A feeding tube for thought

From eating a bagel cut into small triangular pieces for lunch to the most splashed face on TV, Terry Schiavo has come a long way. We could term it to be a journey but to me it's an ordeal of gigantic proportions.

Most of us will always remember her as a file photograph taken in 2002 (after she was kept alive in a vegetative state for 13 years) and flashed all across the length and breadth of this country by media networks. An inanimate figure with cropped hair and glazed eyes smiling in a retarded manner to the touch of her mother. I wonder if that's how Terry wanted the world to know her. Would she, who suffered from an eating disorder as she was afraid of being overweight, have liked us to remember her as this unsightly figure who could elicit nothing but a tepid sympathy?

We will never spare the time or the effort to read who Terry really was. We will never know that she was a shy and insecure kid who had more birds than friends. We will never know that she was so conscious of her looks that she veered into an eating disorder that caused the cardiac arrest. All that we will ever know is that she's someone who, for most of us, has become synonymous to a feeding tube.

Terry does not deserve it. She deserves to be left alone with her family and not crucified everyday on national television. She does not need the support of pro-life demonstrators; she needs a peaceful end to the drama that has surrounded her life. She does not need Congress or the President to use her misfortune to prove a point; she simply needs to retire far from the madding crowd where she's treated like a human being and not a primetime reality series.

In times that we live, sometime that's too much to ask.

A little waltz for a night

Remember in 'When Harry met Sally', Harry Burns had this peculiar habit of reading a book backwards. I don't have that problem but I, for one, did see the second part of a sequel without watching the first. Strangely, I don't regret it and like most of the people who can't wait to see the sequel, I can't wait to watch the prequel.
I am talking about 'Before Sunset' starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and directed by Richard Linklater. It, IMO, is not a movie it's one hour and twenty minutes of meandering through the streets of Paris by two brilliant characters sketched by Hawke, Delpy and Linklater.

Before Sunset is an essay in human relations. It portrays the chasm in the life of the two characters left by the day they spent together in Vienna, nine years ago. Both Delpy and Hawke render brilliant performances. They are older and skinnier from their previous film, Before Sunrise, but still hopelessly in love with each other. There are moments in the film when Hawke looks at Julie with this touching helplessness, when she's not watching and she reaches out to almost touch him when he's not looking. The tension portrayed between them is mesmerizing.

The highest point of the movie is it's climax. Julie Delpy, in her melancholy song and the impersonation of Nina Simone leaves you with a feeling that's as simmering as the Chamomile tea she offers Hawke. Her dance fades into the titles and leaves you floating with the opening bars of her song....let me sing you a waltz!

An englishman in New York!

Pain caused by humiliation must be one of its worst forms. I had an experience yesterday which left me with immense pain and hurt. I am simply trying to assuage it by sharing it with you. Texas, for the most part, has been a pleasant living experience for me. The weather reminds me of back home, the people are warm and friendly, much like the climate, and life moves at a comfortable pace.
In short, it's been good here up until yesterday when things took an ugly turn...literally.

Yesterday afternoon I took an exit from the freeway 114 and stopped at a traffic light. I was talking to my wife on the cellphone and missed the signal turning green for no more than a second. To my utmost surprise, I heard a honk, witnessed some frantic actions in the rearview mirror and a few minutes later was cursed at by the driver of a speeding Camry.The words still ring in my ears, “You’ve got a problem, you fu***** idiot immigrant!"

I felt seething rage rising inside me. Humiliation and insult followed. I tried to figure out what my crime was. It was not the delay and it certainly was not the fact that I was talking on the phone. The answer lied in the way we perceive people, how we see them - as white, black, rich, poor, alien, immigrant etc. I figured that this racial divide is deep-rooted in all of us and surfaces whenever our limits of patience are tested. In some cases it is less than a second, and in some a lifetime.

I remembered these lyrics from an old ‘immigrant’ song:
Takes more than combat gear to make a man
Takes more than a license for a gun
Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can
A gentleman will walk but never run...
I'm an alien I'm a legal alien. I'm an Englishman in New York

Black is beautiful!

Black is stark. Black is elegant.
Black is mellifluous. Black is absorbing. “Black” is also Indian cinema's coming-of-age effort!

We live in a world that's filled with light and it's spectrum of millions of colors. Most of us can separate the blues from the reds and the yellows from the greens. We can, metaphorically speaking, categorize sounds too into different colors based on their aural tones. But sometimes we stumble upon people who are less fortunate and have to live their life with a single color. Those people are the blind deaf-mutes of the world and the color is the color of darkness, the color of silence, the color Black!

Sanjay Leela Bhansali, inspired by the life of Helen Keller, takes this vacuum of human life and weaves a magical, almost surreal picture depicting the power of belief and human endeavor in a light that dispels the very notion the movie is based on. He takes the erstwhile black canvas of a blind deaf-mute and fills it with the colors of human resolve, hope and indomitable spirit. It shows that with guidance and encouragement even handicaps of epic proportions can be overcome.

The movie, in short, portrays the life of Michelle McNally, a blind deaf-mute girl and her relationship with a quirky teacher Debraj Sahai who refuses to give up in spite of the gargantuan proportions of the task at hand, which is to make Michelle learn to live life as normally as possible.

On the cinematic front, Bhansali works at his usual grand scale, only the fiery reds and bright turquoises of his earlier films get replaced by darker shades of brown and black. His canvas is big and almost Bergmanesque in many frames reminding you of the ice cold Swedish imagery with lavish doses of black thrown in to break the monotony. True to the theme and the name of the film, Bhansali uses color in a masterful manner to supplement the moods of his frames. It is magical and makes you want to go back to those haunting images again and again.

The performances embellish this superlative effort in movie making. First, its the mesmerizing portrayal of the young Michelle by Ayesha Kapoor which evokes a sense of both despair and hope in the viewer. It makes you look helplessly on as you are introduced to her sightless soundless world, and it makes you choke with emotion to see her learn to perform tasks which seemed Herculean a while ago. It is the performance of a lifetime and is delivered with authority and convincing aplomb.

Rani carries on from where Ayesha leaves off in her portrayal of Michelle and delivers a performance which is surely her best till date. She gives the character a sense of pride and infuses it with a never-say-die spirit on the screen.

Amitabh Bachchan as the idiosyncratic Debraj Sahai delivers a performance that leaves you both baffled and flabbergasted. His initial scenes of quirk, underlined by some fine dialogues by Prakash Kapadia, and later his first scenes in the McNally household give you a feeling of unsettlement. (which in retrospect I can see why) As the story unfolds, Amitabh's actions make more and more sense. They reflect the intensity of Michelle McNally as a perfect mirror. He is her voice and eyes. He is her 'Teacher'. He shouts at her, challenges her, inspires her, loves her and then forgets her!
Amitabh is simply fluid in every aspect of his persona.

Together, from their very first scenes in the movie, Amitabh and Rani inhabit their roles so completely, acting with such simultaneous command and finesse that the occasional bouts of histrionics that Bhansali offers can not distract us from their relationship. Both of them act with supreme nuance and neither is ever less than compelling!
Shernaz Patel deserves mention for her wonderful portrayal as a helpless doting mother.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali has created a movie which will make every film maker in his right mind push the envelope a little bit more. It is, and should be, the watershed moment of contemporary Indian cinema, akin to Ray's Pather Panchali. If marketed and promoted correctly, Bhansali might bag the ultimate honor for a movie, just like the man he's trying to emulate, Ingmar Bergman, did many a times.

In the last scene of the movie, Debraj Sahai opens up a symbolical window to his mind. The music rises to a crescendo as he takes Michelle's hand and makes her feel the rain.
The memories come back flooding in, only this time the landscape of these memories is not black, its stark white…

Black is beautiful!

Oh Aamir!

I have often noticed that people who are pioneers in the world of Art tend to have an eccentric bone in their body. They are perfectionists, sucker for details and many-a-times obnoxious!

When I visited India this time, I saw the ads. of TITAN and Aamir in his hair-raising (literally) avatar. He grew his hair to fit the character of Mangal Pandey that he's playing in his next movie. It also meant that he was not doing any other movie until 'The rising' was released. (unless someone decides to cast him with his long hair and big moustache)
I was reminded of this quote "Striving for excellence motivates you, striving for perfection is demoralizing". In his quest for perfection, Aamir does one movie in five years, can their be anything more demoralizing for his fans?

I also concede that the role of Mohan Bhargava in Swades could have been played only by Shahrukh 'cause one of the requisites for this role was spontanity and heyyyyyyyyy...Shahrukh say zyaada spontaneous koi hai kya ?

We the Swadesis

The last time I remember Shahrukh actually stepping into the shoes of a character and not letting his stammering and stuttering get in the way was more than a decade ago, in a certain film called Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. In KHKN he played a desultory teenager who had two things driving his life, one was his Music band and the second his love for the local belle, Anna. He was careless, forgetful and deceptive but a talented guy who was often given a rude awakening by his band leader in the film , one stocky and tall drummer who believed that actions spoke louder than words...
Fast forward to a decade later and the often lying, lovelorn teenager has morphed into a larger-than-life King Khan. Acting has taken a backseat and every movie is, instead, a showcase of his hamming skills... enter the stocky drummer again, this time with an Oscar nomination, a much serious persona and a directorial avatar which cuts the 'King' to fit the size of a diminutive Mohan Bhargava, our main protagonist of Swades.

Swades is about the transformation of a repetitive and boring SRK into a character that he plays on the celluloid. It's about an Indian who is faced with the classic dilemma of to-return-or-not-to-return. Swades tries to deal with an issue which is not uncommon with every Indian who is living abroad and wants to go back, but for the glamour and comfort of the foreign land. The pursuit of this subject in most simple and honest manner, remains it's biggest strength.
Compared to the bawdy skin flicks and hackneyed whodunits that Bollywood dishes out with aplomb, Swades is a breath of fresh air.

One of the biggest positives of the movie is it's earthiness. There're no ostentatious sets, no meaningless glorifications and no exaggerations. Swades makes you feel that it's all happening around you and does not try to create a false sense of the subject being larger than life. It does create an aura of vulnerability and that to me is it's winning point. I almost felt like reaching out and hugging Kaveriamma, jostling with the kids running behind the big caravan and taking a dip in the village pool.

In the true tradition of his earlier movie (read Lagaan and no other) Gowarikar does show the triumph of human spirit, only this time, like the movie, it's at a much lower scale. The music and lyrics too compliment the setting instead of being individual triumphs. All in all Swades is a director's movie but unlike some other famous favourite sons of bollywood, Gowarikar does not try to jump out in every frame and tell the user 'Watch me! Watch me!'. On the other hand he deftly stands behind his subject and like his character in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, let his actions speak more for him.

On an other note, there have been murmurs that the movie was 'preachy' and boringly lengthy. Barring a couple of instances, the movie tries not to offer a ready solution to the bevy of problems it showcases and the length is certainly true to the subject it attempts to handle.

Like all sincere efforts, this one has it's flaws too but we will stick with the old adage here, nobody's perfect!

P.S. Gayatri Joshi is as good an actress as she's beautiful, only she carries the elusiveness a bit too far.

An open letter to Aussies

OK... so you guys got what you wanted from this Indian 'test only' series. You call it the final frontier and you've achieved it, but do you realize what you guys have done to this Indian team ? First of all, this is cricket mates, not a war and even if it were, hello, we are the cornerstone of peace in this world, we bid farewell to arms long before Hemingway was running around in his diapers and you're trying to coax us to get into a volatile situation... nice try guys but that's not gonna work. We love our peace and even if it comes over losing a humiliating series to you, so be it !!!

And what's with all the intimidation guys ? Take it easy. There's more to life than cricket, OK. You think that you will come to India with your menacing stubbles and long hair and you will extract an emotion out of us, nah.... you gotta be more creative than that. You guys with your swollen heads went on endlessly about how you would defeat us even before a single ball was bowled. Did you know that we had a 'got milk' teenage kid in our team. Poor thing, he was so scared that he spilled all the edges you sent his way not because he's a bad keeper (and Ganguly will vouch for this) but because he was petrified of you tobacco (or gum, who knows) chewing, scowling, gnarling barbarians !!!
I'm sure you'll bring up Clarke and his age too. Hey, can I see his birth certificate ?

Look at your slogan for this series - the Final Frontier. Mates, in case you forgot, this is India and not some far out enigmatic place tucked deep between the black holes of this galaxy and you are mere cricketers and not the enviable bunch of cosmonauts lead by one Captain Kirk so drop all these fancy phrases cause you just defeated an out-of-form team and not a set of green eyed, multiple limbed monsters!!!

Also, let me ask you, what have we done to receive such a treatment from you guys ? OK so we have the Border-Gavaskar trophy with us, but is that really that important for you guys to have that you scared our famous top-order batsmen not to score even in double digits ? You could have simply asked us and we would have given the darned trophy to you, hell when we gave away the Kohinoor to the British what's a menial cup to us !!!! You should at least have taken in account that three of our top order batsmen got married recently and that they have responsibilities now...but you guys, all you can think about is a petty game of cricket and winning.

I hope you have had your fill with all your frontiers and what not. Please stop this brow-beating, we will concede the next test too. Please don't plan any more series in the future, our schedules is completely booked till the end of 2010 as we are playing some real teams in Bangladesh, Kenya, Holland and USA.

Last but not the least, please take that cricketer turned guitarist with you, before you know he would pen a song about this final frontier of yours and cause our cricketers unnecessary trouble.

An ardent Indian cricket fan

Winter of '42

Out of the few Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) episodes that I have watched, I remember one where the man in the hot seat was a Senior Bank Manager from Nagpur. Performing his usual ritual, Amitabh Bachchan (AB) pointed towards the participant's wife and introduced her. The fifty year old manager told AB, “She’s a huge fan of you, back in 1975 when we got engaged she asked me to show on of your latest films. That year, 'Don' was released. We went and saw it, what a movie!"
AB interrupted him and blushing from ear-to-ear said, "Yeah, it was an old film, nothing like the films they make today". The man in the hot seat said, "No Sir! It was a great film; they don't make such movies anymore. I have one request though, please come as our Prime Minister and save this country!"
That's Amitabh, the way we Indians see him.
(No wonder he defeated the political heavyweight Bahuguna by a margin of more than two lakh votes in his debut as a politician)

One of the fondest memories of my childhood has been going to watch Amar Akbar Anthony on a cycle with my dad at a theatre far far off. I remember why I liked the film. Amitabh lived till the end, unlike the previous one where he died. To my nubile mind, that was all that separated a good movie from a bad one!
Needless to say, unlike most of his successful movie endings, he lives on. He lives on with his larger than life persona and unending charisma entertaining audiences with his intensity and dry wit.

He has been the quintessential star that Hindi film cinema has seen, and if I may, will ever see. Like a bottle of fine wine, he keeps maturing into a finer performer with every passing year. While all his contemporaries have already retired or are battling with dwindling political careers, Amitabh keeps adding a new feather every year. The charismatic anchor in KBC, the schizophrenic police inspector in Aks, villain in Aankhein...........the list just grows on.

While many of us go with the popular opinion that Amitabh was the archetypal 'angry young man', many Indian directors differ from this opinion. Yash Chopra believes that his potential for romance is yet untapped and since Silsila did not succeed on the box-office, that aspect of his personality was never really explored. (Though Chopra himself tried it with the classic romantic...Kabhie-Kabhie).
Hrishikesh Mukherjee, one of the greatest mainstream directors Indian cinema has seen, who worked with AB in Chupke-Chupke, Mili, Abhimaan, Anand etc. was once asked to rank the best ten actors of his times. His answer...one to ten Amitabh!

He has turned sixty now, completing more than thirty years of entertaining people from all spheres of life. The last decade saw the return of his Midas touch, here's sincerely hoping that he does that for many more decades to come!

I can go on and on (trust me, I can) but will end with one of my favorite lines, picturised on Amitabh
tujhko mujhko jeevan amrit ab in haathon se peenaa hai
inkee dhadkan mein basnaa hai, inkee sanson mein jeenaa hai
tu apnii adaein baksh inhein, main apnii wafaein detaa huun
jo apne liye sochin thi kabhi, vo saari duaaein detaa huun

Pride without Prejudice

Yesterday, while I was reading the reviews of the fourth day's play, one thing stuck out amongst the rest. It was a mail from an Indian cricket fan, in Australia, written at the time when India had slumped to 150/8 in the first innings at Calcutta. The girl wrote, with despair written all over the mail, that after the rout of the touring Indian team by the hands of the Aussies, she had to face a lot of humiliating remarks from her Aussie co-workers.
She had waited patiently, till the Aussie tour, to give them all a befitting reply.

Needless to say, she got little or no chance after the first test loss and now that India was tottering at Calcutta, there seemed to be none in the offing either. All that she asked from god was a drawn series.
Through all of yesterday, I could feel the pain that she must have undergone, thanks to the shoddy Indian showing. I kept thinking what was it to be an Indian cricket fan.

As it is there are a few things that the odd billion Indian population takes collective pride in. Cricket happens to be one of them, and cricketers, thus, become demigods. Seeing them fall from grace gives immense pain to every single individual. We curse the cricketers when they get involved in match fixing. We swear to never watch the team play again, but when the d-day arrives, we find ourselves glued to whatever gives us information about the match. Because we, as Indians, take pride in the game.

Today, the Aussies have been humiliated. Heck, we have mothered them. Shane Warne and McGrath have been reduced to first class bowlers and the Aussie batting has been exposed to the bone by a twenty year old. This is our moment of glory and for once we will mince no words even if it's at the cost of the Aussie pride. I will take a leaf out of Julia Roberts’s book and say what she said on getting the golden globe. "Oh good golly!" I'm just shamelessly filled with joy.

I can't help, but think of the girl, back in Australia. She must be waltzing away to glory now. True to the characteristic style of the shy protagonist of an Indian film, who after getting battered for the initial two and a half hours walks away with the girl!!!

Oh Eden! the garden of pleasure.

Win! at last or should I say loss.......finally! :-)
If you ask me, both the phrases give me equal amount of pleasure. Not only did we destabilize the throne of the erstwhile mighty Aussies, we did it in great style.
One hundred and seventy one runs win as against a ten wicket loss. We seem to have leveled the series, in all meanings of the word.

The match review column in rediff made an interesting observation, it had to do with the invincibility of a player or team and the myth/mystique that comes as a part of the package. I agree to it fully. Many a times, it so happens, that the teams go on winning almost habitually, till the time someone throws in a spanner in the victory march. Within no time the spell breaks. The invincible air disappears and the same team which boasts of demigods appears to be comprised of mere mortals, who can be beaten.
India, thanks to their unpredictability, does not really inspire enough confidence in me as a team who can perform the task of taming the Aussies (oh! and I would love to eat my words!). However, we have done this 'belittling the goliath' act earlier too! (remember '83 world cup and '85 World Series). So if we go on from here and win almost everything in sight, I wouldn't be much surprised, either.

That is akin to Gopichand winning the all England title. Hey that happened, didn't it?
Whatever happens, I am going to drink to this long awaited win, and drink silly!!!

15th August: New millennium.

It's 15th of August again, and we Indians are basking in the glory of having come 53 long years away from the days of British rule in 1947. A Golden Jubilee plus, in terms of the years our freedom has seen, but sadly that's all that remains to be a high point in the country's road towards progress. The question is, are we aware of all that has transpired in the past 50 odd years, or is it that we couldn't care less even if we were.

Bill Clinton so proudly exclaimed yesterday in the Democratic National Convention that "America, in the past eight years, has seen prosperity by choice and not by chance", and I was left to ask myself, will the largest democracy of this world ever have the luxury to enjoy prosperity, even by chance?

I remember having read somewhere that Winston Churchill once remarked (as an opposition candidate) that "Nothing would remain of this great country India, but a mass of warring tribes". He could see it, inspite of being a rank outsider. Alas, the future makers of our country, the men at helm, lacked his foresight. Today, the 'sovereign democratic republic' remains to be in the constitutional verbiage only. We are too busy with our petty regional identities to be able to rise above it and shine. Perhaps independence has found contorted manifestations, where we identify ourselves with fundamentalists. The secularism that we were so proud of dies a thousand deaths every time a Father Staines is burnt to ashes or a city takes to arms collectively against the shooting of a film.
Have we lost out on our sensibilities, or simply redefined them to suit our needs?

We sure can boast of a significant growth in a lot of areas. Our population has reached a billion, the illiteracy rate is growing, and inflation too is on the upside. Sadly much of the growth is in unwanted areas. Why are we, then, proud of another Independence Day? Do we need a prime minister, shouting from the top of Red fort to tell us what have been our achievements? What is it that we have achieved that we can proudly exhibit on another day of our Independence???

It's not that the achievements are non-existent. Only they are few and far. It's not that I have a personal vendetta against a country that I belong to and have spent my entire life in. It's the very fact that I take a lot of pride in it which makes me so bitter about it's shortcomings.

Success is always flaunted, it's the failures that, more often than naught, get missed out. Till the time we do not recognise these failures and make a sincere and conscious effort to uproot them completely, Independence Day will remain just another day for me.

Momentous but uneventful!

End of a dream

America to me existed in the songs of Paul Simon, architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and films of Steven Spielberg. I wanted to listen to the sounds that silence made here, meet Mrs. Robinson living next door and watch people playing guitar in the streets.
I found none here or you may say that I was a dreamer..
Little did I know that dreams get over when the night passes away and all that's left of them is a set of hazy images!

I have been in America for a week now, my first. There's a lot of silence but no sounds that excite me, I do not know who lives next door, upto the next mile and have heard no one singing 'Yellow Submarine' even on the radio !!
There's no indian food or should I say that there's no food worth eating, unless ofcourse, you can swear by the taste of a mac burger.
Welcome to the most powerful democracy of the world. Grin and bear it, options are few and far.. (do I sound like Agastya in English August ?)

They tell me (I am still catching up, you know) that Detroit is midwest country and thus there are no Meg Ryans here, nor any Tom Cruises. People weigh as much as a family in India and eat almost as much. A mushroom resembles a potato and a potato, a pumpkin. (thank god I haven't seen a pumpkin as yet) and before anyone sings praises of the agricultural advancements of the place, let me tell you, they all taste weird. Nothing close to what they are supposed to taste like !

There are no STD, PCOs (and believe me they are a gift of India to the world), no buses who stop at the wave of your hand (the closest is an 18 wheeler by Diamler Chryshler corp.) and absolutely no disorder. Infact most of the time I feel that I am in a hospital, the order here is so clinical.
Do I see a smile on the faces of those of you who've 'been here and done that' or are you already reaching for the escape button?

Cricket is a dream, soccer non existant and the american version of both of them, not my cup of tea. (that takes care of my professing to be a sports buff)
I'll will take a break as I need to go to the toilet, oops rest room (see I'm already learning :-)

P.S. I wrote this back in 2000 when I was had just arrived in the US. It makes interesting reading 'cause a lot of this stuff sounds puerile now. Some friends even call it the "rants of a FOB!"