Trophy lives

It’s the time of year where filmi types all over the world get together and give each other statuettes and air kisses. It’s awards season.

A couple of nights ago, India time, the Oscar awards were given out. There was the usual guff about who was wearing what and who designed which jewels for whom, but under the frivolity there was the reality of a situation that has been, in a way, mirrored here, too. The films that won were not the usual pulp fare, the commercial formulae guaranteed to succeed, but the movies that were unusual, made a strong statement, may not have found box-office bonanzas, but took home the bacon the form of critical applause. Which about what happened here, with a little concession to the usual round of popular and populist principle of appeasement.

I watched some of the Indian awards ceremonies on television, the ones that have been held, like Star Screen and Filmfare. And when I was part of the Times of India group, I even watched the Filmfare Awards live, standing right in front near the stage and bopping along with the music, loud, crass and tremendously appealing as it was. And the memories come flooding back every time I watch any vignettes of the occasion on TV. It was a formative time in my life, when I learned that not everything Bollywood is nasty, most of it is great fun and infectious in its appeal. And I found that the space in my head that is ready and willing to absorb has pulled in everything I have read and seen about the Hindi film industry with an osmotic pressure that has been, to me, not just revealing, but startling as well.

I rarely watch a movie in a theatre. In fact, I cannot even remember when I last went to a movie house – I do not like the noise levels, the cold and the proximity to other creatures, human and insect, that a theatre mandates. So I wait until the film is either available on DVD or on cable, and watch it at my own comfort levels, my feet curled up under me on the couch, Father within yelling distance if something scary happens and Small Cat muttering and rolling about on the carpet. I can switch off when I get sleepy, knowing full well that the same film will be broadcast endlessly and I can have seen all of it, albeit in parts, and put it all together somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle without a ‘finished’ picture as a template.

Perhaps the first movie I saw that way was Amar Akbar Anthony, with Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor and Amitach Bachchan. It was a giggle-fest, with slapstick comedy punctuated with family drama, fights, songs and bimbo-heroine love stories. Great fun, even seen in choppy bits, and memorable indeed. Another favourite is the Aamir Khan-Juhi Chawla starrer, Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke, where chaos and confusion are dotted with completely OTT fun and games that are not in the least bit credible, but hilarious any which way. And, of course, more recently there have been the Karan Johar potboilers, with Shah Rukh Khan dominating the proceedings, all glitz, glamour and glycerine. Those are rather easier to watch, since the fashion dominates the plot and everyone is so busy looking gorgeous that nothing much really happens that you cannot catch up with in whatever little you do see.

But this time a lot of smaller films have been part of the marquee for the awards – Bheja Fry, Life in a Metro, Cheeni Kum…all part of a line-up that dares to be hatke and manages to do so without losing kudos. Of course, the big winners were the big tickets: Om Shanti Om, Kareena Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan, Taare Zameen Par and more. But that was expected…and accepted.

View from my window

I sit next to a window at work and every now and then peer out to see what the outside world is up to. Not that there is much to see, since we overlook a parking lot and garden, with a factory and chimneys beyond the retaining wall, but it can often be more exciting than the view within, which is mainly people hacking away at keyboards or else standing around in groups chatting or, at certain times of the day, sitting in clusters and yelling madly in what is defined as an ‘edit meeting’. Occasionally there will be a wild outburst if there is a cricket match on television, or if there is a birthday, after which the housekeeping crew bustles about trying to get frosting out of the anonymously coloured carpet. Beyond the small upheavals of life, it is routine in here, nothing really exciting happening other than the daily grind of a broadsheet being made ready for production.

On an average day – which is what most of them are – life outside is far more exciting. Right now, as we speak, there is a gentleman in a brilliant pink shirt and blue tie (his trousers are unremarkably black) walking up and down the garden, talking animatedly on his cellphone. Nothing unusual about that. Except that every now and then he peers at another mobile phone in his other hand, texts out a message and then continues his conversation. Somewhere along the way, he stops, unhooks his first phone, speaks briefly into his second and then reverts to type. Which makes me wonder what he is saying to whom and why he cannot sit in the cool confines of his office and do it, instead of wandering about in the heat of the late afternoon.

My driver was telling me recently about some drama that happened right outside my window. You didn’t see it, he was astonished, but then he did not realise that every now and that I get pulled into one of those rather meaningless edit meetings and an dragged away from my little panorama of the world outside. Apparently, there was a human drama that unfolded late in the morning. A couple from the office next door had a little spat outside and there was violence, he exclaimed. First they came out, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee – or maybe it was tea, he speculated – and then chatted briefly. The talk became an argument and finally a bit of a fracas, as the woman hauled off and slapped her male companion. He, startled at first and then obviously furious, returned the favour – he hit her full on and she stood there, I was told, her mouth open, one hand to her shocked face. Then he put an arm around her and she leaned against him. They chatted a little more, smoked another cigarette and then went back in to the office they came from, evidently friends once more.

Perhaps more worth watching is the animal life outside. Apart from the birds, there is often a dog outside, playing in the garden or romping in the parking lot, frequently with a puppy or two in tow. The first litter that we saw was given a lot of attention by the staff of the newspaper – one or the other would run downstairs with milk or biscuits and feed the babies, while others played with the dirty, semi-starved little creatures. But by now so many of these litters have come and gone that we are all rather blasé about them, admiring the puppies, coochieing with them if we meet them at close quarters and then more or less forgetting they exist. We cannot do more; we have only that much angst and time to make them more special than they are already as young animals just starting to make a life for themselves.

For now, life outside my window is a diversion from the humdrum working day. Once in a while, it colours a blue mood and sometimes lowers my otherwise blithe spirits. But it is always changing, always new, always different, just like life itself.

Prophecies of the day

I once wrote a blog on how people are dead keen on horoscopes. A former editor of mine would grab the afternoon tabloid from my hands if I had bought one on my lunch break and then flip fast forward to the forecasts for the day. Once she was done with that, my paper was mine again; the rest of it was not relevant.

Then I worked with Internet sites on astrology. Which meant that I had to do a lot of research to find out just what people wanted from them, what kind of stuff they wanted to read and how deep they were willing to go online. It was amazing that so many would even plunk down money to learn that they would be married in such-and-such year and find a new job say when and have to deal with a personal/professional crisis then and not now. But I was and still am a bit of a cynic. It doesn’t really make sense to me to consult anyone who does not know me about what will happen to me.

And as for horoscopes – well, I have to confess this one: when I was just starting out as a journalist, I have on occasion had to juggle around predictions for the week if the astrologer who normally sent them had been derelict in his duty and we were horoscope-less for at least that day that I was making the relevant pages of the newspaper. Which meant that even if I just moved the forecasts around, changing them slightly, it really made little difference. It worked – the astrologer never objected and the reading audience lapped it all up.

A few years after that, I was in charge of an online astrology portal (almost) that had a number of astrologers on board to answer queries for a fee. Since it was essentially e-commerce, and I was rather averse to dealing with people who had some kind of beef about the money they spent that was not being realised in the way they would prefer, I stayed out of it. But then I was asked to filter the experts and retain only those who were really worth having, contracts renegotiated and re-signed to the company’s satisfaction rather than that of the astrologer. I was only the editor, I protested fairly violently, but no one would listen. So I girded my loins, swallowed my qualms and got down to the job.

It was an interesting but exhausting business. Each of them was so eager to please, so keen to stay in the loop we had created for them that they bent over practically backwards to make sure they were pleasing me and the chappie who was in charge of the money part of the deal. Each insisted on charting my astrological profile and telling me what my fate was all about, past and present. None of which made me happy, since all I wanted to do was get out of there and either get back to work or go home, depending on what time it was that day. The experts worked very hard to do their jobs, my colleague worked even harder to get me to stop being my usual nasty self and just hear them out, even if I had to be in a semi-asleep daze to do it. The net result of the exercise was entirely predictable – the astrologers were disgruntled because so many of them were thrown out of the portal citing contractual non-extension, and I was disgruntled because I was bored, not-pleased and completely out of the depth I normally cruised at.

But somewhere along the line I was amazed at the similarities in the various predictions. Most of the experts said the same thing, about my past, my present and, more or less, my future. That I would never have paid any of them to predict my life for me on the Internet was a different issue all together. It was just not my style to do that, even if I had believed in the whole shebang. And it all made me rather sick with the unctuousness of the people involved and the oiliness with which we had to eliminate them without causing rancour. All a hoot. And we should have known better - and we would have, if only we had consulted our horoscopes!

One for the birds

I was at work, wondering what to do after a rather healthy lunch that made me feel like saying “Moo!” when a pigeon landed heavily on the light fixture just outside the window beside which I hack away at my keyboard all day. It peered at me with its beady little eye, first one then the other, and seemed to dismiss me as being not just irrelevant, but unworthy, since it shrugged, settled its feathers and then took off to more interesting and important assignations. For a moment there I was startled, then thought deeply and darkly to myself that since for so many years I have regarded the wretched birds with so much contempt, it was only fitting that I should be seen in a similar light. And pigeons have such expressive eyes that you can read what they are thinking by just looking at one.

Once upon a different lifetime we lived in an apartment that was high up on a hill. Which meant we not only got a fabulous view all around, but also got all manner of fowl wandering into our flat when all the windows and French doors were open. It was, of course, fairly unpredictable, this kind of invasion, since we never knew when it would happen that a bird flew into the house and forgot how to get out again. It often was the case that we had to chase the silly thing all around the apartment, swearing madly and wondering if we would ever get the poo off the brocade cushion covers and the pin feathers out of the Chinese lampshades. All the fans would hastily be switched off and the glass-slatted vents closed, just so that the idiotic creature would not fly into something that would injure it. Every time it headed that way, I would close not just my eyes, but my ears as well – just as I do in the spooky moments in movies and television shows, to avoid seeing anything that would be unwontedly bloody and stick in my rather fragile psyche for the rest of my life.

The incursions were not infrequent. It came to such a pass that we had to put up chicken wire – or bird wire, as would be more appropriate – over all the openings that the pigeons could fly into, from the large windows to the even larger balconies. In a way that sort of solved the problem, for the most part. But the stupid birds (lovers of the pigeon community would instantly censure me for that, saying that the IQ of a pigeon was higher than I believed it to be) managed occasionally to find a way in and flew bashingly into the mesh and got tangled it is, sometimes breaking through into the flat and causing the aforementioned merry - and loud – havoc in the process. We did avert most of these mishaps, but had to replace the netting at regular intervals.

In the apartment we now live in, pigeons are not visitors, though they do peer hopefully in once in a while. As soon as they land on the awnings over the windows, Small Cat takes grave objection and chatters her teeth with a yarring sound, looking glaringly in the general direction of the birds. That is all very well, except that she does that even if the pigeons perch on a rooflet in the next building. She will keep doing this for as long as it takes for me or Father to shoo the fowl away. But she will never make any attempt to attack or jump at the birds, preferring to lie regally like a furry little princess on the carpet or a chair, sounding off. Only rarely, when she is feeling exceptionally hoppity and believes that the pigeons are daring to make inroads on to her turf, will she gallop across the living room, leap onto Father’s large armchair and chatter at the enemy from a more vantage point.

I am still wondering what Small Cat will do if a pigeon actually comes into the house and does its version of testing the chaos theory. But I am not particularly keen to find out.

Speaking in tongues

We were talking today at work about how nobody in this city speaks Hindi as it should ideally be spoken. Except perhaps Amitabh Bachchan, someone said with a bit of a sly grin showing. His sonorous voice and his nicely rounded vowels make listening to him a pleasure, though I did hear some time ago that some of his voice-overs were actually done by someone else and you could tell the difference only if you knew whether the Big B had done the assignment or not. Be that – as I giggle saying – as it may, there is admittedly hardly anyone I know who is a good average Mumbaikar and who can do the Hindi thing like it should be done. Our Bollywood movie stars least of all.

Most of them speak in tongues that are not discernibly anything. In the ‘old days’, as my irascible boss loves to put it, the actors came from parts beyond, usually north-ish, and spoke Hindi like the natives of the heartland that they were. Dharmendra had his good looks and his drawl to endear him to the masses who clamoured to watch his films. And he spoke decent Hindi, though he stumbled through English with pitiable results – every speech he made at every awards function was fraught with stress and effort for both the actor and his viewers. Then there was Dilip Kumar, who had moments of chaste Urdu in his public appearances. And there was Sanjiv Kumar, Rajesh Khanna and so many more. The women, too, were articulate, from Madhubala to Geeta Bali to Sadhana, even Hema Malini, who spoke good Hindi in a wonderfully Tamilian accent and never managed to do much with her English, even years after being the well-travelled public persona that she is.

Today the younger stars, be it Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan, Aamir Khan or any of the others of that generation, are far more comfortable in English, albeit oddly accented at times and definitely ‘Indian’. When SRK speaks to the public through a media interview or some kind of special show, he tends to say whatever he wants to say in ‘Hinglish’, mixing his own special brand of cocktail that works wonders for his articulate and expressive image as well as for his appeal to even those who are not Khan fans. Salman Khan speaks his strangely American-accented English without very much hesitation, though where he acquired his twang is still a mystery. Aamir Khan talks a lot when he does say anything, and he goes far deeper and is a lot more diplomatic than his peers. Akshay Kumar’s English is not as good as his Hindi and the action-emotion star very wisely sticks to the language he is more comfortable in, which makes a lot more sense than to babble on in a strange tongue that no one really understands but is too polite to question.

The women, too, are off-and-on types when it comes to speaking. Kajol talks a lot, in loud and very ‘Bombay’ English, though her Hindi is not bad either. Rani tends to trip over her pronunciation, and her accent is never very far from her Bengali roots. Tabu is unabashedly a non-English speaker, never mind her experience, and Manisha Koirala’s speech varies with her escort of the moment. Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen and Dia Mirza are very articulate and can hold their own in an international forum, but Aishwarya Rai’s accent tends to slip into Tulu when she is self-conscious, which is most of the time. But all these women have the unfair advantage of being well-finished products of their time, polished from toenails to phonetics. And they have been communicating internationally for so long now that it all comes naturally.

Which makes me wonder – if the men were shoved into international beauty pageants, would they speak better?

Friends for ever

It’s funny how the whole concept of friendship changes over the years, as you grow up. Once upon a time I stayed far away from the idea of ‘friends’, because we moved in and out of the country and any that I did make had to be left too soon; for a child, that can be devastating. But as I grew up, I got more cynical and a little more realistic – I made friends, albeit not very close ones, whom I could spend time with, laugh with, play with and then leave, perhaps keeping in touch for a few months, or even a couple of years, before relegating them to the back of the memory-closet where they could be looked at and savoured when the time and need arose, with no rancour or regret. Rediscovering friends like these is in itself a unique experience, refreshing from the point of view of a psyche battered by time and always looking for a new way to recuperate and reenergise.

Many years ago, I had a ‘best friend’. We spent more time together than anyone who lived in the same house would, and we shared everything from childhood dreams to teenage crushes to eyeshadow travails to driving lessons. Since she was a little older than me, it all happened to her earlier than it did to me and I often found myself running harder to catch up than I really needed to. It was only many years later that I understood that it was not necessary at all for me to catch up with her, or indeed with anyone else. I was myself, I was what I was and why should I feel the need to be or do anything that was not in my own destiny?

My ‘best friend’ and I had our own lives, quite separate from the one we shared in so many ways. She became another child in our household and was treated as one, an open affection often opposed by me, overly possessive of my parents’ affection, attention and time. I made occasional visits to her home, while she had free season in ours, neither of which really mattered to any of us. And we spent most waking moments in communication with each other, as only two little girls can manage to do – we would wake up and call each other, we would bathe and call each other, we would call each other just before we left our own homes, walk down to school together and then spend most of the day together in our various classes, finally walking home together after the sports session was done, the immaculate hair dishevelled, the uniforms wrinkled and grubby, the socks sagging somewhat over bruised ankles and the pong of sweaty little girl hovering like an almost-tangible aura over us both.

We grew up soon enough. It was often not too happy a process and we dealt with angsts and anxieties, parents and, in her case, siblings. There was rivalry and small envies, none ever spiralling into an argument or anything that could remotely be described as a ‘fight’. But slowly, as we grew in different directions, so did the friendship. I had new experiences she could never be part of, she had a life that never impinged on mine. For a while, we did not communicate at all – I was out of the country, she had a separate orbit. And then we met again, almost like we had never been apart. Adult now, both of us were careful about how we talked and what we talked about. But there was the old affection, the old teasing and knowing and awareness. It just was not that important to me when it all ended. It didn’t seem as important to keep it going, or to find out why it stopped.

But, like the cycle of perhaps life itself, it seems to have come around again. There is some sort of contact between the families…or what is left of them. What happens next, I wait to find out. It should be fun, any which way it goes.

Keeping the faith

Today is Pancake Tuesday. The day when all old food is cleaned out of the house to make way for a period of austerity and piety called Lent, which begins tomorrow, with Ash Wednesday. I used to know all this, since close family friends that became my home for a period of time when I was in college observed all the customs and traditions associated with the religion that I was peripherally familiar with and had watched with interest ever since I was very young. It was perhaps at that time that I seriously started thinking about faith and its observance, the way different people in different countries and decided that I liked a little of each and would ‘talk’ to whoever or whatever I believed to be divine rather than do it the conventional way via prayer, rite and ritual.

And, for me, it has worked. It makes sense to be somewhat like Akbar’s own brand of religion, the Din-e-Ilahi was said to be in my history textbooks, but more so. Where the Mughal emperor tried to blend the best of what he considered to be faith in Hinduism and Islam, for me God – of the godhead – was wherever I wanted it to be, from a temple to a mosque to a church to a synagogue and a gurudwara, wherever the spirit, in a matter of speaking, beckoned to me and I followed. It was not a God, never one figure to whom I addressed whatever I ‘said’. It was a wild combination of various entities that all embodied one aspect of belief: the faith in something that was clean, true, honest and, most of all, supportive.

For a while now my ‘God’ has been paying little attention to me, or so it seems. I love and it is taken away when I want and need it most. I trust and that trust is shattered. I believe and my beliefs are destroyed by everything from humans to circumstances that are beyond any conceivable human control. And whenever I think about loving, trusting or believing again, that nasty little voice inside my head asks me whether I really want to replay my own history and live through that same trauma once more.

But then I think about it and my own native, natural, internal sense of logic kicks in. Faith is about believing in oneself first, about trusting in oneself before in anyone else, in loving oneself and then spreading that love. I have all that. I have it coming into me and going out of me. I have a home, a life, comfort, support, security. So what am I complaining about? Everything in human existence has a shelf life, all faiths say that. I need to just accept that all that I am is also here for now. As for tomorrow…God knows!

When the wind blows

The past week or so has been unseasonably cold for Mumbai and everyone has been shivering gently around the edges, even the die-hard, self-professed, semi-Eskimo-related folks who are transplants to the city from more icy climes. Today I went out in the blazing sunshine and found that my fingertips were frosty and my nose started running, my toes curled in their search for a warmer part of my sandals and my cheeks were slowly going pink. Meanwhile, the wind blew my hair around my head in a streaky black cloud and my eyes watered black runnels of un-waterproof mascara along the rim of my lashes and the corners of my eyes. As I walked along the shopping street to my destination, I found people in sweaters, shawls and – I almost stopped to stare there – one young thing proudly showed off a pair of pink Ugg boots worn over skintight jeans and a tiny camisole (presumably only her bottom half was cold, the top seemed quite happy bare). And I was quite glad to dive into the store I was headed to, with its tinny piped music and all, because it sheltered me from the wind, so dried out my sniffles and let me replace my dishevel with a general state of more dignified kempt-ness.

They say it is all because of cold spells in the north of the country that we are more chilly than we are used to being down here in the mid-lands. The breeze blowing in from the sea is cool, getting colder as the sun sinks slowly over the horizon. And the tall buildings act as funnels for the gale to shoot down the roads that snake between them. Even as we shiver, as we drive with the air-conditioner off and we snuggle into sweaters that would normally be relegated to a mothballed suitcase in the attic, we revel in the novelty of being able to jog around the block without sweating, even welcoming the crush of the crowds in the commuter trains and the hordes of people who clamour for the bus. At work I yell for the air-conditioning to be switched off until there are more people in the vast space to warm it up and I drink mugs of hot water (or herbal tea) to make my insides a little warmer than my outside can be in this environment.

But even as we huddle against the cold, we Mumbaikars are a warm lot. We care, we get involved, we have the strange disregard for personal privacy that is so characteristically Indian. We are not the anonymous big city that I have always preferred being a resident of. We know our neighbours and their troubles, we help our servants through domestic tribulation and we want to know what life in the other building is all about. But there is one snob value that is truly ours that we are very proud of: the fact that we are Mumbaikars because we live here. This is our city. It belongs to us and we belong to it.

That, at the moment, is causing some upheaval in this city. A cold wind of dissent and disturbance is blowing in through the city. There is a section of the political fraternity that insists that Mumbai is for Maharashtrians. They, spurred on by their leader, have been saying – nay, yelling – so for a while now, but the yelling is getting more strident and more aggressive. Over the past couple of days, there has even been violence when the matter has been debated. Why should someone who lives here and calls Mumbai his home be willing to work for the betterment of another part of the country, is one question being asked. It is indeed a valid one, since it is the immediate environment that should be nurtured first. But, as one sassy, seasoned, savvy politician has said, we should be saying not that Mumbai is ours, but that India is.

We may be Mumbaikars, and very proud of it, but we are, over all the argument, Indians. Which is a matter for even greater pride.