Do Boobies Fit in Your Stocking?

I was reading this extremely reasonable interview of Cate Blanchett’s in which she says about plastic surgery:

“I haven’t done anything, but who knows,” she says. “Andrew said he’d divorce me if I did anything. When you’ve had children, your body changes; there’s history to it. I like the evolution of that history; I’m fortunate to be with somebody who likes the evolution of that history. I think it’s important to not eradicate it. I look at someone’s face and I see the work before I see the person. I personally don’t think people look better when they do it; they just look different. You’re certainly not staving off the inevitable. And if you’re doing it out of fear, that fear’s still going to be seen through your eyes. The windows to your soul, they say.”

Well, if reporters for Vanity Fair dub you “fresh faced and dewey” and an “ethereally pale wraith” (I think that’s meant as a compliment) when you’re jetlagged and 40 is knocking at the door, I think it’s pretty much a given that you’re pretty well off in the looks department.

But what about the rest of us? Most women tend to be insecure about some part of their body – I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who wakes up every single morning, looks in the mirror and says, “Wow, I’m just so perfect!” There are bad hair days, bloat days, pimple days, big pore days, I-ate-too-much-over-the-holidays days and all of them leave you feeling like crap.

Some of us don’t even try on days like these – what’s the point, after all? Just put your head down and hide in your bed if you can, praying for the miserable day to end.

No amount of make-up can ever hide that Leaning Tower of Pisa that erupted overnight on the tip of your nose – even if other people are seemingly blind to it, you know it’s there and you can feel it climbing higher into the sky with every passing hour. No amount of product can make your hair look less like a bad wig when it’s on the outs – even if your friends are telling you it’s “fine”.

Our own imperfections are never as bad when we’re the only ones who get to stare at them. It’s when we start imagining how other people are going to perceive them that we want to run screaming off a high ledge.

Modern day plastic surgery’s greatest accomplishment is not that it has made us look better – arguably most people come away looking like victims of alien experimentation – but that it’s made it possible for us to look the way we want to look to others. To marry the perfect image in our heads to the physical reality of our ordinary selves. And a lot of us want to look like freaks with outsize lips, giant breasts, disproportionate penises, “re-virginized” hymens, immovable-by-reason-of-poison facial muscles, et al.

I have no idea why this is so appealing to so many folks. Perhaps it’s an evolution thing – back in the day when we didn’t have synthetic bio-materials and animal cells to inject/transplant into our bodies, we made do with tattoos and piercings. With advances in technology, we’ve found other ways to up our desirability quotient. What I do know is that it’s hard to find a woman (and quite a lot of men, it must be said) these days who haven’t at least thought about some kind of cosmetic surgery.

Personally, watching them go at it with chisels and hammers (actual plastic surgery tools fyi) on Nip/Tuck might have forever cured me of wanting to even touch my face with a needle, but there have been times when I’ve thought ahead to my 40s and wondered if I might be open to a little assistance as I get older. I don’t worry so much about my face, mainly because I have excellent genes and I don’t think I’m going to end up looking like a Shar Pei (which: awww! adorable!), but gravity exerts its pull on other parts of your body too.

I guess it all depends on what I look like at 40. And whether Demi Moore’s surgeon is still available.

 

Bah, Humbug!

Yah Phooey, Mr. Bond!

I feel the way that baby looks. 2008 is drawing to a close pretty much as it lived – miserably. (One, two, three, four, five)

(Pic Source – Brangelina who? Here’s the celebrity couple for my money.)

 

A Very Merry Christmas!

Because only The Greatest Gift of All would do for you guys. But naturally. See you all next week!

 

Ich Bin Ein Puppet

Puppets! I never really noticed their versatility until today when I saw this amazing remake of Twilight.

Otherwise known as the most annoying movie ever made, these talented and charismatic puppets who have all the chemistry and personality the greasy-haired sullen-faced human leads lack, immediately made Twilight interesting and fun to watch. Displaying a phenomenal sense of pacing and editing, they were even able to shoot the entire movie to its proper length (3 minutes) – special effects included! And I find I can even forgive Bella for her timidity and general uselessness when she is made out of cloth.

In fact, watching Twilight the Puppet Saga made me think of all the other great puppets of our time and the different ways in which they’ve enriched our lives:

The Stylish Mrs. Tom Cruise Puppet: is a Broadway star!

Evil Chucky Puppet: cured me of dolls forever. (Mommy!)

POTUS Puppet: loves Dick Cheney in Bunny suit

Friendly Educational Frog Puppet: is beloved of millions

Russian Puppet: is a total PILF! (Until Obama is sworn in, anyway)

Ye Olde English Puppets: are fancier than everybody else.

Gentle Academic Puppet: is so smart, he can even survive Congress politics

And let us not forget, the Romantic Bollywood Puppets:

We are all puppets now.

Update: Memsaab reminds me that I left out The Most Awesome Julie Andrews Puppets. How shocking!

And Doc Bollywood nominates the Satyajit Ray-remixed Rajshri puppets:

 

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi

Aditya Chopra’s Shahrukh Khan-starrer Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is a towering achievement… in lazy writing.

For his third outing in the director’s chair, Chopra helms a movie positively teeming with interesting possibilities: a marriage of convenience; a bromance between two aging men; an older man’s love for his younger bride, who’s not just his polar opposite but clearly way out of his league; coping with the many shades of love, loneliness and crippling grief; the self-loathing of a man so colorless, his own wife can’t recognize him once he shaves off moustache and puts on a different outfit; the burden of obligation and the importance of kindness; and the little misunderstandings of life that could well turn a dolt into a douchebag.

The movie opens promisingly enough with a couple alighting in front of an old house in Amritsar. The man who owns it is called Surinder Sahni, a small man with a nine-to-five job and little to say to anyone. The lane that runs outside his house and the office in which he works is full of busy, noisy strangers – inside, where he lives, is an echoing emptiness and a quiet loneliness.

Moving in with him is his brand-new wife Taani, a virtual stranger to Surinder and his city, still struggling to find her balance after a recent tragedy left her orphaned and all alone in the world. As Taani sets out the framework for their marriage of convenience, telling him upfront that she doesn’t see herself falling in love with him, Surinder realizes he’s fallen for this young woman – the very first “ladies” he’s ever actually known, he tells her shyly.

The only person Surinder-the-emotional-virgin can share this newfound secret with is his best friend Bobby, a salon-owner who’s much more ‘with it’ (in their minds anyway) than Surinder can ever hope to be. Bobby wears clothes that are a couple of sizes too tight for his tubby frame, he uses an abundance of product on his colored hair, his jeans are skinny, and he walks with his chest puffed out as befits a proper Punjabi ‘macho’ man.

Between the two of them, they hatch a plot to win Taani over by transforming unoffending little Surinder into an ultra-douchebag version of Bobby. Not that that’s what they set out to achieve, mind you. But when Surinder is called upon to justify his pointy-toed snakeskin boots and his neon-blue lycra t-shirt, he apparently decides to emulate those boys he probably saw cutting class when he himself was studiously attending lectures in college – you know, the ones girls would rather cross the road than have to deal with?

Taani is, not unnaturally, less than impressed by Surinder 2.0, hereby dubbed Raj. Raj Kapoor, to be exact. Somehow she manages to keep her hands by her side rather than swiping it across his louche face… and then is taken aback when she catches a glimpse of Surinder’s irrepressible niceness peeping out of Raj’s smug face. She is even more bewildered to find herself responding to this man who just screams “cheap” with his every move – and she ain’t talking money.

You’d think I was giving away the entire plot of the movie, but you’re wrong. You see, halfway through, out of nowhere, we’re told that this is a movie about something entirely different – we’re now watching a love story scripted by God (proof = one coincidence + heroine is a nice person). What follows is either enough to turn you atheist or standard Bollywood fare, depending on how you see it.

Surinder suddenly exhibits a stubborn streak, starts speechifying about how his wife should “love me for who I am on the inside” (even though, Bobby points out sensibly, the only time he ever shows her who he is on the inside is when he’s pretending to be a completely different person. WTF?!) in a manner that reminded me forcefully of the boys from my hometown who used to sneak copies of women’s magazines so they’d have something to talk about with the girls they wanted to impress, while Taani and Raj have zany little conversations about how it’s ok to emotionally cheat on your significant others (Dear Surinder, please read my interviews, XOXO, Jennifer Aniston).

The problem with Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is not that it’s regressive or that it’s badly made.  It’s a tolerably well-made middle-of-the-road movie that isn’t terribly exciting or particularly coherent towards the end, but is leagues better than 90% of the trash YRF has been putting out for the past couple of years and is a definite improvement on the execrable saccharine-fest that was Mohabbatein. The problem with Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is that it shows us a glimpse of the movie it could have been and then stomps all over our fondest hopes.

For Aditya Chopra to have these complex characters at his fingertips, their stories ready to be told in the most commercial manner possible (complete with a bonafide king of the boxoffice, India’s foremost production house, a debutant heroine who can actually speak Hindi without the cringe-inducing self-conscious accent that afflicts most of the younger crop and a supporting actor who’s made his name playing eccentric small-timers) and then choose the least-interesting and most-underwritten story of the lot as his main focus halfway through the movie – well, that’s some kind of genius right there.

We get one little bit of exposition in which we can appreciate Taani’s decision – she took a moment to think it over and came to the conclusion that she couldn’t disrespect the one person who’d shown her nothing but kindness at the lowest point in her life and she’d arrived at a point in her life where being kind to the person who’d shown her kindness was more important than the realization of her callow dreams.

Chopra then takes this adult but unromantic decision, which doesn’t seem to afford her any particular joy, and cleverly cloaks it in some of the mawkish sentiment that rendered Mohabbatein next-to-unwatchable (complete with whispered, throat-clogged declarations of love but thankfully minus a ghost).

But really, all I wanted out of the movies right now was what I got – an old-fashioned Bollywood romance that chugged along till the second half when all the threads were somehow thrown together so things end more or less happily ever after. And you know you’ve got that when Shahrukh Khan wins a dance competition, even if it is in Amritsar.

I’d say I’m perfectly content… but I’d be lying. I keep imagining Taani and Surinder in bed together and I have to say it’s kinda freaking me out. There’s a reason movie stars are pretty – it saves us from the trauma of imagining what our neighbors are upto.

Enjoy the pictures I just put into your mind.

 

The Rooster Did It

The kitchen was his Waterloo.

That damn rooster knew his place in the world – it was the yard in front of the barn, right by the well where the maids still beat dirt out of the day’s laundry the old-fashioned way, amongst the docile white hens that spent their days minding their own business. Out there in the yard, he was the king of all he surveyed. He enforced the loyalty of his dozen or so wives with a vicious beak and a loud crowing that he let loose anytime it suited him. But it wasn’t enough.

The place that rooster wanted to be most of all, was the one place where he had no business to be. The kitchen. Day in and day out, he’d watch the humans as they traipsed in and out of that mysterious room. None of the animals were allowed in there and he knew it. Yet, every single day of his life, he’d sidle his way over when his little beady eyes told him no one was looking, and attempt to sneak inside.

And every single day, one of the servants or my grand-aunt would see him stepping cautiously over the doorstep and chase him out. Out of the kitchen and off the back porch and past the servants’ quarters to the yard where he belonged.

I’d been told to stay away from him. But he was to me what the kitchen was to him. The stray cats that came to feed on fish guts every morning were interesting but they were an aloof presence, lining up silently by their dozens to nibble on the morsels my grand aunt flung out to them before leaving without so much as a meow. The cows were big and smelly, and if they ever left their barn, I never saw it. The dogs were nice but the sweet little Doberman puppy had grown up vicious and I couldn’t get near the Pomeranian or the family of Boxers without bumping into his snarl, so they were all out of the picture for now. The chickens were plain boring except for the little chicks who held some promise for entertainment but scattered too easily at the sound of my footsteps… but the rooster was another story.

Not that I knew he was a rooster back then. I thought he was just a more interesting chicken with his red and gold feathers and his aggressive defense of his territory. He was nearly as tall as I was at age three and ten times as mean. I’d been told a million times to keep away from him because I was too little, too clumsy, too tender, too slow to fight off his beak.

And then one day we bumped into each other in the kitchen. I suppose everybody was busy doing their own thing, because he made it all the way inside unmolested, and I was alone in the kitchen unsupervised even though it was well known that I was a child who liked to get into things that were rightfully none of my business.

I don’t know what I wanted with him – pet him? pull his feathers? study his military prowl around the room? What I remember is running around in circles, screaming my fool head off, once we’d been introduced so to speak, and one of the maids come flying through the pantry with her broom held aloft to chase him out. (For some reason, that’s the image that pops into my head today when I hear the phrase “the farmer had a wife”.)

I don’t think he actually got a chance to peck at me. I certainly don’t remember any injury. I don’t even know if I let him come near enough to think his actions through or if I just went off like a rocket the moment I got close enough to touch him and thus planted the idea in his head. Maybe it was a game I invented on the spot and he became my unwitting playmate.

He sure paid a price for it, if that was what happened. The next day I came out to inspect my little world as usual and there he was, most unusually, tied to one of the pillars of the back porch by a long string. Unlike all the other times I’d seen him near the porch, this time he was looking towards his harem instead of the kitchen, blissfully ignoring him as they went about their business.

From time to time he’d give a rusty little squawk and take a few tentative steps towards his family before the string brought him up short. Some trick of memory, built up over the intervening years, paints me a picture of surprise on his sharp little face. He could feel the string, but he didn’t understand the concept of it, what it was that held him back. Again and again, he’d try; again and again, he’d jerk back when the string choked him.

“What’s he doing there?” I asked the man of all trades. “Is he being punished for being naughty?”

He grinned at me, his teeth very white. “Your grandmother gave the order.”

“But what are you going to do to him?” I persisted.

He grinned again and moved his hand in a slicing motion across his neck. I didn’t understand what he meant but it boded ill for the rooster. I looked nervously at the bird, just a few feet away. It noticed me at the same time and set up a loud squawk, flying up at me in seeming indignation, feathers whistling in the air. Hurriedly I stepped back. I noticed the man was sharpening a wicked looking knife. It resembled a cross between a butcher’s knife and a scythe and was made of iron – he’d let me handle it before to test its weight, enjoying my surprise when I discovered it took both arms to hold up that which he brandished with one hand.

The next time I was out on the porch, perhaps that day, perhaps the next, the rooster was gone. The man was standing over a concrete slab sloping downward at a 45 degree angle, placed, I think, as a butcher’s block on the far side of the back porch. I peeped over the balustrade that encircled the porch but was yet too short to see properly over it. So I walked slowly to the steps, running my hand over the cool green wall with the red balustrade straddling it on top – parrot colors, my ayah called them – to look around the pillar.

I don’t remember blood, but there was a headless rooster being shorn of his feathers. I seem to remember a cloud of them, flying up in the air. And the dark face of the man bent over its lifeless body, brows knit in concentration, no white teeth flashing now.

Later that day, we had chicken curry for lunch.

“I don’t want any, thank you,” I said in a small voice.

“But it’s delicious,” my mother said, her hand hovering over the dish.

Inside I saw the rooster, his bits and pieces swimming in delicious gravy. “No,” I said. “I don’t want any.”

I’ll eat chicken fried, roasted, grilled, baked, in a salad, out of a tandoor… any way you want to serve it. But a chicken curry I will not eat. My inner three year old would rather eat something else, thank you.

 

Jennifer Aniston: “Woof!”

Oy. Jennifer Aniston has a movie coming out this Christmas. Co-starring Owen Wilson, Marley and Me is about a couple and their dog, and she’s been on a major promotional tour for it.

But did she really have to pose for GQ in that particular pose? Like she was begging for scraps at the table? Especially when the Brangeloonie-fueled anti-Aniston crowd has been calling her a dog for years?

Just look at it! The cover asks: “Is it just us or is Jennifer Aniston getting hotter?”

Oh sure, she used to be a dog, but now she’s taken her clothes off, you hardly even notice it.

Sigh. Provocative – ur doin’ it wrong.

I don’t know who designed this cover but I know two things about them:

1. They could talk an Eskimo into buying a refrigerator.
2. They really, really hate Jennifer Aniston.

 

Australia

There are those who think Baz Luhrmann is nothing short of a cinematic genius but I am not one of them – of the three movies he’s directed, I haven’t seen Strictly Ballroom yet but I found Romeo + Juliet more interesting in theory than in execution while Moulin Rouge! just annoyed the hell out of me. But I can’t bring myself to ignore his work either because my main frustration with his movies is that he displays just enough brilliance to make me expect more out of him without his ever quite delivering on that promise. It’s like an architect who designs really amazing, towering, complex structures, yet neglects to put in a stairway.

Much of this has to do with his casting choices. His imagery is top-notch, his ear for music is perfect and the people he casts for supporting roles are brilliant – and then he arrives at his lead roles and everything collapses like a cheap deck of cards. In Romeo + Juliet, we had the super lovely and charismatic Leonardo di Caprio and Claire Danes who together demonstrated all the emotions from A (impassive/ constipated) to B (making cow eyes/ kissing). Then there was Moulin Rouge! where once again a super lovely and charismatic couple i.e.  Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman marched determinedly from A (befuddlement) to B (increasing bouts of hysteria).

So it was a given that I’d go see Australia (listen, I saw Singh is Kinng, I’m not picky) but the odds were good that I wouldn’t much care for it. So it’s a bit of a shock to find myself rather in love with it.

One reason for this is that Luhrmann finally got his lead couple right. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman are just as super lovely and charismatic as he likes to direct them, but there’s a depth to these actors as well as the characters they play in this movie that I haven’t noticed in either Romeo + Juliet (which, frankly, is not one of my favorite plays nor are they anywhere near my favorite Shakespearean characters so I’m prepared to cut all involved some slack on that count) or Moulin Rouge! (simply unbearable lead characters).

Tonnes of ink have been spilled about Kidman’s marble brow (as well as her movie star status) and how it adversely affects the film, but she is in fact its strength. For one thing, she is cast perfectly to type: English rose with a spine of steel trying to find her feet in a strange land. The immovable brow coupled with her ease of body language (a trait that Luhrmann seems particularly able to tap in her – it served as the foundation of her performance in Moulin Rouge! as well) is just right for the uptight Lady Sarah forced to deal with a range of experiences and emotions for which her former life did not train her.

Luhrmann likes to reference Gone With the Wind as the inspiration for his epic, but his heroine is a standard from an entirely different kind of epic, more in the style of Out of Africa and Heat and Dust.

Kidman’s Lady Sarah Ashley is at the very top of the social heirarchy and is imbued with the kind of confidence (and occasionally arrogance) this bestows upon her kind – she has a certain idea of what the world is like and she sees no reason why trifling inconveniences like driving cattle through the outback should interfere with it. And like other Lady Sarah Ashleys before her, Australia portrays her transformation from disdainful colonizer to humble human being through her close interaction with a foreign land and its people. From an instinctive fear and suspicion of other people and their customs, she must determine for herself whether she loves the land enough to accept its ways rather than imposing her own desires on it.

It’s extremely easy for a movie of this type to come off as glib and condescending and Luhrmann deserves credit for the way he handles the growing bond between Sarah and her adopted land through her relationship with Nullah (Brandon Walters – the most beautiful little boy who just about killed me with his performance).

Nullah is half-white, half-black (Aboriginal) and, sometimes literally, pure magic. Set in the era when the Australian government followed a policy based on eugenics that is now termed The Stolen Generations, Nullah lives in fear of the day when the authorities will forcibly take him away from his mother so he can learn how best to live up to the white side of his bloodline without, of course, ever being fully accepted as white. He will never fit anywhere, he thinks sadly to himself, never have a story of his own.

In an ironical twist of fate, it is child-less, English Sarah who ultimately becomes that mother from whose arms he is snatched and who is willing to deal with the devil himself to win him back. This probably bears further study but there just might be an argument to be made that Australia works as a (romanticized?) view of colonialism in which Sarah embodies the mother country that has to learn to accept the colonial child on his own terms and let go.

Of course, at the other end of things we have Hugh Jackman who plays The Drover, the traditional foil to the Sarah character – the white man who has no problems immersing himself in the native culture and doesn’t care who looks down on him for it. His compulsions are his own and deeply personal, he leaves nations and the mysterious, nasty ways of their powerful strictly alone. He doesn’t wish to be involved. He’s burnt his fingers once and that has been a lesson to him.

In his other movies, I’ve felt that Luhrmann was able to instinctively zero in on one great strength of his male leads and used them to mixed effect: di Caprio’s sulky prettiness in Romeo + Juliet, McGregor’s sheer niceness in Moulin Rouge! In Australia, he trains his lens on Jackman’s manliness and you don’t see me complaining.

The Drover has bar brawls, he rides a horse, he wears a tux to perfection, he knocks back his liquor, he saves little children from burning islands and, in one absolutely perfect (and perfectly hilarious) scene, he raises a bucket of water like he’s posing for an art class and rinses off his Wolverine muscles in front of an awestruck Sarah. It sounds like career suicide but Jackman manages to invest The Drover with more than highly developed pecs – there’s a lovely heart beating inside the vast expanses of his manly chest.

Throw in Japanese bombs, a truly sinister villain, dancing in the rain, a magical grandfather, some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet, kangaroos, and The Wizard of Oz… I rather loved it.

 

Mumbai: Before & After – 4

It is by now pretty common knowledge that a massive intelligence failure on the Indian side aided the attack on Mumbai. Members of the armed forces as well as top bureaucrats have chimed in; Shivraj Patil – our dandy Home Minister – resigned on ‘moral grounds’ which is apparently the latest euphemism for “suck at your job”; and even that inevitable fixture of the modern world viz. An Anonymous American Official has said that warnings were ignored.

Lost in the cacophony is one simple truth – the nature of terrorism is such that it will always be one step ahead.

Take the Mumbai siege for example: many people have pointed out that it’s almost unbelievable that 10 measly terrorists were able to hold off hundreds of trained commandos for 60 hours. What they fail to take into consideration is that the security forces were trying to save lives, rescue hostages, secure locations, manage crowds of curious/concerned citizens, deal with the media, carry out a joint operation with members of separate forces (the Navy, the Army and the Mumbai police) who seldom have occasion to come into contact with each other, and liaising with the government. The terrorists on the other hand had but one agenda – destroy everything in sight. They were lobbing grenades out of windows and off stairways, firing indiscriminately into crowds and had little expectation of getting out of the encounter alive. Guess who has the advantage here?

I’m not trying to be pessimistic but it’s rubbish to imagine that we’ll always be able to foil every terror plot ever hatched. Right now, conventional wisdom has it that this attack might have been averted if the Navy and the coastguard had paid proper attention to the intelligence handed them or if someone had bothered to pass along said information, depending on whose side of the story you’re listening to. But the fact is, the terrorists might have launched their attack from the shores of Pakistan but they came ashore by hijacking an Indian ship. Even if they had been stopped at sea, they would have had all the papers needed to pass inspection.

And let’s be honest, if they had been arrested somewhere near Porbandar and a newspaper item had appeared the next morning about a bunch of terrorists who had plans to storm Mumbai and shoot it up before blowing up the Taj – what would our reaction have been? We’d either have dismissed it and moved on to more “interesting” things or we’d have laughed it off because seriously, they wanted to do what? Where? What do these silly terrorists think this is? A Bollywood movie? Things like that would never happen in a million years! And if by some chance they made it all the way to Mumbai, they’d get shut down so fast…

Hubris, delusion, denial. This is why the Indian political class’ obsession with all things Pakistan has always put my teeth on edge. It’s one thing to be on our guard but our knee-jerk use of the Pakistan card meant that we could go on ignoring domestic issues regarding security. It’s true our neighborhood leaves a lot to be desired (isn’t it interesting that in all the anger towards Pakistan, hardly any mention has been made of Bangladesh?) but what’s the use of getting all hot under the collar about what your neighbor is up to when your house is falling down around your ears?

Since everyone these days has a list of things they wish the government would do, here’s mine.

1. Equipment – According to a 2007 Assocham report, India’s military is due to spend $30 billion over the next 5 years in imports alone. We’re buying all kinds of stuff from all over the world and I don’t begrudge any branch of the armed forces those upgrades. We all remember Kargil – or at least, we should.

But what about the Indian policeman? Forget terrorists, the Indian  crime world has more sophisticated weaponry than the Indian police. Ashok Kamte, Hemant Karkare, Vijay Salaskar, Shashank Shinde, Praksh More, Bapusaheb Durugade, Tukaram Omble, Balasaheb Bhosale, Arun Chitte, Jaywant Patil, Yogesh Patil, Ambadas Pawar, M.C. Chowdhary and Mukesh Jadhav were at risk on the streets of Mumbai doing their job everyday, it was just their fate that they fell to trained terrorists.

Surely the Indian government can spare a couple of billion dollars to buy our policemen better equipment? Aren’t we some kind of economic success story now? Do ask our new Home Minister, P. Chidambaram. It’s my understanding that he knows about these things.

I’m sure the Americans and the Israelis and the French who’re selling us airplanes and tanks can scrounge up a few handguns and bullet proof vests to go with them. The kickbacks may not be as awesome – bulletproof vests are considerably cheaper than your standard fighter jet – but it might do wonders for the morale of our police force.

2. Training – All this equipment is of no use if we don’t know how to use them. If India can have joint military exercises with other nations, why not joint police exercises?

And by this I don’t mean classes on How to Fire Your Weapon although perhaps that will be useful too. But as millions of people move into urban areas all over the world, it’s becoming increasingly important for security forces the world over to understand urban warfare – what is it, how to combat it, who is at risk, how to defuse it, etc.

Another area where India would benefit from joint exercises is in the science of crime scene investigations. Anyone who saw footage of the earthmovers digging up graves in Noida after the serial killings knows that Indians might be major devotees of science in general but when it comes to things like gathering evidence and processing it, the Indian police lives in another century. I’m not sure exactly which, but it might be the 19th.

It’s why there’s always an air of skepticism about Indian prosecutions. How can you be really sure that this is the person who did this thing, you wonder. And when you combine this sloppiness with torture, a standard part of police interrogations that hardly anybody in India even seems to be bothered about anymore, it’s pretty much up in the air who or what you want to believe.

So many Indians object to us being called a third world country. You want to know what you must do to avoid being called a third world country? Stop acting like one.

Of course, thanks to President Bush, America’s hands are no longer clean in this matter so perhaps the FBI is looking to pick up a few pointers from us, but in an ideal world we’d at least be talking about effective interrogation techniques with other countries, given that so many of us are now (to use everybody’s favorite term) “in the same boat”.

3. Communication – Here’s Sitaram Yechury on why, all these years later, India has no federal security agency (emphasis added):

The government proposes to set up a federal investigation agency to deal with cases of terrorism and other pan-Indian crimes. This has so far not found favour with the states which legitimately fear that they will be kept out of sensitive security investigations. There has to be a co-ordinated mechanism to deal with terrorism but co-ordination needs to bring in the states.

Um, has anybody heard of this totally awesome new machine called the computer? You can do things like network and maintain databases on them which can be accessed from multiple locations by different people. It’s even possible to restrict access at different levels so that not everybody can read the same thing. I even heard a wild rumor about India being some kind of big cheese in this field. The government ought to look into it.

In all seriousness though, I don’t know if a federal agency will magically take care of everything that’s wrong. It seems to me that we want a federal agency for precisely one thing – so we all know who to look towards in times of crisis.

I don’t see why one of the million or so agencies already in existence can’t do the job, just more efficiently and with more powers. We need to simplify the hierarchy to let more information through – adding more layers sounds like a terrible idea to me. But maybe I’m missing something?

I’ve also heard talk about the government creating more bases for the NSG in other parts of the country so that response will be more speedy in the future. This is probably a good idea but given that the local police is always the first on scene, it might be a better idea to send delegations of local police for training with the commandos. In that way, we’re assured that there’s somebody on the ground in those first few crucial minutes who knows what is going on and what the incoming commandos are likely to require in terms of support.

4. Life – When I was a kid growing up in Delhi in the 1980s at the height of the twin threats of Sikh and Kashmiri militancy, there were certain things we were supposed to be on the lookout for: suspicious packages, ‘strange’ neighbors (the nice people who lived the next building over from one of our family friends turned out to be a notorious dacoit, his brother and his wife, all of whom had been on the run from the law for years), nervous drivers, etc. The police were doing their bit, of course, but these were things that made the citizen feel involved. It’s highly doubtful any of it actually ever worked, but it gave you a feeling that you knew what was going on and that you had a stake in it.

But these days people seem to want something altogether more draconian if Indian television is to be believed – no habeas corpus under certain laws! fingerprint citizens! relax gun permits! more executions! nuclear war! revolt by the armed forces!

I really wish these people would calm down. As John Oliver said on The Daily Show: “There have always been motherfuckers, there always will be motherfuckers, but what we can’t do is let them control our motherfucking lives. Fuck these fuckers.”

It sounds trite to say that the greatest revenge is to live well. But I remember back when the streets of New York were full of protesters marching against the then-upcoming Iraq War, I thought to myself: “Couldn’t take that away, could they?” Today as I watch the Indian media warmongering its fool head off, I look at the Mumbaikars coming together (like one of my favorites here) because their government can’t govern its way out of a paper bag, and get the same feeling.

[Previously: Pakistan, Indian Muslims, Politicans]

 

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is rather like a fist of iron clad in a velvet glove  applied directly to your chin. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (Khosla ka Ghosla) and starring Abhay Deol and Paresh Rawal, Oye Lucky! is a story about pretty much everything human and what it all means.

The movie opens in the narrow lanes of the lower middle class in class-obsessed Delhi where a young Sikh boy named Lucky (Manjot Singh) is coming to terms with the fact that if he wants to live up to his name, he’ll just have create his own luck. His father (Paresh Rawal in the first of three roles) is a crushing disappointment, his mother is a doormat, his elder brother stays out of the house as much as he can, his younger brother is just a kid and his father’s fat mistress has moved into their home and has less than wholesome designs on his young self. To complicate matters further, he is obsessed with the “gentry” – rich/upper middle class kids who’re usually up to no good but have everything he wants and look down upon him.

All Lucky wants is to be able to live their life, romancing their women and beating down their men and he isn’t really sure how it all works or why it’s so important but it’s the greenest grass he can imagine and he really wants to play in it.

As Lucky grows up (into Abhay Deol), things seemingly begin to look up. He’s not just a smalltime punk pulling a smalltime scam to impress some girl in the neighborhood; he’s hanging out with real movers and shakers, and moving on up himself. A born hustler who instinctively understands the power of the image over reality, he embarks on a brazen career of crime.

Along the way, he loses his family, tries to buy them back, loses his friends, tries to buy them back, loses his substitute father figures (Paresh Rawal in roles two and three)… and tries to buy them back. Sadly for him, he just ends up spending a lot of money.

On the surface, this is very much a story about Delhi and the impulses that drive that city, but at a deeper level this is the story of modern India as well. Although Lucky is rooted in the city of his birth, his aspirations are the kind that infect millions.

It all sounds rather depressing when you think about it, and in many ways it is as you watch Lucky scratch repeatedly, desperately at the surface of the life he wants, begging, demanding to be let in and trying to deal with the disappointment of it when he fails again and again – yet Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! never loses its sense of humor. There’s nothing particularly funny about either the dialogues or the situations the characters find themselves in – it lacks the kind of zany comedic value that Ranvir Shorey imparted to Khosla ka Ghosla, for example – so if you’re expecting the usual slapstick, this isn’t the movie for you. What it is, is clever; a black comedy that recognizes the futility of race it’s tracking between all the serious little hamsters on their wheels.

I can’t end without a special shoutout to Abhay Deol, which is not to say that the ensemble as a whole wasn’t excellent right from Paresh Rawal to Neetu Chandra (Traffic Signal) and Manjot Singh. However, if you’d told me just a couple of years ago that I’d actually see the day when I’d find myself looking forward to the movies of a second-generation Deol, I’d have laughed myself silly. Well, the day’s arrived and I don’t find it in the least bit hilarious – he carries the film.