's also something gratifying about encountering the stubborn survival of something that remains so resistant to the homogenizing drives of our current moment. The two don't cancel each other out -- I simply note that they jostle together in me.

Music Review: RAAVAN (Hindi; 2010)

The music of "Raavan" -- supposedly a modern day re-telling of The Ramayana -- wasn't what I was expecting. Instead of a self-contained album confining itself to the world of the film like several other collaborations between composer A.R. Rahman and director Mani Rathnam (such as "Alai Payuthey", "Yuva", or "Kannathil Muthamittal"), this album hearkens to the music of the greatest Rathnam film of all, "Iruvar", in its anthologizing of almost an entire film music tradition. But whereas Rehman's mode in "Iruvar" was history, with each song representing a different Tamil film era (Rehman's genius ensuring that none of the songs seemed derivative or stale, as merely nostalgic numbers would have), the "Raavan" album cannot imagine such continuity: the Hindi film musical tradition is here, but in shards as it were. The cumulative effect of the album is thus somewhat disorienting, as musical moments from Bollywood's past -- a 1990s song here, a Punjabi beat there, a tapori jig elsewhere, even strains reminiscent of some who have followed in Rahman's wake, such as Mithoon -- occur when least expected. Fitting: for nothing so linear as chronology (even where history is refracted through Rathnam's eye) makes sense in the realm of myth (and the power of myth), even if, in the case of Rathnam's Ramayana, by virtue of being a contemporary tale, the myth is itself heir to several histories...

The first song on the CD, "Beera", would have been more at home in "Yuva" than at least one song in that Rahman/Rathnam/Abhishek Bachchan film (think of "Kabhi Neem Neem"): the soaring, clean instrumentation, the in-your-face lyrics, the urban vibe (that is to say, not music targeted at the self-consciously urbane, but music that takes its bustle and restlessness from cities) that was practically invented in Hindi and Tamil cinema by Rahman -- "Beera" shows that six years on, the Master still has it, and he doesn't need to repeat himself to show it. Gulzar's lyrics owe more than a few debts to his earlier work on the title song of "Omkara", but musically the two are as different as can be; and if the lyrics of "Beera" are nowhere near the equals of those in the earlier song in terms of epic grandeur and the sort of myth-making this sort of "hero" song cries out for (although Gulzar shrewdly uses the word "Beera" ("brave"; or "warrior") as a refrain for entire lines of song, almost seeking to obviate the need for any other poetry), musically the solid and assured "Omkara" cannot match "Beera" in fleetness of foot or deft touch. And if this emphasis on charm seems a bit incongruous in a film named after Hinduism's most famous villain (or, from the perspective of Dravidian nationalists, its most vilified hero), perhaps it tells us something about the film: virtually all of the album's quintessential "hero" songs are lighter, more upbeat, than its dark, fretful love songs. A quibble: at just a shade over three minutes, I wish it were longer -- Keerthi Prakash, Vijay Prakash, Mustafa, and Rahman's vocals didn't begin to satisfy me, giving this song the air of a tease.

Its opening fifty seconds are reminiscent in tone of Anwar's "Symphony in Blue", but "Behne Do" then veers back into a more traditional direction (this track is about transporting love; not the victim of society at Anwar's core), combining a conventional tune-structure with the mood of "Dil Se Re" (Dil Se). Over a decade on from that unsatisfying number, though, Rahman is now more adept at composing testimonials to hopelessly overwrought desi love in a semi-Western orchestral setting. Think of it as the frontier between "Dil Se Re" and "Satrangi" from the same film (certainly singers Mohammad Irfan and Karthik seem to think so, with their Sonu Nigam-inspired vocals) -- while I doubt "Behne Do" will ever rise to the level of "Satrangi", the best neo-Sufi love song in Bollywood history, Rahman's integration of the Western orchestration into a completely Indian emotional landscape bodes well (in the past, his attempts along these lines have more often than not been unsuccessful). Ultimately, though, the song, splendid in itself (except for the fact that, not for the first or last time in the album, Rahman relegates his own vocals to the background), suffers from the presence of "Ranjha Ranjha" in the same album, almost as if two different attempts at fulfilling director Mani Rathnam's brief have been preserved in the same album. "Behne De" isn't completely subsumed by the later song's spell, but what is its own is poorer.

With respect to "Thok de Kili", it is a real pity that the album's most politically daring lyrics -- turning on childish rhymes between nails (killi), a common Indian street game (gilli), and of course, the national capital (in lines reminiscent of the 1857 battle-cry "Delhi chalo!", itself appropriated decades later by Subhash Chandra Bose for his rebel Indian National Army) -- should be housed in the least impressive musical number. It's certainly early days for me and this song yet, and it is perhaps the least accessible (and deceptively so) of the album's songs. But while the instrumental portions have a chocolate velocity to them that is hard to resist, the vocal portions (by Am'nico, Sukhvinder Singh, and Rahman himself, although one is hard-pressed to make out anyone but Singh) drone on without getting anywhere. Gulzar's daring appropriation of the rebel trope for some of contemporary India's least popular political militants (Abhishek's "Raavan" character has long been rumored to have Naxalite antecedents; the stinging criticisms of Delhi's neglect, and references to the color red, appear to provide confirmation), deserved better. I'm curious to see if the Tamil version will showcase this song's music to greater advantage.

The folly inherent in predicting which number in a Rahman album is going to stand the test of time in my iPod playlists is not going to prevent me from nominating "Ranjha Ranjha" as my favorite song from this album. Rekha Bharadwaj's chorus-refrain (adapted from Bhulle Shah's poetry) is addictively catchy, but insistently and urgently so, and no less mournful for it -- a worthy metonym for a song that re-treads old ground about love being both blessing and curse, loss of identity and derangement, slave and master, and -- not coincidentally given Raavan's theme -- kidnapper and captive. Thanks to Gulzar, who is at his best where, as here, he borrows bits of folk songs and poetry to use as a springboard, the lyrics are that rarest of things in Hindi romantic numbers: fresh. The song's urgency -- devoid of aggression -- is crucial in rescuing the song from the merely conventional, far removed from the strains (too familiar to place with precision, in too unfamiliar a setting to be placed), left over from other songs, other musical moments wafting in and out of this seductive yet unsettled number. Who knew that a khichdi of everything from Nadeem-Shravan's mediocrity (often by means of Javed Ali's callow-sounding voice); Sufi-kitsch the Bhatts specialize in; the generic urban sound of countless "male bonding" songs; all held together by the promise of intimacy always suggested by Rekha Bharadwaj's voice, could combine to yield an ambience so compelling?

I'm not a huge fan of Rahman's very slow Hindi numbers, but "Khili Re" is the way Goldilocks would have liked it: just right. Rahman gets it right, first, by using a female solo (most of his slow misfires are male solos, such as Bombay's "Tu Hi Re" (Hindi)/ "Uyire" (Tamil)); and second, by keeping things simple for the first minute and a half with restrained instrumentation accompanying Reena Bhardwaj's delicate voice. Just when you begin to think the song might have trouble sustaining interest over five minutes, tabla beats (of a decidedly traditional dance bent) break into the song, inflecting this song with a structure and balance it might not otherwise have had, even after it has returned to Bharadwaj's vocals. Over all, the purity of this song is reminiscent of some of Rahman's earliest works (such as "Dil Hai Chota Sa" from "Roja"; or "Karuthamma"), and while it is too polished and ornate to completely blend in with that company, it is heartening to encounter Rahman's abiding readiness to compose work in a decidedly minor vein. Especially nowadays, when the combination of the Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire" and the fact that (unlike in Tamil, as even the far-from-great Vinaithaandi Varuvaaya will attest), his Hindi music is mostly for Big Films, threatens the mellower pleasures his music affords.

"Kata Kata Bechaara Bakra" has to be the most rambunctious, fun, Rahman number in quite some time, a wedding-song that reminds the audience there was one (far more lewd) in the album that brought Rahman India-wide renown ("Rukmini Rukmi" from Roja). Despite all the throwback fun -- the backup vocals, the percussion, and the speed, all might have been transposed from the era when Rahman unleashed Kathalan on us, while the lyrics are clear kin to those in "September Maatham" (Alai Payuthey)/ "Chori pe Chori" (Saathiya) -- this song is not fluff. In any film that purports to engage with the Ramayana, the question of That Marriage has to loom large; and while I don't know if this song is set at the wedding of the purported Ram and Sita-characters, the conch shell-sounds that punctuate this track never allowed me to forget that this film is supposed to re-imagine an epic, that something cosmic is in the air. That extra dimension, unncessary in the analogous songs from Roja or Alai Payuthey, is also expressed in Ila Arun's vocals, which take this song into a more traditional (and surprising) place, the North Indian "household" women's songs that are now virtually extinct in urban India (but not, apparently, for Rahman, whose "Genda Phool" (Delhi-6) is also in this vein). In a little over five minutes, distinct Indian spaces -- the urban South, the North, and the western deserts it is impossible not to think of when confronted with Arun's voice -- bubble up and vanish. This song (like its mythical progenitor) has geography on its mind. [My one reservation: while my non-existent grasp of Tamil will mean that I'll miss Gulzar's lyrics in the Tamil version, I can't help feeling that language's more definite consonants and springy rhythm will do greater justice to the mood of this number than Gulzar's playful lyrics; I mean, could "Kummi Aaadi" (Sillunu Oru Kaadal) have been nearly as much fun in any other language?]

R.I.P. Dr. Siras

Dr. Siras, a professor at the Aligarh Muslim University ("AMU"), shot to national prominence a couple of months ago after lhe was videotaped having sex with another man began circulating on campus. Because AMU, in its wisdom, decided to suspend the professor for "gross indecency" rather than take any action against those who broke into Dr. Siras' home and violated his privacy (a Times of India piece said it was reporters who had done the taping; other sources have claimed that a tape was sent to AMU authorities) in a manner that can only be called, well, gross and indecent. [The report of a fact-finding team may be found HERE.]

Why am I bringing this up now? Because Dr. Siras is now dead, apparently the result of a suicide a few days after a court ordered his reinstatement. But legal victories are small compensation for a public culture of hostility on campus. Those who taped him --students or others -- are morally responsible, and AMU itself is complicit; and perhaps worse, given that some AMU faculty/administration members responded to the incident by stoking hysteria and blaming the victim. AMU took away Dr. Siras' job, and would have taken away his dignity had he not shown himself incapable of losing it. Sadly, it seems the maelstrom surrounding the professor did not let him see matters in the same light.

One wonders how long before Dr. Siras' heirs, or someone else (via a PIL), sues AMU. And more generally, AMU needs to learn that it is a "minority institution" -- not an institution that merely presents the pageant of "Muslimness". The two are not the same.

The Indian Express carried a moving account of the circumstances in which Dr. Siras spent his last few days HERE.

R.I.P.

More Pages on Dantewada [UPDATED 4/11/10]

A few tweets, an attempt to be a bit more comprehensive, and an editor's suggestion, led to this piece.

APRIL 11, 2010 UPDATE: [PS -- the footnote about page length isn't mine; that's courtesy of the Outlook editors.]

Roy Among the Comrades -- II

I have previously expressed some irritation at Arundhati Roy's "embedded" piece from Dantewada, while affirming its essential importance: whatever "side" you find yourself on, you need to read this piece if you are interested in Indian politics, economic growth (more broadly, the discipline that used to be called "political economy" back in Adam Smith's day; I'm one of those who wishes it still was), and even global economic growth, with an especial focus on the "extractive"/mining industries. But Barkha Dutt's tweet, responding to yesterday's appalling massacre of 76 security personnel by Naxal rebels by taking a dig at Roy for even writing about the issue ("no more 36 page essays on the good folk of dantewada pls"), is silly: the severity and scale of this attack makes 36-page essays on understanding what the state is up against even more important. Recoiling from horror into ignorance is no tribute to the fallen: it is the privilege of those whose lives are not at risk. That can't be said of either the dead jawans or "the good folk of Dantewada". We do neither any service by reflexively jumping to the view that only an escalation in hostilities can serve the purpose.

I am not naive, and do not doubt that the Naxalites can be beaten without the use of military force/police action -- but nor can the rebellion's back be broken absent a far-reaching overhaul of the way in which the state treats its most marginal citizens. Unlike what is suggested by some of Roy's rhetoric, I do not believe this is a war being waged to wholesale displace adivasis or to exterminate them -- but there is no doubt that they are being made to bear the costs of economic development for which they see virtually no benefits. As long as that doesn't change, the insurgency cannot be dealt with: the massacre of 76 jawans (themselves almost certainly from some of the poorest segments of Indian society) doesn't change that reality; nor should it diminish the urgency of understanding the Naxalite point of view, of hearing adivasi voices that we simply don't get to hear very much of in the mainstream media. The lives of not just adivasis in Dantewada, but of many more men like the 76 slaughtered yesterday, depend on it.

ah, THAT old ugliness...

The ongoing "controversy" surrounding Amitabh Bachchan and the Congress casts a new light on the point made by far too many that celebrities need to stay away from politics; when the stakes are this high and the profile this visible, one is likely to be politicized no matter what one does -- figures as diverse as SRK, Amitabh, and Sachin have become embroiled in manufactured controversies over the last few years -- so rather than try and maintain the naive (and perhaps disingenuous) fiction that one is simply apolitical (as virtually all celebrities do when facing flak from this or that political outfit), one should face the reality of one's position, so that any political interventions are measured and deliberate, not haphazard and reactive, and despite one as it were.

[Aside: the lack of introspection displayed by the ordinarily effective Manish Tewari is amusing: everything he says about Bachchan vis-a-vis the 2002 Gujarat pogroms can also be applied to himself vis-a-vis the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms; to paraphrase Tewari himself, he "would be stripped of his ... job the moment he uttered a word against" the Congress' "record during the anti-[Sikh] violence of [1984]." Not to mention that, given this particular round of the Congress-Bachchan war was kicked off when a Maharashtra minister from the Congress' own ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, invited Bachchan for the inauguration of the Bandra-Worli Sealink's second phase, Tewari needs to do some soul-searching on the impossibility of "construct[ing] walls between" politicos "and the communal violence and choose to see them separately; he must tell us what his views ... are." But that might be too much to ask of the spokesperson of a political party.]

Roy Among the Comrades [UPDATED 3/31/10]

Arundhati Roy irritates me: her tone, her smugness, her careless use of history -- specifically, her stringing of disparate events/places/phenomena as if they all amounted to the same old same old (e.g. lumping together the Indian annexation of Hyderabad as part of the country's "colonialis[t]" course, bizarre given the old order displaced by the annexation was an absolute monarchy hijacked by religious revivalists in its twilight, an old order diametrically opposed to the sort of peasant insurgency one would expect Roy to be sympathetic to -- were the Indian state not on the "other" side of the argument, that is) -- her sloppy and oft-expressed views that the Indian polity is no more than an "upper caste Hindu state", are annoying not only in themselves, but because they mar the force of her arguments, on issues that are so crucial one can ill afford to slip up.

But. But. But. For the courage to talk about what (at least when it comes to what can only be called a civil war in Central India) is barely touched upon by other writers in English, and rarely without resort to the empty platitudes of those who use language not to think about the problem, but to avoid thinking about problems; and for the courage -- and this is perhaps hardest for a writer, even unknowns and aspiring writers, let alone famous ones -- to not pander to her audience, to be unafraid of being misunderstood; everything Roy writes on the plight of the Indian polity's ultimate expendables (far more so than any religious minorities, far more so than even Dalits), namely the "tribal" populations, cannot be missed.

Her latest dispatch from the front-lines is in this week's Outlook.

[MARCH 31, 2010 UPDATE: Here's a clip of Roy reading from her essay (thanks sepoy!)

Time to Listen

On the Indo-Pak front, enough talks about talks. How about some re-/dis- orientation instead?

AVATAR: a note

I finally saw Avatar, probably the last person on earth to have done so. In response to Goodfella's fine review at Satyamshot:

"Personally, I was as enchanted by the 3-D/IMAX visuals as I expected to be — but did find myself squirming in my seat by film's end. The utter predictability of the plot, the banality of the dialog, did begin to grate after a while. And it isn’t enough to say that isn’t the point of the film; in the very best films, the audience would not, should not, feel any “gap” between visuals and other elements. Here, I did. That being said, it is perhaps no crime to not be among the “very best films”, especially when one is at the forefront of the list of films that have to be seen, and have to be seen on the big screen. That is to say, no other recent film has been so resistant to the DVD/home viewing/computer viewing/youtube culture that we find ourselves increasingly tending toward year after year. To use the cricketing analogy, in a world embracing 20/20s, despite the cutting edge technology, Avatar is a test match. For that alone, I could forgive it much.

Additionally, Cameron deserves especial credit for setting up a new standard of beauty and elegance that isn’t just a rehash of what we are already familiar with. We know the alternative rather well from pop culture: where feminine beauty is concerned, exotic forms of the babedom we already embrace are held up: the blonde bombshell becomes an Asian or a Latina, but the only thing that has changed is/are the facial features and skin tones (sometimes not by much, given the sorts of “others” chosen). In Avatar, by contrast, in the representations of the Navi we have a standard of beauty and elegance that is far less assimilable, and yet no less seductive for all that. When the technology underlying this film becomes outdated or overtaken, this achievement will nevertheless endure."

A second fragment on The Museum of Innocence

[First one HERE].

I was thoroughly charmed by the concluding portions of The Museum of Innocence: Pamuk’s introduction of himself as the character who has been recounting Kamal’s story all along – in the first-person, no less -- was handled with the lightness and understated humor worthy of a tongue-in-cheek take on Proust’s insight that the “I” who writes is different from, and perhaps irreducible to, the biographical I, the I who inhabits society. But I was also thoroughly moved, by the novel’s concluding demonstration of that other Proustian truth: that we appear wholly other to others than we do to ourselves, a gulf that proceeds not so much from imperfect information as from our inability to avoid refracting ourselves even when we see others. Or, in terms of Pamuk’s novel, Kamal’s life, which by book’s end is seen by the world around him as tragic or even pathetic, but at any rate a complete failure, is, from Kamal’s perspective, a life well-lived. I found myself wondering whether Kamal’s lover Fusun would have said the same, but that didn’t detract from the truth of Kamal’s claim: and in the face of the latter, Istanbul’s objective judgment to the contrary seemed both presumptuous and trivial.

A note on ISHQIYA (Hindi; 2010)

Ishqiya is better than most films the Hindi film industry makes, even if its pleasures weren't the ones I was expecting. I went into the film looking for a taut, erotically charged thriller about a femme fatale manipulating two saps over a pot of gold, film noir in a bhaiyya-setting as it were. What I got was a compelling evocation of a small-town U.P. milieu (the (in)famous badlands of Gorakhpur district, along the Nepal border), a locale debutant director Abhishek Chaubhey has presented even more naturally than his mentor Vishal Bhardwaj ever managed with his out-of-the-way settings in either Maqbool or Omkara(that is to say, Chaubhey does it "simply", such that the presentation of the milieu (to "outsiders") does not itself become the point of the film). Thus, in place of the exoticized Muslim gangsters of Maqbool, we have Khalujan/Iftiqar (Naseeruddin Shah) and Babban/Raza Hussain (Arshad Warsi), two small-time thieves who don't perform either their "Muslimness", or their "U.P.-ness" -- the viewer simply finds them as they are. As (s)he does Krishna (Vidya Balan), the lady of the house where the two thieves have sought refuge, on the run from Mushtaqbhai (played by the famous Pakistani actor Salman Shahid) over the small matter of 20 (missing) lakhs.

The dialogs and interplay between the three principal characters are the best part about the film: each of the three loves to talk, and two of them -- Khalujan and Krishna -- share a great weakness for old Hindi film songs (the third, well, Babban's heart is more likely to skip a beat in response to Apna Sapna Money Money's "Dekha jo tujhe yaar / Dil mein baje guitar"; although, make no mistake, all three take their cue from that film's title), and the film is strongest when the viewer's ear is thus engaged (including by several of the film's supporting characters, ranging from a savory old village woman -- "tai" -- to the precocious Nandu to the local steel baron K.K.). Stated differently, the film is weakest when it tries to justify its title, or Krishna's pregnant dialog "ishq mein sab bevajaa hota hai" ("In love, nothing is with reason"; that is to say, love is its own reason, and needs none other, even as it shades into meaninglessness in a terrain dominated by hunger and conflict): the insight -- and the plot device needed to drive the point home -- seems forced, firmly inserting far too much contrived "vajaa" for my liking. A hot kiss between Babban and Krishna notwithstanding, the film never comfortably seems like it's about three people deranged by Eros, so much as about three people down on their luck and thrown together.

The acting performances hold the film together. None are less than competent, but Warsi, Shahid, and the boy who plays Nandu are easily the standouts, with Warsi's Babban cheerfully hogging the limelight. Shah is probably incapable of delivering a bad performance on this sort of "small film" terrain, but does suffer from the fact that his hugely enjoyable character takes a rather passive turn in the film's second half. Balan's Krishna is no natural femme fatale, but Chaubhey uses her well: this siren seduces more with her voice, her singing, and her love of word-play, than the promos might lead one to believe (sure, she brandishes a gun and, later, suggestively sucks Babban's bleeding thumb to light his fire, but then again, what else would work with a mind as unsubtle as his?). All in all, the film is pretty good fun, so don't be a ______ sulfate: Ishqiya deserves to be seen, not least because it will acquaint you with the sort of compound your chemistry teacher never told you about (but that even the tai is intimately familiar with).

Book Review: MY POLITICAL STRUGGLE, by M. Asghar Khan (2008)

My review is up at H-Net, HERE.

New Year

Happy New Year. heh heh.

Liminality: A Reprise

A re-working of an earlier blogpost of mine, this article was published in the January 16, 2010 issue of the Economic & Political Weekly.

A word on NADODIGAL (Tamil; 2009)

I recently saw Nadodigal, and after all the hype, was quite disappointed. The film is quite well-made in terms of ambience, but uneasily straddles the line between old-school masala and "new" tamil cinema -- and ends up with neither the energy and enthusiasm of the former, nor the rawness and "street cred" of the latter (not to mention that the film's protagonists, chief among them Sasikumar, are not well adapted as far as the masala-end is concerned.

What I did appreciate about the film -- which centers on a band of friends who help a couple elope in the face of fierce parental opposition -- was that this was the one film where the "heroes" were the characters who are peripheral in most love stories: the friends, siblings etc. who help the lovers run away from oppressive parents. Nor is any of this costless: in the typical potboiler, one never sees the consequences, be it the violence or the heartache, that accompanies such filmi romances. Nadodigal certainly does not suffer from that problem, but goes too far, draining truth in yielding to the temptation to be maudlin (not to mention that the film's (un-ironic) representation of the politics of friendship, the violence that such love can itself entail, is highly disturbing; sure, other Tamil films might suffer from the same worldview, but the stakes are higher on the supposedly "realistic" terrain of the "new" Tamil cinema, and there is no escapist hatch one can resort to). I only wish director Samuthikarani had followed his impulse -- to do justice to the marginal -- through to the end, instead of trying to make a Bigtime movie out of it...

Stadium Days

...or, memories from past lives at Sharjah stadium.

The print version is a bit shorter than I would have liked, due to space considerations. An earlier, longer, version, follows:

I wish I had held on to those -- brochures? booklets? we called them “souvenir books” even though they commemorated no memory, instead serving advance notice -- glossy publications issued in connection with the Sharjah cricket tournaments of the 1980s. Looking back, the articles in the souvenir books were little more than puff-pieces on the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams, and the obligatory third team (and sometimes, a fourth or even a fifth) brought in to avoid the tournament seeming like a bilateral India-Pakistan series, veiling the latter, as it were, but only to heighten the ultimate pleasure of the encounter. But back then, they seemed like little pieces of magic that my father would bring back from his trips to Sharjah stadium, and I devoured not only the write-ups, but also the full-page photographs that made even obscure players -- such as an uneasy-looking Laxman Sivaramakrishnan in the white-bordered souvenir issued for the 1985 “Challenge Cup” -- seem like titans. Even the tobacco ads did not escape my attention. We lived in Abu Dhabi then, and I had never been to Sharjah, not being Old Enough to be allowed a day trip to the stadium; accordingly, I had to content myself with these souvenir books, coveting them almost more than news of who had won the match.

Things began to look up after we moved to Dubai: I was older, and Sharjah wasn’t far away at all. Certainly close enough to go to an India-Pakistan match with my father in 1987, where no fewer than three Indian batsmen perished to the generally unthreatening Salim Jaffer’s full-tosses. My father didn’t stay long -- he had to work that day -- but there were many more matches in the ensuing years, both with him and with classmates, leading to a treasure chest of disjointed images for memories: Viv Richards walking back to the pavilion after having scored 36 nonchalant runs that briefly lifted the tedium of yet another predestined West Indies victory -- the match doesn’t matter, he seemed to be saying to me as he walked back to the pavilion with that inimitable swagger of his, only the style does; name-calling in the stands, as a red-bearded Pathan raffle-ticket seller grew enraged at being mock-whistled at (“like a girl,” he fumed); Waqar Younis running in to complete his 10-over bowling quota, destroying New Zealand to the tune of a two-figure score, his run-up and action an excuse to showcase his godlike open-chested form at the point of delivery; my father’s binoculars, difficult to focus but indispensable if I was ever to associate the men the scoreboard assured me were on the pitch, with the photos I had seen in Khaleej Times; that impossibly little boy with curly hair walking out to bat, to face batteries of West Indian and Pakistani fast bowlers -- Sunny Gavaskar always said Sachin was special, and in my memory that specialness lingers in an image of the child’s fragility; he was only 17 or 18, wasn’t he? Surely that helmet was too big for him? Surely Sunny -- who never could be hurried, who always seemed like he had more time than anyone else -- should have made Sachin wait?

Never having watched a cricket match being played in any other country, I had no idea, in those days before live telecasts of the 1992 World Cup from Australia and New Zealand, that the Sharjah stadium pitch was a “flat” one, that its cracked and parched surface greatly favored batsmen over bowlers. “There’s no grass on it,” my father had long mourned, but it wasn’t until years later, when satellite TV began broadcasting images from England and New Zealand that I began to appreciate what he meant. Television gave rise to other doubts too (just how many of Aqib Javed’s 7 wickets represented dubious umpiring decisions?). By the time I left Dubai behind in the late 1990s, Sharjah cricket was losing much of its sheen: upstart neutral venues like Singapore and Toronto were springing up; and there were growing murmurs about match-fixing, murmurs that couldn’t simply be ascribed to the whining of Indian fans who turned up at every tournament to watch India snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against Pakistan.

Or perhaps it was that I was simply older, and more likely to fancy myself a cricket connoisseur and look down my nose at the batting paradise the curator had cooked up, affording even the moderately gifted time to back away from the stumps and pummel a Curtly Ambrose offering through the offside (I thought Pakistan’s Basit Ali was good back in 1994, but I knew he wasn’t that good). More likely to wince at the taunting chants of Ganpati Bappa chorya (“Ganpati [Lord Ganesh] is a thief”) by some of the more raucous Pakistani fans -- taunts that could not be repaid in kind by Indian fans who were similarly inclined, who would know that analogous insults against Islam would not be tolerated by the authorities. Neutrality only went so far; Bambai mein bolte to bataate (“We would’ve showed ‘em had they said it in Bombay”), I heard one spectator mutter near me. All in all, by the time Sharjah hosted what turned out to be its last match in 2003, I was indifferent to its cricket, preferring to watch the various test series and tournaments I could access in New York thanks to TV and the internet. It didn’t seem to matter anymore (did Pakistan celebrate after beating Zimbabwe to lift the Cherry Blossom Sharjah Cup that year?), and it wasn’t until much later that I realized no one played international cricket in Sharjah any more.

But Ganpatti Bappa chorya stayed with me. It wasn’t just the unfairness of the situation, but the fact that it all seemed so, well, un-Sharjah. But why? It surely wasn’t the fact that some religious sensibilities were more equal than others (the state had never made any claim to the contrary). Perhaps it represented a contravention of the stadium’s spirit? After all, the whole point of Sharjah cricket was to enable India and Pakistan to play each other when relations between the the two countries were hardly friendly, and thus cricket tours of the “other” country, rare. And cricket tournaments were few and far between in the 1980s: outside of the World Cup every four years, there would hardly have been any opportunity for India and Pakistan to play each other, had it not been for Sharjah. Moreover, Sharjah wasn’t just a neutral venue: the large expatriate population from the sub-continent meant that it was one of the very few venues on the planet where neutrality would mean an almost entirely -- and equally -- bi-partisan crowd. Australia versus the West Indies at London’s Lord’s this most certainly was not. That is to say, Sharjah wasn’t just a showcase for quality cricket for the game’s fans -- it was an opportunity for Indian and Pakistani fans to wage war by other means, in each other’s presence. To me, this says something about Sharjah, more broadly, about the Gulf. About the deep and abiding connection between the Gulf and the wider region within which it is embedded.

This is an under-studied aspect of the Gulf boom: for a few decades now, it has been common to dismiss the “petrocracies” of the Middle East as almost unreal (and hence, the implication is, vaguely illegitimate) places, their success dependent on their promise of secession from a “real world” that is just too messy. One sees it even in otherwise sober media coverage, where this or that outlandish idea (an indoor ski slope; the world’s largest something or other) is held up as emblematic of what is “wrong” with the place. There is some truth to this view, indeed I remember subscribing to it myself for a long time, but it is too glib. The stadium -- and by extension, the Gulf -- wasn’t “unreal” in the sense that it had no connection to what was left offshore. Tying the Gulf, and my memories of it, to notions of “reality” (and its double, “fantasy”) would be to use the wrong metaphor: the stadium was, as the Gulf is, a crossroads, a place where certain sorts of encounters and exchanges might happen, fraught encounters running the gamut of the surrounding region. India and Pakistan mostly couldn’t play each other except in Sharjah; more broadly, Pathans and Malayalees and Sikhs couldn’t stumble over each other as they could in the Gulf. [To be sure, there were desi diasporas in Toronto, London, and New York even two decades ago, but these were far more monolithic than the Gulf: under the sign of the catch-all “desi”, one could be forgiven for thinking only of Sikhs in Vancouver, Gujaratis in the American South, Pakistani Kashmiris in the north of England, Hyderabadis in Melbourne, Sri Lankan Tamils and Pakistani Punjabis in Toronto, Bangladeshis in New York. And in North America, there was no public event that would bring desi immigrants together while reminding them of their otherness to each other; London with its cricket could have had such an event, but the sport’s authorities didn’t see England in that role: in their imagining, England was simply itself, not a medium for bringing foreign -stans face to face.]

All of which means I was right to be unsettled by Ganpati Bappa chorya, even beyond the bigotry embodied therein, but not for the reason I had imagined then: my unease was in part the discomfort of someone who had to recognize the untenability of an idea that had hitherto been assumed. Politics, bigotry, and nationalistic hatreds -- “reality” -- weren’t checked in at the Sharjah stadium gate. The promise was and is a different one: of simply enabling the encounter, on ground that has never been a blank slate.

If this is an insight, it isn’t necessarily a melancholy one: you see, I’m one of those who finds something illegitimate about fantasias (whether conceived by the the builders or critics of indoor ski-slopes and outsized malls) designed to keep the “real world” out. A snatch of a taunt and muttered discontent overheard in Sharjah stadium long ago, even perhaps the match-fixing allegations, only make sense now: the real Gulf wasn’t -- and shouldn’t be -- about keeping the rest of the world out; but also about enabling those nearby to stumble upon others who wouldn’t be encountered elsewhere. It’s also why I’ve been more sanguine than many about Dubai’s prospects in the wake of the recent economic turbulence: not because of the billions this or that entity continues to have invested in the city, but because, as long as Indians and Pakistanis, or Malayalees and “North Indians”, Bombayites and Tamilians, Pathans and Muhajirs (I could go on: west to the Levant and Egypt, then south through East Africa; or east to the Philippines and beyond -- but that wouldn’t be cricket, would it?) need to meet, do business, eat each other’s food, resent in close proximity, and make love, Dubai, and the Gulf, will keep renewing the meaning of Sharjah stadium. Ye Hindu hamare fast bowlers se darte hain (“These Hindus are scared of our fast bowlers”) I heard in 1991, in the same tournament when the 18 year-old Sachin helped take 65 runs off 5 overs from the fearsome Wasim and Waqar, as India finally broke its Sharjah jinx against Pakistan. I felt bile rising as I turned to glare at the man behind me, but nearly two decades later I see something else as well. Alone, each of us might have been anywhere; but the two of us, sitting a row apart in unfriendly togetherness, as those around paid us no heed -- back then, it could only happen there.

The Post That Isn't A Post

I have, I know, been remiss about updating this blog of late, mostly because of a (foolish?) decision to embark upon reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the charm of its endless deferrals, its perversity, its acuity and wisdom ultimately proving too much to resist this New York winter. However, since Proust's novel also does a fair impersonation of the Monster That Eats Up A Year, I'll have to find a way to make sure the rest of me -- also known as my blog and my film-viewing, and (maybe, just maybe) my writing -- doesn't get put into cold storage. In terms of a resolution for 2010, that's as good as any.

Happy New Year, readers.

3 IDIOTS (Hindi; 2009)

Midway through 3 Idiots, there's a sequence where the ultra-irritating Chatur, the epitome of the learn-by-rote student that principal Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani) delights in producing at the Imperial College of Engineering ("ICE"), has to deliver a speech at a college function, before the student body and its chief guest, an education minister. Chatur Ramalingam, a Tamilian by way of Uganda, doesn't know very much Hindi, and has memorized a Hindi speech that he has (unethically) had ICE’s librarian write for him -- another reminder (in a film that doesn’t lack for them) about the petty meanness of a system where everyone’s looking out for No. 1. Unknown to Chatur, however, Rancho (Aamir Khan) and Farhan (Madhavan) have conspired to find and replace several Hindi words with rather more lewd equivalents. Chatur is none the wiser, but the student body and the chief guest collapse in laughter as Chatur’s “chamatkaar” (miracle) is repeatedly replaced by “balaatkar” (rape). The comedy is broad, the shot is cheap, and the audience cannot help laughing its guts out.

A lesser director might have been satisfied with that, but Raj Kumar Hirani gives us more. As the tyrant Sahastrabuddhe tries to get out of his seat to stop Chatur’s speech, he is physically restrained by the politician next to him: neither sleazy nor villainous, this V.I.P. is simply having a blast, and Hirani makes clear that not even ICE’s dictatorial principal can overrule a minister. Not in India. Not in the system that Sahastrabuddhe and ICE serve so well. The actor playing the politician in question is memorable, despite barely a couple of lines of dialog, and that says a lot. About Hirani, about his films, and about the state of the Hindi film industry, where even most lead protagonists are forgotten by the time the audience walks out of the theater. The female lead of De Dhana Dhan, anyone?

The scene discussed above neatly encapsulates Hirani’s films, with their reliance on broad (but not mean-spirited) comedy, a social message, strong writing and the love of dialog, and a very, very desi silliness. Contemporary Hindi cinema has more than one director whose films I’d pay money to see -- but none have drunk so deep from the almost forgotten well of the Hindi comedies of the 1970s, that is to say, none are as humane, as cheerful (and cheerfully local), and as unpretentiously instructive, as Hirani’s films.

To no-one’s surprise, Hirani doesn’t stop at bit parts: 3 Idiots is a film of two halves, both very strong, and combining to give us the finest Hindi film of the year. The imbeciles of the title are played by Madhavan and Sharman Joshi (as the conventional Farhan Qureshi and Raju Rastogi, respectively), and by Aamir Khan (as the decidedly unconventional Rancho); the three are freshmen at ICE, and are the vehicles for Hirani’s relentless (and relentlessly welcome) message to his audience that a mindset that views education as a means to secure mere social advantage, or as a means to do better what everyone else is trying to do, is a system that is focused on producing people with degrees, not educated young men and women. A system that places a higher premium on training highly qualified coolies than on creative thinking that might lead to practical solutions for India’s problems. Rancho is relentless in thumbing his nose at ICE’s powers-that-be, and naturally runs afoul of Sahastrabuddhe -- with potentially disastrous consequences for the three idiots’ future prospects. Indeed, when the film opens we don’t know what has become of Rancho, and will not find out until the very end: throughout, the film flits effortlessly between the past -- i.e. Raju’s, Rancho’s, and Farhan’s antics at ICE -- and the present, when Farhan and Raju are in a quest to find their friend, guru and guide.

As far as vanished imams go, they could do far worse. This is a Big Bollywood film, so some of the idiots are more equal than others. Specifically, as the biggest star, Aamir gets the biggest part, as the prophet of Hirani’s gospel preaching secession (of sorts) from the rat race (not completely: the success ethic isn’t completely left behind, given Rancho’s repeated promises that withdrawal from the race will lead to the greatest success). And Khan is equal to the task: he has the most over-the-top role, and performs it with aplomb and genuine likeability, and -- crucially -- with infectious enthusiasm and energy. There aren’t really any students like Rancho, but I didn’t care, because this film is about one, almost other-worldly student (and his flock of two). Not for nothing does the Zoobi Doobi song video offer a partial tribute to Raj Kapoor: Aamir’s Rancho is very much in the line of the wise fools Kapoor liked to play (not Awaara so much as Chalia), not to mention that in this decade, no-one has more determinedly played the role of India’s cinematic conscience than Aamir Khan. And in ringing out the decade, he does so again, in a film that might be called the revenge of India’s students on Baaghban. To all those “elders” fond of casting reproachful looks around the room while Ravi Chopra’s sobfest is playing out, here’s a film that asserts, unapologetically, the right of India’s kids to be something other than engineers and doctors, to be whatever the hell it is that they want to be. Take that.

The other two idiots have important roles, but more importantly, they are played by very good actors: Sharman Joshi makes good use of, but also rises above, the comical oddity of his face to give his most memorable performance since Rang De Basanti, while the reliably superb Madhavan is, well, super. Not to mention effortlessly natural. Aamir Khan provides the star wattage and charisma here, but deserves credit for not being shy of sharing the stage with more natural, quirkier performers. A lesson more than one Big Time Star could learn.

Kareena Kapoor (who plays Rancho’s love interest -- and Sahastrabuddhe’s daughter -- Pia) deserves a special mention. Her role isn’t very long or intricate, but it is gratifying to see that Hirani knows what only Govind Nihalani, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Mani Rathnam seem to have learned before him: that the camera loves Kapoor when she isn’t trying too hard to play the mega-babe, when it can catch smiles, anger, that flush only Ms. Kapoor seems to have, flit across her face. I felt disappointed when I saw her in 3 Idiots -- because of all those other films she seems to do. Also welcome was Hirani’s evocation of the Raj Kapoor legacy in the context of a song video featuring the man’s grand-daughter: a (small) victory in an industry where, all too often, notions of inheritance and legacy are tied to sons, not daughters. This one is a Kapoor too, Hirani gently reminds us (he wouldn’t shout, that man), and one wishes more would take the lesson to heart.

No-one is perfect, and not even Hirani-the-writer/director can redeem the utter mediocrity of this film’s music (having to swap his preferred A.R. Rahman for the Vinod Chopra banner’s Shantanu Moitra serves as a reminder to us all that Aamir Khan doesn’t always get his own way). Likewise, Hirani’s visual idiom is generally no more than functional -- although he seems to have taken strides from his Munnabhai work; in particular, one odd sequence -- the film’s first look at Raju’s family home -- is insanely funny, at once a descendant and well ahead of Lage Raho Munnabhai’s “Samjho Ho Hi Gaya” song. I’m almost relieved to be able to point to these limitations: otherwise, I might have had to change my religion, and come to Hirani’s altar to hear Rancho’s gospel in an altogether different way.