Blog is Dark

… for a couple of days. See you all this weekend!

Meanwhile, does Ranbir Kapoor lisp? “Shikshty sheconds” is what I heard.

 

Fight the Love Jihad!

The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming!

Jihadis around the world are plotting to blow up people, take over governments and generally unleash holy hell – but in South India, they have a much more sinister plan. Powerfully affected by its balmy weather and spicy food, evil jihadis have concocted a devious plan to destroy society as we know it.

Romeo Jihadis (actual term) will love up Hindu and Christian girls! After which they will elope with them! And marry them! And convert them to Islam! And then…and then…er, and then bad things will happen! So bad, nobody but the evil Love Jihadis can imagine what they are! (WARNING: might include sex!)

That’s right! Marriage is a holy war against infidels for Muslims! What’s next – children? How low can you get, Muslims?

The Sri Ram Sene will agitate against this! The SNDP Yogam will “unleash propaganda“! The VHP and Bajrang Dal want special squads to check (read: hunt and destroy) this nascent attack on our society! The Kerala and Karnataka High Courts want some answers!

[Well, according to The Hindu, some answers were provided, but we want different answers! Preferably ones that agree that there is a Love Jihad!]

 

The Fug Fairy

Rejoice, O Fuglies! Your queen is here!

Once you’ve recovered from the hysterical blindness brought on by the sheer elegance of that outfit, you’ll be happy to know that she is wearing “a differently styled, multi-coloured and floral salwar-kameez” as part of designer duo Ashima-Leena’s “Go Green, Go Delhi, Go Haute” collection.

Well, success! I’m pretty sure the audience went green and went from Delhi and its haute. To gaze upon this marvel in hi-res glory, click here.

But really, who am I kidding? This is all just an elaborate excuse to post the most amazing photo ever:

That’s right. A photograph in which Mithun is the most restrained person.

 

You Do Not Want to Sex Up a Humpback

Unless you like to run around the Kingdom of Tonga battling angry 40 tonne monsters in heat.

Cameraman Mr Roger Munns filmed most of the underwater footage of the heat run for the BBC.

Mr Munns had to freedive whilst holding his breath to get shots of the whales swimming past him at speed, as the use of scuba tanks would disturb the humpbacks.

“We had to find the whales when they are on the heat run, which is hard,” says Dr Oakes.

“Then we had to position the diving team in front of the charging pack of whales for them to have any chance.”

“At one point I think Roger had the female and seven or eight males go past him. He said it was the most incredible experience of his life. Like standing in the middle of a motorway.”

And this is why I watch the BBC.

On a related note, if your stomach can handle it, watch The Cove:

 

What Our Mothers Watch: Bairi Piya

Some people have mentioned in the past that they’re puzzled by my Ekta Mata fascination. To these people I say: go forth my children and gaze upon the marvel that is her new TV soap, Bairi Piya.

It takes real talent in the cojones area, after all, to take an oft-repeated criticism of your company’s productions – to wit, the lack of any resemblance to reality as we know it – and twist it to your satisfaction to the point where it is both a plausible answer to your fiercest critics and a giant one finger salute to their sensibilities.

Featuring a “ripped from the headlines” plot, Bairi Piya is set in rural Maharashtra where the farmers have it bad: they’re not just battling Mother Nature for her doubtful bounty but most of them are deep in the clutches of the local moneylender who actively encourages them to not only get into debt but to pledge their comely young daughters if they don’t have anything of value to hock. Fathers desperate for money figure this is an acceptable gamble – after all, God is great, the crop will soon be in and what can the moneylender possibly want with their daughters?

As you can imagine, this is not a situation that is going to end well. When a swarm of locusts (?) destroys the year’s crops, more than one family lives to rue the day they made a deal with the devilish moneylender. In the aftermath, one farmer copies real life farmers of that region and kills himself and his entire family because they have lost everything. Another farmer, more pertinent to our story, gets to live because their daughter “pays off” the debt.

Welcome to the main plot point.

The moneylender, you see, is not working for himself. He’s the right-hand man of the local landowner, Thakur Digvijay Singh, a charismatic sociopath. Despot of all he surveys, one of his more charming customs is the local variant of droit de signeur (“entitled hereditary serial rapist” works just as well in modern parlance).

Indeed, Digvijay is the kind of lovely fellow who sincerely views his relations with the young village women who (we’re led to believe) routinely end up in his bed as a distasteful necessity: they need their families’ debts forgiven and he has his own needs that require discretion (thanks to the old devoted ball and chain at home who’s blissfully unaware of her husband’s rape-fabulous lifestyle).

Unfortunately for his well-reasoned comfy set-up, his latest “partner” is best friends with a girl called Amoli. She doesn’t know what happens to all these girls who get carted off by the moneylender, and has no idea that Digvijay is the puppetmaster, but knows she isn’t going to sit idly by and watch as her BFF gets kidnapped and shipped off to face an unknown fate. While everyone else is wringing their hands and her friend is getting raped, she manages to send Digvijay’s wife to the rescue (albeit after the fact) and gets her back home.

Digvijay is not a happy camper. His wife is now increasingly nosy, he’s out of a playmate, and a despised poor person is at the root of all this new evil in his life. He will have his revenge! But wait! He gets even more unhappy when he gets a good look at his unlikely nemesis.

Amoli (Supriya Kumari) is absolutely fetching with giant gray eyes that frequently make her resemble a startled kitten. Digvijay, twisted alpha male as he is, can barely stop himself from drooling at first sight. Oh no! How can Amoli possibly save herself?

Sounds like your average old-fashioned potboiler pitting good against evil, doesn’t it? Rape bad, power evil, truth good, woman virtuous, etc?

WRONG, suckas!

Bairi Piya‘s greatest liberty with the formula lies in its casting choice of Digvijay. Played by Sharad Kelkar, a former male model, Digvijay is presented as a flawed hero figure. That’s right, I said “a flawed hero figure”. Being rape-inclined is a flaw, didn’t you know?

Unlike your usual shortcode for evil in Indian productions, Digvijay is not an unattractive man. Nor does he lick his lips, indulge in double entendre, speak in childish rhyme, dress in lame or say “muahahaha” when he laughs. And unlike his possible counterparts in real life (about which opinion is mixed), he is not short, paunchy, with a double chin and dowdy clothes a size too big for him. On the contrary, he is tall, appears to be in excellent shape, dresses well, and manages to accomplish his evilness with nothing more overtly sinister than a steely glare. Even his theme music when he’s thinking rapetastic thoughts about poor virginal Amoli sounds romantic rather than the usual crash-boom-gong-DOOM music that typically accompanies all evil-doers in the Ekta Mata universe.

Amoli, he explains to his disgusted (without being willing in any shape or form to take a stand about it) friend, is not your usual run of rape victim. Her refusal to lie down and think of her family’s barren acres at his command have somehow converted her into his obsession. And there are  a couple of things that Bollywood has taught us about men who obsess over women:

1) It’s lurve.

2) It’s all her fault.

3) Her love will save him if only the stupid, wicked girl could recognize that all-important truth.

Granted, Bairi Piya doesn’t actually make this case in so many words. What it does, however, is subtly play on the audience’s past familiarity with similar storylines. As the enthusiastic reaction to the show at its official (?) forum testifies, it’s already managed to gather a dedicated following that recognizes that Digvijay is a vile serial rapist who raped Amoli’s best friend right before her wedding – and are now waiting to see him “reform” through love of her.

But the show does explicitly draw comparisons between three different generations of women.

Digvijay’s mother is the steely-spined aristocratic woman of a by-gone who openly hints at a less than stellar married life when she sees her son set his sights on Amoli. Her primary concern, she makes clear, is not Amoli’s well-being but rather that her son has had the temerity to let his libido make the decisions to the point where his wife, her beloved daughter-in-law, might actually find out the truth of his, um, alternate lifestyle. At least his late lamented father had the decency to conduct his raping out of the sight of his family.

Amoli’s mother is the hapless farmer’s wife who tries her best to stick up for her daughter but when confronted with the true might of the Thakur’s rule, meekly bends down and counsels her daughter to accept her would-be rapist’s plans for a “marriage”. At least it’d be respectable rape, carried out on a proper marital bed with the promise of much money and jewelry to follow. Good times!

In the middle is Digvijay’s wife, the (allegedly) emotionally fragile Urmila, who thinks her husband is spun out of sugar and rainbows. Occasionally she attempts to think for herself and accidentally does some good, at which point Digvijay gets mighty upset and gently suggests that she is making life difficult for him with all this thinking business. So she begs his pardon and cooks him lunch. Which he doesn’t eat because he’s too busy fantasizing over Amoli. Interestingly though, her mother-in-law frequently reiterates that she won’t stand for her husband’s extra-marital shenanigans if she ever found out. Keeping in mind my 30-something friends, wait until she finds out that his favorite pick-up line is “I rape you now”, is what I think.

And last but certainly not least, is Amoli and her BFF. The youngest characters, they’re apparently also the only ones who can notice that Digvijay isn’t exactly a prize in the marital department. The proposed marriage sounds a great deal like legalized sex slavery to Amoli and she is not hoodwinked by all the fancy glitter he promises to throw on the walls of her cell. And you know what? She would be correct! Which is a first for anyone on this show!

Now some would argue that this is a great deal of thought over nothing – I mean, it’s an Ekta Mata soap, talk about a tempest in a teapot. But when a rape (or, if you prefer an erotic lit euphemism, “non consent”) fantasy is sold as primetime viewing to women across India, I feel it deserves a commemoration of some sort, wouldn’t you?

 

Birds, Bees and Barbies

I love the father’s expression in this. How many times have I seen it on my own Daddy’s face when my mother made him do things he did not want!

So, the comments here make me wonder if I was the only child in the world who wasn’t slutting up her Barbies’ life. Maybe this is why I could never understand how mermaids have sex. If only my infant brain had been accustomed to the idea of genitalia-less dolls having sex, maybe it could make the leap to fish-tail sex.

And that, by the way, is the logical reason why fishy-type people frequently gain the use of legs on dry land in all the stories.

 

Main Aur Mrs. Khanna Go To Sleep

Prem Soni’s directorial debut, Main Aur Mrs. Khanna is simply astounding.

Astoundingly boring, that is.

Meet Samir Khanna (Salman Khan, botoxed within an inch of his life and channeling Mephistopheles’ younger brother), a nearly comatose financial bigwig who’s just sunk an entire stock exchange in Melbourne. Just go with it, ok? He currently spends all his time chewing with his mouth open and informing his wife that no money = no love. Meet his wife, Mrs. Khanna (a well dressed Kareena Kapoor), a pathetically grateful and somewhat duh orphan who repeatedly thanks him for “giving her the name that God forgot to give her”. Here, use this bucket to throw up. Feel better? Ok. Now meet Aakash (Sohail Khan heroically portraying all the emotions from A to A-and-a-half), the sap whose response to his parents’ disastrous marriage and subsequent divorce is to fall for somebody else’s wife.

The story of these three somnambulists is about as entertaining and heartwarming as chomping into a hermetically sealed cucumber sandwich.

Aakash is possibly the most uninteresting lover ever seen on film. And I’ve seen Bharat Bhushan at work. He’s such a romantic succubus, he manages to suck the charm out of a Balika Badhu song of all things.

Samir goes from stonewalling his wife when she tries to support him in his hour of need to experiencing a fullblown crisis when… uh, actually I still haven’t figured this out. His doll-like wife doesn’t automatically respond to set cues after he disappeared on her for months and wouldn’t even answer her calls? Because she has friends of her own? Because she doesn’t realize her new best friend is in love with her?

I’m not being facetious – I really don’t understand what Samir’s deal was. After she spends months waiting for him and telling him how much she loves him, he tells her she’s “wrong” (about what?) and tells her she has to decide whether she wants to be with him… because some guy she’s not in love with is in love with her? What the fuck is that? Even by Bollywood standards that makes no sense. It’s like they came to the end of the shoot and suddenly realized, “Hey, wait a minute! Were we supposed to have a story for this thing? Hmm, well then let’s just give Samir something to cry about. We’ve got that Rahat Fateh Ali Khan song lying around anyway.” Solutions!

And of course, there’s the desirable Mrs. Khanna – who stays where she’s put and generally acts like a puppet. Unless she’s drunk, in which case she loses what few wits she has, apparently. Which seems to be a recurring theme in Kareena’s career. I’m just glad nobody’s concern-raped* her yet.

Wanted had a more affecting love story.

* For the uninitiated: “Concern-rape”. When a man rapes a woman out of concern for her health and safety. He’s just being helpful, see? Like so. Scroll down, it’s the third or fourth rape in that movie. My hero!

 

The Shining Message

I’ve read my fair share of moon-landing conspiracy theories, but this essay about The Shining as Stanley Kubrick’s coded confession to helping fake the Apollo mission is quite possibly the best ever.

Consider, for instance:

A cold winter storm has now blown over the Hotel. The oncoming storm is a symbol of the Cold War between Russia and the United States. Of course the Cold War is also one of the driving forces for the entire reason for faking the moon landings. It was necessary to hide the advanced U.S. saucer technology from the Soviet Union. We were living in a very dangerous world and it was shrewd to hide our advanced technology from the Russians. This is the reason for the bears that are seen all over The Shining. The Russian Bear, and its competition for the race to the Moon, was a driving force behind having to fake the Apollo Moon landings.

Jack, his family, and the Overlook Hotel, are trapped in the Cold, just as America was trapped in the Cold War with Russia. The stuffed bears, seen through out the film, are the Soviet Empire’s symbol.

Sorry kitties, but Caturdays are clearly meant for conspiracies.

[via Fark]

[Pic: My Modern Met via The Daily Dish. Click for more awesomeness.]

 

Trauma Theatre

Pop historian Sarah Vowell slips in this little anecdote:

My friend and I went to see The Informant the other night at Union Square. And this mother brought these two kids—both of them were well under eleven. I would say they were seven and ten. At one point, the little girl said, “This isn’t a real movie!” They ended up leaving when the little girl said, “This is SO boring!” really loudly. That’s when the mother got up to leave. And when the little girl got up to leave, she actually came down the aisle riding a scooter. So it was sort of the greatest mid-movie exit of a little girl on a scooter who for some reason was not enjoying a comedy about price-fixing.

Three things:

A) That girl has mad mojo.

B) Her mother clearly doesn’t pinch her arm when she acts out in public.

C) I’m so glad I wasn’t sitting in the audience with them because this would have been a really inconvenient time to go to jail for hissing at a stranger’s child.

Not that there’s ever a convenient time, but…

That mom must have been a huge fan of Matt Damon and/or Steven Soderbergh if she thought she could sneak her kids in for that movie and get away with it. I feel bad for her now.

 

Roasted Relatives

One of the many benefits of being the proud descendant of generations of in-bred people (and I say this with the utmost love) is that the hilarity never ends. There’s always another story to make your head spin, some long-ago relative with a serious case of WTFs, and the knowledge that these are the people who ultimately gave you life and thus the onus is now upon you to make what you can of it.

This particular story started innocuously enough with a long drive and the inevitable lull in conversation.

“Hey,” I said, for want of anything better to say. “Where’s Grandpa’s ancestral home?”

For a bit of background, you should know I grew up listening to a number of stories about my paternal grandmother’s ancestral home, the House of V, now a heritage building lovingly preserved by my father’s cousins even though it’s too old, too big, too remote and too expensive to actually live in.

Over the past quarter century or so, this practice of turning our older homes into quasi museums has developed into something of a tradition amongst the extended clans of my father’s people. It’s as good a way of honoring the past as any and lets people live in whatever comfy house or apartment they choose. Given the intra-family competition to puff themselves off, I had to wonder at some point about the House of K, Grandpa’s ancestral home, which nobody’d ever invited me to visit. Thanks to boredom, some point was now.

That side of my family was traditionally matrilineal until the British unilaterally decreed patrilineage to be the better option for everybody. Daddy’s generation was the first to identify themselves with their father’s name but the old ways don’t die so easy, so he’d still been brought up to regard his father’s maternal uncle as the patriarch of his father’s family and often talked about his visits to the House of K (which tale is whole lot of crazy unto itself). But never once was its exact location mentioned, nor did he ever take any of us to visit. This was strange because Daddy really likes his family history.

“Oh, there isn’t one,” Ma said matter-of-factly. “The house burned down in a fire and took the poor old grandpa who lived there at the time – your grandfather’s uncle’s uncle – with it.”

“What?” I said, shocked. “I never heard that before.”

“Oh yes,” Daddy affirmed. “The Fire-Cooked Grandpa. His portrait hung in our home.”

Surely I’d misheard.

“The what Grandpa whose portrait hung in your home?” I asked carefully.

“The Fire-Cooked Grandpa,” said Daddy, helpfully enunciating the words. “My father’s maternal uncle’s maternal uncle.”

You’d think I’d be used to this stuff by now. The murders, the polygamy, the court cases, the robberies, the suicides, the elopements… my family lives an interesting life. The depressingly Vivaah-like story goes like this:

Once, at the House of K, a general need for firecrackers was expressed. I can’t precisely remember the reason as it was explained to me but no doubt it was a festival of some kind. In the fashion of all disasters of this kind, a considerable amount of primitive ammo was found, enough to thrill all the inhabitants and workers of an estate whose people famously never felt the need to cross its borders except once a year to sell the harvest (sounds like bunkum to me, but we’re talking old-timey people here when the preferred transport was stuff like bullock carts which are hellishly uncomfortable so I’m not going to judge them. I’d sit my ass at home too if I had to travel everywhere on a bullock cart).

All of this firepower was then placed into a back room of the main house to await the event for which it had been purchased. I’ll give you three guesses what happened next. Of course a fire broke out and the whole house threatened to blow. Grandpa came running with the rest of the household and realized matters were dire.

This is where things take a turn for the bizarre.

Apparently, Grandpa looked around and then got a couple of his men to grab one of the enormous copper vessels usually used to cook lunch (this meal was apparently something of an event at the house because it was the custom to provide the midday meal to all workers on the estate, so you can imagine the size of this thing). By the time they’d dragged it to the room, the whole place was spitting and exploding and they barely managed to shove it upside down over the bulk of the firecrackers that were yet to explode. Then Grandpa yelled at the workers to get out and take the rest of the household with them – and jumped on top of the copper vessel.

Yeah. I don’t know what to make of that either. He was either a hero or suicidal or an egomaniac who thought he could literally keep a lid on things by sheer willpower. Maybe smoke inhalation turned him insane. Or the in-breeding got to him first. I guess we’ll never know.

The house burned down, God knows what happened to the copper vessel and Grandpa ended up as a portrait on the walls of my grandparents’ home, thereafter known as The Fire-Cooked Grandpa.

The family never built another house upon the remains of the earlier one, choosing instead to convert the two guesthouses on the property into the main residence. After the land reforms came into effect and the family disputes amongst the many scattered descendants were finally settled, my father’s cousin chose to use that part of her inheritance to revive the old temple on the estate that had fallen into disuse and neglect as the world changed around it.

Nothing remains of the house that the Fire-Cooked Grandpa died to protect but the house of God.