(The Hindu Magazine, October 9, 2011)
It had been cooking for an hour already. But when I checked, it still was not done. If it had not been a strangely bad day, I would have cottoned on; but then, if it had not been a strangely bad day, I would not have done it. My mistake was one that many aspiring cooks make and it was perfectly understandable, except that I was not an aspiring cook and I could not understand how I had done it. I was making dal for dinner. And instead of the tur or arhar dal that was on my menu, I was boiling all heck out of chana dal and getting nowhere and not too fast either. It became especially funny, since just a couple of weeks earlier I had been giggling at the exact same mistake a friend of mine had made…But the story ended well enough. The semi-cooked dal was incorporated into a kind of adai, a multigrain dosai/pancake that perhaps no good Keralite would admit into their food habits, but that was eventually delicious.
Dal, or split pulses of various kinds, is a mainstay dish in almost every part of India and much of South Asia. It takes on many avatars, eaten with rice or roti, spiced or plain, with vegetables or meat, and can be the ideal diet food as well as a calorific indulgence. Today you don’t even have to bother to make it in your own kitchen (perhaps getting mixed up between one dal and the other, like so many of us are still embarrassed about) – you can buy cans of the famous Dal Bukhara originally from the well-known Delhi hotel, you can pick up cans of lentil soup at the imported goods store in the mall, you can find ready-to-heat-and eat packages from brands best known for ketchup, you could even just call the local eatery, be it a high-end restaurant or the dhaba at the corner, and collect a pot of steaming hot goodness ladled out from a huge vat that has probably been simmering for hours.
It all begins with pulses, as they are called, or lentils or dried beans that are hulled and then split. These are processed in various ways and then stored, either in oil (which keeps longer but also needs to cook longer) or not. It is an essential part of almost any diet, even at today’s unbelievably high prices, since it provides most of the protein required in a normal diet – in fact, dal is about 25-30 percent protein in its own makeup. Most commonly used are tur (which I actually wanted), chana (which I inadvertently used), moong (from the well known mung or moong bean), urad and masoor dal, with the less salubrious kesar dal listed among others. A number of beans and peas too are staples, from the familiar rajma, chana and cowpeas (blackeyed beans or lobia) to the Mussyang or melange of pulses comon in the hilly regions of Nepal, to the less seen in India varieties like lima beans, fava beans, yellow split peas (favoured by the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad) vetch and horse lentil.
Dal is not difficult to make, even for the novice, once the kind of dal being used is determined. Quickest to cook is moong dal, while the beans need more intense pressure cooking to soften and absorb flavour; if pre-soaked in water, cooking time can be reduced appreciably. The whole lentil, called sabut dal, contains more dietary fibre and is preferred in sub-continental cuisine, though the split pulse, or dhuli dal, is easier to handle, especially in a modern and hurried kitchen. Once cooked, the dal is flavoured in a variety of ways, from the addition of a simple tadka to a more elaborate preparation like the Parsi dhansak or the South Indian sambhar.
Perhaps the simplest and most delicious way to prepare dal is to leave it alone. Well, not completely alone, but in the company of just a basic spicing of salt and a squeeze of lemon. This works best with moong dal, eaten with a more complex vegetable dish that provides the ‘taste’ and ‘appearance’ but needs the support of the dal to stand out. One step further along the culinary evolutionary chain is the dal that has tadka or chonk added to it – a tiny spoonful of ghee, in which is sputtered a pinch of asafoetida, a few mustard seeds and a couple of curry leaves is all that it takes to make magic. Adding dried red chillies, chopped ginger, green chillies, fried onions et al layers flavours on to the essential blandness of the dal, and mandates the rest of the meal is simpler, for the full pleasure of the experience. Some dals do well with pressure cooking, which rushes through the traditional process of simmering for hours, even overnight – as is done with the deliciously rich and creamy ma di dal, for instance, or the meaty, hearty dhansak – and pushes nuances of flavour and spice into what is rather tasteless and bland.
In India, the traditional stress buster is always considered to be dahi-chawal, a cool melange of softly cooked rice and fresh yoghurt. But khichdi, an almost-amorphous blend of rice and dal cooked together to a delicious tenderness, or a plateful of squishy dal eaten with ever-so-slightly overcooked rice and a dollop of ghee would do the same magic trick without too much effort. And that is exactly what eventually came to my table that day, once I had sorted out which dal I wanted to use!
Thursday, October 13, 2011
When the music stopped...
(bdnews24.com, October 8, 2011)
In 1941, a few years before India became an independent nation, a son was born to devout Sigh parents in Sriganganagar, Rajasthan. He was called Jagmohan, but his father changed his name as per the suggestion of the family’s guru of the Namdhari sect. The child became Jagjit Singh – a name that is now spoken of with reverence and admiration by anyone with any musical interest. He was trained by a blind teacher, Pandit Chhaganlal Sharma, and by Ustad Jamal Khan of the Senia gharaana and learned to sing shabad kirtans (Sikh hymns) in gurdwaras and holy processions. The interest became a passion very soon and Jagjit’s first paid public performance was when he was in the 9th grade, when people paid hin small sums of money and cheered and applauded as he sang. His favourite songs were always coloured with soft sadness, a gentle melancholy that spoke of love lost but hope still in bloom.
My taste is not for this kind of music. I like happy sounds, dramatic sounds, vibrant sounds, colourful sounds, not tunes that are tinged with blue and touched with the edge of tears. So when I was asked to go with friend to a Jagjit Singh concert in Mumbai some years ago, I protested, objected, cavilled. Not me, I grumbled, it’s just not my thing at al. To me, ghazals, the singer’s forte, were for airplanes and elevators, music that soothed and softened, that could easily – and often did – put me into a soporific state that was akin to intense boredom. I was not especially interested in that kind of mood at the time and had to be pushed into being part of the group, bribed with the promise of dessert that was all about chocolate. And I was right; the music was soft, gentle, sleepy almost, lulling my self-frazzled synapses into a kind of torpor that was extremely pleasant, on the verge of being addictive. What grabbed my attention was not the man on the stage playing the harmonium and singing, but the way people around me reacted to him and his music. They were spellbound; they knew every word of the lyrics; they sang along, teary-eyed, smiling, unabashed by the emotion that beamed off their faces.
Jagjit Singh often told the story of what happened during a concert in college – the electricity suddenly went off and he had an audience of 4,000 people watching and listening to him. Mercifully, the sound system was battery operated and he could be heard. He remembered, "I went on singing, nobody moved, nothing stirred ... such incidents and the response from audiences convinced me that I should concentrate on music."
And thereon, he did. He was a huge fan of classical musicians of the time, from Talat Mehmood and Abdul Karim Khan to Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Amir Khan. He developed a taste for Urdu poetry, and thus a preference for bol-pradaan music, which focuses more on the words and expression rather than the tune itself. Geets and ghazals made magic for him, and he soon built up not just a repertoire of songs, but a roster of loyal fans who asked for certain compositions whenever he sang. But Bombay, as it was then, was where he wanted to be and in 1961 Jagjit Singh moved to the big city to try and make it big in film circles. People liked his music, but had no work for him at the time and he left for Jalandhar. Four years later, he tried again. This time, he found a degree of success. He made two albums for a recording company and shed his turban and cut off his long hair to be more photogenic for the cover photographs. From small gatherings to – very, very slowly – bigger projects, it was not an easy journey for the music-man. But the struggle added depth and emotion to his songs and his voice, adding real-life anguish of experience to words that anyway sang of sorrow and loss. And he made the ghazal an accepted, anticipated and applauded form of vocal expression.
Along the way, there was great joy, too. He met and married his love, Chitra, and the two sang together in a collaboration that was sheer poetry. It was still not easy, even though he was getting increasingly popular, both as a solo singer and with his wife as a couple. The birth of his son Vivek in 1971 brought him not just happiness, but luck too. In 1975 he composed his first LP for HMV and sold unbelievably well. But grief came in 1990 when Vivek was killed in a car accident. Chitra lost her voice and refused to even try and sing again, certainly never in public. Jagjit Singh decided to use his loss to colour his music and focussed on it as a kind of meditation, concentrating entirely on his work. He became more spiritual, less ebullient, increasingly philosophical. And the audiences poured in. Bollywood too had become a fan – his songs were used in blockbusters like the arthouse Arth and the more populist Sarfarosh.
Along the way, his health suffered. Jagjit Singh had a heart attach in January 1998, after which he stopped smoking. Nine years later, he suffered blood circulation problems and had to spend time in hospital. A few weeks ago, he had a stroke and was rushed into surgery, where clots in the brain were removed. He was on life support and died on October 10 at the age of 70 in a Mumbai hospital. I may not have been a huge fan of his music, but I will always admire the man who could give so many so much pleasure.
In 1941, a few years before India became an independent nation, a son was born to devout Sigh parents in Sriganganagar, Rajasthan. He was called Jagmohan, but his father changed his name as per the suggestion of the family’s guru of the Namdhari sect. The child became Jagjit Singh – a name that is now spoken of with reverence and admiration by anyone with any musical interest. He was trained by a blind teacher, Pandit Chhaganlal Sharma, and by Ustad Jamal Khan of the Senia gharaana and learned to sing shabad kirtans (Sikh hymns) in gurdwaras and holy processions. The interest became a passion very soon and Jagjit’s first paid public performance was when he was in the 9th grade, when people paid hin small sums of money and cheered and applauded as he sang. His favourite songs were always coloured with soft sadness, a gentle melancholy that spoke of love lost but hope still in bloom.
My taste is not for this kind of music. I like happy sounds, dramatic sounds, vibrant sounds, colourful sounds, not tunes that are tinged with blue and touched with the edge of tears. So when I was asked to go with friend to a Jagjit Singh concert in Mumbai some years ago, I protested, objected, cavilled. Not me, I grumbled, it’s just not my thing at al. To me, ghazals, the singer’s forte, were for airplanes and elevators, music that soothed and softened, that could easily – and often did – put me into a soporific state that was akin to intense boredom. I was not especially interested in that kind of mood at the time and had to be pushed into being part of the group, bribed with the promise of dessert that was all about chocolate. And I was right; the music was soft, gentle, sleepy almost, lulling my self-frazzled synapses into a kind of torpor that was extremely pleasant, on the verge of being addictive. What grabbed my attention was not the man on the stage playing the harmonium and singing, but the way people around me reacted to him and his music. They were spellbound; they knew every word of the lyrics; they sang along, teary-eyed, smiling, unabashed by the emotion that beamed off their faces.
Jagjit Singh often told the story of what happened during a concert in college – the electricity suddenly went off and he had an audience of 4,000 people watching and listening to him. Mercifully, the sound system was battery operated and he could be heard. He remembered, "I went on singing, nobody moved, nothing stirred ... such incidents and the response from audiences convinced me that I should concentrate on music."
And thereon, he did. He was a huge fan of classical musicians of the time, from Talat Mehmood and Abdul Karim Khan to Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Amir Khan. He developed a taste for Urdu poetry, and thus a preference for bol-pradaan music, which focuses more on the words and expression rather than the tune itself. Geets and ghazals made magic for him, and he soon built up not just a repertoire of songs, but a roster of loyal fans who asked for certain compositions whenever he sang. But Bombay, as it was then, was where he wanted to be and in 1961 Jagjit Singh moved to the big city to try and make it big in film circles. People liked his music, but had no work for him at the time and he left for Jalandhar. Four years later, he tried again. This time, he found a degree of success. He made two albums for a recording company and shed his turban and cut off his long hair to be more photogenic for the cover photographs. From small gatherings to – very, very slowly – bigger projects, it was not an easy journey for the music-man. But the struggle added depth and emotion to his songs and his voice, adding real-life anguish of experience to words that anyway sang of sorrow and loss. And he made the ghazal an accepted, anticipated and applauded form of vocal expression.
Along the way, there was great joy, too. He met and married his love, Chitra, and the two sang together in a collaboration that was sheer poetry. It was still not easy, even though he was getting increasingly popular, both as a solo singer and with his wife as a couple. The birth of his son Vivek in 1971 brought him not just happiness, but luck too. In 1975 he composed his first LP for HMV and sold unbelievably well. But grief came in 1990 when Vivek was killed in a car accident. Chitra lost her voice and refused to even try and sing again, certainly never in public. Jagjit Singh decided to use his loss to colour his music and focussed on it as a kind of meditation, concentrating entirely on his work. He became more spiritual, less ebullient, increasingly philosophical. And the audiences poured in. Bollywood too had become a fan – his songs were used in blockbusters like the arthouse Arth and the more populist Sarfarosh.
Along the way, his health suffered. Jagjit Singh had a heart attach in January 1998, after which he stopped smoking. Nine years later, he suffered blood circulation problems and had to spend time in hospital. A few weeks ago, he had a stroke and was rushed into surgery, where clots in the brain were removed. He was on life support and died on October 10 at the age of 70 in a Mumbai hospital. I may not have been a huge fan of his music, but I will always admire the man who could give so many so much pleasure.
Getting the jobs done
(bdnews24.com, October 8, 2011)
Many many years ago, when I was very young but had already started writing, I used a pencil and wrote in laborious longhand on lined paper. Soon, I had graduated to bashing away on a typewriter, first an old model we had inherited and then a more modern electronic one that beeped if I went too fast and erased my mistakes with a ka-chunk sound as if I was being severely whopped. And then I learned – and pretty fast it went too – to use a computer.
It did not take long and I did go through the usual problems of deleting something instead of saving it, battling worms and virus attacks, grappling with new programmes or old ones being updated so fast I could barely keep up and suddenly finding that something I knew I had saved had mysteriously vanished and then, just when I had written it all over again, had reappeared without any word about where it had taken its secret holiday.
Along the way, I learned not to check for spelling errors since it was all done on a programme with auto-correct mode firmly on, and I rarely missed a deadline since writing was for me not only easy because of the way my head worked, but much easier because of the way my machines worked.
As technology advanced, so did my own skills as a kind-of-journalist. My list of contacts grew longer; my own talents of getting a story done and filed became honed. I could out-write almost anyone, with no need for an editor at the end of it. Most of it came courtesy me, but some of it was thanks to my trusty, handy-dandy computer. I could bash almost anything into it, but it almost always got it right when it translated it into English as the local media wanted it and better.
It was all great fun and, along the way, it left me free to do more with the story itself, whatever it may have been, without needing to be tied down to any rules of grammar or linguistic etiquette that made me stop and think about how I should be saying that I wanted to say. I could create pictures, which is what all really good writing does, and not be tied down by the size of the canvas or the paints on my palette.
And it was great fun; I learned along the way that writing for a career can be more satisfying than writing for myself, because you not only reach a lot more people who tend to marvel at your work, but you even get paid for it, which in turn would pay for books or shoes or diamonds or whatever else you want to get with it. And it also fed my never-happy ego, pushing me to do more, be read more, be known as a name more. What more did I want?
Actually, there is a lot more than I want. Or so I found as I wrote that little bit extra that made me better known than so many others who had started out with me. I wanted more technology. More science that could be applied to making my life as a writer easier, better, faster, simpler, more interesting, more everything. And I wanted more of it to be done for me.
To help, there has always been a machine, I argued, so why is there not more than a machine that I can use without too much trouble can do without me having to do it? Once upon a time I used a pen, frantically wielded, to take notes during an interview. Then I graduated to a tape recorder, a large and irritatingly awkward object that needed a whole big bag of its own and never switched on and off the way I wanted it to. Relief came in the shape of my Walkman, chosen deliberately for its recording functions. And then I moved on to a digital recorder, a slim, neat, light gizmo that worked as I demanded it should, at least most of the time. I did figure out how to use my mobile phone for recording interviews, but needed far more talk time than it gave me, so gave up on it very quickly.
But, as always, there was the next step that had to be taken. I now am looking for a programme that will transcribe what is on my digital recorder directly into a text file that I can edit on my computer. I have found one, but the errors that it comes up with drive me to tears…of frustration, of laughter, of bemoaning my own fate at having to listen to and comprehend hours of someone speaking and make it into words that suit the newspaper, magazine or website I may have done the interview for.
I once wrote travel stories on a palmtop; I am now looking for a rather more advanced kind of device I can carry around without strain. Now that Steve Jobs is no longer on this earth to make one that will fit all my requirements, where do I find what I really want?
Anyone have any realistic inspirations here? Do tell….
Many many years ago, when I was very young but had already started writing, I used a pencil and wrote in laborious longhand on lined paper. Soon, I had graduated to bashing away on a typewriter, first an old model we had inherited and then a more modern electronic one that beeped if I went too fast and erased my mistakes with a ka-chunk sound as if I was being severely whopped. And then I learned – and pretty fast it went too – to use a computer.
It did not take long and I did go through the usual problems of deleting something instead of saving it, battling worms and virus attacks, grappling with new programmes or old ones being updated so fast I could barely keep up and suddenly finding that something I knew I had saved had mysteriously vanished and then, just when I had written it all over again, had reappeared without any word about where it had taken its secret holiday.
Along the way, I learned not to check for spelling errors since it was all done on a programme with auto-correct mode firmly on, and I rarely missed a deadline since writing was for me not only easy because of the way my head worked, but much easier because of the way my machines worked.
As technology advanced, so did my own skills as a kind-of-journalist. My list of contacts grew longer; my own talents of getting a story done and filed became honed. I could out-write almost anyone, with no need for an editor at the end of it. Most of it came courtesy me, but some of it was thanks to my trusty, handy-dandy computer. I could bash almost anything into it, but it almost always got it right when it translated it into English as the local media wanted it and better.
It was all great fun and, along the way, it left me free to do more with the story itself, whatever it may have been, without needing to be tied down to any rules of grammar or linguistic etiquette that made me stop and think about how I should be saying that I wanted to say. I could create pictures, which is what all really good writing does, and not be tied down by the size of the canvas or the paints on my palette.
And it was great fun; I learned along the way that writing for a career can be more satisfying than writing for myself, because you not only reach a lot more people who tend to marvel at your work, but you even get paid for it, which in turn would pay for books or shoes or diamonds or whatever else you want to get with it. And it also fed my never-happy ego, pushing me to do more, be read more, be known as a name more. What more did I want?
Actually, there is a lot more than I want. Or so I found as I wrote that little bit extra that made me better known than so many others who had started out with me. I wanted more technology. More science that could be applied to making my life as a writer easier, better, faster, simpler, more interesting, more everything. And I wanted more of it to be done for me.
To help, there has always been a machine, I argued, so why is there not more than a machine that I can use without too much trouble can do without me having to do it? Once upon a time I used a pen, frantically wielded, to take notes during an interview. Then I graduated to a tape recorder, a large and irritatingly awkward object that needed a whole big bag of its own and never switched on and off the way I wanted it to. Relief came in the shape of my Walkman, chosen deliberately for its recording functions. And then I moved on to a digital recorder, a slim, neat, light gizmo that worked as I demanded it should, at least most of the time. I did figure out how to use my mobile phone for recording interviews, but needed far more talk time than it gave me, so gave up on it very quickly.
But, as always, there was the next step that had to be taken. I now am looking for a programme that will transcribe what is on my digital recorder directly into a text file that I can edit on my computer. I have found one, but the errors that it comes up with drive me to tears…of frustration, of laughter, of bemoaning my own fate at having to listen to and comprehend hours of someone speaking and make it into words that suit the newspaper, magazine or website I may have done the interview for.
I once wrote travel stories on a palmtop; I am now looking for a rather more advanced kind of device I can carry around without strain. Now that Steve Jobs is no longer on this earth to make one that will fit all my requirements, where do I find what I really want?
Anyone have any realistic inspirations here? Do tell….
Friday, October 07, 2011
Animal enthusiasm
(bdnews24.com, September 30, 2011)
I was reading this morning about some large animals – a rhino and a couple of elephants – in the zoo in Mumbai, a place called Ranibagh situated right in the most crowded part of the city. The unfortunate creatures are single, alone, without mates, without company, with no real friends except their keepers, who have their own lives and loyalties. But I am not going to come up with another sad rona-dhona story. This is a tale of valiant efforts and some measure of success. This is the story of animals who have people who care.
The state of zoos in many parts of the world leaves a great deal to be desired. There are newspapers galore talking of the woeful conditions of animals in zoos in cities that have been in the middle of some conflict or the other, caused by man or nature. You see reports almost every other day about a lion dying in Tripoli zoo or monkeys eating dead simians in a cage in Russia somewhere or birds struggling to stay above the water level in New Orleans. There are animals in distress everywhere in the world, some with no hope other than a merciful death. A lot of the time, it comes slowly, painfully, eventually. And then, once in a wonderful while, a miracle happens. Caregivers from all over the world are able to go into the zone of such greatly nightmarish proportions and save a few of these suffering creatures, giving them relief, care, food, medical treatment, hope, life. Not all of them survive, sometimes not enough can be done. But enough is done to make the rest of the world aware of what is happening, to awaken consciousness and consciences about this kind of cruelty, to start changing the world’s perspective on animals in zoos.
In this battle, there are those who have done plenty of good work and I, we, all of us salute them and cheer them on. While the media has spoken about a lot of them, some unsung heroes are never known, never seen, never heard of. Like the little girl in the park the other day who was feeding a small group of stray dogs with biscuits from her tiffin box. Like the young man who fosters injured pigeons from his chawl room near the railway tracks in central Mumbai. Like the rather foolhardy gentleman who pushes his luck every day when he walks through the national park tracking leopards to study their habits, so that they do not get caught and killed by less caring humans who have poached on the cats’ territory. Like the group of schoolchildren who have been saving up to make the elephants at the zoo more comfortable, even though their efforts may never be enough to make any kind of difference.
For some reason, animals are given unfair and very short shrift from most of humanity. Organisations like PETA, Save the Tiger, World Worldlife Fund et al do their bit, but it is not in any way enough to cope with the downside of the situation. There is just too much bad stuff happening for the good stuff to be able to balance it. Along the way, new species are being discovered – they recently found 12 new kinds of frogs in India – and old ones are being wiped out – the Tasmanian Tiger, for instance, has not been spotted in years in its natural habitat and the last specimen died in captivity a while ago.
In India, a group of enterprising, enthusiastic people has done much to increase awareness of what is happening to the tiger, that great striped cat that once roamed this continent. Save the Tiger is now a movement of worthwhile proportions, being supported by television campaigns, phonathons, fund collecting drives, government diktats and public noise made by a wide cross-section of people, from schoolchildren to celebrities from the sports and film world. Is it all helping? Actually, there have been contradicting reports, but on the whole the response has been favourable and positive.
There are so many animals waiting in line for attention, from the tiger to elephants in Mumbai’s overcrowded and neglected zoo, from small insects in the forests of the northeast to rhinos that cannot find mates. But the tiger has grabbed most of the pie where focus is concerned. It makes for good photographs, suits soft toys and has so many poems and stories written about it that almost anyone can identify it without too much trouble. The best part is that saving the tiger is a cross-border effort, which could help our two countries, in fact, India and Bangladesh, work together, thereby becoming better friends and perhaps increasing the scope for partnerships.
The Sunderbans tiger, a magnificent beast, often stalking through fields and waterways of both nations, once in a rare while caught and transported to safer regions – safer for both animal and man – and celebrated as a symbol of strength, vigour and beauty, could be the glue that keeps the bond close and firm for centuries.
Maybe that is something all of us should think about!
I was reading this morning about some large animals – a rhino and a couple of elephants – in the zoo in Mumbai, a place called Ranibagh situated right in the most crowded part of the city. The unfortunate creatures are single, alone, without mates, without company, with no real friends except their keepers, who have their own lives and loyalties. But I am not going to come up with another sad rona-dhona story. This is a tale of valiant efforts and some measure of success. This is the story of animals who have people who care.
The state of zoos in many parts of the world leaves a great deal to be desired. There are newspapers galore talking of the woeful conditions of animals in zoos in cities that have been in the middle of some conflict or the other, caused by man or nature. You see reports almost every other day about a lion dying in Tripoli zoo or monkeys eating dead simians in a cage in Russia somewhere or birds struggling to stay above the water level in New Orleans. There are animals in distress everywhere in the world, some with no hope other than a merciful death. A lot of the time, it comes slowly, painfully, eventually. And then, once in a wonderful while, a miracle happens. Caregivers from all over the world are able to go into the zone of such greatly nightmarish proportions and save a few of these suffering creatures, giving them relief, care, food, medical treatment, hope, life. Not all of them survive, sometimes not enough can be done. But enough is done to make the rest of the world aware of what is happening, to awaken consciousness and consciences about this kind of cruelty, to start changing the world’s perspective on animals in zoos.
In this battle, there are those who have done plenty of good work and I, we, all of us salute them and cheer them on. While the media has spoken about a lot of them, some unsung heroes are never known, never seen, never heard of. Like the little girl in the park the other day who was feeding a small group of stray dogs with biscuits from her tiffin box. Like the young man who fosters injured pigeons from his chawl room near the railway tracks in central Mumbai. Like the rather foolhardy gentleman who pushes his luck every day when he walks through the national park tracking leopards to study their habits, so that they do not get caught and killed by less caring humans who have poached on the cats’ territory. Like the group of schoolchildren who have been saving up to make the elephants at the zoo more comfortable, even though their efforts may never be enough to make any kind of difference.
For some reason, animals are given unfair and very short shrift from most of humanity. Organisations like PETA, Save the Tiger, World Worldlife Fund et al do their bit, but it is not in any way enough to cope with the downside of the situation. There is just too much bad stuff happening for the good stuff to be able to balance it. Along the way, new species are being discovered – they recently found 12 new kinds of frogs in India – and old ones are being wiped out – the Tasmanian Tiger, for instance, has not been spotted in years in its natural habitat and the last specimen died in captivity a while ago.
In India, a group of enterprising, enthusiastic people has done much to increase awareness of what is happening to the tiger, that great striped cat that once roamed this continent. Save the Tiger is now a movement of worthwhile proportions, being supported by television campaigns, phonathons, fund collecting drives, government diktats and public noise made by a wide cross-section of people, from schoolchildren to celebrities from the sports and film world. Is it all helping? Actually, there have been contradicting reports, but on the whole the response has been favourable and positive.
There are so many animals waiting in line for attention, from the tiger to elephants in Mumbai’s overcrowded and neglected zoo, from small insects in the forests of the northeast to rhinos that cannot find mates. But the tiger has grabbed most of the pie where focus is concerned. It makes for good photographs, suits soft toys and has so many poems and stories written about it that almost anyone can identify it without too much trouble. The best part is that saving the tiger is a cross-border effort, which could help our two countries, in fact, India and Bangladesh, work together, thereby becoming better friends and perhaps increasing the scope for partnerships.
The Sunderbans tiger, a magnificent beast, often stalking through fields and waterways of both nations, once in a rare while caught and transported to safer regions – safer for both animal and man – and celebrated as a symbol of strength, vigour and beauty, could be the glue that keeps the bond close and firm for centuries.
Maybe that is something all of us should think about!
Can we ever be ready to die?
(bdnews24.com, September 23, 2011)
Disaster is a part of life anywhere in the world. And as one disaster follows the other, as it will inevitably do, people learn from the first and are better prepared to face the second. Or so anyone would presume. But things are not that simple. Consider what happens in India, for instance. I am always writing about how we never seem to learn, how we fail to follow up with any degree of efficiency when we are badly hit by man or nature, and how we cannot understand what George Santayana meant when he said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We do not remember what went wrong and why, just as we cannot remember what we did when it happened and why it did not work. And when it happens again, as it will, we are not ready to deal with it.
All this sounds obscure, right? Actually, it is very simple. And it comes back to haunt me, you, all of us each time.
Consider the recent bomb blasts in Mumbai – how much have we changed since the previous blasts just a few years earlier? And then there was a bomb that went off in a crowded location in Delhi just a couple of weeks ago; people are still dying from that one. Have we learned how to prevent this sort of attack, or do we now know how to handle the consequences of not remembering? People are still dying. People are still not willing to fix themselves and thus help fix the situation. What are they doing instead? Blaming the government for not keeping them secure, for not being able to prevent such attacks, for not seeing that our country and its citizens are safe. Where does the primary responsibility for that actually lie? I would think each one of us should be alert, aware, able to keep ourselves inviolate, as far as is possible.
But we cannot do that. Not unless we, as a nation, as a people, as a culture, are willing to change our behaviour, our perceptions and our comfort levels. Consider this: Just two short weeks before the attacks on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in November 2008, I went in there to do some errands; my bags were thoroughly checked, my person was thoroughly checked and I was torn between indignation at the hold-up and gladness that the hotel was being so careful. The next week, I walked right in, without more than the most cursory and totally normal check. I did wonder, but without too much effort spent on the exercise. Just a few days later, all hell broke loose.
Today, no cars are allowed into the hotel porch without special reason; no one is allowed into the building itself without a thorough search. And people – even those who remember the nightmare of those three days – have already started objecting to being examined, to being stopped before they go in, to being held up for the all-important minute or so that it takes for the check.
The same sort of thing happens with natural disaster too. We all read about the tsunami of Christmas time in 2004 and its aftermath, the death toll, the number of missing, the devastation of land and families that nature brought with it. Some of the responsibility for the toll the wave took lay with man, with intemperate destruction of the shoreline, leaving it vulnerable to even the mildest attack, the lack of safety measures along a coast that could be thus destroyed, the instability of homes and the total incompetence of the authorities to deal with the situation. And then there was the great flood of 2005 in Mumbai, when the city was forced to a standstill, about 5000 people died, incalculable financial losses were incurred and innumerable homes were destroyed.
Today, we still moan about waterlogging, but we do not stop ourselves throwing garbage into the waterways and drains and clogging them. We still stay home in fear when a storm blows up, but we do not make sure that there will not be flooding through the streets of the city, there will not be delays in travel and there will not be deaths by drowning or disease.
And where it comes to earthquakes, we will never learn. True, we cannot predict when a quake will hit, but we can make sure that we do not indulge in excessive deforestation and thus make mountain slopes fragile, we do not make buildings that are earthquake proof, we do not make sure that response teams are trained and equipped to handle the movement of the earth without delay or inefficient fumbling.
From that point of view, the aftermath earthquake that struck last Sunday in Sikkim was amazingly well managed – or so it seems, perhaps because the area is not too highly populated, and getting information from there is still not the easiest task right now. That may be the cynical way of looking at it, but it is true. The 6.8 Richter earthquake has so far resulted in about 60 deaths, though another figure puts the fatalities at 98 till now. Thick fog is hampering relief and rescue operations, communications signals are not clear, if any links exist, and the terrain limits access. Landslides have caused much of the damage to life and property.
But have we learned from the previous quakes? In 2005 over 80,000 people died in northern India and Pakistan. In 2001, over 20,000 people died in Gujarat. In 1993, about 10,000 people died in Maharashtra. What comes next? That depends, I would think, on what we have learned from what has happened so far. It all depends on us…
Disaster is a part of life anywhere in the world. And as one disaster follows the other, as it will inevitably do, people learn from the first and are better prepared to face the second. Or so anyone would presume. But things are not that simple. Consider what happens in India, for instance. I am always writing about how we never seem to learn, how we fail to follow up with any degree of efficiency when we are badly hit by man or nature, and how we cannot understand what George Santayana meant when he said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We do not remember what went wrong and why, just as we cannot remember what we did when it happened and why it did not work. And when it happens again, as it will, we are not ready to deal with it.
All this sounds obscure, right? Actually, it is very simple. And it comes back to haunt me, you, all of us each time.
Consider the recent bomb blasts in Mumbai – how much have we changed since the previous blasts just a few years earlier? And then there was a bomb that went off in a crowded location in Delhi just a couple of weeks ago; people are still dying from that one. Have we learned how to prevent this sort of attack, or do we now know how to handle the consequences of not remembering? People are still dying. People are still not willing to fix themselves and thus help fix the situation. What are they doing instead? Blaming the government for not keeping them secure, for not being able to prevent such attacks, for not seeing that our country and its citizens are safe. Where does the primary responsibility for that actually lie? I would think each one of us should be alert, aware, able to keep ourselves inviolate, as far as is possible.
But we cannot do that. Not unless we, as a nation, as a people, as a culture, are willing to change our behaviour, our perceptions and our comfort levels. Consider this: Just two short weeks before the attacks on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in November 2008, I went in there to do some errands; my bags were thoroughly checked, my person was thoroughly checked and I was torn between indignation at the hold-up and gladness that the hotel was being so careful. The next week, I walked right in, without more than the most cursory and totally normal check. I did wonder, but without too much effort spent on the exercise. Just a few days later, all hell broke loose.
Today, no cars are allowed into the hotel porch without special reason; no one is allowed into the building itself without a thorough search. And people – even those who remember the nightmare of those three days – have already started objecting to being examined, to being stopped before they go in, to being held up for the all-important minute or so that it takes for the check.
The same sort of thing happens with natural disaster too. We all read about the tsunami of Christmas time in 2004 and its aftermath, the death toll, the number of missing, the devastation of land and families that nature brought with it. Some of the responsibility for the toll the wave took lay with man, with intemperate destruction of the shoreline, leaving it vulnerable to even the mildest attack, the lack of safety measures along a coast that could be thus destroyed, the instability of homes and the total incompetence of the authorities to deal with the situation. And then there was the great flood of 2005 in Mumbai, when the city was forced to a standstill, about 5000 people died, incalculable financial losses were incurred and innumerable homes were destroyed.
Today, we still moan about waterlogging, but we do not stop ourselves throwing garbage into the waterways and drains and clogging them. We still stay home in fear when a storm blows up, but we do not make sure that there will not be flooding through the streets of the city, there will not be delays in travel and there will not be deaths by drowning or disease.
And where it comes to earthquakes, we will never learn. True, we cannot predict when a quake will hit, but we can make sure that we do not indulge in excessive deforestation and thus make mountain slopes fragile, we do not make buildings that are earthquake proof, we do not make sure that response teams are trained and equipped to handle the movement of the earth without delay or inefficient fumbling.
From that point of view, the aftermath earthquake that struck last Sunday in Sikkim was amazingly well managed – or so it seems, perhaps because the area is not too highly populated, and getting information from there is still not the easiest task right now. That may be the cynical way of looking at it, but it is true. The 6.8 Richter earthquake has so far resulted in about 60 deaths, though another figure puts the fatalities at 98 till now. Thick fog is hampering relief and rescue operations, communications signals are not clear, if any links exist, and the terrain limits access. Landslides have caused much of the damage to life and property.
But have we learned from the previous quakes? In 2005 over 80,000 people died in northern India and Pakistan. In 2001, over 20,000 people died in Gujarat. In 1993, about 10,000 people died in Maharashtra. What comes next? That depends, I would think, on what we have learned from what has happened so far. It all depends on us…
And terror knocks on our door…again!
(bdnews24.com, September 13, 2011)
After 26/11, 2008, when ten terrorists came sneaking in to Mumbai and held hundreds of people and a whole city hostage, we promised ourselves that it would never happen again. We tightened our heartstrings, our belts and our security systems and battened down the hatches that had allowed the baddies to come sneaking into our turf. Or, at least, we promised to do so.
That it didn’t work completely, that it was not foolproof, is another story altogether. For the time being, we felt like something had been done to keep our collective future safe. Unfortunately, it all happened again, in another time, another place, another avatar. Only a few months ago, on July 13, three bombs detonated in crowded parts of Mumbai city, where there was nowhere to run to; 26 people died, about 130 were injured, some still in hospital.
Then, only a couple of days ago, on September 7, there was more death, this time in the Indian capital of New Delhi. A bomb set in a briefcase was placed just outside the High Court gate, where the crowd was thickest, where people stood waiting to collect passes to enter the hallowed precincts. In the ensuing mayhem, ten people died, at least 75 were injured; three more are now dead after serious injuries.
Who does this? Whom do we hold responsible for killing our loved ones? Who are these people who cause pain to so many, not just those who are hurt by their misdeeds? Do we call them the bad guys, the villains of the piece, the anti-heroes? Or are they just misguided folk trying to get a point across and using violence to do so just because nothing else works? What is the deal?
In the Mumbai carnage of 2008, nine out of ten terrorists were killed. The last is in jail, awaiting death. They came from a neighbouring country, which still protests any links with them. They came to cause chaos, to destabilise, to damage, to prejudice any kind of positive bond that could possibly be forming between the two countries. And to some extent they did succeed, since any bloodshed does make diplomacy stop and take a deep breath, but no permanent damage was done. The peace process will continue, overtures will be made again and yet again, and life will go on in the subcontinent, accusations, maladjustments and mania notwithstanding.
The July blasts in Mumbai, on the other hand, have no known perpetrators, at least none that the government is telling us about. Some unseen hand is directing people to come in, sneak in, tiptoe in to our cities, plant deadly devices and rain down death. Why? Who knows. Who? Who knows. How? Who knows. And what do they get from doing this? Who knows!
And this week in Delhi? Why? Who? How? Nothing is certain, but the Delhi police was sent an email just hours after the bomb went off, saying that there will be another such attack, this time likely in Ahmedabad, that little bit closer to Mumbai. Before that, two more emails were received – one said that the bomb had been planted by the HuJI or Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, a terrorist group that demanded that the death sentence of Afzal Guru, in jail now for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building, be commuted.
The battle has been raging for years now, with everyone from human rights activists to local freedom fighters to terror groups in the fray. This particular email has been traced to Jammu and a manhunt is on. But to complicate the matter, another email was received by a local television news channel that claimed that the Indian Mujahideen was responsible for the bomb, but without any raison d’etre or details. Apparently Google has been asked to help trace this one back to its sender.
What is distressing about almost any violence is that it is not a precise, cold, simple strike. The collateral damage is huge, beyond comprehension. Innocent lives are inevitably lost – this may sound like a cliché, but there is no other sane way to describe what happens. Someone just walking past to buy an ice cream, a child chasing a ball, a woman waiting for a bus, a young man talking to his girl on the phone, a grandfather holding a balloon for his granddaughter as she ties her shoelaces…they all are blown to bits by a bomb that does not target them. They die instantly, or wait for death in a hospital bed.
And they leave behind families, friends, people who mourn even as they get on with their lives. Some of these people may decide to react, sometimes with the same violence, the same anger, the same heat, the same fanaticism.
And then they enter the cycle that never has an end…except in death.
After 26/11, 2008, when ten terrorists came sneaking in to Mumbai and held hundreds of people and a whole city hostage, we promised ourselves that it would never happen again. We tightened our heartstrings, our belts and our security systems and battened down the hatches that had allowed the baddies to come sneaking into our turf. Or, at least, we promised to do so.
That it didn’t work completely, that it was not foolproof, is another story altogether. For the time being, we felt like something had been done to keep our collective future safe. Unfortunately, it all happened again, in another time, another place, another avatar. Only a few months ago, on July 13, three bombs detonated in crowded parts of Mumbai city, where there was nowhere to run to; 26 people died, about 130 were injured, some still in hospital.
Then, only a couple of days ago, on September 7, there was more death, this time in the Indian capital of New Delhi. A bomb set in a briefcase was placed just outside the High Court gate, where the crowd was thickest, where people stood waiting to collect passes to enter the hallowed precincts. In the ensuing mayhem, ten people died, at least 75 were injured; three more are now dead after serious injuries.
Who does this? Whom do we hold responsible for killing our loved ones? Who are these people who cause pain to so many, not just those who are hurt by their misdeeds? Do we call them the bad guys, the villains of the piece, the anti-heroes? Or are they just misguided folk trying to get a point across and using violence to do so just because nothing else works? What is the deal?
In the Mumbai carnage of 2008, nine out of ten terrorists were killed. The last is in jail, awaiting death. They came from a neighbouring country, which still protests any links with them. They came to cause chaos, to destabilise, to damage, to prejudice any kind of positive bond that could possibly be forming between the two countries. And to some extent they did succeed, since any bloodshed does make diplomacy stop and take a deep breath, but no permanent damage was done. The peace process will continue, overtures will be made again and yet again, and life will go on in the subcontinent, accusations, maladjustments and mania notwithstanding.
The July blasts in Mumbai, on the other hand, have no known perpetrators, at least none that the government is telling us about. Some unseen hand is directing people to come in, sneak in, tiptoe in to our cities, plant deadly devices and rain down death. Why? Who knows. Who? Who knows. How? Who knows. And what do they get from doing this? Who knows!
And this week in Delhi? Why? Who? How? Nothing is certain, but the Delhi police was sent an email just hours after the bomb went off, saying that there will be another such attack, this time likely in Ahmedabad, that little bit closer to Mumbai. Before that, two more emails were received – one said that the bomb had been planted by the HuJI or Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, a terrorist group that demanded that the death sentence of Afzal Guru, in jail now for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building, be commuted.
The battle has been raging for years now, with everyone from human rights activists to local freedom fighters to terror groups in the fray. This particular email has been traced to Jammu and a manhunt is on. But to complicate the matter, another email was received by a local television news channel that claimed that the Indian Mujahideen was responsible for the bomb, but without any raison d’etre or details. Apparently Google has been asked to help trace this one back to its sender.
What is distressing about almost any violence is that it is not a precise, cold, simple strike. The collateral damage is huge, beyond comprehension. Innocent lives are inevitably lost – this may sound like a cliché, but there is no other sane way to describe what happens. Someone just walking past to buy an ice cream, a child chasing a ball, a woman waiting for a bus, a young man talking to his girl on the phone, a grandfather holding a balloon for his granddaughter as she ties her shoelaces…they all are blown to bits by a bomb that does not target them. They die instantly, or wait for death in a hospital bed.
And they leave behind families, friends, people who mourn even as they get on with their lives. Some of these people may decide to react, sometimes with the same violence, the same anger, the same heat, the same fanaticism.
And then they enter the cycle that never has an end…except in death.
Longing for that old-fashioned filmi fun
(The Bengal Post, September 18, 2011)
Once upon a time heroes were heroes and a vamp did a little seducing. The big screen came alive with stereotypes and no one ever wondered why the bad guy was doing good things, or even if the bad guy was bad, after all. Which is what happens when I watch a movie made in Bollywood – with apologies to a stalwart named Amitabh Bachchan, who decries the use of that terribly useful term to describe an entire industry that is based in Mumbai, even though the B in Bollywood actually came from the old name of the city: Bombay. Be all that as it may, I sometimes long for the day when I knew what was going to happen next in a film, and enjoyed not just the strangely expected twist in the plot, but every cliché and predictable catchphrase that was part of the dialogue, the story and the song sequences. Today I never know who is going to do what and why, and who will run around which tree with whom but end the movie with someone else…or something like that, anyway. I miss that good, old-fashioned and totally trite progression of a film from introductory scene to the climax. And I feel huge amounts of nostalgia when I see the good guys being bad, the bad guys being heroes and the heroine wiggling and jiggling somewhere I between creating merry mayhem in the emotional well-being of men and women alike with no real reason to do so except sheer wickedness and a need to make some noise at the box office.
Thus it was, a long time ago, maybe even as far back as last year. The hero and the heroine were good people, young, carefree, happy, dealing with family, education, stress and growing up with a lovely insouciance that made me, as a viewer, as happy, carefree, ad infinitum. The closest that we have come with any degree of significance to that in recent times is a funny little film called Ajab Prem ki Gajab Kahaani, starring the charming Ranbir Kapoor and the lovely Katrina Kaif as well as a host of other people who came and went as the plot dictated and never really did much beyond being able supporters of the main leads. The two danced, they sang, they played games, they fell in love – not necessarily with each other – and eventually, after some trial, error, twists and turns, got married to – I hoped – live happily ever after. There was really no lesson presented to be learned, no moralistic sledgehammer, no cause promoted. It was a happy film, not commenting on social issues or presenting a doom and gloom scenario that reeked of reality. I laughed when I was supposed to, and I knew when that was; I also understood when I was supposed to be sad and though I may not have cried, I did see that I was not really meant to. But Ajab Prem… is a rare instance of a totally clichéd and feelgood film that did its job as well as it could be done. Since then, there have been others, from F.A.L.T.U. to Delhi Belly, with so many shades in between many of them not many in any way special, that came, made a lot of noise and left, without telling me just what was going on and why. I am left feeling sad at the vacuum.
I liked it the way it was. I liked it when Bindu or Helen or Padma Khanna or even Mumtaz, in her very young days, heaved her bosom and sang seductively to lure the men on and off screen in to watch her. While the heaving bosom was not the charm for me, the ambience of the scene as it unfolded, was. There was magic when Helen stood on the bridge holding a parasol and singing Mera naam hai Chin Chin Choo, as much enchantment as when she cavorted, insisting that Yeh mera dil, around a grim Amitabh Bachchan in Don, dressed in a white and gold cut out frock and showing off every overblown curve. And when she did her best to distract the leering Gabbar Singh with her sinuous moves in Mehbooba oh mehbooba, I brushed sand out of my eyes and waited for the action to begin, since I knew that a fight sequence after an “item song” was like toast and butter, lightning and thunder, the Internet and Google, an inevitable partnership. And what Helen did, no one else has been able to, not even the chameleonic Kareena Kapoor in the Farhan Akhtar-Shahrukh Khan version of Don, where the lady wriggled on a shag rug (no pun intended, honestly) wearing a glittery gold dress (Kareena, not the rug, of course).
There was another spell being cast alongside the music and Helen. The whole egg-chucking, bottom-bashing, water-spraying, broom wielding way of the filmi world, so wonderfully epitomised in films like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, Ishq, Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke and so many David Dhawan-Govinda productions has yielded to far more intellectual humour, as seen in Waisa Bhi Hota Hai II, Tere Bin Laden and the aforementioned Delhi Belly. There is a brand of slapstick in movies like Golmaal and its successors, Ajay Devgn’s Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge, Double Dhamaal and so many other more recent films that have not rung firebells at the box office, but have done enough to make filmmakers consider more. But many of these rely on a brand of funny that is plain sly, not cleverly so, based heavily on sex and potty-jokes rather than the straight out bashed-on-the-head-with-a-balloon genre, which is a lot more fun, a lot more innocent, a lot more straightforward and a lot more watchable with a general audience.
And then there were the stars. Salman Khan kept it more or less clean, but spawned his own brand of saleable Hindi cinema, with a nice combination of self-deprecating humour, intensely muscular humour and shirtless body-beauty with a babe clinging to his arm style, which worked fabulously with the masses but somehow never gets critics happily clicking away with reviews and reports. He is not the Prem of Maine Pyaar Kiya or Hum Saath Saath Hain or even Hum Aapke Hain Kaun any more, all of whom I liked as real people. As he gets older, his stunts get madder and his fans get happier. Shahrukh Khan, on the other hand, is starting to take risks, do experiments, play with his look and plotlines and acting, even though the ‘romantic hero’ tag sticks firmly on him. Saif Ali Khan tries to do more than he started out with and has been successful in proving himself as a capable actor, but I miss that chocolate boy I liked in Yeh Dillagi, for instance. Akshay Kumar appealed more in the long-ago Dhadkan, with his glasses and preppie look, than in any of the silly films he has been part of more recently, be it the highly popular Singh is Kingg or the flop show Chandni Chowk to China. And Sunny Deol, the jingoistic, speech-yelling, Pakistani-bashing hero of Gadar has vanished into the filmi woodwork, surfacing only rarely with a not-great product and then sinking back into obscurity.
So where has the larger than life Hindi movie that I grew up with vanished to? Is life only about Salman’s pectorals and SRK’s NRI appeal? Since everything that goes around comes around, or so I am assured, I am looking forward to the good old days soon becoming the good new days again. Bollywood zindabad!
Once upon a time heroes were heroes and a vamp did a little seducing. The big screen came alive with stereotypes and no one ever wondered why the bad guy was doing good things, or even if the bad guy was bad, after all. Which is what happens when I watch a movie made in Bollywood – with apologies to a stalwart named Amitabh Bachchan, who decries the use of that terribly useful term to describe an entire industry that is based in Mumbai, even though the B in Bollywood actually came from the old name of the city: Bombay. Be all that as it may, I sometimes long for the day when I knew what was going to happen next in a film, and enjoyed not just the strangely expected twist in the plot, but every cliché and predictable catchphrase that was part of the dialogue, the story and the song sequences. Today I never know who is going to do what and why, and who will run around which tree with whom but end the movie with someone else…or something like that, anyway. I miss that good, old-fashioned and totally trite progression of a film from introductory scene to the climax. And I feel huge amounts of nostalgia when I see the good guys being bad, the bad guys being heroes and the heroine wiggling and jiggling somewhere I between creating merry mayhem in the emotional well-being of men and women alike with no real reason to do so except sheer wickedness and a need to make some noise at the box office.
Thus it was, a long time ago, maybe even as far back as last year. The hero and the heroine were good people, young, carefree, happy, dealing with family, education, stress and growing up with a lovely insouciance that made me, as a viewer, as happy, carefree, ad infinitum. The closest that we have come with any degree of significance to that in recent times is a funny little film called Ajab Prem ki Gajab Kahaani, starring the charming Ranbir Kapoor and the lovely Katrina Kaif as well as a host of other people who came and went as the plot dictated and never really did much beyond being able supporters of the main leads. The two danced, they sang, they played games, they fell in love – not necessarily with each other – and eventually, after some trial, error, twists and turns, got married to – I hoped – live happily ever after. There was really no lesson presented to be learned, no moralistic sledgehammer, no cause promoted. It was a happy film, not commenting on social issues or presenting a doom and gloom scenario that reeked of reality. I laughed when I was supposed to, and I knew when that was; I also understood when I was supposed to be sad and though I may not have cried, I did see that I was not really meant to. But Ajab Prem… is a rare instance of a totally clichéd and feelgood film that did its job as well as it could be done. Since then, there have been others, from F.A.L.T.U. to Delhi Belly, with so many shades in between many of them not many in any way special, that came, made a lot of noise and left, without telling me just what was going on and why. I am left feeling sad at the vacuum.
I liked it the way it was. I liked it when Bindu or Helen or Padma Khanna or even Mumtaz, in her very young days, heaved her bosom and sang seductively to lure the men on and off screen in to watch her. While the heaving bosom was not the charm for me, the ambience of the scene as it unfolded, was. There was magic when Helen stood on the bridge holding a parasol and singing Mera naam hai Chin Chin Choo, as much enchantment as when she cavorted, insisting that Yeh mera dil, around a grim Amitabh Bachchan in Don, dressed in a white and gold cut out frock and showing off every overblown curve. And when she did her best to distract the leering Gabbar Singh with her sinuous moves in Mehbooba oh mehbooba, I brushed sand out of my eyes and waited for the action to begin, since I knew that a fight sequence after an “item song” was like toast and butter, lightning and thunder, the Internet and Google, an inevitable partnership. And what Helen did, no one else has been able to, not even the chameleonic Kareena Kapoor in the Farhan Akhtar-Shahrukh Khan version of Don, where the lady wriggled on a shag rug (no pun intended, honestly) wearing a glittery gold dress (Kareena, not the rug, of course).
There was another spell being cast alongside the music and Helen. The whole egg-chucking, bottom-bashing, water-spraying, broom wielding way of the filmi world, so wonderfully epitomised in films like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, Ishq, Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke and so many David Dhawan-Govinda productions has yielded to far more intellectual humour, as seen in Waisa Bhi Hota Hai II, Tere Bin Laden and the aforementioned Delhi Belly. There is a brand of slapstick in movies like Golmaal and its successors, Ajay Devgn’s Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge, Double Dhamaal and so many other more recent films that have not rung firebells at the box office, but have done enough to make filmmakers consider more. But many of these rely on a brand of funny that is plain sly, not cleverly so, based heavily on sex and potty-jokes rather than the straight out bashed-on-the-head-with-a-balloon genre, which is a lot more fun, a lot more innocent, a lot more straightforward and a lot more watchable with a general audience.
And then there were the stars. Salman Khan kept it more or less clean, but spawned his own brand of saleable Hindi cinema, with a nice combination of self-deprecating humour, intensely muscular humour and shirtless body-beauty with a babe clinging to his arm style, which worked fabulously with the masses but somehow never gets critics happily clicking away with reviews and reports. He is not the Prem of Maine Pyaar Kiya or Hum Saath Saath Hain or even Hum Aapke Hain Kaun any more, all of whom I liked as real people. As he gets older, his stunts get madder and his fans get happier. Shahrukh Khan, on the other hand, is starting to take risks, do experiments, play with his look and plotlines and acting, even though the ‘romantic hero’ tag sticks firmly on him. Saif Ali Khan tries to do more than he started out with and has been successful in proving himself as a capable actor, but I miss that chocolate boy I liked in Yeh Dillagi, for instance. Akshay Kumar appealed more in the long-ago Dhadkan, with his glasses and preppie look, than in any of the silly films he has been part of more recently, be it the highly popular Singh is Kingg or the flop show Chandni Chowk to China. And Sunny Deol, the jingoistic, speech-yelling, Pakistani-bashing hero of Gadar has vanished into the filmi woodwork, surfacing only rarely with a not-great product and then sinking back into obscurity.
So where has the larger than life Hindi movie that I grew up with vanished to? Is life only about Salman’s pectorals and SRK’s NRI appeal? Since everything that goes around comes around, or so I am assured, I am looking forward to the good old days soon becoming the good new days again. Bollywood zindabad!
Sunday, September 04, 2011
God of all things
(bdnews24.com, September 4, 2011)
August 31 was Ganesh Chaturti in India, the day when the Lord Ganesha was born. He is the universally beloved Elephant God, the child with the head of a baby elephant, the adult with the head of a fully grown tusker. Mythology has a lot of explanations for the man-animal form of this deity, but one of my favourites is a well known story, told me with a little modernising in style and language. It may not have been conventionally and politically correctly presented, but it stuck and made more sense than the way the scriptures recorded it.
This is how my version went: Shiva and Parvati were married and happily so. One day, Shiva was out hunting, while Parvati decided she needed some me-time and decided to take a bath. But since all her companions were busy with their chores, she had no one to guard the bathroom door, which did not lock properly. So she had a good scrub and used the dead skin she rubbed off herself to fashion a small boy, whom she posted outside the door while she soaked a bit in the tub. But she had not told her rather possessive husband about what she had done, so when he came back from the hunt and decided to tell his wife all about it, he was startled to find that he could not enter the bathroom. There was a small boy standing outside who would not let him go in, saying that he had orders to do so. The argument raged for a while and then Shiva, tired, sweaty and fed up, pulled out his sword and cut off the boy’s head.
That was only the beginning. When Parvati heard the uproar outside she quickly rinsed off, got dressed and stepped out of the bathroom, only to find that the child she had created from her own body, her child, as it were, was lying there dead, decapitated, and that by her own husband! There were tears and curses and ultimatums and finally Shiva promised to restore the child to life. Unfortunately, during all this drama, a large bird had picked up the child’s head and flown off with it. Parvati stormed off to her friends, leaving her husband to sort out the whole issue. Shiva, annoyed and rather desperate to find a solution and mollify his wife, sent his men in every direction to find the first baby they could. He, too, went looking. The first baby he found was an elephant, young, lost and hungry. So he cut off its head, took it back to where the child’s body was lying and attached the two. A mantra was said, some gestures were made and, lo! A new baby was created! This one had the body of a human child and the head of an elephant, but as soon as Parvati saw it, she took it as her own son. And Ganesha was born.
In India, Ganesha is considered to be the destroyer of all evil, the remover of all obstacles, the protector of all life. He is prayed to before the start of anything good and in my home state of Maharashtra and my native South India, He is especially revered, with good food and hymns. They bring Him into the city on His birthday from hundreds of miles away where he is made with high-quality clay, plaster of Paris, reverence and prayers, on trucks, bullock carts and tempos, and install him with great love in elaborately decorated pandals or pavilions that often mirror the state of the nation and people’s sentiments.
This year, Anna Hazare and his fight against corruption will be a popular theme, with cricket, Salman Khan and potholes being favourite subjects. By using these as part of the Ganpati (which is another name for Him) celebrations, the aspects of everyday life that matter to everyman are reflected, mulled over, debated and finally laughed about. Occasionally, there is even a solution, very often the local communities getting together to use funds collected during the ten-day puja (period of worship) to help sort out things.
But what is extra special about this time of year is the genuine harmony that wraps around the average Mumbaikar – if I knew more about the rest of the country, I would probably include that too! There are fewer fights for a seat on the overcrowded trains, one less argument with that supermarket checkout boy, a smile for the lady who chugs along in her new Honda in the fast lane, even the maid who comes in long after she is supposed to and holds up your day.
There will be little, if any, communal battles, and women in burkhas and men in white kurtas with skull caps will stand in line to visit the Elephant God, along with their Hindu friends and neighbours. Sweets and crunchies are exchanged along with hugs, while fervent pleas, ardent prayers and heartfelt thanks echo through the streets. It is a time for celebration, a time to speak to Lord Ganesha, a time to be at peace. It is the Ganpati festival and all should be well with our world.
August 31 was Ganesh Chaturti in India, the day when the Lord Ganesha was born. He is the universally beloved Elephant God, the child with the head of a baby elephant, the adult with the head of a fully grown tusker. Mythology has a lot of explanations for the man-animal form of this deity, but one of my favourites is a well known story, told me with a little modernising in style and language. It may not have been conventionally and politically correctly presented, but it stuck and made more sense than the way the scriptures recorded it.
This is how my version went: Shiva and Parvati were married and happily so. One day, Shiva was out hunting, while Parvati decided she needed some me-time and decided to take a bath. But since all her companions were busy with their chores, she had no one to guard the bathroom door, which did not lock properly. So she had a good scrub and used the dead skin she rubbed off herself to fashion a small boy, whom she posted outside the door while she soaked a bit in the tub. But she had not told her rather possessive husband about what she had done, so when he came back from the hunt and decided to tell his wife all about it, he was startled to find that he could not enter the bathroom. There was a small boy standing outside who would not let him go in, saying that he had orders to do so. The argument raged for a while and then Shiva, tired, sweaty and fed up, pulled out his sword and cut off the boy’s head.
That was only the beginning. When Parvati heard the uproar outside she quickly rinsed off, got dressed and stepped out of the bathroom, only to find that the child she had created from her own body, her child, as it were, was lying there dead, decapitated, and that by her own husband! There were tears and curses and ultimatums and finally Shiva promised to restore the child to life. Unfortunately, during all this drama, a large bird had picked up the child’s head and flown off with it. Parvati stormed off to her friends, leaving her husband to sort out the whole issue. Shiva, annoyed and rather desperate to find a solution and mollify his wife, sent his men in every direction to find the first baby they could. He, too, went looking. The first baby he found was an elephant, young, lost and hungry. So he cut off its head, took it back to where the child’s body was lying and attached the two. A mantra was said, some gestures were made and, lo! A new baby was created! This one had the body of a human child and the head of an elephant, but as soon as Parvati saw it, she took it as her own son. And Ganesha was born.
In India, Ganesha is considered to be the destroyer of all evil, the remover of all obstacles, the protector of all life. He is prayed to before the start of anything good and in my home state of Maharashtra and my native South India, He is especially revered, with good food and hymns. They bring Him into the city on His birthday from hundreds of miles away where he is made with high-quality clay, plaster of Paris, reverence and prayers, on trucks, bullock carts and tempos, and install him with great love in elaborately decorated pandals or pavilions that often mirror the state of the nation and people’s sentiments.
This year, Anna Hazare and his fight against corruption will be a popular theme, with cricket, Salman Khan and potholes being favourite subjects. By using these as part of the Ganpati (which is another name for Him) celebrations, the aspects of everyday life that matter to everyman are reflected, mulled over, debated and finally laughed about. Occasionally, there is even a solution, very often the local communities getting together to use funds collected during the ten-day puja (period of worship) to help sort out things.
But what is extra special about this time of year is the genuine harmony that wraps around the average Mumbaikar – if I knew more about the rest of the country, I would probably include that too! There are fewer fights for a seat on the overcrowded trains, one less argument with that supermarket checkout boy, a smile for the lady who chugs along in her new Honda in the fast lane, even the maid who comes in long after she is supposed to and holds up your day.
There will be little, if any, communal battles, and women in burkhas and men in white kurtas with skull caps will stand in line to visit the Elephant God, along with their Hindu friends and neighbours. Sweets and crunchies are exchanged along with hugs, while fervent pleas, ardent prayers and heartfelt thanks echo through the streets. It is a time for celebration, a time to speak to Lord Ganesha, a time to be at peace. It is the Ganpati festival and all should be well with our world.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Shammi Kapoor: India's own Elvis
(bdnews24.com, August 26, 2011)
Many years ago, when I was in graduate school in the United States, I saw my first Shammi Kapoor film. I was staying with an Indian friend and knew next to nothing about Hindi movies, stars or anything about the place called Bollywood that existed in and around my home city of Mumbai. But as I sat with my friend’s small daughter cuddled on my lap and watched this portly gentleman slide down in the snow yelling what sounded like “Yahoo!”, I caught the first spark in what eventually became a fascination with the world of Indian cinema. The word was indeed ‘Yahoo’, the snow was packed against a hillside in Kashmir and the stout man was Shammi Kapoor.
The film was Junglee, a classic black and white movie that created a special brand of history when it was released and made its hero and heroine (Saira Banu) stars. And as I started to get more familiar with the music of the hundreds of Bollywood productions that my friends knew so much about, the tunes stayed in my head, along with the many interesting bits of information I heard, read and saw about this exotic new (for me) realm.
It got better – once I started working on the Internet, creating online versions of magazines, writing content for websites and using cyberspace to talk to friends, find information and enjoy discovering new concepts and facts, Shammi Kapoor played a surprisingly non-filmi role. I learned that the star had retired many years before I saw that sliding-in-the-snow routine. He was ill with kidney trouble, underwent regular dialysis and did the occasional cameo in a film.
But, more interestingly, he had a fairly full life that had little, if any, connection with films. He was the founder and chairman of the Internet Users Community of India (IUCI) and had played a major role in setting up the Ethical Hackers Association. Best of all for his fan club, he also maintained a website dedicated to the Kapoor family.
And that perhaps is the story of a star. Born on October 21, 1931, into the first family of Hindi films, as it is often called, Shamsher Raj Kapoor was the son of Prithviraj and Ramsharni Kapoor, brother to Raj and Shashi. He spent a few years in Kolkata, where his father acted in films, and then the family moved to Bombay, as it was known then. Academics was not his forte and he preferred to start working first in his father’s company, Prithvi Theatres, and then as a junior artiste in films – he made his big screen debut as a hero in 1953, with Jeevan Jyoti, co-starring Chand Usmani.
Serious roles got him nowhere near the big time, and he was almost forced into a change of image with Nasir Hussain’s Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1959), with a young Ameeta as his heroine. Dil Deke Dekho with Asha Parekh cemented this new avatar in the minds of the audience and Shammi Kapoor was labelled a ‘star’. Tall, athletic, light-eyed and handsome, his looks made it even easier, while his wealthy playboy persona seemed true to life and won hearts all over the world. Junglee was followed by Dil Tera Diwana, Professor, China Town, Rajkumar, Kashmir Ki Kali, Janwar, Teesri Manzil, An Evening in Paris, Bramhachari, Andaz and Vidhaata.
Music played a huge part in Shammi Kapoor’s success. Most of his super hit songs came from the composers Shankar-Jaikishen or OP Nayyar, and were sung by Mohammed Rafi. They include – apart from the exuberant ‘Yahoo…Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe’, of course - Suku Suku, Ae Gulbadan, Govinda Aala Re, Deewana Hua Badal, Tumne Pukara Aur Hum Chale Aaye,Tumse Achha Kaun Hai, O Mere Sona Re, Akele Akele Kahan Jaa Rahe Ho, Aajkal Tere Mere Pyar ke Charche, Badan pe Sitare and Hain Na Bolo Bolo. We all remember those and can sing along with them.
But even as we do, we tend to close our eyes rather than watch Shammi Kapoor on the screen in so many of his films. He may have started out as a handsome, agile, gloriously ogle-able heartthrob, but soon gained a lot of weight and became lined, ungainly, unappealing. By the 1970s he had stopped acting as hero and did character roles in films.
He even directed two films – Manoranjan and Bundal Baaz, neither too successful. And earlier this year, he managed to shoot for his grand-nephew Ranbir Kapoor’s next movie, Rockstar. But by then he was fairly seriously ill with kidney failure. And early morning on August 14, he died in Mumbai.
Shammi Kapoor is an integral part of Hindi movie history. He was called the ‘Elvis of India’ and sang, danced and romanced on the big screen like few others have managed to do. For his sheer joie de vivre and the memories of friendship, movies, music and masti that his work have given me, I will always be a fan.
Many years ago, when I was in graduate school in the United States, I saw my first Shammi Kapoor film. I was staying with an Indian friend and knew next to nothing about Hindi movies, stars or anything about the place called Bollywood that existed in and around my home city of Mumbai. But as I sat with my friend’s small daughter cuddled on my lap and watched this portly gentleman slide down in the snow yelling what sounded like “Yahoo!”, I caught the first spark in what eventually became a fascination with the world of Indian cinema. The word was indeed ‘Yahoo’, the snow was packed against a hillside in Kashmir and the stout man was Shammi Kapoor.
The film was Junglee, a classic black and white movie that created a special brand of history when it was released and made its hero and heroine (Saira Banu) stars. And as I started to get more familiar with the music of the hundreds of Bollywood productions that my friends knew so much about, the tunes stayed in my head, along with the many interesting bits of information I heard, read and saw about this exotic new (for me) realm.
It got better – once I started working on the Internet, creating online versions of magazines, writing content for websites and using cyberspace to talk to friends, find information and enjoy discovering new concepts and facts, Shammi Kapoor played a surprisingly non-filmi role. I learned that the star had retired many years before I saw that sliding-in-the-snow routine. He was ill with kidney trouble, underwent regular dialysis and did the occasional cameo in a film.
But, more interestingly, he had a fairly full life that had little, if any, connection with films. He was the founder and chairman of the Internet Users Community of India (IUCI) and had played a major role in setting up the Ethical Hackers Association. Best of all for his fan club, he also maintained a website dedicated to the Kapoor family.
And that perhaps is the story of a star. Born on October 21, 1931, into the first family of Hindi films, as it is often called, Shamsher Raj Kapoor was the son of Prithviraj and Ramsharni Kapoor, brother to Raj and Shashi. He spent a few years in Kolkata, where his father acted in films, and then the family moved to Bombay, as it was known then. Academics was not his forte and he preferred to start working first in his father’s company, Prithvi Theatres, and then as a junior artiste in films – he made his big screen debut as a hero in 1953, with Jeevan Jyoti, co-starring Chand Usmani.
Serious roles got him nowhere near the big time, and he was almost forced into a change of image with Nasir Hussain’s Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1959), with a young Ameeta as his heroine. Dil Deke Dekho with Asha Parekh cemented this new avatar in the minds of the audience and Shammi Kapoor was labelled a ‘star’. Tall, athletic, light-eyed and handsome, his looks made it even easier, while his wealthy playboy persona seemed true to life and won hearts all over the world. Junglee was followed by Dil Tera Diwana, Professor, China Town, Rajkumar, Kashmir Ki Kali, Janwar, Teesri Manzil, An Evening in Paris, Bramhachari, Andaz and Vidhaata.
Music played a huge part in Shammi Kapoor’s success. Most of his super hit songs came from the composers Shankar-Jaikishen or OP Nayyar, and were sung by Mohammed Rafi. They include – apart from the exuberant ‘Yahoo…Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe’, of course - Suku Suku, Ae Gulbadan, Govinda Aala Re, Deewana Hua Badal, Tumne Pukara Aur Hum Chale Aaye,Tumse Achha Kaun Hai, O Mere Sona Re, Akele Akele Kahan Jaa Rahe Ho, Aajkal Tere Mere Pyar ke Charche, Badan pe Sitare and Hain Na Bolo Bolo. We all remember those and can sing along with them.
But even as we do, we tend to close our eyes rather than watch Shammi Kapoor on the screen in so many of his films. He may have started out as a handsome, agile, gloriously ogle-able heartthrob, but soon gained a lot of weight and became lined, ungainly, unappealing. By the 1970s he had stopped acting as hero and did character roles in films.
He even directed two films – Manoranjan and Bundal Baaz, neither too successful. And earlier this year, he managed to shoot for his grand-nephew Ranbir Kapoor’s next movie, Rockstar. But by then he was fairly seriously ill with kidney failure. And early morning on August 14, he died in Mumbai.
Shammi Kapoor is an integral part of Hindi movie history. He was called the ‘Elvis of India’ and sang, danced and romanced on the big screen like few others have managed to do. For his sheer joie de vivre and the memories of friendship, movies, music and masti that his work have given me, I will always be a fan.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Book review - The Tiger's Wife
(The Times of India Crest Edition, August 19, 2011)
THE TIGER’S WIFE
Tea Obrecht
A book is generally the sum of its parts. There is the story, the characters, the development of the plot, the point of view, the overall coherence and, of course, the writing itself go a long way to making a book readable, buyable and, eventually successful. Once in a while, the entire package comes together beautifully, and you, as reader, will not just buy the book, but read it over and over again for the sheer pleasure of imbibing something worth owning. But sometimes a book comes along which makes sense in a strange way, for just the experience of being something different, with a story that is so unlike the norm, characters that make sense but are obviously not anyone you would know well and all in a setting that is unusual, magical, enjoyable. The writing may not be the best. The language may not be the most refined or evolved or even adult. The various parts could be disjointed and not all of a high quality. But the book does well, the critics love it and you, as reader, like it without being sure what is wrong with it, though you know there is something off-kilter. But, frankly, you don’t really care.
This is what happens with The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obrecht. The story is amazingly interesting, enchanting, casting a rarely used spell with its out-of-the-ordinary progress. It begins with the small girl-child Natalia being taken to the zoo by her grandfather. They have food for the animals, from cabbage heads for the hippos to sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the carriage, but what they really head for is the tiger cage. And, as they watch, the dustpan keeper is attacked by one of the big striped cats, his arm mauled and bleeding, a matter of shame for the man and frustration for the animal. When she grows up, Natalia becomes a doctor in the big city, like her grandfather was. All through her life – she ‘speaks’ when she is over 60 – the tiger has been a major influence on her family, somehow deeply connected to the copy of the Jungle Book that her grandfather has always kept, no matter what the circumstances.
Natalia is on her way to a seaside town orphanage somewhere in the Balkans to treat the children there when she is told that her grandfather has mysteriously passed away. The young doctor chases up the reason for his death, by going back along the path that he too while he was alive, going through the stories he had told her, the places they had been to together, the small pleasures that they had shared in the process. And along the way there are two stories that always resurface – of a tiger escaped from the zoo which prowled around the fictional village of Galina, and the ‘deathless man’ who is fated to live on in spite of whatever is done to him. The deathless man and the tiger walk side by side with Natalia’s grandfather through his life, whimsically appearing and vanishing in a complex puzzle that the reader tries to unravel as the story unfolds.
The tale has a special magic, the characters played out, the bonds strong, though lacking emotional depth and perhaps endurance, even the clichés making sense in their positions. Most of all it is the imagination of the author that carries most weight, making her well deserving of the applause that has come her way since the book was published. It is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort.
THE TIGER’S WIFE
Tea Obrecht
A book is generally the sum of its parts. There is the story, the characters, the development of the plot, the point of view, the overall coherence and, of course, the writing itself go a long way to making a book readable, buyable and, eventually successful. Once in a while, the entire package comes together beautifully, and you, as reader, will not just buy the book, but read it over and over again for the sheer pleasure of imbibing something worth owning. But sometimes a book comes along which makes sense in a strange way, for just the experience of being something different, with a story that is so unlike the norm, characters that make sense but are obviously not anyone you would know well and all in a setting that is unusual, magical, enjoyable. The writing may not be the best. The language may not be the most refined or evolved or even adult. The various parts could be disjointed and not all of a high quality. But the book does well, the critics love it and you, as reader, like it without being sure what is wrong with it, though you know there is something off-kilter. But, frankly, you don’t really care.
This is what happens with The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obrecht. The story is amazingly interesting, enchanting, casting a rarely used spell with its out-of-the-ordinary progress. It begins with the small girl-child Natalia being taken to the zoo by her grandfather. They have food for the animals, from cabbage heads for the hippos to sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the carriage, but what they really head for is the tiger cage. And, as they watch, the dustpan keeper is attacked by one of the big striped cats, his arm mauled and bleeding, a matter of shame for the man and frustration for the animal. When she grows up, Natalia becomes a doctor in the big city, like her grandfather was. All through her life – she ‘speaks’ when she is over 60 – the tiger has been a major influence on her family, somehow deeply connected to the copy of the Jungle Book that her grandfather has always kept, no matter what the circumstances.
Natalia is on her way to a seaside town orphanage somewhere in the Balkans to treat the children there when she is told that her grandfather has mysteriously passed away. The young doctor chases up the reason for his death, by going back along the path that he too while he was alive, going through the stories he had told her, the places they had been to together, the small pleasures that they had shared in the process. And along the way there are two stories that always resurface – of a tiger escaped from the zoo which prowled around the fictional village of Galina, and the ‘deathless man’ who is fated to live on in spite of whatever is done to him. The deathless man and the tiger walk side by side with Natalia’s grandfather through his life, whimsically appearing and vanishing in a complex puzzle that the reader tries to unravel as the story unfolds.
The tale has a special magic, the characters played out, the bonds strong, though lacking emotional depth and perhaps endurance, even the clichés making sense in their positions. Most of all it is the imagination of the author that carries most weight, making her well deserving of the applause that has come her way since the book was published. It is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort.
We all need a hero
For the past few months one small and unassuming man has been making a lot of noise all over my country, India. His name is Kisan Baburao Hazare, and he is usually known as Anna. He has a reason to make his presence felt and has much of this nation – educated and not, rich and poor, urban and rural – on his side, rooting for him.
The social activist is best known for his fight against corruption and, while his methods may be questionable, his goals are indeed noble, a cause worth doing battle for. And while a lot of my friends and others I know may support him and his way of getting heard, I certainly do not. But then, for now at least, he is a hero and all of us needs one of those every now and then, I know.
Hazare was born June 15, 1937, and does his work from a village in my home state of Maharashtra called Ralegaon Siddhi, a place he has been credited with helping to develop and structure into what is today known as a model township. As part of a family that was not very well off or highly educated, he was brought to the city by his aunt, who brought him up, educating him till the 7th grade. To bring some money into the family, he started working after that, selling flowers in central Mumbai. He prospered and brought two of his brothers to the city to work.
It is perhaps the next stage of his life that taught him much about strategy and battle – in 1962 the 25-year-old Hazare joined the army as a driver, posted near the Pakistan border at the Khem Karan sector. In an air attack on Indian bases in 1865, Hazare narrowly escaped death, but his comrades were all killed – this started him thinking about the purpose and meaning of life and death and set him on the path of reform and service of the less advantaged. A road accident in the mid-70s was the true turning point – that decided Hazare’s future; he vowed to dedicate his life to the service of humanity. He was 38.
Hazare retired from the army in 1978. Much of his work centred around the small village of Ralegaon Siddhi, where he worked on development and in fighting alcoholism. In that battle, he was unstintingly harsh. Hazare himself flogged drunk villagers and justified his actions: “Rural India is a harsh society. Doesn’t a mother administer bitter medicines to a sick child when she knows that the medicine can cure her child? The child may not like the medicine, but the mother does it only because she cares for the child. The alcoholics were punished so that their families would not be destroyed.” And the tough love seemed to pay off; he became the crusader, the saviour, the hero.
Soon Hazare’s work and its ambit had stretched to cover more than just one village and more than the issues he was already known for. He battled politicians and industry alike, laying the foundation for the Right to Information Act, among other milestones. This time, over the past few months, his aim is to wipe out a national ailment: corruption. He has proposed to the Indian government the Jan Lokpal Bill, a law to establish an ombudsman, or Lokpal, who has the power to deal with the problem of corruption in public office – from the prime minister to a less exalted minion in the corridors of government.
On April 5 this year, he decided to begin a fast unto death at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi to push the Indian government into taking action on a strong anti-corruption act. The fast ended four days later, when the government agreed to his demands, hoping to get him out of the spotlight, but Hazare’s name had already become a buzzword all over the country.
For so many reasons, the little man from a little village is now a national figure, respected, almost revered, by luminaries like social activists Medha Patkar and Arvind Kejriwal, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, spiritual leaders Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Ramdev and Swami Agnivesh, former Indian cricketer Kapil Dev, along with countless less well-known people nation-wide. The protests continue, every now and then flaring up into mass rallies and marches, as Anna Hazare and his team find new issues to object to – the arrest of Baba Ramdev, the draft of the Lokpal Bill, something a government official said, a new sugar factory, an obscure point in the draft being considered for approval…anything that could even remotely be contentious becomes so.
Along the way, there is a lot that I cannot understand. If – as so many people call him – this ‘new Gandhi’ is really on the side of progress, why is he stopping a city like Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, working with his rallies and protest marches? Does he realise that one day off work can mean the difference between starvation and a meal for some of the urban poor? Why are so many people, some extremely well qualified, highly educated, reputed as thinkers, see him as such a significant presence today? Are they all – are we all – so tired of the way India survives with corruption as an everyday- every moment companion to accomplishment of anything from getting a ration card to gaining admission into primary school? We are. I am.
But do I believe in Anna Hazare as the solution to all the problems faced by a modern, progressive and developing nation? No, I don’t. I would, frankly, stop all these marches, rallies, protests and find a way to keep myself free from any taint of corruption first, be it paying a cop for a traffic offence or accepting a favour for writing a story published in a newspaper. It starts with me. As an individual, I can make a difference, quietly, effectively, without having to make any noise about it, without playing a tangled game of politics in doing it, without confrontation and hordes of unwashed people gathering in a public space and creating chaos and disrupting life. To me, for me, that is where the battle can really be won: in me, with me, by me.
The social activist is best known for his fight against corruption and, while his methods may be questionable, his goals are indeed noble, a cause worth doing battle for. And while a lot of my friends and others I know may support him and his way of getting heard, I certainly do not. But then, for now at least, he is a hero and all of us needs one of those every now and then, I know.
Hazare was born June 15, 1937, and does his work from a village in my home state of Maharashtra called Ralegaon Siddhi, a place he has been credited with helping to develop and structure into what is today known as a model township. As part of a family that was not very well off or highly educated, he was brought to the city by his aunt, who brought him up, educating him till the 7th grade. To bring some money into the family, he started working after that, selling flowers in central Mumbai. He prospered and brought two of his brothers to the city to work.
It is perhaps the next stage of his life that taught him much about strategy and battle – in 1962 the 25-year-old Hazare joined the army as a driver, posted near the Pakistan border at the Khem Karan sector. In an air attack on Indian bases in 1865, Hazare narrowly escaped death, but his comrades were all killed – this started him thinking about the purpose and meaning of life and death and set him on the path of reform and service of the less advantaged. A road accident in the mid-70s was the true turning point – that decided Hazare’s future; he vowed to dedicate his life to the service of humanity. He was 38.
Hazare retired from the army in 1978. Much of his work centred around the small village of Ralegaon Siddhi, where he worked on development and in fighting alcoholism. In that battle, he was unstintingly harsh. Hazare himself flogged drunk villagers and justified his actions: “Rural India is a harsh society. Doesn’t a mother administer bitter medicines to a sick child when she knows that the medicine can cure her child? The child may not like the medicine, but the mother does it only because she cares for the child. The alcoholics were punished so that their families would not be destroyed.” And the tough love seemed to pay off; he became the crusader, the saviour, the hero.
Soon Hazare’s work and its ambit had stretched to cover more than just one village and more than the issues he was already known for. He battled politicians and industry alike, laying the foundation for the Right to Information Act, among other milestones. This time, over the past few months, his aim is to wipe out a national ailment: corruption. He has proposed to the Indian government the Jan Lokpal Bill, a law to establish an ombudsman, or Lokpal, who has the power to deal with the problem of corruption in public office – from the prime minister to a less exalted minion in the corridors of government.
On April 5 this year, he decided to begin a fast unto death at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi to push the Indian government into taking action on a strong anti-corruption act. The fast ended four days later, when the government agreed to his demands, hoping to get him out of the spotlight, but Hazare’s name had already become a buzzword all over the country.
For so many reasons, the little man from a little village is now a national figure, respected, almost revered, by luminaries like social activists Medha Patkar and Arvind Kejriwal, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, spiritual leaders Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Ramdev and Swami Agnivesh, former Indian cricketer Kapil Dev, along with countless less well-known people nation-wide. The protests continue, every now and then flaring up into mass rallies and marches, as Anna Hazare and his team find new issues to object to – the arrest of Baba Ramdev, the draft of the Lokpal Bill, something a government official said, a new sugar factory, an obscure point in the draft being considered for approval…anything that could even remotely be contentious becomes so.
Along the way, there is a lot that I cannot understand. If – as so many people call him – this ‘new Gandhi’ is really on the side of progress, why is he stopping a city like Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, working with his rallies and protest marches? Does he realise that one day off work can mean the difference between starvation and a meal for some of the urban poor? Why are so many people, some extremely well qualified, highly educated, reputed as thinkers, see him as such a significant presence today? Are they all – are we all – so tired of the way India survives with corruption as an everyday- every moment companion to accomplishment of anything from getting a ration card to gaining admission into primary school? We are. I am.
But do I believe in Anna Hazare as the solution to all the problems faced by a modern, progressive and developing nation? No, I don’t. I would, frankly, stop all these marches, rallies, protests and find a way to keep myself free from any taint of corruption first, be it paying a cop for a traffic offence or accepting a favour for writing a story published in a newspaper. It starts with me. As an individual, I can make a difference, quietly, effectively, without having to make any noise about it, without playing a tangled game of politics in doing it, without confrontation and hordes of unwashed people gathering in a public space and creating chaos and disrupting life. To me, for me, that is where the battle can really be won: in me, with me, by me.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The freedom to be independent
(bdnews24.com, August 14, 2011)
It is the 65th year of my country’s independence on August 15, and I feel a strange sense of joy at knowing I am part of a nation that has earned its freedom. We – my grandparents’ generation actually – fought long and hard to earn that right and took huge risks, sacrificed their lives, their homes, their families to get it all. They gave it to us as a kind of birthright, something we never worked to get, something we took and still take for granted. And 64 years is a long time for anyone to learn how to be free. But what bothers me is one simple question: Have we deserved that same freedom? I wonder.
With freedom comes responsibility, maturity, ambition, ethics, honesty, reliability, accountability…so many add-ons that it gets bewildering. Freedom is not just about not needing to carry a permit to get in and out of anywhere, to be able to work and live as you may wish to or to be able to exist without persecution and prosecution for your sheer existence. It is far more than material; it has to be ethical, almost spiritual. Freedom is about giving as much as it is about taking; it speaks of a need to be a useful productive, supportive, grown-up member of a family, a community, a society, a nation.
And so I wonder, are we doing all that? Are we, in fact, capable of doing any of it? I am honestly not too sure about that one.
Consider life as it is today. We face major issues like corruption, terrorism, inefficiency, instability, poverty, backwardness and goodness knows what else, all issues that seem to have no real solution, not unless we stop, end everything and start over again. We cannot, obviously, afford to do that. We have over the past few years battled immense economic problems, recovering amazingly well from a downturn, a recession, a gradual climb back up and a volatile job market that still is not up to par in many fields.
We have battled graft in so many different forms at so many different levels, finding the corrupt in more high places than we would ever have expected, from heads of state governments and prestigious departments to chiefs of the biggest and most successful corporations. Terrorism has been less terrorising than even a year ago, but the violence has not stopped – just recently there were three bomb blasts, one rapidly following the other, in parts of Mumbai that are highly populated and thus vulnerable.
There has been environmental crisis, with oil leaking into the sea after a ship was holed and slowly sank just off the coast of my home city; another threatens even as I write this. Our roads are a mess, with the infrastructure victim to corruption and inefficiency, putting lives at risk every day in every way – people die in uncovered manholes, after skidding on badly surfaced roads, after accidents caused by potholes and rash driving. And our government…well…the less said about its functioning and organisation, the better.
So are we a bad people in a bad nation? No, not at all. We have the drive, the knowledge, the experience, the ambition and, best of all, the ability to be all that is good and positive and successful. And we are, in many pockets, in many fields, in many ways. But, as always, the bad tends to overshadow the good, working against what we actually are and highlighting what we seem to be. We are a people of God, in so many ways, a people who believe that good always triumphs. We are a people who always accept, often understand and are willing to believe, just because that is the tradition we grow up with. And we are willing to work hard, in our individual capacities, to get where we think we should be, without shortcuts, if the system permits.
Now there is the problem. Very often, the system does not permit. We get stuck in the cracks that have developed with time and negligence and, to come extent, habit. We know that, for instance, it is easy to get away with a traffic offence, especially if it is minor, like jumping light or driving without a seatbelt; all we need to do, we have seen, is pay off the cop who has stopped us and then we proceed as if nothing had happened. We know, for instance, that to get a passport, we can, if we are willing, pay a gent standing outside the passport office and thereby jump a lot of lines and shortcut a lot of procedure that would normally take longer than we like. We know, for instance, that we can get a job that we are not really best qualified for by telling the headhunters that we are related to so-and-so or you-know-who and get a salary we do not really deserve. It is all a matter of the life we know…and this, unfortunately, is it.
So whom do we blame? Ourselves or the system? Either, both, all of the above. Freedom is a flexible concept that we can easily learn to use. We should start by doing a little growing up…then we will indeed be, as they say, Indians shining!
It is the 65th year of my country’s independence on August 15, and I feel a strange sense of joy at knowing I am part of a nation that has earned its freedom. We – my grandparents’ generation actually – fought long and hard to earn that right and took huge risks, sacrificed their lives, their homes, their families to get it all. They gave it to us as a kind of birthright, something we never worked to get, something we took and still take for granted. And 64 years is a long time for anyone to learn how to be free. But what bothers me is one simple question: Have we deserved that same freedom? I wonder.
With freedom comes responsibility, maturity, ambition, ethics, honesty, reliability, accountability…so many add-ons that it gets bewildering. Freedom is not just about not needing to carry a permit to get in and out of anywhere, to be able to work and live as you may wish to or to be able to exist without persecution and prosecution for your sheer existence. It is far more than material; it has to be ethical, almost spiritual. Freedom is about giving as much as it is about taking; it speaks of a need to be a useful productive, supportive, grown-up member of a family, a community, a society, a nation.
And so I wonder, are we doing all that? Are we, in fact, capable of doing any of it? I am honestly not too sure about that one.
Consider life as it is today. We face major issues like corruption, terrorism, inefficiency, instability, poverty, backwardness and goodness knows what else, all issues that seem to have no real solution, not unless we stop, end everything and start over again. We cannot, obviously, afford to do that. We have over the past few years battled immense economic problems, recovering amazingly well from a downturn, a recession, a gradual climb back up and a volatile job market that still is not up to par in many fields.
We have battled graft in so many different forms at so many different levels, finding the corrupt in more high places than we would ever have expected, from heads of state governments and prestigious departments to chiefs of the biggest and most successful corporations. Terrorism has been less terrorising than even a year ago, but the violence has not stopped – just recently there were three bomb blasts, one rapidly following the other, in parts of Mumbai that are highly populated and thus vulnerable.
There has been environmental crisis, with oil leaking into the sea after a ship was holed and slowly sank just off the coast of my home city; another threatens even as I write this. Our roads are a mess, with the infrastructure victim to corruption and inefficiency, putting lives at risk every day in every way – people die in uncovered manholes, after skidding on badly surfaced roads, after accidents caused by potholes and rash driving. And our government…well…the less said about its functioning and organisation, the better.
So are we a bad people in a bad nation? No, not at all. We have the drive, the knowledge, the experience, the ambition and, best of all, the ability to be all that is good and positive and successful. And we are, in many pockets, in many fields, in many ways. But, as always, the bad tends to overshadow the good, working against what we actually are and highlighting what we seem to be. We are a people of God, in so many ways, a people who believe that good always triumphs. We are a people who always accept, often understand and are willing to believe, just because that is the tradition we grow up with. And we are willing to work hard, in our individual capacities, to get where we think we should be, without shortcuts, if the system permits.
Now there is the problem. Very often, the system does not permit. We get stuck in the cracks that have developed with time and negligence and, to come extent, habit. We know that, for instance, it is easy to get away with a traffic offence, especially if it is minor, like jumping light or driving without a seatbelt; all we need to do, we have seen, is pay off the cop who has stopped us and then we proceed as if nothing had happened. We know, for instance, that to get a passport, we can, if we are willing, pay a gent standing outside the passport office and thereby jump a lot of lines and shortcut a lot of procedure that would normally take longer than we like. We know, for instance, that we can get a job that we are not really best qualified for by telling the headhunters that we are related to so-and-so or you-know-who and get a salary we do not really deserve. It is all a matter of the life we know…and this, unfortunately, is it.
So whom do we blame? Ourselves or the system? Either, both, all of the above. Freedom is a flexible concept that we can easily learn to use. We should start by doing a little growing up…then we will indeed be, as they say, Indians shining!
Potholing could become an Olympic sport!
(bdnews24.com, August 7, 2011)
I was out yesterday and most of the time, trying to navigate the roads of my city, Mumbai. It was not just a time-consuming effort, given the traffic bogging up every street, but also a rather painful one. This, because at every six or so paces or so the car dipped in and out of a pothole, often unexpected, that bane of the Mumbai municipality’s infrastructural department.
There were, of course, alternatives to sitting in a comfortable automobile doing little more than checking text messages or talking gently to the driver and my co-passenger. I could have started a small business in milkshakes, adding flavour to milk and letting it froth happily in the spin, whirl and rattle of the road against the wheels. I could have started a whole range of milk products, really, churning butter in the boot, fluffing up espresso in the front seat and making cheese under the hood. But the fallout of all my mad entrepreneurial thoughts? And that long bumpy trip in the car: a severe backache, a cricked neck, stiff legs and a whacking great headache.
The main topic of discussion these days in any home from almost any socio-economic stratum is the state of the city and its various essential services. In other words, whatever affects the ordinary resident of the megalopolis, from the price of milk to the number of potholes to the collection of garbage to overall cleanliness is up there for hot debate that can include everything from curses to the government in general to vexed noises about the vegetable market that tends to accumulate garbage and thus pests and thus illness.
And along the way there will be many rude words said, many dire predictions made, many what-ifs and opinions aired. Reams of newsprint and hours of airtime will be occupied with the ramifications of the problem, and audits will be done on whether any solutions have been found and, if so, how effective they have been and for how long. But along the way, people seem to forget one simple way into and around the whole issue of civic maintenance, be it road surfaces, garbage heaps or prices of essential commodities.
The ones directly impacted are the users, the customers, but the ones almost directly responsible for the problems are, in fact, the same users, customers.
Consider my horror some years ago, when I started commuting by the local trains – those amazingly efficient (especially considering the load they carry and the conditions they need to function in) metal worms that wind their way around my city transporting millions of commuters from one place to another – and found that personal space and habits lose all importance. I sat there watching life out the train window and inside the compartment, wondering at the number of people piling in and out of the bogies at breakneck speed. There were people spitting, throwing plastic bags, pieces of paper, fruit peels and who knows what else on to the rails, children squatting on the tracks doing a happy and thorough bowel-cleansing and, alongside, women cutting vegetables and meat, vendors selling fried snacks and cotton candy, stalls hawking assorted local medicines, hairclips, T-shirts and umbrellas and so much more.
When I started driving to work in my own car, I would see men in suits leaning back in fancy, foreign-labelled, chauffeur-driven limousines casually tossing empty plastic mineral water bottles out of the window, women glittering with diamonds and immaculate manicures flicking things out of their cars – biscuit packets, magazine tags, plastic bags, even orange peels and chocolate wrappers.
And there will be the civic authorities, made responsible for the task of getting the city’s infrastructure working to par. Highly placed officials finance their luxury homes and travel jaunts abroad with bribes taken to ignore the quality of the asphalt used to pave the streets. Contractors responsible for getting the job done, be it resurfacing the roads or installing safety devices for a metro-railway will use the payments they receive to make their own lives more comfortable, compromising on the effectiveness of whatever task they are assigned, and putting so many lives at risk.
Huge budgets allocated for making my city – or, indeed, so many others all over the world – a better place to live and work in will be used to line pockets of those who hardly deserve the rather dubious honour, destroying any chance of making life better for those who provided the money by paying taxes or creating corpus funds.
The result? Backaches, headaches, miscarriages, accidents, deaths.
Roads once built and surfaced should stay that way for a few years, if not decades, able to withstand the onslaught of heavy container trucks and the lightest of footfalls from a beauty queen alike. Instead, one shower of rain and the potholes appear, reappear, and again. The sand is washed away, the bricks come bursting out and it is as if nothing has been fixed, nothing is built to last, nothing has been done to make life better, nothing changes.
I was out yesterday and most of the time, trying to navigate the roads of my city, Mumbai. It was not just a time-consuming effort, given the traffic bogging up every street, but also a rather painful one. This, because at every six or so paces or so the car dipped in and out of a pothole, often unexpected, that bane of the Mumbai municipality’s infrastructural department.
There were, of course, alternatives to sitting in a comfortable automobile doing little more than checking text messages or talking gently to the driver and my co-passenger. I could have started a small business in milkshakes, adding flavour to milk and letting it froth happily in the spin, whirl and rattle of the road against the wheels. I could have started a whole range of milk products, really, churning butter in the boot, fluffing up espresso in the front seat and making cheese under the hood. But the fallout of all my mad entrepreneurial thoughts? And that long bumpy trip in the car: a severe backache, a cricked neck, stiff legs and a whacking great headache.
The main topic of discussion these days in any home from almost any socio-economic stratum is the state of the city and its various essential services. In other words, whatever affects the ordinary resident of the megalopolis, from the price of milk to the number of potholes to the collection of garbage to overall cleanliness is up there for hot debate that can include everything from curses to the government in general to vexed noises about the vegetable market that tends to accumulate garbage and thus pests and thus illness.
And along the way there will be many rude words said, many dire predictions made, many what-ifs and opinions aired. Reams of newsprint and hours of airtime will be occupied with the ramifications of the problem, and audits will be done on whether any solutions have been found and, if so, how effective they have been and for how long. But along the way, people seem to forget one simple way into and around the whole issue of civic maintenance, be it road surfaces, garbage heaps or prices of essential commodities.
The ones directly impacted are the users, the customers, but the ones almost directly responsible for the problems are, in fact, the same users, customers.
Consider my horror some years ago, when I started commuting by the local trains – those amazingly efficient (especially considering the load they carry and the conditions they need to function in) metal worms that wind their way around my city transporting millions of commuters from one place to another – and found that personal space and habits lose all importance. I sat there watching life out the train window and inside the compartment, wondering at the number of people piling in and out of the bogies at breakneck speed. There were people spitting, throwing plastic bags, pieces of paper, fruit peels and who knows what else on to the rails, children squatting on the tracks doing a happy and thorough bowel-cleansing and, alongside, women cutting vegetables and meat, vendors selling fried snacks and cotton candy, stalls hawking assorted local medicines, hairclips, T-shirts and umbrellas and so much more.
When I started driving to work in my own car, I would see men in suits leaning back in fancy, foreign-labelled, chauffeur-driven limousines casually tossing empty plastic mineral water bottles out of the window, women glittering with diamonds and immaculate manicures flicking things out of their cars – biscuit packets, magazine tags, plastic bags, even orange peels and chocolate wrappers.
And there will be the civic authorities, made responsible for the task of getting the city’s infrastructure working to par. Highly placed officials finance their luxury homes and travel jaunts abroad with bribes taken to ignore the quality of the asphalt used to pave the streets. Contractors responsible for getting the job done, be it resurfacing the roads or installing safety devices for a metro-railway will use the payments they receive to make their own lives more comfortable, compromising on the effectiveness of whatever task they are assigned, and putting so many lives at risk.
Huge budgets allocated for making my city – or, indeed, so many others all over the world – a better place to live and work in will be used to line pockets of those who hardly deserve the rather dubious honour, destroying any chance of making life better for those who provided the money by paying taxes or creating corpus funds.
The result? Backaches, headaches, miscarriages, accidents, deaths.
Roads once built and surfaced should stay that way for a few years, if not decades, able to withstand the onslaught of heavy container trucks and the lightest of footfalls from a beauty queen alike. Instead, one shower of rain and the potholes appear, reappear, and again. The sand is washed away, the bricks come bursting out and it is as if nothing has been fixed, nothing is built to last, nothing has been done to make life better, nothing changes.
Style vs substance
(bdnews24.com, July 29, 2011)
The Indian media has been buzzing madly with news and views on the visit of Hina Rabbani Khar to India. She landed at Delhi airport a few days ago with all the noise and fanfare that only a young and good looking woman from a traditionally male-dominated country with a history of hostility with our nation can drum up.
We the media, in various ways and various means, were waiting with anticipation and breath baited (literally) with speculation, and came up with all sorts of reasons for her appointment as foreign minister of Pakistan, known more for its restrictive Islamist attitudes towards the fairer sex rather than equality or even any degree of suffragette-like freedom.
Most believe that it is cosmetic — a token gesture to please the western world who expects sexual parity, at least to some extent. Some believe that it is due to the fact that Ms Khar comes from a very wealthy and extremely influential family, which could help the political balance in Pakistan tip in favour of those connected with that same family. And a few believe that she actually will do the nation and its rather troubled image some good, that she is a shrewd politician, a sharp operator and a very clever negotiator with carefully honed skills in observation and analysis.
And her speeches have certainly been clever and careful. She arrived in India last Tuesday to meet and talk to Indian foreign minister SM Krishna, with the optimistic statement hoping that India and Pakistan can “move forward… that these two countries have learnt lessons from history, but are not burdened by history and we can move forward as good, friendly neighbours who have a stake in each other’s future and both the countries understand their responsibilities to the region and within the region”, she said, with doubtful English but earnest intent.
And the meeting and talking was with some focus on bilateral issues, from confidence building between the two nations, to India’s concerns on terror attacks and on the Jammu and Kashmir argument (to put it mildly). Ms Khar is understood to have said to the Pakistan media that she and her government are looking forward to “pro-active, productive and result-oriented engagement” with our nation on everything that is planned for discussion.
Along the way, peace has always held centre stage. According to Ms Khar, both India and Pakistan are determined to commit to an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible peace process”, something that is often and tragically interrupted at frequent intervals by a terrorist incursion and attack on (usually) Indian soil, leaving us as a people and a nation stunned and shocked to the point that any trouble that cannot be accounted for as perpetrated by any single individual is automatically and inevitably blamed on Pakistan, its government, its government-supported militants or anything in that context.
So the meeting that Ms Khar had with the Hurriyat leaders could be a matter for concern, though the powers-that-be insist that it will have no effect on the peace process in general. According to the Dawn, “What Pakistan’s Foreign Minister and SM Krishna, her Indian counterpart, have achieved arouses hopes for a tension-free relationship between the two South Asian neighbours.” We can only keep our fingers crossed that media optimism is indeed made concrete with deed rather than merely word.
In this very sunny environment, however, there is a note of caution that needs to be sounded, clear and very loud. The media in India, whether local or international, seem to prefer seeing Ms Khar as a glamorous female presence rather than a woman of substance, one who was in India for a definite, important and very necessary process. Her star power, her fashion statement, her sunglasses…all theses became much more important than why she was actually here.
As one scathing and well-deserved editorial said, “Just how little was achieved at the summit is demonstrated by the fact that the talks themselves were a sideshow obscured by Khar’s star power. In just one day, she has become a bona fide celebrity in India, not for her diplomatic skills but for her looks, sense of style and pricey handbags.” Ms Khar’s presence was made notable for her Birkin bag, especially, which bodes well for the just-opened Hermes store in South Mumbai’s elite shopping precinct, but not happy for the diplomatic raison d’etre of her visit.
What is encouraging is that Ms Khar herself is not especially happy with her positioning as a ‘fashion icon’. She is reported to have been quite annoyed at the coverage in the press for her style and attitude, saying that “You see paparazzi are everywhere. Besides, you (media) should not do such acts.” And thereafter she refused to answer any more questions. So is she serious about her diplomatic intent doubted during her visit to India? We give her the benefit of the doubt, but wonder, especially since she does not have the experience that a diplomat ideally needs for this delicate job. But the Wall Street Journal said it all, with “From her blue tunic pants ensemble to her Roberto Cavalli shades, everything grabbed Indian eyeballs, with media coverage of her accessories practically overshadowing the India-Pakistan dialogue….”
And at the end of it all, the Hermes Birkin bag grabbed more headlines with the general public than Ms Khar did as foreign minister of Pakistan. And that, amazingly, amusingly, is how that cookie crumbled.
The Indian media has been buzzing madly with news and views on the visit of Hina Rabbani Khar to India. She landed at Delhi airport a few days ago with all the noise and fanfare that only a young and good looking woman from a traditionally male-dominated country with a history of hostility with our nation can drum up.
We the media, in various ways and various means, were waiting with anticipation and breath baited (literally) with speculation, and came up with all sorts of reasons for her appointment as foreign minister of Pakistan, known more for its restrictive Islamist attitudes towards the fairer sex rather than equality or even any degree of suffragette-like freedom.
Most believe that it is cosmetic — a token gesture to please the western world who expects sexual parity, at least to some extent. Some believe that it is due to the fact that Ms Khar comes from a very wealthy and extremely influential family, which could help the political balance in Pakistan tip in favour of those connected with that same family. And a few believe that she actually will do the nation and its rather troubled image some good, that she is a shrewd politician, a sharp operator and a very clever negotiator with carefully honed skills in observation and analysis.
And her speeches have certainly been clever and careful. She arrived in India last Tuesday to meet and talk to Indian foreign minister SM Krishna, with the optimistic statement hoping that India and Pakistan can “move forward… that these two countries have learnt lessons from history, but are not burdened by history and we can move forward as good, friendly neighbours who have a stake in each other’s future and both the countries understand their responsibilities to the region and within the region”, she said, with doubtful English but earnest intent.
And the meeting and talking was with some focus on bilateral issues, from confidence building between the two nations, to India’s concerns on terror attacks and on the Jammu and Kashmir argument (to put it mildly). Ms Khar is understood to have said to the Pakistan media that she and her government are looking forward to “pro-active, productive and result-oriented engagement” with our nation on everything that is planned for discussion.
Along the way, peace has always held centre stage. According to Ms Khar, both India and Pakistan are determined to commit to an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible peace process”, something that is often and tragically interrupted at frequent intervals by a terrorist incursion and attack on (usually) Indian soil, leaving us as a people and a nation stunned and shocked to the point that any trouble that cannot be accounted for as perpetrated by any single individual is automatically and inevitably blamed on Pakistan, its government, its government-supported militants or anything in that context.
So the meeting that Ms Khar had with the Hurriyat leaders could be a matter for concern, though the powers-that-be insist that it will have no effect on the peace process in general. According to the Dawn, “What Pakistan’s Foreign Minister and SM Krishna, her Indian counterpart, have achieved arouses hopes for a tension-free relationship between the two South Asian neighbours.” We can only keep our fingers crossed that media optimism is indeed made concrete with deed rather than merely word.
In this very sunny environment, however, there is a note of caution that needs to be sounded, clear and very loud. The media in India, whether local or international, seem to prefer seeing Ms Khar as a glamorous female presence rather than a woman of substance, one who was in India for a definite, important and very necessary process. Her star power, her fashion statement, her sunglasses…all theses became much more important than why she was actually here.
As one scathing and well-deserved editorial said, “Just how little was achieved at the summit is demonstrated by the fact that the talks themselves were a sideshow obscured by Khar’s star power. In just one day, she has become a bona fide celebrity in India, not for her diplomatic skills but for her looks, sense of style and pricey handbags.” Ms Khar’s presence was made notable for her Birkin bag, especially, which bodes well for the just-opened Hermes store in South Mumbai’s elite shopping precinct, but not happy for the diplomatic raison d’etre of her visit.
What is encouraging is that Ms Khar herself is not especially happy with her positioning as a ‘fashion icon’. She is reported to have been quite annoyed at the coverage in the press for her style and attitude, saying that “You see paparazzi are everywhere. Besides, you (media) should not do such acts.” And thereafter she refused to answer any more questions. So is she serious about her diplomatic intent doubted during her visit to India? We give her the benefit of the doubt, but wonder, especially since she does not have the experience that a diplomat ideally needs for this delicate job. But the Wall Street Journal said it all, with “From her blue tunic pants ensemble to her Roberto Cavalli shades, everything grabbed Indian eyeballs, with media coverage of her accessories practically overshadowing the India-Pakistan dialogue….”
And at the end of it all, the Hermes Birkin bag grabbed more headlines with the general public than Ms Khar did as foreign minister of Pakistan. And that, amazingly, amusingly, is how that cookie crumbled.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Living with virtuality
(The Hindu Sunday Magazine, July 24, 2011)
With his latest show on in London, artist Baiju Parthan reflects on how his exploration of mythology and technology contributes to his art.
He once floated through the halls of a media house, his glasses glinting with an almost-childlike glee as he saw the world from a different perspective. Baiju Parthan drew, he said mildly. From his prolific pen and fertile mind came illustrations that seemed otherworldly, often surreal, bizarre, from a reality that was not easy to visualise, leave alone comprehend; until suddenly, startlingly, it all came together brilliantly. And then he vanished, as suddenly, emerging anew as an artist with the same view of his world, his art selling like the proverbial hotcakes; his image as an artist soaring, albeit in the same gentle, detached, off-earthly way that he always seemed to have around him.
Tell him this and he will laugh, still gently, vaguely embarrassed. He lives in a world that to him is real, though perhaps not always practical, and he sees his art and his former job in the same light.
“I haven't categorised it as ‘practical', but respond to a kind of feedback from the condition I live in. At one point in time I needed to survive, but those conditions changed when the job became non-essential. I am not saying that I did not have that idealistic notion when I was a student, that art was art and life were separate and that one should not sell art, etc., but I started looking at it differently. When you are a student you are full of idealism and when you are out of college, you are full of realism. Unless, of course, your tummy is full, you can't produce art!”
Learning something new
Study is a fact of life for Parthan, even today, ‘established' as he is as a reputed artist. But to call him an ‘intellectual', as many do, makes him blush. “The intellectual side was nurtured when I was a student; I kept on studying, enrolled for distance learning courses. It is a personal quirk of mine; I believe that as long as you keep learning something new, you feel young and hopeful. But I do not think I am an ‘intellectual' in the sense of someone who is possessed with the notion of ideas. I am interested in knowledge.” And he is also passionate about science, technology and the realm that computers have opened up to him. “I work essentially with 3D graphics directly linked with animation and virtual reality. I am now learning a bit of programming with Python, a scripted language used in 3D procedural animation.”
This kind of not-all-there air hides a very sharp mind that is open and absorbing. And that has come from his youth, reveals Parthan, who is originally from Kerala but studied art in Goa. “I came from a very Marxian background with extremely well defined ideas to conform to social norms. I met this group of people that were the opposite and were much happier and for the first time I realised that I had a choice. This changed me. I was exposed to a lot of not-so-mainstream literature that was mind-bending and loosened up my ideas of the world. I did get very interested in anthropological studies, sculpture, mythology, all adding to my artistic growth.” And he created his own reality in the process. As Parthan says, “Reality is what you make of it; it is up to you to extract meaning from it, depending on the peculiarities of your perceptual framework. You see the world depending on who you are and what you are. My whole idea of art itself got shaken up, almost 30 years ago. We were taught Western art history, as part of the curriculum; I was quite disillusioned that you had to be of British or Western origin to be an artist of substance. That was when I started becoming realist and earned a living.”
From there on, it was all about exploration for Parthan. “At some point I got deeply involved in philosophy: the definition of the self in the western and eastern modes of thinking. The western self is self-aware and separated from what is around to become what you are; the eastern is more an inclusion that makes you what you are. The eastern self is also more inclined towards metaphysical thinking, while the western sees cause and effect. The way the self is organized defines how you make art.” His own quest is something to do with knowledge “Every new piece of knowledge, once imbibed, can never be undone. I try and transform myself through learning…how far you can extend yourself into yourself, your immediate family, the community, the nation. I have lived in a personal bubble, totally involved with my own pursuits ... job, art, whatever. One blocks out the environment to do what one is doing. At some point I decided that maybe I was being unfair to the rest of my life.”
Symbiotic
His interest in technology, married to his passion for mythology is reflected in his art. Parthan sees them as symbiotic. “I think technology and mythology feed off each other. I am always hunting for metaphors that can be translated into symbols used in art. I studied mythology and got a chance to pit different systems against each other and find motifs like the hero myth, creation, etc. I am a hardcore science fiction junkie – that is where the two meet for me. Metaphysical becomes science fiction – Matrix is essentially the hero myth in a cyberpunk environment! You start finding parallels in these worlds.” All narratives are indirectly quests of some kind. I enjoy the whole aspect of technology because it shifts perceptions, makes us extend our own selves in newer ways into the environment we live in.”
The Show
Dislocation: Milljunction Part II @ Aicon Gallery, London, July 15 – August 20, 2011.
Baiju Parthan's new show at the Aicon Gallery in London is a solo, Dislocation: Milljunction Part II, which includes painting, photography, video and lenticular prints. Different styles of painting coexist within a single frame in some works, while in others, there seems to be a time-space continuum, with two different realities working together. There is a mirror effect in some; in others, computer code races vertically. Which world are you in, as a viewer? Are you in today or a time that is long past, that may not actually have existed? And should you be joyous, maddened, angered or just plain confused? That depends on you. Parthan just handles the controls in a subtle, clever, almost disturbing manner.
The artist explains: “This is actually part two of my solo, Mill Junction, held in New York in March, 2010. It was originally planned as a dual location show simultaneously opening in two venues of the Aicon Gallery, but I couldn't come up with the required number of works at the time. Hence the slightly modified title - Displacement- Mill Junction 2. It is about 'Bombay/Mumbai' as a city that exists in retrospect, solely as memory or recollection. It is also about how these memories get erased or modified through technological and social change.” Parthan uses the city's iconic presences to describe the vestiges of a fast-changing cityscape. “The most coherent aspect of Bombay is the mill area – there's really no coherence otherwise through the city, since so many people live so many lives. In all Bollywood movies, the early black and white ones especially, the mill and the worker is so prominent. I haven't lived here during that time, but the vestiges of that reality still exist, seen in the symbols and motifs strewn around. As we move forward in time, the motifs vanish gradually – the mills become towers, the taxis give way to cars. I am trying to relate to them more personally, making a point of view.”
The show has “paintings as well as modified photographs or photoworks, a combination of photographs and 3D graphics elements. The paintings form a series of ‘soft graffiti' and are derived from photographic references. The paintings are intentionally defaced with over-painted ASCII computer code - today the (digital) photograph is actually a document made up of ASCII code which is parsed/translated into the image by the computer.” Three photo-works titled Lunch Break present the city environment from the vantage point of someone engaged in a First Person Shooter game (FPS computer games), an oblique reference to the vandalism the city is often subjected to by some political party or the other. Two large photoworks Titled Chorus and Monument are lenticular prints that create a virtual 3D-like space.
According to Parthan, “The show is also about the softening of our reality experience as information/digital technology and economy conquers every domain of human activity. Probably this is the first time in our intellectual history that we have two categories of reality overlapping each other – virtual and real - we have augmented our reality with virtuality.” But the virtual transactions that we do, from paying bills to shopping to social networking, which happen away from hard-edged physical reality, soften the experience of everyday reality.
With his latest show on in London, artist Baiju Parthan reflects on how his exploration of mythology and technology contributes to his art.
He once floated through the halls of a media house, his glasses glinting with an almost-childlike glee as he saw the world from a different perspective. Baiju Parthan drew, he said mildly. From his prolific pen and fertile mind came illustrations that seemed otherworldly, often surreal, bizarre, from a reality that was not easy to visualise, leave alone comprehend; until suddenly, startlingly, it all came together brilliantly. And then he vanished, as suddenly, emerging anew as an artist with the same view of his world, his art selling like the proverbial hotcakes; his image as an artist soaring, albeit in the same gentle, detached, off-earthly way that he always seemed to have around him.
Tell him this and he will laugh, still gently, vaguely embarrassed. He lives in a world that to him is real, though perhaps not always practical, and he sees his art and his former job in the same light.
“I haven't categorised it as ‘practical', but respond to a kind of feedback from the condition I live in. At one point in time I needed to survive, but those conditions changed when the job became non-essential. I am not saying that I did not have that idealistic notion when I was a student, that art was art and life were separate and that one should not sell art, etc., but I started looking at it differently. When you are a student you are full of idealism and when you are out of college, you are full of realism. Unless, of course, your tummy is full, you can't produce art!”
Learning something new
Study is a fact of life for Parthan, even today, ‘established' as he is as a reputed artist. But to call him an ‘intellectual', as many do, makes him blush. “The intellectual side was nurtured when I was a student; I kept on studying, enrolled for distance learning courses. It is a personal quirk of mine; I believe that as long as you keep learning something new, you feel young and hopeful. But I do not think I am an ‘intellectual' in the sense of someone who is possessed with the notion of ideas. I am interested in knowledge.” And he is also passionate about science, technology and the realm that computers have opened up to him. “I work essentially with 3D graphics directly linked with animation and virtual reality. I am now learning a bit of programming with Python, a scripted language used in 3D procedural animation.”
This kind of not-all-there air hides a very sharp mind that is open and absorbing. And that has come from his youth, reveals Parthan, who is originally from Kerala but studied art in Goa. “I came from a very Marxian background with extremely well defined ideas to conform to social norms. I met this group of people that were the opposite and were much happier and for the first time I realised that I had a choice. This changed me. I was exposed to a lot of not-so-mainstream literature that was mind-bending and loosened up my ideas of the world. I did get very interested in anthropological studies, sculpture, mythology, all adding to my artistic growth.” And he created his own reality in the process. As Parthan says, “Reality is what you make of it; it is up to you to extract meaning from it, depending on the peculiarities of your perceptual framework. You see the world depending on who you are and what you are. My whole idea of art itself got shaken up, almost 30 years ago. We were taught Western art history, as part of the curriculum; I was quite disillusioned that you had to be of British or Western origin to be an artist of substance. That was when I started becoming realist and earned a living.”
From there on, it was all about exploration for Parthan. “At some point I got deeply involved in philosophy: the definition of the self in the western and eastern modes of thinking. The western self is self-aware and separated from what is around to become what you are; the eastern is more an inclusion that makes you what you are. The eastern self is also more inclined towards metaphysical thinking, while the western sees cause and effect. The way the self is organized defines how you make art.” His own quest is something to do with knowledge “Every new piece of knowledge, once imbibed, can never be undone. I try and transform myself through learning…how far you can extend yourself into yourself, your immediate family, the community, the nation. I have lived in a personal bubble, totally involved with my own pursuits ... job, art, whatever. One blocks out the environment to do what one is doing. At some point I decided that maybe I was being unfair to the rest of my life.”
Symbiotic
His interest in technology, married to his passion for mythology is reflected in his art. Parthan sees them as symbiotic. “I think technology and mythology feed off each other. I am always hunting for metaphors that can be translated into symbols used in art. I studied mythology and got a chance to pit different systems against each other and find motifs like the hero myth, creation, etc. I am a hardcore science fiction junkie – that is where the two meet for me. Metaphysical becomes science fiction – Matrix is essentially the hero myth in a cyberpunk environment! You start finding parallels in these worlds.” All narratives are indirectly quests of some kind. I enjoy the whole aspect of technology because it shifts perceptions, makes us extend our own selves in newer ways into the environment we live in.”
The Show
Dislocation: Milljunction Part II @ Aicon Gallery, London, July 15 – August 20, 2011.
Baiju Parthan's new show at the Aicon Gallery in London is a solo, Dislocation: Milljunction Part II, which includes painting, photography, video and lenticular prints. Different styles of painting coexist within a single frame in some works, while in others, there seems to be a time-space continuum, with two different realities working together. There is a mirror effect in some; in others, computer code races vertically. Which world are you in, as a viewer? Are you in today or a time that is long past, that may not actually have existed? And should you be joyous, maddened, angered or just plain confused? That depends on you. Parthan just handles the controls in a subtle, clever, almost disturbing manner.
The artist explains: “This is actually part two of my solo, Mill Junction, held in New York in March, 2010. It was originally planned as a dual location show simultaneously opening in two venues of the Aicon Gallery, but I couldn't come up with the required number of works at the time. Hence the slightly modified title - Displacement- Mill Junction 2. It is about 'Bombay/Mumbai' as a city that exists in retrospect, solely as memory or recollection. It is also about how these memories get erased or modified through technological and social change.” Parthan uses the city's iconic presences to describe the vestiges of a fast-changing cityscape. “The most coherent aspect of Bombay is the mill area – there's really no coherence otherwise through the city, since so many people live so many lives. In all Bollywood movies, the early black and white ones especially, the mill and the worker is so prominent. I haven't lived here during that time, but the vestiges of that reality still exist, seen in the symbols and motifs strewn around. As we move forward in time, the motifs vanish gradually – the mills become towers, the taxis give way to cars. I am trying to relate to them more personally, making a point of view.”
The show has “paintings as well as modified photographs or photoworks, a combination of photographs and 3D graphics elements. The paintings form a series of ‘soft graffiti' and are derived from photographic references. The paintings are intentionally defaced with over-painted ASCII computer code - today the (digital) photograph is actually a document made up of ASCII code which is parsed/translated into the image by the computer.” Three photo-works titled Lunch Break present the city environment from the vantage point of someone engaged in a First Person Shooter game (FPS computer games), an oblique reference to the vandalism the city is often subjected to by some political party or the other. Two large photoworks Titled Chorus and Monument are lenticular prints that create a virtual 3D-like space.
According to Parthan, “The show is also about the softening of our reality experience as information/digital technology and economy conquers every domain of human activity. Probably this is the first time in our intellectual history that we have two categories of reality overlapping each other – virtual and real - we have augmented our reality with virtuality.” But the virtual transactions that we do, from paying bills to shopping to social networking, which happen away from hard-edged physical reality, soften the experience of everyday reality.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
The new Iron Lady comes to tea
(bdnews24.com, July 22, 2011)
She came, she saw, she spoke and she conquered a few sceptics with her neat logic and undoubted enthusiasm. But Hillary Clinton’s main strength is perhaps her genuine interest in my country, India. She was here earlier this week, speaking of many issues that concerned not only India and the United States as friends and political allies, such as they are, but the subcontinent as a whole and its people in general. While the eyes of the world were fixed on her clothes, her hair, her mien and her handshakes, we looked into what she was saying and wondered whether it was more eyewash than concrete plans to get things moving, to make this part of the world a safer place to live in, to change certain realities that, for the world, are not exactly positive and progressive.
Clinton’s speech wherever she went focussed on her “vision for the 21st century” and the desire of the United States to “forge multi-faceted ties with India”. Her reason: “We understand that much of the history of the 21st century will be written in Asia…and that much of the future of Asia will be shaped by decisions not just by the Indian government but by governments across India and by the 1.3 billion people who live in this country,” according to her and so, presumably, her government. Even as China is a nation that has perhaps the strongest and more enduring ties with the United States, a fact that has been proven again and again through time, we found – as we have known for a while – that the American politic looks at us to be a “steward” in the region, a presence that will set the standards and the rules for the behaviour of governments across this part of the world. And the reason for this is fairly simple, one that we well recognise and accept as fact: India is, after all, the largest country in the subcontinent and can channel that power into being the most influential. If we do things right, that is.
But one aspect of existence in the region is of concern now, has been for a while and will remain so, until it is dealt with in a more effective and permanent manner: counter-terrorism. This was the prime focus this time, since Mumbai became the victim of terrorism once again just a few days ago, when three bombs exploded in the most crowded parts of the city, one quickly after the other…and then the third. The United States, in a message and via Clinton, has once again pledged its full support to Indian efforts to deal with terrorist threats and with security to prevent such activities, and has also promised to stress the point with Pakistan – often the first suspect in any terror events on Indian soil – in its drive to ‘clean up’ the region. In this direction, Clinton has suggested that India should be more proactive and strong in its responses to any threats and actions that jeopardise the security of the subcontinent.
As she put it, “India’s leadership has the potential to positively shape the future of the Asia-Pacific… and we encourage you not just to look east, but continue to engage and act east as well,” and play its role as an ally of the United States in regional meets such as ASEAN and the East Asia Summit planned for later this year. As she said, “We are betting that India’s vibrant pluralistic society will inspire others to follow a similar path of tolerance. We are making this bet not out of blind faith but because we have watched your progress with great admiration.”
On the whole, Clinton’s visit to my country was seen as a positive one, full of promise for the future and for increased interactions and cooperation between India and the United States, And she left us with three key agreements: an “end-use monitoring” deal that will give the United States the ability and freedom to track arms supplies to India to ensure that there is no further trade in these weapons to third and perhaps hostile elements. The technical-safeguards agreement is set to give India the capability of launching non-commercial satellites containing American components, in conjunction with a science and technology cooperation agreement. And there will be, as there tends to be, a strategic dialogue on a whole range of issues – from education to climate change, terrorism to nuclear non-proliferation.
All this sounds great, especially in the light of the current political situation and the goal that India has of earning a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. But who gets the better deal in this set of bargains? It sounds as if the United States is giving more than it is getting, but that country has not achieved its power and position in the world political scenario by being altruistic. Somewhere along the way, we have to be sure that we have not got hold of the short end of the stick and that we are indeed the power that Hillary Clinton has told us we are. And, if we are, we need to be sure that we know how to use it, be truly powerful, without abusing what we are and what we can be…
She came, she saw, she spoke and she conquered a few sceptics with her neat logic and undoubted enthusiasm. But Hillary Clinton’s main strength is perhaps her genuine interest in my country, India. She was here earlier this week, speaking of many issues that concerned not only India and the United States as friends and political allies, such as they are, but the subcontinent as a whole and its people in general. While the eyes of the world were fixed on her clothes, her hair, her mien and her handshakes, we looked into what she was saying and wondered whether it was more eyewash than concrete plans to get things moving, to make this part of the world a safer place to live in, to change certain realities that, for the world, are not exactly positive and progressive.
Clinton’s speech wherever she went focussed on her “vision for the 21st century” and the desire of the United States to “forge multi-faceted ties with India”. Her reason: “We understand that much of the history of the 21st century will be written in Asia…and that much of the future of Asia will be shaped by decisions not just by the Indian government but by governments across India and by the 1.3 billion people who live in this country,” according to her and so, presumably, her government. Even as China is a nation that has perhaps the strongest and more enduring ties with the United States, a fact that has been proven again and again through time, we found – as we have known for a while – that the American politic looks at us to be a “steward” in the region, a presence that will set the standards and the rules for the behaviour of governments across this part of the world. And the reason for this is fairly simple, one that we well recognise and accept as fact: India is, after all, the largest country in the subcontinent and can channel that power into being the most influential. If we do things right, that is.
But one aspect of existence in the region is of concern now, has been for a while and will remain so, until it is dealt with in a more effective and permanent manner: counter-terrorism. This was the prime focus this time, since Mumbai became the victim of terrorism once again just a few days ago, when three bombs exploded in the most crowded parts of the city, one quickly after the other…and then the third. The United States, in a message and via Clinton, has once again pledged its full support to Indian efforts to deal with terrorist threats and with security to prevent such activities, and has also promised to stress the point with Pakistan – often the first suspect in any terror events on Indian soil – in its drive to ‘clean up’ the region. In this direction, Clinton has suggested that India should be more proactive and strong in its responses to any threats and actions that jeopardise the security of the subcontinent.
As she put it, “India’s leadership has the potential to positively shape the future of the Asia-Pacific… and we encourage you not just to look east, but continue to engage and act east as well,” and play its role as an ally of the United States in regional meets such as ASEAN and the East Asia Summit planned for later this year. As she said, “We are betting that India’s vibrant pluralistic society will inspire others to follow a similar path of tolerance. We are making this bet not out of blind faith but because we have watched your progress with great admiration.”
On the whole, Clinton’s visit to my country was seen as a positive one, full of promise for the future and for increased interactions and cooperation between India and the United States, And she left us with three key agreements: an “end-use monitoring” deal that will give the United States the ability and freedom to track arms supplies to India to ensure that there is no further trade in these weapons to third and perhaps hostile elements. The technical-safeguards agreement is set to give India the capability of launching non-commercial satellites containing American components, in conjunction with a science and technology cooperation agreement. And there will be, as there tends to be, a strategic dialogue on a whole range of issues – from education to climate change, terrorism to nuclear non-proliferation.
All this sounds great, especially in the light of the current political situation and the goal that India has of earning a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. But who gets the better deal in this set of bargains? It sounds as if the United States is giving more than it is getting, but that country has not achieved its power and position in the world political scenario by being altruistic. Somewhere along the way, we have to be sure that we have not got hold of the short end of the stick and that we are indeed the power that Hillary Clinton has told us we are. And, if we are, we need to be sure that we know how to use it, be truly powerful, without abusing what we are and what we can be…
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Blood on the streets, again
(bdnews24.com, July 15, 2011)
It seems to be a never-ending story. Back in 1993, about 18 years ago, a series of bombs went off across the city of Mumbai – or Bombay, as it still was then. I was in the city then, doing a little shopping very close to the Stock Exchange building, where the blast tore through the side of the fairly new tower. Not too far away, another bomb went off, blowing a hole into the base of the Air India building, a South Mumbai landmark and part of what is considered among the most expensive real estate in the world. In quick succession, there were more bombs and more deaths – near the Passport Office, near a gas station, at a hotel, in a crowded market. In all, 13 bombs went off. When the carnage was over, the bodies were counted. About 700 people were hurt, some very seriously; about 250 people died.
A few years later, it seemed to be happening again. Between 1997 and 2003, there were 9 reported bomb blasts, with about 29 people dead and 199 injured. Par for the course, some would say, and certainly far fewer than the number killed or hurt in everyday accidents, illness or criminal acts. And then came August 2003, when twin blasts echoed through the mean streets of my city, leaving 50 dead and 150, at least, badly hurt. About three years later, seven bombs went off in local trains, the city’s commuter network, injuring 890 and killing 181. This was in 2006.
In 2008, November 26, something happened that shook not just the city, but the world. Terrorists attacked Mumbai, choosing crowded locations to kill and shock; the difference: this time, the targets were elitist enclaves too, two multi-star hotels – the Taj Mahal and the Trident – as well as the main railway station, our historic Victoria Terminus, now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. At the end of the three days that the attack lasted, 166 had died, over 300 were injured.
And now it is as if those black days have come back. Two days ago, on July 13, three bombs went off in my city. The first, at 6:45 pm, blew up at the very crowded Zaveri Bazaar, in the heart of the diamond market. The second, at 6:46 pm, blasted into the evening crowds at Opera House, just outside the main diamond export centre. The third, at 7:05 pm, occurred at the Kabutar Khana in Dadar, near a key railway terminus.
The sites were well chosen – there would be people milling, pushing and shoving to get to their trains or buses to go home, not really noticing anyone who did not belong, who was acting in any way unusually, who carried a high-intensity explosive designed to destroy. When the sound of the pouring rain could be heard again, before the sounds of pain and death echoed through the blood-soaked streets, 18 people had died; 131 were being treated for injuries, some life-threatening. No one had seen it coming; there were no warnings at all, the government insists. Nothing could have been done.
But there is something that could be done, at least now. While various government bodies, parties and politicians debate the who, where, why, what and how of the whole nightmare, we are citizens of India’s commercial capital – and we as citizens of the country and the world, in general – can do something to make ourselves and our lives and loves safer. To start with, for the moment, we can all stop blaming each other and the authorities and deal with the situation as it is now, as people have so valiantly been doing ever since that first drop of blood spattered on the ground. We can all stop pointing fingers at terrorist groups – be it Al-Quaeda, Lashkar-e-taiba, Indian Mujahideen, whatever, whoever – and at the government that we think is not doing enough, and take a good hard look at what we may be doing wrong.
Hang on, I am not saying that we are to blame. All I am saying is that we are not helping any by playing the blame game and shoving responsibility on to other people. We need to look at what we are doing – or not, really – to keep ourselves, our surroundings and our city (or cities) safe. We still pack a lot into very little where space is concerned; true, we need to, but there is a neat and clean and SAFE way to do that, too, where there are escape routes, where anything untoward would be noticed, where clutter is not a way of life, but a temporary inconvenience that does, indeed, stay strictly temporary and is cleared out within minutes or at least hours.
We need, regrettably, to be a little less accepting of strangers and what they are doing, not just in the community, or the city as a whole, but as a nation, making sure that those who want access to our world are worthy of existing in it.
There is so much more that we can do, but so little that we actually do. But we need to learn to do it, as much as I need to learn to do it, soon, before the next bomb goes off in this city that is my home.
It seems to be a never-ending story. Back in 1993, about 18 years ago, a series of bombs went off across the city of Mumbai – or Bombay, as it still was then. I was in the city then, doing a little shopping very close to the Stock Exchange building, where the blast tore through the side of the fairly new tower. Not too far away, another bomb went off, blowing a hole into the base of the Air India building, a South Mumbai landmark and part of what is considered among the most expensive real estate in the world. In quick succession, there were more bombs and more deaths – near the Passport Office, near a gas station, at a hotel, in a crowded market. In all, 13 bombs went off. When the carnage was over, the bodies were counted. About 700 people were hurt, some very seriously; about 250 people died.
A few years later, it seemed to be happening again. Between 1997 and 2003, there were 9 reported bomb blasts, with about 29 people dead and 199 injured. Par for the course, some would say, and certainly far fewer than the number killed or hurt in everyday accidents, illness or criminal acts. And then came August 2003, when twin blasts echoed through the mean streets of my city, leaving 50 dead and 150, at least, badly hurt. About three years later, seven bombs went off in local trains, the city’s commuter network, injuring 890 and killing 181. This was in 2006.
In 2008, November 26, something happened that shook not just the city, but the world. Terrorists attacked Mumbai, choosing crowded locations to kill and shock; the difference: this time, the targets were elitist enclaves too, two multi-star hotels – the Taj Mahal and the Trident – as well as the main railway station, our historic Victoria Terminus, now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. At the end of the three days that the attack lasted, 166 had died, over 300 were injured.
And now it is as if those black days have come back. Two days ago, on July 13, three bombs went off in my city. The first, at 6:45 pm, blew up at the very crowded Zaveri Bazaar, in the heart of the diamond market. The second, at 6:46 pm, blasted into the evening crowds at Opera House, just outside the main diamond export centre. The third, at 7:05 pm, occurred at the Kabutar Khana in Dadar, near a key railway terminus.
The sites were well chosen – there would be people milling, pushing and shoving to get to their trains or buses to go home, not really noticing anyone who did not belong, who was acting in any way unusually, who carried a high-intensity explosive designed to destroy. When the sound of the pouring rain could be heard again, before the sounds of pain and death echoed through the blood-soaked streets, 18 people had died; 131 were being treated for injuries, some life-threatening. No one had seen it coming; there were no warnings at all, the government insists. Nothing could have been done.
But there is something that could be done, at least now. While various government bodies, parties and politicians debate the who, where, why, what and how of the whole nightmare, we are citizens of India’s commercial capital – and we as citizens of the country and the world, in general – can do something to make ourselves and our lives and loves safer. To start with, for the moment, we can all stop blaming each other and the authorities and deal with the situation as it is now, as people have so valiantly been doing ever since that first drop of blood spattered on the ground. We can all stop pointing fingers at terrorist groups – be it Al-Quaeda, Lashkar-e-taiba, Indian Mujahideen, whatever, whoever – and at the government that we think is not doing enough, and take a good hard look at what we may be doing wrong.
Hang on, I am not saying that we are to blame. All I am saying is that we are not helping any by playing the blame game and shoving responsibility on to other people. We need to look at what we are doing – or not, really – to keep ourselves, our surroundings and our city (or cities) safe. We still pack a lot into very little where space is concerned; true, we need to, but there is a neat and clean and SAFE way to do that, too, where there are escape routes, where anything untoward would be noticed, where clutter is not a way of life, but a temporary inconvenience that does, indeed, stay strictly temporary and is cleared out within minutes or at least hours.
We need, regrettably, to be a little less accepting of strangers and what they are doing, not just in the community, or the city as a whole, but as a nation, making sure that those who want access to our world are worthy of existing in it.
There is so much more that we can do, but so little that we actually do. But we need to learn to do it, as much as I need to learn to do it, soon, before the next bomb goes off in this city that is my home.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Singing on the rain
(bdnews24.com, July 8, 2011)
The monsoon has just revived in Mumbai after a few weeks of muggy weather and people are celebrating. Yes, there are problems with flooded roads, stalled trains, water logging, slugs and worms, fungus, damp clothes, smelly carpets and much more, but it is that time of year when the temperatures suddenly and pleasurably drop after too long being too high, the earth and air smell fresh and clean and the water is cool and sweet. And even as the average Mumbaikar complains about the rain and says many rude words at having to travel to work in the wet, he or she will almost always start humming one or the other of the many songs that are associated with this time of year. And almost all of them will be from Bollywood productions.
Even I, who do not watch movies very often but run a film website with my team, have been heard bursting into song when the rain is coming down, preferably outside my window and not on my head. And when there is rain, when there is song, the two together will invariably spell romance, with a capital ‘R’, the kind that needs an umbrella built for two, the kind that is about chai and pakoras, the kind that doesn’t really need a significant other but works with one too.
Sometimes the rain reminds me of romance classic style. Like in Shri 420, when Nargis and Raj Kapoor sang Pyar hua ikrar hua hai. It is considered to be iconic of the genre, with two rain-washed faces gazing lovingly at each other under a large black umbrella. The couple under the shelter are soaking wet, but don’t seem to notice, and the rumoured real-life love story of the leading lady and gentleman (in those days they were, I am told!) made the scene even more romantic.
In contrast was the cutely funny ditty from Kishore Kumar’s Chalti ka Naam Gaadi, with the delectable Madhubala. As he sings, softly at first, then louder, Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi si, I never fail to smile, in empathy, in amusement, in some degree of wistful wishful thinking. There is such fun in the lyrics and such liveliness in the tune, and such a happy sound when the two come together to create one unforgettable moment!
More elaborate harmony and difficult vocals come with Rimjhim gire saawan, from Manzil. It comes in two versions, for male and female voice, and both are superb. The first, with Kishore Kumar, shows off the strength, the power, the force of the rain pounding down on the ground, on roofs, on bare heads, while the softer feminine version is more soulful, plaintive, gentle, with Lata Mangeshkar evoking visions of giggling girls, hot tea pouring into a cup, rain drizzling on flowers, the fresh wetness of grass tickling bare feet.
Lagaan had a more contemporary take on this, as the villagers wait for the long-delayed rain to give them and their fields and wells some respite from the heat and drought. As Aamir Khan and Gracy Singh join the rest of the community to sing Ghanan ghanan ghir ghir aye badara, in an AR Rahman composition, you can almost hear the rain rattling down on a wooden roof, pattering into an almost-empty well, drenching the cows and village folk alike as it soaks quickly into arid ground.
And then there is the seduction of the rain, a gentle, lazy, swaying kind of rhythm that lulls frazzled minds and nerves into soft lethargy. In Bheegi bheegi raaton main, from Ajnabee, Zeenat Aman manages to seduce Rajesh Khanna and everyone watching her – or even just listening to the song – with the gorgeous lyrics: Bheegi bheegi raaton main, meethi meethi baaton main aisi barsaaton main kaisa lagta hai? (in the rain-soaked nights, with sweet words and the monsoon season, how do you feel?). More seduction comes in the shape of a sexy Sridevi singing Kaate nahin katte in Mr India, with a mesmerised Anil Kapoor keeping her company, though invisibly as the object of his adoration sings Lo aaj main kehti hoon…I love you (Listen, I will say it today…I love you!)
But there are so many different ways to play in the rain, some of them a lot more energetic and young, maybe not even romantic, but great fun. In the Aamir Khan-Sonali Bendre starrer Sarfarosh, they sing to each other, Jo haal dil ka idhar ho raha hai (The condition of the heart that is happening here…), there is love, romance, seduction, fun, but all in a joking, jesting, teasing way, with a driving beat and very western tune. And Kareena Kapoor danced in the pouring rain to first try and seduce a rather staid Rahul Bose and then in sheer joy of being washed clean by the rain in Chameli, singing Beheta hai mann kahin, kahaan jaante nahin, koyi rokle yahin..Bhaage re mann kahin, in her character as a prostitute.
Of course, no writing on fun-filmi-fabulous rain songs would be complete without speaking of one that is not from Bollywood, but has that contemporary beat and a beautiful voice backing it – Shubha Mudgal’s Ab ke saawan aise barse…that one could inspire anyone to go running out to dance in the rain. Even me!
The monsoon has just revived in Mumbai after a few weeks of muggy weather and people are celebrating. Yes, there are problems with flooded roads, stalled trains, water logging, slugs and worms, fungus, damp clothes, smelly carpets and much more, but it is that time of year when the temperatures suddenly and pleasurably drop after too long being too high, the earth and air smell fresh and clean and the water is cool and sweet. And even as the average Mumbaikar complains about the rain and says many rude words at having to travel to work in the wet, he or she will almost always start humming one or the other of the many songs that are associated with this time of year. And almost all of them will be from Bollywood productions.
Even I, who do not watch movies very often but run a film website with my team, have been heard bursting into song when the rain is coming down, preferably outside my window and not on my head. And when there is rain, when there is song, the two together will invariably spell romance, with a capital ‘R’, the kind that needs an umbrella built for two, the kind that is about chai and pakoras, the kind that doesn’t really need a significant other but works with one too.
Sometimes the rain reminds me of romance classic style. Like in Shri 420, when Nargis and Raj Kapoor sang Pyar hua ikrar hua hai. It is considered to be iconic of the genre, with two rain-washed faces gazing lovingly at each other under a large black umbrella. The couple under the shelter are soaking wet, but don’t seem to notice, and the rumoured real-life love story of the leading lady and gentleman (in those days they were, I am told!) made the scene even more romantic.
In contrast was the cutely funny ditty from Kishore Kumar’s Chalti ka Naam Gaadi, with the delectable Madhubala. As he sings, softly at first, then louder, Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi si, I never fail to smile, in empathy, in amusement, in some degree of wistful wishful thinking. There is such fun in the lyrics and such liveliness in the tune, and such a happy sound when the two come together to create one unforgettable moment!
More elaborate harmony and difficult vocals come with Rimjhim gire saawan, from Manzil. It comes in two versions, for male and female voice, and both are superb. The first, with Kishore Kumar, shows off the strength, the power, the force of the rain pounding down on the ground, on roofs, on bare heads, while the softer feminine version is more soulful, plaintive, gentle, with Lata Mangeshkar evoking visions of giggling girls, hot tea pouring into a cup, rain drizzling on flowers, the fresh wetness of grass tickling bare feet.
Lagaan had a more contemporary take on this, as the villagers wait for the long-delayed rain to give them and their fields and wells some respite from the heat and drought. As Aamir Khan and Gracy Singh join the rest of the community to sing Ghanan ghanan ghir ghir aye badara, in an AR Rahman composition, you can almost hear the rain rattling down on a wooden roof, pattering into an almost-empty well, drenching the cows and village folk alike as it soaks quickly into arid ground.
And then there is the seduction of the rain, a gentle, lazy, swaying kind of rhythm that lulls frazzled minds and nerves into soft lethargy. In Bheegi bheegi raaton main, from Ajnabee, Zeenat Aman manages to seduce Rajesh Khanna and everyone watching her – or even just listening to the song – with the gorgeous lyrics: Bheegi bheegi raaton main, meethi meethi baaton main aisi barsaaton main kaisa lagta hai? (in the rain-soaked nights, with sweet words and the monsoon season, how do you feel?). More seduction comes in the shape of a sexy Sridevi singing Kaate nahin katte in Mr India, with a mesmerised Anil Kapoor keeping her company, though invisibly as the object of his adoration sings Lo aaj main kehti hoon…I love you (Listen, I will say it today…I love you!)
But there are so many different ways to play in the rain, some of them a lot more energetic and young, maybe not even romantic, but great fun. In the Aamir Khan-Sonali Bendre starrer Sarfarosh, they sing to each other, Jo haal dil ka idhar ho raha hai (The condition of the heart that is happening here…), there is love, romance, seduction, fun, but all in a joking, jesting, teasing way, with a driving beat and very western tune. And Kareena Kapoor danced in the pouring rain to first try and seduce a rather staid Rahul Bose and then in sheer joy of being washed clean by the rain in Chameli, singing Beheta hai mann kahin, kahaan jaante nahin, koyi rokle yahin..Bhaage re mann kahin, in her character as a prostitute.
Of course, no writing on fun-filmi-fabulous rain songs would be complete without speaking of one that is not from Bollywood, but has that contemporary beat and a beautiful voice backing it – Shubha Mudgal’s Ab ke saawan aise barse…that one could inspire anyone to go running out to dance in the rain. Even me!
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