The hills are alive (but only just) - on Kalpish Ratna's new book

[Did this review for The Sunday Guardian]

“Who would want to imprison a hill?”

The question might seem to come from the fantasy genre – from something like the story of Tolkien’s tree-like Ents, sundered from their kin, their gardens destroyed by the forces of evil. Like many such fables, Kalpish Ratna’s Once Upon a Hill is a cautionary tale and an elegy for the natural world, but its silent hero is a real hill – or rather, something that was once part of a hill: a 60-metre-high column of rock in Mumbai’s Andheri, a surreal presence (for someone who actually looks at it instead of taking it for granted) in the heart of a dirty, crowded urban settlement. And Gilbert Hill isn’t imprisoned only in the sense that it has been separated from its hill friends and plonked into a city: when the author views it early one Sunday morning, it is literally behind a gate – “barred, padlocked, grilled”.

Make that “authors”, for Kalpish Ratna is the lyrical pseudonym used by Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, who write together (this can sometimes be confusing: the book’s narrator mentions “my daughter Afaaf” – the reference is to Syed’s child – and there are incidents that read like a single person’s experiences). Even if you don’t know that they are professional surgeons, you might guess it from some of the descriptors they use: the east face of the hill is a “dry ulcer, an ugly keloid of crumbling tissue that will never be repaired again”; from one angle, it “looks like an über-scar”.

Their intention, however, is to discover what Gilbert Hill really is, what it tells us about Bombay’s geological past and about ourselves. How did its distinctive hexagonal columns form? What of the shrine – to a mysterious goddess named Gaodevi – at the top? What of its modern history – its sale and subsequent quarrying? These questions are addressed through much research (including a study of the papers of the 19th century surgeon Henry John Carter), the consultation of old maps, and many dead ends. There is a hint of detective story here; like the protagonist in Swaminathan’s Lalli books, the authors rigorously work things out, conducting an investigation that reaches back to 65 million years ago, when the landmass we now call India had not yet collided into Asia; they scrutinise the whys and hows of rock formations, peck at the exact meaning of “basalt”.

One sees here a trademark of Kalpish Ratna’s work: obsessive attention to detail and a propensity to cut through – or fold back – the surfaces of things to discover what lies beneath them (the reviewer’s pen trembles for trite analogies involving surgery and scalpels). But another quality – one I admire greatly – is a visible love for the nuts and bolts of writing. This duo has never been content to run with a good plot (or, as in this case, a worthy non-fiction subject) – their writing, at a sentence by sentence level, is rich, inventive, full of sharp imagery (“a tinsel arc of water shivers in the air as an autorickshaw gets its morning sluice”) that sometimes steers close to over-descriptiveness.

Thus, inanimate things are given life – a large construction crane becomes a steel tyrannosaurus, tearing away the pavement with its “titanic mandibles”. There is humour (“a one-headed dog” rises from a guttery Styx; an archaeologist “has a bright future and is equally illuminating about the past”), there is poetry (“flatten the hills, push back the sea, make even more space for the builder and me”), and even a whimsical firsthand account by a fossilised turtle whose memories stretch back to a time the authors themselves can barely imagine. Mostly, these are cases of form enhancing content – the language shakes up the reader, giving us new ways of looking at things that might otherwise be tediously familiar – though there are stray passages where the flair is overdone and the serrated narrative becomes a barrier to a clear understanding of the issues involved.

Flowing beneath the stylistic playfulness – like the rock-forming magma often mentioned in the text – is a deep anger about our ravaged ecology and the planet’s future. “To flatten a hill is the very acme of arrogance, but to leave it rotting thus in its flayed layers is psychotic,” the narrator observes. “Your fossil name is homo sapiens sapiens, the creature who can think about thinking,” the turtle chides the narrator, “Isn’t it time you thought about that?” Once Upon a Hill is a testament to forgotten landscapes that now host manicured urban settlements; a reminder that the lives of even very old cities would barely register on the geological time-scale, and that human beings – whose hubris and dominance is just another blip on that scale – have responsibilities.

The denser, more jargon-ridden passages of this difficult-to-classify book may test the patience of even the engaged reader (quick, what’s the difference between a batholith and a lopolith?), but it occupies a special place in the ever-growing library of literature about Bombay – and it should be just as relevant to those who aren’t from that city. I have lived in a south Delhi colony for 25 years and Gilbert Hill has never loomed on my horizon; but now, each time I look at the little mound – barely a few feet high – in the park near my flat, with a newly built Metro station running directly beneath it, I wonder what this terrain was like before the sapiens arrived with their construction cranes – and what it will be like a hundred years from now.

Post abhi baaki hai...some more Wasseypur rambling

[Warning: none of this will make any sense if you haven't seen Gangs of Wasseypur, and possibly even if you have]

Looking at my GoW post again, I realised it came across as more negative than intended, perhaps giving the impression that I didn’t like the film – which is very far from the truth. Part of the reason is that the post wasn’t a consolidated “review”, it was a specific attempt to discuss some things that didn’t work for me – and so, the tone necessarily leant in a particular direction. (I could have written a piece twice as long gushing about the many things I loved in the film, but that wasn’t the intention here.)

It’s always a good thing when a movie can provoke impassioned, well-articulated conversations, and GoW has certainly been doing this. I’m not about to quote all my email chats with friends on the subject, but here’s an example of a discussion of a relatively minor plot point. My friend Shougat has written three separate pieces about GoW for Tehelka. In the last of these, he notes:

An arresting image, Kashyap should be told, is not the same as an idea. For instance, in GoW1, a consigliere (one of two, like everything in this film) of the Khan family crime syndicate self-flagellates in the manner of Shia Muslims to punish himself for his lust. There are other scenes of collective Shia self-flagellation in GoW1, and in GoW2 the same character once again cracks the lash against his back, his face set in stoic denial, while listening to Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Huma Qureshi’s extended post-nuptial frolicking. This must mean something, you think, must reflect something about this man’s character, or perhaps make some general point. But, no, Kashyap just likes the sight and sound of a man whipping himself.

My response to the above passage:

Actually, I think Farhan's self-flagellating was intended to make a point about his character (whether it's made convincingly is another matter). His inability to control his sexual drives in the first film plays a big part in defining Faisal's life trajectory, and one gets the impression that from this point onwards Farhan is on a relentless, self-conscious mission to detach himself from the material world in the face of his baser instincts. (His role as the sutradhaar lusting after successive generations of clan women reminded me oddly of Vyasa's ambiguous role in the Mahabharata.) Perhaps there is some sort of moral point intended in the fact that, all those namaazes and self-flagellations later, he is essentially the sole survivor at the end (and looking after Mohsina and her child the same way Vyasa was lingering about at the epic’s end as preceptor for the heir-apparent Parikshit after the Pandavas f***ed off to Heaven). Or perhaps nothing moral is intended.

To which Shougat tersely replied:

Sounds plausible to me... except that two scenes of the chap whipping himself followed by a last scene in Bombay is very little on which to hang an elaborate but interesting analysis.

Indeed, so rushed is the pace of GoW and so hard is it to take anything in it at face value that at times it feels like the only way to discuss the film is through subtextual analysis, playful speculation and guesswork. Which might simply mean that we need the evolution of a new mode of criticism to deal with a new type of cinema.

[Speaking of the Pandavas - and subtextual analysis - did Faisal’s ganja addiction remind anyone else of Yudhisthira’s gambling? Did Perpendicular’s activities put you in mind of Bheema’s appetite for random, cruel violence? No? Well, then.]

****

The fun thing about discussing this film is that nearly every intelligent viewer I know has expressed some ambivalence about their reactions, and wondered if they misread the tone of a crucial scene. On my post and elsewhere, the possibility has been raised that even Faisal’s big emotional moment near the end may have been an inside joke – another meta-reference to how the hero of a “typical” mainstream Hindi movie might be expected to behave in a certain situation. It has also been suggested that the characters of GoW – or at least the characters of GoW 2 – are not meant to have the interiority and roundedness that so many reviewers have been seeking; they are meant to be nothing more than hollow constructs of the movies they watch.

At risk of getting “meta” and self-indulgent myself, I want to again clarify something about my main objection to the film. I can’t do better than to simply quote a poster named Ami, who (in the comments thread of this blog) articulated my position better than I did. Here goes (bold marks mine):

I don’t think he is criticizing the film for its tragicomedic humour but for the fact that it cannot decide whether it wants the viewers to be emotionally invested in its characters and view them as real people or whether it wants to present its characters more as archetypical composites of popular culture living in a cardboard universe that is playfully derivative of gangster films and masala movies.

[...] He’s objecting to the uneven emotional engagement that the film provokes – not the fact that it is both serious and playful but the fact that it is both emotionally superficial and emotionally deep.

To reiterate: I respect any work that recognises the possibility of playfulness/levity in a tragic moment, and vice versa. (The scene where Faisal stumbles back to wear his shoes is one of a few scenes in GoW where I thought this was done quite nicely.) But I also think that in the really successful examples of such juxtapositions, those apparently contradictory moods are integrated within a given context. And in GoW, there were too many cases of the film simply telling us “This is how you're supposed to feel about these characters” in one scene and then “Now you have to feel this way” in the next scene.

Anyway, like I said in the earlier post, I look forward to watching the whole 6-hour shebang a second time and quite possibly changing my mind about it completely. Maybe a second viewing will reveal that the entire story is a ganja dream along the lines of the hallucinatory opium den scenes in Once Upon a Time in America.

Mind the gaps: conflicting thoughts on Gangs of Wasseypur

Much of the conversation around Anurag Kashyap’s multi-generational gangland epic Gangs of Wasseypur has centred on authenticity (or its absence). Some of the negative criticism has been based on pre-release publicity that appeared to flag GoW as a grittily realistic film with its roots firmly in the hinterland. I’ll avoid getting into that particular argument because I know nothing about the real Wasseypur, about its violent history and about when its young people first discovered the special pleasures of sunglasses – but also because “authenticity” and “realism” in cinema are always ambiguous things. I find it more useful to consider another level of reality – the one involving the creation of an internally consistent world. Given that GoW is a family epic involving layers of personal tragedy, I was perplexed by its wildly shifting tone, which made it difficult (for me at least) to feel strongly invested in its people.

In what is essentially a single five-and-a-half-hour film (released in two parts), it’s strange how little attempt there is at sustained character development. Partly, that’s because of the sheer size of the canvas – perhaps as big as any Hindi film has ever had. The narrative, with its panoply of characters, spans six decades, and the use of a voiceover (by Piyush Mishra’s sutradhaar Farhan) facilitates a speedy recording of events: courtships are hurriedly conducted, children are born, they grow up and we learn all the essential things about them in a few minutes (or seconds); vignettes flash by in the time it takes for a revolver to be cocked. Colourful characters (like an adolescent thug with a speech impediment and the nickname Perpendicular) hold the screen briefly and then exit, the main purpose of their existence being to amuse the viewer. Which in itself is fine (the totla Perpendicular’s mangling of cuss words - bhen tod - provides a superb laugh-out-loud moment), but it can become problematic if they divide the film’s running time among themselves in such a way that one doesn’t get to spend enough time with the principal characters.

Consequently Gangs of Wasseypur can be a confounding film to watch. There are so many brilliant things in it (and regardless of everything I say here, I look forward to watching Part I and Part II back to back on DVD at some point). There are the performances, notably by Manoj Bajpai, Richa Chadda, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and especially the film’s co-writer Zeishan Qadri in an (ahem) author-backed part as the imperturbable Definite. There is Sneha Khanwalkar’s versatile music score, ranging from the 1940s-style ballad “Ik Bagal” (written by the multitalented Mishra) to the reggae-hippie song “I am a Hunter” (which incorporates elements from Trinidadian music with what sounds – to my ears – like a hint of the classic children’s song “Nani teri morni”).

In Part II the music becomes noisily contrapuntal, and by this point the film in general is defined by constantly clashing tones. Many of the darkest scenes are treated with humour, occasionally to the point of inappropriateness (so that it’s common to find audience members laughing during moments of extreme violence, as they would during a Tom and Jerry cartoon). Admittedly, some of the little touches of levity are well done. When a sleeping (and probably ganja-addled) Faisal Khan is told that his father has been killed, he jumps off the charpoy and dashes down a stairway and out of the frame, looking very much the purposeful hero about to assume a responsibility – but a second later he scampers back awkwardly because he has forgotten to put on his shoes. It’s a nice touch – a pointer to the mundane things that can interfere with the playing out of the dramatic “scenes” in our lives, and the kind of shot one wouldn’t see in the Bachchan-starrer Trishul, which Faisal is so obsessed with. (More about that in this post.)

A notable thing about GoW is how its characters are influenced by cinema, and there is explicit commentary on this in one of the rare quiet scenes in Part II where the ancient Ramadhir Singh (looking increasingly like the old Don Ciccio, destined to be cleanly gutted by De Niro’s Vito Corleone near the end of The Godfather Part II) mulls that one reason he has stayed alive for so long is “kyonke main cinema nahin dekhta” – he has never been swayed by the flair and the heroics he sees onscreen, played out over the decades by generations of movie stars from Dilip Kumar through “Bachchan Amitabh” to Salman Khan. Elsewhere, there is much evidence of personalities and relationships shaped by celluloid dreams, such as when Mohsina (Huma Qureshi) sees that Faisal has come to her house to ask for her hand in marriage, and reacts by pirouetting dreamily in slow-motion the way Madhuri Dixit might have done in a less self-conscious film of an earlier age. These scenes are notable as meta-commentary about a people’s connection with their cinema, but it also means that most of the characters in Gangs of Wasseypur are about as fleshed out as movie-star posters.

The strongest emotional response I had to any killing in the film was when the imperial, dignified Shahid Khan is assassinated in Varanasi relatively early in Part I. And after watching Part II, just because of that “main cinema nahin dekhta” scene, I came away feeling like Ramadhir Singh was the character I knew best in the entire film. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both these moments involve members of the old guard – people whose heyday takes place very early in this epic story. This could be tied to the idea that there was a certain intrinsic honour in the earlier generations, even a rationale for violence, and that the younger lot – culminating in the amoral Perpendicular and the opportunistic Definite – have lost that grounding; nihilism has set in.

Caught between these two worlds is the Faisal Khan character, who might be called GoW's protagonist. The role is well-performed and Faisal’s initial trajectory recalls Michael Corleone in The Godfather – the innocent sucked into a vortex of crime. Indeed he even has a scene late in the second part where he cries in his wife’s arms about how he didn’t want to have anything to do with this violent life. Yet there’s something random about this scene: it comes out of nowhere, feels psychologically improbable given how far gone Faisal is by this point (besides, if he was initially unwilling, it was probably because he was immersed in ganja, not because of any moral compulsions) and I thought it existed only to give us a reason to feel sorry for Faisal in light of what will happen later. In any case this pathos-filled moment is soon rendered meaningless: the grim bloodbath that Faisal engages in at the end doesn’t suggest someone who was ever a reluctant participant – this is killing for the fun of it, pure bloodlust combined with a boy’s fantasy of cornering his mortal enemy in a no-escape position and emptying round after round into his body.

The outlandish, cartoon violence of that final sequence – blood rendered shinily aesthetic, so that Ramadhir Singh’s ravaged corpse looks like it is studded with rubies – is a reminder that the film has stopped taking any of these killings seriously. Earlier, when the young widow Shama is shot dead in the Khan clan's house, the voiceover quickly tells us that this has come as a big shock to everyone because it’s the first time ever that a woman has been killed thus during the gang wars; cut to a very brief shot of Faisal sitting by himself, looking despondent, and then everyone gets back to the business of revenge and the business of business. A little while later, Faisal’s mother – a key character – is gunned down in the market, and this again is glossed over. And once you have heard faux-maudlin versions of Hindi-film songs like “Teri Meherbaniyan” being played alongside what are mean to be genuinely sad scenes (a family weeping over a young son’s body), it’s hard to take any of the emotions at face value. Gangs of Wasseypur encourages the viewer to chuckle at its violence and at the mourning that follows it, but also wants us to feel strongly enough about the main characters that there is a sense of genuine tragedy in the last act (and the last scene, which returns us to the plaintive “Ik Bagal”). Possibly this is my failing, but – much as I enjoyed many things about this epic film – I couldn’t muster both feelings at once.

Kite and kin: notes on Patang

At a film festival like Cinefan, some of the more poetic things get said after a screening is over, when the movie’s crew comes up on the stage to address the audience. Consider Aakash Maheriya, a non-professional actor from Ahmedabad, who played one of the main roles in Prashant Bhargava’s fine film Patang. Too many people choose to highlight the unpleasant things about his city’s recent history, Maheriya said – communal riots, for example. “Lekin Prashant ne kuay mein haath daalkar hamaari khushiyan nikaali aur aapko dikhayee.” (“But Prashant dipped his hand in the well, found the happier side of our lives and put it into this film.”)

Much of this khushi is expressed during Ahmedabad’s vibrant kite festival Uttarayan, the event around which the film pivots. Patang, which won the Special Jury Award at Cinefan earlier today, is one of the least plot-driven movies I’ve seen in a while (this isn’t meant as criticism). Its slice-of-life story takes place over two days: a middle-aged businessman named Jayesh (Mukkund Shukla) visits his hometown with his young daughter Priya (Sugandha Garg); they stay with Jayesh’s mother, his widowed bhabhi Sudha (the excellent Seema Biswas in one of her too-infrequent screen appearances) and his nephew Chakku (Nawazuddin Siddiqui in another of a continuing line of impressive performances), who sings in a wedding band. Not very much “happens” – kites are flown, the old city is explored, Sudha seems happy but a little guarded, the family engages in everyday talk, the uncle is patronising towards his nephew – but steadily, deftly, little details of character and circumstance are revealed.

Early on, with no explicit information provided about Jayesh’s current life (and given the knowledge that the film itself was made by non-resident Indians), I assumed that Jayesh and Priya had come from “abroad”. (Clearly I wasn’t the only one: someone brought it up during the post-screening Q-A.) But midway through the film it is disclosed that they live in Delhi, and one realises that this father and daughter are in some ways foreigners even though they are in the same country, a few hundred miles away; the gulf between the lives they lead in the capital and the lives of their lower-middle-class relatives in old Ahmedabad (for whom they bring such wondrous gifts as iPods and "scent") is nearly as wide as it would have been if they were in the US.

As the narrative progresses, one sees the calm but insistent hegemony exercised by the big-city man who wants to settle his mother in a posh colony that has everything he thinks she could want (“AC hai, gardens hain ... mandir bhi hai”), as well as the vulnerability of the old woman, keen to avoid offending her son. One realises that Chakku, his loud shirts and sunglasses aside, is an insecure young man, very possessive of his mother, bitter about the past and essentially childlike (indeed he spends much of his time with the poor local children, who have their own daily struggles). Another young man, Bobby – apparently smug and self-assured – finds himself out of his depth when faced with the sexual frankness of a big-city girl (and with her goggle-eyed, admiring reaction when she discovers he is a college dropout - though in truth he would have preferred to continue studying). And in Priya’s behaviour, there are hints of an unhappy, neglected childhood (her mother was too busy to come along, she hesitantly reveals, because she was “wine-tasting”).

Most of this is not spelled out, it emerges through throwaway conversations. And though I understand what Maheriya meant in his quote about Ahmedabad ki khushi, it would be simplistic to describe this as a “happy” film. Seemingly commonplace early scenes – such as one where the old mother is asked to sign a document – come to suggest darker possibilities later; fractures appear in relationships. The most conventionally dramatic scene is a confrontation between Chakku and his uncle, but tension has already been building for a while, and the film’s pacing reflects this. When the kite-fliers take to the rooftops for friendly competition, the cuts become shorter and more urgent, the music more conspicuous, and though everyone is laughing and joking the event soon acquires a primal, ritualistic intensity. On the screen is a manic dance of hands (some of them bandaged) pulling at strings with increasing fervour; faces become tighter, more focused. Here is the spirit of festivity turned into the survival of the fittest (and this is, in more than one sense, a story about undercutting) – it’s possible, for a while at least, to believe that these people, nominally friends, will do anything to bring a rival kite down. These edgy scenes are later offset by quieter, more graceful night-time shots of kites with paper lanterns tied on their strings, but a point about human nature – and about sibling rivalries and class conflict – has already been made.

Patang combines a few well-chosen stylistic flourishes (such as hazy, dreamlike imagery when Jayesh recalls his childhood flying kites alongside his elder brother) with elements of cinéma vérité, including the casting of non-actors and the use of unobtrusive camerawork. Though based in Chicago, Prashant Bhargava spent months at a time living in Ahmedabad’s old city, observing the pulse of daily life, getting to know everyone from the chai-wallahs to the local gangsters. Later, during the shoot, he encouraged his crew to do the same. “In the first week we did nothing but hang out,” Sugandha Garg said after the screening, while Seema Biswas added that the camera was often left on for three or four hours until the actors became less conscious of it.

This brings a nice spontaneity to many shots, which must then have been painstakingly assembled in the editing room - the final film contains many close-ups of faces and hands, people caught in half-gestures and half-glances, and most of it works very well for this story. There are a few heavy-handed touches: the use of titles in the first 10 minutes to identify the major characters and their relationships to each other (this was presumably done to make things simpler for a non-Indian audience); a trite, over-expository conversation between Priya and Bobby during a romantic moment. But for most of its running time, Patang is a pleasingly intimate observation of small-town India (or rather, "old-city India") and of the many little complications attending family life.

Nizamuddin cats and Mani Ratnam

Two close friends, who are also two of my favourite writers (and the fandom preceded the friendship), have books coming out very soon. Presenting:

The Wildings, by Nilanjana S Roy (some information and an excerpt here; available for pre-order on Flipkart)

and

Conversations with Mani Ratnam, by Baradwaj Rangan

I haven’t read Nilanjana’s book yet but hope to soon – more on it in a later post. I have read most of Baradwaj’s manuscript, and instead of gushing on mindlessly as I’m prone to doing, I’ll say just this: it holds up extremely well in comparison with the two best conversations-with-directors books I have read: Bogdanovich on Orson Welles and Truffaut-Hitchcock. When Baradwaj first told me the book was going to be almost entirely in the Q&A format, I had...not misgivings but a tinge of regret, because I’m such a fan of his flowing writing. But he’s achieved something very special here: he has got Mani Ratnam to open up about a lot of things, moderated a series of fascinating conversations (and these ARE conversations between two people who are very knowledgeable about film – not standard-issue “interviews” where Serf asks Celebrity a line of vapid questions) - and most tricky of all, he has structured those sessions in such a way that a reader gets a sense of drama as well as chronology. I was riveted even by the discussions about the early Ratnam films that I haven’t seen.

(Okay, so I did gush on mindlessly. Won’t apologise for it though. Do keep an eye out for both books.)

Creatures and things we don't see, revisited

The author Vandana Singh left a comment on this post about human apathy towards other life-forms, and I thought it worthwhile to put it up here separately. Here it is - do take the time to read it.

My deepest condolences, and thanks for connecting to my essay.

I don't think the problem is specifically to do with Indians. One thing I've noticed from living in the US for a while is that often the same sort of attitudes or practices persist, but they are not out in the open. In India, everything is out in the open, such as animal abuse. In the US there are plenty of shelters filled with abandoned animals, some of them horribly abused (one dog I saw had been shot by his owner). My own dog is a rescue from some abused past that still haunts him.

I think, though, that the possibility that Indian attitudes toward animals has worsened over the years deserves deeper analysis. I can only present a hypothesis or two for what they're worth: consider the fact that my mother and many people from her generation who were raised in small towns or villages, still regard animals as ensouled beings who also have to live. Consider old practices that my mother still follows, of giving rice grains and so on to the birds or ants after you sort the grains. Consider that once India didn't have factory farms for meat, that once that would have been unthinkable, to line up animals in tiny cages so they couldn't even turn around, and subject them to unbelievable terror and cruelty – this is common practice in the US on a scale of millions of animals every single day, and is considered scientific farming.

Consider also the observation that the less educated, less westernized chowkidars actually are able to treat the dogs like fellow beings.

My suspicion is that we in India are in the middle of a cultural transformation, likely brought about by a) a colonised mind-set that compels us to blindly accept Western notions and paradigms without examining them, b) increasingly globalized consumerist culture that emphasizes I over we and therefore one's individual status and power and wealth over social good and environmental health. I've mentioned in my article naturalist Valmik Thapar's conjecture that the only reason why so many animals survived in India despite the population explosion was because of the Hindu attitude toward animals, one also reflected in other religions of the subcontinent – but in particular the idea that animals and humans are not essentially different and via reincarnation one can get to be various life-forms, so they are kin to us. One does not have to take this literally, or even be a Hindu to recognize our kinship with all beings, but one can see how this kinship might still exist among poor people who haven't had an expensive Western education/ cultural brainwashing beat it out of them.

Think about this: India's natural resources have taken more hits in the last two decades than in the 200 years of British rule. Think about how it makes certain corporations drool to see "their" coal and oil under all those forests. Isn't it easier to rape and pillage a land if the attitude toward animals and trees and forests can be undermined? And how much easier it is to do that when people are disconnected from each other and plugged into a global urban culture that is all about feeding the insatiable appetite for things, things, things? Undermining a love for nature and animals paves the way for mass scale destruction of the world habitat.

This might sound unduly portentous and melodramatic but sadly, it is true.

I suggest that likeminded people of all backgrounds rally together to make kinship with our street dogs, the local trees, the local patches of nature not swallowed up by our endless greed. I also have a lot of hope in children, who can make their families change their attitudes. Start a nature club! When I was growing up in Delhi, we did this with great success in many schools but it should work just as well in various colonies and apartment complexes.

In solidarity,
Vandana Singh

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[Note: in a small way, this discussion ties in with the Mr Colpeper character in A Canterbury Tale – a lonesome crusader who has a strong connection with the natural world and is concerned about the relentless march of "progress" (though he is incapable of discerning between the good and bad aspects of a modern world). Perhaps one reason why I've been thinking so much lately about that very moving film]

Collective mourning in the internet age

[Did this somewhat slapdash piece for Business Standard’s “Eye Culture” space last week. Putting it here mainly because the BS website still looks as terrible as it did in 2003 when I first trolled it]

A few years ago I used to write a column called Neterati for this paper – basically, a round-up of what denizens of the Internet were saying about a newsy topic, along with slivers of tasteful (or so I hoped) commentary. The column has long been put to rest, but my fingers began itching something fierce last week when my Facebook timeline and every website I clicked on became jammed with eulogies to Rajesh Khanna. The dominant expression of sorrow was an “RIP Kaka” followed, in a few cases, by what I assume was a mistyped smiley face (it appeared to be winking and crying simultaneously) – but what do I know?

Whenever an old-time movie-star dies – even if it now happens every other week – “an era comes to an end”. This we have long known from obituaries in print and electronic media. In the cyber-age, though, the quantum of group-hugging – and the eagerness to share in a collective experience in real time – can be staggering. Much has already been written about how social networking gives us instant outlets for self-expression in times of joy and grief, but a couple of things about the reaction to Khanna’s death were particularly notable.

One was the nature of the nostalgia involved. Among the more self-aware comments I read came from someone who said he disliked Khanna as an actor, but that was beside the point. “My friends and I used to laugh at his mannerisms. Yet, when I heard the news I almost wept. There's so much history – years of watching his movies, talking about how he hammed a scene. He became a part of growing up and in a weird way, almost like a distant family member.” Still more interesting were the displays of yearning for a past that the yearner had never experienced firsthand, along with the Golden Ageist tendency to sentimentalise “a time when things were so much simpler” – it was common to see youngsters shedding virtual tears because Khanna had meant so much to their parents or grandparents, never mind that they weren’t much familiar with his work themselves. (This is easy to relate to: much of my personal interest in Hindi movie stars of the 1960s is tied to my mother’s memories of the time, and to fascinated speculation about what the world was like when my parents were young.)

One thing I heartily approved of was the widespread linking to videos of songs from such films as Amar Prem and Kati Patang; these are lovely tunes, we should use every chance we get to spread them around. But consider some of the accompanying commentary. On my news feed, a link to “Zindagi Kaisi Hai Paheli” carried the remark “Kaka knows his death from 1971 and this movie and song says it all.” (Or: how to retrospectively turn a star into a soothsayer.) Interesting discussions can be had – in other spaces – about how a popular movie star with a distinct personality might become the “co-author” of his roles (a post along those lines here), but some of the reactions to Khanna’s passing took this to a new level, giving him credit for the things he said in his films; dialogues and lyrics became meta-commentaries on his life. It was easy to predict that TV channels would endlessly replay the famous death scene from Anand, with its rich possibilities for subtextual analysis: the future superstar (Amitabh Bachchan as Dr Bhaskar) presiding over the passing of the current one (Khanna as Anand); the playing of a tape that reminds us that the dead man will always live on (in much the same way that Khanna’s best screen moments will continue to be accessible to us).

In our more composed moments, we can scoff at all this. But it tells us something important about that beast called superstardom, at whose scaly feet rationality must bow and scrape. The sort of popularity Khanna attained in the early 1970s involves a mysterious and immeasurable connect between viewer and screen persona – a bond that has fuelled commercial cinema since the days of Chaplin, Valentino and Lillian Gish. Such stardom is made up of some permutations of obsessive personal identification, wish-fulfilment, romantic love and platonic crushes (with all the talk about screaming college girls and marriage proposals written in blood, it gets forgotten that Khanna also had a huge base of fixated male fans). And a necessary by-product of this is the inability to separate the star from the roles.

And so, even as a non-fan, I’ll belatedly add to the sentimental chorus. So what if the man himself had been out of the public glare – and basically irrelevant – for most of the last three decades? So what if it’s unlikely that he was a lovable Anand in real life? All that matters now is the chord he struck with millions of people, the joy he spread for so long – and the fact that he had the good sense to shuffle off his mortal coil in the Facebook and YouTube age.

[A post from a few months ago: Zombie Rajesh in Shaitani Anand]