Rituparno Ghosh’s Abohoman: Men, Women and Love

Rituparno Ghosh’s latest venture Abohoman (Since Time Immemorial) raised storms as many found similarities with Satyajit Ray’s much-gossiped-about affair with actor Madhabi Mukhopadhyay, a claim Ghosh has been rejecting vehemently in every interview. Ray’s differences, due to this alleged affair with the actor, with his wife and son had come under media scanner, and were widely speculated upon by the Bengali middleclass. This affair has till date remained a luscious Tollywood scandal, although Ray and his family had always been rather guarded about it. But, Bijaya Ray in her memoir has often insinuated at this affair, but has drawn the line before revealing intimate detail. A film based on this scandal, or as it has been publicized by the media would definitely draw the crowd, especially middle-aged middleclass Bengalis. 

The connection with Ray is most evident in the manner in which Ghosh has designed Aniket’s study. Ray seated in an armchair amid a sea of books in his study is quite a familiar image to Bengalis. Ghosh revisits this image in Abohoman by way of which he quite unambiguously suggests what is being speculated. Shrimati alias Shikha’s (Ananya Chatterjee) arrival at Aniket’s funeral in full makeup, straight from the stage, is reminscient of Madhabi’s arrival at Ray’s cremation, with surma in her eyes. Apart from these two easily recognizable similarities, the film travels beyond the biography of a well-known filmmaker to narrate the tale of a director and his muse, an age-old story, as attested by the title of the film. 

The film within the film tells the story of Binodini Dashi, the legendary nineteenth century Bengali theatre actor, and her tryst with life on stage (till then an essentially ‘male’ domain), her admirers, and her mentor. Ghosh’s Binodini is proud, impulsive, seductive on the one hand, and emotional, unrelenting and persevering. Binodini’s self-anagnorisis lies in the acquisition of the knowledge that she is indeed an actor, a puppet hung from the invisible hand of the patriarch. Essentially the film is an artistic take on the position of women in the world of entertainment, a dreaded public space where they are most vulnerable. Even if there is recognition of their talents (in case of Binodini as well as Shrimati), they are never real actors, but passive recipients. Ironically, the film’s title, while alluding to the eternal romantic bonding between the director and his muse, also alludes to the broader man-woman relationship, in which the power dynamics are still unaltered, even in the new globalized world, and its neo-liberal hullaballoo about women’s liberation and empowerment. It’s the same power equation: the man vehicle of the agency and the woman the passive performer. The age-old binaries of the rational/irrational, active/passive, or intelligent/emotional do not seem to have changed. The housewife (played by Mamata Sankar) complains of betrayal; so does the actor of the nineteenth century as well as the present day. The complaint, I guess, is less against an individual; rather it is against a system so deep-rooted that it’s impossible to to be dismantled. Interestingly, even if we assume that the complaint is against an individual, say director Aniket or theatre-magnet of Renaissance Bengal Girish Ghosh, both these individuals are much too aware of the plight of women. Aniket, for instance, reads out to Shrimati tales of prostitutes: “Hinger Kochuri”, “Barbodhu”, and others. Tales of the ‘other’ woman, an eternal outlaw inhabiting the fringes; yet without whom the centre cannot function. Actually, the tales of these prostitutes in a way become commentaries on the eternally marginalized position of women: the prostitute’s ‘otherness’ is visible; the housewife’s isn’t. But both are equally dominated. And this story is really really old…as old as eternity: abohoman. But, as with all Rituparno Ghosh films, the victimhood narrative becomes a bit tiring towards the end. The film-with-the-film, in particular, makes of Binodini a sentimental heroine, and suppresses the other side of her story, for instance, the power she exercised in bringing out her autobiography, despite insurmountable odds. I felt that way Ghosh has not been fair to her. 

The film offers three very powerful performances. Ananya Chatterjee steals the show with her freshness, although she is not quite up-to-the-mark as Binodini. She seems to imitate Madhuri, perhaps, on Ghosh’s instruction, for he wanted Madhuri to play the role initially. Mamata Sankar emotes as effortlessly as she breathes. Dipankar De is extremely believable. The others are just about okay. The background score and the music would score really high. Ghosh’s attention to details is hardly questionable, although the scenes are mostly shot indoors, thereby the gigantic task of recreating early modern Kolkata has been cunningly avoided . However, I felt that the film within the film telling Binodini’s story could have been shot in black and white or sepia tone. That would have made it more believable. After two debacles (Khela and The Last Lear) and an average attempt (Sab Choritro Kalponik), Rituparno Ghosh seems back to his elements. He would not disappoint this time.

Wrapping up a devastating decade!

What pains me most when I look back on the decade that was, is the changing nature of global terrorism. No other decade perhaps has been so fraught with paradoxes: on the one hand, the world was condensed into a small global village, thanks to the revolution in information technology; on the other hand, distances between communities, residing side by side, increased beyond measurement. While multiculturalism officially entered the state parlance, mad rush at ethnic cleansing reached a hitherto unforeseen level. In India, nobody seemed to have learned any lesson from the Babri Masjid demolition riots! The Godhra riots in Gujarat, the Malegaon blasts, the unprecedented rise of Hindutva, violence against religious minorities − all of these introduced the most dehumanizing chapters in the history of humanity. The 26/11 Taj Hotel massacre in Mumbai brought the drama of man slaughter to a climax, which, as things are, would never see a denouement. The decade closed under the dark clouds of the Telengana demand for a state separate from Andhra Pradesh, once again throwing into dismal relief the drama of fragmentation of the country that began after the independence and is still going strong. On the other hand, the demand for a Gorkhaland, separate from West Bengal, had been making headlines for quite a few months now! And to top it all, there was the unspeakably inhuman Nandigram debacle that marked a turn to the barbaric age. Amidst this entire hullabaloo for a separate state, religious purity, communal violence, emerged the Maoist rebellion, giving sleepless nights to the government. May be one good thing was the state recognition of same-sex desire as natural. But what was ridiculously ironic was the whole tragicomic drama that was played out by the media in the ‘highly saleable’ hype of legalizing (!) something that was always already natural.

While we were happy that we have finally arrived with high-end technologies entering the middle class home, none of was really bothered about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. All seemed hunky-dory, for the media represented it as such. No one really cared what happened in the remotest areas, miles away from the globalizing urban centres. The new Indian middle class were blissfully unaware of the world beyond McDonald’s, KFC, Shopping Malls, Coke and Pepsi. It took a Slumdog Millionaire to uncover the murky reality that co-existed with the glam and glitz of the country’s economic capital. And in remote villages of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, etc., people still starved to death. The impact of global warming was felt the hard way: in lots of villages the ground water level decreased considerably, super-cyclones hit eastern India time and again taking innumerable lives, and above all a remarkable change in the climate was felt across the country. And not to forget the colossal tsunamis that hit South Asia, almost giving signals of an apocalypse. The great Copenhagen Summit on environmental issues that closed the decade did not really predict a very bright future. However, we hope to live on! All we need are love, patience and a bit of selflessness. May the new decade ring out all that was depressing and ring in life, in true sense of the term!

Paa: Emotional Extravaganza

Now melodrama is not always a bad word. Avant garde cinema has always been at wars with it, for that is the stuff popular cinema is made of. Of late, however, the dividing line between ‘art’ and ‘popular’ has thinned down, as far as Indian cinema is concerned. What we have today is something ‘middle of the road’: emotional melodrama weaved into technical brilliance; everyday reality stirred into the larger than life. R. Balki’s Paa is one such film. You would surely fumble a few times before calling it brilliant; but there’s definitely something that stays with you long after you have left the theatre.

Interestingly Paa is not about progeria, as all the promotional media hype surrounding it focused on. It’s a love story between a father and a son, where the son is incidentally a progeric baby. He could have been perfectly normal. Paa reminded me of a very well-made but not so popular film, starring Pallavi Joshi, Neena Gupta and Paresh Rawal, called Woh Chhokri (That Girl Out There). In this film, Pallavi Joshi estranged from her father (Paresh Rawal) at a very young age goes through several ups and downs and lands up in a railway yard slum, dirty, slightly deranged and often vulnerable to sexual advances of roadside tramps and railway coolies. Parallely, Rawal rises meteorically in his political career, and becomes an MP. Completely unaware of such a development, Pallavi recognizes her father on the television one day. She visits one of his meetings in the city, hoping a reunion, when her father remarried and popular refuses to recognize her, for he wants to keep his past strictly undercover, fearing a downfall in his political career. Pallavi returns to her slum, emotionally shattered. Paa apparently seems to retell this story, but from a different perspective. The ending, however, is not tragic; but rather hopeful. Amol Arte’s (Abhishek Bachchan) recognition of Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) at the expense of putting his own successful political career in jeopardy has lot to do with the popular notion of a changing India. Though the reality may be totally at odds with such popular narration of the nation as rising to be the next superpower, Paa sort of compels you into believing a definite change in the political scenario, with educated youngsters entering the picture.

The film also concerns itself with the establishment of the picture of the new Indian woman, independent, yet carrying within her certain old values. I do not want to sound judgemental in this: but I did not understand why a doctor, foreign-educated and powerfully independent, gets down explaining to a female patient the pleasures of motherhood. She seems to claim that motherhood is a natural necessity. Is that so? In this sense, the film appears a little regressive: putting motherhood above careers, the home above the world. This scene somewhat sticks out as a sore thumb even after you have been sufficiently involved emotionally with the naughty Auro.

And Auro! Yes, Mr. Bachchan scores spectacularly high. He almost literally enacts the metaphor ‘Old age is the second childhood’. He talks like a boy of thirteen, he emotes like one. He is naughty; he is loveable; yet, more mature than the age he plays. Your extra-diegetic awareness of the real age of the actor enables you to appreciate him more. He is the hero, sans heroism: his excellent comic timing, his expressive eyes, and his awesome co-ordination with the other actors in the frame win him the battle. All the best actor awards are waiting to populate his already overcrowded mantelpiece. All the actors are simply brilliant. Vidya Balan as the single mother is so natural that her star status is often forgotten. Abhishek’s character is a bit amateurishly drawn; but he does excel as a father. One fine discovery is Arundhati Nag. As ‘bum’, Auro’s grandma, hers is perhaps the second most powerful performance. The character is extremely consistent and therefore least flawed.

It’s laudable that Balki does not make a documentary on projeria. Unlike Taare Zameen Par where dyslexia was a major cause behind the marginalization of the protagonist, Paa does not make progeria a cause of humiliation of Auro. He is treated like every other child in school, and he is the hero of his group. Though Paa is not a great film, it’s worth a watch. Full-on entertainment, the film caters to every emotional nook and corner of your soul; be there, to be with Auro! He makes a great company.

“Perhaps, you are scared of conventional happiness”

This year, 15th Kolkata International Film Festival, had in its kitty a number of French films of which I got to watch two: The Day God Walked Away and The Frontier of Dawn. The first one is an extremely realistic portrayal of the Rwanda genocide, sometimes stomach-wrenchingly grotesque, and the second is a love story of a photographer. None of these are great films so to speak; yet, the second film did manage to impress me. This photographer (he would constantly remind you of the handsome photographer of Aparna Sen’s Parama who compelled the demure Rakhee to rediscover herself beyond the confines of her home) falls in love with a married actress who dies shortly after. Though it was a steamy affair, the guy, devastatingly debonair, falls in love again. However, none of the two affairs seems to move beyond carnal desires, and the bindaas photographer does not really seem involved in any of the affairs emotionally. But the second affair transpires into responsibilities, as the girl suddenly announces that she is pregnant and wishes to keep the baby. Though reluctant, the photographer relents and they are about to tie the knot. Once the wedding day is fixed, whenever the would-be-groom stands in front of the mirror, he sees his former girl friend, the dead actress, appearing in his place and inviting him to be with her. Anxious and awfully perplexed, the photographer seeks his friends’ counsel: while one blandly puts it as his subconscious surfacing in form of the dead actress, the other points towards something more profound, and perhaps a bit spine-chilling. Terribly sceptical of marriage and the social rituals associated with it, this loveable friend tells him “Perhaps you are scared of conventional happiness”. The dead actress rises from the dead to incarnate his fears. Careless, mobile, completely in love with life, and revelling in carnality, this photographer is wild, and cannot be bound within domestic circles. Although he has agreed to marry and raise his baby, for that is exactly what society demands of him, he is scared of being harnessed. Usually (and more often because you are expected to, for that is what it has been), people are expected to rejoice at the prospects of having a baby and a family. But there’s no harm in thinking otherwise. It’s like Camus’ Outsider who does not feel like weeping at his mother’s funeral.

This photographer listens intently to his friend’s explanation and the night before the wedding commits suicide. He was indeed scared of conventional happiness. Many of us are! And I sympathised with him, completely. Why can’t we have our very own ways of being happy?

Mammon turns God: Contemporary Bombay Cinema’s Penchant for New Money

It’s already a cliché to link up everything Bollywood does today with the economic liberalization in India, a project kicked off by Rajiv Gandhi, realized by the finance minister Manmohan Singh, the fruits of which were reaped by the BJP. While n-number of articles have been already churned out on the changed look and import of the family drama and candy floss romance, much has not been yet written on a new genre which emerged in the late nineties and is still alive and kicking — a new form of slapstick comedy related to the worship of Mammon (or pursuit of cash), and a variation on that, a neo-picaresque comedy of the cop and the crook.

While rags-to-riches stories in the earlier days had a morale associated with them, the morale of hard work and perseverance, the new flapdoodles (most of them are barely comedy in true sense of the term) celebrate the short cuts to easy money and associated comfort. Most of these films end in happiness, with a few exceptions. The pursuit of money is the dominant instinct that drives the plot, and all age-old values connected with friendship and kinship ties, honesty, hard work, etc are unsentimentally shoved aside. No moral compunctions are any longer associated with hera-pheri, for the consumerist impulse is so overwhelming that it almost instinctively destroys any obstacle on the road to the riches. And while we were thinking that such a phenomenon is remarkably urban and bourgeois, Priyadarshan, a pioneer of this genre, came up with Malamaal Weekly where an apparently primitive village with a local feudal system still going strong, is incurably caught in the whirlpool of easy money-making. Here the road to easy money is the age-old lottery; but what is interesting is the comic euphoria in which the entire village participates, as each of them lusts for a share of the one crore won by some Anthony who incidentally dies before the money is encashed. This late capitalist craziness for cash, interestingly, ends with the collapse of the local feudal system, when the tyrannical village thakurain drowns in the river. The highly over-the-top comic chase sequence in which the entire village follows an enraged thakurain determined to convey to the lottery inspector the elaborate lie the villagers had resorted to, ends in the death of the feudal lady, when her motorcycle accidentally suffers a head-on collision with the lottery-inspector’s Ambassador. A distraught cowardly inspector is assured safety by the cunning villagers, for they promise him to keep the whole incident under cover, provided he never ever returned to that village. The poor lottery inspector agrees, and the villagers breathe a sigh of relief for that one crore is now safely in their custody, no matter how many shares are to be given out. The film thereby ends in the triumph of capitalism over feudalism, which also brings in its wake a remarkable transformation of the mythical Indian village associated with honesty, simplicity, naivety, and love. The country/city binary thus disintegrates, opening up the space of the village to the corruption which was so far a special character of the city.

Such changing nature of the country, the small town and the suburbs are seen in other films as well. The dream of good life has certainly caught up with almost everyone across the country, as small-town boys and girls have become adventurous and abandon conventional roads to happiness. The Yash-Raj blockbuster Bunty aur Bablee tells such a story, where a small town boy leaves his hometown dumping a secure government job and his female counterpart sneaks out of her home to become Miss India, throwing away a prospective marriage proposal. When things do not work out the way they imagined it to be, they both join hands to become the all-time famous rogues, almost turning into youth icons. They effortlessly hoodwink the cop, and make interesting headlines with their innovative ways of burglary. The same picaresque narrative is repeated in Dhoom 1 and Dhoom 2 where the crook turns burglary into a glamorous profession, thereby emerging as the hero, in comparison to whom the cop appears in rather poor light. These neo-picaresque films are a significant departure from older stories where the heroic cop won accolades in the end, while remaining deeply rooted in the idealism of the oath he had taken on the very first day of work. Interestingly, in these films, where money is the only driving force, the cops appear clownish, figures to be laughed at or even pitied, every time they are masterfully outdone by the intelligent crooks. This remarkable role reversal of the cop and the crook is an interesting marker of the changing times. The law of the land however remains unchanged; but seems to have become inadequate to impose obstacles on the path of these super-crooks who care a damn for morals. Virtue and vice seem to gather new connotations as the global dream of a good life, or in other words the worship of the hidden God of late capitalism (read, Mammon), catches up with the Indians, changing their lives forever; however, we still do not whether this change is for the better or the worse!

Epic Life: In the memory of Rama

In his famous ‘foreword’ to Kanthapura, an early Indian English novel, Raja Rao writes: “There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana, or legendary history, of its own. Some god or god-like hero has passed by the village — Rama might have rested under this papal-tree, Sita might have dried her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow stone…In this way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your grandmother always bright.” In Kanthapura, Rao narrates the story of a fictional South Indian village deeply rooted in Hindu myths and tradition. My recent visit to Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu 10 days back made me feel that I had suddenly arrived in one such village.

Rameswaram, as the name suggests, lives in and out of the legends associated with Rama, Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman. The people of the village (now a developing small town) seem to relive the great epic day-in and day-out; and every nook and corner of the place is steeped in epical legends. The central temple has two lingams of Lord Shiva, one of sand and the other of stone. The local legend has it that when Rama, after having killed Ravana and rescuing Sita, landed in India, he met a group of sages in the forests of Rameswaram. The sages told him that killing human beings (brahma-hatya) was an abominable sin and Rama must expiate by offering puja to Lord Shiva. Rama immediately sent Hanuman to Kailash to bring a Shiva-lingam. However, Hanuman was delayed, and Rama ordered Sita to build a lingam of sand. When Hanuman arrived, he was infuriated to see that the lingam was already set up. Rama asked him to destroy the lingam and replace by the one he had brought from Kailash. Hanuman could not break the sand lingam in spite of all his strength; Rama, in order to appease him, said that his lingam would be worshipped before the one Sita had consecrated. Since then, the temple has two lingams; and the rituals are followed as instructed by Rama some millions of years ago. A look around the place would reveal several kundas or wells, named after the legendary gods and goddesses, and a bath in the wells is still considered holy. The sea is unnaturally quiet, and the water a perfect blue. At a point from the coast, called Dhanushkoti, Sri Lanka can be seen on a very bright sunny day. It is also the point from which the famous bridge that Rama had built to reach Lanka is supposed to start.

The place has a primordial look, somewhat spoilt by greedy pandas and priests who are always hankering after money. This lust for wealth is perhaps the most manifest indication of modernization which has crept into this legendary village on the beach. It’s so ironical that a place like Rameswaram in a Dravidian-dominated place has such a deep-rooted myth associated with an Aryan hero. Rameswaram by the virtue of its geographical location stands as a living example of cultural and political hegemony of a foreign race that infiltrated an old civilization and almost wiped out its indigenousness by interpellating the people in its own myths and legends. Ramayana was definitely a powerful cultural tool that was necessary for consolidating Aryan rule. Today, after so many years, it’s really spine-chilling to think how politically charged the Ramayana was. What outstanding political vision had gone into its making! So much so that it has replaced all other realities to become a reality itself.

Kaustav's Arden: Wake up call

Kaustav's Arden: Wake up Sid-

Wake up call

What do I write about Wake Up Sid? I do not really want to dissect it critically; it’s so innocently brilliant that you feel like sparing it of the critic’s weapons. Well, to put it simply, Wake Up Sid is like coming home to love. It is a wake up call to all those who create a mayhem about falling in love, who rake up a melodrama more often than not...for, love may also happen, just like that! The film gives you a feel that such love can perhaps only happen in Bombay, our very own Bombay. The disclaimer in the very beginning of the film apologizes for referring to the city as Bombay more often than as Mumbai recalling the agonizing history of the riots that had tore the most tolerant city into shreds. At the same time, it overwrites that history of hatred with a simple tale of love between a Calcutta girl who comes to the city to become independent and a Bombay boy who refuses to grow up. The Chor Bazaar, the Marine Lines, the Bandra housing complexes, and several nooks and corners of the city feature in a big-small way to consolidate the foundation of the lover’s nest the film builds brick by brick.

Sid (Ranbir Kapoor) and Ayesha (Konkona Sen Sharma) are both familiar to us: they are with us in college, in our office, on the roads we travel everyday, in the cafes we often visit. It’s the era of the middle class youth: self-respect, independence, open-mindedness, and responsibility. The film celebrates the spirit of the Generation X, but without moralising, without sounding didactic. Like all good art, it shows; doesn’t tell. Sid’s mother (Supriya Pathak) with her flawed English and awfully middle class dress sense is absolutely loveable. She has never been to school, but has grown up into a modern mother who doesn’t shed buckets of tears at the prospect of her only son living in with a single woman. Her foray into the upper class (because of her husband’s rise in social status) has left her slightly uncomfortable; yet, the film is much too subtle in representing her comic discomfiture. No hullabaloo, no melodrama! It’s just there for you to see.

Konkana looks awesome; and Ranbir impersonalizes Sid, as if he was born to play this character. Sid’s friends are brilliant too, reminding you often of the not-so-good-looking group of Jaane Tu Yaa Jane Na. It’s not that we have not heard this Wake Up Sid story before. It’s not that we did not anticipate the ending at the very beginning. But you stay on, as if by some emotional compulsion, to see how it all happens. And it happens the right way. As you leave the theatre, the iktara continues to hum in the cores of your heart, and it never seems to stop!

NB: Those who are interested in home décor, please note how Ayesha does up her flat.

One Big Reason for Not Rejoicing Dashami

It’s time again to go knee-deep in flood of sweets; it’s time again to don an artificial smile and wish Subho Bijaya to every Tom, Dick and Harry, whether you like them or not; it’s time again to feel customary grief for Devi Durga is retreating to her Himalayan abode for a year, even if you actually feel delighted for life will return to normal and people would, hopefully, recoup their sanity which they usually lose in these carnivalesque madness. Do I sound like Malvolio? Yes, I do. But I care a damn!

How many of us actually remember that Dashami is the fateful day on which Ravana lost it to Ram? Any ‘mythologically’ conscious Hindu remembers that quite vividly, and, in fact, draws from such memory more energy to celebrate Dashami or Dasera with all its paraphernalia. Any politically conscious ‘normal’ human being should however hesitate to participate in this euphoria. For, doesn’t this day mark the official beginning of a very long era of colonization, whereby the Dravidians, once and for all, were demonized in the popular imagination to be culturally, socially, economically, and politically ruled over by the fairer and better looking Aryans? Doesn’t this day celebrate awful racist tendencies whereby an entire tribe was constructed as sub-human or demonic in order to consolidate the hegemony of a foreign race? And, unfortunately, this racist drama that saw its climax in the killing of Ravana, never saw a dénouement. The buzzword across borders and within nations has been ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! For, they are not us.” Racism, fundamentalism, religious bigotry, nationalism, purity — the endless list of words that have now entered common parlance and are often pronounced with disgust, was always, already there.

Let’s shove aside our misti doi, rasgolla, and all that! Let’s hold hand and shed some tears, for it was on Dashami, that such fashionably ‘great’ terms as tolerance, love and brotherhood had already been immersed into the river. So all those viswa-nyaka Bengalis who dance to the beatings of the dhaak, and drape themselves in red-bordered saris to play with vermillion, turn your heads (the women are especially requested to recall that soon after the Dashami celebrations, came the notorious fire-trial or the agnipariksha that underscored the beginning of a patriarchal, anti-feminist discourse, in which women have been interpellated to accept an eternally subordinate status)…it’s high time, you actually, ‘thought’!

Ashura and the sexy six-pack

Today a blown-up picture of the Herculean Ashur in

a newspaper supplementary struck me in an odd way: hey, doesn’t he bear a resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger? The fiercely destructive Terminator? A minute later, he seemed to look a lot like a shirtless Salman Khan, of course, a beefier avatar of the actor. His bulging biceps, well-toned triceps, concave chest-muscles, enviably lean waistline and most importantly his six-pack were always, already there, but hitherto have gone unnoticed, until, of course, the Bollywood hero endorsed them, and made them highly desirable.

It was in the late 90s that the six-pack abs and a well-toned body won unprecedented fan-following, thanks, to the likes of Salman Khan, Akshaye Kumar, John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan and the new old man on the block, Shah Rukh Khan who went shirtless at the drop of a hat, and the sexist, homophobic camera, once and for all, changed its lens to lovingly caress the male body. The female/gay gaze was hitherto treated as sacrilegious or non-existent (for Indian women were pious asexual creatures and homosexual men did not exist), and therefore, the male body had never attracted as much limelight it did thereafter. While Shah Rukh Khan set the sets on fire by his macho Darde-disco act, a steaming hot John Abraham overshadowed a petite Priyanka Chopra, emerging half-nude from the blue oceans; a beautifully muscular Hrithik Roshan fought the elephant to the demurring yet lustful gaze of a coy Aishwarya Rai, while a tattooed Aamir Khan fixed everyone’s gaze on his awesome muscles by turning his body into a notepad.

It may be recalled that in older Hindi films (as late as the late-80s) it was the villain and his cohorts who were well-built as against the comparatively average looking hero, thoroughly unconscious of his bulging tummy and flaccid hips. Interestingly, the villain was very often shown shirtless in the vicinity of swimming pools or even in spas, locations considered as impure Western spaces invading the pure Indian space of piety, sacrifice, asceticism, and self-effacement. Consequently, the practice of going shirtless, frolicking in the swimming pool, and self-indulgent spa expeditions were associated with the corrupt and the visibly westernized, who was, therefore, the villain. And this image of the bad man was compatible with the mythological muscle-man, that is, Ashur, the anti-God, the Hindu counterpart of the abominable Satan.

But things have changed. Ganesh with his enormous tummy and Kartik with his good boy looks are no longer desirable. In fact, they appear in a poor pitiable light compared to the heavy-hipped and toned and tanned Ashura. While Martyolok has shifted its allegiances, the market economy has undergone a sea-change. Women and metrosexual men are the new customers high on the target list. Ashur would be gaining more popularity amongst both men and women, for he would become increasingly desirable. Gym-chains have spread across the country to offer the Ashur-look, while the shopping malls are ready with all the accessories that make you look good. All you need to do is to plunge in the Ashur-mania! The slogan of the biggest festival of the unassuming Bengalis is about to change: Jai Ashur ki Jai!

We Are They!

We stay on the extreme borders of South Kolkata, and all through I have friends and enemies teasing me that Garia (that’s precisely the name of the place) is barely Kolkata, and I might as well accept myself as a rustic! However, very recently, the place has shot into metropolitan stardom, thanks to the extension of the Metro Railways! Even before this metro revolution, Garia had been becoming remarkably cosmopolitan for quite sometime now, with people from various states making the place their home. However, the locality, or ‘para’ in the vernacular parlance, where we stay is particularly interesting. Though Hindu dominated, there are a considerable number of Christian families residing in the Christian ‘para’ and even larger number of Muslim families. There are no separate quarters, of course: in other words, people of all these religions are kind of spatially interspersed with one another. We have hardly felt any we/they feeling ever, and have happily co-existed, even during the unspeakable catastrophe of the Babri Masjid. We have not felt even a slight ripple of the pogrom that was tearing the nation (especially Bombay) apart, and our experience of the political cataclysm was solely contingent upon televised images of the violence.

This year Eid comes after the official inception of Devipaksha (the period in which Durga Puja is celebrated). Today in the morning I woke up to a song commemorating Ibrahim playing from a Muslim ‘para’. What interested me is that the song was in Bengali, and not in Urdu. Many songs played all through the day, and now as I am writing this blog-entry I hear a song celebrating Durga Puja playing from the same quarters. I guess it’s from some Bengali film. Whatever it is, I suddenly feel like asking what is the real basis of all these incidents of communal violence that are jeopardizing our very existence? If the common people are mostly not so violently racist, what leads to such brutal cases of communal riots, butchering of innocent lives and cross-border terrorism? Who is the mastermind behind all these? Is it the State and its exclusivist nationalism that ignores the feelings and emotions of the common people? What is it? As I experience at this very moment how the spirit of the Durga Puja melts into the euphoria of Eid, I feel like getting into a self-trial…it’s high time we enquired ourselves of our shortcomings. What exactly is going wrong?
Eid Mubarak and Subho Durga Pujo!

Sab Choritro Kalponik: Grand Conception, Faulty Execution

The pre-release hype that made us feel Sab Choritro Kalponik was Rituparno’s artistic comeback with a bang, after such odious let-downs as The Last Lear and Khela, died into a whim, not long after the curtains went up. A worldly-wise corporate wife (Bipasha Basu as Rai), a heedless husband lost in his world of poetry (Prosenjit Chatterjee as Indranil), a surrogate mother-stereotype of a housemaid (Sohag Sen as Priyabala alias Nandor Ma), and the wife’s apparently caring male colleague (Jishu Sengupta as Sekhar) set up a familiar quadrilateral. However, I can’t recall any Bengali film that has a poet as its protagonist, and that way, Sab Choritro Kalponik had set high hopes of doing something novel. But as the narrative unfolds in leaps and jumps (there’s no story apparently; the director opts for the stream-of-consciousness technique, thereby doing away with the linearity of time — the abrupt fade-out and fade-in of short scenes gives the impression of a collage), the film seems to be more about the same-old problem: marital differences, and an eternally whining distraught wife, and a pacifying colleague acting happily as a stand-in for the husband absent in her emotional space. The only saving grace in these otherwise painful moments is a vibrant Bipasha Basu (perfectly done-up in awesome designer sarees, and perfectly complementary accessories). However, Sohini Sengupta’s voice-over irredeemably damages Bipasha’s performance which is, believe me, quite good. Prosenjit looks anything but a poet, though he tries hard. But, sorry dear! You do not have the intellectual demeanour to carry the image of a ‘frenzied’ poet with panache, no matter, how much you refrain from make-up or sport stubble. In fact, his wrinkles (in this deglamourized avatar) so conspicuously stare into your face that Bispasha with all her youthful vivacity seems to be his balika badhu (courtesy: a witty friend of mine). Jishu is awful. Sohag Sen pumps life into Priyabala, but her bangal bhasha appears a bit too contrived.

Back to the narrative: in the second half, after Indranil’s sudden demise, the film takes an unexpected turn. Though the pre-release promotional of the film constantly harps on the fact that Rai falls in love with her husband through his poetry after his death, I believe the film is more about Rai’s discovery of her own poetic self, which in turn, emotionally connects her with her husband. Clearly, the film is about journeys, as underscored by the repeated use of the train-motif. If one the one hand, it talks about the Partition and the forced migration from the other side of the border, of rootlessness, of the pain of un-belonging, on the other hand, it charts an internal journey into the soul. While Priyabala does not know where her ‘desh’ is and the mad man in the streets of Kolkata still hunts for a vehicle that will take him back to Dhaka-Bikrampur, Rai too suffers from an intense sense of un-belonging in the domestic space where the emotional distance between her and Indranil is insurmountably immense. Rai’s journey is essentially a journey into the inner most recesses of her soul whereby she discovers her poetic self, which eventually erases that distance. Reality effortlessly blends into the imaginative in the dream sequences, where Rai meets Kajari (Pauli Daam), her husband’s muse. Interestingly, however, Kajari turns out to be her second self, her alter-ego, the hidden poetry in her heart. She had once asked Indranil, “Who is Kajari? Me?” Indranil had said “No”. Since then, Rai has been wondering who this woman is who recurs in his poetry. She gets the answer towards the end: it’s her poetic self, which could translate Tagore’s “Amader chhoto nodi/ Chole anke-banke/Boishakh mashe tar haantu jal thake”, which could compose an almost ethereal poem about a woman whose husband returns to her after a long time, insane and almost unrecognizable! May be Indranil has always celebrated the poet-Rai in poem after poem, the poet who got buried under worldly pursuits.

When retold, as I have attempted to, Sab Choritro Kalponik, may appear to be a brilliant film. In fact, Rituparno had a grand conception; but the execution is faulty. It’s the same problem that destroyed Sanjay Leela Bansali’s Sawaariya. Although poetry plays a very important role in the narrative, the film is far from poetic. Emotions do overflow, but the flow isn’t spontaneous enough. Sab Choritro Kalponik, nonetheless, would not be forgotten easily; for, in spite of several shortcomings, it makes a different attempt; an attempt at reinstating the importance of poetry in an overwhelmingly consumerist world, where softer feelings often get lost in mad materialism.

Of Shopping

No, Bacon could not have written anything about this! Even his much-read ‘Of Travel’ bypasses the issue. While we can barely separate travel from shopping, Bacon makes an oblique reference to it, telling his readers that it isn’t desirable to pick anything or everything that comes his way while travelling…picking up foreign culture demands some degree of pragmatism on part of the traveller. But for us, the lesser mortals (I mean the presumably morally corrupt, with no admirable respect for tradition, and that’s what the brooding vanguards of Victorian morality think), the ‘foreign-bred’ is dearer to the ‘home-grown’, and we really believe, at times, ‘Ghar ka murgi dal barabar’. Therefore, with shopping malls mushrooming faster than monsoon-enthused mushrooms and driving us crazy with a gigantic spectrum of brand-names, our path to consumerist salvation seems to have been carved out.

Believe me, I’m not here to write about the evils of shopping; I’m very much in favour of the great economic liberalization, which has, at least, if not anything else, truly liberated us from the trauma of wearing unimaginative apparels and of having no sense of accessories. (Let me stop here and share something with you: In spite of such tsunamic revolution in the attire arena, I more often than not suffer visual strokes on having to watch my irredeemably middle class colleagues sporting prehistoric clothes and bags which should have received honourable awards in the dumping grounds for being so characteristically ‘dumpable’). Anyways, DKNY, Lacosté, Bare, Levi’s, Reebok, Adidas, Westside, Zodiac, John Miller, and so on and so forth have joined hands to make Gardens of Eden of the Shopping Malls…the only difference in this Paradise is that covetousness here is no sin. In fact, the “Dil Maange More” slogan popularized by Pepsi is the driving mantra!

My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, if I do not have too much in my wallet to spend in the shopping malls. Oftentimes, I feel that I may even forego my honesty and heed Iago’s culpable advice “Put money in thy purse”, if that means endless shopping. My friend U and I never tire of lamenting our proletariat status every time we lay our eyes on diamond-studded watches and designer furniture that hang like forbidden fruits right under our nose. My friend D vows to himself that he would never come to shopping malls again, for these are evil enticements that drain his bank balance like flood streams, but has never been able to keep that promise. Nothing on the display windows fails to astonish him, and very often than not, he strips unsuspecting mannequins to sheer nakedness, for he usually falls in love with them (I mean, their clothes). Another friend of mine P (who is also like an elder sister) blames it all on her zodiac-sign (Libra) for loving all the ‘good things of life’ and shops till she drops believing that her birth-hour had already predetermined her fate as a compulsive shopper. I am an equally powerful Libran who never feels tired of accompanying P when it comes to shopping, be it here in the city or as far away as Rajasthan. And U keeps on updating me on discounts, and our social network dotted with award-winning shoppers pass on the news with electrifying speed across the city and very often than not we find our friends having an unwitting get-together at these Shopping Elysiums. My abhorrence towards buying vegetables and fish has also evaporated ever since Spencer’s and Big Bazaar have come into the neighbourhood, replacing the nightmarish walk through the odiously smelly, muddy, blood-stained alleys of downmarket bazaars with dream ambling on marble floors in air-conditioned comfort. My mom rails at me for the vegetables are mostly stale and tasteless; but, I choose to overlook such demerits for I believe shopping malls can do no wrong!

We know that shopping malls swindle us into buying things at much higher prices, and the discounts they offer are but a eye-wash. For, the discounted price is the real price of the goods, and the seller is never at a loss. Yet, we love to indulge in them…it’s like gorging on chocolate brownie when you know you must be on a diet. There’s no end to it. Macbeth had murdered Duncan believing that’s it, only one, just one murder, would settle his life as a monarch forever. Well, let’s kill Banquo as well! Just two…then, my position is secured! O no! The poor man had turned into a serial killer by the time the realization dawns upon him that “Life is but a walking shadow…Full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing”. So, beware! Once you step into a shopping mall, believing “O this is just my first time…who’s going to come here again? It’s so expensive, my God!” You are wrong, my dear! The last time never comes. I would say come back, as many times as you wish. Don’t take it so seriously…what if, even when I have alluded to something as serious as Macbeth?

Why I suddenly hated "Dil to Pagal Hai" after a decade of loving it

Dil to Pagal Hai was released when I was still a school kid, naïve, unassuming, easily impressed by fairy tales from Bollywood, understanding everything with the heart and not with the head, and was unnaturally enamoured by the mesmerizing Madhuri Dixit, revelling in the post-Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! hangover that had eclipsed all other existing women, reel-life or real-life! Dil to Pagal Hai arrived at the theatres with a bang and set the box-office bells ringing from Day 1, sucking the audience into the whirlpool of ‘good life’ it celebrated, transposing them to a world levitating much above the ‘ground-reality’. Nursery-rhyme-inspired sets, pageants of abundance in the form of food, clothes, and money, extravagant shaadi ka rasm, dream-like dances, and a naïve heroine, clad in semi-transparent designer apparels, gyrating in lush European meadows, and inhabiting a world so formidably immune from the reality around it, coalesced together to create magic that took in its folds innocent kids like us, almost effortlessly. The impression the film had left on me, ‘I bore in my heart’ for a decade or so, almost deliberately overlooking the substantial hollowness at the very core of it; for, every time I have watched it, I have seen nothing beyond Madhuri Dixit who almost looked ethereal, lolling in the verdurous meadows, lip-syncing to romantic songs in milk-white designer salwar kameezes (the Manish Malhotra kind, which no one had seen ever before)! Her romantic philosophies, the platitudes she uttered were music to our ears, and we hardly ever thought how regressive those were!

Yesterday, I again glued myself to the sofa to watch Dil to Pagal Hai for the 192nd time, when, I was kind of shaken out of a waking dream, and realised, as if in an epiphanic moment, that “fled is that music”, and am really, wide awake now. A thing of beauty cannot be joy forever…Keats was wrong! I suddenly started hating Madhuri Dixit and all her designer nyakami (believe me ‘affectation’ is not a good translation of this adjective…), when it occurred to me that she actually DOES NOTHING in the film. I mean nothing meaningful! Her job is to look good, buy clothes from shopping malls, dance around the trees in the meadows without any sense of time, and LOOK FOR A LOVER! This last thing preoccupies every single moment of her day, like those 24*7 news channels which refuse to stop. How idiotic, my God! She behaves as if people are born to get married, and nothing else is meaningful in life, even if you’re a NASA astronomer, exploring the outer space. Everyday is Valentine’s celebration for her, and she is intolerable enough to Indianize this remarkably western festival (read, Archie’s one more excuse to sell cards and accessories and bamboozle unsuspecting emotionally downmarket lovers) by linking it up with Puranmashi! Sounds like one of those B-grade supernatural thrillers? Yes, it does! For, it’s indeed supernatural, for the even more irritating Shah Rukh Khan really bumps into her over the phone in a wrong connection, on that momentous night of Puranmashi melting into Valentine’s Day. Even more irritating is Aruna Irani, the veteran Godmother of lessons in love, who distributes designer Ganesha idols once things seem to have gone for a toss. And why forget the hideous Farida Jalal? The most excruciatingly painful scene is the one where Akshay Kumar tells her over the phone that he is tying the knot with Madhuri, and she walks into the latter’s room shedding a bucket of tears, and carrying with her an elaborate shaadi ka joda, and god knows, what other stupid accessories on a tray! I wonder did she have an instant-supply of these shaadi ka accessories. Like those instant-noodles and instant-coffee? May be! The world of Dil to Pagal Hai is clinically and incurably mad about getting married, and there’s every possibility that these mother-figures churn out marriage uniforms at the drop of a hat. How retro! How regressive! Awful! O my god, I had never imagined that I would view Dil to Pagal Hai with so much hatred and loathing! I almost surprised myself. I did not ever imagine that I was actually capable of such reactions to the film, which I have loved so much! Finally, I have grown up, I guess. Better late than never, what say?

‘Summer of ’42’: A Prequel to ‘The Reader’?

While watching Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42, I was struck by its similarity to The Reader, released in 2008. It’s again a younger boy, the 15-year old Hermie falling in love with the 22-year Dorothy, in the backdrop of the World War II. The Holocaust, if you recall, is the major historical event informing The Reader. Summer of ’42 is as poetic as its title, bringing home to its viewers a tangible feel of a New England beach colony, a summer about which Shakespeare wouldn’t have cribbed! This summer does have a short lease too, but it’s the kind of summer every beloved would have loved himself (or herself) to be compared to. It’s so beautiful, so lyrical and so vibrantly lively. Three young boys, the ‘terrible trio’ as they call themselves, mature from childhood to adolescence through a pedantic knowledge of sex, followed by real life experiences. While these boys literally come of age, their crossing the threshold of innocence culminates in the loss of Hermie’s beloved, Dorothy. Having lost her husband in the war, she finds solace in the arms of Hermie, much to the boy’s surprise. He suddenly matures that night: a casual call turns into an experience of a lifetime when Dorothy melts into him, feeling the intense need of human touch, the very human soul which seems to have been buried beneath the humdrum of the global battle for power. But the next day she leaves, leaving a letter for Hermie, now an adult, overnight. Although he does not understand why she deserts him, the voice-over, the older Hermie seems to have comprehended her sudden disappearance.
The World War II was so cataclysmic that it had battered faith in humanity to death. The bonds of love had become fragile, and summers had turned bloodier than beautiful. Summer of ’42, or for that matter, The Reader, are few of those great sublime works of art that makes an attempt to re-establish faith in humanity, and celebrate love, the fundamental driving principle of life. When the real world is eating and sleeping violence, the responsibility of reaffirming life lies with the world of fiction. And once that responsibility is responsibly taken, you have such gems as Summer of ’42 or The Reader. Though, both the films end on a sad note, it is worth living each and every moment of the film. The war is always happening for us civilians in some place else…we needn’t bother. But every war changes our lives forever. Sometimes we realize it, sometimes we don’t. These films make you realise that in a beautiful way. It’s not just about leaning against the coppice gate and watching…it’s something more than that!

Of Loneliness

Had Francis Bacon been living at this hour, he would have certainly added to his long list of Essays, another having the same title. With the world becoming more and more crowded, loneliness has caught up like an incurable disease which has of late taken the proportion of an epidemic. However, the focus has been more or less on those who are visibly lonely: old people abandoned by their children, widows, a single child, a single man or woman, an expatriate (sometimes nuclear diasporic families), etc. And because people are usually afraid of being lonely, they have, in desperation, found ways to ward off their loneliness. For, frail old people we have old age homes; widows sometimes choose to remarry; a single child is sent to the playschool very early; single men or women are urged on to tie the knot; an expatriate takes no time in joining or sometimes forming communities abroad, and so on and so forth. We are all too ready to hold hands and form a sacred circle to keep away the demon called LONELINESS. But do we really overpower loneliness through bonding? Do we? Understandably, if we do not have anyone to share our deepest sorrows, or our biggest achievements, nothing could be more depressing than that. Remember Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner? Doesn’t his tragedy lie in being alienated from human community for an unforgivable sin? And doesn’t he desperately try to get himself reintegrated to the community by performing the act of penance through sharing his story with the wedding guest? That’s what everyone does. A criminal was often sent on exile or outlawed. The most heinous punishment one can think of! More terrifying, perhaps, than death! Remember Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim? We needn’t go that far! Consider Ramayana: Sita’s exile to the forest is perhaps the most severe punishment a husband has ever meted out to his wife. The punishment of being alone! Yet, isn’t it more depressing, even tragic, to realise one fine day that you are really alone in spite of company? Like Sita, who supposedly had the most adorable husband in the world (and therefore, she was conventionally, not lonely), we all come to realise some day or the other that we are really really lonely. No loyal friends, no doting lover, no loving relatives, no sympathetic colleagues, no caring spouse can ever embalm that pain, even if they are lying on the same bed with you or are just a phone call away.

Yet, we look for company! Recall those splendidly poetical line: Is ajnabi se seher me jana-pehchana dhunndta hai... (In this strange city, the lonesome soul keeps looknig for an acquaintance) It's so sadly true for all of us! We all need to talk. The moment we start talking, we barely realise, that the medium of conversation, that is language, is a construction, which more often than not fails to communicate the right kind of feelings or emotions, or has a very different or no impact on the listener, for its import is mostly lost on him. Hold on! Tell me, who would actually lend an ear to you? It’s easier to convert coal into diamond than to find a sympathetic listener. We do feel a heavy abhiman (No English synonym can actually bring out the implication of this very beautiful Sanskrit word) unbearably shrouding our hearts…for, friends appear selfish, spouses seem nonchalant, children too busy to pay attention, colleagues too competitive to feel for you…but, we are helpless. We are like Shelley’s Moon whose eyes are perpetually joyless, for she has not yet found a worthy companion who would love her forever. But don’t we feel secured at times by starting off a family? And initially it appears to us that we have found that worthy companion in our spouses? I mean, that’s what people generally do! But such illusion of security is short-lived…however, pitifully permanent for those who unwittingly turn such a relationship into a habit, and refuse to admit that they’ve actually become lonely all over again. May be such delusion saves one from facing a harsh reality head-on. But is that desirable? We continue to play this game until life teaches us the hard way that there is no other way to be than to be alone on the day we leave this world. So, my point is let’s not bewail being lonely…for, that is the norm. And let’s not be afraid…for, we can be gracefully lonely. For, hasn’t the veteran poet said, Jodi tor daak shune keu na ashe, tobey ekla cholo re (If no one answers your call, carry on with the journey, alone)?

Kaustav's Arden: Beyond Barriers: The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Show Gathers Unprecedented Momentum

Kaustav's Arden: Beyond Barriers: The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Show Gathers Unprecedented Momentum

Beyond Barriers: The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Show Gathers Unprecedented Momentum

I exchanged amorous glances with my beloved.

Let the women and girls say what they like---

I exchanged amorous glances with my beloved.

His beautiful face, his charming form

I absorbed into my innermost heart.

----Amir Khusro

The three days (June 12-June 14) at Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata saw a proud assertion of sexuality, generally dubbed ‘abnormal’ by a silly ‘normal’ majority, through films and videos from across the globe. The Kolkata LGBT Film and Video Festival smugly entered its third year, throwing to the winds anxieties, hatred, denial, rejection, shame and all other ‘constructed’ negativities associated with alternate sexualities. The films the festival featured were a mixed bag of good and bad flicks, judged by cinematic standards, but each of them has a historically momentous role in representing or giving voice to people mostly overlooked or made fun of in popular culture. Each of these films effectively and unpretentiously narrates the story of ‘invisible’ men and women, and gives them a place in human history.
The turn-out was amazing! Both heterosexual people and people of alternative sexualities gathered in considerable numbers in the premises of Max Mueller Bhavan. The film festival opened up a rather comfortable space to all those who are very often than not jibed at, made butts of laughter, and often brutally humiliated and even ravished in the world outside. ‘Dialogues’ organized by Sappho and Pratyay Gender Trust is kind of an eventful homecoming for all those who are never at home in the big bad world. I could overhear conversations amongst gay men who have come out to their parents and friends; some of them have been accepted, while some have faced downright rejection. Yet they all shone out in resplendent glory and beamed with glee in this public event which is so blissfully open! If the big bad world makes this dismal demand to conform to heteronormativity and any kind of digression is treated with unspeakable malice, Sappho and Pratyay have conquered an honourable space for all those who are treated or maltreated thus. ‘Dialogues’ is one of the many events that seeks to make the presence of those who have been so far treated as non-existent or diseased strongly felt. The festival opened to a full-house with director Onir (My Brother Nikhil) and fashion designer Nil (Dev R Nil) sharing the stage. Next in line was the inaugural film A Jihad for Love, a docufeature narrating ‘coming-out’ stories of men and women from across the globe. Interestingly, many of the films showcased in the festival linked up minority anxieties, religious fundamentalism, apartheid, racism, and the hoax associated with multiculturalism with sexual othering. Both All My Life (set in a conservative Muslim community of Egypt) and The World Unseen (set in an Indian community of South Africa) situate the sexual minority in a world of religious orthodoxy and homophobia, and fierce apartheid respectively. All these films question democracy (if it at all exists), the right of the individual, and the right to assert one’s sexual needs, which are perhaps the most fundamental reality of human life. Harvey Milk’s clarion call — “My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you” — is perhaps the major inspiration behind all these films which seek to recruit people of alternative sexualities in mainstream politics and naturalize homosexuality. Although the murky cloud covering the issue of homosexuality has just started to be lined with silver, it’s really long before the sun shines forth in its full glory. But the journey has begun…certainly it has!

‘The Reader’: Emancipation through reading

The 33-year old Hannah (Kate Winslet) chances upon the 15-year old Michael (David Cross), sick with symptoms of scarlet fever, on her doorsteps one rainy afternoon and the foundation stone of a breezy love affair is set. A love affair set in motion by carnal desires, a young boy’s ecstatic initiation into the world of sex, his sudden realization of his own manliness, takes a ‘literary’ turn as Hannah lays the condition that he has to read to her first before he could bed her. An extraordinary condition indeed, which, Michael does not find difficult to comply with! Their prelude to passionate love-making becomes emotional journeys through literary texts of Homer, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, and many others. Constantly referred to as ‘kid’ both lovingly and condescendingly by the woman, Michael soon realizes that this affair is solely and rather dominantly steered by Hannah’s own will, sometimes whimsical and incomprehensible. His male ego is profoundly hurt by Hannah’s quirky behaviour, her shifting moods, and her maturity. And one fine day, Hannah abandons the apartment without even leaving a note for him. The entire story is told in flashback, when a middle-aged Michael (Ralph Finesse) is now a well-established lawyer in Germany.
The narrative moves to and fro in time, covering several decades, especially the years of the Holocaust. The tagline of the film “How far would you go to protect a secret?” is complemented by a class lecture in which the professor says that most literatures are about keeping a secret really well and he cites the example of Odysseus. Hannah who laughs and cries through the reading sessions also has a deep secret, which she protects with an unimaginable zeal, stretching to an unthinkable extent. Accused of having deliberately locked six hundred Jews in a church on fire, she could have escaped life sentence had she told the court that she could not read or write. Ashamed of her illiteracy, she embraces the punishment with a stoical calm.
The film takes an unusually lovely turn, when Michael who had really fallen in love with Hannah starts sending her recorded books of literary classics, realizing that she cannot read or write. Hannah’s inflated ego had prevented her from telling the court that she was illiterate. The same indomitable ego sees her turning her days behind the bars into the fruitful activity of learning to read and write. She borrows books from the prison library and learns to read by matching the sound (of the recorded text) and the written word. Michael’s love for her comes across as the sustaining quality of the human community which has already seen something as monstrous as the Holocaust. Set against the background of the Holocaust that was inhumanly exclusionary in nature, an irremovable blot on human history, Michael’s pure love for Hannah gathers especial significance. Imprisoned by illiteracy, Hannah’s real emancipation comes, ironically, in the prison where through reading literary classics she emerges as a better human being. She commits suicide in the end, for she has nothing to go back to in the world outside. The freedom she got in the fictional world of literature within the four walls of the prison perhaps seems to her to be marred by her recourse to the real world. She leaves behind all her money to the little girl (now a grown-up woman) who had by a stroke of luck survived the church incident.
Based on a book by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader leaves you mesmerised. Kate Winslet effortless performance, David Cross’ freshness, and Ralph Finesse’s dignified demeanour would stay with you for long. A must watch!

N.B: I have not written a review, really! I only felt like sharing the story with you…it has moved me immensely.

Tagore Woes!

Who’s the biggest Bengali celebrity? No prizes for guessing. It’s Goddess Durga. Who comes next to her? Of course, our very own property - the Kobiguru! Bengalis are melodramatically sentimental about the poet, most of the time, not realizing who they are worshipping and why is he worthy of being worshipped. This year, I was awfully perturbed on my visit to Jorasanko Thakurbari. The place was mindlessly populated (this happens every year) mostly by people who were there to habitually join the bandwagon of Bengali euphoria for Tagore, people who are euphoric about anything on earth, from a lucrative discount at a shopping mall to Aishwarya Rai’s shooting spree on the ghats of the Ganges! There’s nothing wrong in being zestful about everything; but my point is that this overwhelming zest should have some purpose. For instance, there is an understandable purpose in running after a discount, say, at Zodiac or Westside! There is also a purpose behind making a beeline around the shooting spot of an Abhishek-Aishwarya starrer! What is the purpose, you may ask. The purpose is as simple and as unostentatious as taking a look at the stars. Sounds ridiculous? It does! But, that’s the truth, and there’s nothing beyond it. But the purpose of visiting Jorasanko or Rabindra Sadan on ‘25 Baisakh’ (and that too in a red-bordered white sari or designer dhoti-kurta) should have some deeper purpose than just ‘for the sake of remembering Tagore’.
Ironically, and very very unfortunately, most of these Jorasanko and Rabindra Sadan crowd is highly conservative about Tagore. But of course, all of them can at least sing a few lines of “Hare re re amaye chhere de re de re” or “Purano shei diner kotha”! That does not of course make them qualified enough to celebrate Tagore’s birthday. For, most of them do not know that the man they revere or worship as God is someone who has been the most carefree of conservative norms, someone who has always tried to break free of the conventional! Closely read, Tagore is capable of shaking the Bengali middle class out of their traditionalist Elysium (read Pandemonium) of fixed notions of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, of ‘black’ and ‘white’, of ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’. Whether a novel or a poem, a play or a song, an average Bengali has mostly enjoyed it at the surface level, without understanding its real import (of course, there are exceptions; or else, this article would not be written at all). Tagore has time and again questioned norms, problematized conventional notions of the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’, and in a way, he is one of the first postmodernists to give voice to all the concerns that occupy today’s thinkers. His Ghare Baire voices the anxiety of the hypermasculine discourse of nationalism, while his Chokher Bali unleashes unabashedly the socially forbidden passions of a widow. How many Tagore fans know that the novelist was compelled to change the ending of Chokher Bali where his Binodini was not apologetic at all? And hello! How many of us go gaga over Chandalika? Most remembers it for its awesome songs, right? But isn’t this dance-drama one of the very first truly ‘subaltern’ stuffs? Chandalika’s woes have a lot to do with her subaltern position, and her painful realization that how her personal emotions are regulated by an overarching caste system. Chitrangada is a marvel! Everybody agrees to it! Because it has spectacular songs: ‘Bandhu kon alo laglo chokhe’, ‘Rodon bhara e basanta’, and many more! But isn’t the play dealing with the anxieties regarding sexuality? Chintrangada’s transformation from ‘kurupa’ to ‘surupa’ has lot to do with the construction of feminine sexuality as petite, delicate and soft! Does not the play remind us of the endlessly irritating beauty cream ads that promote physical beauty as the only powerful weapon? Tagore’s play problematizes brilliantly the set notions of female sexuality. Though it does not digress from its main source (i.e. The Mahabharata), it was, in a way, ahead of its time. I was in fact reminded of Chitrangada’s discomfiture while watching Kajol in Karan Johar’s postmodern candy-floss romance Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

Now, such a list is endless. I am not writing a eulogy of Tagore. What I wish to point out is that let’s not be sentimental about this great poet. It’s high time we recognized that his greatness lies in breaking rules, not in constructing them. His works are sublime by the virtue of their aesthetic quality; but all of these works are also open to political reading. I’m saying nothing new. At least, some elitists would think so. But my target audience is the pitifully downmarket crowd at Rabindra Sadan and Jorasanko Thakurbari who celebrate Ponchishe Boishakh without knowing why they are doing so. They barely know that they are almost sinfully tying up the poet who has been iconoclastic in myriad ways in thousands of meaninglessly conservative knots. Tagore has been given a godly status; I have no objection to that. But I’m sure the poet would have himself objected to such a rendition of his image, as one who is out there, at a Height, the Other, who needs to be posited always against the Self. Even if we believe in the ‘death of the author’, the works that are available to us are enough evidence to break-free from any orthodoxy. True, by celebrating Tagore’s birthday, we do pay homage to that great creative principle that keeps the world going; but, there’s no need to associate notions of pseudo-sanctity with that.