It’s true Hillary Clinton put eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling – but she didn’t do it by showing up one day and pretending that life in Alaska was pretty much akin to living life in a war zone. She paid for those cracks by being called every name in the book, dealing with outright hostility, not only from her opponents but from fellow Democrats and people she thought were her friends, by enduring years of public humiliation and vilification, facing her toughest opponents one on one and inspiring respect in them, by facing down the hate of almost every media personality out there, one on one if necessary, and by becoming the butt of every late night zinger.
Hillary Clinton didn’t put those cracks in the ceiling because she comes equipped with an uterus; she did it because she’s Hillary freakin’ Clinton. If Sarah Palin or any other Republican wants to squeeze into the space she carved out for herself after all these years, then they better be prepared for a lot worse than the innuendo and speculation that’s already begun to emerge:
Sarah Palin was not pregnant with child.
Her sixteen year-old daughter was.
Checking with the Anchorage High School that Bristol Palin attended, reporters were given word that her family had taken Bristol out of school due to contracting infectious mononucleosis. The amount of time Bristol was absent shifts from five to eight months.
Mono can last anywhere from two weeks to three months, but an eight month infection is a freak oddity. Yet it remains a common excuse given by girls in private & Catholic schools around the nation when pregnancy comes into play.
Not to be left behind, an anonymous tipster (unless Little R. Hen is their legal name, in which case I apologize) has already written in to Wonkette saying Palin’s husband has a “John Edwards problem“.
Meanwhile, the rightwing, I understand, is shocked and upset that the party of women-lovers a.k.a. the Democrats should turn vicious so quick on this beauteous mother of many. How is this possible? they ask. Is it not hypocritical? they ask.
I suggest they go back and study Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the reactions it evoked a little more closely for the answers they seek. And if that doesn’t satisfy them, please go back and study the years of the Clinton White House.
So far I’ve heard that Barack Obama is not an American but is a Pledge of Alliance-spurning radical Muslim; he does not place his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played, but his mother was a radical Leftist and his own books prove him to be a racist; he will not release his birth certificate because it either lists him as “white” or because it holds definitive proof that he is not an American citizen but he has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan; he refuses to wear a flag pin or sing the national anthem because he “won’t take sides” and it might upset those who hate America but he has spoken at least 50 lies (ZOMG! 50!) on the campaign trail; and the crowning cherry on top: his mere touch can heal the ailing but he is the AntiChrist.
These are just a selected few of the rumors floating around the Senator from Illinois. Snopes.com has so far debunked at least 48 of them. Let it be said that there is no dearth of imagination in the United States.
Unfortunately, none of it really stuck. Sure, there are still people out there who think he’s a Muslim and thus a terrible person out to destroy all of them, but even that didn’t appear to faze the Obama campaign. There he went, speechifying and rallying and raising money and even getting the Germans to turn out to hear him speak, bringing back strong memories of JFK. Something had to be done! Inspiration apparently struck a few of them when they saw Obama standing in front of tens of thousands of flag waving Americans (or “brainwashed Democrats” as they like to call it) yelling for change.
Aaannndddd…. just in time to save the day, here’s Hitler!
That’s right, rightwingers (no, not Ryan Tate, scroll down to the comments) across the net have seen the resemblance and will not be swayed: the Democratic Convention was just like the rally at Nuremberg and Obama is just like Hitler because he stood in front of a big old West Wing set in a big stadium in front of more than 70, 000 people. He was whipping that crowd into a frenzy the way only fascists do! He was making ominous sounds about the glories of the past the way only fascists do! He wants socialized medicine like only fascists do! He raised his arm to wave… the way only fascists do!
Really, what could be more like Hitler than this speech:
The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.
So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.
When you talk to old-timey people, they will tell of the dark days of the Licence Raj, when India was a “mixed economy” a.k.a. Socialist But Didn’t Want to Say So In Case They Had to Take care of People in More Ways Than Emotional. Those were the days when you daren’t run an efficient manufacturing unit, in case the government fined you for doing your job too well and exceeding your permitted quota of finished goods. The days when you drank Campa Cola and bloody well liked it because Coca Cola was too capitalist for pure Indian throats. When a Customs job was like Christmas every day because every Indian who came back from the splendidly debauched Abroad came dripping with exotic items such as French perfume, Swiss chocolates and Japanese electronics and were only to happy to “gift” you a little something if they could take in the majority of their haul.
Those were also the days when my mother customarily bid adieu to my father by telling him to take care of himself and to forget the perfume and eat all the chocolates he wanted – but for the love of God, bring her back a dozen bras.
For years, those bras were an integral part of any gift package that arrived for our family. Her sisters, living in capitalist luxury elsewhere in the world would buy them for her. My father, the poor man, knew lingerie shops in every country he’d been to. But I didn’t realize the depth of her obsession until my thirteenth birthday brought with it her idea of The Perfect Gift: training bras, made in France.
The lace was itchy, the elastic was uncomfortable and I couldn’t breathe. “I hate it!” I told her.
“They’re French!” she said, shocked. “How can you hate it?”
“I don’t care where they were made,” I insisted stubbornly. “I hate them.”
She fiddled with the straps and pushed and pulled (not that there was much at the time to push or pull but she tried her best) a bit. “Is that better?”
“No! It’s too tight. I can’t breathe.”
“Oh, that!” She let out a sigh of relief. “That’s just how a bra functions.”
“What!” I was stunned. The whole bra-burning thing suddenly made so much sense to me. First Wave Feminism, yay! “You mean I have to feel this way for the rest of my life? I can’t breathe from now till I’m dead?” Was this what they meant by ‘the pain of being a woman’? “I won’t! I refuse!”
“Well, then do you want your breasts to droop to the floor?” It was clear she didn’t think much of this course of action.
I toyed with the idea of saying yes just to piss her off. But truly, that didn’t sound very comfortable. “No.”
“Then this is how it is,” she said firmly. “If every other woman can do it, so can you.”
Temporarily defeated by the thought of the Droopy Boobies, I let it go. But soon found another thing to complain about: “All this twisting and pulling is too much trouble, I don’t like it and I can’t see what I’m doing and I’m getting angry and since you want me to control my temper, I can’t wear a bra. The end.”
Not that easily, it turned out. A phone call was placed and I soon received a lovely gift from my aunt in America: a front open bra. “Great,” I muttered glumly.
“Look,” said my mother in the accents one generally reserves for toddlers. “It has pretty little flowers embroidered around the border. So pretty!”
I thought I might vomit.
Reading the rebellion on my face, Ma immediately changed tactics. “Fine, why don’t we go look for some Indian bras then? You can choose what you like.”
“Something loose and comfortable?” I asked hopefully.
“Whatever you like,” she said with a worrying amunt of smugness in her voice.
I soon found out why: nobody makes anything resembling a passable bra in India.
Oh, they looked like bras, and they’re called bras, but in texture they resembled the very finest the khadi industry had to offer and they fit about as well as if I’d hung lampshades about my bosom. They had names like Fairy and Angel and featured pictures of coy women and their magnificent bosoms on the cover of their cardboard cartons, but the only way you could achieve a similar result was if you stood in the same pose as they did, which is to say leaning back with your arms behind your head. It being a little hard to go about normal life in such a fashion, I went back to my hated training bras – at least they were pretty and soft. And the lace might be itchy but at least it didn’t make it look as though my breasts were collapsing in the middle. I now understood why women of my grandmother’s generation had stuck to their little “bodices” instead of switching to the new fangled bra to go with their painstakingly stitched saree blouses.
Now that I’m older and Indian women are buying imported bras in the comfort of their own cities, I have to wonder: what do Indian women who don’t feel like (or can’t afford to) shelling out upwards of several hundred rupees a bra do when they need a little support? Are they all buying Fairy and Angel, figuring nobody will notice the odd contours under the all forgiving saree? And why hasn’t anybody figured out that all these women must be dying for the same comforts and variety of choice offered to their Western counterparts? Not just out of the goodness of their hearts (I’m not that naive) but there must be a fortune to be made here.
For myself, ever since I upgraded to adult sized brassieres, I’ve been hunting for a good bra. I have found two, one of them despite a disapproving fitter at Victoria’s Secret who was outraged that my breasts defied her decries of what would properly fit. “I said you have to go up a size,” she told me in condemnatory tones as I jumped around the dressing room, delirious with happiness at finding a bra that finally fit me the way it was supposed to.
It’s experiences like that one that make me think that Secrets from Your Sister might actually be on to something. I don’t know yet if I’ve given up enough to pay them for their services, but I feel comforted by the thought that if all else fails and they pull my two preferred bras off the market, I’ll at least have them to fall back on, even if I do have to go to Canada for the privilege. Somewhere in this cold world, someone cares about my boobies’ comfort, even if I have to pay them for it.
Actually I’d be all for the Spanx bra if I could wear it with something other than round neck Ts which I usually avoid like the plague – seriously, I can deal with stepping into it rather than snapping it on, but with bands that wide, what on earth can you wear it with? Your pyjamas?
Remember that scene in Chak De India where the entire hockey team ends up trashing a McDonald’s and beating up a bunch of louts who verbally harass two of their teammates? Beth of BethLovesBollywood thought-provokingly writes:
Apart from this scene, Chak De! India is for me a feminist film, unapologetically, boldly, with heart and humor. But women taking on the worst behavior of men and/or male-established/dominated society is not what feminism about. You don’t get to attack people because they mistreat you. Of course these jackasses deserved to be punished… [b]ut vigilante violence isn’t really the answer here… In a story that highlights personal and professional success by playing by the rules and behaving ethically and with concern for others, it doesn’t fit. I’m so disappointed that not only does the movie have the girls engage in this behavior, it also has this outburst of short tempers and violence serve as the bonding moment, the experience that enables the very existence of the team continue. What’s the message here? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? We will rise when we beat down others? The people who mistreated us behave like this, so we should too? Violence demonstrates our potential for greatness?
My answer, and i promise it’s not a copout, is that it’s complicated.
On the one hand, she has it absolutely right. Vigilante justice might solve a particular crime at a specific point in time but in the long run and larger scheme of things, it’s an ineffectual band aid applied on a deep wound. The lesson those men in Chak De are likely to have learned is not to refrain from eve teasing, as we call it in India, but to target girls singly because groups can turn nasty and, above all else, to keep away from girls with hockey sticks. That is most important.
But on the other hand, I’m an Indian woman.
When I was eleven, a cousin and I were followed home by a group of grown men who kept describing the various ways they’d like to fuck us and how much we deserved it – because I’d gone to the store down the street from our house with no one but my nineteen-year-old cousin sister to give me company. My pocket-sized, hot tempered self immediately wanted to stand my ground and throw punches, or maybe a few rocks while I was it. But my cousin all but dragged me home, holding on to my hand with a white knuckled grip, signalling me with her eyes to keep quiet every time I opened my mouth to say something, hurrying as fast we could without actually breaking into a run, and we didn’t stop until we were inside the main gates of the house and the security guard threw the lock behind us.
This was not a big city where crime was rampant. This was a small town in southern India, where my cousins and I couldn’t walk down the street without ten aunties calling home to check whether our mothers knew we were wandering about “like vagabonds”. That day when we came back home and told our mothers what had taken place, my aunt simply informed us that we were not to go to the store any more and could send one of the servants to buy whatever we wanted.
We were not poor and we were not defenceless – perhaps the two of us couldn’t have taken them on the way I wanted to on the street, but there was plenty we could have done. Yet the easiest solution was to apparently take away our freedom because who wanted to get involved in that kind of mess? Dealing with the police, registering complaints, and all for what? So some guy could get a few licks of some constable’s cane and spend a night breaking the government’s bread before he went back on the street and possibly created more troubles for us?
It was the first time I’d ever been harassed on the street and I’ve undergone the experience plenty of times since then, but what sets that one incident apart in my memory, is the laughter of those men as we ran into our house. Perhaps what he did that day was nothing more than idle amusement for him, and he really didn’t mean anything by it. Perhaps he was a bully and this was how he got his kicks. I don’t know. I remember feeling vaguely threatened, eleven year olds not being used to much sexual banter at least in my day, but what I remember most clearly is the feeling of impotent rage that shook me when I heard that man laugh. It stays with me to this day.
This is why that scene in Chak De struck such a chord in every single Indian woman I know. There is not one of us that has not experienced a moment like that one. A moment when we would have done anything just to rip some motherfucker’s throat out but had to satisfy ourselves with a few choice insults or maybe a dignified silence depending upon the circumstances, our personalities and our upbringing. If there’s something that Indian women across caste, class and regional lines can relate to, it’s being harassed. Therefore it was a cathartic moment to watch those guys get beaten up – our long suppressed wishes were being fulfilled on screen in one glorious scene. And unlike other Bollywood movies, where women only get to beat up evil doers in the most “eeks! don’t break my itsy bitsy fingernail” uber-ditsy feminine manner possible by using lampshades and sandals, and that too only with the help of either a cunning, faithful dog or a massive crowd, these women were using hockey sticks, those oh-so-macho tools of every gangster’s trade and they didn’t care if they broke a few tables along with their fingernails.
The Law. Technically speaking, there are laws against eve teasing. Nothing soul destroying but it will get you sent to the slammer for a couple of nights and maybe fined. Reality is far different. It starts with the policeman telling you he’ll “take care of it” and not to bother your pretty little head about it. The “taking care of it” might entail his rushing at the man or the group of men in question and making them run away by waving his truncheon threateningly at them or maybe giving them a “good scare” by threatening to lock them up and then finally letting him go after he’s emptied his pockets.
The Family. If, by some miracle, you manage to get someone arrested for their nasty behavior, then it’s very likely that your family won’t be too pleased. Going to the police and registering a complaint against eve teasers might end up harming the victim‘s reputation. You’d think this is ignorant rural bumpkin behavior. You’d be wrong. Take one of my cousins who just abandoned her degree at a famous engineering college because a group of male students had developed a habit of bursting into the women’s hostel in the middle of the night to create a ruckus every time they got a good drunk on. This is a girl whose maternal uncle is a Minister, whose parents are well educated professionals settled abroad, and who is certainly not hurting for money. Rather than place a few calls and take a stand, her family chose to forget the three years she’d plugged into her engineering degree and place her elsewhere because, I suppose, least said soonest mended. And even if your family stood by you and wanted to bring the guilty to justice, the perpetrator’s family would probably slip immediately into denial mode and refuse to believe that their dear child could be capable of such heinous behavior and strive to portray themselves as victims of a heartless Westernized, feminist culture out to destroy their values and their lives. Which would, of course, make no sense logically but would set off deep alarm bells because it used the five-alarm words “Western culture” and “feminism”. And at the end of it all, the man in question would have learned precisely nothing from his experience.
The Culture. This culture of silence, deflecting blame and taking the path of least resistance floats on the fact that a lot of Indian men and women have limited social skills when it comes to the opposite gender. Not all of them, but a lot of them, especially in smaller cities and in less advantaged or more conservative communities where segregation is the order of the day.
There was this kid in my high school who really liked this one girl who was a year junior to him. She was a brilliant student, very fair skinned, soft spoken and all her close friends were girls. All important requirements for a proper girl in our hometown. He was lucky not to flunk out, very dark, and addicted to displays of machismo that were all too likely to backfire like the bits fluff he grew on his upper lip. As per the dynamics of conservative small town South India, there was no way in hell the princess would even look at him, especially because she was also a Good Girl and didn’t do things like that because it offended her moral principles. So what’s a guy to do to get her attention? He pulled off her dupatta in the stairwell during recess which nearly (or maybe it did?) drove her to tears. And then he followed her around everywhere she went, offering her little gifts and sweet cards from Hallmark. She did what soft-spoken, moral girls do all over India when faced with a situation like this – she tied him a rakhi and hoped that was an end to it.
She thought he was a scumbag. Every single girl in school thought he was a scumbag. And all the guys rushed to tell us that he wasn’t that bad, he was actually a good guy, he didn’t mean anything by it. The faceless 21 year old in this article, Raja Kumar, puts it best: “I was never really taught how to act around a girl. I thought teasing was the way to get them to notice me.”
And he isn’t entirely wrong. I’m sure he’s closely related to one woman at least and he doesn’t usually interact with her by complimenting her ass, so with a little thought I’m sure he knew what he was doing was objectionable. But there actually are men and women who think this kind of behavior, as long as it comes from someone they like or consider personable, is romantic. If that boy in my school had been better looking or more charismatic, I bet there would have been girls who thought his behavior deliciously deplorable rather than just plain old deplorable.
This is why it’s “cute” and “fun” when a Bollywood hero (or a hero from any of India’s fim industries for that matter – this is a national sterotype) stalks the heroine and “teases” her unmercifully until she “realizes” that he’s being an asshole because he “loves” her. But it’s terrible and threatening when the villain does the same thing because well, he’s kind of unfortunate looking and is clearly motivated by impure thoughts rather than pure ones. The hero is the guy who stalks the girl because he wants to marry her and father adorable little babies with her; the villain is the guy who even if he wants to marry her and father adorable little babies with her, only wants to do so via some athletic, kinky sex unimaginable and shocking to those who’re pure of heart.
So when those 16 women in Chak De India took up their hocket sticks and laid all those men out, they were fulfilling the fantasies of millions of Indian women who’d never seen anything like it before.
Ooh, looks like somebody’s lawyers need to justify their hefty legal retainer. Reuters reports:
Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against Mumbai-based producer/distributor Mirchi Movies related to the title of its upcoming film “Hari Puttar — A Comedy of Terrors,” which Warners feels is a tad too similar to its franchise about a certain young wizard.
Yup, that makes total sense to me. Because obviously people could mistake a B-movie headlining with Jackie Shroff, Saurabh Shukla and Sarika with oh, the biggest franchise to have hit the entertainment industry the world over in years.
It reminds of the time when the best mom-and-pop biriyani place in my hometown received a legal notice from the representatives of a certain Japanese electronics giant who felt their name had been infringed upon – presumably because Sony wanted to go into the biriyani and paya business and were worried they wouldn’t be able to put it all under one roof. Hey, mutton curry makes overpriced gadgets sell like… er, sheermal?
The things you learn everyday. Above is a sample ad (I don’t know if it’s gone out yet) from RAVE i.e. Revolt Against Virus Exchange targeting homosexual men between the ages of 18 and 30, specifically those called “bug chasers“. If you, like me, are hearing the term for the first time it indicates “a gay man who deliberately attempts to contract HIV by having unprotected sex with a man or group of men who are known to have the virus.”
To say this is one of the most disturbing things I’ve heard in my life (and ‘disturbing’ is kind of my end of the pool) is to put it mildly. But what bothers me even more is that this is the first time I’ve ever heard about such a thing.
I suppose it makes sense in one way because I can see how this would play into the hands of the anti-gay lobby but then the very existence of a gay person plays into the hands of those who oppose the LGBT community. You could adopt a starving child off the streets and bring it up to become a Nobel prize winning scientist who finds a way to end famines forever while cleaning up the environment and reducing crime – and there would still be people who think there’s something fundamentally perverted about you being a parent because you choose to sleep with someone of your own gender.
So in a time and age when Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe’s mild case of clumsiness (Dyspraxia: A Motor Skill Development Problem) is making the headlines as a whole new disorder parents should be watching out for, why isn’t bug chasing front page news? (Rolling Stone being the sole exception with a honorable mention for Anderson Cooper as he discusses a documentary called ‘The Gift‘.)
More ads featuring tag lines such as “HIV+ Guys Get All The Attention and Support in Our Community” and “When I Turn Positive, I Can Bareback and Not Have to Worry” below.
Nothing can quite prepare you for Romancing with Life, Dev Anand’s autobiography. All the reviews, the excerpts, the interviews, the soundbytes – all of it, including this post, becomes ultimately comparable to describing a rainbow for a blind man.
Consider this: At the very outset of this rather blog-style narrative, he tells you that his ultimate aim in writing his memoirs is to reduce the reader to a state of complete adoration for him, The Star. Anything else, he informs us, wouldn’t be worth his time and effort or befit his status as the beloved of millions. He then proceeds to dole out (sometimes graphic) anecdotes about his sexual exploits with married women, his own adulterous affairs, his jealousies, his despondencies, his vague spiritual flights of fancy (if you’ve seen Guide, you know what it is), and a laundry list of people he’s met in all the places he’s been. All of which make it increasingly difficult for you to feel anything even resembling the blatant adoration that he feels is his due.
Occasionally he writes of little incidents that have could possibly have been heartwarming in the right hands like the time his daughter cut her hand and he took her to the doctor in tears – once the trauma is over and the screaming little baby is all stitched up and soothed, she automatically sticks her thumb in her mouth. But after informing us in great detail about his suffering over her pain, he ends the little tale with the information that he later made Zeenat Aman (or rather the child who played the younger Zeenie) suck her thumb in Hare Rama Hare Krishna. The audience quite liked it, he assures us.
There are quite a few anecdotes like this one – the one in which he begins Navketan Films for the sake of his brother Chetan Anand is another one that sticks in my mind – but they all wind up making you grateful that you weren’t the recipient of his magnanimity. For instance, by the time we learn, rather early on, that Chetan repaid his younger brother’s magnanimity by eventually looking at him as the problem not the solution, you can’t help but feel there must have been something to it for Dev is already beginning to sound like a man you would rather not be indebted to – not because he’s a monster but because he wouldn’t understand that his idea of a kindness and yours might be considerably different.
But these are secondary things, as are his memories of his various colleagues and the films he made. The main theme of this book is Dev Anand’s love life, forever chased by a horde of panty-flinging women everywhere he goes.
It starts early on, as we meet a young, shy, and beautiful Dev, much cosseted by his family, a bit of a Peeping Tom and tortured by his unrequited love for the prettiest and smartest girl in his class who doesn’t even know he’s alive. Instead, he’s relentlessly pursued by another girl for whom he has no use – she’s “dark-skinned” and “smell[ed] of sex” and likes to chase him into secluded corners where she can plant one on his unwilling lips. I might have felt bad for him if he hadn’t all but drawn a diagram of a boner on the page with a neon arrow pointing to it.
The older Dev, according to his autobiography, is still shy and beautiful. However, we don’t see any of that shyness once he starts fooling around with (mostly married) women. The more successful he becomes, the greater the frenzy amongst women for a little taste of him. They throng around him, demand to act opposite him, kiss him, giggle at his jokes, exchange a great deal of tedious (and tediously recorded) banter and occasionally sleep with him until pesky things like husbands and children interfere.
I felt uncomfortable precisely twice – once when he described his first extended sexual encounter up to and including oral sex (my eyes!! my eyes!!) and secondly when he described his “courtship” of his wife Kalpana Karthik a.k.a. Mona. The way he describes the latter leaves the impression that Mona, dazzled by all the shiny toys he owned, pretty much begged him to marry her while he used her to get out a deep funk that was interfering with his work and life, getting stuck in the relationship before he could figure out a graceful way to end things in the absence of a waiting husband and pitiful children wailing for mommy at home.
The payoff for it, as far as I’m concerned, comes in an incredibly funny sequence towards the end of the book when Mona finds an injured Dev lying in bed studying some “sexy” blow ups of Richa Sharma, the future Mrs. Sanjay Dutt (although none of them knew it at the time) whom he first meets as a winsome 13 year old wannabe actress whom he invites into his hotel room in New York. Glaring at him without a word, Mona gathers up the photos and spitefully puts them where he can’t reach them with his broken ribs in a cast. Which makes him mutter to himself, “Why you gotta do me like this woman? Didn’t I always come home at the end of the day and sleep in my own bed?” I paraphrase. And then he painfully drags himself out of his bed, gets the pictures, triumphantly pores over them and hides them away in his bedside drawer where no one else could get at them.
Thus, it’s perhaps predictable that the only two times he ever actively pursues a woman (we’ll skate over his man-crush on Jawaharlal Nehru), it’s both tragic and unintentionally hilarious.
They’re falling in love right there!
The first is Suraiya, who wins his heart at the first meeting by carefully refraining from disturbing his puff (that thing on the front of his head? It’s known as the puff. So now you know). He rewards her by bestowing a fond nickname on her – “Nosey” because her only “defect” is her long nose – and soon he’s channeling Barbara Cartland. I’m not kidding. If you ever read Cartland’s description of an orgasm, then you’ll know how Dev Anand thinks of cuddling his chaste beloved. However, Suraiyya’s grandmother, whom he hilariously calls “granny” throughout the episode, wasn’t about to let her little baby marry some Hindu with a puff in his hair and Suraiyya was convinced to throw her feelings for him along with his very expensive ring into the sea. She never married and he rebounded with Mona. The (miserable) end.
Where are the rustic boobies?
The second was Zeenat Aman whom he impressed by bumming a cigarette from her so he could blow smoke in her face. Once she was dazed by it, he dragged her off to Nepal to watch Mumtaz act so she’d know what to do in front of the camera and hey presto! Hare Krishna Hare Rama was made. Once that got over, he took her to South India, stuck her in a bikini, posed her in a hammock, rescued his fly away cap from the “bulging breasts” of some village belle surprised to see what a freak dust storm had blown her way… and just when he was about to declare his love for her, went to a party and found a bloated, drunken Raj Kapoor discreetly feeling her up. “Humiliated”, he went back home and tried to think happy thoughts.
I think I’m supposed to feel bad for him but I couldn’t really concentrate with my skin crawling at the thought of that scene – the young sexy woman and the two old men jousting over her. It’s nothing I didn’t know before, but it’s still creepy as all hell.
And yet… in the middle of all this there is a note of sincerity and honesty. He has nothing but praise for his contemporaries, especially Dilip Kumar and Ashok Kumar, the man he calls his idol. It’s true he gives them about as much space in the book as some random pretty girl who blows him a kiss on the street but I believe him when he says he cared/cares for them, as well as Kishore Kumar and Guru Dutt, a great deal.
Generally speaking, Indian movie stars simply don’t do things of this sort (for good reason it turns out) but not only do I think Dev Anand wrote this book on his own but I think he made a conscious effort to be as frank as he could be.
The oddities of this book emanate from its author, for it becomes increasingly clear that over the past sixty years or so Dev Anand has devoted himself to his image as a movie star to such an extent that it’s managed to completely imprison him. There is always an unconscious whiff of a man who has spent a great deal of his time in front of a mirror trying to divine what it is that others see in him, and not being able to spot it himself, has arrived at his own (inaccurate) conclusions.
He wears a hat and dangles his “goggles” because he thinks of them as a sort of calling card, a part of his silhouette that announces to the world “Here Stands Dev Anand, Movie Star”; he nods his head and smiles a special smile for special people that he’s convinced is his “most charming smile”; he believes in the infallibility of his cinematic taste where every failure at the box office is the fault of the little people who lag behind his own exquisite sensibility; and lacking any real demons to fight, he gives a splendid speech highlighting his unique position in the film industry to a flummoxed set of film association people who didn’t appreciate his sticking up for the media at a time when they’d all decided to boycott what they called its yellow journalism.
As I reached the end of the book, I was about as far away from adoration as you could get. But what I did want to do, was take him by the hand and tell him it’s okay – he’ll always be Dev Anand even if he loses the scarf and the goggles and doesn’t nod his head… or chat up women young enough to be his granddaughter.
Ol’ Pop 1: “I saw my doctor today. He’s the FRCP, MRCP, BA, MA, MBBS head of neuro-cardiac-ENT-gastro-medicine at the biggest hospital in our city. He says I need to up the dosage of my cholesterol meds.”
Ol’ Pop 2: “Ah, well. It’s our age. I saw my doctor the other day. He’s the FRCP, MRCP, BA, MA, MBBS, MALLB head of neuro-cardiac-ENT-gastro-pediatric-medicine at the biggest hospital in the next town over from yours. He used to work in America and teach at Harvard and when he wanted to leave they begged him not to go and even offered to give his wife a job but he said his roots are here. So he told me that my cholesterol and my blood pressure are both up and I need to increase my dosage.”
Ol’ Pop 1: “Oh, really? Harvard, is it? And he lives in the next town? Not ours? One of these young fellows I suppose. Very eccentric these fellows, all kinds of ideas. My doctor is a more experienced man. England-returned, you know. He was personal physician to the Mayor of London. Maybe even the Queen but he’s very modest. They wanted to knight him but he refused because he’s one of those old fashioned patriots, you know. He’s also a millionaire and married to the daughter of the man who owns the hospital. Half the doctors who work there used to work in America. Now they all get fabulous salaries to work there. Of course, none of them gets paid what he does. They’d all pee on their shoes if he even looked at them.”
Ol’ Pop 2: “My doctor doesn’t like to live in the big city. He likes to live in our town because you know how your city is these days. Too many people, too much crime, pollution. He came back specially to work here. He used to treat George Bush but after a while he decided he’d rather serve the poor at home. He has principles. And of course, he doesn’t need any money – his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather were all famous doctors. His father used to charge 100 rupees in the 1950s! And still, every morning his garden was full of waiting people who’d come from far and wide to consult him.”
Ol’ Pop 1: “Ah, yes. My doctor is like that. He charges 500 rupees for a ten minute consultation. He doesn’t even do anything in that time but look at you and ask you what is wrong with you. Oh, what beautiful manners he has! Very much a gentleman. Then he’ll listen to your heart and tell you what tests you must take and then he’ll cure you. 100%. And all of those tests are very expensive. They’re not for just anybody. Oh no! You have to be somebody before he’ll examine you. And when he does examine you, he won’t touch you with his hands. He’ll always wear gloves which he throws away once they’ve been used.”
Ol’ Pop 2: How much does he charge for your medicine?”
Ol Pop 1: My cholesterol tablets are 60 rupees. And they’re only available at one chemist shop in our city.
Ol’ Pop 2: Ha! I knew it. I’ve taken that medicine. And it didn’t work for me. All these old and dated medicines are the same. What we need now are new ideas from young men. You know how much my tablets cost? My cholesterol tablets are 20 rupees each and I have to take them two times a day while my blood pressure tablets are 25 rupees each. My medical bills each month are so monstrous, the local chemist offers me tea when I go to his shop. I have his number on speed dial on my cell phone. Have you seen my cell phone, by the way? It’s 45,000 rupees. Imported. But I got a deal on it and bought it for 35, 000.
Ol’ Pop 1: I’m afraid I don’t carry cell phones. Ever since my heart operation, which cost one lakh 75,000 rupees plus 2,000 rupees per day for a private suite with a drawing room at the big hospital as my doctor recommended especially for me, I have been wary of using things that have radiation problems. But in a way that is good because now I can do other things with it like buy this watch. See? It’s 2,00,000, gold plated with diamonds. When I go somewhere, everyone stares at it.
Yet again, the courts get something right – when a foreign national is concerned. It’s not that I’m against the courts working properly for the citizens of other countries who might be our guests but it makes a striking contrast when one sessions court awards the death penalty for rape and murder while another asks the victim to marry her rapist. An example followed again and again. And yet another acquits the accused because the victim had first eloped with him. Because, obviously, if you want to marry someone or think you want to marry someone then you have no right to say no.
