Tough love: in which good guy Dharmendra serenades bad guy Amjad Khan

[the first entry in my Lounge mini-series about Hindi-film song sequences]
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If you know the mainstream Hindi film of the early eighties, this scene should be familiar. A villain’s ornate lair, stocked with henchmen, dancing girls, Vat 69 bottles and gaudy wall art. The good guys – including the second hero, the heroine and a long-suffering mother – trussed up together like chickens in a coop. Everyone dutifully waits for the arrival of the rescuer, the main hero – and here he comes, right on cue, and he’s played by Dharmendra, which leads one to expect much dhishoom-dhishoom preceded by blistering dialogue-baazi.

However, the climactic sequence of the 1982 film Teesri Aankh has a surprise in store. Forgoing his usual “kuttay-kameenay” tirade, Dharmendra launches into song – and continues singing for the next six minutes as he takes the minions down one by one.

“Salaam, Salaam, Salaam, Salaam, Main Aa Gaya” he begins, and the rest of the number is as polite and good-natured, even affectionate, as those lyrics would suggest – though it is punctuated by the sound of fists meeting noses and elbows pounding abdomens. Directed at the lair-meister – played by a very surprised-looking Amjad Khan – it includes respectful lines like “Mere laayak koi khidmat ho toh phir farmayeeay (Please let me know if I can be of service to you)”. And it is all in Mohammed Rafi’s gentle voice. Imagine Pete Seeger smacking the Ku Klux Klan about with his guitar while crooning “If I Had a Hammer” and you might start to get a sense of how otherworldly this scenario is.

But that still wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t prepare you for the game-show quality of this scene – how the hero must negotiate his way through antechambers in a multi-level art-deco nightmare, menaced by dangers: chubby men in their underwear, wielding spiky weapons; giant incendiary golden owl statues with red eyes; and most memorably, a bevy of lethal dancing girls led by Helen, their nails long and sharp as knives, sparks flying as they caress the walls. (If Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 classic of the Surrealist movement, was the result of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel throwing their dreams together to construct a film, this Helen vignette might easily have come from a collective dream by Russ Meyer and Quentin Tarantino.)

For this series about Hindi-film song sequences, I had in mind the elegantly crafted work of auteurs like Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt and Vijay Anand. In deference to my baser instincts, though, I begin with this scene from a not-very-good movie.

Calling Teesri Aankh formulaic would be kind: it pivots around such tropes as lost-and-found siblings and revenge as a dish served twenty years late, and it is usually content with being derivative. A scene where Amjad Khan, being led to jail in handcuffs, threatens the cop who caught him, is a straight reprise of the Gabbar-Thakur confrontation in Sholay, with none of the intensity of the original. This film’s “prose” sections are barely worth sitting through.

The glorious exception is the “Salaam Salaam” song, which represents everything that is brassy and unrestrained about the masala movie of the era, yet goes further than you’d expect. Even with hyper-dramatic movies that mix emotional registers, there are (narrow) concessions to structure: it is understood that a song-and-dance sequence occupies a separate space from a fight scene. But here, both things come together, and the conception is so bold that you’re willing to overlook the tackier moments (such as the many insert shots of Khan in a neon-lit chamber looking worried and gloating in turn).

Watching it, I get the impression that everyone, from set decorators to actors, was having fun during the shoot. Many old-time Dharmendra fans rue the generic action films he made in the 1980s, but his energy here is infectious, and the scene provides a good showcase for his ability to mix goofy comedy with the demands of being an action hero. The song itself is catchy and robust, without being anything close to a classic. And if you’re offended at the thought of the great Rafi’s voice having to share space with fight sounds, you might console yourself with the reminder that the singer was a fan of boxing and Muhammad Ali; he probably enjoyed this too.

Musical numbers in these tense climactic scenes are usually the preserve of the heroine, who tries to buy time by performing for the leering villain (while also catering to the audience’s predominantly male gaze). On the rare occasions where the heroes do this (think “Yamma Yamma” in Shaan), they are undercover. But in Teesri Aankh, we have a male lead openly singing a sort of love song to the villain, even as he coaxes him out of his hiding place. “Mere saahib, chhup gaye kyun, saamne aajayeeye,” he sings, and the “mere saahib” here feels like a close cousin to the “mere mehboob” of other songs.

And this makes an odd kind of sense. In popular literature, good guys and their nemeses share a mutual dependence – a Batman needs a Joker to define or complete him – and this has also been the case in the archetypes used by mainstream Hindi films. So why can’t a lavish song sequence – one of our cinema’s distinguishing features – be used to underline the bond between hero and villain? Why not let them waltz together for a while, until the ticking time-bomb – or in this case, the golden owl – explodes?
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P.S. One might note that Amjad Khan in this scene seems just as reluctant to be “wooed” as most of the heroines in those "thrill of the chase" songs of the time were.

P.P.S. Here is the sequence, minus an important bit at the end where the owl explodes:

When love and neuroscience collide: on Oliver Sacks, Bill Hayes and Insomniac City

[Did this review for Scroll]
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Near the end of Bill Hayes’s memoir Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me, a celebrated neurologist and writer contemplates the bowl of blueberries he is eating for breakfast. “Each one gives a quantum of pleasure,” says Oliver Sacks, behaving like an excited child and a pedantic man of science at the same time, “if pleasure can be quantified”.

It is one of many such playful moments in a narrative that is – among other things – about the meeting of the emotional life and the rational one. Embracing one’s deepest feelings while also coolly analyzing them, as if from a remove, is something most writers do – it comes with the territory. But it seems to happen much more in this book, and little wonder, given the protagonists and their personal situations. In that blueberry passage, Sacks is afflicted with the cancer that will end his life just a month or so later. Hayes, his friend and lover, is with him, and they are making the most of the time they have left.

A few years before this, Hayes had to deal with another life-changing trauma. He opens his narrative with the sudden death of his partner Steve, and a subsequent shift from San Francisco to New York. Developing an initially wary relationship with this new city and the people who inhabit or flit through it, he also found love with Sacks – who was in his mid-seventies at the time and who, despite having spent a lifetime studying the workings of the human mind, had never been in a full-fledged romantic relationship before.

All this comes to us through short chapters, vignettes and fragments of journal entries, interspersed with images: mainly photos Hayes himself took on the streets of NYC, but also some remarkable exceptions, such as a drawing of his eye done by a 95-year-old woman who befriends him. Through his anecdotes – brief encounters during the subway commute; a conversation with a man lugging about carts filled with empty cans and bottles for sale; an impromptu meeting at a party that he gate-crashes – New York becomes a vital, breathing presence in the book, embodying the dynamic metropolis where people temporarily find themselves in each other’s orbits before going their separate ways.

On a very different scale of intensity, the Hayes-Sacks relationship could also be seen as two orbits coinciding for a relatively short period: after all, it encompassed “only” the final six years of Sacks’s long life. But it would be impossible to quantify this pleasure, or the relationship’s importance to both men. “I felt like Odysseus reaching shore,” Hayes writes near the end, a dramatic but apt analogy: Sacks, and the city, serve first as lifeboats for him, and then mother-ships guiding him back to land.

And of course, it works in the other direction too. “It has sometimes seemed to me that I have lived at a certain distance from life,” Sacks wrote in his own lovely memoir On the Move, published shortly before his death, “This changed when Billy and I fell in love […] the habits of a lifetime’s solitude, and a sort of implicit selfishness and self-absorption, had to change. New needs, new fears enter one’s life – the need for another, the fear of abandonment. […] We have a tranquil, many-dimensional sharing of lives – a great and unexpected gift in my old age, after a lifetime of keeping at a distance.”

*****

While enjoying Insomniac City very much, I don’t know if the book would have held my interest in the same way if it weren’t partly about the last years of a writer I have long admired. Sacks’s marvelous contributions to popular-science writing include the collected case studies in books like Musicophilia, An Anthropologist on Mars, and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat to the childhood memoir Uncle Tungsten. All these are, to varying degrees, autobiographical, dealing as they do with his life and his work (which, to him, was his life). But the Sacks we get in Hayes’s book is in some ways more intriguing, since this is the very personal gaze of someone who grew to know and love him in his final years.

Here is the respected scientist as a shy social outsider, but also at heart a little boy who is eager to keep discovering and understanding new things – including something as “irrational” as love, whose mechanics can’t be worked out on a chart, nor its essence distilled in the laboratory. He wears swimming goggles when Hayes teaches him to open a bottle of champagne for the first time. He knows little about pop-culture (asking “What is Michael Jackson?” when the singer dies), yet develops a poignant and unexpected friendship with the musician Bjork (and Hayes has a lovely description of a New Year’s Eve dinner at Bjork’s house in Reykjavik, fireworks going off, the whole experience “like being safely in the middle of a very happy war”). A more fleeting but equally improbable connection is formed with the model and actress Lauren Hutton, who turns out to be “intensely curious” like Sacks himself, despite their superficial differences and very different lifestyles.

The book’s structure – weaving Hayes’s experiences of New York City with constant reminders of Sacks’s presence in his life – was for me perfectly encapsulated in a chapter where the author watches youngsters skateboarding and gets a crash course in skateboard mechanics from a sharp kid. Even in this vivid little aside about a city, its people and what it is like to see and listen to someone for the first time, there is a guest appearance by Sacks who gets to be the savant and the wonderstruck observer at the same time; watching kids performing seemingly impossible parabolas at the skateboard park, he describes it as a living geometry – “they may not have read Euclid, but they know it all”.

Given that loss and grief haunt its pages, it is a minor astonishment how uplifting Insomniac City is. It is about savouring little moments while the world keeps throwing larger disappointments our way; about the terror and liberation of leaving things, including parts of yourself, behind; about sharing apple pieces while soaking in a warm tub, or breaking the rules in small ways such as adding artificial sweetener to wine for taste. About sharing someone else’s life, even if only for a short while. You might be embarrassed by the raw emotion in Hayes’s journal excerpts, some of which is corny (I: “What else can I do for you?” O: “Exist”) or mundane, or both (In the middle of the night: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dream together?” O whispers), but surely that’s part of the point, in a book about finding wonder and comfort in everyday things – even when you’re living in a very big and intimidating city.
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 [Bill Hayes's website, including his photography, is here]

When we became "cable connected": TV memories from the early 1990s

[This is a slightly longer version of a piece I wrote for Mint Lounge’s 1990s special]

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Longtime movie buffs can get spooked when the stars they grew up with behave like Dorian Grays, unwilling to age normally. If you were a timid 12-year-old watching Maine Pyar Kiya in 1989 and thinking of Salman Khan as a full-formed adult (even when he didn’t behave like one onscreen), it feels odd, three decades later, to see the same man playing buff young heroes while your middle-aged bones creak as you reach for the remote.

With TV actors, the ageing process is more relatable because of the grounded, real-time nature of the medium. But it can be unsettling in other ways. Last month I began binge-watching the new show Riverdale—a dark, wittily meta, sometimes gothic take on the sweet world of Archie comics—with almost no prior information about the cast. Then Luke Perry shuffled into the frame.

Luke Perry! Beverly Hills 90210’s too-cool-for-school Dylan McKay—a lean, mean teen icon from another epoch—now playing Archie Andrews’ dad, grizzled and affectionate and full of senior-citizen wisdom. The question that leapt to my mind wasn’t just “Gosh, how old is this guy now?” but also “How old am I?” And: “Has it already been a quarter of a century since THAT happened?”

“That” being the heady, life-changing moment when satellite TV came to town.

We got our cable connection (the term sounds nearly as quaint now as “trunk call”) exactly 25 years ago, in early 1992. My sole initial reason to be excited about this wealth of riches, falling on us from the newly liberalized skies, was the Sunday-afternoon Hollywood classic on Star Plus. There were no other expectations.

That quickly changed, though. New addictions formed each day; one viewing experience opened doors to others; shedding our soft-socialist skins for unapologetic consumerism meant becoming impatient and grasping, less willing to wait. Looking through my 1992-1996 diaries, I’m surprised by how much TV I watched (and this was mainly American TV, with a few exceptions such as the addictive British game show The Crystal Maze) – everything from prime-time shows to daytime soaps. Not that those categories meant much to us in India: The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara were granted privileged nighttime slots since they had the highest ratings among Indian viewers; meanwhile, celebrated old Emmy-winners like M*A*S*H*, which had been weekly (and seasonal) shows in the US, came to us daily.

Compared to the multilayered narratives of today’s shows like Breaking Bad – with lengthy arcs conceptualized well in advance – the old prime-time serials were simpler in structure; episodes often worked as stand-alones, anchored by familiar characters, and this made them comforting and easy to absorb. (It’s a bit like the difference between the formula-based Hindi cinema of the past and today’s edgier, more detail-saturated films.) Among other things, we learnt that a tender coming-of-age tale could be built around one of the most turbulent periods in a country’s history (The Wonder Years), that humour and tragedy could play musical chairs in hospitals (St Elsewhere), newspaper offices (Lou Grant) and courtrooms (L.A. Law), that a prim little town could be a battleground for hot-button subjects like the ethics of euthanasia (Picket Fences), that a 14-year-old could become a doctor (Doogie Howser, MD), and that lifeguards, even the hot ones, took their work as seriously as officegoers in less glamorous professions (Baywatch).

No one who didn’t live through the period can know what a rich stew of experiences this was, and how startling it was for us Doordarshan-era waifs to realise that we had been hungry for so long. It was such an impressionable time that I have strong memories of even the shows I only skimmed. Despite the Luke Perry nostalgia moment mentioned above, I didn’t follow Beverly Hills 90210 closely – only enough to feel like I was on nodding terms with Dylan and the other regulars. I wasn’t a Baywatch fan either, beyond the novelty value of the first few episodes, but I remember the enormous grin on the face of a classmate who worshipped at the altar of Erika Eleniak, when we went for the action film Under Siege and she emerged from a cake and took off her top.

Today’s young viewers, who take instant access to global pop-culture for granted, may also have trouble grasping that in satellite TV’s first few years, we lived in a time warp. Our early/mid-1990s experience included a few bona fide “90s shows” such as NYPD Blue, but it was mainly about first-time exposure to much older television – which we were just as excited about. (It was often easier for middle-class Indians to relate to the older offerings anyway: consider Bewitched, originally telecast in the US between 1964-1972, and set in a conservative suburban world where a woman juggles magic powers with her many duties as a housewife.) Occasionally, it felt like we were inhabiting two or three time periods at once: around the same time that I saw Bruce Willis as Butch the boxer, intoning “Zed’s dead, baby” in Pulp Fiction on videocassette, I could see a younger, hipper, more verbose version of Willis on TV, in his star-making Moonlighting.

Also walking the line between the old and the new was MTV. Crushes on VJs like Nonie and Danny McGill became catalysts for becoming interested in the music… and the visuals that went with it. I would sit by our VCR, finger poised over the recording button, thrilled when the song that came on turned out to be by a favourite band like the Pet Shop Boys or R.E.M. And even more thrilled when the video was a masterpiece of condensed storytelling: the stop-motion animation of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”, the dreamlike rotoscoping in A-Ha’s “Take on Me”, the operatic melodrama of Meat Loaf’s “Objects in the Rear-View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are”.

Speaking with hindsight as a professional critic, this intense TV-watching period forever blurred my ideas about High and Low art. I had recently moved away from Hindi films, into the stratosphere of “respectable” world cinema – the realm of the Bergmans and Kurosawas – and cable TV kept me grounded; it showed that creativity and rigour could be found – even if in small doses – in things that weren’t outwardly respectable. It was possible, I learnt, to be stimulated to thought even by something as plebeian as a daily soap: I won’t provide an extended account of my love affair with Santa Barbara here, but my mother and I fell into a ritual of watching it together every night, discussing characters and their motivations and the politics of issues such as rape – and I maintain that some of the writing and acting was of a surprisingly high standard for the medium. Even as an adult, I have visited the show’s fan sites and stalked one of my favourite actors on Facebook.

Does all this amount to nostalgic defensiveness? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s an acknowledgement of everything that can go into one’s personal history, and how ideas about art and culture and the examined life may be formed over time. I still have my dusty videocassettes, with the songs and cherished episodes recorded on them. They haven’t been in working condition for years (and where would one play them now anyway), but throwing them away would be like denying the many effects of the past. To rephrase my deep-voiced friend Meat Loaf, objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than you might think.

[A somewhat related post - on diary writing, and memories of 1990]