A crisis of faith in My Father My Lord

A small boy watches as an old woman’s body is wheeled into an ambulance. An Alsatian runs out of the apartment where the woman used to live, jumps into the vehicle and sits, whimpering, next to the stretcher; it has to be dragged away by a neighbour. Later that night, the boy asks his father if dogs have souls.

“No,” replies the father, an orthodox Rabbi of the Haredic community. He says this as a simple statement of fact: the “rules” are different for animals, to whom such concepts as “soul” or “heaven” do not apply in the way they do to humans – or, more precisely, the way they do to Jews who follow the word of the Torah: they are the only ones God looks out for.

This is one of the establishing scenes in David Volach’s superb My Father, My Lord, a film about the conflict between religious faith and humanity, played out on an intimate scale, through the simple story of a small family (there is no larger picture here, no grandstanding about the things that are being done around the world in the name of religion). At 72 minutes, this is one of the most compact movies I’ve seen in recent times, and my favourite among the contemporary features at Cinefan 2007.

The film begins with glimpses of the daily lives of the boy, Menahem, and his parents. The Rabbi is, in his own way, a fond father, but we immediately sense a distance between him and his son – for the Rabbi’s life revolves around his faith, the ritualistic acting out of that faith, and a literalist approach to his holy book, while Menahem is a restless, curious child whose engagement with the world goes beyond the circumscribed limits set by religion (as is the case with most children). The mother, Esther, is not as rigid in her beliefs as her husband is – one senses that for her, the true face of God is in her child – but on the whole the family is happy and content. Despite the Rabbi’s brief show of anger when his son brings home a photo depicting idolatry (“which goes against God’s will”), this isn’t anything like a simplified story about a religious fanatic lording it over his wife and son.

The family makes plans for a pilgrimage trip to the Dead Sea. Before leaving, the Rabbi comes upon a dove’s nest outside one of the synagogue’s windows; he waves the mother bird away, separating her from her children. Back in the van, he explains this action to his wife and son by quoting from a Torah passage that will seem obscure to anyone who isn’t familiar with the book – but part of the point seems to be that the fate of the young ones should be left in God’s hands, to do as He will. (The mother bird might come back, but then again she might not.) As we will soon see, this scene is a foreshadowing: when they reach the sea, the Rabbi asks Menahem to come with him to the men’s beach, leaving Esther with the women. This amounts to another separation of a mother from her child (though we make the connection only in retrospect) and the ground has been laid for tragedy – the Rabbi is preoccupied with his prayers, with “being wrapped in the arms of the Almighty”, as he later tells his wife, and therefore unconcerned with more mundane, worldly things such as the welfare of his son.

The catalogue notes for My Father, My Son mention that it was “conceived as a thematic dialogue with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue 1”. I don’t know if director David Volach ever met the Polish master or discussed matters of faith (or matters of movie-making) with him, but this film has many of the qualities of Kieslowski’s work. It’s quiet and gentle, made with stark simplicity, but hard-hitting in a way that other, more strident films on this subject aren’t. There are a few early sequences where nothing very significant seems to happen plot-wise, but which are invaluable character studies. And many scenes – notably a prolonged aerial shot of men praying on a beach while a little boy tries to get their attention and a storm brews in the distance – are filmed with an intensity that, in my view, approximates the fervour of the religious experience; it’s almost like the director’s camera lens is his God.

It’s admirable how Volach manages to set his tale in a very particular community (one of many sects within Judaism) and still give it universal appeal. On paper, there are many things here that could have a distancing effect on viewers around the world (Indian people sitting in an auditorium in Delhi, for instance). Take something as basic as the Jewish way of praying – the swaying back and forth, which an inexperienced viewer could easily find very funny. But Volach tells his story with such conviction and directness, makes his characters so recognisably human, that we aren’t allowed the comfort of thinking, “Well, this is a story about someone else, it doesn’t apply to us.”

P.S. The scenes where Menahem is made to participate in religious rituals made me think of the most impassioned passages in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins is angry throughout the book, but he gets positively Dirty Harry-ish when discussing the corruption of young minds by religion. “Unquestioned faith can be very dangerous and to deliberately plant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong,” he writes. "I want everyone to flinch when they hear a phrase like 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'."

In principle I’m in complete agreement with him, but from any practical viewpoint this is uselessly idealistic. Most parents quite naturally see their children as extensions of themselves (in fact, one of the main reasons to have children at all is to leave something of yourself behind when you’re gone) and there are countless examples everywhere of people being severely disillusioned or angry when their children secede from their views even in relatively minor issues, let alone something as sensitive as religion. It's pointless to expect that parents will stop drumming their own religious views into their younglings’ heads, or encouraging them to do mechanical things like folding their hands each time they see a temple, or to believe without questioning. One of the achievements of My Father, My Lord, a film that evokes complex reactions in a viewer, is that even while we feel disturbed about Menahem being religiously conditioned, the film's pace and matter-of-fact depiction of everyday life allows us to see such conditioning as a natural process within the framework of the family structure. There are no easy answers here.

Cinefan: Driving to Zigzigland

"How would you like it if someone threw you out of your home, saying God had promised it to them 2,000 years ago?"

- Palestinian cab-driver Bashar to an American woman who has condemned the suicide bomb attacks on Israel

The last couple of days at Cinefan have been surprisingly good. On Wednesday I saw two films that were as different in tone as you can imagine, but each very satisfying in its own way. The better of these was the taut Israeli feature My Father, My Lord, a film about religious faith, shot with an almost ritualistic intensity. Will write about it in a separate post. But for now, quick notes on Nicole Ballivian’s Driving to Zigzigland, a low-budget US-made movie about a Palestinian named Bashar who works in Los Angeles as a cab-driver while simultaneously pursuing his dream of becoming a Hollywood star. (At the point where we join him, he’s so far succeeded in making a two-second appearance as a “supporting Aztec warrior” on a Discovery channel documentary, but he’s nothing if not persistent.)

I’ve learnt over the years to be wary of the Cross-Cultural Encounters section, in which this film was screened. While most of the films included under this head are quite breezy (and usually your best bet for standard narrative-driven movies in case you’re uncertain about what to see at Cinefan), many of them are also banal - full of superficial, self-congratulatory accounts of characters discovering things about other cultures, over-simplified interactions between people from different backgrounds etc. One exception was the Toni Collette-starrer Japanese Story a few years ago, a powerful personal story about an encounter between an Australian woman and a Japanese man, which didn’t belabour any points for the viewer.

There were little pockets of triteness in Driving in Zigzigland too, especially in some of the crowd-pleasing vignettes of Bashar’s conversations with different sets of customers in his cab - such as an Israeli couple who, believing him to be Israeli, go on about what a wonderful job Ariel Sharon has been doing clearing the Palestinians out, while Bashar seethes quietly. But despite the occasional glib moments, this film has a grounded, honest quality that raises it above many of the other “cross-cultural” dramas I’ve seen.


Even among the scenes that most lend themselves to stereotyping, there are moments that work: when Bashar indulges the Israeli couple by suggesting that perhaps Sharon should have all the Palestinians killed, their reaction (taken aback at first, but gradually accepting that this might just be a good idea) says a lot about the potential for extremism that lies just beneath the surface of many moderate, politically correct attitudes.** The running joke that gives the film its title is effective too: Bashar prefers not to mention his Palestinian origins, so he tells most people he’s from Zigzigland, a small country near South America, and that his native tongue is Japanese “because we were colonised by them - but that’s okay, we got over it”. Unsurprisingly, many of his geographically disadvantaged customers take him at face value (the only one who knows better, an Irishman, snaps, “I’m Irish, I’m not stupid”, which is a nice little jab at national stereotypes).

There are other good bits such as when a couple are travelling in Bashar’s cab and the woman asks him to turn off a Cat Stevens song because “he’s joined the Al-Qaeda”. The husband says to leave the song on, which Bashar does, saying faux-chauvinistically, “Sorry ma’am, in my country the man is the boss, and when you’re in my cab you’re in my country.” And I liked the little touches, such as the revelation that the film Bashar’s family back home are raptly watching is A Nightmare on Elm Street.

A big factor in Driving to Zigzigland’s success is the charismatic lead performance by Basher Da’as, a likable actor whose facial expressions and general hangdog quality reminded me of the young tennis star Marcos Baghdatis. He plays the light scenes very well but is equally believable in the second half, as troubles pile up in Bashar’s world and he becomes morose and downcast. Bashar is never really in danger of turning into a Travis Bickle - pushed to psychosis by big-city alienation - and the film retains its lightheartedness till the end, but as the story progresses we sense that he isn’t too far from a meltdown. Ultimately, there is only one decision left for him to make, and by the end we’ve seen enough to know that it’s the right decision.

One gripe: the sound quality was jarring in some of the early scenes, with the background music drowning the narration. But I learn from this post by Toe Knee that the problem was with the print, and that the director was annoyed about it too.

P.S. Driving to Zigzigland was part of a double-bill, preceded by a nice 12-minute short, Where To?, about an Egyptian taxi-driver in New York struggling with similar questions about how long he should stay in his adopted country. (Ostensibly, the “Where to?” of the title is the question every cab-driver must ask his customers, but soon the deeper meaning takes over.)

** The scene with the Israeli couple reminded me of a bit of mischief a friend and I played on an English acquaintance at a party once. He had been trying to say all the right things about the American and British intervention in Iraq being uncalled for, but when we privately suggested to him that maybe some of the criticism against Bush and Blair was excessive, he promptly changed colour to reveal a rabidly right-wing side: “Yes, yes, of course, it’s most ghastly the way these protestors have been going on. It’s all for the good in the long run” Immense fun and, I like to think, nicely anarchic on our part.

Overheard at Cinefan; and moron categories

I was watching the Tunisian film Tender is the Wolf in one of the smaller auditoria and sitting within earshot were two talkative ladies who, going by their exchanges, had never once in their lives been exposed to the idea that bad things can happen in the world. To be fair, Tender is the Wolf is a claustrophobic film full of unpleasant goings-on and without a single likable character, but never before have I encountered such a high level of shock and moral outrage from film-watchers, expressed continuously. (It was like a heightened version of what happened at the Brokeback Mountain screening I wrote about in this post.) One or both of my neighbours must have uttered the phrase "This is so terrible!" at least 60 times. If they were characters in that Amol Palekar film, they would have intoned, "Life has ripped away our rose-coloured glasses."

Most idiotic remark of all: during a scene where a prostitute is being raped by a lowlife, there's a shot of the rapist thrusting away purposefully. And one of the ladies goes:

"This is so terrible! Why doesn't he STOP?!"

I felt like offering her a cookie.

In other news, here’s proof that I'm now a Cinefan veteran: I've been quoted in more stories about the festival this year than I've actually written. And one of them called me “Jai Arjun Singh, a local blooger...” Yay yay.

Having attended the festival since it began eight years ago, it’s good to see the growing sophistication of the event, and the increasing attendance. But a part of me remains ambivalent about the democratisation. Maybe it’s sour grapes: I first became interested in world cinema at a time when hardly anyone in Delhi outside of film students/scholars went to such festivals; certainly, no one else in my circle of friends or acquaintances was into such movies when I was growing up, which contributed to making my adolescent years very lonesome. (Your cue to go "Awww...") Also, options in this city were limited, and I had to put in a lot of effort to get access to such films: trudging regularly to embassy libraries to rent from their small collection of videos, keeping an eye out for one-column notifications in newspapers about a tiny "film festival” going on in some corner of the city. So I sometimes feel almost disgruntled about how fashionable “world cinema” has suddenly become, and how much more accessible it is to today’s generation, thanks to the DVD culture. (In my part-time office, colleagues regularly exchange discs of Kiarostami and Wong Kar-Wai films and discuss them as unselfconsciously as they would any Bollywood film. Which is good on many levels, but it also makes me feel odd in a way I can’t explain. Am probably being elitist/proprietorial.)

Anyway, on a lighter note, there are still many comedies of errors involving people who are newbies to non-mainstream cinema. These people span many categories, including the “how can they show such terrible things” types I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Other categories include:

The "No idea why we're here" category: these are the people who (as I imagine it) see the word "film" written outside the Siri Fort Complex, which sets off a vague buzzing sound inside their heads – and so, arms outstretched like the zombies in George Romero's movies, they stagger into the nearest hall without the slightest idea of what they are going to watch. Then they stagger out 10 minutes later, shocked out of their senses by the fact that the film was in black-and-white (and Japanese! And made in the 1940s!).

The "We're just here to jerk off" brigade: It sounds like a lazy cliché, but for the longest time the phrase "film festival" in Delhi was, for many people (including the policemen who do duty at Siri Fort), synonymous with "uncensored sex scenes". To an extent this has changed over the years, but it still occasionally happens that a sad-looking creature in the next seat taps me on the shoulder, gives me a meaningful look and says, "Bhai saab, iss phillum mein scenes hain kya?" (If you point out that all films have scenes, they scowl and emit noisome vapours in your direction throughout the screening.)

And, at the opposite end of the spectrum:
The ones who never expected to see any “scenes”: an extension of the first category. It's always stunning to see the confidence with which a conservative family strides in, hands linked together, for the 9 PM show of a film they know nothing about, convinced that it’s going to be along the general lines of Mary Poppins. A few minutes later they flee the hall sobbing, hands placed over the eyes of the teenage daughter who has learnt life’s grisly truths way before she was supposed to (the film was In the Realm of the Senses!).

Unpunctual/clueless about how Time works: this is a generic category, not restricted to film festival-goers. It works like this: first, someone misreads the schedule, leading them to think that a film is being screened at 9.30 PM instead of 9 PM. Naturally, they then plan to reach at exactly 9.30 PM (because giving themselves a small window by reaching 15 minutes early would mean eternal damnation). Having failed to account for traffic, they will then reach the venue at 9.50 PM. There will be the inevitable stumbling blocks, someone will misplace a ticket or get into an argument with a security guard, which means they will enter the dark auditorium, noisily stumbling over everyone else’s feet, at 10.05 PM. Five minutes after they have sat down the lights will go on, because it was a 70-minute film and now it’s over.

Cinefan notes: Amol Palekar's The Quest

After the screening of Amol Palekar’s Thang/The Quest, there was some goodly applause, and then the organisers called Mr Palekar to the front of the auditorium and invited questions from the audience. One girl raised her hand and made what I thought was a very pertinent observation. “It was jarring to see these middle-class Marathi characters, including a servant and a little boy, speaking to each other in English throughout,” she said. “Why didn’t you make the film in Marathi?” One of the organisers retorted with a facile attempt at cleverness – “Why are you asking your question in English?” – but Palekar’s response was more measured.

“The characters in the film are working professionals,” he said. “The wife is an advocate at the Mumbai High Court, where all work is done in English. The husband is a chef at a five-star hotel, where again English is spoken. Even the aged nana is a retired professor…” Besides, as he pointed out, he has made another version of the film, in Marathi.

The reference to the characters’ professional lives hardly explains why the husband and wife would speak to each other only in English (and in very strained English) at home. But on reflection, the problem with The Quest doesn’t lie in the director’s choice of language – that’s a valid artistic decision, which requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. (It isn’t much different from, say, the cinematic licence employed in Hindi versions of Parineeta, where we understand that in strictly realistic terms the protagonists would be speaking to each other in Bangla, but that the film has been made in Hindi for the convenience of a particular audience. Or, for that matter, the literary licence used in much of Indian writing in English.) It wasn’t the choice of English for the screenplay that was wrong, it was the screenplay itself, which was terribly stilted and didn’t give the actors much scope for developing their characters. In the lead role, Mrinal Kulkarni seemed particularly ill at ease with some of the bombastic lines she had to speak.

At the Q&A session, Palekar said he “didn’t want my middle-class Marathi characters speaking the Queen’s English – I wanted them to speak English the way I speak it”. But in fact, despite their heavy accents and imperfect diction, the actual words spoken by the characters in this film are very much a version of the Queen’s English, or at least the English that would be spoken in a self-consciously scripted and acted high-school drama.

For instance, the protagonist, Sai (Kulkarni), shortly after discovering that her husband Aditya (Rishi Deshpande) is having an intense extra-marital relationship with another man, says (during a supposedly casual chat): “Life has ripped away my rose-coloured glasses.” (I wish I had taken notes – she goes on in this vein for some time.) Later, a colleague tries to explain latent homosexual impulses with a pat analogy involving sandwiches (“which one is accustomed to”) and croissants (“which one might never have tried before”). [Sidenote: this reminded me of the infamous oysters-and-snails scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus, with the bisexual Crassus saying “I like both oysters AND snails.”]

Just two among many examples of dialogue that sounded unnatural, over-expository and plain wrong. And here, from a scene where Sai and her husband begin to make love, is an instance of the use of full, grammatically perfect sentences during a moment of intimacy/high emotion between people whose accents and pronunciation make it obvious that this isn’t their first language anyway:

Sai: Switch off the lights.
Adi: But then how will I feast my eyes on you?
Sai: I am scared of our own shadows.
Adi: Most people are afraid of the dark. But you are afraid of the light!

Thang is problematic on other levels too. This is a film where two hopelessly misguided schools of thought about “Serious Cinema” converge: one, that a good, message-oriented film requires its characters to keep saying instructive things and wagging their fingers in the audience’s face, even during casual conversations (e.g. "You see, Adi is a representation of the thousands of men whose feelings have been closeted by society." A problem here is that Adi remains just that, a representation - he never becomes a developed character in his own right); and two, that if you fill a movie with scenes of characters sobbing noisily over their misfortunes, it will make for profound drama. (By this criterion, Ekta Kapoor’s serials should be High Tragedy at the level of Sophocles.) Some scenes exist for no reason other than to show us gratuitous close-ups of people screwing their faces up and weeping, and it doesn’t help that most of the acting in these scenes is dreadful.

The film also goes on for 30-40 minutes longer than it needs to, and the shift in focus in those last 30-40 minutes is awkward. For the first hour-and-a-half, it's a story about a woman going through an emotional upheaval after discovering that her husband has cheated on her. (For a better treatment of this theme, see Rituparna Ghosh's Dosar, which I saw at Cinefan last year.) But three-fourths of the way through, it changes direction and becomes a polemic about society’s inhumanity towards homosexuals. What starts off as a promising personal story soon turns into a preachy social documentary that tries too hard to look at the Big Picture, and the issues get muddled. As an individual, Sai has to deal with a crumbling marriage, and with a husband who has betrayed her; surely it’s too much to expect her, at this point, to also become a crusader for his gay rights! (As if this weren’t enough, a late, superfluous sub-plot then tackles the even wider theme of discrimination against HIV victims, with Sai taking on a case where a young boy has been expelled from school because his father has AIDS. Palekar has way too many balls up in the air at the same time.)

P.S.: if only as much attention had been paid to the script as to the sound-effects editing. Thang is full of meticulously recorded background sounds that aim for a faux-realistic effect, even if it’s at the cost of irritating the viewer’s ears. A courtroom discussion between Sai and her colleagues is punctuated by the distracting sound of a typewriter; in a scene set in a church, the fluttering of birds’ wings (presumably on the roof outside) can be heard; there are numerous plane and train sounds. Most annoying of all, the Idea mobile ring-tone and the NDTV theme tune, though those probably had more to do with sponsorship dictates than with artistic decisions.

Cinefan: Falafel, Rekados, Crossing the Dust

Since I can’t write lengthy posts about every film I see at Cinefan (because then there would be no time left to see films at Cinefan), here are a few quick notes on some of them:

Crossing the Dust: I shiver in terror when the film I'm about to watch is a “first feature”, but this was a pleasant surprise. Short, compact, very focused film set in Iraq around the time of the fall of the Saddam regime: two Peshmerga soldiers – the idealistic young Azad and the embittered Rashid – are on a mission carrying large cans of food to their associates when they come across a lost little boy. Much to Rashid’s annoyance, Azad takes pity on the child (whose name turns out to be “Saddam”, not the best handle to have in the present circumstances) and sets about trying to help him return home. Marked by the piquant humour one often sees in films from countries where people live with the constant sounds of rumbling tanks and rockets. (Of course, there can be no happy endings here, which only heightens and intensifies the humour.)

I liked the simple, poignant ending, especially the final 2-3 shots. It could have been maudlin but the director, Shawkat Amin Korki, handles it just right.

Falafel: disaffected, restless urban youngsters on the streets of Beirut late one night – zipping around on quaint scooters, partying, getting into fights, trying to score. This Michel Kammoun film wasn’t as brilliant as I had expected – it drifts aimlessly in the middle (which may have been part of the point, for it's a film about drifting), and I suspect one needs to know something about Lebanon’s political/social history in the last few years to really appreciate it – but it was well shot, acted, and most importantly, well-subtitled. Some nice family scenes and a few good laugh-out-loud moments, especially those involving a goofy character named Abboudi, and one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in a long time – it involves an astronaut and a “f#!king huge falafel”. Maybe I was just in a silly mood or something, but it had me giggling for several minutes, which was a nice way to end a long day. (Also, during a scene where a character imagines falafels raining down on him from the sky, the sardarji next to me muttered, “pakore gir rahe hain?” That was fun too.)

Rekados: so-so. An earnest (how often I use this word for movies screened at this festival!) story about three generations of Filipino women, this film draws on the Latin American tradition of mixing magic realism with food. (For another such film, see this old post.) In the social stratum that these characters belong to, we are told, “a woman’s worth lies in her cooking” (when a man tells friends his wife is a good cook, it’s the highest possible compliment). Each woman has her own story, a background of failures and successes (with men and with food), and each of them develops a distinct style and a distinct recipe: for instance, a mother uses a few drops of blood from her daughter’s first period to give a finishing touch to a dish. Yum.

P.S. The film had to be re-started after the first few minutes revealed a “format transference problem”, which meant much pixellation on the screen. The audience muttered and shifted restlessly, and the director, Paolo Herras, who was present for the screening, looked apologetic.

(Coming up soon: longish post on Amol Palekar's Thang)

Cinefan notes: Mizoguchi and the benshi

At Cinefan yesterday evening, at the screening of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1933 film The Water Magician, I saw what was promoted as “the first ever benshi show in India”. This is an old tradition in Japanese cinema – in the silent-film era, the benshi (not to be confused with the banshee, or with Benji) was a sutradhar figure who would stand by the movie screen and interpret the story for the audience, often speaking out the dialogue for different characters (even as the title cards simultaneously appeared on the screen). I have no way of knowing whether the Cinefan organisers’ claim that this was the first such show in India was true, but I suspect it was: there aren’t very many benshi around today, and in his speech before yesterday’s screening the Japanese ambassador (who looked at least 60 years old) caused much mirth by admitting that he had never seen a benshi in action himself.

Ms Yuko Saito was our benshi-in-residence and her performance was excellent (though admittedly I have no idea what the benchmarks are for judging these things) – we especially enjoyed her skilful voice modulation in the scenes where lots of characters were talking to each other. Have to say though that I’m not really sold on the idea of having someone speaking aloud throughout the course of a silent movie.

As it is, The Water Magician is not the kind of silent film I really enjoy – it’s too heavily driven by narrative. Very much in the grand melodramatic tradition (I kept thinking of 1930s Hollywood films about self-sacrificing women, like Stella Dallas), this is the story of the large-hearted Taki no Shiraito who falls in love with a young carriage driver and takes on the responsibility of funding his law studies in Tokyo – sending him money regularly until hard times come along and she ends up murdering a lecherous moneylender and then being reunited with her lover in the most tragic circumstances. Unlike some of my favourite silent films (examples: Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and even Hitchcock’s narrative-driven Blackmail), which tell their stories more through visuals than through the written word, this one relies on lots of title cards that carry the plot forward, explaining all the characters’ motivations and inner thoughts. At yesterday’s screening this meant that the benshi had to emote almost non-stop, and while she did it extremely well, I prefer my silent films to be more...silent.

Don’t have too much else to say about the film, partly because the print was very poor – it was faded, making it difficult in some scenes to even see the characters’ expressions, and the area it took up on the auditorium’s screen was frustratingly small (only about 30 per cent). I believe it’s considered a key film in Mizoguchi’s early career, but watching it I got little sense that it was by a young director who would, years later, make such classics as Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff. (There were a couple of very striking shots – Shiraito and her lover on a bridge together, a quick nightmare montage before Shiraito attempts suicide by throwing herself off a train. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if the print had been better.)

P.S. The anachronistic subtitles on prints of period Japanese films bring much joy. Kurosawa’s medieval peasants are forever saying things like “Hey, so what’s up?” to each other on my DVDs, and at yesterday’s screening my wife was mightily amused by a scene where the noble, teary-eyed Shiraito helps a young couple to elope and the subtitle reads: “I’m a sucker for young love!” (There were also quite a few “gonnas” and “gottas”: for example, “I’m gonna throw myself off this train!”)

Atheist film festival, Psycho III

Two links from Jim Emerson’s excellent Scanners blog: first, an invitation for entries for a hypothetical “Atheist film festival”. (Read the comments, especially the ones on godlessness in Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen’s films. Other neat observations include the one about George Romero’s zombie trilogy being atheist because they show that the dead have nowhere else to go.) Incidentally Emerson clarifies what he means by an “atheist film” in this comment: “…not one that says ‘No’ to the question, ‘Does God exist?’ but one that doesn't even see why the question is worth asking.”

The second, related link is about Psycho III, the neglected sequel directed by Anthony Perkins in 1986, two-and-a-half decades after he first played Norman Bates in the Hitchcock classic. I’ve always enjoyed Emerson’s writing when he defends films that haven’t received the acclaim (or even basic attention) that they should have; of course, it helps that our tastes in such films are quite similar. (Here’s an earlier post by him on four underrated horror films.)

Home fires burning

(Positively the last post – at least for today – about the perils of domestic living. This is a version of my latest column for Metro Now.)

A few days before we moved into our new flat, I got a call from one of the builder’s henchmen, informing me that all the electricity meters for the building had exploded without warning or apparent reason. A fire engine had had to be summoned late at night and people had gathered outside the house throwing handfuls of sand at the conflagration, like they did in ancient tribal societies. “It was very exciting, you should have been there,” a neighbour told us later, seemingly unperturbed by the idea that if we had been staying there at the time, my car would have been parked right next to the section of the wall that hosted the erupting items.

Anyway, with the alacrity one doesn’t normally associate with the electricity board, a call came from a BSES spokesman saying would I please deposit a large amount of money towards getting a new meter installed. It had to be cash. “The reason for this,” said the unctuous spokesman, “is that if we give the cash deposit immediately, your new meter will come within a couple of days. Otherwise, heh heh, you know how these things work, it could even take 2-3 weeks.”

So I ran, panting, to the nearest ATM, and four weeks later our new meter arrived. By this time, of course, my wife and I were well-ensconced in the new flat. I hesitate to use the word “comfortably” because we had spent at least three nights in mortal terror. Walking upstairs one evening, we noticed a sinister glow emanating from the temporary-connection wires coiled together in the charred meter box; the wire began sparking as if on cue whenever one of us went closer. The builder’s electrician let out an Amrish Puri laugh when we phoned him: “Avoid using the air-conditioner, the fridge or anything else and it will most probably be all right.” The next day he showed up with a large grin and a shiny red thing tucked under his arm. “Here, have a fire extinguisher,” he said, “Very effective for big electric fires. That will be Rs 3,000 only. Cash please.”

“O ho, don’t worry so much,” chuckled a grandmother when we related our woes, “These are mere teething troubles. Such things happen in every new house. Ten years from now you will have such fun looking back and discussing all the problems you had when you first moved in.” Does that mean it will take 10 years for the house to become livable, I was about to ask, but a look from the wife silenced me.

Meanwhile the sparking continued until we called in a private electrician who discovered that the builder’s men had omitted to use basic thimbles in the temporary wiring. Effectively, this made the house a modern-day equivalent of the palace of lac constructed by Duryodhana for his hated cousins, the Pandavas. More money quickly flew out of our pockets as we got the thimbling done ourselves. The local ATM booth was now considering hiring musicians to develop a special welcome tune just for me.

The next afternoon, we asked a plumber to investigate a possible air vacuum in our water-pump. After poking and prodding about for a while, he informed us conversationally that the water meters for all three flats in the building had been stolen – from a sturdy, locked container. Why would anyone go to such trouble for an old water meter, we wondered. “There are all kinds of people in this world, sir,” he replied mysteriously. Then he took lots of money from us and went away, and we never saw him again.

“Like I said, teething problems,” the grandmother said. “This is only the beginning. I am sure things will get much worse before they get better.” The old have always been insanely jealous of the young, I reflected. They resent the greater freedoms of our time and the fact that we have the Internet on which to vent our frustrations, whereas they had nothing.

Cinefan 2007

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’ve been covering/rigorously attending the Cinefan film festival for many years now (a few earlier posts here, here, here, here, here and here). This year’s edition is on between July 20-29. Some of the films on my to-see list:

From the Kenzi Mizoguchi tribute section – Sansho the Bailiff, Street of Shame and The Woman of Rumour (have seen the first two but need a refresher course).

From the Arab competition section – Falafel, Tender is the Wolf. (Deciding what to watch at Cinefan can be a hit-and-miss affair – which is inevitable for a festival that shows more than 120 films – but I’ve found the movies in the Arab section to be consistently rewarding over the years.)

Indian competition – Podokkhep, Kayyoppu, Shoonya.

Films on Intolerance – Shame (a documentary about Mukhtaran Mai's fight for justice), Iraq in Fragments, The Colour of Olives.

Hymns to Freedom – The Battle of Algiers (haven’t seen it on the big screen), Children of Fire.

From the whimsically titled “Spotlight Filmcraft” section, two old favourites that I haven’t seen on a big screen: Ozu’s Tokyo Story and Hitchcock’s The Birds (no, don't ask me what it's doing in a festival of Asian cinema; maybe some of the starring birds were immigrants), though the latter is being shown in the tiny Siri Fort 4 auditorium so might give it a miss.

Focus on Japan – Taboo (directed by Nagisa Oshima, who made the fascinating Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and In the Realm of the Senses), Hiroshi Inagaki’s four-hour epic Chushingura/Samurai.

Of course, I’ll probably only be able to see a few of these films, and maybe a couple of others based on convenience, and hopefully I won't see anything as faltu as some of the stuff I stumbled into last year. Check out the full schedules here.

More notes from Married Life

In recent months, almost each time I’ve stepped out of the house, the first thing I’ve seen is the neighbours' young boy perched on the elevated platform where our building’s water tanks are kept. He looks intently into each tank by turn, plays with the lids, knocks on the pipes for a while, and then repeats the process. This is the only context in which I’ve ever seen this boy; for all I know, he lives up there and they send him his meals in a basket.

I used to be indifferent to this sight, except for small patches of annoyance (the species takes so much time to evolve to the point where it’s walking about on level ground, and then these dissidents come along and spoil everything?) – but now, in a macabre reversal of fortunes, I have become a version of this very boy. Roughly 30 per cent of my married life has been spent climbing up ladders and peering forlornly into the muddy depths of the water tank that services our new flat. (When people ask me the inevitable and meaningless question “So, how does it feel to be married?”, the only answer I can think to give them is “The view from the terrace is very nice.”)


Muddy water blues; or, My Life in Water Tanks

When I check the tank on a good day, there’s a trickle of only-slightly-muddy water filling the inside at a negligible rate (given that the water supply in the main line lasts only around an hour) – but at least the sight of the muddy trickle makes one feel like life has meaning. On the bad days I gaze into the tank for several minutes, espy no trickle but shrug my shoulders stoically and say, “Oh well, no dead crows this time. One mustn’t expect too much.”

[Note: that old fable about the crow raising the water level in a pitcher by dropping stones into it? All lies. In reality, the dumb things just dive straight in and drown noisily.]

So one good thing about marriage is that it has belatedly heightened my awareness of water tanks. I realise now that I have been unpardonably neglectful of these huge black plastic things, considering this is a city where you can’t cast your gaze sky-wards without seeing dozens of them everywhere. Having not thought about water tanks at all for most of my life, I now regularly have nightmares where they gather around and tap-dance, like the penguins in Happy Feet, and then bend forward and tip their lids to show me that they are all empty. Each time I pass a tank on the road I stop and examine it respectfully, even perambulate it a couple of times.

– Ditto heightened awareness about electricity meters, wires and “thumbles” (which apparently is the same as “thimble”, a word I had previously encountered only in Enid Blyton stories where sweet old ladies in armchairs use these things while knitting sweaters for their grandchildren).

How the Rinch Stole our Water Supply

– Something else I’ve learnt in these initial days of grihastha ashram: electricians and plumbers go on their assignments without ever thinking to carry tool-bags or basic equipment. It regularly happens that an electrician comes to the house, plays around with switches and wires, a faraway look on his face, and then turns to us and asks: “Aapke paas 5 metre ka wire hai kya?” And this after we’ve explained the specific problem to him over the phone, carefully covering all possibilities, and asked him to bring along anything he might need.

When it’s the plumber, “5 metre ka wire” can be substituted by “rinch”, which is either a corruption of “wrench” or a new word altogether. By all accounts this is the first thing any self-respecting plumber would need when he’s checking a water-pump for air vacuums, but you think there’s a chance he would actually have one in his tool-kit? Oh no. Instead he looks at you balefully when you confess that you have no idea what a “rinch” even is. It’s like the doctor tapping his patient on the head with a scalpel during a bypass surgery, asking “Would you have a spare pacemaker I could use?” and then, on receiving No for an answer, growling “What use are you?”

– Plumbers and electricians usually have fixed scowls on their faces, but they smile with boundless merriment during times of adversity – your adversity, that is. I’ve lost count of the number of times a grinning face has informed me that a) someone has stolen our water meters, b) someone has tried to steal our water tank but it was too heavy so they’ve simply damaged it instead, c) the sparking in our electricity wires means that the air-conditioner can’t be switched on for more than an hour, otherwise the building will implode, d) the people living on the top floor are cannibalistic chainsaw-wielders, e) our block gets fresh water supply only between 3-4 in the afternoon and 3-4 in the morning, “but sometimes it doesn’t come in the afternoon”. All this lends credence to my theory that true happiness can only be attained through the misery of others.

[Coming up: why it’s bad news when a builder calls and insists that you collect the fire extinguisher from his office before moving into your new flat for the first time]

Tips for a successful marriage - 1

(Needless to say, this is a post-in-progress)

– Quickly get used to the idea that someone else will now be addressing your mother as “mom”, but don’t feel obliged to reciprocate in kind. No new “papas” and “mummies” for me; the existing ones are hard enough to deal with. As my wife says, what you call your in-laws should be a personal choice - do the “mummy-daddy” thing only if it’s spontaneous. (What I can’t quite figure out: she’s been on great terms with my mother for the better part of four years now, and she’s been calling her “aunty” all that time, so how is this shift “spontaneous”?)

The whole thing does take some getting used to. A recent phone conversation:

Jai: Hey, what is up.
Abhilasha: Hi, I’m out with mummy, will call you in a while.
J (confused): Your mom’s come over?
A: Um, no. I’m with your mom.
J: You know, I’m sure this is all very sweet and good-intentioned on some level, but when you refer to my mother as “mummy” it makes me feel like I’ve grown a new sister.
(Cold silence)
A: Well, wouldn’t that be in keeping with the tradition of incest in your family?

This last remark must be explained. There are lots of second-cousin marriages in my extended family (because apparently no one could find a suitable or willing match in the outside world). This accounts for all the looniness in the current generation. I’m the only sane one, which should tell you something.

– If you’ve been having nightmares because you’re spending too much time studying Chapter 10 of From Hell (you know, the part that has Jack the Ripper alone with Mary Jane Kelly’s corpse in her room late at night) and the wife gives you a Hanuman Chaalisa to ward off evil thoughts, DO NOT exclaim, “Cool! The cover of this book has a monkey tearing his chest open to expose a bloodied heart!” It’s in bad taste. Or something.

– With the aforementioned Chaalisa under the pillow, you may still continue reading The God Delusion. No conflict – it’s like that last scene in Inherit the Wind, with Clarence Darrow balancing the Bible in one hand and the Origin of Species in the other.

– Most important tip of all: separate toilets. Always.

The Saket column

[Did this column for Time Out Delhi’s “I love such-and-such colony” section. Warned them that I'm indifferent to many things about the colony I've lived in for 20 years, and so the piece would be too lukewarm for the “I love Saket” headline that the column format would bestow on it. But it was a nice nostalgia piece to write. Have a longer version of it somewhere on my laptop, will put that up soon.]

We moved to Saket in September 1987. Still years away from acquiring road sense, I had little idea then of where this quiet colony placed on the map in relation to the rest of South Delhi, but I'd heard the area was once a forestland where people went fox-hunting, and it seemed a very adventurous thing to live in such a place. To reach the first-floor flat we made our home, we had to drive along a narrow, horseshoe-shaped lane off the main road and it felt like the opening scene of Rebecca, trees parting to reveal Manderley in the distance. The block we lived in bordered a small park, cut off from the main road, and perfect for cycling in and for playing cricket.

A couple of hundred metres down the road was a commercial complex that wasn't exactly the picture of activity: six or seven small shops (including the shacks with the dusty photocopier machines) scattered haphazardly about, a line of office doors and a single, downbeat cinema hall called Anupam. We never saw a film at this hall in the first decade of our stay; we were videocassette junkies and the complex wasn't a "happening" place, this being years before the Baristas, Subways and McDonalds' moved in to what is now PVR Saket.

Neighborhoods change gradually, through a slow accumulation of events, but in my mind's eye Saket's transformation can be condensed into a few cuts or dissolves, like in films where Master Raju jumps onto a train and becomes Amitabh Bachchan. One moment we are playing cricket in our small ground, a ball hits one of the few cars parked around the circumference and an uncle bellows that we should take our game elsewhere; the next second the park has lost its greenery and turned into an overcrowded car space where we have to find increasingly innovative ways to manoeuvre our vehicles in the evenings. One day we hear the Anupam hall is shutting down and the next thing we know we are gaping at the exteriors of India's first multiplex, plusher than any movie-hall we have seen before. (The interim period, many months of scaffolds and workers and tarpaulins, seems now to have occurred in fast-forward.)

Happily, some things haven't changed. I've gone to the same barbershop for 20 years (it used to be called "He-Man and She" or something such, now it's "A Cut Above"). Familiar faces, links to a more innocent time, still sit behind the counters of the chemist shops and the Mother Dairy en route to PVR. And though the name for our block of flats has changed to the duplicitous "Golf View Apartments" (the Lado Sarai golf course is nearby but nary a glimpse can be had), we still refer to them as DDA flats.

It would be dishonest to claim that I think Saket is a great neighborhood in some overriding sense. It's a pleasant, self-sufficient little place at its best, and crowded and traffic-spoilt at its worst, like dozens of other colonies. If it has a distinct character, I can't claim to know what that is. My love for it comes from intangibles, from the fact that the most important personal spaces of my life were situated here. The house I've lived in for two decades. The mini-market where we played Mario Bros video games outside a tiny grocery shop. The tree where a beloved kitten learnt how to climb for the first time. The large, invigorating F-Block park (a real park, not like the one outside our house) where I've gone for thousands of evening walks over the years, and where I sat on a bench with my girlfriend, now wife, in the early days of our courtship while a cop eyed us suspiciously from a distance. The Sports Complex with its giant swimming pool, clay-courts and cove-like entrance.

There are other advantages to living here. The growth of the NCR has turned Saket into a very convenient location, more or less equidistant from Connaught Place, Gurgaon and Noida (approx. 15 km each way). The Qutab Minar and the Mehrauli ruins are a ten-minute drive away. Except on Friday and Saturday evenings, when the road leading to PVR gets clogged, there isn't a major traffic problem. Let's see if that changes when the new malls near Pushpa Vihar open; I’m feeling ambivalent about those, but there’s going to be a huge new Landmark bookstore, and that’s something to look forward to.

What all this adds up to is that many of my best memories are connected with Saket, and I can't think of much that's wrong with the place. When you're living in a loud, messy city, not out of choice but circumstance, that's near the best you can hope for.

[A related post: PVR memories/Madhuban “Fine Dining”]

Intellectual meets fanboy in Men in White

[Did a version of this review for Cricinfo magazine]

A few months ago, in the wake of the hysterical public reaction to the Indian team's early World Cup exit, Mukul Kesavan wrote an editorial for a daily newspaper, denouncing the average Indian cricket follower as a "lazy, pampered know-nothing" with an unreasonable sense of entitlement. The piece drew some strong negative reactions. Accusing Kesavan of being an armchair intellectual, blind to the tribulations and feelings of the average fan, one blogger asked rhetorically if he had ever been inside a stadium in a non-journalistic (hence non-privileged) capacity.

Calling a sports writer an armchair intellectual is another way of saying he lacks genuine passion for the game – the kind of passion that makes you forego all pretence to refined objectivity, turns you into an atavistic chest-thumper each time the fortunes of a favourite team or player are at stake. But Kesavan's love for cricket, Test cricket in particular, is there to see on every page of Men in White, a compilation of pieces that were first printed in this magazine and in other publications. The answer to the stadium question can be found here too, in the Introduction, where he recalls a run-in with police brutality at the Ferozshah Kotla when he was just nine. The point is, the experience didn’t end his relationship with cricket. He went back again. And yet again.

Like most cricket lovers, Kesavan is very opinionated (in fact, he expressly states the value of subjectivity in a short piece on Don Bradman's World XI) and he holds forth here on a variety of topics. He makes a persuasive case for doing away with the match referee ("a bureaucrat, removed from the action, his decisions opaque to authority") and some of the special rules created for ODIs ("one-day cricket is crying out to be deregulated. Currently it's a kind of licence Raj where inefficient batsmen flourish"). He recounts helping India win a Test against the Aussies in 2001 (by the simple expedient of keeping his eyes shut in the final half-hour so that no more Indian wickets fell). He discusses favourite players (the likening of Kapil Dev to Br'er Rabbit is one of the neatest throwaway descriptions I've read), the culture of cricket in Chennai and the implications of a racist remark by commentator Dean Jones. Other highlights include his childhood memories –playing the "Lutyens Variant" of cricket in a neighbourhood park, something most of us can relate to, and listening to radio commentary. And in one of the most perceptive essays in this collection, he discusses the role “anecdotage” – the treating of period gossip as undisputed fact – has played in the creation of cricket’s mythology (was Bedi really a better bowler than Chandrasekhar?).

But the most compelling thing about this book is Kesavan’s recognition of the conflict between fair-minded sports analysis and that visceral feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when a cherished team does badly. And equally, the recognition that both qualities co-exist in himself. At one point, while discussing the “non-paying and non-playing” spectator who treats defeat as a personal betrayal, he complains that for the typical Indian cricket fan, no real-world match can compare with the fictional one in Lagaan, where Aamir Khan's Bhuvan hits a six off the last ball to take a village team to victory against British colonialists. But in the very next paragraph, he restrains himself. “That’s a cheap shot,” he writes. “After 40 years or more of rooting for India, I may not contain multitudes but I know that I have to make room for at least two people: that middle-aged, freeloading, non-playing slob on the sofa and the child on the concrete terraces for whom the sight of Farokh Engineer swaggering down the steps of Willingdon Pavilion to open the Indian innings was a doorway to heaven. Separately and sometimes together, both of them wrote this book.”

Later, in a tongue-in-cheek essay on a "Super Test", played between Australia and a World XI, he observes that watching Sehwag and Dravid playing for a non-Indian team purged him of "tamasik patriotism and other base feelings". When Shane Warne takes Sehwag's wicket in this match, he can coolly write, "You had to give it to the great man, he'd out-thought Sehwag by bowling leg-and-middle..." But if it had been an Australia-vs-India tie, he admits, the sentence might have read: "Luck on that scale was the only way that rutting, peroxided pig was likely to take an Indian wicket."

This self-awareness is what makes Men in White so readable. Essays collections of this sort don’t always hold together, but the pieces here form a body of work that tells us as much about the nature of a cricket lover’s evolving relationship with the sport as it does about the sport itself. They reflect the ambivalences and inconsistencies of our opinions (commenting on his adulatory piece about Rahul Dravid, Kesavan says, “I set out to write a hard-nosed assessment of an overrated batsman, and look what emerged”) and the role that irrational perceptions play in shaping our feelings towards teams and players. (Just by the by, I strongly disagree with Kesavan's view of the Aussies as a graceless bunch, incapable of appreciating the talents of opposition players.)

For those disillusioned by poor administration and the increasing mediocrity of the one-day game, Men in White is a reminder of what cricket can be at its best. But it’s also a reminder of what our reaction to sporting victories and defeats tells us about ourselves.