Proust. My Map.

"How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" Tamaru asked. "If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing."
"Have you read it?"
"No, I've never been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust."
"Do you know anybody who has read the whole thing?"
"I've known some people who have spent a long period in jail, but none were the type to be interested in Proust."

-- 1Q84 (pgs. 613-14), Haruki Murakami

I wouldn't have been able to read Proust without public (and not-so-public) transport: over the last two years, New York's subways; and, after I moved to India, its flights and trains, provided much of the (odd) setting for my entry into Proust's mysterious world (nothing hermetically sealed or self-contained about it, and yet I can think of few novels that I've read that so persuasively imagine a world that seems its own world, timeless in that it seems utterly remote from the reader's world, but subject to the same laws as our world). So, without further ado, thank you to the 6 train (most often from 103rd Street to Grand Central); the Q and B trains (for after-work trips to Brighton Beach, but -- for a very few days while I was in the middle of the second volume -- elsewhere in Brooklyn too); the rides on the E to Queens and on the 4/5 to Brooklyn; and the even rarer jaunts on the 1 or the L (the West Side has not been subway terrain to me for years); for a couple of cold months late in 2010 (my last in New York), there were different rides on the 4/5, to Wall Street; earlier that year, in my last summer in the City (and, it seemed to me even then, one of my happiest), there were trips on the F and R to GOWANUS too). The NYC subways weren't the only trains: the occasional Metro-North trains on the Harlem Line to Westchester; and the New Jersey transit lines to Rockland County, did their bit too. And then there were the flights: not very frequent, but guaranteed to afford me uninterrupted time to read: a few between New York and London or Dubai; or between New York and Delhi or Bombay. Indeed, after I moved to India and my diligence in this matter fell away, my Proust became increasingly dependent on the chunks I got through on planes: so thank you, too, to the Mumbai-Delhi flights; and the Mumbai-Dubai ones; the take-offs and landings otherwise known as the Mumbai-Bhopal and Delhi-Bhopal flights; and two outliers from Bombay, to Calcutta and Hyderabad. But for sheer pleasure, nothing topped the two Proust train journeys, the Samparkranti Express that took me from Mumbai to Bhopal for my niece's wedding (in a carriage where the air was so thick with talk of commerce and complaints about corruption, it was transformed into something comforting, a familiar and dense ambience that felt snug); and the Rajdhani from Mumbai to Delhi. There was much reading at home too, of course: my Proust-world is bordered at one end by an apartment on 103rd Street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan; and by a flat on Shirly-Rajen Road in Bandra at the other. And much reading that I owe to the friends I was going to see or staying with (you know who you are; some of you cannot be named, hence it's fairer to do it this way).

It's only fitting that it takes so much time to read Proust's novel: long enough that, reading it, one cannot ignore the passage of time. The novel demarcates my own last two years from other periods of my life, but it also refracts them through its prism. Perhaps every novel would do that, but this one, of necessity, takes up so much of one time, its imprint is permanent. Thank you, Bhaiya, for planting the seed back in 1995, in a wooden attic with a "Teach Yourself French" book; through several false starts (poor Swann only found his way at the third attempt), the idea persisted.

DEOOL (Marathi; 2011)

When abzee initially recommended that we go see Deool, I kept my hopes modest, and for one reason above all others. At least based on my experience with Indian films, we don’t seem to do political films – that is to say, films set in the world of politics and politicking – very well. Even otherwise celebrated directors have faltered (I’d pick the Gulzar of Mausam over the director of Aandhi any day of the week), when they aren’t busy falling flat on their face (Prakash Jha in Rajneeti is a good example), or using it as a vehicle for masala entertainment, where politicians can simply be one kind of villain.

There are several reasons for this failure, but a common thread runs through these films, be they “high-brow” (Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu); low-brow (Shankar’s Nayak/Muthalvan); chauvinistic (Avdhoot Gupre’s Jhenda); or just plain pretentious and awful (Madhur Bhandarkar’s Satta): in virtually all of them, the purpose of the film is to pander to our prejudices about politics. These films never tell us anything new about ourselves, about the milieu that enables the politicians we all love to berate, because the films are so busy regurgitating what we already know about our leaders. Worse still, many of these films demand the mantle of courage as well (for “exposing” that which no-one has been able to hide to begin with), further confirming the audience in its own complacency.[Mani Rathnam's sublime Iruvar is indeed very special, but what makes it so is not its engagement with politics or ideology, so much as its representation of cinema, memory, and a friendship sundered by politics -- a Tamil archive, but not an archive of Tamil politics.]

Umesh Kulkarni’s Deool ("temple" in Marathi) has no such problem, and is, to put it simply, the finest Indian film set in the world of politics that I have ever seen. It is so, in the first instance, because “the world of politics” is nothing separate and apart from our world, and is not inhabited by caricatures and gangsters worlds removed from the “us” of the audience. Rather, Kulkarni’s film is acute – and acerbic – enough to appreciate the ways in which our reality (our poverty or prosperity; our venality; our religiosity; and our commerce) is already political.

This is certainly true of the village where nearly all of Deool is set: early on in the film, the modest farmer Kesha (Girish Kulkarni, who also wrote the script) tracks down a runaway cow near a ficus tree; worn down by the heat, Kesha goes off to sleep, only to be woken by a vision of Lord Dattatreya (a tripartite deity combining Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva especially popular in the Deccan and Gujarat). Kesha is wonder-struck, and goes around shouting about what he has experienced to the entire village. No-one takes the simple farmer seriously at first – his own mother and much of the rest of the village can barely stir from the TV (the film has several disturbing visuals of people reduced to zombies before their televisions); and Bhauji Gadande (Nana Patekar), the seasoned local politician who owns the runaway cow, is more interested in worthy practical pursuits, like ensuring the village do-gooder Anna (Dilip Prabhavalkar) gets a hospital built. At first. But very soon, Bhauji is at risk of being undermined by the most ambitious of his own men, who see in Kesha’s vision an opportunity, not just for themselves but also for the village (to be fair to them, they might even believe in the vision, as Bhauji’s wife Vahini (Sonali Kulkarni) does); and Bhauji survives the challenge by coopting their enthusiasm; succumbing to pressure from his boss, the local MLA (Mohan Agashe); and embracing popular opinion in the village, coming out in favor of a temple at the now-sacred site. The unnamed political party Bhau and the MLA belong to has not, we were told earlier, hitherto been trafficking in religion. That changes rapidly: a temple is built, and before long the village is transformed into a bustling commercial center, with religion the chief commodity for sale.

The villagers we have been introduced to over the course of the film have all become much wealthier when we see them after the film's intermission, as have the political players. There is no suggestion that any of this wealth has been illegally gained, but Kulkarni is clear that it is ill-gotten, based on the merchandising and consumption of religion (a sequence featuring customers who want bhajans to the tune of the latest Bollywood hits is especially funny). Who’s to complain, if no one is harmed? Here and there, however, we see glimpses of warped priorities, of hospitals not built as land is developed for hotels and entertainment centers. Anna, and in time Kesha, appreciate that the village, more importantly the village’s god, have lost their soul.

If the above makes Deool sound crude and preachy, it does this magnificent film a grave injustice. The Kulkarni brothers are nuanced, even at their most explicit: the final meeting between Bhau and Anna, when the former reminds the Samaritan of how miserable the old days were for the village, is a case in point. In the beginning, Bhau reminds Anna (and us), he wasn’t in favor of this sort of thing. But a few compromises aren’t so bad if they mean electricity, better roads, and greater prosperity. Bhau with his compromises cannot be the hero of this film, but there is chastisement here for Anna too: the sort of man who will do anything rather than get his hands dirty, the village has passed him by, and he has abdicated his responsibility to try and make a difference in the life of his village. From that point on, it is up to the disillusioned Kesha to try something desperate, inspired by a stranger (Naseeruddin Shah) who might or might not be god himself. This isn’t the sort of film where the end means victory: the status quo is jolted, adjusts, and continues.

If Mangesh Khadke’s score had consisted solely of the background to the opening credits, it would nevertheless have been one of the year’s better pieces of film music for me. But there’s more: a soulful, throaty bhajan; and excellent background music throughout the film; not to mention a sleazy item number that gleefully wallows in mediocrity, ramming home the manufactured tawdriness that is about to replace the intimacy of one man’s religious devotion. I could have done without the repetitive “Dutta Dutta” track (with its obvious lyrics) accompanying visuals of devotees performing the pilgrimage, but it is a minor blemish in a very good album.

The acting in Deool is of a uniformly high standard, and just about everyone plays a part in vividly etching the characters to life: Nana Patekar was no surprise, but it must count as an achievement to steer clear of caricature when essaying the role of a politician; Sonali Kulkarni is also superb as his wife, skeptical of her husband’s religious skepticism, and used to lording it over those around her by virtue of her husband’s position (I do wish the script gave her more to do in the film’s second half, although the one scene of her as hostess, in a much spruced up home, to a number of guests eager for the Dattatreya darshan, is very well done). Bhau’s boisterous, loutish underlings are all memorable, effortlessly drawing laughter from the audience (in a notable scene, a casually venal schoolteacher boasts that he has been able to get donations for the temple by threatening to fail his students). As is the initially diffident sarpanch: when we first see her, presumably a beneficiary of reservations for women (and perhaps for “backward” castes?) at the panchayat level, she’s a quavering mess, taking a back seat to Bhau and Vahini – over time, we see her grow in confidence and stature. No dialog announces this – Kulkarni’s modus operandi is to show the audience – and a stance here, a gesture there, complicate the picture: she might well have been a beneficiary of a quota system, but even quotas can help complicate and disturb established power structures.

For me, the most memorable character of all was the landscape: harsh, desolate, and beautiful; and never more so than in the film’s closing sequences. As cinematographer Sudhakar Reddy’s camera follows Kesha through cliffs, caverns, and ending at the sea, the Deccan landscape seems timeless, underscoring (as did the isolated village setting, and even the virtuoso “sand art” performance that accompanies the opening credits) that the Kulkarnis’ classic is a modern-day fable – but also, more darkly, that one man might be (as Anna tells Kesha) no more than a freckle in the cosmos. A freckle, not a speck – because man leaves a trace. Deool fittingly opens with an archaeological dig, and periodically returns to the site: surveying the village’s landscape by film’s end, one is tempted to ask the same question that, as Anna tells Kesha, propels archaeology: centuries later, what will they make of us from our debris?

ROCKSTAR (Hindi; 2011)

Early on in Rockstar, Khatana (Kumud Mishra), the resident sage of Delhi University's Hindu College's canteen, pooh poohs the musical ambitions of Janardhan Jakhar (Ranbir Kapoor): for Khatana, art is borne of suffering, and sorrow in turn of love and a broken heart. The callow Janardhan (who will in time be re-christened "Jordan") promptly decides to fall in love with the next pretty girl he sees, with an artificiality the film knows better than to take seriously. I found myself chuckling at these scenes, reading in them director Imtiaz Ali's send-up of a bourgeois misreading of Romanticism in the arts.

I was wrong: Imtiaz Ali was dead serious. His Jordan really can become, not only a musical success but even a genuine musical talent, only once he has loved and lost Heer (Nargis Fakhri). Not a trace of irony may be discerned here, and the result -- a "rockstar" who might see "Free Tibet" signs at his concerts, but whose military fatigues and lyrics about "Sadda Haq" cannot hide the fact that there is no cause, no politics, nor even any social awareness here but a highly personal loss. Nor is there any of the sex and drugs one might expect: Jordan barely drinks (and is expressly a teetotaler until he no longer has Heer). While the latter might seem like a minor point, both of these underscore just how safe Imtiaz Ali wants to play things (perhaps he, like most others of his directorial generation in Bollywood, simply knows no other way; certainly every other film Ali has made has been utterly conformist, and Rockstar is, in the final analysis, no exception for the most part.)* The story arc sounds epic enough -- struggling musician falls in love; loses the woman in his life by way of her marriage to another man; becomes a celebrity; finds her again before losing her for good; and continues with a tortured and guilt-ridden career -- but its execution, heavily weighted as it is in favor of the love story, left me confused as to whether Ali had made a film on the proverbial rock star, or whether this was a love story where one of the protagonists simply happened to be a popular singer. Imtiaz Ali has clearly lived with this script and this character for a long time -- perhaps far too long: it bears all the hallmarks of adolescence, the sort of film one gets into the film industry in order to make. It shows in the film's "rock" backdrop, more reminiscent of a youngster's investment in icons like Jim Morrisson and Led Zeppelin, than of the wider relevance of that sort of figure in the Indian landscape; in how Heer seems to be a boy's fantasy given form, given her reveling delight in all things bawdy (ranging from skin flicks to strip clubs); and in how indulgent Rockstar is: it is much looser than Ali's other films; the second half feels especially long, and is quite tedious (several people in the Andheri theater I saw the film at were audibly impatient by the end).

Perhaps the film seems so long because of Nargis Fakhri: her acting is so wretched, so abominable in just about every scene, you have to wonder what Imtiaz Ali was thinking by casting a performer this weak as half of his lead pair, in a film that is more a love story than anything else. Fine performances by the likes of the reliably excellent Piyush Mishra (playing a hard-nosed music producer; for those unfamiliar with his work, the scene where he exploits Jordan's need by snapping "mein tujh se bade kuttay paper sign karvaaonga" should suffice) and Shernaz Patel (who plays Heer's mother) cannot make up for it, and it's no use criticizing the actress -- the blame lies squarely with the director, for offering her the role in the first place.

But goddammit, there is a lot I can forgive this film: while intellectually conformist, Rockstar, like Dum Maaro Dum earlier this year, hearkens back to a time when big films could nevertheless be made with passion (not assembled in the way far too many contemporary Hollywood and Bollywood films are). In these times, a film that demands a little bit from its audience, both in the form of sustained attention and the possibility of (gasp!) a Sad Ending, might without more be considered risky. On that front, Rockstar is a world removed from the sort of banality that far too many of Ali's peers churn out: simply put, there is some cost to watching this film. And even if it is less than the sum of its parts, it has some superb parts: the Delhi ambience early on in the film; very brief Bombay sequences much later on; and the most striking Kashmir I have ever seen on film (a cheap nod to Ranbir's genealogy in the form of a reprise of a Shammi Kapoor song notwithstanding). [Ali falters badly in Prague, which could be, as he;s filmed it, anywhere in Europe -- an unpardonable sin where this city is concerned.]

And then there's the music. Not just A.R. Rahman's songs, nor even his background score, but the way Ali has used it in this film: so seamlessly has the music been integrated into the film -- heck it is almost the very texture of the film -- that I would be hard-pressed to pick a high-point: as Mani Rathnam first did with Rahman's music in Guru (2007) (in particular, with the "Ae Hairath-e-Aashiqui" song); and later Rakeysh Mehra (albeit less adroitly) managed in Delhi-6 (2009) (the omission of most of the sublime "Rehna Tu" still smarts), Ali treats Rahman's album as a collection of musical motifs for the most part, and pieces of different songs float in and out, leaving me both incomplete and spellbound -- in this, the music tracks the films chronology (featuring flashbacks within flashbacks, including non-linear ones!), and makes the film. Not since Rang de Basanti (2006) has a major Hindi film been so unimaginable without its music -- and while I still maintain Rahman's album is hardly a rock album, I found myself caring not a whit. Not when "Hawaa Hawaa" easily transcends its origins in Guru's "Maiyya Maiyya" and bewitches the audience; or when "Kun Faya Kun" is given form in and around Nizamuddin (replete with appearances by the shrine's Nizami qawwals): the dargah has featured in many a Hindi film, but never so vividly, in as magical a manner, as here, where it is literally the site of Jordan's awakening. Even on "Nadaan Parindey", where the over-the-top trailer (that is, the video's incongruity with the lyrics) had given me grave misgivings, it all made sense in the film. Not the best musical moment in Rockstar, but perhaps it couldn't be: by then Jakhar is Jordan Inc., the singer's troubled life and controversies simply fodder for the manufacture of his own celebrity.

I'm nearly at the end of this piece, and if I haven't said anything about Ranbir Kapoor's performance yet, it's because there isn't much to say. Beyond that he is superb here, in easily the role of his young career (indeed, he might well go years without getting another opportunity like this one). Prior to Rockstar, I'd never found Ranbir less than competent; but equally, I'd generally found him too groomed, too safe to really surprise the audience. And while there is some of that here (I found his portrayal of the young Janardhan in college condescending, and somewhat implausible -- more a representation of some imagined middle-class boy from Pitampura than Janardhan Jakhar), there is no denying that he really comes into his own once he is kicked out of the family home, rising above the inconsistent characterization the script saddles him with to weave in real nuance and impact. We see Jordan go from epiphanic acolyte at the dargah -- the scenes where he takes a back seat to the qawwals in the singing parties are masterpieces of understatement -- to hack singer at private parties, combining earnestness and disinterest, to bona fide celebrity, to tormented star, and you really feel the change in circumstance, the fact that this character has come a long way. Even in the romantic segments later on in the film, Ranbir manages to make the done-to-death sequences more than watchable; given my limited patience with this Bollywood genre, that's saying something. And then there are all those scenes of the man singing. If, like me, you've been irritated at how unconvincing most actors seem while playing other artists, look no further: I kept forgetting that the man on the screen in "Sadda Haq", every sinew into the song, was simply lip-syncing for Mohit Chauhan's voice. It might not seem like much, but the conviction and variety he brought to these sequences, were integral to his role's -- and the film's -- plausibility. Rockstar isn't a great film, and Jordan isn't an especially well-etched character, but Ranbir doesn't let you see any daylight between him and his avatar once Janardhan Jakhar is out of the way: you suspend disbelief, and stay till the end.

*[But not completely: Ali deserves credit for the fact that this is perhaps the first popular Hindi film I have seen where a woman cheats on her husband, and is nevertheless dealt with as a sympathetic character. The film's final twist is similarly unconventional, inasmuch as it, while quickly buried, does not reflect Jordan in a good light.]

7 Aum Arivu and The Degradation of the Dravidian Movement

Ordinarily, there wouldn't be much to write about 7 Aum Arivu, the latest Surya starrer by Murugadoss (of Ghajini fame): it's a shoddy and thoroughly mediocre masala movie, a promising first twenty minutes -- set in ancient India and China, and tracking the legends surrounding the monk Bodhidharman's founding of the Shao Lin order (now world famous for its Kung Fu martial arts) -- undone by the routine beat 'em up that follows, as the film tracks Bodhidharman's 21st century descendant through his efforts to foil a Chinese bio-terror plot targeting India. Unfortunately, that isn't all there is to it. 7 Aum Arivu, produced by the son of DMK supremo M. Karunanidhi (Stalin), is also an unwitting showcase for the Dravidian movement's degeneration; or rather, of the movement's reduction to its most problematic aspects, and to empty gestures that try to mask its contemporary hollowness with bombast.

7 Aum Arivu isn't just marred by its naked anti-Chinese jingoism (a jingoism that testifies to nothing so much as to a pervasive feeling of inferiority on the part of many in India's bourgeoisie with respect to its gigantic, and economically far more successful, neighbor; as well as to a clandestine envy of the authoritarianism that characterizes the People's Republic); it goes further, and tries to graft this xenophobia onto the gestures of the Dravidian movement, perhaps trying to update the latter even as the politicians and ideologies clamoring about it have long since emptied it of almost everything other than ethnic chauvinism. Thus, in the finest fascist traditions, Tamil identity in this film is about Tamil blood, about the genes as it were -- so much so that Bodhidharman's contemporary descendant doesn't need to learn anything, undergo any training, in order to become like his super-powered ancestor. He simply needs to be made aware of his (biological) heritage (more accurately, a cultural heritage that is simply a biological inheritance); that awareness, married to modern scientific wizardry, suffices to make him a new Bodhidharman. This isn't mere symbolism: time and again, characters in the film (most notably the young scientist played by Shruti Haasan) announce it too. The message is dinned into our heads: it is blood that matters, and "our" inheritance has been stolen by others, and used against us (it is typical of this film's dimwitted ethos that it never pauses to reflect on why Bodhidharman himself taught his learning to the inhabitants of a Chinese village; if nothing else, the ancestor seems to have been far less provincial than his contemporary urban descendant). History is nothing more than ethnic chauvinism -- "we" were the first, the best, the most, and some combination of villainy and our own indifference conspires to keep us in chains. It's a fairy story, and even as tales go, a rather stale and not especially insightful tale.

Murugadoss doesn't stop with the rather standard "supremacist" approach common to revivalists and xenophobes the world over. In fits and starts, his script remembers that it needs to be chauvinistic in an especially Dravidian way, and thus we are treated to the specter of Shruti Haasan being mocked by senior professors for speaking in Tamil (a scene so ludicrous and incongruous given the context, it verges on spoof, of the film closing with Surya's character chiding Hinduism for replacing the scientific/rationalist bases of Indian culture with ritual and cult; the true god of Reason obscured by false idols, as it were. This much is standard, lifted from the texts of Periyar and others -- but whatever one thought of Periyar's ideology, it found expression in a context of resistance and revolt (against Brahminical dominance; the social "backwardness" of various castes; and the Sanskritization that implicitly or explicitly held Tamil culture inferior). Today, after four decades of rule by this or that (more or less) Dravidian party in Tamil Nadu, and a movement that has been rather successful in many of its cultural aims (although not at all in Periyar's anti-Hinduism), Murugadoss' gestures seem lazy and stale, and directed at soft targets.

I might have been more forgiving of these gestures if they were more sincere -- but they are utterly cynical. 7 Aum Arivu is a film where Surya deploys blond highlights for much of the film; just about every song is saturated in the imagery and aesthetics of American music videos (Harris Jayaraj's music is also very far from the rootedness of Ilaiyaraja or Rahman at their Tamil best; in fact it is miles from even the popular Tamil music feel of Jayaraj's own Samurai, and is utterly bland, generic, and forgettable); and then there's Shruti Haasan, whose Tamil accent sounds off even to my non-Tamil ear, and whose Bollywoody, manipulated appearance brings to mind the long tradition of Tamil films casting light-skinned North Indian women as heroines. When Shruti Haasan mouths Tamil nationalist dialogs, I didn't even get to taking offense -- I laughed, and I laughed.

A conversation, and a reflection on movie stars...

A discussion with a friend, about the contrast between the zeal with which contemporary stars promote their films, and the anxiety that often manages to shine through, led to the following note. The specific context here is Shah Rukh Khan's Ra-One campaign (during the course of which he's spoken more of failure than he usually does), but the point is generally applicable:

...If the specter of failure seems to haunt the stars, and seems to haunt them more intensely the bigger they are, it is because of the disconnect between the promotions, the campaigns, the machinery of the promotions -- which are about the corporatized entity, the brand, that each of today’s Bollywood superstars have become, be they SRK, Aamir, Salman, whoever -- and the man. Aamir Inc., or SRK Inc., has to be impressed into service – but the man at the core of the machine (here, SRK) might know better, or at least differently. The man at the core of the machine might be talking about failure not because he expects this film to flop (I don’t think it will; but more importantly, I don’t think he thinks it will, and I doubt he could function if he believed it would), but because the man at the core of the machine didn’t get into cinema for this, surely? When the man dreamed decades ago of standing on the Bollywood summit, did he think he would be staking it all on a seemingly derivative sci-fi film with large doses of child-friendly appeal? Surely not – that is to say, I believe SRK is enough of a child of the traditional Hindi film registers to regard that fate with some distaste (the answer might well be different for a new breed of actor, but SRK is from a different era).

Nor is SRK the only one: did Aamir really get into it to be the guy wanting to break opening day records with every film? Yes, he does more "different stuff" than his peers, but even that is drained of joy: he now has to do the unconventional (alternating with huge grossers -- this is necessary, because the audience increasingly has begun to withhold respect unless the star is seen to participate in the drama of consumption itself; for certain segments of the audience, nothing on-screen is as dramatic as the sound of cash registers ringing offscreen), else he wouldn’t be recognized as Aamir. [I am reminded of the (Foucault?) quote that once upon a time, women struggled for the right to have an orgasm; today, they labor under the obligation to have one.]

And even Salman: when he was a teenager in the late 1970s and 1980s; or even after Maine Pyar Kiya and Baaghi released, was he really in it to be a swaggering oaf in every film, to have every film be about an oafish swagger? Surely not. And let’s not even get started on the greatest star of all, the one who is now busy encrusting his legacy with mediocrity from recent years (my one consolation that his achievements are too luminous for even his own latter day efforts to completely obscure), when he isn’t busy hawking cement. This is why the scene from Halla Bol (one of my favorite in recent Bollywood) is so important: not only does it remind us that every star is a stranger to his own image; but (and this is a point I did not make in my review) given that in the film Sameer Khan is confronted by his image right after he has stood idly by in the face of a murder committed openly and amidst a party; it reminds us that every star ultimately bankrupts himself (perhaps I should say, is bankrupted by himself, that is to say by the image that is himself yet other than himself); one might even go further: every star stands idly by in the face of a murder – the murder of his own self.

SAHEB, BIWI AUR GANGSTER (Hindi; 2011)

I won't say much about Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, because Tigmanshu Dhulia's film has little or nothing to do with Abrar Alvi's 1962 classic (although never a personal favorite). Which isn't to say that the 2011 film is bad (or not for that reason) -- but simply that the film is so removed from the sensibility of Guru Dutt, Alvi, and Bimal Mitra, that I couldn't help but wonder why Dhulia felt the need to raise the specter here (one could just as easily have done so with Ishqiya if one had been so inclined; mercifully, Abhishek Chaubhey was not). Of course, that much was clear from the trailer; the fact that I nevertheless went to watch Saheb, Biwi aur Gangster in the cinema testifies to Mahie Gill's considerable charm, and to my determination to do my bit to reward Jimmy Shergill for turning in consistently charismatic performances (and, perhaps, to the interest on the principal of Dhulia's Haasil (2003), a film that deserved more viewers than it received). And, I can't really say I was disappointed: I expected atmosphere and the two gills to be the best things about the movie, while Randeep Hooda was always going to be a misfit, and Dhulia served up exactly what I expected. Nevertheless, the fact that this could have been a very good film had it been better written, specifically, had its characterization been more consistent, rankled. [Hey, it's rare enough when non-Punjabis get some representation time in Bollywood, and the most has to be made of these chances (who knows when the next one will materialize?). Dhulia does not disturb that other maxim of contemporary Bollywood: only representations of Punjabi culture get to be happy ones; the rest of us are just plain violent.]

Saheb (Shergill) is the latest in the line of Devgarh rajas, the family's glory faded in the face of the modern world's predilections for commerce, elections, and competition. In contemporary U.P., Saheb is simply one of many jockeying for advantage, his exalted self-image incongruous given how hard-up he seems to be as far as money is concerned. Even his palatial haveli is sparsely populated -- most of his retainers have left for greener pastures, leaving only a few ghosts to haunt the manor. Saheb, however, is not the kind to quietly fade away, and uses a mix of thuggery, political wheeling dealing, and tenders for road work, to try and turn his fortunes around. One of his rivals, the decidedly more plebeian Genda Singh (Vipin Sharma) decides to settle scores with Saheb, and plants a spy in his household, in the form of Lalit (Randeep Hooda), hired to chauffeur the haveli's discontented, psychologically unstable Rani (Mahie Gill). The Rani has reasons for dissatisfaction: her husband is not only authoritarian but besotted with another woman; Lalit, himself dumped by a woman who felt he wasn't classy enough, is the right man at the right (or perhaps wrong) time. Some truly awful music (Lalit crooning "Choo Choo" has to be experienced to be believed) and many twists and turns later, the film suddenly ends, in an unconvincing climax that I won't spoil here. Suffice it to say that the film is never kinetic enough to suggest that it is building up toward something; and both the Rani and Lalit are so poorly written that the actors inhabiting them can hardly be blamed for not being able to redeem these roles. Lalit, for instance, seems like a callow youngster who periodically has to remind himself that he is supposed to be animated by class resentment; likewise, the Rani seems off her rocker early on in the film, but forgets her way to melancholy sanity the rest of the way (her spunky independence also seems to lapse into docility the more she gets close to love, an accidental domestication all the more disquieting because Dhulia seems to view it as natural). And the Rani and Lalit are the lucky ones: other, less central characters, are taken up, appear to portend something, but are abandoned (not to mention that at least one is a condescending portrayal of a "village girl" (Deepal Shaw's lively Bijli, enjoyable enough in her attempt to resurrect Deepti Naval); and then there's the usual lazy contempt for India's politicians, especially ones from the heartland).

Which isn't to say that the actors don't compound the script's problems. They most certainly do: Randeep Hooda has wandered into the wrong film, and screams "fake" with just about every scene, Exhibit "A" for the truth that it takes more than pronouncing a "z" like a "j" before one can earn even Bollywoodized bhaiyya chops. Mahie Gill is also disappointing: although ravishing as ever on that strange boundary she inhabits between limpidity and erotic initiative, she (as a friend wisely observed) channels Maqbool's Tabu far too much to use her own strengths, and simply does not register the requisite impact in a film where she has the title role. If these two were all there was to the film, I'd be urging people to skip the film. [Not everyone agrees -- Tushar Amin seems to have watched a different film than the one I did.]

Mercifully, Jimmy Shergill completes the tinity of the film's title, and his fine form here (perhaps the best of his roles that I have seen) serves as further reproach (after the likes of Eklavya and Tanu Weds Manu) to an industry that doesn't seem to be able to get him more quality work on a regular basis. Shergill's thakur is fantastic, in itself worth the price of admission: the script denies him any real interiority or growth, but none of that seems to matter when the Saheb seems sculpted from the landscape, every inch of him asserting that he and his kind do not agree with any reading of history that confines them to the safety of the past. His accommodations with the modern world are simply those sufficient to enable him to carry on as before (even as neither he nor Dhulia seem to appreciate that the nature of those accommodations make him just another gangster in U.P.'s rough and tumble countryside, a far bigger gangster than Lalit could ever hope to be). There are two reasons to watch Saheb, Biwi aur Gangster, and Jimmy Shergill is definitely one of them.

The second is simply the setting: Dhulia seems to have tracked down some outstanding havelis, and their faded splendor elevates this film. In scene after scene, I found myself marveling at the architecture, and just as important, at the interiors (whether these are sets or on location, the art director deserves an award) -- the milieu was completely transporting, and I found myself wanting to re-visit scenes from the film even as I was exiting the theater criticizing the movie. In his third feature, Dhulia has gotten many things wrong about what goes into making a good film, but the importance of creating a plausible world, of a sense of place that, whether or not "authentic" in some anthropological sense, is compelling as its own place, is surely not lost on him.

Dreaming in Calcutta...

There’s a strange sequence in Apocalypse Now Redux when the lead characters (who are, of course, American soldiers in Vietnam) come across an abandoned (French) colonial-era plantation, replete with the mistress of the house. I was reminded of that sequence when I visited the Marble Palace in Calcutta last Saturday (alas, photography was not permitted), the neo-classical columns and plethora of European sculptures and paintings of Raja Rajendra Mallik’s grand 19th century mansion almost comically out of place amidst the Muktaram Babu street neighborhood it is part of (in stark contrast, I couldn’t help but think later on the same morning, with the nearby residence of Rabindranath Tagore, a traditional mansion that is like nothing else in its vicinity, and yet feels as organically Bengali as anything could be). It was a feeling that recurred a day later at the Park Street Cemetery (where the last three photos here are from), where just about all the graves of 18th and early 19th century Englishmen and –women seemed tinged with green algae; I felt I had wandered into an abandoned site that had nothing to do with the city outside, even as I knew that the feeling was completely unfounded, because I was wandering amidst the detritus of a colonialism that had shaped and built the very city that now motored along indifferent to it.



Walking around the Marble Palace is the closest I have come to a waking dream: I saw no other tourist until I was leaving; the lights in all the rooms were switched off until my guide switched them on, but even that did little to change how dimly visible many of the paintings (in particular, the ones mounted high up on the walls) were; and I kept stumbling across treasures – a Joshua Reynolds painting of the infant Hercules strangling serpents registered more of an impact than it ever could have in a well-lit museum gallery, a Murillo painting of St. Sebastian was perfectly placed to catch the light, and seemed better than everything else in the gallery (as did an amazing Jan Fyt still life at the foot of the staircase on the floor below, this one aided by the darkness), and Rubens’ Marriage of St. Catherine was on a wall so bereft of light it seemed older than it was, and bore only a distant kinship to other paintings that I had seen by the same artist; everything seemed charged with an obscure meaning, and it was hard to imagine these rooms as once inhabited. As with dreams, there was plenty of frustration to go around -- the guide knew little, and I never did find the Titian painting I knew was there somewhere – but that was part of the disorienting spell. Magic is difficult to find for the contemporary tourist, but last Saturday, for an hour or two in the early afternoon, the world slept at 46, Muktaram Babu Street in Calcutta. And dreamed.



I was right to realize that my feeling was completely unfounded: the colonial world is not past, it lingers. And that world is our world too, even as it renders us strangers to ourselves: the Marble Palace was built not by the British but by one of the wealthiest of the nineteenth century Company babus; eyes with a keener appreciation of architecture than mine can easily look past the European sculptures, exterior, and columns to spot the interior courtyard that the Palace shares with traditional Indian mansions. I needn’t have even wondered about those exotic Australian birds in the cages lining the walls and overlooking the courtyard, oddly unsettled as I was by this sign of life (even if imprisoned and foreign) that had appeared without explanation. On the upper floor, as I was leaving one of the galleries, I saw in front of me my guide bring his hands together in respect. I saw an old man on the other side, in a shirt and lungi, nodding to my guide; he neither looked at me nor acknowledged my presence in any other way. That’s Mallik sahib, my guide (whose accent placed him as being from Bihar or Eastern U.P.) told me. Half the Palace is off-limits to the public, because Rajendra Mallik’s descendants still live there, apparently the seventh successive generation to do so. I presume the birds belong to them.

Thoughts on Anna Hazare's Movement: An Email

A (non-Indian) friend of mine had asked me for my take on the Anna Hazare movement. I excerpt the relevant portions of my response to him below:

"On the anti-corruption movement, while I obviously don't disagree with the notion that corruption pervades every aspect of Indian life, and that this anti-corruption legislation (the "Lokpal bill", which would create an anti-corruption ombudsman with the power to call elected politicians to account, but which would not itself be elected) that Anna Hazare was fasting to get enacted has been stuck in legislative limbo for years precisely because it is inconvenient for the powers-that-be to just enact it; nevertheless this whole movement, and the orgiastic way in which the media has embraced the cause, is for me a matter of grave concern. I see it as yet another instance of the Indian middle class' flight from politics, i.e. of that class' self-image as fleeing from politics (into the technocratic arms of "good governance" and the like). Once upon a time these fetishes gave us planning commissions and bloated socialist bureaucracies in India; now, with the children and grand-children of those post-colonial days, the same fetish gives us an uncritical valorisation of the private sector in everything, and a corrosive suspicion of India's political class (at the very time when the political system is increasingly subject to the push and pull of various interest groups that were more marginalized in the early decades of the republic than they are now. Certainly, political gangsterism is on the rise, but some of that is also because the politicians are no longer simply the genteel products of the haute bourgeoisie or the elites -- the criminality of the latter, who often did not need strong arm tactics to get that which could be obtained by favors, networks, and patronage, was tolerated for decades with barely a protest by the middle classes, perhaps because the loot was by "people like us." It still is tolerated, and even admired: when was the last time we heard one of the anti-corruption crusaders complain about the coziness of this or that corporate titan to the government, with all the attendant benefits?).

It isn't surprising that the crusade has taken "anti-corruption" as its rallying cry, an abstraction so vague as to be meaningless (who, after all, is for corruption?). That there is no such crusade for greater police accountability, or for a focus on human rights violations by the police/armed forces, the social situation of various marginalized groups, adivasis (aboriginals) dispossessed by mining projects, or even an anti-corruption crusade targeting the business community (when the politicians strike dirty deals, they usually don't do it with themselves!), is telling (I note that support for the movement from India's minority and Dalit groups has been tepid at best, despite Anna Hazare's photo-op showing him breaking his fast courtesy honey water fed by Muslim and Dalit children; whatever the failings of India's political process -- and they are many -- it is access to the political process that has yielded whatever gains have come the way of these sorts of social groups; and one could hardly expect them to side with majoritarian demagoguery at the expense of India's political institutions). Because "politics" could not be effaced from those hypothetical agitations, and once "politics" rears its head, the imagined consensus would collapse. Stated differently, Anna Hazare's political campaign is of course political (he insists it isn't), but this is a politics that functions by effacing itself, by acting dishonestly as it were, and that is thereby liberated -- to try and colonize the entire political sphere. As a result of this completely "non-political" campaign for greater probity in Indian public life, suddenly there is (for the moment anyway) little oxygen for any other discussion, for any other politics. This is the highest, nay the only salient issue in India today, and one might as well say one is on the side of corruption/the ruling Congress-led coalition if one demurs.

So in my view, this is a dangerous precedent: the spectacle of a self-righteous man claiming to be the sole spokesman for all India, browbeating the (admittedly flabby, corrupt, and spineless) government into creating yet another massive Indian bureaucracy (except that this one won't be accountable to the public, but will be manned by experts), the "Lokpal" that will have the power to investigate corruption everywhere in government (but nowhere else); and all of this pervaded by the intoxication of self-congratulation among the commentariat and the bourgeoisie; was a bit nauseating, even apart from the fact that Anna Hazare's own track record isn't exactly the most progressive out there (for instance, his Gandhian views on Dalits seem quaint at best, and completely out-of-step with the temper of contemporary Dalit activism), even ignoring the political use made of the movement by a host of right-wing groups opposing the governing coalition.

At the same time, a part of me resists the above tirade. Because "politics" doesn't just mean "the political process," doesn't just mean "politicking," and the Anna Hazare-led movement demonstrates that -- shouldn't that be cause for celebration? Wouldn't a mass movement in one of the Western democracies thrill me for that very reason, as offering a way out of the apathy that increasingly empties those republics of their democratic fervor, a passion that yet seems alive in India? If my concern is because the stakes are too high in India, that nothing is "settled", that the political spectrum includes -- as legitimate options -- everyone from socialists; medieval-style communitarian politickers, trafficking in myriad caste and linguistic identities; to fascist parties proudly implicated in pogroms and glorifying violence, then shouldn't that be a reason to participate in politics, rather than to abdicate the scene in favor of the rancid compromise that tells us there can never be anything better, that seeks to substitute resignation for any passion for democracy? Isn't that an insight afforded us by Holderlin's line that the saving power grows where the danger does? Yes, those interventions will be more difficult than Hazare's -- because they will not have the enormous force of urban privilege, hypocrisy, and addled millenarian thinking behind them -- but it is possible their path might be eased by the precedent that has been set here (more accurately, advanced; the precedent was set with Jayaprakash Narayan's anti-Congress campaign of the 1970s, culminating in Indira Gandhi's suspension of democracy for two years. Once as tragedy, then as farce...) Perhaps not (very many people have been "doing" politics on the sidelines for a very long time without much support or attention from the culture's commanding heights, so why should the Hazare movement change anything?), but, inasmuch as the anti-corruption movement reminds us what should never have been forgotten -- that although everything in public life is always already enmeshed in politics; in the truest sense politics belongs to the actively political, an immense burden that is at present borne far too often by only the boldly unscrupulous; the fanatical; or the desperate -- perhaps..."

Half-asleep, musing on The Tree of Life

This line in a recent A.O. Scott piece in the New York Times discussing, among others, Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, caught my eye:

I “read” the film as much darker; well, “darker” is not the right word, but I did not see the sequence about the dinosaurs as “impl[ying] that something like divine grace was operative … before humanity”, but instead that the film, while it does not endorse, it wistfully acknowledges that despite our aspirations to Grace, we live in a world of Nature (that is to say, a world indifferent to Grace, and yet a world that has produced us, so needy of Grace). Certainly this film needs more viewings than I have been able to accord it thus far, but for now I do see the “key” as lying in the Chastain voice-over early on in the film, about choosing between the way of Nature and the way of Grace (the film offers no resolution, of course, but makes us experience that although the way of Nature rules the cosmos; an insistence on Grace might be the only thing that makes us human)....

Bombay Letter -- 3

No, the emails aren’t becoming more frequent because inspiration has suddenly struck (that thunderbolt needs drier wood), it’s that I am fast approaching my – homecoming to? Vacation in? – New York, which has been a beloved city for so long that must be part of the reason I found myself unable to tear myself away from Teju Cole’s “Open City”, with so much of that novel set amidst the narrator’s walks and subway rides across the city, part of the reason I was sad when it ended. A good time to take stock – or as good as any; all the more so given the monsoon season is well underway, and I’ve had it on good authority that whatever the level of my affection for Bombay, it would be sorely tested once the rains started.

…And there is much to irritate about the rains, from the traffic (never great at the driest of times) to the puddles one steps into early in the work-day (and the dampness one has to live with for the rest of it) to the random drips, drops and leaks getting into and out of cars, buildings, or just standing around waiting for the roadside sandwich; to the fact that many of one’s colleagues simply won’t be able to show up to work on any given day, lending a whole new dimension to coordination.

But the prose of workday plans is banal. You feel it when you are woken up in the morning by the sound of rain so loud it registers over the drone of the AC; you look out your window, and you can’t quite believe mere rain could be this unremitting, as if the gods had decided Earth needed a shower (the sort you find in hotels in the US, enthusiastic and ready to beat you down at the first sign of feebleness). Not much imagination needed to believe Brahma’s warning to Bhagiratha, that summoning the celestial Ganga was one thing, but the earth would be washed away by the force of her torrents – except of course that Shiva’s matted hair breaks the fall, leaving the earthly Ganga as run-off. If we stay with the myth (and what fool wouldn’t want to, especially walking home from the gym when every last salty trace of fatigue and heat is washed away?) Bombay city, always unsightly and under-construction in the outer suburbs; its traffic, its railway lines, its tenements, its grilled windows, its balconies with their potted dieffenbachia plants and baby coconut saplings, its concrete, its stone, its trees, the underbellies of its flyovers, the always under-construction metro-to-come, are the mendicant god’s locks, drenched so that we might be spared. [Not completely, and not all of us: far too many scurry for cover from the rain for me to ignore the fact that looking down from my window on the rain hitting the ground is a privilege.]

“[S]orely tested”? Monsoons do your worst. Or best, I’m not sure which. I’ll be glad to be in New York in August (although, will scratching that itch help or hurt?), but part of me is sorry the monsoon season will be on the downswing by the time I’m back. They tell me not to worry, there will be a next year, there’s always a next year where the monsoons are concerned, but it’s hard to believe their cosmic force is renewable. In my mind there is a finality to the end of the season. But then, that’s why we’ve always needed myths, like the one about Shiva and Ganga – to rescue us from time.

Bombay Letter - 2

More from my email inbox (this time only two days out of date):

It’s been a long time since the last missive, mostly due to some combination of business and personal travel, and the fact that once mango season begins, there really isn’t anything for anyone to do but gorge on the fruit. I’m no stranger to the mango’s delights, but it had been nearly six years since I’d had any of the sub-continental varieties. And I guess I’d never really focused on the post-modern ambiguities of the mango, the extremely “localized” nature of various mango narratives and mythologies that all but ensure that two amateur mangophiles are often unsure as to whether or not they are talking about the same varieties. Thus, the Sunehra of North India is the dense and almost sour Kesari in Bombay parlance (isn’t it?); the Banganapalli of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu is the Badaami from Gujarat and up north (or is it?); but what of the large yellow ones I feasted on over the course of a June weekend in Bhopal – simply the best mangos I’ve had so far this season, not yet pulpy and over-ripe, no longer hard yet sustained by the firmness I prize above all else when it comes to mangos (flavor? Of course the fruit needs flavor, but the best mangos are as much marvels of texture as taste; and if you’re one of those who prefers to suck your mangos rather than bite into them, you should simply stop reading this, as you’ve clearly never grown up) – referred to as Badaami by this Bombay-born Bhopali; Safaidy by another; and Baynishaan by a Hyderabadi visitor? I instinctively sided with the expansive promise of the last: Badami would do for the more generic mangos of that ilk that I’d been having in Bombay and Delhi; and Banganapalli (or my family’s own variant, the Baingan Palli) seemed to require a more intimate (or at least a Southern) setting. For mangos this perfect, “Baynishaan” promised matchlessness.

But mango consumption is post-modern not just because the names promise no stability, but also because of the structure of deferral this fruit seems to thrive in. The sensational Langda I discovered in Noida, delicate and floral to the tongue but also as fibrous as the Chaunsa I knew quite well from childhood trips to Karachi, was surely the last word on the variety? Ah, the company guest-house’s caretaker Rajinderji told me, real Langdas begin to arrive a few weeks later. The sickly sweet little Dussehris, so lauded by U.P.-waalas and so disappointing that I asked several times if I really was eating one of the 46 mango varieties mentioned in Ghalib’s letters? No no, everyone said, the good Dussehris aren’t available until after the rains. Fair enough, but at least I’d get to try Hyderabad’s legendary Himayath when I’d visit my aunt in that city later in the summer? – but it’s too late, my cousin murmured, the Himayath is an early¬-season mango. Ah, I see. So not much to do but to stay put in Bombay, every year in the grip of Alphonso-mania, the little mangos flourishing during a brief pre-monsoon season and at the center of a fanatical cult, the core precept of which requires adherents to regard anyone who prefers mangos other than ones named for Portugese monarchs with contempt and pity. And no question, they were very good – but but but, more than one colleague told me, this year the harvest in Ratnagiri hasn’t been very good, the Alphonsos are simply not as good as they usually are. Too early, or too late, and never quite the right time.

There is the small matter of accommodation: I have found a place to stay since I last wrote to all of you. After seeing dozens of apartments all over the central and northern suburbs, I fell for one in the very suburb my broker had advised me to go for on the first day of my quest. What can I say, he was right: it isn’t just the fact that in Bandra (West), no-one seemed to care whether I was a bachelor, a non-veg, or a Muslim; or even that I’m a five minute walk from the sea at Carter road in one direction, and leafy Pali Hill in the other. No, it’s the fact that in contrast to the scores of Dubai-style apartment buildings that seem to be cropping up all over the city, old Bandra has charm by the bucketloads – in its quiet side-streets, its fading (few remaining) Christian cottages and villas, in the crosses that one stumbles upon walking around – some with “J.N.R.J.” or even the odd “J.N.R.I.”, but others with greater fidelity to the Latin, hence “I.N.R.I.” – in the gulmohar tree outside my window that startled me red one morning, changing color from dull green virtually overnight and transforming my rather pedestrian bedroom view into something magical. The downside to this charm? A weeks-long hassle getting a cooking gas cylinder, and don’t even get me started on the ancient electrical and bathroom fixtures I need to replace. In the meantime, the place has become home: the gym is a 15 minute walk away,* and the books, posters, and computer I’d had shipped from New York (and without which the place was simply an apartment) arrived none the worse for wear.

*[A follow-up to my story about the free gym associated with the Powai guest-house? I thought you’d never ask. Suffice it to say, at the end of the torturous road I’d laid out in my last letter, and still some time away from moving to Bandra, I had my form, my documentation, but more importantly I had hope. I filled it out, until I got to the point where I needed the apartment owner’s signature. Undaunted, I took the form to work to hand in to the Admin department. And heard nothing for a couple of days, until a sheepish colleague from that department materialized in my office. The guest-house lease will be up in a couple of months, he told me. And? We were in the middle of tough negotiations with the landlord as far as the rent was concerned. I see. He lives in London. Of course. All of which could only mean one thing. Sir, I don’t think he’ll sign until we resolve the issue. Simple, really. It isn’t that I was beaten, it’s just that one cannot fight fate, and it was my fate to be denied access to the free gym at Hiranandani Gardens. I moved out shortly thereafter, and now pay for my work-outs. Moral of the story: the cheap stay flabby.

No, that’s lazy, I was right the first time: in the face of malignant fate, there is no moral. A month or two after I moved out, another expat, a new hire, arrived. When last heard, she was merrily using the Hiranandani gym.]

A Note on JHENDA (Marathi; 2010)

For all the hype about director Avdhoot Gupte's thinly-disguised film on four young men caught up in the turmoil over the split in the Shiv Sena, with the party passing on from founding father Bal Thackeray to son Uddhav Thackeray, and the more charismatic nephew Raj Thackeray forming his own splinter Maharashtra Navnirman Sena ("MNS"); Jhenda is deeply disappointing. That is to say, disappointing in the way that so much of Maharashtrian politics is, and that so many Indian "political films" are: emptied of any charge against the political class but cynicism, and hence ostensibly drained of politicized content, the "political films" (Rajneeti and Satta come to mind from Bollywood) end up re-inscribing the narrative into precisely the sort of reinforcement that ideologies bent on effacing themselves qua ideologies (i.e. focused on presenting themselves as simply "natural" effects of "given" phenomena, such as a linguistic, ethnic, or religious identity) thrive upon.

To be honest, Jhenda doesn't even try very hard at effacing much. As with its Bollywood kin, its only charge against the politicians (more the characters standing in for MNS supremo Raj Thackeray and an establishment Congress-ish minister, than the Uddhav stand-in; although the film's Raj is clearly the charismatic center of the film) is opportunism and moral corruption. Men like the film's politicians have betrayed the ideals of a Marathi-centric politics, and of the Hindu rashtra Savarkar had envisioned. But those ideals themselves are never called into question. Indeed, the fact that they are accepted as givens; to the point where the viewer is supposed to empathize with the disgust of one of the film's protagonists when his boss Rajesh (the rebel politician) embraces a Muslim political leader (the latter himself as disgusting a caricature as can be imagined); is a vivid reminder of how deep the rot is in Maharashtrian politics. [Not to mention how total the impoverishment of any liberal sphere is, the ruling Congress/NCP combine seemingly content to play rent-a-state with major corporates. On some days, it seems the two Senas are the only major political parties to have hitches their stars to the state's aam aadmi, however narrowly he is defined.]

Bombay Letter

A month out-of-date, but I re-produce an email I had sent friends and family three weeks after arriving in Mumbai (more missives to follow); on the bright side, they didn't get the photos (click on them for larger images):

"Just a general update: it’s been nearly three weeks since I landed in Mumbai [on January 27], and things have pretty much settled into a routine. The whole thing still feels a bit “provisional” because I haven’t found an apartment yet. I’ve been fairly assiduous about looking, and in a variety of areas, but the market is hot (read: rents are high) now, and more importantly it is premised on information arbitrage (e.g. one broker quoted me a rate twice as high as another for, coincidentally, the very same apartment!), not to mention other uniquely Indian issues (some buildings won’t rent to bachelors; others to Muslims; others to non-vegetarians (read: Maharashtrians or Muslims); others to non-Parsees; others to non-Muslims (no-one wants to stay in those areas anyway); others to nobody except for Gujaratis). I could avoid the whole issue by renting in the expat-friendly area I am currently in (Powai), but that’s kind of dull. Fashionable Bandra, with some really charming side-streets and lanes, is also ok on this front, although is probably pricier than South Bombay these days. Then there’s traffic: plenty of reasonably-priced apartments around, but if they’re that reasonable you can bet the commute will be murder.

But then, one spends the sort of weekend I did, and one is reminded why one came to the city in the first place: Saturday began with lunch at a colleague’s place in Borivali (way up in North Mumbai), near the national park; after an afternoon looking at a few apartments in the vicinity, took the train from Borivali to Mahim (Central Mumbai, on the western edge), walking from the train station to the Koli food festival. (The trains are much less crowded on the weekends, so if one takes [them] at the right time the rush is easily negotiable). The Kolis are a traditional fishing community, so this was the place to be for a seafood lover. The stalls represented Koli communities from just about every part of the city, and certainly added to the nautical ambience of the area (Mahim is on the water, and I could smell the sea when I got off the train; not unusual in Bombay, but welcome whenever it happens). The only eyebrow-raising moment: when I got to the festival, past a predominantly Muslim neighborhood and one of the city’s best known churches (St. Michael’s), I realized that it was sponsored and organized by the Shiv Sena-breakaway, the MNS. True to the MNS’ xenophobic but relatively non-communal ideology, there were a large number of burqas and beards (from what I could gather, Marathi-speaking Muslims) in the crowd (and many of the Koli are Christian), and all announcements and signs were in Marathi. The food was worth the commute though: my favorite fish the pomfret was to be found in abundance (including stuffed with green masala, a dish I’d never had before), but I also thought the bombil (Bombay Duck), the raavas, and the surmai were superb.



After dinner, there was nothing to do but to enjoy the breeze on the back of a friend’s bike through sea-side Bandra and into Juhu (both are Western “suburbs”, as areas not in South Bombay are referred to here, and immediately north of, and much posher than, Mahim) to a cinema showing the flavor of the month “Ye Saali Zindagi” (verdict: excellent, pungent dialogs, but all-in-all a mediocre film; Chitrangada Singh is smoking hot though). A 1AM rickshaw ride from Juhu back to Powai underscored how remarkably commutable the city would be with the sort of metro Delhi has: the journey took a mere 22 minutes at that time of the night (those few miles would take over two hours in peak traffic).

Sunday was just as, um, productive: went down to near the southern tip of Mumbai, to Kalaghoda for the last day of the annual arts festival. In general, South Mumbai is the best preserved, most gorgeous part of the city, combining the poshest of the posh with some of the most atmospheric areas where [some of] Bombay’s oldest and most rooted communities live (including various traditionally Parsi, Bohri, Khoja, and other Gujarati areas where outsiders can’t get in the building for love or money; for a superb representation of the old Muslim neighborhoods, and a meditation on the city as a whole, check out the recent art-house flick “Dhobi Ghaat”), and it doesn’t get much more posh here than Kalaghoda. The art installations were pretty mediocre though, except for a disturbing one on the Bhopal gas tragedy that consisted simply of large photographs of the interior of the abandoned Union Carbide plant, often overlaid on other similar, but not identical, photographs, leading to a somewhat disorienting and eerie effect. The absence of any people in the photos spoke volumes. Afterwards, I went to the Tata theater (overlooking the Marine Drive) for an English-language play called “Pune Highway”. The play was well-written and interesting, and the staging/seating were truly memorable: I was in the second row, and the lower, “closer” stage (than I am used to from the US, except in off- or off-off-type productions; certainly not in theaters this large) made for a thrilling experience.



Late at night my friend and I headed to the legendary Bade Miyan, who has a whole range of tikkas and kababs (but not, interestingly, mutton seekh kababs; he refuses to make those) but is best known for the chicken seekh kababs, the roomali roti, and most of all, mutton bheja fry. Each of those was phenomenal (although the high cholesterol in bheja means this cannot be a regular meal; indeed I think it’s the first time since 2004 that I’d had it); the chicken tikka and boti kababs were less so.



All in all, I’ve either bored the !@#$# out of you by now, or made you really hungry. I can’t wait to get my own place and settle into a better rhythm. Two things in particular have suffered: Proust-reading (patchy; but I think it’ll get more regular going forward) and the gym. The issue on the latter is that the [company] guest house [in Powai, where I'm staying in while I find a place] is associated with a free gym, but the number of days it takes to get the relevant form*/complete the paperwork (still not done; the signatures of two people utterly irrelevant to the gym remain) has meant that I haven’t worked out in three weeks. Hopefully it’ll be sorted out soon, but the real solution will be when I get a membership in a gym close to wherever I end up moving. Other banal routines have been worked out: I get a tiffin delivered to work ... my newspaper is the Indian Express (the Times of India is a celebrity-obsessed rag) for now (I’ll probably switch to The Hindu, which Abbaji [my grandfather] preferred to all others, with good reason).

Work? I was going to write about that too, but will save it for a different missive; I can only count on so much indulgence."

No words. Only pics.

No new blogposts, but lots of new photos from the last month or so...

...not an excuse for not writing more, of course. Patience (all three of you who read this blog) -- the mojo is coming back.

Secrets: Musings on Sodom and Gomorrah

The secret is the secret of Proust -- even for his homosexuals, the secret of their secret is not their homosexuality, but their homosexuality is the sign of their secret. Nor can the question of secrecy be resolved simply by avowal: the secret is simply that reality, that hidden truth that shadows everything we can see, taste, and touch, that haunts every party, every gathering, every encounter (even the most intimate ones), and particular secrets (this or that character's homosexuality, for instance) are merely symbols of that reality. Of the hidden nature of that reality.

For this reason, and even though it seems very far from Proust's intention, the Recherche seems of great relevance for us, in a political sense (especially in this season of Wikileaks). There is no great conspiracy underlying the political phenomena we see all around us; it is just that the surface of all politics seems to be inconsistent with the reality underlying that politics. Zunguzungu might say -- effectively did say in his piece on Assange -- that the maintenance of secrecy, the conduct of work-in-secret, has itself become the overriding work of governments. Proust doesn't overtly think about this aspect, of course (although, given the close linkage of "high society", homosexuality, the Dreyfus affair, and foreign diplomats in his novel, that is to say, given these recurring signs and motifs, that aren't so much coherently linked as associated the way colors might be, that evoke each other; is this aspect really as far from Proust's thought as might, at first blush, seem?), but foreshadows, represents, immerses the reader in, a world where everything is thus.

Irish Hunger Memorial, near Battery Park City (Manhattan)

Sighted: The Man in the Podar Suit

The possibility of this sort of random encounter is, to me, the most exciting aspect of the internet. [Not "exciting" in the sense of intellectually stimulating, oh no, but something far more immediate, that frission I feel when fingers lightly pass over my arm...]

Scattershot notes on KHELEIN HUM JEE JAAN SE (Hindi; 2010)

I saw the film last night, and was quite disappointed. It certainly deserved a way way better box office fate than it has received (yet again I am appalled at an audience that not only prefers a Golmaal 3 -- that doesn't surprise me in itself -- but prefers it by a tenfold margin (if the box office grosses are any indication)!!!), and some scenes/sequences were definitely big-screen worthy (I liked the whole attack on the armory sequence quite a bit). And in general the second half is much better than the turgid first half. But all in all, this is an earnest, clunky, stagey film. Stated differently, Gowariker's earnestness and stageyness drags it down (I lost track of the number of times character 1 steps forward, recites his dialog; then character 2 does the same to recite his dialog, and so on -- are you fricking kidding me?!) in a way that was more "hidden" (under the costumes and sets) in Jodha Akbar. In the sparser Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se, there is no place to hide...

As an Abhishek fan, I was most disappointed by the fact that it wasn't enough of an "Abhishek film" for me. That's my problem, not Gowariker's, I suppose, but this film doesn't get made without a star, and yet there isn't enough of the star here -- that is, the film ends up seeming curiously de-centered in the second-half, likely because of the director's desire to do justice to as many aspects of the Chittagong insurgency as possible (the same sort of problem bogged down J.P. Dutta's LoC as well), and at the expense of the drama inherent to a film centered around a star.

One caveat to my scorn for the public: at some level, this film isn't just old-school (to the point of quaintness) in its cinematic choices -- it marches to the beat of a drummer that is no longer plausible to many in the contemporary audience. I mean that the notion of Patriotic Freedom Fighters unaffected, un-humanized by anything like psychology, any remotely ordinary motive whatsoever, is JUST NOT CREDIBLE (the only exception is the initial impetus toward the movement for several teenagers, who are aggrieved because their local football ground has been taken over by the military; but even this is not dwelt upon after a few minutes, when it could have been poignantly re-visited at film's end: weren't the children exploited by the adults in the movement? Was a football ground worth dying for?). This isn't about "heros" per se, it is that, except in Gowariker's world, the notion of heroism is inflected differently in 2010 than in 1953. In other words, the real Chittagong rebels were nationalist heros, brave men and women, etc. -- their counterparts in this film seem drawn from the pages of school textbooks. Gowariker claims his film is based on a true story, but it is no less a fable than the Asterix-inspired Lagaan. But that film was not only rescued but legitimized by its unabashed comic book-air; Jodha Akbar too was a fable (Gowariker revealingly cited the Amar Chitra Katha comics as an inspiration in one interview), but the relatively recent milieu of the nationalist movement cannot survive this sort of treatment...Right or wrong, one expects "authenticity" from an evocation of 1930, perhaps because we think (or delude ourselves) that we would more surely spot a false note than we would where a film on the Mauryan emperor Asoka is concerned.

The Pleasures of Work: A Note on UNSTOPPABLE (English; 2010)

One of the pleasures of Hollywood films for me used to be work. Specifically, the depiction of labor in this or that industry as a powerful and understated way of drawing the viewer into the film’s world, of constructing both that world’s plausibility as well as its claustrophobia, the sense that this might be the only world there is. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood abandoned this aspect of movie-making to television where, at its best, series like “The Wire” preserve the old-fashioned sense that density of detail matters (such density is absent in a “Boardwalk Empire” or (returning to cinema) in “Guru”, and the absence is deeply felt), and separates an experience of the real from a canter through a film set. But television series have the luxury of time, and I find myself admiring the successful compression of cinema that much more.

Outlook Column: Dangerous Pedestal

New column on Outlook's website, in the wake of the Adarsh Society scandal.

A (rushed) note on garbage and ENTHIRAN (Tamil; 2010)

The detritus of modern life -- specifically the detritus of a specific kind of consumer culture -- litters the language of most Shankar films, especially the songs. Unlike in most other Tamil songs, lovers in Shankar's films croon about cell phones and digital tunes (Indiyan (1996)); Coke, ice-cream, and following a Friday temple-visit with a Saturday disco-jaunt and a Sunday screening of "Titanic" (Mudhalvan (1999)); cappucino (Anniyan (2005))-- and don't even get me started on Boys (2003). The effect can come across as wannabe, or reminiscent of a time capsule (and hence fated to seem dated in a few years), but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as nothing more than silliness: Shankar is more self-aware than any other contemporary ringmaster of glitzy, cheesy spectacles, and certainly more than he is given credit for. It is fitting, then, that one of Enthiran's most important scenes -- the discovery of the discarded "Robo" by baddie Dr. Bhora (Danny Denzongpa) -- occurs at a vast garbage dump. [The site hearkens simultaneously to Wall-E, "new" Tamil cinema, and the excavation site in the Shankar-esque Citizen (2001), but retains a vibe that is all Shankar (indeed, the setting is prefigured in Anniyan).] Here (finally, I might add) the cue is visual (not, as is far too often the case in other Shankar-films, verbal), and seamlessly integrated with the film's theme, powerfully driving home a point about our own callousness, and the dispensability of, not just the things we make, but the other. Scientist Vaseegaran has created an android-robot out of what can only be described as monstrous vanity: the machine looks like him, is named after the scientist's childhood nickname ("Chitti"), and exists to serve him. When Chitti's absence of human feeling presents a roadblock in Vaseegaran's attempts to get official sanction for his project, he thoughtlessly decides to make more of a man out of his machine by imbuing Chitti with human feelings (pride is fittingly the first to surface) -- only to discard him when Chitti falls head over heels in love with Vaseegaran's girlfriend Sana (Aishwariya Rai, looking every bit the sort of woman who justifies the use of "hapless" before "lover"; the "Kiliminjaro" song almost made me weep; the video's problem? It ended). The garbage dump is an ideal place for a re-birth such as Chitti's: at the film's outset, he was created by Vaseegaran, but amidst all of humanity's other refuse, Chitti re-assembles himself, a touching sign that he is human enough to engage in the self-fashioning denied other animals; and that we too do not re-make ourselves out of nothing, dependent on the bits and pieces bequeathed us.

There's a second reason why the sequence at the garbage dump is the lodestar of this wacky film that, if it has a flaw, it is that it struggles to contain all the zest it teems with. Chitti re-assembling himself parallels his dismantling of himself in the film's penultimate sequence, and by means of the latter, Shankar places the "Robo" far ahead of the people he shares the film with, who have shown themselves singularly incapable of self-sacrifice. Simultaneously, the director gets to pay tribute to Rajni's "Thalaivar" aura. Given that the superstar plays all three of the film's male protagonists -- Vaseegaran, Chitti, and the villainous Chitti -- the message is clear: the super-Rajni who can do anything is created by Rajni (creates himself, as the sequence at the garbage dump makes clear), and to the extent Rajni loses (whether in love or in combat), it can only be to -- you guessed it -- Rajni. Rajni is both hero and villain, and hence this film's Alpha and Omega. (He is also remarkably bad-ass as the villainous Chitti. There's simply no other way to phrase this: Rajni is the best, most fun baddie in years, and easily steals the show from the more staid Rajnis who have preceded him. It also helps that Shankar's action sequences are his most fun ever, underscoring that all the SFX in the world -- such as far too many Hollywood films' -- cannot make up for a lack of imagination.) Rajni also gets to survive his own de-construction, that is to say he -- or pieces of him -- get(s) to be there even after he's no longer there (watch the film, you'll see what I mean). Detritus was never this much fun -- and in linking debris to the quest for identity, desire, and what it means to be human; as well as in his presentation of the star who is the film, it's clear Shankar has meaning on his mind. The meaning that only excavation and archaeology can provide to garbage.

New York, with Fall approaching...

Who says the city never sleeps? Last night, walking home past 1AM to East Harlem from 113th Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard, I went block after block with barely anyone in sight save the odd amorous couples on the benches on Central Park North, and a couple of people sauntering in the opposite direction. Once past the park, I saw no-one at all until 106th Street and 3rd Avenue. No one at all. I felt by myself in the city, but not all alone: the weight of all the people behind windows was with me.

The city does sleep, at least in the early hours of Monday morning when the buses have stopped running and I am awake to cross from West to East Harlem, past the gorgeous, melancholy lights (both in Central Park and outside, white until I got to 5th Avenue, at which point they all turned yellow), the shadows, the streets that seem so clean after dark. And I was entranced to watch it asleep.

Reflections on Masala Cinema and DABANGG (Hindi; 2010)

In recent times, Bollywood has tried to shake off some of the industry's contemporary distaste for its masala roots, with periodic salvos in the form of films like Bunty aur Babli (2005), Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007), Tashan (2008), and Chandni Chowk to China (2009). Looking back, it is not difficult to see why all of the films named (barring the first) failed miserably at the box office. Although I liked more than one of these, their attempt to resurrect masala cinema itself testified to the corpse in our midst: these films typically began with the premise that there was something drastically wrong with, not just masala films as the tradition degenerated over the course of the 1980s and 1990s into cliched set-pieces and moldiness; but the masala mode itself. That is, even the directors who purported to love the old masala cinema saw that way of approaching films -- rooted in the mythic; and other to both the neo-realist rhythms of Hollywood-inspired fare as well as the greeting card cheesiness of the NRI romances, that had swept all before them in the Hindi film industry from the late 1990s-onward -- as irremediably past. The specter of masala, it seemed, could only be summoned if the medium was funny, held at a distance by irony, or rendered homage to by spoof. Films like Lagaan (2001), seeking to incarnate masala in a more urbane and globalizable, yet also perhaps more bland, garb, promised new paths, but the film was too good for its own good: the message the industry seems to have taken to heart was that serious masala could work only if the film were as good as Lagaan. Which did wonders for the reputation and career of the film's leading man, Aamir Khan, but made an aberration of the film itself (an effect intensified by Khan's subsequent career trajectory, that has led far too many to equate the "different film" as one only Aamir could pull off, and hence as one that need not be emulated by others). In retrospect, it was a different Aamir Khan film, a far more embarrassing one for the industry's multiplexie filmmakers and audiences, that sounded the bugle: Fanaa (2006) was a mediocre film, but above all else, was a throwback of a film, hearkening to the cinema of Rajendra Kumar and even Rajesh Khanna, with only the flimsy patina of Kashmir militancy to clue the audience in that this was supposed to be Our Own Time. The film was a smash success, and Aamir had his formula (i.e. alternate more "serious" fare with "massy" cinema hearkening to Bollywood's past). The actor followed up the middle-brow (and thoroughly multiplex) Taare Zameen Par (2007) with the pan-North Indian smash-hit Ghajini (2008). While too early to say for sure, the latter's eye-popping box-office receipts finally seem to have made the truth impossible to deny: that films like the sort that had become synonymous with Yashraj and Dharma productions were not simply motivated by commercial considerations but by ideological ones. Audiences excluded from the new Bollywood paradigm were not simply "backward" folk who would, in time, see the light, but were simply not going to the cinemas often enough. In short, a film like Ghajini, by amassing crores and crores beyond what even the biggest Yashraj and Dharma films had managed to earn in the domestic market, irrefutably demonstrated that contemporary Bollywood was very far from maximizing audience share -- that millions of fans just did not care for candyfloss films set in NRIstan for no good reason, that paraded brand names and product placements with breathtaking vulgarity, making the display of consumption part of their drama. That millions of fans, in short, wanted a more authentic cinema, or at least wanted more of it than they had been getting.

Did I just say "wanted"? Salman Khan's 2009 blockbuster of the same name was an unabashed celebration of the masala mode, in both its thrilling and its ridiculous (even unsavory) aspects. No matter. Its authenticity, its lack of pretention, made for a successful box office run for a film that many hadn't expected to do much. Much of the credit had to go to the leading man of Wanted: Salman Khan's off-screen bad boy air, combined with a refusal to bullshit about his career or the industry (a disease with most of his colleagues), and a self-deprecating twinkle that winked to the audience "you think I don't get this is ridiculous?!" while simultaneously standing by the legitimacy of the film, made for an irresistible combination (it certainly got me to the cinema for a Salman Khan film, a phenomenon much rarer than a leap year). But so what? From a different perspective, both Ghajini and Wanted testified to the paucity of Bollywood masala: both films were remakes of Tamil and Telugu blockbusters; and both were directed by successful directors from Southern film industries. Both films, that is, were barely products of Bollywood at all.

That didn't make them any easier to ignore, but it did raise questions in my mind as to whether I could hope for a genuine Bolly-filmmaker -- that is to say one not simply seeking to translate a successful Southern film -- to follow in their wake. Salman Khan, apparently, was also paying attention to the fate ofGhajini and Wanted, as was Abhinav Kashyap, brother of enfant terrible -- and dean of a (yet another!) new, "indie-ishtyle" Bollywood that is neither masala nor Hollywood-lite nor Hallmark-drenched -- Anurag Kashyap. The result is Dabangg -- for me, a Sallu film in the theaters for a second consecutive year (this time with a better title: the word means brave, fearless, perhaps even reckless, and -- for all these reasons -- manly, the sort of title the late Feroze Khan would have approved of. None of this sissy Love Aaj Kal stuff for him). Not for nothing is it Eid ka chand.

Abhinav Kashyap attempts to answer my questions. Acting like it's 1983 won't do, but neither will spoofing all the way to a gag-fest -- leaving everything else aside, masala-as-slapfest just isn't funny. Nor does the tongue in cheek cleverness, or rather, the cinematic presentation of cleverness (a la Bluffmaster!), sit comfortably with a mode the very lifeblood of which is "as if": masala cinema takes the absolute significance of the story and characters that it is presenting for granted, as if nothing mattered more. What's left, then? In a word, the world of Robert Rodriguez (something like Desperado), the exaggerated gesturality of which, combined with the complete seriousness of purpose, makes clear that this world must be taken seriously, even if it seems a bit like kabuki, sending us missives in a language that is no longer completely retrievable, evoking a mode that can only be viewed through a screen. Kashyap must walk a tightrope: self-consciousness -- the curse of recent attempts to resurrect masala, and unknown to the Southern remakes -- cannot simply be wished (or willed) away, but too much of an emphasis on mode can itself betray that one is at a wake, with the films focusing almost exclusively on the hero's gesturality, to the exclusion of everything else (to the extent Tamil and Telugu masala cinema has itself fallen into a rut, it is this one). To the extent Kashyap has to come down on one side, he does so on the latter, but not before maintaining his balance for longer than most others on this terrain. Dabangg, in short, is good fun: in an old-school way, it takes its narrative seriously, evoking the traditional tropes of mother, paternity, and dispossession; while its representation of a cheerfully corrupt, amoral hero, looking out above all else for himself, is of more modern vintage. Bridging the gap between the two, the one who holds it all up, is Salman Khan, never more charismatic than he is here, and whose Lalgunj Inspector Chulbul Pandey is cleverly drawn by Kashyap to give full rein to the audience's skepticism -- if we succumb to this film's charms, Pandey's own eccentric antics will stand for and sum up everything that can't be happening on screen. Leaving us to imbibe the rest of the film as is, freed as it were. Sure, we can never feel for Chulbul Pandey -- that isn't his function. Instead, Salman is asked to function as a medium for the ghosts of a certain kind of hero; by making the character's --and the actor's -- oddity explicit, Kashyap enables us to stop asking the question.

If the above makes Dabangg, sound like a somewhat bloodless, even abstract, film, despite the star at its core, that is my intention. For, in a nutshell, the film, while quite enjoyable and never less than engaging, and certainly no film that I can think of has (with the possible exception of Saawariya) showcased Salman Khan better; lacks something. Perhaps it is what desi audiences call an "emotional connection" with the film. Perhaps it is simply that the film comes across as an interesting concept given form, rather than a distinctive vision or a compelling story. Don't get me wrong, I laud the concept -- the film's relentless embrace of a dusty U.P. milieu, of a hero who isn't (a shocker in these Bollytimes) a gazillionaire, and of Indian popular cinema's heritage -- but the film needed more. Such as, oh, some kind of moral core: the film simply has none; for all the promos announcing Dabangg's protagonist as "Robin Hood Panday", there is precious little of that in the film. What there is oodles of is a casual attitude toward police brutality, corruption, encounter deaths, and even the use of false arrests as an excuse to get Inspector Panday's lady-love to the police station. All of these can be material for humor -- of the bleak, not guffawing, sort, even if the last-named of these moments provides guilty consolation by segueing into an energetic "Hum Ka Peeni Hai" song that is one of the film's highlights.

To recap: Chulbul Panday grows up a second-class member of his step-father's household, and into the sort of cop who will fight criminals only so he can steal their money. This naturally runs this descendant of Bachchan's Shahenshah-cop afoul of Lalgunj's politicians, specifically Chedi Singh (Sonu Sood), the guy behind at least some of the gangsters. Along the way to a reckoning with Chedi Singh, Panday meets and falls for potter Rajo (Sonakshi Sinha), reconciles with his estranged family, faces tragedy, and, by film's end, triumphs. And becomes the only man ever to hook his shades on the back of his collar.

The best of the rest of the cast certainly deserved better: Sonakshi Sinha's Rajo isn't asked to do much, but we see glimpses of something interesting in her, a flash of quiet anger and resentment here, a wary look there, that leads us to want more. With the exception of a hilarious moment with Chulbul Pandey on her wedding night (the only gender-bending moment in a rather sexist film), we are disappointed, as Sinha is barely present as the film wears on. Not to mention that her Indian look, squarely at odds with the sort of "size zero"-blandness that seems to be par for the course in contemporary Hindi cinema, was easy on the eyes. Sonu Sood's villainous Chedi Singh suffers from the opposite problem, appearing at the beginning and towards the end, but barely present for much of the film's middle as it takes a detour toward resolving Chulbul's conflicts with his brother Maakhan (Arbaaz Khan) and stepfather Pandayji (Vinod Khanna). The film could have done with more of him, and more villainy (less simpering) from him.

The music was better than I expected: the title song "Dabangg" is pungent, despite the "Omkara" hangover, and the very fact that Sajid-Wajid were able to rescue the utterly conventional "Tere Mast Mast Do Nain" from staleness is reason enough to be impressed (not to mention the zany video). Malaika Arora-Khan's item number "Munni Badnaam Hui" was popular leading up to the film's release, and certainly features a fun video (wherein, it must be said, Sonu Sood is the scene stealer), but the song suffers from poor placement in the film, diluting its impact. There was another song, set in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but it was so generic I can't for the life of me remember its name.

I can remember the action sequences, though, but not because they were memorable: there are too many sequences marred by poor SFX and close-ups (i.e., close-ups designed to mask the inadequacy of the SFX), a grave sin in a film with this title, and it is hard to square these with the verve shown by Kashyap at several other points during the film. This is not, visually speaking, a pedestrian film (even if it comes most alive during the various bazaar sequences), making the inadequacy of the action scenes mystifying.

Should you see it? That depends on what you want: if, like me, you've been casting about for signs of a disturbance in the reigning cultural hegemony within Bollywood, Dabangg might be one of the clearest signs yet that the prospects for greater diversity aren't dead. And, despite the film's shortcomings, that will thrill you, as it did me, and you won't regret watching it. But even if you aren't sympathetic to this kind of cinema, it still might be worth checking out. Along the way, you will certainly get glimpses of the sorts of people who have been marginalized for years in Bollywood's Big Films. Sure, none of this might matter to you -- perhaps you prefer your dish bland, or laced with saccharine -- but I'm betting most have enough of a weakness for spice, and Dabangg is light enough and Salman Khan certainly funny enough, that they probably won't regret watching it.