…with this song.
It feels good to be able to say that about an A.R. Rahman composition again.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Who Wants to be a Molester?
It’s open season! Apply now!
Two parties named after Ram and Hanuman squabbling over who gets to take ‘credit’ for molesting women. Talk about motherfuckers. Even Ravan kept his hands to himself.
Today I walked a little taller, straightened my spine and looked everyone in the eye. Sometimes I forget to do that. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing that. But today I was reminded that I am not a citizen of a country where I can afford to either forget or set aside my self-worth.
I am a female citizen of India. My equality is circumstantial.
Farhan Akhtar Ripped Me Off
Okay, so he totally didn’t.
A while back, after watching some Akshay Kumar movie, I suggested that he ought to make Indian television happy by basically adapting his style of moviemaking into an SNL-type skit show. Thereupon Akshay did the following: signed on for reality shows, made Chandini Chowk to China (with Warner Bros footing the bill) and wore plaid pants to the premiere – to spite me, I say! Those pants are proof.
But lookie! What do we have here? It’s Oye It’s Friday! The little show with a bit of everything you and your friends always wanted to produce in high school for the public access channel but never did because it was so much more important to, like, paint your nails and talk about boys/girls and stuff.
Farhan Akhtar in the meantime, got his friends together and actually made it. With celebrities and dancing girls and a big neon board that spells out F-A-R-H-A-N… not outside the building but right next to the couch where he conducts his interviews (more Chelsea Handler than Dave Letterman) because we’re like that only.
It is adorable!
Yes, that’s a silly title and yes, it has that horrible laugh track that’s mandatory on Indian TV which lets you know “Laugh HERE” (et tu Farhan?), and yes, the skits aren’t all that funny really, and omiGOD yes, they have those super annoying backup dancers for I don’t even know what reason, but I could no more hate on this show than I could sneer at my brother and his band friends back in school.
I am a marshmallow. You can all rob me of my lunch money in a little bit.
For one thing, Farhan oozes dorkiness and sincerity in equal parts. He mumbles and stumbles his way through the show, delivering his lame one-liners and puns with the same glee with which little children offer to tell you a knock-knock joke. How can you hate a four year old that thinks “Orange you glad I’m not a banana” is the height of comedy? You could, of course… if you’re the proud owner of a gingerbread house. Similarly, Farhan and his show.
You get the same sense of “awww” when you watch the actors in the skits. Most of them have been hacking a living for years now by displaying mounting amounts of love, anger, shock, rage, evil, shock, jealousy, shock, repentance, rinse and repeat, shock, in the one hundred and one daily soaps of Ekta Kapoor. But once upon a time they were, you know, actors and they pretty much ooze relief as they take part in these little pieces.
Then there are the interviews: they’re slightly awkward as you would expect from watching Farhan in action, but unlike other Bollywood insiders who’ve tried their hand at it, he’s laid-back enough to subtly invite his guests to relax and join in on the fun and has no problem using his intimacy off-stage with several of his guests without descending into stilted obsequiousness a la Karan Johar or forced jocularity a la Shekhar Suman (remember that horrible period when he was the late night king? I read all about it. I couldn’t bear to watch), much less the saccharine earnestness of a Simi Garewal.
So let’s see: Farhan can direct, act, sing and host a variety show while being all dorky and charming. Now if he could just put on a pair of roller skates and get a girl pregnant with his super!sperm! while she’s unconscious and possibly dying, kidnap the kid, raise it, cure its polio and beat up a bunch of bad guys without once taking them off – I will bestow upon him the ultimate honor of Aaj Ka Shashi.
The Lal Patthar Mystery
I’m never more bothered about the lack of scholarly writing focused on mainstream Indian cinema than when I watch movies like Lal Patthar. An auteur like Satyajit Ray might never have gotten his rightful due, but at least his work has been studied and subjected to scrutiny over the years. If nothing else, then the actors and technicians who had the privilege of working with him still provide a history of their collaboration, giving us a glimpse into the man behind the movies. It is still possible to weave together an understanding, however imperfect, of his work and his artistic vision.
Movies like Lal Patthar (a.k.a. Sandstone or, literally, Red Stone), however, are lucky databases like the IMDB exist, because that’s about as much as they can hope for.
Presumably adapted from the 1964 Bengali movie of the same name that he also directed, Sushil Majumdar’s Lal Patthar is actually not a very good movie – it’s too melodramatic and stuffed full of unsympathetic characters to be anything more than tolerable. On the other hand, it’s perhaps one of the most interesting movies I’ve ever seen.
Part of its fascination for me derives from its pulpy nature: Lal Patthar is the story of a nobleman called Kumar Bahadur (Raaj Kumar) who one day chances upon a mysterious procession moving through the forest where he is attending a hunt. Suspicious of the small group stealthily making its way through this deep part of the forest, he and his Sikh ADC attack the party, forcing them to leave behind the palanquin they were guarding. Upon further investigation, Kumar Bahadur discovers that the men were bandits returning from a raid and inside the palanquin is a gagged and tied up woman they’d kidnapped from a nearby village.
Kumar Bahadur, an abstemious figure (he’s unmoved by Padma Khanna and the wine she proffers at the beginning of the movie, largely due to the curse laid upon his head by some long suffering woman who was fed up by the debauched ways of the men in his family), is nevertheless taken by the luminous beauty as she tumbles out of the palanquin and lies unconscious at his feet.
The woman is Saudamani (Hema Malini), a poor widow who’s beset by an unkind mother-in-law and an ox of a brother-in-law who like to starve and beat her. Kumar Bahadur decides to do her a favor and send her to some widow farm where she can think holy thoughts without getting kidnapped by bandits or beaten by her inlaws. Saudamani, unsurprisingly, is less than thrilled by the prospect. What is surprising is that when the opportunity arises, she grabs it by seducing the Kumar Bahadur, choosing to live as the sinful mistress of this dashing savior of her virtue than, you know, actually living a life of virtue as he’d planned.
Kumar Bahadur too has apparently wearied of all his good habits. After throwing money at her inlaws, he rechristens his brand new bit of luscious property with the name of Madhuri, and hands her the keys to his palace before symbolically entrusting her with his family jewels (ahem, those too).
If he wanted to play Pygmalion, however, Madhuri nee Saudamani turns out to be something less than the perfect Galatea. For one thing, as she was not previously made of marble, she has her own ideas. She’s perfectly willing to adapt to her new luxurious lifestyle and cater to Kumar Bahadur in the bedroom, for example, but she’s less than enthralled with his idea of a good time which seems to involve long train journeys, a bunch of dusty old monuments and boring but high class music. She suffers through it as best as she can for as long as she can hack it but when he starts dragging her to Muslim tombs, thus “destroying her caste”, his beautiful barbarian has had about enough and tells him so in no uncertain terms. She might be a widow and a whore but she’s got standards.
After a few years of gradually turning into a spineless sot, Kumar Bahadur suddenly wakes up and realizes Madhuri is pretty much in charge and he’s basically a waste of space in his own household. His solution? A wife, of course!
A nice educated girl from his own class, Sumita (Rakhee) is half his age and culled from a family of limited means so she’ll be properly grateful to live the life he’s about to provide for her without caviling at the omnipresence of his mistress whom everybody treats as the rightful head of the household.
Things work out about as well as you’d expect it to, especially when a jealous Madhuri discovers the existence of a childhood sweetheart, Shekhar (Vinod Mehra), a very nice wholesome young man who looks like Ken next to Sumita’s Barbie.
The movie then crashes towards a tumultuous ending where the Kumar Bahadur turns into an Othello figure ready to believe the very worst of his wife, with Madhuri’s well-developed sense of survival feeding the flames while the extremely clueless Sumita and Shekhar bumble along in their wake, moralizing to each other about the sanctity of marriage and eternal nature of emotional bonds. The mealymouthed-ness of the pair is alone enough to drive the Kumar Bahadur insane, but he gets plenty of choleric help from the harsh doses of stone cold reality handed out by a bitter Madhuri who accuses him of being a loser who likes to buy his women and then play lord and master over them until he finds their working brains inconvenient. So then he hits her… obviously.
Next, to prove the existence of his spine, Kumar Bahadur kicks her out of his house and then replays the first days of their relationship with Sumita who had no idea why her husband is being so nice to her but is thrilled all the same. Unlike Madhuri, Sumita likes the long train journeys, dusty monuments and boring high class music that the Kumar Bahadur likes and hopes to bring up little Kumar Bahadurs who will like the same. Unfortunately for her, her mealymouthed-ness interferes with this plan and Kumar Bahadur decides to stage a play.
You laugh but when I tell you it involves this guy in blackface and pearl-handled pistols that fire blanks and moonshine and fancy costumes, I bet you change your mind! It is a play of death, you see. Muahahahah!
Um, yes. Anyhoo…
Ever since I saw this movie as a kid, it’s stuck in my memory and I’ve never been able to figure out why. Madhuri is the only person who is worth anything in this movie and she’s a bit of a rat. It’s not entirely her fault she is a rat and she has to suffer a great deal for it but she is definitely a member of the rodent family. So why do I find myself thinking about this movie at random moments through the years?
Perhaps it’s because it’s such a weird movie to be made by an Indian. The story, credited to Prasanta Chowdhary, could easily have been a feverish exotic romance penned by a nineteenth century Englishman (or Englishwoman for that matter). Look at it this way:
An English captain stationed in a far way district in exotic India comes upon a mysterious palanquin being carried through the teeming jungles with the utmost secrecy. Suspecting foul play, the brave captain and his faithful Indian guard attack and scatter the men; upon investigation, he finds that the palanquin contains the unconscious and provocatively dressed body of a native woman.
Although he can never marry her, the captain knows that the beautiful woman is destined for a living death as a Hindu widow and when she seeks shelter in his arms, he decides to let her stay. He gives her a name more pleasing to his ears and tries to teach her the finer points of civilization. Overnight his attitudes to the debaucheries of India have changed and he goes from an upright officer to a man besotted by lust and drink.
Brought to his senses years later by her shrill greed, he returns to polite society and finds himself a sheltered bride of the right pedigree. He brings her back to his home in India where his native mistress reigns supreme and where she is subjected to the indignity of living under the rule of a woman she despises, fears, can never comete with and does not understand.
It’s a pretty basic colonial romance, really. I just wish I knew more about what went into the making of it and what came first – did they adapt it off some random English novel or was this an uniquely Bengali tale that the Brits adapted to English?
Fly Girl Indeed
Was Jennifer Lopez an amphibian of some kind in her past life? Or a Venus fly trap? Is she waiting for a tasty little snack to come zooming into her orbit?
If you have nothing better to do for five minutes or so, slick on some glossy lipstick (you too, gentlemen! Live dangerously, yeah?) and try pulling that face in your bathroom mirror. Remember to clench jaw, narrow eyes and stick out lower lip.
Best cheap entertainment evah!
PS – Am I the only one that suspects that somewhere in the temples of South India, there lives a sad pachyderm missing its headgear? Just look at that champagne dress. Thief! Render unto elephant things which are elephant’s.
“Many Have Died For This Day”
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
Why do I and so many others, none of us Americans, feel so strongly about the election of this man?
It’s partly charisma, partly the oratory, some of it is a reaction to the past eight years and I’m sure our personal brand of politics has something to do with it too.
And a lot of it is hope – that in a world of six billion people, there must be more like him, waiting to come forward.
Four years from now, or perhaps eight, we will know how it all turned out. Whether it was just a chimera we desperately wanted to believe in or whether that early promise bore fruit. But at least we’ll always have had this moment of possibility.
My grandparents took a train to listen to Mahatma Gandhi speak, my mother cried when Pandit Nehru died, my father waited in the cold to listen to A. B. Vajpayee orate… I could never connect with any of that. How could you feel that way about a politician? The closest I ever came to it was when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and my father and I would pore over the articles. But I don’t think either one of us looked at Mandela as a politician as such.
And then one day, I noticed a strange pull in my facial muscles as I watched Barack Obama deliver a speech. I was, to put it mildly, grinning from ear to ear.
Years have passed since then and I still don’t know whether I trust half the things he says… nothing personal, but even the best of politicians is still a politician. But I feel as though I’ve passed a rite of passage by experiencing this happiness.
I can only imagine what it would have been like if he’d been my fellow citizen.
This is an Actual Person
Or else she’s some kind of advanced (?) robot built in Atlanta. A robot who is luring me to watch her terrible show about “southern belles”.
I believe Scarlett O’Hara expressed my sentiments exactly when she was asked about this new breed of ‘Hotlanta’ (hey, Tyra Banks said it!) royalty: “Nahiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin!Yeh paap hai!”
I won’t let you get me, Bravo! I’m on to you!
Buy, Do Not Steal
Put on your headphones and prepare to be happy! If Dev D, Anurag Kashyap’s modern take on Devdas – that classic tale of the quintessential overprivileged manchild, his idiot lover and the masochistic courtesan – winds up even half as subversive as its soundtrack, I’m going to be ecstatic come February 6.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll notice that I haven’t reviewed an album for quite some time. This is not because I’ve gone off Hindi film music – quite the contrary, I’ve been listening to more of it than can possibly be good for me.
But how many times could I point and giggle at each new album coming out of Bollywood without it getting to me? After all, mere seene mein bhi dil hai! And it is made of marshmallow.
And now, behold! Thus is kindness rewarded! Here, after a long time, comes a soundtrack courtesy Amit Trivedi (Aamir) that makes me hope that you’ll actually plonk down hard cash in these financially tough times for the pleasure of listening to 18 (that’s right: eighteen!) marvelous tracks. I’d tell you how awesome it all is but everytime I sit down to write about this album I’m reminded that writing about music is indeed like dancing about architecture.
However, the P-PCC feels no such compunction, so this is your lucky day!
PS – this seems an appropriate post wherein to ask: why do Indian liquor stores advertise themselves as Brandy Shops? Or is it an uniquely South Indian terminology? Is there something particularly alcoholic about brandy or do they just call any ol’ moonshine brandy? Does it have something to do with the colonial era – did they think ‘brandy’ was white for ‘thing you drink at night that gets you really drunk’? Man, the colonial era must have been teeming with lushes.
The Importance of Women
If you were following Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings in the United States Senate, by now you know what anybody who’s followed her career, much less the Presidential primaries, knows: she’s a phenomenon. She’s smart, she’s on the ball and she knows her stuff inside out and backwards forwards.
So this little exchange with Senator Barbara Boxer (D. Calif.) was interesting to say the least (note: condensed version, you can read the full exchange here):
BOXER: I wanted to pick off a few of the issues that I care about. I’m going to do it very quickly because there are so many — just to make my voice heard on those — and then ask you a question on a topic you raised, and we’ve discussed it before, the status of women in the world — in particular, violence against women in the world…
So I’m introducing some legislation. One is a companion piece of Representative Carolyn Maloney. Another one is the Afghan Women Empowerment Act, which many on this committee have worked with us on. And that’s just the beginning. No woman or girl should ever have to live in fear or face persecution for being born female.
And, senator, I know how deeply you feel about this. And so I wanted you to take a little more time to talk about your commitment to this particular issue. And, obviously, I would be so pleased if you would commit to help us work on a legislation to fight this immorality.
CLINTON: [And] I want to pledge to you that as secretary of state I view these issues as central to our foreign policy, not as adjunct or auxiliary or in any way lesser than all of the other issues that we have to confront.
I, too, have followed the stories that are exemplified by the pictures that you held up. I mean, it is heartbreaking beyond works that, you know, young girls are attacked on their way to school by Taliban sympathizers and members who do not want young women to be educated. It’s not complicated: They want to maintain an attitude that keeps women, as I said in my testimony, unhealthy, unfed, uneducated.
And this is something that results all too often in violence against these young women, both within their families and from the outside. This is not culture. This is not custom. This is criminal. And it will be my hope to persuade more governments, as I have attempted to do since I spoke at Beijing on these issues, you know, 13 and some years ago, that we cannot have a free, prosperous, peaceful, progressive world if women are treated in such a discriminatory and violent way.
KERRY: Senator Boxer, thank you.
Thanks for that important line of inquiry. And let me just say that Senator Boxer has talked to me personally about how the committee might focus on this. And I’m determined that the committee will… I think that all of the other members of the committee share a concern and passion about this. So we will find a way to appropriately work with the secretary and see if we can’t augment our international efforts on this.
In a way, this is a dog-bites-man sort of story: superpower sets moral agenda. Big deal. Also unsurprising: rhetoric focusing on the lot of women. It’s almost mandatory in international relations – Thou Shalt Judge the Morality of Other Nations Through the Behavior of Their Women.
But what struck me was the definite way she answered that question, no equivocations. There is no way she didn’t understand the implications of what she was saying, especially with regard to Saudi Arabia. When a former First Lady turned Secretary of State says she sees women’r rights as “central” to the foreign policy of the United States… it means something surely?
While the “Imperial America” faction will no doubt see this as further proof of America meddling in what is none of their business, I can’t help but be intrigued by the thought of America under Obama actually making an effort to instill an universal morality.
That is, of course, a loaded term: universal morality. It can so easily smack of ethnocentricism and with America involved in two costly and largely disastrous wars in countries with cultures that have little in common with its own, the Obama administration might want to think twice before it starts talking morality. And God knows President Bush with his talk of Good and Evil has pretty much put everybody else on the defensive.
Which is where Obama himself might perhaps be a symbolic help in this direction: to have somebody of his ancestry and intellectual curiosity, especially with his demonstrated willingness to engage with all sides, even if it is to his political cost (and even if it might not make any difference in the long run) pushes this line of thinking those necessary few inches away from universal morality and all its painful baggage and towards cosmopolitanism. Clinton’s answer to Boxer, viz. that you can’t use culture as a defense, for instance, could easily have been voiced by a modern day cosmopolitanist.
However, as (the amazing) Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of the leading proponents of cosmopolitanism today [fun trivia: he's also the grandson of Sir Stafford Cripps] points out, there is just one problem: there isn’t any consensus even within these societies as to what is morally correct.
Take the Taliban, for example. Over the past several years, I’ve seen people, including Clinton in her exchange above, talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan as though they were a bunch of foreigners who’d somehow taken over the country. This is simply not true. The Taliban might be supported by fighters brought in from elsewhere in the jihad against the United States and the Soviets before them, and the al Qaeda is definitely a global organization drawing members from all over the world, but as and of itself, the Taliban is a homegrown affair feeding off Afghans themselves.
If the Obama administration is actually serious about this facet of their foreign policy, then they’re going to have to find a local solution to these problems. And they’ll have to adapt and replicate that in each nation. So while they might all come under the grand plan of “Women: Improve Lot of”, there is no one universal solution that I can think of.
Education, perhaps, is the one that we’re all hoping will be the magic bullet. But as the Taliban have amply demonstrated, they’ve got the memo too and are working bombs and acid to stop that particular idea from taking off.
I guess it all does comes down to the individual in the end. And her courage and strength of resolve.
