SCORPION IN A ROSE GARDEN

(Written for The Times Of India Crest Edition)

Gipin Verghese likes chaos theory, where minute initial movements affect the entire phenomenon, he says. And like moss spreading on walls, he likes his art to blend into his surroundings. It does, until you look closer…and then the horror surfaces

There is life all around, forest cover, animals, people, everything and everyone going about their own business quite happily. No one interrupts, except to unroll the works and look at them more carefully, examining the scenes depicted in fine lines of acrylic on handmade paper and canvas. And there is joy in the verdant green, the leaves rustling as some small creature runs through the undergrowth, the trees swaying in the gentle breeze as a villager walks past, the dinosaur hiding in the brush…dinosaur? Perhaps not that, but something that looks like a large lizard. You look again, seeking something you can easily understand and you see elephants, lots of elephants, three elephants, seemingly frolicking in the dense green. The only good non human is a dead non human, the caption reads. Look more closely and you see the elephants in attitudes of pain, suffering, death, their heads severed from their wracked bodies. Where did that come from? Which reality created it?

Inspiration for his work comes from “thoughts about the endless pain and struggles of those who were neglected in the history of life forms”, says the artist responsible for the works, Gipin Verghese. “The structural inspiration comes from all forms of human expression which have a formal quality of organic patterns, like murals, miniatures, graffiti, hand-written texts, manuscripts, illuminations, fractals, etc. We know facts, but not aware of the reality. It is is a complex existence we all have. Each and every change we make has irreversible effects on the future. We have to be more conscious in our actions; we have to be more ecocentric. Even a single act is important.”

There are many more than just single acts in Verghese’s work. It has gentle colours, sepia tones, pale greens, greys, ochres, yellows, the edges of the handmade paper in the smaller works charred, aged, as if the paintings were discovered at some future time. There is a deliberation in the images used, but the reality they depict is alien. There are elements not easily recognized – apart from the strange lizard-like creatures, there are dodo birds, baobab trees, kangaroos (is that what they are?) and more. According to Verghese, “If you are seeing them as victims in the game of power, they can be recognised easily. The works (from 2010) are about genocide, forced relocation and extinction of species, all of which has had a greater impact on existing life forms. It is presented like in virtual reality, so that you can’t neglect it as a news splash.”

Some works are less animal-focussed, more human. There are people getting shot, people climbing walls, people being sprayed with something from planes flying above their forest dwellings. Wait…those people are not normal, are they? They have twisted limbs, deformed backs, strangely shaped heads. What is wrong with them? The writing on the canvas explains it all. Agent Orange, the code name for the herbicides and defoliants, unfortunately contaminated with lethal dioxins, used in the Vietnam war to clear the area so that US troops could see the ‘enemy’, not only destroyed vegetation, but human lives too. Verghese may not have experienced that horror first-hand, but he shows it, with a certain cartoon-ish helplessness about the bodies and the sickening effects of chemical poisoning, perhaps inspired by his reading of Silent Spring, the Rachel Carson book that detailed the negative effects of pesticides on the environment. 

Verghese spent the first five years of his life, “by a wild river side, surrounded by hills and forests near the border of Kerala and Karnataka. I still remember the `luxuries' that I experienced in those days. During my school days, I was a member of an ecological club in Payyannur named SEEK.” He read voraciously, mostly about the environment, and found opportunities to interact with “many famous visiting wildlife photographers, bird watchers, butterfly specialists, ecologists, spending time at camps in forests, all of which shaped my mind and made me a good observer of the unseen structures and systems of the nature.”

More of the mind behind the works is explained by the artist’s reading habits – “books that reveal the politics behind events, such as One Straw Revolution and The Road Back to Nature by Masanobu Fukuoka, Carson’s significant writings and Discipline and Punishment: The birth of the prison by Michel Foucault”, he details. Escape from imprisonment – of the mind, of the body, of the soul – is a particular point of focus for Verghese. The prison is not in an urban setting, but in an open environment, one that leads to fields and forests, freedom that could, in a dreamscape, be more than just a temporary measure. He explains that “The works done in 2011 are not based on a particular incident. They are about prison and modern agriculture - how these two are becoming the tools for appropriating people and nature, as per the wishes of the authority, those in positions of power.” In fact, he says that he dreams of creating a farm by following and implementing Fukuoka’s philosophy, applying his theory of ‘doing nothing’ and allowing nature to decide and for the plants to grow by themselves, “where everything and everybody is equal and on the same plane. I have incorporated this philosophy in my work where all are on a single plane and are dissolving into the same setting.”

Where there is such lush green, where there is escape, where there is a window into a future that does not necessarily have pain and suffering colouring it, why all the anguish? Verghese admits that his work is about pain, all influenced by “the poets, artists, who record pain, the eco-spiritual activists. It must be the way of my seeing things, In normal ‘seeing’, the world doesn’t have any problems. It’s quite fine. Everything is balanced. We don’t have the chance to interrupt; we can go on with our work. But a curious second look helps to brings forth inequalities. It gives the feel of a scorpion in a rose garden.”

Gipin Verghese
May 4-25, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai

Bollywood blatherings

(Frankly, I do not remember writing this. But it was fun to read when I dug it out of a folder, so I include it.)

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!

Shades of silly

I wrote this for The Times of India Crest Edition...but I had to stop laughing first!
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
EL James
Arrow Books
514 pages
(No price given)

There are erotic novels and there are the more blatant versions, the straight-out porn books. And then there is smut. Walking a fine line between the two is the Fifty Shades Trilogy, of which the second and third parts – Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, the latter making little sense as a title, if ‘meaning’ is what is relevant – are expected to feature in bestseller lists, though they may not climb as high as this one, Fifty Shades of Grey. Nicely gender indiscernible in the writer’s name (though the author’s note explains that she is a woman), the book has done phenomenally well already, hitting top of the mass market fiction charts and fourth in the official top 50 list across all genres in the UK. And it has managed to be first on the e-book downloads roster determined by the New York Times Bestseller list. So there must be something special about it, right? If the reviews – local and international – are anything to go by, this has to be the best thing written since maybe the how-to book on writing was put together some generations ago, if it ever was.

Well, maybe not. The books tell the steamy story of the ‘romance’ – for lack of any other suitable word – between Christian Grey, a successful young entrepreneur with a taste for S&M (BDSM, really), and a literature student, still a virgin, Anastasia Steele. It all begins when the girl takes her friend’s place to interview Grey. And things develop fairly fast, escalating from a formal interview in an office to a rather less than formal exploration of possibilities in Grey’s bedroom, his bathtub and elsewhere, with the dominant-subservient relationship established early on. After a point the action, if one may call it that, gets repetitive and predictable, with the heroine breathing heavily and calling upon the Divine in various ways (“Holy crap”, “Holy s***” and “Holy F***” being some) to save her…from what? Herself? Her newly discovered sexual synapses? Or the man who shows her the way to carnal bliss? Or perhaps that devilish contract she wonders why she signed, even as she learns to enjoy all the minor clauses and fine print it covers.

Of course, this is not literature, far from it. The tone wavers from being modern and street-smart-ish to outright juvenile and inane, with instances like “Our fingers brush very briefly, and the current is there again, zapping through me” our heroine gasps. “I feel it all the way down to somewhere dark and unexplored, deep in my belly.” She “desperately” does the expected, “scrabble around for my equilibrium”. And even as Anastasia is doing her scrabble thing, Christian is saying “Please”, his tongue caressing her name just before he “strides with renewed purpose” out of the store, leaving her a “quivering mass of raging female hormones”. Through the book, things progress and that same tongue does a lot more than just caress her name, while those raging hormones…err…rage on through endless chapters of graphically and anatomically descriptive prose. And the clichés rage on too, along with the action. There is only so much that you can write about a sexual encounter without seeming trite, repetitive or downright silly and the author goes through every permutation and combination of physical contortions, emotional analysis and interactive calculations that any mind, fertile or not, can come up with, and is interesting for a while…and then that ennui sets in again.

There are aspects of this book that are appealing, none of them what most people have commented on. There is the bond between Anastasia and her friend Kate. There is the series of admittedly funny-real emails exchanged between Christian and his fast-learning little lover. There is the presumably unintentional hilarity that ensues when the hero’s mother turns up unexpectedly, just as the two protagonists are engulfed by a haze of coital bliss. Even more ridiculous though strangely unamusing is the multi-page contract that the author presents in great and glorious detail, the ‘deal’ that the rich, talented, dishy and oh-so-bizarre Christian gives the innocent, adventurous and oddly accepting Anastasia reads through. And there is that incredible scene when our heroine is subjected (that being the operative word here) to what would have been called a ‘whupping’ in cowboy-America and finds herself enjoying it, rather like the pleasure-pain that comes from poking at a ripe bruise or picking at a scab before it is ready to fall off. Translated into the sexual idiom, it seems perverse, brutal, even sickening; but in everyday action, we all do it to ourselves, or have done, at some time or the other. Of course, the question lingers – what made Anastasia finally feel that she had had enough, that she wanted out, that she had to walk away from the man who had held her in sexual thrall for so long, taught her delights that she would never otherwise have known, pushed her to the limits she did not know she could reach? And, in the next two volumes, how much more heavy breathing and calisthenics will this ‘interesting’ couple manage to get up to?

This one does not have any of the class of the erotica or Anais Nin, or even Henry Miller, and what is perhaps the most sensual writing ever in the Song of Songs from Genesis is like a top quality diamond next to a pebble from under a road repairman’s boots. But its appeal is understandable. It travels safe territory along the road of the modern Mills and Boon romance, with sex served up in heaping handfuls; and then it steps just enough off the ‘familiar’ path with its BDSM indulgences, still maintaining that ‘nice’ balance between romance and something kinkier. As long as ‘feelings’ come into the story, it is acceptable, seems to be the rationale and to a certain extent that works. The author admits to being inspired by the lead characters from the Twilight series, sexed up and served with a huge helping of fantasy. And even as Anastasia exclaims, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle” an uncountable number of times in the first few pages of the book, you, as reader, start wondering how she will manage to keep monkeying around for another two volumes in the series. And, honestly, why you would bother to read them to find out!

Mystery in stone

I wrote this for The Hindu Sunday Magazine....and decided to collect MJ books! ENGRAVED IN STONE Madhulika Liddle Hachette 309 pages Rs395 Have you met Marcus Didius Falco? Perhaps not, since he was born a while ago, in March 41AD, to be precise. He quit the Roman army soon after the Boudiccan Revolt and became a private investigator who via a series of adventures – and some misadventures – is attached to the royal court, a go-to man that Emperor Vespasian consults whenever life gets rather more complicated than usual and there is blood shed under circumstances that are not easily understood. Falco has a significant other in Helena, daughter of a senator, a very unsuitable and unacceptable match in the strict class system of the time, who helps him in his work and keeps him coming back home to her. Muzaffar Jung would like Falco. They come from different times, cultures and contexts, but show the same persistence and determination, slogging on until the end and always aiming to win, no matter how ‘unsolvable’ the case. And success always comes with a few bruises, some friends made, others lost, and lots of questions that are usually answered. Muzaffar Jung is a detective in 17th century Mughal India, a charmer you may have met in The Englishman’s Cameo (2009) or The Eighth Guest and Other Muzaffar Jung Mysteries (2011). He has class, he has style, he has looks, he has brains…what more does an investigator need? This tale starts with blood and has a happy ending, literally speaking – not only is the murder mystery solved, but MJ (as I found myself calling him very soon into the book) finds a lady he can – and does – love. It starts in a livestock bazaar in Agra, where MJ is looking for a horse, since his own has become lame with infection. A close friend finds him there and him to borrow one of his horses. Muzaffar goes home with Akram and meets his uncle, Mumtaz Hassan, in his opulent, OTT home, decorated lavishly, showing the greater use of money than sense. And as the two friends talk, bond, share a meal, there is something dark lurking in the shadows. And no, it is not a minion or a dog, but a murderer. Mumtaz Hassan is killed, his assassin melting into the landscape as if he – or she- were a djinn who had vanished into the mists. In hot pursuit, MJ stumbles over another mystery, this one much older and far more difficult to unravel – a missing woman. As the stories so many people tell get tangled, much like the fishing nets in the Yamuna, and slowly and painstakingly untangled, many truths are revealed, many secrets uncovered. The murderer is found, the woman’s story is heard, the villains punished. And delightfully, albeit expectedly, MJ finds love in the lovely shape and face of Shireen, the lady who was being mooted to him as a potential bride. But what is most interesting is not the story itself. It is the way that story is told. Liddle writes easily, relaxedly, naturally, setting the scene in 17th century Agra without sounding like a history lesson or a museum lecture. The language is contemporary; the way of thought and movement is too. The narrative style is casual, everyday, the stuff of which young urban linguistic India is made. Yes, there is a setting that is ye olde India, the fashions, the class structure, the monuments…everything works to place MJ in his time and place, but without any laboring, with no hint of academic must. The first paragraph itself makes you fall in love with the narrative style, which takes you back to Agra’s nakhkhas or the cattle market during Shahjahan’s time. It’s just been a few years since the Taj Mahal was built. It stands proud and unpolluted in the heat of the city and people who grew up seeing it being built from scratch and artisans who worked then speak of the days of the Taj. The stories behind the fine architecture and their superstitions, as secrets from the past and present unfold, and the mystery of the paving stones is slowly revealed. The humour is intelligent wherever intended. “And no, the hands of artisans who built the Taj Mahal were not chopped off,” says one of the characters, outraged at such a rumour, going into an animated explanation of why this is a ridiculous thing to assume. Evidences of how the rich were getting richer and poor becoming poorer in those days, inter-state politics, the religious, cultural and social practices that prevailed, make an interesting read, giving you an insight into the kind of lives people led during that period. It is a story set in the backdrop of history you have grown up reading and can relate to. If you love detective novels, this is a must read.

Reconstructing (White) 3

This was written for Times of India's Crest edition The 1x1 x1 foot white cubes of this art show mimics the superdensitycrush constraints that Mumbai functions in Once upon a time it was a space that rattled and rolled with the sounds and sights of a printing press, tucked into the property that was one of the many mills that dotted the landscape of central Bombay (as it was then). In more recent times, it morphed into The Loft, a gallery space and, since 2008 a haven for experiments in art, fostered by arts consultant and curator Anupa Mehta. One such project will soon take up residence there, the space re-staged as a studio apartment, part of what is known as 'The Square Foot Project'. Curated by Himali Singh Soin, the soon-to-open show – if it may be termed that – could be seen as a comment on the time-space-density issue that the city of Mumbai (as it is today) lives in every moment. This interesting exhibition is called Reconstructing (White)3. It is made up of cubes, each one foot by one foot by one foot in dimension, each a “paradox of space and its foldability”, each interpreted in a unique and edgy manner by contemporary artists Hema Upadhyay, Mithu Sen, Abir Karmarkar, Prajakta Potnis, Gautam Bhatia, Zuleikha Chaudhari, Niyeti Chadha, Praneet Soi and Chittrovanu Mazumdar. Speaking about the concept, Soin and Mehta explained how it all came about and what it says to the (often rather bewildered) visitor…. Why this concept of white cubes? How did it happen? Himali Singh Soin: The idea of the white cube was coined by a gentleman named Brian O' Dougherty in a 1980's Arforum issue. Anupa and I were intrigued by this idea of both substantiating and subverting this concept, which symbolises not only the sterilised, blank slate created by museum and galleries as a condition through which art might be viewed with a neutral, unconditional lens, but also the larger strictures of society and its control. You close your ears to the sirens outside and enter these little dream worlds of image and ideas. Time frees itself from clocks and their shadows. This is the White Cube: a delusion of neutrality, a systematic context, a modernist shroud for Absolute Art -- a blank slate, a grid for the laying out of impulse. The show deconstructs this perfect cube --- and reconstructs it --- giving artists an important constraint: to create a work of art that exists inside -- or leaks outside --- a 1 x 1 x 1 white box fabricated from a material of their choice. Big things can be contained in little space, by improvising known formulas with 'home-made' idiosyncracies. The White Cube is a space to navigate the formulas we have learned, and perhaps, do away with them, resigning to the shapeless white of naivete. When Anupa decided to convert the Loft as part of the Square Foot project with the dissent that there is a constraint of space in Mumbai and a greed for domestic space, thus did the constraint of the 1 foot x 1 foot enter the curatorial discourse. How did you select the artists that will be part of Reconstructing (White) 3? They are an interesting and fairly eclectic group! Chittrovanu, for one, is rarely seen here, while Praneet is becoming a familiar presence; Gautam Bhatia is primarily known as an architect. HSS: Because the white cube is not only a physical, architectural aspect, but also an interior, psyschological condition, I chose artists that used ideas of space both externally as well as internally, but all in idioyscratic, displacing ways. You're right, Gautam Bhatia is much better known as an architect, but his art includes quirky, severe and humorous critiques of society through the larger rules of architecture: perspective, light and function. I am attaching some images of the evolution of his work and a concept note (the 'final composition' gets lain out inside the cube, and the viewer looks in through peepholes, as a voyeur). With each artist, I have had a three-month dialogue about their concepts and works-in-progress. Would this be considered an ‘experiment’ or ‘adventure’ in contemporary art? HSS: I do think this show would be considered 'experimental', mostly because the process of arriving at the product is just as stimulating and complex as the end. It's curatorial through-line is definite: all the work is created for the concept, and each cube contains a universe of its own, that prompts the imagination to situate themselves somewhere within. Also important is the title, Reconstructing (White)3, written in itself as a formula. It is purposefully not 'deconstructing', as this show, for me, is not about the fall of cities due to congestion, rather about how all life and art grows outward and adapts to its spatial environment. Anupa Mehta: THE LOFT is an arts project space that's funds itself through art sales. The square foot project is an attempt to foster new ways of seeing.... Are galleries and display spaces better than they used to be? You once wrote a piece for a daily newspaper, Anupa, on how tacky most galleries are, if I remember right. Have things changed? For the better? AM: Oh yes, you could say it's coming of age! Is there original art being created in India today? Or is the younger generation being imitative? AM: It's trendy to be imitative, but there are a few very talented artists for sure... THE LOFT at LOWER PAREL Presents The Square Foot Project June 2012 to March 2013

Yes, it’s me… again!

It’s been ages since I last wrote or posted anything here and there is tons to catch up on. I have no idea why I have not been here in over a year…it could be because I have been busy with so much else that this never got dealt with. Or it could be that I was bored with the whole blog thing and wanted out. Or I was just lazy. That last sounds about right, no? So in the past year-plus there have been many changes in me, in my life, in my wardrobe, my hair, my work and my friends. Some of those last have been left where they were last, some are still with me. And there have been new ones added, people I hope to cherish for ever and ever. Yes, tis easy to say, but rarely happens, I know. Maybe this time it will be for real, who knows! Be that as it may, I need to now catch up with everything written since the last time. It will not be in any specific order, except what I find on my various computers, when I find it, but it will be the usual kind of stuff – stories I have written, thoughts I have had and people I have met. After all, that is what a blog is all about, isn’t it? Go ahead…read. Or don’t. But be happy!

Splitting the perfect pea

(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!

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.

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….

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!

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…

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.

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!

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.