tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82045422024-03-18T19:46:11.546+05:30Jabberwock"It seems very pretty," she said, "but it's rather hard to understand."Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.comBlogger2275125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-12683182473326410652024-03-16T18:36:00.001+05:302024-03-16T18:36:52.009+05:30A part-response to a piece about Nolan's Oppenheimer<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIGMZqSgCo8io_ppCEbF77wtlz67Pf3FWzZx0hWe_fQArrxA4_PvbDvHiLU2Nym5XMuYGcx6iEQyt2m9jwk-eUunZePf_UcVpdOxLzLkFpoD5eqbsY2KFPtxAkYX4FQ5UwLSkNByhbgx1jBkz0LvfPLBWanXNV99_qlrf90kXgpWQ1SlOn8lkb/s580/Dr-Strangelove.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="580" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIGMZqSgCo8io_ppCEbF77wtlz67Pf3FWzZx0hWe_fQArrxA4_PvbDvHiLU2Nym5XMuYGcx6iEQyt2m9jwk-eUunZePf_UcVpdOxLzLkFpoD5eqbsY2KFPtxAkYX4FQ5UwLSkNByhbgx1jBkz0LvfPLBWanXNV99_qlrf90kXgpWQ1SlOn8lkb/s320/Dr-Strangelove.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;">(This is a short thing I wrote on Facebook in August last year - forgot to put it here. So here it is, as part of the continuing discussions around "Oscar films"...)</i></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">-------------------<br /></span></span></p><div><div class="" dir="auto"><div class="x1iorvi4 x1pi30zi x1swvt13 xjkvuk6" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id=":r109:"><div class="x78zum5 xdt5ytf xz62fqu x16ldp7u"><div class="xu06os2 x1ok221b"><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: verdana;"><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The writer Vaibhav Vats wrote this thoughtful piece, <a href="https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/complicated-fandom-the-nature-of-the-indian-cult-around-christopher-nolan-and-oppenheimer/cid/1958695?fbclid=IwAR3-Bg1yI_NnM7scS0uJf1pCs0qYH9KNWZiqtoJxtk7ExkcK9FAcJDP982A">"Complicated Fandom"</a>, about <i>Oppenheimer</i> and some of the responses to it by Indian viewers – there is much to chew on here, and I recommend you read the whole thing. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have a slight issue, though, with two examples he provides of the audience applauding and cheering (during scenes that he felt should have been greeted more sombrely and introspectively, if not with outright dismay). </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The second of these examples – involving the very end of the film, after the frisson-creating moment between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (a.k.a. “Oppie aur Albie ki Prem Kahani” as I have been calling them in my film-club discussions) – is more easily dealt with. The film is over, the lights come on, and the audience applauds – this can be seen as a straightforward endorsement of the film’s overall quality (by those who genuinely loved it, or by those who feel they must openly celebrate a Nolan film because of peer pressure). Or even just relieved applause by those who are thankful it is over. It doesn’t have to be seen as anything more specific. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The other sequence Vaibhav mentions – the Trinity test scene, which begat cheering and excitement in the theatre – may need a more complex discussion, more than I can really get into here. But briefly, I think he goes a little too far in setting up a binary along these lines: 1) Chris Nolan set out to create a “deeply sobering philosophical moment” in this scene, and 2) these viewers in a sense betrayed him (and the film) with their excited/gung-ho reaction to a scene that should only have elicited horror and pity and respectful silence. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But… that isn’t how kinetic cinema works, and it isn’t how most of our brains work when it comes to visceral stimulation. Apart from anything that it may be at a philosophical level, that Trinity scene is *also* a great cinematic action setpiece, a paisa-vasool moment for many of us, and Nolan certainly knew it would be an engine that would get the viewers’ pulses racing. He constructed it that way, set it up, detailed it, for precisely that effect. This doesn’t mean that he is indifferent to the hideous things the Bomb did to those who experienced it firsthand in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but then, he isn’t indifferent either to the primal excitement of the scientists who had worked manically for this moment and were now seeing the awe-inspiring results in front of their eyes. BOTH those experiences, and many others in between, make up this messy thing we like to call the human condition. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Besides, the creative process, as I have often written elsewhere, is a very complicated thing where the filmmaker/writer is trying to be true to world-creation and to the particular point of entry he/she has chosen, rather than preparing a flowchart which goes: I have to take *<i>this this this</i>* ethical position/deliver *<i>this this this</i>* message, so I will structure this work accordingly. There are countless great books and great films that humanise very “problematic” characters, not because the authors or filmmakers endorse their actions in some all-encompassing way but because, in the process of honest world-building, they have had to occupy the mind-spaces of these protagonists. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’m always surprised by this expectation that we should have precisely calibrated ethical responses to everything, be it a film or a joke. Even the most “liberal” of us (or “sensitive”, or whatever other word you want to use) have reptilian layers that can be stimulated or excited by nasty things. And equally, when a well-made film contains a depressing or upsetting sequence, you can still be thrilled or moved to applause because of how powerfully it was done, because you recognise the quality of the achievement. When <i>Dr Strangelove</i> ends with those gorgeous images of mushroom clouds over our stone-dead planet, and Vera Lynn’s eloquent voice on the soundtrack reminding us of the music that has also forever died, I know I find it haunting and stimulating, think of it as the perfect ending to a wonderful film. If I were watching it in a hall, my response would be to express my appreciation – not to sit there quietly pondering the terrible implications.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(End of rant. For now.)</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">P.S. that point about the Hindutva lot having very little interest in, or knowledge of the nuances of, Hindu high culture – bang on. Starting with the prime minister, whose occasional pontifications about the Mahabharata have left me bemused. But more on that some other time.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Related post: <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2023/07/prometheus-icarus-vishnu-thoughts-on.html">my Oppenheimer review</a>) <br /></i></span></div></div></span></div></div></div></div></div>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-74176130446375683832024-03-12T07:44:00.001+05:302024-03-12T07:45:21.733+05:30Creativity in art, science and life: thoughts on some 2024 Oscar nominees<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this general Oscars-themed piece for Economic Times. Not a “who won/should have won” analysis)</i><br /><b>--------------</b><br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsMyrPbOxkf8SrVc231paYJT8xxN_QenrZr0Hcb2g8-vm-bE5vD4jzmvcleqLNnEruZ3RUsMy0aAVlaFyyOyqYldvlvW_sv51opcR4MdgolRavV1eYrcjQsHo9OIHiyN_m6rlLhIn5CtV18EtUrBS1bGxJN7Lz0yGI7KN0HMbYAN868Di8CS78/s1227/et%20oscars%20march24.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1227" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsMyrPbOxkf8SrVc231paYJT8xxN_QenrZr0Hcb2g8-vm-bE5vD4jzmvcleqLNnEruZ3RUsMy0aAVlaFyyOyqYldvlvW_sv51opcR4MdgolRavV1eYrcjQsHo9OIHiyN_m6rlLhIn5CtV18EtUrBS1bGxJN7Lz0yGI7KN0HMbYAN868Di8CS78/s320/et%20oscars%20march24.jpg" width="188" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is one way of staying interested in the unending Oscar hoopla and the tedious (pre-and-post award) conversations: watch all the major nominated films and cross-pollinate scenes from them just for amusement. I’ll go first – in Bradley Cooper’s <i>Maestro</i>, composer Leonard Bernstein and his girlfriend Felicia are sitting with their backs pressed against each other, trading romantic banter. “<i>You could be building a bomb back there for all I know</i>,” he says. This scene, depicting real-life people, is set in the mid-1940s – and the line reminded me that around this same time J Robert Oppenheimer (the subject of the biopic that won the best picture Oscar) really was busy building a big bomb elsewhere. <br /><br />And as if that weren’t enough, guess the name of the close friend/sometime lover whom Bernstein leaves for Felicia? The musician David <i>Oppenheim</i>, another real-life figure of the period. <br /><i>(Cue Twilight Zone music.)</i><br /><br />Of course, this is merely a smart-aleck observation: it doesn’t tell you anything important about either <i>Oppenheimer</i> or <i>Maestro</i>. But it’s as good a way of conducting Oscar discourse as any other – and preferable to the teeth-gnashing about who “should” and “should not” have won/been nominated. Even in my teens, when I was excitable enough about the awards to make detailed lists, I had little interest in comparing the nominees by merit (or pretending that my tastes represented an objective ranking system, which the awards would either validate or do injustice to). It is more stimulating when the films – watched closely together – become an occasion to examine tiny connections between works; to get a sense of the motifs that may have struck a chord with critics and jury members. <br /><br />And there are many stylistic or thematic echoes in these films, even though the directors certainly weren’t consulting with each other while making them. Christopher Nolan’s alternating use of black-and-white and colour in <i>Oppenheimer</i> (each visual choice representing a specific perspective, a subjective vs objective view of Oppenheimer’s life) has been much discussed, but two of the other best picture nominees – <i>Maestro</i> and Yorgos Lanthimos’s magnificent <i>Poor Things</i> – also make notable shifts between monochrome and colour. They do it similarly too: in each case, the first 40-45 minutes of the film is (mainly) in black and white. In <i>Poor Things</i>, this effect felt very similar to that in the 1939 classic <i>The Wizard of </i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTE0hXDapRiHgcGK-byhzP5yGLGC5PIwQ22Ev2m9yVZZS6U46vJu_GYS0Hy9nU0PasbJDAb6S2d9LcH1Tae56G1mwDJMyWXMConG8f49aTuOB8cITLeHIZ33anw0Wx0xP_N8MtpUO1jhi34R99nuPY4-iJ4lPdznQtooNAPU7Yuw6k-v5t534O/s888/Screenshot%202024-03-08%20at%2011.06.11%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="497" data-original-width="888" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTE0hXDapRiHgcGK-byhzP5yGLGC5PIwQ22Ev2m9yVZZS6U46vJu_GYS0Hy9nU0PasbJDAb6S2d9LcH1Tae56G1mwDJMyWXMConG8f49aTuOB8cITLeHIZ33anw0Wx0xP_N8MtpUO1jhi34R99nuPY4-iJ4lPdznQtooNAPU7Yuw6k-v5t534O/w400-h224/Screenshot%202024-03-08%20at%2011.06.11%20AM.png" width="400" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Oz</i>. When Bella, a young woman who has been reanimated like Frankenstein’s monster, moves out into the world beyond the one she was confined in (and also discovers the joys of sex), the art design explodes into bright saturated colours, with hallucinatory non-realistic depictions of 19th century Lisbon and Paris. In <i>Maestro</i>, the shift to colour (more muted) occurs as a once-sparkling relationship is starting to wear down into domestic drudgery.<br /><br />Many of the major nominated films also grapple with the creative process, the forms it may take, and the struggle to keep it going – whether in the realm of art, or science, or even in terms of building a life for oneself. In both <i>American Fiction</i> (winner for best adapted screenplay) and <i>The Holdovers</i> (best supporting actress) there is a sense of life as an empty page that needs to be filled. In the former, a novelist struggles to write what he wants to write (his books don’t sell; when he meets a woman who mentions having read a particular novel of his, he deadpans “So <i>you’re</i> the one!”) – the story touches on creating in a vacuum versus also maintaining a family life and close relationships, doing the right thing by an ailing mother and a flighty brother. Meanwhile the middle-aged protagonist of <i>The Holdovers</i>, a classics teacher who has lived an uneventful, parochial life, isn’t sure he has an entire book in him; maybe a monograph? (“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” someone says.) When a friend gifts him a notebook, he says “I don’t know. There’s a lot of empty pages in here” – and she replies, “All you got to do is write one word after another – can’t be that hard, can it?”<br /><br />But of course it <i>can</i> be that hard, as the distraught, writing-blocked husband in Justine Triet’s <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2024/02/couple-chaos-anatomy-of-present-and.html"><i>Anatomy of a Fall</i></a> knows. Even <i>Maestro</i>’s Bernstein, a clear achiever in his field, ruefully says: “I haven’t done very much at all when you add it up. Not a long list.” (Both films have key scenes where spouses argue about creativity and responsibility.)<br /><br />Bernstein also worries that <i>artistic</i> invention has come to a grinding halt while <i>science</i> continues to progress madly. It’s a reminder that what Oppenheimer and the other physicists are doing – coming up with an inventive new method to kill millions of people – is also a form of “creativity”. As is the ghastly work of the Auschwitz camp commandant in Jonathan Glazer’s haunting <i>The Zone of Interest</i> – a film in which a beautiful villa-garden and a concentration camp exist in adjacent spaces. While a Nazi commandant’s wife tends to her plants – and is reduced to tears at the thought that they might have to leave this “paradise” – the husband sits in meetings that discuss how gas chambers may be made more efficient; he has detached conversations about the daily “load” per oven. (Cue a funny line from <i>American Fiction</i>: “Hard work doesn’t <i>demand</i> respect. People worked hard on the Third Reich too.”)<br /><br />And what of the intersection of life and art, to a point where they blur into one? In Todd Haynes’s lovely melodrama <i>May December</i> – which wasn’t nominated for best picture but easily could have been – an actress seems to cannibalise the life of the woman she is playing in her upcoming film – </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixo77lo2I3D92OyRkUHo6zWM5LRUgrFNr3ZPz_P25L6FSolg6EMWrdf1mc8Dd_tW5hyphenhyphenMtMOnLIxcE-v7XrXrPTZtAK8Bu8DbjBM4e5KIWFXD-hNMDSiuGSvYYvxeACR-l3VyLHOdZnKjO6Ni6fr0evZmvhXmjEDp3RnkMtnZgCRQYngALaMfik/s680/Screenshot%202024-03-07%20at%207.55.44%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="680" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixo77lo2I3D92OyRkUHo6zWM5LRUgrFNr3ZPz_P25L6FSolg6EMWrdf1mc8Dd_tW5hyphenhyphenMtMOnLIxcE-v7XrXrPTZtAK8Bu8DbjBM4e5KIWFXD-hNMDSiuGSvYYvxeACR-l3VyLHOdZnKjO6Ni6fr0evZmvhXmjEDp3RnkMtnZgCRQYngALaMfik/s320/Screenshot%202024-03-07%20at%207.55.44%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">even to the extent of seducing her subject’s husband. And <i>Poor Things</i> – my favourite of the ten best-picture nominees – has a scene where Bella, working in a Parisian brothel, responds to a pejorative shout of “Whore!” with the line “We are our own means of production.” She and her friend are on their way to a Socialist meeting, but there is also a nod here to her delight in her newfound freedom – the use of sex not just as a source of income but a voyage of self-discovery, and maybe even a creative pursuit.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">(Related piece: <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2024/02/couple-chaos-anatomy-of-present-and.html">husbands and wives in Anatomy of a Fall</a>)<br /></span><br /></i></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-73137615709701405002024-02-23T20:19:00.002+05:302024-02-23T20:19:58.539+05:30Couple chaos: Anatomy of Present and Past Lives<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4JoUDDw14Ck60E3es9osZtUu58V9TByGZQixcs8l9YPTS_1C5ON8qqjSHbLI7piOqPSPRRNcb2yLcv62s3q4srixBGHtWWLZDJ7g0eGusJ1xL4Ykp5i3Cyu3iXVlhLI64nrIKgW7tIXQ_V831h1ne1rrawg3GzKKNAciUDkOFWnyuUcsvGQlz/s794/Screenshot%202024-02-23%20at%208.18.37%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="465" data-original-width="794" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4JoUDDw14Ck60E3es9osZtUu58V9TByGZQixcs8l9YPTS_1C5ON8qqjSHbLI7piOqPSPRRNcb2yLcv62s3q4srixBGHtWWLZDJ7g0eGusJ1xL4Ykp5i3Cyu3iXVlhLI64nrIKgW7tIXQ_V831h1ne1rrawg3GzKKNAciUDkOFWnyuUcsvGQlz/s320/Screenshot%202024-02-23%20at%208.18.37%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(On new films about language barriers, ambiguity and memory. Did this for my Economic Times column)</i><br /><b>------------------------</b><br /><br />Many Indian movie buffs will have noted the striking coincidental similarities between Avinash Arun’s <i>Three of Us</i> and Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated <i>Past Lives </i>– both films being about a temporary reunion between a woman and a man who were very close as adolescents, and separated by circumstances before they could grapple with such possibilities as romantic love or commitment. Another important element in each story is the woman’s husband, a decent man who, even as he wants to be supportive, is a bit rattled by suddenly feeling peripheral. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HIKnyaSSfU-AsV9Xy1GJvTUED2thAbxI2cwmYCqGZDAATObGaYIlHbpjj0iTah6MBvYZJBMokIychBqBYI-BwIY3cmF19R4b0wmn19S51v6g4pwFWSEIjwe3DzLl2tRfVz7TtCL4CA8-TIIP31MsCntpNs26BR-tPCFYJwlt0azwbSLiRPtD/s641/Screenshot%202024-02-23%20at%201.58.24%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="539" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HIKnyaSSfU-AsV9Xy1GJvTUED2thAbxI2cwmYCqGZDAATObGaYIlHbpjj0iTah6MBvYZJBMokIychBqBYI-BwIY3cmF19R4b0wmn19S51v6g4pwFWSEIjwe3DzLl2tRfVz7TtCL4CA8-TIIP31MsCntpNs26BR-tPCFYJwlt0azwbSLiRPtD/w336-h400/Screenshot%202024-02-23%20at%201.58.24%20PM.png" width="336" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In <i>Three of Us</i>, the catalyst for this is that the protagonist has dementia and we sense that some of her distant memories – including her childhood ones – are more immediate than recent ones involving her family. In <i>Past Lives</i> the woman is a Korean inhabiting an Anglophone world with her husband in America, but her old friend can only speak with her in Korean – this creates a situation where the husband realises she dreams in a language he doesn’t even understand, that there exists an inner world he can’t grasp. <br /><br />Language – as bridge or barrier, or as an uneasy middle ground between two people – is also central to Justine Triet’s excellent <i>Anatomy of a Fall </i>(another best picture nominee this year). Sandra, a German writer living with her husband Samuel in his French village, needs English to express complex thoughts – especially during a court trial after the depressed Samuel falls (or jumps? Or is pushed?) to his death. Sandra’s struggle with French felt to me like a part-metaphor for what it’s like when we have to explain ourselves and our relationships in a way that would be easily digested by someone on the outside. Because this is what <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i> repeatedly stresses – the unknowability of people, and of even our closest bonds. Though the film plays like a metaphysical thriller, by the end “what really happened” is almost beside the point, and there certainly is more than one possible interpretation. <br /><br />Triet’s film is about two people who have cared deeply for each other over a long time, but have also been navigating very dark waters. A couple is “a kind of chaos”, Sandra says at one point. Responding to the prosecutor’s take on a damning audio recording of a fight between her and Samuel the day before his death, she says: “It’s an <i>argument</i> – people exaggerate and alter facts when they argue.” <i>What you heard on the tape wasn’t all that we were</i>, she means – <i>we were many things at many times</i>. This ambiguity runs through the film anyway, and adds layers to its mystery: early on, it’s notable that Sandra doesn’t give her lawyer the sort of information that might help her own case – e.g. she says her husband wasn’t careless, he was slow and meticulous (meaning an accidental fall was unlikely). Even much later in court, after the lawyer makes a statement conjecturing Samuel’s last year, painting a picture of a man heading towards self-obliteration, Sandra reaches out to tell him “no, he wasn’t like that”.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1utlZxvVtHRutLSUIPqrnC108jPTvdFxnRjWVStGAPzLWf8vevNNMAMjwYoNkWR4wwCqhQsFnoLcbtpgEKs13gngLtUOpsKveJue8Lpad0SerOROhz1H2gXXEtUwo_uH-xMc5mm3-cbdkn8okp5m-RcK7__A5_udFfM3mp_ifjevDBLQDwxFU/s638/Screenshot%202024-02-23%20at%201.35.30%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="567" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1utlZxvVtHRutLSUIPqrnC108jPTvdFxnRjWVStGAPzLWf8vevNNMAMjwYoNkWR4wwCqhQsFnoLcbtpgEKs13gngLtUOpsKveJue8Lpad0SerOROhz1H2gXXEtUwo_uH-xMc5mm3-cbdkn8okp5m-RcK7__A5_udFfM3mp_ifjevDBLQDwxFU/w355-h400/Screenshot%202024-02-23%20at%201.35.30%20PM.png" width="355" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Without getting into deep personal exegesis in this short space: I could relate with the central messy relationship in this film. I even have a parallel in my life for the tragic event that began a downward spiral for Sandra and Samuel – their four-year-old son blinded after an accident – and I know what it’s like to feel like your own time doesn’t matter, only the other person’s does, while you carry on making sacrifices and putting life on hold. Yet there can’t be precise one-on-one mapping when it comes to these things. Part of the power of the argument scene (which is presented to us visually while the courtroom hears the audio version) comes from its overturning of gender expectations. We see this in what Samuel and Sandra say to each other, and their body language as they say it: Samuel’s despair, his feeble repeating of words and phrases like “you <i>impose</i> on me” as he teeters on the edge of panic; Sandra’s poised, unblinking display of control as she responds to his accusations, or even when she appreciates the food he has just made. However, power does subtly shift back and forth during the argument too, and it would be limiting this film – with its understanding of couple dynamics – to view it through a rigid gender-politics lens. It knows that we can all be different people in different contexts – and that over the course of a long relationship that is founded, to at least some degree, on affection, it is possible for each person to behave in ways that might broadly be labelled “male” or “female” (with the specific types of toxic behaviour associated with each of those categories). <br /><br />As I exited the hall with the (woman) friend I had watched the film with, it transpired that in that argument scene we had both identified more with Samuel. This was funny because this friend and I have been prolific writers in the past, exactly the sort of people the tortured Samuel would resent; and yet here we were relating to a man who has tied himself up in knots of paranoia because he is unable to write and needs to rationalise this. It was a reminder of how a well-told story can allow you to be many people at once, or to tap into the conflicting parts of your own personality: dominant and submissive, victim and persecutor, even man and woman. </span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(<i>Related post: <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2023/07/emotional-time-travel-and-play-acting.html">a recent piece</a> about two other films - 96 and Blue Jay - involving reunions between two people who were once very close</i>) </span><br /></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-23360997927275409772024-02-10T18:36:00.001+05:302024-02-10T18:38:08.714+05:30In memory of our Kaali/Mother/Prada (2008/9 – Feb 6, 2024)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Our Kaali, aged between 15 and 16, died after old-age-related deterioration that had carried on for several months, even years. Here's a wholly inadequate tribute)</i><br />--------------<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLogQwPtjnEi-80WJXM_M-mvg5BeY7_QXAJtDILf5F66R17F4hC59fq6vI83oQItxvjYb0OXUm9gXA83Yl8NFy92JzfhuBWis81kAL8hN6P8wgZFfoEGltaqL5uVyAL5rdoW5cIz2w5ptdUz0AzDL-_SeIYGP3h4M44qlm_9VUr3dU3DS42pyw/s1417/kaali%20pots2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1063" data-original-width="1417" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLogQwPtjnEi-80WJXM_M-mvg5BeY7_QXAJtDILf5F66R17F4hC59fq6vI83oQItxvjYb0OXUm9gXA83Yl8NFy92JzfhuBWis81kAL8hN6P8wgZFfoEGltaqL5uVyAL5rdoW5cIz2w5ptdUz0AzDL-_SeIYGP3h4M44qlm_9VUr3dU3DS42pyw/s320/kaali%20pots2.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">For the longest time, we had called her “the mother” – an unintentionally mystical-sounding form of address, as if we were referring to the Holy Mother or some such divinity, though that thought hadn’t crossed our minds. (Mata Kali in her most ferocious form…maybe.) More to the point, we sometimes called her “Chotu’s mother” or “Chotu’s mom” – Chotu being her increasingly obese and dumb-looking son, probably the only surviving member of her litter, from whom she was inseparable: right from the time they came together into our lives in late 2011, until his death, likely of a heart ailment, in 2018. <br /><br />“Chotu and the mother” – a classic case of the patriarchy decreeing a woman’s identity in relation to a man. But in the years after Chotu went, she morphed into the generic “Kaali” – something I still regret a little, since I would have liked her to be distinguished from the many other black street dogs, the Kaalis and Kaalus, named by other people, whom I have known. (In the last few months alone, I have written obits <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2023/10/kaalu-in-remembrance-2023.html">for two</a> <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-dogs-of-saket-files-goodbye-little.html">of those</a>.)<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMnw7wjMwGrJWGmB-Igqi-xGJn-mxgNMxCsYitmZLHI0Y4yyrtvgVtdAnv1DwOP4jIjnKp4_9eYdvmz1Z_lvM5P8AUD9vNLzWsvN2EcD3job3Q7TQffcNIEFt8enONAx-hmitLMkU7Mn6QTfyG1W1vev7VMht6xaKjfMJV27xfU1BmVncvzkd/s1269/kaali%20army.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1269" data-original-width="1020" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMnw7wjMwGrJWGmB-Igqi-xGJn-mxgNMxCsYitmZLHI0Y4yyrtvgVtdAnv1DwOP4jIjnKp4_9eYdvmz1Z_lvM5P8AUD9vNLzWsvN2EcD3job3Q7TQffcNIEFt8enONAx-hmitLMkU7Mn6QTfyG1W1vev7VMht6xaKjfMJV27xfU1BmVncvzkd/s320/kaali%20army.jpg" width="257" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">When I wrote a little about *this* Kaali – in her own voice – in an essay for the anthology <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2021/12/two-new-anthologies-cat-people-and-book.html"><i>The Book of Dog</i></a>, I designated her the dog who had no name, and recounted how we had briefly toyed with calling her Prada (only because Chotu was a lovable Gucci – as in a gucci-coochie-pie – and Prada was the harsher-sounding name that suited her). When I watched the horror/historical-fiction series <i>The Terror</i> in 2018, I thought of naming her Tuunbaq after the monster in that show – she was still the bane of many newcomers to our lane, and over the years we had often had to compensate courier boys, maids and others who came wailing to our door with bleeding ankles. Inside the house, she complained and muttered and squinted like a canine Lalita Pawar, even wailing in indignation if she thought one of us was scolding Chotu or coming too close to him. There were many name possibilities.<br /><br />But Kaali she stayed. It seemed most convenient (and I hadn’t yet made acquaintance with many other black dogs as I would do from the pandemic years onward). <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhS7GFrY6eC7hs2ZGUiVK-8JKTk2iEk4xkS4b-WoFeIc56mq1LxQuHnjW-l5g-vtVxWAYWmfynQpfemlE5TJlUs6iLEXiKall2mqFIBJky3O-EEl55dVCF2hkNeVeOzY-bIk8L5dF3_9GCshwG5K0_T1juk-p0zq_u5VDZONML9FrdGd_qKRje/s953/calcium.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="953" data-original-width="680" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhS7GFrY6eC7hs2ZGUiVK-8JKTk2iEk4xkS4b-WoFeIc56mq1LxQuHnjW-l5g-vtVxWAYWmfynQpfemlE5TJlUs6iLEXiKall2mqFIBJky3O-EEl55dVCF2hkNeVeOzY-bIk8L5dF3_9GCshwG5K0_T1juk-p0zq_u5VDZONML9FrdGd_qKRje/s320/calcium.jpg" width="228" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In that <i>Book of Dog</i> piece, I had also touched on how many different types of relationships it is possible to have with dogs, across the continuum from street animal to house pet. With the “part-time dog” – part home, part street, in varying degrees – being the trickiest. Well, Kaali Ma was the towering example of that variety. For the first few years that she was part of my life, not only was she a very independent, full-time street dog, but I wasn’t even the primary caregiver for her and her son, and had minimal interaction with them: my wife Abhilasha (perhaps feeling the absence of our Foxie who had moved almost completely to my mother’s flat) began feeding them once a day near the gate of our building, fielded most of the neighbours’ complaints for a few weeks, and then started bringing them inside our flat just for 5-10 minutes each day so they could eat and go back down – she also arranged for their sterilization operations, a necessary step that if I recall right also led to the first time that they spent a few hours inside the house (carefully restricted to one room), since we had to monitor their healing after the operation. A photo from that time below, Chotu in the foreground, Kaali at back – one of the rare pics we have of them together.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhteGVsuTt6N9EW2r5puvzqFGgBWA_OGOXtel80UgAPgcY8dboHxrnE_S76Dd4E6La831Av74RtJOM0_HnVzq5AZxTkhbWCRFD0Z2Z8NSVcCYvW_5CAAFCY2WkVp56xqP28NorGNYveohAq1EgesyXZJX2K4wxyKIjQSEKT-oDeskrVtQNmFZir/s1280/kaali%20chotu.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhteGVsuTt6N9EW2r5puvzqFGgBWA_OGOXtel80UgAPgcY8dboHxrnE_S76Dd4E6La831Av74RtJOM0_HnVzq5AZxTkhbWCRFD0Z2Z8NSVcCYvW_5CAAFCY2WkVp56xqP28NorGNYveohAq1EgesyXZJX2K4wxyKIjQSEKT-oDeskrVtQNmFZir/w400-h300/kaali%20chotu.jpg" width="400" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Resistant as I am to sweeping pronouncements, Kaali was in many ways the dog with the most distinct, versatile personality that I have known up-close. <i>Or just the most personality, period</i>. Even in the early years, before I had much to do with her or Chotu, I would tell Abhilasha I much preferred The Mother because she had vitality – unlike her “bhondu” boy (bhondu being an inside reference, it was what my alpha-male maamu had always called *me*). <br /><br />Personality, personality, personality all over – much more than the Samuel L Jackson character in <i>Pulp Fiction</i> could have imagined when he said that line about personality going a long way. She was the feistiest, the most expressive, the most fearless. (For comparison, the two dogs I have been closest to in a parental way – <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2012/06/in-memory-of-beautiful-brave-child.html">Foxie</a> and Lara – were, respectively, very introverted and very nervous.) </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">From her full-throated singing as accompaniment to Abhilasha’s practice (music teachers, hearing Kaali in the background on Zoom videos, would in all seriousness hold her up as an example to emulate, noting her control over sur and taal. “She is a true Rasika”, my friend Karthika Nair – who knows a good deal about poetry, performance and artistic rigour – remarked after seeing a video) to her playful way of pouncing, panther-like, on a calcium bone I had thrown out for her – or, if she was seated and it was within arm’s reach, crooking her paw (often unnecessarily, more as a dramatic gesture than a practical one) to grab it and draw it towards her, like a dog from a picture-book story, or like Macbeth reaching for the dagger of the mind: “Come, let me clutch thee.” </span></span><br /><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyx5Ueb00AkJAddKL9eTmRyLN-aRo0p4dXhNJ5o2gqWD-Ekney4NRDiLujsuyU4U1GpJ51wk59pErk' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwhFv8b_4sjoxDOwbcay5AcqeiozCWNqYCu5VM_L1a_XVeeoXzU62hNWbZXPfo7dvTzqlSG3h_7z2s' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Looking back now, I still marvel at how much on the periphery of my life Kaali and Chotu were for the first few years they were with us; marvel at how, despite ours being a fairly small, compact flat, they never even got to see the little balconies next to the rooms for years. (Kaali would later spend a lot of time in the drawing-room balcony in her old age.) When they did start spending more time indoors, they weren’t allowed inside the living area, were mostly restricted to a room, and were very well-behaved about this.<br /><br />This means that in my head – even now – when I think about the period between June 2012 (when my Foxie died, aged just four) and mid-2015, when we adopted puppy Lara, I think of myself as dog-less (and this was the time when I managed to work on the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book and also get some of my most prolific writing done as a columnist and reviewer). Chotu and Chotu’s mother were very much around during that time, but there wasn’t much responsibility attached to them. Also, as relations between Abhilasha and me began to get strained in the year after Foxie’s death, I may have felt a tiny bit of resentment (mixed up with the vague fondness) about these dogs who weren’t really “my” dogs, spending so much time in the house. <br /><br />There is no point overanalysing along those lines, but it’s certainly true that I never came close to thinking of them as *children* whom I loved, like I did with Foxie and do with Lara – there wasn’t any comparable physical closeness, no cuddling or sleeping on the same bed; anyway, when Kaali came into our lives she was already an adult dog with an almost-adult son. The most intimate contact I had with her and Chotu was on the occasions when I had to pluck what seemed like dozens of ticks of all sizes out of their ears and back during the summers. And even with that proximity, I don’t recall feeling the need to pet or stroke them.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjIfgECqqUX8ooPg63cNnOTt-aWjqOrsGukFSQXKKtbbuANW9t2WRhU1KzX91_INoGCIu3F_8681ZI9h-Ubbjlfq5ofZUmTkmMO2tkJp6aP-AG6IOBHa_qQRKnGrgs4Ltx34oVSNWGnOvl3STYS3iVvrJfLFtRaRnm4ml9WgCj3ASDp5XwmbF9/s765/Screenshot%202024-02-10%20at%205.50.02%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="765" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjIfgECqqUX8ooPg63cNnOTt-aWjqOrsGukFSQXKKtbbuANW9t2WRhU1KzX91_INoGCIu3F_8681ZI9h-Ubbjlfq5ofZUmTkmMO2tkJp6aP-AG6IOBHa_qQRKnGrgs4Ltx34oVSNWGnOvl3STYS3iVvrJfLFtRaRnm4ml9WgCj3ASDp5XwmbF9/s320/Screenshot%202024-02-10%20at%205.50.02%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This began to change, very gradually, after Chotu went – and especially in the last 3-4 years: first, as Kaali became an almost round-the-clock companion to Abhilasha during the lockdown months (when my attentions were largely on the dogs around my mother’s flat and on the streets), and then in late 2021 when her walking problems became more pronounced and an X-ray disclosed that an incurable joint issue </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> one paravet called it a form of "bone cancer" </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> had taken root. Around that point I took over her feeding full-time, changing her diet to the food that was already being made for Lara and the other dogs in my other house, and giving her the daily medicines she needed for her joint problem and for numerous other issues she developed along the way. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My routine became organized around her – even being out of town for a couple of days meant having to give detailed instructions to our domestic staff. In her last two years, my driver Mohan or I would accompany her whenever she needed to go downstairs, even though she was never leashed. (The big epiphany for me had happened one night when, looking down from my balcony shortly after letting Kaali out, I heard whining from the end of the lane and realised that for the first time ever, *<i>she</i>* was being bullied by a couple of dogs whose territory she had confidently crossed into. I had to go downstairs and get her to emerge from the car she had hidden under. Such a thing would have been unimaginable a few years earlier when she was in her pomp, and the scourge of every other dog – and a few humans – in our lane.) She had always loved car drives anyway, and had this unnerving habit of randomly jumping into an auto-rickshaw if it stopped on the road near where she is (and then sitting elegantly in it, as if waiting for the driver to get on with it) </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> but taking her for a short morning drive around the block became a new ritual in her old age.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjginIjrGvdnnn_kESIOoGBIbuwnu9bNs9cPQO0N6HkY2reMs5djtFdNzN_EOJzSLriB-JCdK8mnGNiSP2s9Y3RJ2ZsdW5fv9XdRRU_7qU-SiKvtgWBdbj5D_i30meJ9dSfoXtPy1c8sCkhmwY6rlhFAkmLSKtM0hIhf7thnufAFJA6MsT-IbZz/s1046/stairs%20carry.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1046" data-original-width="850" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjginIjrGvdnnn_kESIOoGBIbuwnu9bNs9cPQO0N6HkY2reMs5djtFdNzN_EOJzSLriB-JCdK8mnGNiSP2s9Y3RJ2ZsdW5fv9XdRRU_7qU-SiKvtgWBdbj5D_i30meJ9dSfoXtPy1c8sCkhmwY6rlhFAkmLSKtM0hIhf7thnufAFJA6MsT-IbZz/w163-h200/stairs%20carry.jpg" width="163" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And in the final couple of months, as one dire diagnosis followed another – intense diabetes, necessitating two insulin shots a day; liver and kidney failure – I was carrying all 40 kg of her up and down most of the stairs as it had become almost impossible for her to negotiate them. Sleeping on a couch very close to her bed, I would feel reassured at night when she was snoring peacefully; feel stressed when I heard her getting up and shifting around uncomfortably, or drinking more water than she should be. <br /><br />At the start of this month, a cloud hung over my Jaipur lit-fest trip, which had been planned months ahead: I made the decision to leave on the scheduled day only after a long phone conversation with our vet, who told me it was very probable that if given electrolytes daily through a drip, she would stay alive and reasonably comfortable for the two-and-a-half days I was away. Even so, I had a terrible, sleepless night in Jaipur on the 3rd, calling Abhilasha to check at 4 AM, looking at various permutations of flight bookings, convinced I would have to fly back to Delhi for a cremation and then try to get back to Jaipur in time for my session. <br /><br />Kaali waited, though. Wagged her tail when she heard my voice when I walked through the door. Continued to deteriorate otherwise, being unable to retain the water she was so thirsty for, unable to get in the right positions for her toilet. And on the 6th evening, with the gentle encouragement of a vet who almost never encourages euthanasia, it was time to take a call.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgodHviG9qjsf-HCXtHWWKQ-aoDtKP5_-uzJHn1up1WRCU1ITI4WEBq9MILA112Qvgdf3yPnnti7Xr2BjGlvKBuVY5UwQc8KP_uDT9IoD6dQBwM0YrRISUF-kht3WponyGKEkQnEV8PsMQX3bKGMVfMGb7f8vGEa0hRZmAKMHUQUgZ5aPiZfHZP/s737/Screenshot%202024-02-10%20at%204.26.53%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="737" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgodHviG9qjsf-HCXtHWWKQ-aoDtKP5_-uzJHn1up1WRCU1ITI4WEBq9MILA112Qvgdf3yPnnti7Xr2BjGlvKBuVY5UwQc8KP_uDT9IoD6dQBwM0YrRISUF-kht3WponyGKEkQnEV8PsMQX3bKGMVfMGb7f8vGEa0hRZmAKMHUQUgZ5aPiZfHZP/s320/Screenshot%202024-02-10%20at%204.26.53%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In the past few years, I have taken other dogs to be put to sleep (including <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2020/05/lockdown-chronicles-reunion-of-old-foes.html">another old black dog</a>, another “Kaali”, who was Lara’s mother – and quite possibly the mother of this Kaali too). But this time was different, more difficult, since it was the first time I was doing it for a dog I had become really close to and spent many years with. And yet, when it happened – calmly, peacefully – there was a strange feeling of satisfaction. This whole process – looking after an old dog round the clock, dealing with the trials and challenges of age, all heading up to the inevitable moment of letting go – felt like the sort of closure we hadn’t got <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2012/06/in-memory-of-beautiful-brave-child.html">when Foxie died</a> on another vet’s table when we were completely unprepared for it on June 16, 2012, still the worst day of my life. <br /><br />When Kaali was cremated at Sai Ashram, Chhatarpur, a few feet away from a tombstone that had Foxie’s birth and death dates on it, it struck me that though they had never really known each other, </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Kaali must have been very close to Foxie in age: they were probably born just a few weeks or months apart. And apart from everything else Kaali gave us over the years, she had given us this opportunity – so badly missed and regretted on an earlier occasion – to celebrate and participate in a full life. Her ashes are buried in a little site right next to Fox's grave, which feels apt.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">**********<br /><br />There is much more to say about her, many other memories – and if I get around to doing a monograph about the dogs in my life, she will be an anchoring presence in it – but for now here are a few photos/videos.<br /><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibKFmEs2YV4dKxOoFlMc-0Ln6zH04jQSIBu04eo8dggceMRScidnPTC3hwNFRGL1D2R1rYU-21JP3wsPAfdEkKT6aedcTg6bcxbyXx6mHPOjYRBn3Uko39OzV-g9VXJTwJxQ7yHDbDZgtaENGCXE7DT_19bbGSxc10Yz6E16fiVHhQXTKElYIc/s992/collage%20car.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="992" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibKFmEs2YV4dKxOoFlMc-0Ln6zH04jQSIBu04eo8dggceMRScidnPTC3hwNFRGL1D2R1rYU-21JP3wsPAfdEkKT6aedcTg6bcxbyXx6mHPOjYRBn3Uko39OzV-g9VXJTwJxQ7yHDbDZgtaENGCXE7DT_19bbGSxc10Yz6E16fiVHhQXTKElYIc/w640-h333/collage%20car.png" width="640" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">During car drives</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRoka5IxEkg_3F-ayxC6msRCiLueUfpzvB9wLzZNr9gXez53vkmbp2Yb13fYbmrjN-NMRyj6IRg4pxbb9ovje_171mVw9H_kOLgAVrvZt3u0LhYjI24PuporsZRmZOa6562_rcIZ6Hht3iZiTDbI7YClZu3IZwaNff7aVo_BIG4HN8RVtU2V9c/s1212/collage%20Abhi.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="582" data-original-width="1212" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRoka5IxEkg_3F-ayxC6msRCiLueUfpzvB9wLzZNr9gXez53vkmbp2Yb13fYbmrjN-NMRyj6IRg4pxbb9ovje_171mVw9H_kOLgAVrvZt3u0LhYjI24PuporsZRmZOa6562_rcIZ6Hht3iZiTDbI7YClZu3IZwaNff7aVo_BIG4HN8RVtU2V9c/w640-h309/collage%20Abhi.png" width="640" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Posing with her “bestie”</span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6zcpZ1LNl7fQySWRvVPEgQN5WsiLPNEZRnUgSzaRO0VeAQQ5M-0vs-BPeSElU8fKRyS4yM0KCInTMGZjqZe2VJwGQ7DWr3tqJV9rpsXodxw4iVIgwXJwcx1-y2AM3T4laqnUbBN7cpRsUkMcMGNxiebONKesLvucbKM6XUKp1y2WfAtThvoO8/s879/collage%20sing%20meditate.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="879" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6zcpZ1LNl7fQySWRvVPEgQN5WsiLPNEZRnUgSzaRO0VeAQQ5M-0vs-BPeSElU8fKRyS4yM0KCInTMGZjqZe2VJwGQ7DWr3tqJV9rpsXodxw4iVIgwXJwcx1-y2AM3T4laqnUbBN7cpRsUkMcMGNxiebONKesLvucbKM6XUKp1y2WfAtThvoO8/s320/collage%20sing%20meditate.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Singing and contemplating</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhon0WhKExnOxNRU5lvoT4uZreC0qu-d5_Gju3HMH8Vz9SA_lGlzclPSLmtNZVMwG_xymrbGdGl2LCWQoJkUVpS9779R67DJ8_pVbUn61bte70OCGIZlpuBHbVMqVh6fXrcsHULxaDVjYWo4bohwNBlAAD2uJOZRBGdHMlo94GRdAsBvTXpgJQg/s709/balconies.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="709" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhon0WhKExnOxNRU5lvoT4uZreC0qu-d5_Gju3HMH8Vz9SA_lGlzclPSLmtNZVMwG_xymrbGdGl2LCWQoJkUVpS9779R67DJ8_pVbUn61bte70OCGIZlpuBHbVMqVh6fXrcsHULxaDVjYWo4bohwNBlAAD2uJOZRBGdHMlo94GRdAsBvTXpgJQg/s320/balconies.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The balcony, discovered and enjoyed very late in life</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidIqQBn1bAjvYU2VEolkVAyseIcaG0phEbt1Pg_Z91NgXfEDwljJ_yMfNQwsTkeIjLr1V1zAFpKkU5WD-LPF8dkPDye2iwlm-cYQDvzDhufqwP0BJ4pVh2KwvxsKKZRgo65uYQu385aQw4PdOlHQx0UroELLBVPGMgCQL4lhU3rY-DgOjlWF8q/s945/smile.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="945" data-original-width="709" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidIqQBn1bAjvYU2VEolkVAyseIcaG0phEbt1Pg_Z91NgXfEDwljJ_yMfNQwsTkeIjLr1V1zAFpKkU5WD-LPF8dkPDye2iwlm-cYQDvzDhufqwP0BJ4pVh2KwvxsKKZRgo65uYQu385aQw4PdOlHQx0UroELLBVPGMgCQL4lhU3rY-DgOjlWF8q/s320/smile.jpg" width="240" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Smiling wistfully at the remembered scent of courier-boy blood </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglfDlxXDYN4WBiStfSmuaKA9w0_F33iUch3f0KC_RZntQGyNBakNS97MsHyoCGZkXvkP6Bv8iSHHvAhrlJi2gWw6PefHJ2DAxWFHU87_J7kXbNzp-ke3i4ajiLkbT6EKWyItyo9xOaU6ZeYZIsp0BOu1LGRAOUlnhaerWnOS2ZE9FYJ6sK0Szz/s1189/rearview%20mirror.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1189" data-original-width="1041" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglfDlxXDYN4WBiStfSmuaKA9w0_F33iUch3f0KC_RZntQGyNBakNS97MsHyoCGZkXvkP6Bv8iSHHvAhrlJi2gWw6PefHJ2DAxWFHU87_J7kXbNzp-ke3i4ajiLkbT6EKWyItyo9xOaU6ZeYZIsp0BOu1LGRAOUlnhaerWnOS2ZE9FYJ6sK0Szz/s320/rearview%20mirror.jpg" width="280" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Objects in the rear-view mirror...</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLIFhyphenhyphenzkqyXKz-ebcePbVKbTtDbUenbkAzA11mNMqhCWQW9sf-Kmwt2bwf2eAu4jtu1URsJ6LKebsrksFt_AS9Y3dOKgJcK1bov-8sYTLEWfHctdG4eL1IA7BgRd4EEu7xdWzS-zx4wzjrgnqSlz6FUGRbG_LksDWa2ctkCHPi7Odx8HG3Tk23/s742/mishra2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="742" data-original-width="543" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLIFhyphenhyphenzkqyXKz-ebcePbVKbTtDbUenbkAzA11mNMqhCWQW9sf-Kmwt2bwf2eAu4jtu1URsJ6LKebsrksFt_AS9Y3dOKgJcK1bov-8sYTLEWfHctdG4eL1IA7BgRd4EEu7xdWzS-zx4wzjrgnqSlz6FUGRbG_LksDWa2ctkCHPi7Odx8HG3Tk23/s320/mishra2.jpg" width="234" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">With Mishra ji, one of our lane's residents who must be the only one around who remembers Kaali when she was a pup and still talked to her as if she was one (and she tolerated it!)<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Gg2uRuxj60FXUiYZ3kSSIiLQ8f7mgDScDOfm87XJ1ivOvDDGAZVmMLUhimSdfDUCtUzEzLs8_bf7TKN45J_rRCdd1QGiHU3baxDbE2YNq1-l4qZrnZX7myr3eSsaLYLK8JyBmo8yThqKFgp64ekzKbfENv_XFkabGuq8C2fzVk1gongifCkY/s794/boy%20collage.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="609" data-original-width="794" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Gg2uRuxj60FXUiYZ3kSSIiLQ8f7mgDScDOfm87XJ1ivOvDDGAZVmMLUhimSdfDUCtUzEzLs8_bf7TKN45J_rRCdd1QGiHU3baxDbE2YNq1-l4qZrnZX7myr3eSsaLYLK8JyBmo8yThqKFgp64ekzKbfENv_XFkabGuq8C2fzVk1gongifCkY/w400-h306/boy%20collage.png" width="400" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Rediscovering her youth briefly after becoming very fond of a young boy dog - there was an age difference of around 80 years between them in dog-years, but romance knows no borders etc.<br /><br /> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv3jD9WTL9vHJ6HcuM6lD1BCzRd4kZhCv8uswDH1V7l7yrxjcQRW6krnoTWAnimiuF_uqsR5hViMCzx_cN1JoXk_FT0svTyqcVHftJ-SM8nXr2b9nzRhRzTZUDNc_9LJXkkn3unu7UdlgXwkOj5aR69lCj-oBQd5CSXY69G21LmyZ2JwT2zf0T/s994/panchshila2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="994" data-original-width="938" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv3jD9WTL9vHJ6HcuM6lD1BCzRd4kZhCv8uswDH1V7l7yrxjcQRW6krnoTWAnimiuF_uqsR5hViMCzx_cN1JoXk_FT0svTyqcVHftJ-SM8nXr2b9nzRhRzTZUDNc_9LJXkkn3unu7UdlgXwkOj5aR69lCj-oBQd5CSXY69G21LmyZ2JwT2zf0T/s320/panchshila2.jpg" width="302" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">A rare trip out of Saket - when she came and visited the Panchshila Park house in which I grew up, shortly before it was demolished for reconstruction. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8NesnVuCS8J0sJbPo0UQCJYYQ04m-QZtsNEg2BrPy0WHkbNj6gv_itGk0KvYpZx0YIo1RVMz_buwGCcV5rRnM-ROur9ohCP9yCTE_n4JaeR_Bmn7bIQ8N7aHCWzSkZ24_y_iXlphBw7q_5LgO75Y3IOljtroS1RGCoMqiFMOXWk9IaovuFwAb/s850/Screenshot%202024-02-10%20at%204.29.44%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="603" data-original-width="850" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8NesnVuCS8J0sJbPo0UQCJYYQ04m-QZtsNEg2BrPy0WHkbNj6gv_itGk0KvYpZx0YIo1RVMz_buwGCcV5rRnM-ROur9ohCP9yCTE_n4JaeR_Bmn7bIQ8N7aHCWzSkZ24_y_iXlphBw7q_5LgO75Y3IOljtroS1RGCoMqiFMOXWk9IaovuFwAb/s320/Screenshot%202024-02-10%20at%204.29.44%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Guardian of gate and door</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-46918496709021134152024-01-27T21:57:00.002+05:302024-01-27T22:01:27.453+05:30Apsara descending: In praise of Vyjayanthimala<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this tribute piece a while back. <a href="https://www.moneycontrol.com/author/jai-arjun-singh-18211/">Money Control published it</a> yesterday after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyjayanthimala">Vyjayanthimala</a> was given a Padma Vibhushan)</i><br /><b>----------------</b><br /><br />The first time I really noticed Vyjayanthimala was during a 1980s family getaway in Ludhiana when some of the older people insisted on watching <i>Naya Daur</i> on videocassette. I was 11 and not too interested in much of the film, even the exciting climactic race, but I registered the pretty heroine singing “Maang ke saath tumhara” to Dilip Kumar on the horse-cart – seemingly the epitome of demure non-urban Indian womanhood of the 1950s. <br /><br />I didn’t realise it then, but it came as a shock when I did realise it, maybe a few months later: this sweet-looking village belle was the same actress in Raj Kapoor’s opus <i>Sangam</i>, all chic and modern – and sexually desirous – in the “Budha Mil Gaya” song; and in a swimsuit in “Bol Radha Bol”. <br /><br /><i></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwLAAVJ5bHZd3cquCm-X3rJwzinAy48bdWWajqgd9pKjexxdMqS241G3qoJ2gdXjjnQOCgzCPsBxB4x5zB2RCUeET-BKAtlBYR9uw6bomdTK9WCQgon7imY5FJ6gOzo9GKFLuL_nXYE7XFTIbzwaWqYOHq5_-x2z4gQEtYfrfomq7WDsLtYHGo/s662/Screenshot%202024-01-27%20at%209.53.47%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="662" data-original-width="510" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwLAAVJ5bHZd3cquCm-X3rJwzinAy48bdWWajqgd9pKjexxdMqS241G3qoJ2gdXjjnQOCgzCPsBxB4x5zB2RCUeET-BKAtlBYR9uw6bomdTK9WCQgon7imY5FJ6gOzo9GKFLuL_nXYE7XFTIbzwaWqYOHq5_-x2z4gQEtYfrfomq7WDsLtYHGo/s320/Screenshot%202024-01-27%20at%209.53.47%20PM.png" width="247" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Naya Daur</i> and <i>Sangam</i> were made only six or seven years apart, and there is a small similarity in Vyjayanthimala’s function in them – in both, she is the object of desire for two friends, which causes some emotional friction – but in my mind the two films barely occupied the same universe. And for a long time, as I became sporadically exposed to old Hindi cinema, this remained the Vyjayanthimala dichotomy in my head: the old-world version in a black and white film, and the bolder, more assertive version from a bright colour movie just a few years later. The examples changed over the years – <i>Devdas</i> versus <i>Jewel Thief</i>, <i>Madhumati</i> versus <i>Prince</i> – but the dichotomy remained. <br /><br />However, despite her relatively “modern” look in films like <i>Sangam</i> and <i>Prince</i>, and her ability to be convincing in such set-ups and costumes, on the whole Vyjayanthimala still feels like a denizen of an older time in cinema – compared to some of her contemporaries. There are two reasons for this. One is, simply, that she retired very early. Hard as it is to believe, her last film – <i>Ganwaar</i> – was released in 1970, more than half a century ago. <br /><br />In comparison, actresses like Nutan and Waheeda Rehman continued to work in the 1970s and 1980s, even opposite younger leading men like Amitabh Bachchan – before going on to play mother to those same heroes. That never happened with Vyjayanthimala (though this may be a good place to remember that she was offered the role of the soon-to-be-iconic mother in <i>Deewaar</i>). If she began her career very young – as a teenager in the early 1950s – she was still youthful, barely in her mid-thirties, when she ended it. And so, in the mind’s eye, she is permanently located in the 1950s and 1960s.<br /><br />The other reason why Vyjayanthimala seems to belong to a more distant past than some of her peers is her acting style, which was rooted in the mannerisms of a classical dancer, and in the expression of bhava and rasa. This is something that fans of naturalistic screen acting often have little patience with; it represents a different sort of prowess from the one showed by, again, Nutan and Waheeda Rehman – who are the two go-to names when one speaks of great Hindi-film actresses of that era. The ones deemed “natural” and “restrained”. <br /><br />In fact, around the time that I reluctantly watched <i>Naya Daur</i> as a 1980s child, I was a fan of – and had a slight crush on – Meenakshi Seshadri, without ever realising how much of a Vyjayanthimala “type” she was. Though Seshadri – like Vyjayanthimala – was capable of subtle performances when directed accordingly, in her default mode her eyes always seemed to be moving even when she was doing straight “prose” scenes (and even in a video interview I once saw with candid footage of her playing with children outside her building). They were both very attractive and sensual, but also mannered and theatrical in the way that performers trained in classical dance sometimes were.<br /><br />Perhaps this is one reason why there was something so intense and interesting – even poignant – about Vyjayanthimala’s pairing with Dilip Kumar, the determinedly understated actor who had brought a modern, non-theatrical sensibility to Hindi cinema. They were such different types, yet they made for one of our finest romantic teams ever, working well together in a number of varied films, their mutual affection always palpable. In <i>Gunga Jumna</i>, speaking in the Awadhi dialect, they both also got to operate outside their comfort zones. The tempestuousness of their </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLSYqFNlIh_PhYnPsOzKSW6fjTcHe0uXObcMojiWXhBKW5HsaFqKTlhr7f_7MQMueJ8fki5-NR-qlAbvIm84-igFMTE8TV0jqQEWzEGo0r2ULQ_DxmWek_ZheIlCMEpVBLAN2VEARcV2hQ3EhjfDIsTDvDTtd45h3L68QVkwdikYn0OqEpj5rO/s794/paigham.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="794" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLSYqFNlIh_PhYnPsOzKSW6fjTcHe0uXObcMojiWXhBKW5HsaFqKTlhr7f_7MQMueJ8fki5-NR-qlAbvIm84-igFMTE8TV0jqQEWzEGo0r2ULQ_DxmWek_ZheIlCMEpVBLAN2VEARcV2hQ3EhjfDIsTDvDTtd45h3L68QVkwdikYn0OqEpj5rO/s320/paigham.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">work in that film (including the scene where Kumar’s Gunga inadvertently strikes Vyjayanthimala’s Dhanno as she tries to remove a bullet from his shoulder) makes for a fine contrast with their gentle banter in <i>Paigham</i>, which includes the beautifully performed scene where Kumar tries to make Vyjayanthimala jealous by talking about one of his past romances.<br /><br />And then there is the 1968 <i>Sunghursh</i>, loosely adapted from a Mahasweta Devi novel which centred on the courtesan Laila-e-Aasmaan – the character who would be played by Vyjayanthimala in the film. The screen version drastically reduced Laila’s importance, which creates a strange narrative tension within the film: this is one of Vyjayanthimala’s most intriguing performances, Sunghursh feels most alive when she is on screen, her character is the story’s moral centre, a mirror reflecting what is going on around her. And yet her screen time is limited and fragmented, and the film ties itself up in knots by focussing on macho feuds, with much showy posturing by a large male cast including Dilip and Sanjeev Kumar, and Balraj Sahni.<br /><br />Two years earlier, though, Vyjayanthimala had played another courtesan in a film where she was allowed a bigger stage to herself – the title role in the period epic <i>Amrapali</i> – and this is probably my favourite of her performances. It is a gorgeous-looking film (available in very good prints), she looks lovely in it, and the nature of the role and the ancient setting provide the perfect stage for her to show off her range as a classical dancer. Much like Vyjayanthimala herself, Amrapali is an emancipated performer who dances for the pleasure of others as well as for self-expression. There are wonderfully choreographed and shot sequences like the dance challenge that ends with Amrapali being anointed nagarvadhu or royal courtesan; or "Neel Gagan ki Chhaon Mein", where the mood and tempo of the scene moves from sorrow to exhilaration. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhARsml_nMz2y2obVS35x1xYpIUPJvbgUfVMveWc8zrka1wHc9622JKj3ITONbjZRwRGXhE-t6Ob2CQ0uDn0evl9cQ3aZeGRBawesnTx4aEvF9rilBCnSatNSDiLwlAm1IePN1gn_lGR_TSWn2-vElgUfe-T96DMGDsgZ6swz4D6X8grmMvnnr/s850/Screenshot%202024-01-27%20at%209.46.09%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="850" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhARsml_nMz2y2obVS35x1xYpIUPJvbgUfVMveWc8zrka1wHc9622JKj3ITONbjZRwRGXhE-t6Ob2CQ0uDn0evl9cQ3aZeGRBawesnTx4aEvF9rilBCnSatNSDiLwlAm1IePN1gn_lGR_TSWn2-vElgUfe-T96DMGDsgZ6swz4D6X8grmMvnnr/s320/Screenshot%202024-01-27%20at%209.46.09%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Vyjayanthimala at her best seemed of another world, well-suited to playing an apsara in a celestial court, expressing desire openly, unconstrained by societal dictates. She gets to do all of that in this film, and it is not surprising that its commercial failure is usually seen as the big disappointment that led her to end her movie career early, much like a Menaka heading back to Indra’s kingdom after briefly gracing the world of humans.</span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-21829279939576377322024-01-14T10:12:00.004+05:302024-01-14T10:18:20.063+05:30Chandler, Karna, and emotional armour (or, a New York yankee in King Dhritarashtra’s court)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(from my Economic Times column. This is a condensed version of an essay I am writing for my “life as a movie-watcher” book)</i><br /><b>-------------------</b><br /><br />What is the difference between a tragic anti-hero from a great Indian epic and a wisecracking young New Yorker from a popular sitcom? Among many possible answers: only one of them has a laugh track accompanying his life.<br /><br />But what might be <i>common</i> to these two characters? <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkYW8Kq3xDs_QT7w3B89p-PfrOSxmFjIKpXpIwwsXfgLAdIuJG52UWB_Vt8Z-VgjKBJMYLHK9apSESvgpRK1-Rh6c57ucljBvkqi8F-Uz1fi4aZW-s0_mBMjMvmMzMPSazGzU6jGzVK161LLMEWHu_7_xJBfQYiwiu_9lAW_5GmpoOqZ2STcW8/s680/Screenshot%202024-01-14%20at%2010.11.21%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="459" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkYW8Kq3xDs_QT7w3B89p-PfrOSxmFjIKpXpIwwsXfgLAdIuJG52UWB_Vt8Z-VgjKBJMYLHK9apSESvgpRK1-Rh6c57ucljBvkqi8F-Uz1fi4aZW-s0_mBMjMvmMzMPSazGzU6jGzVK161LLMEWHu_7_xJBfQYiwiu_9lAW_5GmpoOqZ2STcW8/s320/Screenshot%202024-01-14%20at%2010.11.21%20AM.png" width="216" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Quite possibly, nothing at all. Or nothing that would make sense to anyone but me. But here’s my glib-sounding answer: the emotional kavacha. The armour that protects you from the world, hiding your vulnerability below a covering of (take your pick) toughness, or nastiness… or goofy, laugh-track-accompanied jokes. <br /><br />Matthew Perry, who died in October, was a great favourite of mine – going back to the early years of this millennium when I watched every <i>Friends</i> episode multiple times as the show was telecast daily on two Indian channels – but if it has taken me this long to write about him it isn’t because I was coming to terms with loss. I just grabbed this pretext to binge-re-watch <i>Friends</i> instead, and to remember a time when the sarcastic Chandler Bing became the last of a series of lonesome types whom I strongly related to – characters encountered between childhood and my twenties, across literature and film.<br /><br />The first of those was Karna in the Mahabharata, which is where the <i>kavacha</i> comes in. As a young reader when I first became obsessed with the luckless Karna, I wasn’t thinking about subtext – but I may have intuitively grasped that the divine armour, attached to his body until he cuts it away in one of the epic’s most stirring passages, had a symbolic function too. At any rate I understood Karna’s anger and resentment towards those who knew their place in the world and were comfortable in their own (standard-issue) skin. And I wasn’t surprised when, many years later, I read the first analyses of the armour as emotional cover, protecting him not just from physical weapons but from the world’s barbs – while also adding to his defensiveness, helping him nurture a sense of persecution. And how a major growth in character occurs around the time he rids himself of this albatross, opening up and accepting his destiny.<br /><br />All this sounds solemn, but whenever I pictured Karna in my head I saw him as a sarcastic man, capable of being very cutting, and genuinely funny at times. I felt this fellow had to have a sense of humour – something like the sardonic quality that Bachchan brought to some of his angry-young-man roles. But I rarely if ever saw such a Karna in the many Mahabharata books I read (or in the TV show): those either turned him maudlin, on the cusp of weepy self-pity, or (in the conventional tellings where the Kauravas epitomized evil) a bad guy who was maybe somewhat less bad than the others. <br /><br />I was well into adulthood when <i>Friends</i> entered my orbit, but Chandler Bing would fill this humour gap with his protective kavacha (“<i>Back then I used humour as a defence mechanism. Thank god I don’t do *that* anymore</i>”). <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR2iFCF5DcVfPv7AgMqCg5W0zAym3Bn7ACmCZHbg6tGLHSn3srZpR0FLWe7PXiJSIDfE8dzavCJyuuB-9djr27U8mU0klByT5EivkwmQAaYFMyNcNPNJErxGs0now-9Y8tBvMp7TLN2JJtx9lkP0U-RJRMpaFDMNkNodQ5-KYfXnh6QuysTedB/s1091/chandler%20ET.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1091" data-original-width="706" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR2iFCF5DcVfPv7AgMqCg5W0zAym3Bn7ACmCZHbg6tGLHSn3srZpR0FLWe7PXiJSIDfE8dzavCJyuuB-9djr27U8mU0klByT5EivkwmQAaYFMyNcNPNJErxGs0now-9Y8tBvMp7TLN2JJtx9lkP0U-RJRMpaFDMNkNodQ5-KYfXnh6QuysTedB/s320/chandler%20ET.jpg" width="207" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">To repeat: I know not much connects Chandler and Karna (well, they both have parent issues. One doesn’t know who his progenitors are, the other has Kathleen Turner for a dad). But at different points in my life, and in broadly comparable ways, they became people to identify with, helping me articulate things about my inner world and my ways of dealing with the terrifying outside world. I didn’t fully appreciate Chandler at first: when I had only watched snippets of <i>Friends</i> on TV before I began watching the show properly, he came across as the least personable, the loudest, the most dependent on what one sometimes sees as facile, broad comedy. But soon I saw that his exaggerated, hysterical comedy was central to his function as a Greek chorus. In some other ways, he was the most poised and responsible of the six friends – despite being set up from the start as the guy who keeps making jokes which the others tolerate or roll their eyes at in the way that an adult might be indulgent of a prattling child. (The implication almost being that they could, if they chose to, say equally funny things, but were too mature for this. Utter nonsense.) <br /><br />Over the course of a 236-episode situation comedy, it is inevitable that we will see each of these six protagonists at their silliest, most immature, most vulnerable at some point or the other – and that character arcs won’t be consistent over 10 years, they will be subordinate to the creation of funny “situations”. But with Chandler (and maybe even Perry), there is a sense that the immaturity is mainly performative, always with a tinge of self-awareness. And unlike my childhood hero, he doesn’t need to lose the armour to become more human. You can drily comment on the action around you, even while being part of it.<br /><br />Or as Chandler might say, “BING!! part of it.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Related posts: <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2019/11/how-to-love-hotchpotch-meal-or-masala.html">Friends and masala</a>; <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2019/07/in-praise-of-shivaji-sawants-mrityunjay.html">Karna in Mrityunjay</a>)</i> <br /></span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-10680352957740745412024-01-13T07:59:00.001+05:302024-01-13T07:59:15.303+05:30In praise of Destry Rides Again<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6tSyanN_CQJvo7Qq7xMwCCzV9nTB6XKom-Ld7ca7-QRbj4sLpoSdwoXcXK6o3nV26Ara1lu8P60e0Z_DReFZiJu5boRlspiu2T1IlDgx37SPuOPC3edbzaciIPUllz21LHutYCJNsdS_adGiLzycrZi8qKy7qcv2nw4hGgsIBatbG9eHzDwfv/s567/destry%20clean%20up.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="567" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6tSyanN_CQJvo7Qq7xMwCCzV9nTB6XKom-Ld7ca7-QRbj4sLpoSdwoXcXK6o3nV26Ara1lu8P60e0Z_DReFZiJu5boRlspiu2T1IlDgx37SPuOPC3edbzaciIPUllz21LHutYCJNsdS_adGiLzycrZi8qKy7qcv2nw4hGgsIBatbG9eHzDwfv/w400-h314/destry%20clean%20up.png" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">I have done very little movie -watching in the past two months, but I ended the year with the wonderful, hard-to-classify 1939 film <i>Destry Rides Again</i> – a Comedy-Drama-Musical-Western(!) with the unusual but very effective pairing of Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart. Technically this is a Western (about the “cleaning up” of a corrupt and violent town called Bottleneck), but that doesn’t begin to describe its quirkiness. Its leading man is a deputy sheriff who drinks milk and refuses to carry a gun (at least, for a while). The longest brawl in the film involves two women (this is 15 years before Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge faced off in <i>Johnny Guitar</i>). There is much loony dialogue, and the characters – both the heroes and the villains – behave very differently from the usual Western archetypes. <br /><br />Here is an example of a studio-era film where all the constituent parts come together brilliantly, under the direction of someone (George Marshall) who doesn’t have a reputation as an auteur or a “personal filmmaker”. One tends to associate such films with reliable solidity (<i>Casablanca</i> might be a major example), as opposed to zaniness, but <i>Destry Rides Again</i> is very much the latter. While it isn’t a revisionist Western in the sense that some films from the 1950s and 1960s onward were, it is offbeat and free-flowing (in comparison, John Ford’s <i>Stagecoach</i>, made the same year, seems traditional and hemmed-in) – a sort of masala movie with bawdy comedy and serious drama (there are a couple of very moving scenes, and beautifully shot close-ups) and music and madness, and even a touch of police procedural.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ9ffGDVBRrKD6J8vsjmo6q41TOthudZkCiWqw3HF_9NE4X7puosR0d34ztsG1X8zSgW5QuFE-FtsTqwvJDxaHKs_k9y1qSB8yFqI_e40VCFSkBXFk8lmt_EJMN1UQvZBhHRgWSKgl_HxhdiAX8X8MoEiPVxwne8q9XTS2de3TAuatw4y3_AWy/s638/destry%20pants%202.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="422" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ9ffGDVBRrKD6J8vsjmo6q41TOthudZkCiWqw3HF_9NE4X7puosR0d34ztsG1X8zSgW5QuFE-FtsTqwvJDxaHKs_k9y1qSB8yFqI_e40VCFSkBXFk8lmt_EJMN1UQvZBhHRgWSKgl_HxhdiAX8X8MoEiPVxwne8q9XTS2de3TAuatw4y3_AWy/s320/destry%20pants%202.png" width="212" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">You haven’t experienced Wild West whimsy until you’ve heard Jimmy Stewart (with his fiercest expression and fastest drawl) say the line: “<i>Now the next time you fellas start any of this here promiscuous shooting around the streets, you’re going to land in jail. Understand</i>?” Or when Mischa Auer (one of many super character actors in this film) unnecessarily says: “Yes Mon Commandant. I am a courier, fast as a bolt of lightning, silent as the night itself” before heading off to perform an important errand for Destry. You can completely see why Mel Brooks was influenced by this film when making <i>Blazing Saddles</i>. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFIpZ255NfgBQRpiqTcaGY7fPsKCZa4h-pslCFRY4MWq3OrkE0YOU7rtuJv2IbT11QtSeoIYSaZdb_LDQavG_zJ-tgE6g6qEqofHLetWlWxZJ1uJ8OtiGjFvl1D-jSd_mzWlmINPmQbju6mSsT0ASJlLYN7xrzenshdiBgbTdCgH5qc4BXs-EO/s722/destry%20nonviolence.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="722" data-original-width="481" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFIpZ255NfgBQRpiqTcaGY7fPsKCZa4h-pslCFRY4MWq3OrkE0YOU7rtuJv2IbT11QtSeoIYSaZdb_LDQavG_zJ-tgE6g6qEqofHLetWlWxZJ1uJ8OtiGjFvl1D-jSd_mzWlmINPmQbju6mSsT0ASJlLYN7xrzenshdiBgbTdCgH5qc4BXs-EO/s320/destry%20nonviolence.png" width="213" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In my view, this film also played as big a part in the creation of the Stewart screen persona as the much better known <i>Mr Smith Goes to Washington</i> did the same year. Meanwhile, Dietrich had been a big star for years, but was being labelled “box-office poison” at this time, and this is one of her most fun roles: yee-haw-ing away in her opening scene in a rambunctious saloon, cat-fighting, singing. (That same year, 1939, <i>Ninotchka</i> was famously promoted as a film where Greta Garbo laughed – and a remote and icy screen goddess was humanised – but <i>Destry Rides Again</i> also gives us a more accessible Marlene Dietrich, compared to the parts she did for Josef von Sternberg earlier in the decade.)<br /><br />So much fun, especially if you’re interested in the history of the Western and the many avatars it took before it settled into the self-consciously revisionist version of the late 1960s and beyond. I try to avoid making recommendations, since I don’t presume to know anyone else’s tastes, but do give this a try. The first 15 minutes or so is chaos, but it settles into a proper storyline after Destry arrives. </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">For those who haven’t
watched much from 1930s Hollywood, this is also a useful introduction
to performers like Brian Donlevy (who played the lead in Preston
Sturges’s wonderful <i>The Great McGinty</i>), Una Merkel, Charles Winninger, and of course Mischa Auer. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />I have shared a good print of <i>Destry Rides Again</i> on my film group. If anyone here wants it, let me know. </span><br /></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-28258104327302732782023-12-13T13:30:00.002+05:302023-12-13T13:30:19.878+05:30On thinking you know a film despite not watching it (or watching it so long ago that your brain has repackaged it)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwG2JNhZtZB9PlzTVVsuRPQUxv7B-A9raXNbB0JoZ4715-m2XF75e1h5IOQGtVNRYJSa5dGsf5tPsaSTHG115BZAAc0YQfhmonH3LALCnvhxzzFScuo4Ek7CBgxONCyX79lKEKpsuPkMh6hkpjIV78vkdK-64lmvV-acdf2dvlvqsuY0Ld8-SJ/s850/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%201.29.08%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="850" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwG2JNhZtZB9PlzTVVsuRPQUxv7B-A9raXNbB0JoZ4715-m2XF75e1h5IOQGtVNRYJSa5dGsf5tPsaSTHG115BZAAc0YQfhmonH3LALCnvhxzzFScuo4Ek7CBgxONCyX79lKEKpsuPkMh6hkpjIV78vkdK-64lmvV-acdf2dvlvqsuY0Ld8-SJ/s320/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%201.29.08%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this for my Economic Times column)</i><br />---------------------<br /><br />If you spend time reading film-related discourse on social media, you’re probably fed up with the endless echo-chamber discussions (both for and against) around Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s <i>Animal</i>. Without watching the film, I feel like I have had it assessed for me through every available lens – along a continuum from virtue-signalling to vice-celebrating. So I’ll spare you my thoughts about the agonising and the exulting, except to say: I find it problematic (to use a cherished “liberal” word) when people unshakably make up their minds about a film they haven’t watched yet, and even dissuade others from watching it. Or when they are convinced that a film can only be one thing, hence worthy of contempt – and that anyone who engages with it on another level is in some sense morally compromised, or deluded.<br /><br />One of the radical points that come up in my conversations with students is that one should ideally <i>experience</i> a work – read a novel beginning to end, watch a whole film, not just its trailer – before venturing an opinion. (In a recent class we spoke about cases – common in the OTT age – of viewers, including professional critics on tight deadlines, forming judgements about a series after watching just an episode or two, without taking the time to discover the arc of a character or situation.) This also involves engaging with many different things – including what you fear may discomfit you – and can result in a special type of joy: being surprised by your own response to a work, even finding a dimension in yourself that you hadn’t fully tapped into. An aunt – rigid in her tastes, very hung up on “realism” in art – was once forced by friends to accompany them for a Sanjay Leela Bhansali opus, and went grumbling, convinced she would hate it based on what she had seen of his work earlier. She came out smitten, gushing about the beauty of the film’s world-creation, and couldn’t stop talking about it for a few days. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhha7AnXUbPfA2IZXn3JggjtaRJN_UwUK_8MUzCYJQz_vhLH95xTgpfk2rfvi5n2N8-Zj9Rw1b7DFYunhnWX4FSYbYf3F5bXVIfMNfCGDgxM0ay0Acg2wq1a6AWYrIVoD_bkLA8sX87S8YpkUZ9pzHBUEiXVi1zPdIE3IwSahcozktKKE2GnAoo/s992/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%201.22.57%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="583" data-original-width="992" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhha7AnXUbPfA2IZXn3JggjtaRJN_UwUK_8MUzCYJQz_vhLH95xTgpfk2rfvi5n2N8-Zj9Rw1b7DFYunhnWX4FSYbYf3F5bXVIfMNfCGDgxM0ay0Acg2wq1a6AWYrIVoD_bkLA8sX87S8YpkUZ9pzHBUEiXVi1zPdIE3IwSahcozktKKE2GnAoo/w400-h235/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%201.22.57%20PM.png" width="400" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, a confession: despite this preaching, there are some films – including iconic ones – that I haven’t watched but still have a version of in my head. As an adolescent developing an interest in old cinema, one of my prized books was Roger Manvell’s 1946 <i>Film</i>, and through its pages – notably a thick image inset filled with black-and-white stills – I first formed impressions of what certain films looked like. There were striking double-exposure shots from German Expressionist classics like <i>The Last Laugh</i>; fragments of the famous Odessa Steps sequence in <i>Battleship Potemkin</i>; images that emphasized giant shadows (<i>Ivan the Terrible</i>), or people caught in a moment of contemplation (Wendy Hiller playing Eliza Doolittle in <i>Pygmalion</i>). A photo of a man on a bicycle in the French film <i>Le Jour se Leve</i> was so evocative, I had it in my head as I cycled through the little lanes around my DDA flats in Saket, imagining a giant camera was recording me from above. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYCV7waBffiwAJ88xYu8v9mhBTduMJq-YqI7UFXbyGnYOkCpii3YK6kFrq35pKE1UhAgTraDOdoUr9wjKRQIRxzO79UV0a-0Yx8gdbkMzwF_kAxD1UHBDSnv6x5wtUxiT5S4GUZoHMakRZbPC7L9RjcagmgLsWMg3sKoCHqKpWjqEJnNaK3vhS/s1276/potemkin.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1082" data-original-width="1276" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYCV7waBffiwAJ88xYu8v9mhBTduMJq-YqI7UFXbyGnYOkCpii3YK6kFrq35pKE1UhAgTraDOdoUr9wjKRQIRxzO79UV0a-0Yx8gdbkMzwF_kAxD1UHBDSnv6x5wtUxiT5S4GUZoHMakRZbPC7L9RjcagmgLsWMg3sKoCHqKpWjqEJnNaK3vhS/s320/potemkin.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thirty years later, thinking of some of these films, I think first of those images in an ancient, crumbling book – or maybe a fleeting scene, a dramatic moment in isolation. And if I watch (or re-watch) them, I am often surprised. In <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-brief-encounter-with-classic-films-on.html">a previous column</a> I mentioned being stirred by David Lean’s <i>Brief Encounter </i>– something I hadn’t expected because in my head this was a cool, reserved, very British film of a certain time, with even deep love being expressed through little nods and surreptitious glances over cups of tea. And it did have scenes like that, but there was a powerful, aching tremor below the film’s surface that made it in its own way just as passionate a love story as anything that an Imtiaz Ali (or a Vanga!) might helm. <br /><br />There are disappointments too: I went into a restored-print screening of the 1956 Dev Anand-starrer <i>CID</i> having not watched the film before (or not having a clear memory of it), and imagining it as a Hindi-film take on American noir, inevitably with songs and masala elements but at least with a sturdy suspenseful plot – and was annoyed to find a disjointed work that didn’t capture the brooding darkness of its source genre (despite game attempts by the young Waheeda Rehman and Mehmood).<br /><br />And there are films that you once knew very well, but which your brain has transformed into something else over time. I recently re-watched two Anthony Hopkins starrers that were an important part of my early-90s viewing life, and was intrigued to find that while Hannibal Lecter’s prison cell in <i>Silence of the Lambs</i> wasn’t quite the rat-infested dungeon-sewer I </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSr4n_o6VHmnKO4sGUYcuuLWxG7gfRWpzyfOfRO-SJZRpXfXOBbMDaaZdrdYAuCQ_pR9FxkzaoyZ_NQiydC6B4dBWnULfL0i67LgPypX8wyjBAhi64RsxOvMHFTPpcE6Jq7qYLdLvkBCjZoZCrmTNb5Q4jBS8BSxpbicuMyhPW8dfreV7WYlQ_/s716/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%201.14.59%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="716" height="154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSr4n_o6VHmnKO4sGUYcuuLWxG7gfRWpzyfOfRO-SJZRpXfXOBbMDaaZdrdYAuCQ_pR9FxkzaoyZ_NQiydC6B4dBWnULfL0i67LgPypX8wyjBAhi64RsxOvMHFTPpcE6Jq7qYLdLvkBCjZoZCrmTNb5Q4jBS8BSxpbicuMyhPW8dfreV7WYlQ_/s320/Screenshot%202023-12-13%20at%201.14.59%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">remembered, the big country house in which Stevens the butler serves in <i>Remains of the Day</i> was not as <i>gleaming</i> as I had thought; this didn’t feel like a sterile, too-polished Merchant-Ivory film (like, say, <i>Howards End</i> which had also starred Hopkins and Emma Thompson) but was more in keeping with the theme of decay that runs through Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. <br /><br />In my memory all these years, the aesthetics of these movies were very different. Watching now, it felt like parts of Darlington Hall, with its gloomy passageways and crumbling plaster, would make an acceptable dwelling for Lecter and cohort. Maybe, to a degree, cannibals and animals are a construct of our fevered minds, and the butler really did it after all. </span><br /></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-34613232479703264882023-11-28T13:51:00.000+05:302023-11-28T13:51:02.080+05:30Catching up with AKB<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhTfMjXvHXe_Qp2vug7dJvC0aDqHUafcaYxUBhSTO1eiO22UscEPUIwv5tFj2Wp26lzl2TKYrgAkBgsZvANmvZ3KqO1lFlkSQsq2rX-0ve8tyfwRQ8ROhKKJZ-4TgNK76qCbxdgiHapFDcA8l6FbwJ89PaPA0RTtHNoLB1Zu645fP4aYBVHT8S/s974/IMG_3538.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="850" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhTfMjXvHXe_Qp2vug7dJvC0aDqHUafcaYxUBhSTO1eiO22UscEPUIwv5tFj2Wp26lzl2TKYrgAkBgsZvANmvZ3KqO1lFlkSQsq2rX-0ve8tyfwRQ8ROhKKJZ-4TgNK76qCbxdgiHapFDcA8l6FbwJ89PaPA0RTtHNoLB1Zu645fP4aYBVHT8S/s320/IMG_3538.jpg" width="279" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">A very pleasing encounter at Kunzum, Greater Kailash-2, a few days ago: I met AK Bhattacharya (or AKB as we always refer to him), the <i>Business Standard</i> editorial director, after what must have been 15 years. From this person flowed many of the kindnesses that enabled me to get started on a freelance career in 2006. He was the big boss who made me the offer I couldn’t refuse - a retainership with Business Standard that would allow me to work independently and write for others - but even before <span></span>that, at a more personal and friendly level, he had been very encouraging about my blog and would often come by my desk to mention a post he had liked (or something he wanted to correct me about, mainly pertaining to Satyajit Ray). Given the big hierarchical gap between us in office, such interactions were unusual, but he pulled them off warmly and without fuss - and he greeted me much the same way at the bookshop yesterday (where I also got my signed copy of his new book about India’s finance ministers between 1947-77). <br /><br /></span><div class="" dir="auto"><div class="x1iorvi4 x1pi30zi x1l90r2v x1swvt13" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id=":r17:"><div class="x78zum5 xdt5ytf xz62fqu x16ldp7u"><div class="xu06os2 x1ok221b"><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8Kwx2RUfIEh3fBBbw4akOqKn9Kuh8JL1rSGK7ZMjVUi-tkHGiObxaZjQVe7fYNR6ttD9msvIj3JFAPsKOVEMw2RbasVGzYPnwLYmMEhNG0GFJwpe1zas9cUcHJWbSeVXXTE0a2GKzj8EubzNxUoSkZhcr2ZuFOVZqvm4ctbxGIR9AAariDU_/s709/Screenshot%202023-11-28%20at%201.45.37%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="709" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH8Kwx2RUfIEh3fBBbw4akOqKn9Kuh8JL1rSGK7ZMjVUi-tkHGiObxaZjQVe7fYNR6ttD9msvIj3JFAPsKOVEMw2RbasVGzYPnwLYmMEhNG0GFJwpe1zas9cUcHJWbSeVXXTE0a2GKzj8EubzNxUoSkZhcr2ZuFOVZqvm4ctbxGIR9AAariDU_/s320/Screenshot%202023-11-28%20at%201.45.37%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Great to see him looking as fit and spry as I remembered, and to find that he often uses the metro for traveling (something that many of the much younger people I know regard with disdain, as if it lowers their status or some such). We’ll catch up again soon, possibly in his lair, the Business Standard office...</span></div></div></span></div></div></div></div>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-71786310808297675402023-11-05T09:19:00.000+05:302023-11-05T09:19:06.596+05:30A brief encounter with classic films, on a big screen <p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2yRE0W7-VT9Dqm1GV0IazKoT22_LG-Rd7zYeMv2mLJbQCs0JSOvdtmvNhD_OP19-3w3oN71n0VvLyTSAUB2CD1wrCLzImUBUzhV-BpWN-1urwoaurrfC4R7HRiqvLpcijR6zHgv87OO5IXTr6ldJwFx9qeSPlo354z9YLid2qhgGCahYGAfBg/s699/Screenshot%202023-11-05%20at%208.51.42%20AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="699" data-original-width="487" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2yRE0W7-VT9Dqm1GV0IazKoT22_LG-Rd7zYeMv2mLJbQCs0JSOvdtmvNhD_OP19-3w3oN71n0VvLyTSAUB2CD1wrCLzImUBUzhV-BpWN-1urwoaurrfC4R7HRiqvLpcijR6zHgv87OO5IXTr6ldJwFx9qeSPlo354z9YLid2qhgGCahYGAfBg/s320/Screenshot%202023-11-05%20at%208.51.42%20AM.png" width="223" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(<i>my latest Economic Times column</i>)<br /><b>-------------------</b><br /><br />Most film buffs who are invested in old cinema (and by “old”, dear post-millennials, I don’t mean the hazy mists of time just before the advent of Christopher Nolan) know that we have mostly viewed classic films in conditions they weren’t made to be watched in. On small, flat screens, with countless distractions. But it is one thing to know this, quite another to be confronted firsthand with the repercussions. A proper, big-screen viewing of an iconic film in a restored print can blow your circuits and cause you to rethink everything about your movie-watching history, as happened with me during the recent Delhi screenings organised by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and the Film Heritage Foundation team.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3dYNJW1tLVHFXEvrYRDSx1PBW6BmxeiRXc9-yP37wMy6gc6xfxZo75HbXU61kFiWrmFEij8iqilGl8CslzWHhN0ilQPJibJcFW8nKznhqzUM1HoAH5w6_HqQDFn-uEUcgr55hWmWoZbdPNbbmMTIDgjJ5h1dH1O97gxMchSSYQSwer5awwXU1/s1276/kummatty.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1096" data-original-width="1276" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3dYNJW1tLVHFXEvrYRDSx1PBW6BmxeiRXc9-yP37wMy6gc6xfxZo75HbXU61kFiWrmFEij8iqilGl8CslzWHhN0ilQPJibJcFW8nKznhqzUM1HoAH5w6_HqQDFn-uEUcgr55hWmWoZbdPNbbmMTIDgjJ5h1dH1O97gxMchSSYQSwer5awwXU1/s320/kummatty.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It began with the Dev Anand centenary in September – and the chance to see <i>Guide</i> and <i>Jewel Thief</i> in plush multiplexes – and continued at the India Habitat Centre and India International Centre. Watching <i>Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut</i>, G Aravindan’s folklore classic <i>Kummatty</i> and even Terrence Malick’s <i>Days of Heaven</i> (which I am not a big fan of generally) in these conditions was an incredibly intense experience. The wonderful, dialogue-less sequence in <i>Kummatty</i> where the bogeyman leads the children in a dance before transforming them into animals had a hypnotic quality that made it seem a wholly different film from the one I had seen just a year ago.<br /><br />An important value-addition to the screenings were inputs by guests such as Lee Kline and Karen Stetler of the Criterion Collection, who have been involved in many restorations and were in a position to offer background information and insights. They recounted anecdotes and ethical dilemmas: is it okay, for instance, to change the look of an old film in restoration, even at the director’s bequest? (What if a director originally wanted the film to look a certain way but couldn’t do it for budgetary or technical reasons, and now has a belated opportunity to restore his vision – but at the cost of changing the look of a work that viewers have known for decades?) “You almost have to become a referee in these cases,” Kline said, mentioning how Theo Angelopoulos had wanted to make little colour corrections in a film during a restoration. Or how there was a brief proposal – eventually shot down – to turn the last two shots of Francis Ford Coppola’s black-and-white film <i>Rumble Fish</i> into colour, to achieve a particular artistic effect. They also spoke about the trickiness of restoring a film from a culture they didn’t know much about, such as the 1977 Senegalese film <i>Ceddo</i>, made by the late Ousmane Sembène. “We were looking for help from <i>anyone</i> since there was so little information available,” Kline said, “It was important to know the difference between one African skin tone and another. Or to be told – I wouldn’t have known this – that in Senegal the sky is almost never blue.”<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfUlmTM9l0bqRRs9m__D0Wolc9FCNUPYF1JGJ1Efd83D9ijdOJ1_Z1cOASyJwVj0a8_1xuoPtBrwPE1OpbopbNsKS2Mq9pOTJwnM4Oz3o9NNggmBeR2NS-R5g1Qm0suGKUfO-DtXuzVOWa7beFShS0T9ivUe_wsSTY8Mg5AmNgOKoYVkwSxNXz/s2019/writtenwind.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1451" data-original-width="2019" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfUlmTM9l0bqRRs9m__D0Wolc9FCNUPYF1JGJ1Efd83D9ijdOJ1_Z1cOASyJwVj0a8_1xuoPtBrwPE1OpbopbNsKS2Mq9pOTJwnM4Oz3o9NNggmBeR2NS-R5g1Qm0suGKUfO-DtXuzVOWa7beFShS0T9ivUe_wsSTY8Mg5AmNgOKoYVkwSxNXz/s320/writtenwind.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My one reservation: during Kline’s introduction to Douglas Sirk’s tempestuous 1956 drama <i>Written on the Wind</i>, I felt he was being patronising about melodrama as a form. “Please keep in mind that you watch a film like this for fun, to laugh a bit at the characters – don’t take it seriously,” he said. This felt bizarre, especially addressed to an Indian audience made up of people who had grown up with mainstream Hindi cinema (even if many of us are sheepish about that filmic language too) – it could be that Kline was being defensive, or trying to keep our expectations low, but either way it wasn’t required, for <i>Written on the Wind</i> got the reception it richly deserved. I had watched it a decade ago, but this was another animal altogether. The brilliant compositions, the use of colour, Sirk’s relentlessly tracking camera which brought a kinetic energy to so many dramatic scenes, and yes, the turbulence of the emotions – all of this was heightened and made more urgent in a dark hall. The texture of the images felt different, a little grainier (in a good way) than the cool, smooth digital images most of us are so used to – you could appreciate details such as the vein popping on an anguished character’s forehead. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijH_GnHCcMxtXXDq3h4CONsKXpLu8f1dtdMRRdnZQyUq-lh_1UB6u6wsO8ZjxlA_cGL-_gLIDyUp5xF8y2ikhio-wvkQoqYwkgQ49EhNUYh2tYDvj28rciggd9OXVCONg_53MClZQPOkyriGyvQKbQJ0ssyj-fOvNZE6VHEz8HI_bxeq2GUK_i/s2288/celia2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1494" data-original-width="2288" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijH_GnHCcMxtXXDq3h4CONsKXpLu8f1dtdMRRdnZQyUq-lh_1UB6u6wsO8ZjxlA_cGL-_gLIDyUp5xF8y2ikhio-wvkQoqYwkgQ49EhNUYh2tYDvj28rciggd9OXVCONg_53MClZQPOkyriGyvQKbQJ0ssyj-fOvNZE6VHEz8HI_bxeq2GUK_i/s320/celia2.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I felt similarly while watching another classic, made in a more restrained mode but also building towards moments of high emotion, all the more effective for having been suppressed: David Lean’s <i>Brief Encounter</i>, about a fleeting extramarital relationship, told mainly from the woman’s viewpoint. As a teen viewer I had crushed on the prim Celia Johnson, but hadn’t been well-placed to properly understand the two forty-ish protagonists and the intolerable situation they find themselves in after falling in love. I understood much better now, and this was aided enormously by the scale of the viewing. The conventional view is that it’s the later Lean films – the epics such as <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i> and <i>Doctor Zhivago</i> – that need a huge screen, but Brief Encounter – so full of stolen glances and anxious gestures – is a different type of big-screen masterpiece: as its tone moves from stiff-upper-lip reserve, and the need to keep feelings under check, to something more desperate, the film becomes tense and alarming, almost like a Hitchcock thriller. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_K7SGm-jJcnP5OEhoKdf4puLrJeYFTKdTA2UvbSegRQPsNTQ9RzyZDYNt5O3WqANfq8vrMrDttnwCxZGma0WBdFJO7MoTHL-F9eIOXYG8mIfVE3_KlTT1qIb519laIm26XJRwPPON6k1qHmVuTjYgJEkVjVrxmLS_RBOEIfjQCBFF-gkThDTK/s699/Screenshot%202023-11-05%20at%208.49.17%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="699" data-original-width="479" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_K7SGm-jJcnP5OEhoKdf4puLrJeYFTKdTA2UvbSegRQPsNTQ9RzyZDYNt5O3WqANfq8vrMrDttnwCxZGma0WBdFJO7MoTHL-F9eIOXYG8mIfVE3_KlTT1qIb519laIm26XJRwPPON6k1qHmVuTjYgJEkVjVrxmLS_RBOEIfjQCBFF-gkThDTK/s320/Screenshot%202023-11-05%20at%208.49.17%20AM.png" width="219" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">To see those magnificent close-ups of Johnson’s troubled face, and then close-ups of another troubled character in a very different genre of film – Gary Cooper as the beleaguered lawman without support in <i>High Noon</i>, or Joan Crawford as the saloonkeeper Vienna in <i>Johnny Guitar</i> – was to be reminded of what film-watching can be like when you do it right, and how vital and relevant and dangerous an 80-year-old film can still be in these conditions. But of course, soon after this I was on my way home in the metro, watching as people “consumed content” on their mobile screens – ravenous zombies on a Halloween night. </span><br /></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-37721962423837687682023-10-29T09:06:00.004+05:302023-10-29T09:06:52.840+05:30Heart, soul, and a terrific Vikrant Massey performance: on 12th Fail<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(About a new film I hadn’t expected to like much – thought it would be another tedious exercise in well-intentionedness – but was completely engrossed by. Wrote this review <a href="(About a new film I hadn’t expected to like much – thought it would be another tedious exercise in well-intentionedness – but was completely engrossed by. Wrote this review for Money Control) ----------- My first all-encompassing thought about Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail, once the closing credits began, was that here is a film which is all heart. Now, ordinarily, that wouldn’t be grounds enough for approval (for me at least) – if anything, the statement could imply a snarky addendum. (To paraphrase a scene from a movie that’s very different in tone and subject, the recent thriller Chup about a serial killer targeting critics: “This film has its heart in the right place; unfortunately the other organs are scattered all over”.) With 12th Fail, though, the other organs are not disorganised or scattered. They are packed neatly together, each fulfilling its given function, in the service of an engrossing, forthright story based on Anurag Pathak’s book about a “12th fail” village lad who gives the IPS exams – repeatedly, and against the odds. At the surface level, this is a straightforward, message-oriented story: Manoj (Vikrant Massey), a young man from a Chambal village, is studying for the UPSC but is also part of a schooling system where the teachers facilitate cheating so the school can maintain its pass percentage – until one day an honest policeman comes in and shakes things up (at risk to himself, given that the local vidhayak is overseeing the school, and the children of Chambal dacoits supposedly study in it!). Manoj – briefly taken into custody for running a “jugaad” shuttle service with his brother – gets gooey-eyed after an encounter with this DSP, and is inspired by the strange possibility of truthfulness. Soon he travels to Gwalior (where his fortunes are almost scuppered by someone else’s dishonesty) and then, with the help of a new friend Pandey (Anantvijay Joshi), to Delhi where he sets his sights on the IPS exam – despite being warned that the percentages are against him (only 25 or so selected out of a lakh or more aspirants). In telling this story, 12th Fail covers some familiar tropes: the kinship of underprivileged strugglers who stand by each other through heartaches, a loving grandmother with pension saved up in a trunk beneath her bed, the hard-working protagonist who does menial labour during the day and studies at night. While Manoj begins a sweet, tentative romance with a more well-off Mussoorie girl named Shradha (Medha Shankar), his own family struggle back in the village but keep their spirits high. So, yes, this film IS all heart; a nit-picker might say that given the very real problems faced by Manoj, there is a little too much cheeriness, a few too many helpful and well-intentioned characters (starting with a restaurant owner in Gwalior who gives Manoj a free meal despite the latter insisting that he must earn it). And yet, 12th Fail – through the integrity of the writing and acting – avoids being schmaltzy in a bad way. Much of its power comes from Massey’s anchoring performance (and one realises, looking at his sincere, sometimes awkward smile, how effective he might have been in the Hrithik Roshan part in Super 30 if that film had chosen to operate in a less starry meter). The narrative of 12th Fail stresses the goodness of people – or their potential for goodness – even in very tough situations; the power of solidarity, even the idealistic sort that goes “Yeh hum sab ki ladaai hai”. As one important character, a benevolent tutor who never gets to clear the main exam himself, puts it, there may be crores of “bhed-bakriyan”, sheep and goats, from all over India coming for these exams, but if even one of them makes it, that is a victory for all the underdogs. This can sound like feel-good mush, but the film also, briefly at least, depicts the bitterness and angst of the sheep who don’t make it, and how close friendships and important relationships can be damaged at the walls where result sheets are pinned up. It is aware that the fates of the “good people”, such as the incorruptible DSP Dushyant whose example sets Manoj on the right path, are precarious. The story is also a testament to the plurality of this country: starting with a panoramic view of that verdant Chambal (Pandey’s voiceover grimly reminding us that this is still in the popular imagination daku terrain), then homing down to a young man studying on the roof of a little house – before moving to large, daunting, overpopulated Delhi where hordes of people buzz about like flies in front of the dazzled Manoj’s eyes. It is about the unequal opportunities for education, and the very different experience of the education system, for people from different backgrounds: about those of us who can take opportunities for granted versus those for whom even completing basic schooling is a challenge (even when they are from supportive, caring families). And how cut off the IPS interviewers – sitting primly in their sterile rooms – can be from grass-roots realities. “I’m 71 years old, but I still press the ‘restart’ button every day of my life,” Vidhu Vinod Chopra said after a recent Delhi screening, alluding to a word that plays a pivotal role in motivating Manoj. 12th Fail seems a like a modest, low-key work coming from the man who gave us Parinda, Khamosh and Mission Kashmir, but it has its own layers of complexity – its structure is such that one is always aware of the countless other stories that don’t have happy endings. The film may posit that Manoj’s journey represents a validation for lakhs of other “bakray” (and one hopes that in real life people like him do retain enough integrity and the common touch to provide voice to the voiceless), but the tone remains grounded and self-aware. Here is a feel-good film which, even as it builds towards a deeply emotional climax, somehow doesn’t play like a facile feel-good film.">for Money Control</a>)</i><br />-----------<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZwhFbqHEYN0R2P1imEtdRD7Te7S7Vqn0grzCe8oJGbrOrGnVWNj_oaL5REeV9y9ZJ3cOfmkF7goXmlUAm0waPCNDv-5bVIVaDxKim-vh_hplDr0hyphenhyphenqllIe3kyWzRlUD6dEy5heAKj-empUoIt2P7-Y2rv2aLkTDutEuzdC3Foq4_RSDi0CzUW/s846/Screenshot%202023-10-28%20at%207.34.50%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="846" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZwhFbqHEYN0R2P1imEtdRD7Te7S7Vqn0grzCe8oJGbrOrGnVWNj_oaL5REeV9y9ZJ3cOfmkF7goXmlUAm0waPCNDv-5bVIVaDxKim-vh_hplDr0hyphenhyphenqllIe3kyWzRlUD6dEy5heAKj-empUoIt2P7-Y2rv2aLkTDutEuzdC3Foq4_RSDi0CzUW/s320/Screenshot%202023-10-28%20at%207.34.50%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My first all-encompassing thought about Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s <i>12th Fail</i>, once the closing credits began, was that here is a film which is all heart. Now, ordinarily, that wouldn’t be grounds enough for approval (for me at least) – if anything, the statement could imply a snarky addendum. (To paraphrase a scene from a movie that’s very different in tone and subject, the recent thriller <i>Chup</i> about a serial killer targeting critics: “This film has its heart in the right place; unfortunately the other organs are scattered all over”.)<br /><br />With <i>12th Fail</i>, though, the other organs are not disorganised or scattered. They are packed neatly together, each fulfilling its given function, in the service of an engrossing, forthright story based on Anurag Pathak’s book about a “12th fail” village lad who gives the IPS exams – repeatedly, and against the odds.<br /><br />At the surface level, this is a straightforward, message-oriented story: Manoj (Vikrant Massey), a young man from a Chambal village, is studying for the UPSC but is also part of a schooling system where the teachers facilitate cheating so the school can maintain its pass percentage – until one day an honest policeman comes in and shakes things up (at risk to himself, given that the local <i>vidhayak</i> is overseeing the school, <i>and</i> the children of Chambal dacoits supposedly study in it!). Manoj – briefly taken into custody for running a “jugaad” shuttle service with his brother – gets gooey-eyed after an encounter with this DSP, and is inspired by the strange possibility of truthfulness. Soon he travels to Gwalior (where his fortunes are almost scuppered by someone else’s dishonesty) and then, with the help of a new friend Pandey (Anantvijay Joshi), to Delhi where he sets his sights on the IPS exam – despite being warned that the percentages are against him (only 25 or so selected out of a lakh or more aspirants). <br /><br />In telling this story, <i>12th Fail</i> covers some familiar tropes: the kinship of underprivileged strugglers who stand by each other through heartaches, a loving grandmother with pension saved up in a trunk beneath her bed, the hard-working protagonist who does menial labour during the day and studies at night. While Manoj begins a sweet, tentative romance with a more well-off Mussoorie girl named Shradha (Medha Shankar), his own family struggle back in the village but keep their spirits high. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibyUsCk-FPuKudBDewgc1xqvkvL9kslYBtA7cF7wSnFflOvoQf2QqvcgLrp0tFz-ZH_HvP1heJqd6x1zfgHNxUuB0J8tSX-RHH5Z53rpnQOqtSbKxC11Em4FHMXVAEPu3IvHMQGsmJ0-S1K1qqBZAcT_6CCo6jCk3lZu0ZbLXXOPIvA8PnvumW/s838/Screenshot%202023-10-28%20at%207.38.11%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="838" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibyUsCk-FPuKudBDewgc1xqvkvL9kslYBtA7cF7wSnFflOvoQf2QqvcgLrp0tFz-ZH_HvP1heJqd6x1zfgHNxUuB0J8tSX-RHH5Z53rpnQOqtSbKxC11Em4FHMXVAEPu3IvHMQGsmJ0-S1K1qqBZAcT_6CCo6jCk3lZu0ZbLXXOPIvA8PnvumW/s320/Screenshot%202023-10-28%20at%207.38.11%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">So, yes, this film IS all heart; a nit-picker might say that given the very real problems faced by Manoj, there is a little too much cheeriness, a few too many helpful and well-intentioned characters (starting with a restaurant owner in Gwalior who gives Manoj a free meal despite the latter insisting that he must earn it). And yet, <i>12th Fail</i> – through the integrity of the writing and acting – avoids being schmaltzy in a bad way. Much of its power comes from Massey’s anchoring performance (and one realises, looking at his sincere, sometimes awkward smile, how effective he might have been in the Hrithik Roshan part in <i>Super 30</i> if that film had chosen to operate in a less starry meter). <br /><br />The narrative of <i>12th Fail</i> stresses the goodness of people – or their potential for goodness – even in very tough situations; the power of solidarity, even the idealistic sort that goes “Yeh hum sab ki ladaai hai”. As one important character, a benevolent tutor who never gets to clear the main exam himself, puts it, there may be crores of “bhed-bakriyan”, sheep and goats, from all over India coming for these exams, but if even one of them makes it, that is a victory for all the underdogs. This can sound like feel-good mush, but the film also, briefly at least, depicts the bitterness and angst of the sheep who <i>don’t</i> make it, and how close friendships and important relationships can be damaged at the walls where result sheets are pinned up. It is aware that the fates of the “good people”, such as the incorruptible DSP Dushyant whose example sets Manoj on the right path, are precarious.<br /><br />The story is also a testament to the plurality of this country: starting with a panoramic view of that verdant Chambal (Pandey’s voiceover grimly reminding us that this is still in the popular imagination daku terrain), then homing down to a young man studying on the roof of a little house – before moving to large, daunting, overpopulated Delhi where hordes of people buzz about like flies in front of the dazzled Manoj’s eyes. It is about the unequal opportunities for education, and the very different experience of the education system, for people from different backgrounds: about those of us who can take opportunities for granted versus those for whom even completing basic schooling is a challenge (even when they are from supportive, caring families). And how cut off the IPS interviewers – sitting primly in their sterile rooms – can be from grass-roots realities. <br /><br />“I’m 71 years old, but I still press the ‘restart’ button every day of my life,” Vidhu Vinod Chopra said after a recent Delhi screening, alluding to a word that plays a pivotal role in motivating Manoj. <i>12th Fail </i>seems a like a modest, low-key work coming from the man who gave us <i>Parinda</i>, <i>Khamosh</i> and <i>Mission Kashmir</i>, but it has its own layers of complexity – its structure is such that one is always aware of the countless other stories that don’t have happy endings. The film may posit that Manoj’s journey represents a validation for lakhs of other “bakray” (and one hopes that in real life people like him do retain enough integrity and the common touch to provide voice to the voiceless), but the tone remains grounded and self-aware. Here is a feel-good film which, even as it builds towards a deeply emotional climax, somehow doesn’t <i>play</i> like a facile feel-good film.</span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-13028419923467057062023-10-25T15:46:00.001+05:302023-10-25T15:46:20.660+05:30Kaalu, in remembrance (???? - 2023)<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: medium;"><span><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto"></span></span></span></p><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: medium;">With a fresh increase in sentiments against street dogs and hostility towards their feeders (even the relatively polite colony groups I am on are now full of gloating, sweeping denunciations by educated people), another reminder of just how precarious these street lives are – even the dogs who have humans regularly feeding and looking out for them. I lost one of my building dogs yesterday, and such were the circumstances and miscommunications involved <span></span>that though he was lying dead for a few hours just across the road from our colony, I didn’t get to see the body before it was taken away by the MCD in the evening. (In recent years I have assisted with the burial/cremation of many community dogs whom I didn’t know personally – some of those stories have been chronicled here – but here was a dog I had been feeding daily for years, and I didn’t see him a final time, much less put him to rest. All I have is an unpleasant, indeterminate photograph that caused some confusion for a few hours since someone else had misidentified it as being a dog she knew.)</span></div></div><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: trebuchet;"><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But then, as a fellow feeder put it in a message to me a while ago, “He didn’t really let us touch him while he was living… and he didn’t let us touch him once he was gone.”</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBq2ef1OdppwzSyG8OiguJ8ExLSXd5HQ0VebfodZNDQNXccXU7TpJXsUCBvzE2bxW2X8BW_EOqqoIKLdESSQWgpMY8hjdSJY9rv85TaHZno5RB2kBnFtEZC8ThAk4x22PzX0ungmJ2Fn9O9St5yTJKLwEOeOJOWejUjBCQERLohnFyQxL3MGz/s1276/kaalu%202021.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="957" data-original-width="1276" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBq2ef1OdppwzSyG8OiguJ8ExLSXd5HQ0VebfodZNDQNXccXU7TpJXsUCBvzE2bxW2X8BW_EOqqoIKLdESSQWgpMY8hjdSJY9rv85TaHZno5RB2kBnFtEZC8ThAk4x22PzX0ungmJ2Fn9O9St5yTJKLwEOeOJOWejUjBCQERLohnFyQxL3MGz/s320/kaalu%202021.jpg" width="320" /></a></span><span style="font-size: medium;">True enough – this Kaalu (another generic name, given to him by guards before I became acquainted with him) was not an easy dog to get along with. He was thin and frail-looking (a condition that had worsened in the past few months – though his appetite was good, I think he may have succumbed to a version of the stomach/intestinal condition that took my Foxie), but many people in the colony, even animal-carers, were wary of his temper; there was a time a few years ago when his potential for aggression had caused me a lot of trouble. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Which made it flattering that he seemed, dare I say it, fond of me in his distant, suspicious way, and even let me pet him for a second or three while I was giving him dry food or biscuits. (I often saw something resembling softness in his eyes, which many people I know would scarcely believe – and, I found this weirdly moving and comforting, if he saw me walking towards the colony gate en route to the shops outside or the PVR Anupam complex, he would follow me closely for some distance even when there clearly wasn’t anything in it for him.) But he was also fully capable of snapping or snarling if my hand got too close to his ears to check for a possible wound. Medicating him was a painfully tough task, and the couple of occasions when I absolutely had to call my paravet friends to treat a maggot infection, it could take us hours just to get him into a sheltered space, restrain and muzzle him. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">He came to Golf View Apartments around five years ago (after having been driven away from another Saket colony, I was reliably told – there are indications that he had a sad history, which may have contributed to his personality issues) and at some point settled near my building, making friends – against the odds – with another recently arrived dog whom we call Pandey. Pandey is beige, and bigger and sturdier than Kaalu was, but a complete scaredy-cat otherwise, and something just happened to click between them: they were usually together these past few years, running around in the colony or sleeping on my stairway (the last three winters my house help and I put out boris/mattresses for them), and Kaalu’s presence seemed to give Pandey confidence. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Personality issues apart, Kaalu wasn’t the sort of dog that neutral observers would take to – too emaciated, not “good-looking”, not enough clearly visible features if you gave him a casual glance from a distance – and I saw him on the receiving end of human hostility a few times over the years: little stones being thrown, sticks being waved threateningly (including by our colony guards at the behest of the RWA, until I intervened and gave a few of those old imbeciles a talking to). On one occasion he was following me around during my evening walk when I saw a vegetable vendor hit him hard, with a stick, on his bony and delicate back — only because he had been sniffing around outside his shop.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">He’s gone now, and I will miss him a lot despite us never having been on anything close to cuddling terms. The main solace is that I could play a part in giving him a decent quality of life for his last few years. The thing to do now is to make lonely, nervous Pandey feel as comfortable as possible in his partner’s absence. Starting with the firecracker days that lie ahead. (Last year, on Diwali night, I kept both Kaalu and Pandey in my mother’s flat for several hours until the noise outside died down, and I remember looking at them and thinking how much like house dogs even the most feral “strays” could become once you gave them a safe space to settle down in. Kaalu didn’t get any more such opportunities, but Pandey will this year too.)</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(<i>Photos here: Kaalu atop a car, looking healthier than he had been in recent months, and under a table on Diwali night; on the stairs, and posing with Uday Bhatia's Satya book; Kaalu and Pandey together in the park, on a car, and on our stairway</i>)</span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCPSKM7y0Y4H-i8ti2DJChsTlHbrIXFxcxuXR8MszRZl4tAw8WW9ca6EONiZ0X1EzoQe_PxfkNCuLZ0IemEw4VPG7L8pA-gXti5PSrv2nCUnNvq6twyEk3xvE9Ltom6096Hojw7BWnbH8Ehe_f9PQJrLt-zCZnHSQnNuuH6RmYcEe7vsVQHJm0/s1417/1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1142" data-original-width="1417" height="323" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCPSKM7y0Y4H-i8ti2DJChsTlHbrIXFxcxuXR8MszRZl4tAw8WW9ca6EONiZ0X1EzoQe_PxfkNCuLZ0IemEw4VPG7L8pA-gXti5PSrv2nCUnNvq6twyEk3xvE9Ltom6096Hojw7BWnbH8Ehe_f9PQJrLt-zCZnHSQnNuuH6RmYcEe7vsVQHJm0/w400-h323/1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: medium;"></span><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiupW4py54uSBm9Qlo_UNZxLLBTRNOSDiV2FxzUO_4ucvSJx3QEx0its3i2syQeXrPDcVvDRzuuTRZYDkJXqrHm2RW9vMd5WbCuxFxukLPTyu9AeHsO_tcYIiSBzbxY-NCPRznAhm_sbowuJ_VBrFZUpBc2smqzSN8LlNCM4ogr5XDjVU5BbD1G/s658/4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="462" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiupW4py54uSBm9Qlo_UNZxLLBTRNOSDiV2FxzUO_4ucvSJx3QEx0its3i2syQeXrPDcVvDRzuuTRZYDkJXqrHm2RW9vMd5WbCuxFxukLPTyu9AeHsO_tcYIiSBzbxY-NCPRznAhm_sbowuJ_VBrFZUpBc2smqzSN8LlNCM4ogr5XDjVU5BbD1G/w281-h400/4.png" width="281" /></a></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: medium;"></span><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9fxSP-2TPxFmRJi6mii-BwnRrFbXJ13rjYmXF_XHJ6rYJKdEESrNdkpZi3rUVyKwIwXA5_Cc1sr3-Y87U1CUIXRpJkOmyggRVYgQIkwuRG3FWjq75LLbWfmbvn543LXfDtS90V7Zdu62L0khgQ7SOau2f8Pju9QM-sWK19Yxlk6MGujt78yEY/s1296/kaalu%20uday.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1296" data-original-width="1134" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9fxSP-2TPxFmRJi6mii-BwnRrFbXJ13rjYmXF_XHJ6rYJKdEESrNdkpZi3rUVyKwIwXA5_Cc1sr3-Y87U1CUIXRpJkOmyggRVYgQIkwuRG3FWjq75LLbWfmbvn543LXfDtS90V7Zdu62L0khgQ7SOau2f8Pju9QM-sWK19Yxlk6MGujt78yEY/w350-h400/kaalu%20uday.jpg" width="350" /></a></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: medium;"></span><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFJn_K1CSwWXVe6kC4ihQBV_Jf_TyOm3kSlTPHmnpwp9tNZM0YUKXZXDeoqli-1IdJG-r_Y3a6fWXtkxvriAjjV_BaSpI2JfQg7hgITPaYa59fdmhJi4vGuAN4eDhpOpjxGk7ifK8OS1a7Ox4pDTFiDgjVPBzBY4AcBvOL2pYxNwTrjq-Zw5tI/s709/3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="709" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFJn_K1CSwWXVe6kC4ihQBV_Jf_TyOm3kSlTPHmnpwp9tNZM0YUKXZXDeoqli-1IdJG-r_Y3a6fWXtkxvriAjjV_BaSpI2JfQg7hgITPaYa59fdmhJi4vGuAN4eDhpOpjxGk7ifK8OS1a7Ox4pDTFiDgjVPBzBY4AcBvOL2pYxNwTrjq-Zw5tI/w400-h328/3.png" width="400" /></a></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><b><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></b></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><b><span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u x1yc453h" dir="auto" style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(<i>Related posts: <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2020/07/sona-in-remembrance-2015-2020.html">Lara's brother Sona</a>; <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-dogs-of-saket-files-goodbye-little.html">little Kaali</a>) </i></span></span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></div></div></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-51089241996274042402023-09-26T16:39:00.002+05:302023-09-26T16:39:29.762+05:30Watching Dev Anand on the big screen, in 2023<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRK-BX7ARMZp_ysW1o17umhb8ii77k6ka7aRqQfnSZTeAXL48UopXKXokCEZFzO2CZhNHqqe66lQr5O8n6HkS5qcQik8hYZbeRVF8jTTMg2hUUzmBFsUMYCauPe7KW4oQmJYzeqdMJW3qOCNbdlEYomVmJm6UrBaFDUR791BaeK34eTiHFu-Eo/s1417/jewel%20thief%20credits.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1383" data-original-width="1417" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRK-BX7ARMZp_ysW1o17umhb8ii77k6ka7aRqQfnSZTeAXL48UopXKXokCEZFzO2CZhNHqqe66lQr5O8n6HkS5qcQik8hYZbeRVF8jTTMg2hUUzmBFsUMYCauPe7KW4oQmJYzeqdMJW3qOCNbdlEYomVmJm6UrBaFDUR791BaeK34eTiHFu-Eo/s320/jewel%20thief%20credits.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this experiential piece – based on going for some of the Dev Anand centenary screenings – for Money Control)</i><br />-------------<br /><br />In conversations about the best-looking leading men in Hindi cinema, a few names repeatedly come up, from the young Prithviraj Kapoor to Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna in their prime to Hrithik Roshan today. Ten years ago, during a screening of the 1951 <i>Baazi</i> at the Centenary Film Festival in Delhi, I witnessed a sight that could make all those discussions irrelevant. The film’s protagonist Madan, a small-time gambler about to be led into an upper-crust world of crime, is glimpsed from the back during a game of dice. He throws a double-six, the camera pans up to show him in full glory – and the entire auditorium bursts into cheers and whoops. Because here is the young Dev Anand, looking just a bit disreputable, peaked cap on head, cigarette in mouth. And completely breath-taking. <br /><br />At a festival that was all about nostalgia – about older viewers coming to relive memories of the films and stars they had loved in their youth – there were many enthusiastic audience responses; but nothing that quite compared with this moment in terms of the electricity it generated in the hall.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr7An6_L_wChCmL1Gz0-I_hpzf5rdc-ytUXh6lGO-VhT5amRlQlX9o2vn6hJv8KZyJKwdeQXlBWXT6YA8UDNiBytB7LwGRGpLlQG15b9tdYVTgfmeRa5B7PAoOeBrbpOzvSZF6RRJWACRZjaVJJxPj7enp_k8pYGQf94LZqYUiNKUmiNKWl4LB/s1984/cid%20still.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1404" data-original-width="1984" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr7An6_L_wChCmL1Gz0-I_hpzf5rdc-ytUXh6lGO-VhT5amRlQlX9o2vn6hJv8KZyJKwdeQXlBWXT6YA8UDNiBytB7LwGRGpLlQG15b9tdYVTgfmeRa5B7PAoOeBrbpOzvSZF6RRJWACRZjaVJJxPj7enp_k8pYGQf94LZqYUiNKUmiNKWl4LB/s320/cid%20still.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">If the Dev Anand of the 1950s – in films like <i>Baazi</i>, <i>Jaal</i>, <i>CID</i>, <i>Taxi Driver</i> – was pure gorgeousness in stark black and white, the later, Eastmancolor avatars had a slightly different texture of charm and confidence: in films like <i>Guide</i> and <i>Jewel Thief</i> and <i>Johny Mera Naam</i>, we can see that version of Dev, still lighting up the screen, not having yet fully succumbed to the self-congratulatory mannerisms that would annoy many viewers in the last two or three decades of his career. Careful restorations of these three films, along with the much earlier <i>CID</i>, were screened in multiplexes across the country this weekend, creating more gasps of admiration – and a few inevitable titters of amusement. I went for <i>Guide</i>, <i>CID</i> and <i>Jewel Thief</i>, and was thrilled by the quality of the restorations (though the hall I watched <i>Guide</i> in had messed up the aspect ratio in projection, turning the print into an exact square; other friends, watching in other cities, had similar stories). <br /><br />The first thing that happened when I entered the hall: a man in his seventies, at least, standing in the aisle and about to shuffle in to find his seat, caught my eye. With my white hair and beard, in a dimly lit hall, he probably thought of me as someone of his vintage, and he smiled widely. It was a very specific smile of kinship and knowingness directed at a stranger – can you believe we are here watching <i>this</i> film in <i>this</i> setting, after all these decades, it seemed to say. It was one of those rare times when I haven’t minded being mistaken for someone much older. <br /><br />There were, as expected, many other old people in the hall for the screenings – some of them seemed fairly independent, even coming in groups and chattering away; others were brought by younger family members, a few of them even moving with the aid of foldable walkers; I sympathised when I saw them going painfully, slowly to the washrooms during the interval, where they had to wait a few minutes because of the queues. But while the films were actually on, there was a palpable energy in the dark hall – I doubt anyone regretted having come, regardless of physical inconvenience. <br /><br />During <i>Guide</i> – the most respectable and canonised of these four films – viewers clapped with reverence after every one of Waheeda Rehman’s dance performances (and, though never a demonstrative viewer myself, I couldn’t help joining in). The responses to the beautifully restored <i>Jewel Thief</i>, one of our finest thrillers, were more extreme and varied: on the one hand, there were gasps of admiration during the film’s many visually beautiful moments, such as the night-time “Rula ke Gaya Sapna” sequence, and Tanuja’s performance of “Raat Akeli Hai”; but on the other hand, viewers clearly also felt liberated enough to laugh at the things they </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAFYn9WiukbhyXeTlOD1RVBSfoVyUe643h9Kq9ahnUt3A-BLDv95uM3H87lyrAuN6tS_K8vSIwSr6jI3rRyNiDFL_BemS8bAs-t3V9S17AiuKk7J1OS_9OAxMvwqd_fJOYuo29ibohgoNJx23lQZMagQiATrULGHCnHEbUxWZEnkRK9DIsLGxr/s1457/jewel%20thief%20vyjayanthimala.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1443" data-original-width="1457" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAFYn9WiukbhyXeTlOD1RVBSfoVyUe643h9Kq9ahnUt3A-BLDv95uM3H87lyrAuN6tS_K8vSIwSr6jI3rRyNiDFL_BemS8bAs-t3V9S17AiuKk7J1OS_9OAxMvwqd_fJOYuo29ibohgoNJx23lQZMagQiATrULGHCnHEbUxWZEnkRK9DIsLGxr/s320/jewel%20thief%20vyjayanthimala.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">found unintentionally funny, such as the prolonged shoe-and-sock-removal scene at the party where Dev’s character Vinay shows that he isn’t the mysterious missing Amar. Or the moment where viewers imitated Dev’s sing-song delivery of the line “Meri Shaalu?!”, or Ashok Kumar’s angry “You dirty rat!” This may have also been because <i>Jewel Thief</i>, billed as an exciting genre movie, drew a larger number of young viewers who couldn’t process the cinematic tropes of a different era, or felt embarrassed by them. <br /><br />Then there was <i>CID</i>, which is film noir on magic mushrooms: a ridiculous, sometimes-existential, sometimes-slapsticky thriller, the main secret to which is that everyone – good guys, bad guys – is incompetent at literally everything they do; so the resolution hinges on whoever happens to be a little more incompetent at the crucial moment. Much as we celebrate Rehman’s magnificent performance in <i>Guide</i>, it was possible to see, through this big-screen experience, that even at age 17 or 18 she was a natural movie star and a future great – raw as she is in her role as a tempered-down femme fatale with a heart, she manages to keep a straight face throughout all the lunacy happening around her. Which is some achievement.<br /><br />What was more important, though – it was a wonderful print, making the film, as well as its 1950s Bombay setting, look fresh and relatable. And of course, the young Dev looked superb. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdDUdX-Q3ZhBgTr3WXDUINDVHhWSaidRPgDx5posgHlLE3ouUo0wpJ6SPmK4L6EBnFCH2h-wjfRe9x9GAF1as5vQOemFME4-OCoMMc7sA499_pq4-2TsHpg-N5qPyDJnI4t0DExRiKWrBfKMQWTjrkFg0WFIDIamHQv-zrzHDCK4Usa-HAuvQ/s850/Screenshot%202023-09-26%20at%204.35.57%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="850" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdDUdX-Q3ZhBgTr3WXDUINDVHhWSaidRPgDx5posgHlLE3ouUo0wpJ6SPmK4L6EBnFCH2h-wjfRe9x9GAF1as5vQOemFME4-OCoMMc7sA499_pq4-2TsHpg-N5qPyDJnI4t0DExRiKWrBfKMQWTjrkFg0WFIDIamHQv-zrzHDCK4Usa-HAuvQ/s320/Screenshot%202023-09-26%20at%204.35.57%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">By the time the evening and night screenings came to an end, on both Saturday and Sunday, my online film groups – on WhatsApp and email – were flooded with messages from members who had attended as many shows as possible in their respective cities. If <i>Jewel Thief</i> was being shown at the same time in Pune or Ahmedabad as <i>Guide</i> was shown in south Delhi, I could be sure that by 1 AM my phone would be beeping with photo or video notifications – from speculation about a misspelt name in an opening credit to an awestruck few minutes from “Tere Mere Sapne” or “Din Dhal Jaaye” in pristine prints. It was palpable, this enthusiasm for the superstar who was turning 100, and for the experience of familiar old films coming alive in the forms that they were always meant to be seen. Anniversaries notwithstanding, we need many more of these screenings in the near future. </span><br /></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-47153255655299440142023-09-25T22:18:00.000+05:302023-09-25T22:18:03.049+05:30From deification to “what if” – the power (and vulnerability) of the screen persona<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>(From my Economic Times column)</i><b><i><br />------------------<br /></i></b><br />A few recent encounters – with a still image, moving images, and an excerpt from an old story – led to intersecting thoughts about star-actors: about career longevity and careers abruptly cut off; about our perceptions of performers who have been enshrined as legends.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW16xGvR8WbXaktLL_OIBQxW9N5xQoCEyQCWIenDW3LuuTiOE6kcjXQWdGYDy11_QKDkIT7AaHubDo0-yCeh30SzGlT7Vjs5je1SxDgcbHsZYVUpB_x8BxjnBCOtAP4FsjI6uXXaX_b2F0GG9XwFUagrdtpOpb0f_nRPuIM1Ge14vdbMeGSCLv/s567/Screenshot%202023-09-25%20at%2010.10.19%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="567" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW16xGvR8WbXaktLL_OIBQxW9N5xQoCEyQCWIenDW3LuuTiOE6kcjXQWdGYDy11_QKDkIT7AaHubDo0-yCeh30SzGlT7Vjs5je1SxDgcbHsZYVUpB_x8BxjnBCOtAP4FsjI6uXXaX_b2F0GG9XwFUagrdtpOpb0f_nRPuIM1Ge14vdbMeGSCLv/s320/Screenshot%202023-09-25%20at%2010.10.19%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">The exhibits:<br /><br /><b>A.</b> In a witty bit of casting in the new season of <i>Only Murders in the Building</i>, Meryl Streep plays – wait for it – <i>an unsuccessful actress</i>. The character is approximately Streep’s age (she is first shown as a little girl in 1962, yearning to be on stage) but with one big difference: Loretta has spent the past six decades trying to get a break, not getting it, and carrying on regardless — showing up for thousands of auditions, making do with what comes her way. <br /><br /><b>B.</b> A photo I hadn’t seen before, from 1955, shows Dilip Kumar sitting with Alfred Hitchcock during the latter’s trip to Bombay. It was a triumphant time for both men, with more glories to come soon: the Indian actor had just played the lead in Bimal Roy’s Devdas, while Hitchcock had three films out in the previous 12 months, including Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><b><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhin4gl2-ntBYJaKNEY28bW3ZCg16vBmxAjgL5Fz6Wt2KPXcz7puzurgWIz3pujlAL2YkeX4n-WiBh2RQNqVaoFTqg0ed_CfPBMNhZZk0-b55lTiq4rxYmJibUAc1G9T-stJehEm3iIgwvhVtz62djiR7Apt5GjN_TeIgKLLcHWeFY5MyyBkIVl/s639/dk%20ah.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="526" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhin4gl2-ntBYJaKNEY28bW3ZCg16vBmxAjgL5Fz6Wt2KPXcz7puzurgWIz3pujlAL2YkeX4n-WiBh2RQNqVaoFTqg0ed_CfPBMNhZZk0-b55lTiq4rxYmJibUAc1G9T-stJehEm3iIgwvhVtz62djiR7Apt5GjN_TeIgKLLcHWeFY5MyyBkIVl/s320/dk%20ah.jpeg" width="263" /></a></i></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">On the face of it, this is a sweet document of two giants from different cultures on equal footing; but here is a dampener from Donald Spoto’s Hitchcock book, condensing the director’s trip into a sentence: “For seven weeks they endured airplane delays, foul weather, uncongenial menus, and the demands for attention by hopeful Asian actors.”<br /><br />So here are iconic performers in a new context, where it’s possible to imagine them just a little diminished, or not fitting into another exalted realm. I’m a bit of a Meryl Streep sceptic (which is not to say I don’t think she’s a fine actor, just that the level of worship — especially at major awards which seem to pencil her in for a nomination the minute they hear she is in anything — has reached ridiculous proportions), but her Loretta is such a marvellous conceit, it almost makes you think about that parallel universe where even someone of Streep’s talent might not have been dealt the right cards. Similarly, Dilip Kumar doesn’t become any less of a legend because a Hollywood filmmaker didn’t mull working with him – but it’s a reminder that greatness doesn’t always transcend place and time, and an icon in one context might be a supplicant in another. <br /><br /><b>C.</b> A scene from the 1935 screwball comedy <i>Hands Across the Table</i>. The lovely young Carole Lombard is in conversation with a wheelchair-bound Ralph Bellamy. He used to be a pilot, he says ruefully, looking at a model of a plane. “Flying is safer now than it was then.”<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpGVU-4c_-X8UzqHx9VWF16gHa4EScjsz_9MtFhlAtNCkd1NUHsUOpNChdSdS3WmwetqjfTSoPczrUzw6Wg4fZY20wiXMDHhUWUGtPHT58lE3PcT0SnnR-2WZ_oWlYLxjrojnGSp2HSCpjB83GVHQGBZ9p2dbIxeUViHrib8cw0QbTrcpzhHzl/s776/Screenshot%202023-09-03%20at%209.43.10%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="565" data-original-width="776" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpGVU-4c_-X8UzqHx9VWF16gHa4EScjsz_9MtFhlAtNCkd1NUHsUOpNChdSdS3WmwetqjfTSoPczrUzw6Wg4fZY20wiXMDHhUWUGtPHT58lE3PcT0SnnR-2WZ_oWlYLxjrojnGSp2HSCpjB83GVHQGBZ9p2dbIxeUViHrib8cw0QbTrcpzhHzl/s320/Screenshot%202023-09-03%20at%209.43.10%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">In real life, Lombard will die in a plane crash a few years later, aged thirty-three – one of the big “what ifs” in film history since she could well have had a long career across mediums, including TV. Meanwhile Bellamy, a charismatic supporting actor, will work in films for nearly six more decades, all the way till <i>Pretty Woman</i> in 1990.<br /><br /><b>D.</b> Speaking of longevity, most people couldn’t hold a candle to Lillian Gish, who was one of the first and biggest movie stars and would play her last role (in a big film, <i>The Whales of August</i>) when she was ninety-six. (Imagine a cinematic career spanning 1912 to 1987! The equivalent in the history of literature might be from, say, Homer to Hemingway.) I was pleased to find Gish appearing as an inspirational figure in a PG Wodehouse story of the 1920s – “The Love That Purifies”, which pivots on an unruly boy with a crush on Gish, causing him to become alarmingly well behaved. As a screen persona Gish exuded inner strength and purity; even the brilliant Jeeves only just manages to rescue a child from her saintliness. <br /><br /><b>E. </b>But then an image can cast a long shadow, as a Hollywood columnist in Damien Chazelle’s recent <i>Babylon</i> – a delirious, bold, polarising, grand folly of a film – knows very well. In one scene she speaks to silent-movie star Jack Conrad (played by Brad Pitt) about the power of film and film personalities; about how these images are ephemeral, delicate, but also indelible. “Someone born 50 years from now might see your image flickering on a screen, and see you as a friend,” she says, bringing some solace to a depressed man who knows his time in the sun has ended. <br /><br />As someone who became obsessed with old cinema as an adolescent, watching films made decades before I was born, I identified with that scene. But with time, and with knowledge of the sinuous workings of film history, it is also easier to see how fragile many of those screen personas are, and how dependent on chance.</span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-82889065104495414972023-09-24T09:25:00.000+05:302023-09-24T09:25:13.531+05:30Good, bad, silly: why all of Dev Anand's work is vital (sort of)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this piece as part of the Times of India’s package around Dev Anand’s centenary)</i><br />---------------------<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjviUjZxe0srFgFT9BaRCk9DvnaMv_rOWmOe-OV2z7uAo4lhNtFLdnl7Ab81xgW-nu6sGfkN-sXgr0BW2j5J7qQEyWllR_SbnPYW47ky6_aFixpRHYjFMZizdvXSZDYLf2uxjnBO24O5-TVFd9-Vg-mBSAztRdhEotQQdIIhTgyuYU780xxPIHW/s950/toi%20sep%2024.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="369" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjviUjZxe0srFgFT9BaRCk9DvnaMv_rOWmOe-OV2z7uAo4lhNtFLdnl7Ab81xgW-nu6sGfkN-sXgr0BW2j5J7qQEyWllR_SbnPYW47ky6_aFixpRHYjFMZizdvXSZDYLf2uxjnBO24O5-TVFd9-Vg-mBSAztRdhEotQQdIIhTgyuYU780xxPIHW/s320/toi%20sep%2024.jpg" width="124" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Our movie history is full of instances of male stars trying to reinvent themselves, making alterations to their screen image or choice of collaborators – to fit a new zeitgeist, to stay relevant for new audiences, or simply to play their age. Thus, most recently, Shah Rukh Khan teamed up with the Tamil director Atlee for a new sort of masala action film; in an earlier time Amitabh Bachchan (when he was exactly the same age SRK is now – 57 going on 58) overturned his shaky fortunes by hosting <i>Kaun Banega Crorepati</i>. Mass superstar Rajinikanth worked in the explicitly political Pa. Ranjith film <i>Kaala</i>, and even Rishi Kapoor played gritty roles in indie cinema late in his career. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">By way of contrast, there is Dev Anand – who was not just forever young, as the cliché has it, but also confident (or over-confident?) enough to not seek an image overhaul (one can imagine him disapproving of the <i>Kaala</i> scenes where the younger version of Rajinikanth is evoked through animation interludes). Dev, for that’s what he wanted us to call him (“<i>those who like me and love me call me Dev, just Dev, short and sweet and possessive, godly and sexy</i>,” he declared in his extraordinary memoir <i>Romancing with Life</i>, a book that reads as if he had personally written every word and never allowed an editor near the thing) – Dev just went on and on, regardless of what anyone thought, confident that his fan base would follow him anywhere. <br /><br />This attitude would result in a number of latter-day films that very few people think of as good cinema. The stories behind the making of some of these films – the continuing infatuation with much younger actresses, the rush to launch a new, untested face as fast as possible – can be embarrassing too. And so, in assessing Dev Anand’s career, one usually sees a clear divide made between the quality of the work in the first two decades (broadly the period from <i>Baazi</i>, 1951 to <i>Johny Mera Naam</i>, 1970) and the diminishing returns that followed – the head-bobbing mannerisms, the displays of narcissism on screen, the hurriedly made ego projects. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8GTNb3zhH8UTZZNjUFfNcnmY6EYiZaeWT9j8QQ3SBRN5cZkhsV6NU3400Y-8fYpcCZUNzD--qRIAE2t-uH5drkN3oq6DxqqUywWLNhufJMMJ2cYj8O8DfQLJV4kFh3MDMF4xikFE1jjis0NgMgMFOy9kKEuN1auMimKfEhmful8Kb4n_1ksB6/s2991/cid1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2256" data-original-width="2991" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8GTNb3zhH8UTZZNjUFfNcnmY6EYiZaeWT9j8QQ3SBRN5cZkhsV6NU3400Y-8fYpcCZUNzD--qRIAE2t-uH5drkN3oq6DxqqUywWLNhufJMMJ2cYj8O8DfQLJV4kFh3MDMF4xikFE1jjis0NgMgMFOy9kKEuN1auMimKfEhmful8Kb4n_1ksB6/s320/cid1.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">As a critical approach, this is useful, because his best work shines so bright. <i>Taxi Driver</i>, <i>Kala Bazaar</i>, <i>Paying Guest</i>, <i>Guide</i>, <i>Jewel Thief</i>… these, to name just a few, are enshrined films that define his legacy, and the reason why he is one of our most important star-actors whose centenary deserves to be celebrated with nationwide screenings. <br /><br />But here’s a proposition: drawing a sharp line between Dev’s early and late career – and emphasising only the quality of the films and performances – can be a barrier to understanding something essential about the man and the star: the unflagging optimism and self-belief that fuelled him through six decades.<br /><br />For my generation, many of the 1980s Dev Anand films, which are thought to represent a decline (from <i>Swami Dada</i> to <i>Sachche ka Bol Bala</i> to <i>Awwal Number</i>), had a strange power because he was a bridge between a much earlier time and the “now” that we were growing up in. As a child, watching my family’s sentimental reactions to him, I realised that this funny, nodding gent – still playing the youthful hero on equal terms with a Jackie Shroff or Aamir Khan – was also the dashing star whom my grandmother had crushed on three decades earlier. This was a very different revelation from watching, say Dilip Kumar and Raaj Kumar reunited in <i>Saudagar</i>, two respectable old men who clearly were old men, with their younger versions played by other actors. (Dev, who infamously cast Cindy Crawford as his mother in a still photograph around the same time in <i>Awwal Number</i>, would have scoffed at such timidity!) For me personally – and I’m sure for others – Dev provided a living, immediate link to the distant past in a way that an elderly Dilip Kumar, singing “I love you” to an elderly Nutan in Karma, couldn’t quite do. <br /><br />Playing devil’s advocate, one can make a small, defensive case for the last few films too – the ones that most people either politely overlook today or turn into funny internet memes. Such as the <i>Love at Times Square</i> phone conversation where Dev’s character tells his daughter about her mother dying in a grisly plane crash, and then, within seconds, changes the subject with a sing-song “<i>Ab aur rona dhona nahin, jo ho gaya so ho gaya</i>”. It’s unintentionally funny, yes, but it is also very much part of the DNA of this forever-sanguine man, the man one finds in the pages of his memoir – where, each time a chapter in his life closes on a sad note (the broken love story with Suraiya, for instance), he quickly moves on to the next phase, with a mention of the ray of light that is forever showing him the way. <br /><br />That buoyancy, however caricatured it may have become in his later work, is inseparable from the qualities that made him such a great star-actor in his prime – the dashing hero forever associated with “Main Zindagi ka Saath Nibhaata Chala Gaya” and “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil”. At the level of personal preference and good taste, it’s understandable that a movie buff would pick a repeat viewing of <i>Guide</i> over a first-time viewing of <i>Mr Prime Minister</i>, but if you really want to grasp the spirit of one of our most beloved legends, <i>all</i> of Dev Anand’s work is vital. </span><br /></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-67674939856374797362023-09-22T16:12:00.003+05:302023-09-24T08:41:45.647+05:30History, then and now: on Anjum Hasan’s new novel about a teacher in the dock<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>(Wrote this review for the latest Reader’s Digest)</i><br />--------------------<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq3xJOQfHzY3U2ROJBMsRHjo4jjpw5AG1BM1tqtsvKBnRPR_Z8fkTqjwCkpfIu14r_gLFxJ21Pv73SkBDKyXJmx5773bNLsJq-P3n5aduvr6-7HDrTIpEHd-yUQBrAP5pz3IgAqIgxLL7S54q8zQOpgM4Ii7xj6yAcYijxOQAOTgbOAm499Fu_/s864/history%20angel.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="567" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq3xJOQfHzY3U2ROJBMsRHjo4jjpw5AG1BM1tqtsvKBnRPR_Z8fkTqjwCkpfIu14r_gLFxJ21Pv73SkBDKyXJmx5773bNLsJq-P3n5aduvr6-7HDrTIpEHd-yUQBrAP5pz3IgAqIgxLL7S54q8zQOpgM4Ii7xj6yAcYijxOQAOTgbOAm499Fu_/s320/history%20angel.jpg" width="210" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Among other things, Anjum Hasan’s elegant and searching new novel <i>History's Angel</i> is a Delhi book. Its protagonist Alif, a history teacher in his forties, lives in the city with his wife Tahi and adolescent son Salim; so do his parents and a few friends and relatives. Delhi in its many iterations – from medieval Shahjahanabad to modern Vasant Kunj – informs Alif’s wanderings, his thoughts, and consequently the narrative. We follow him as he travels from old Delhi (where he lives) to a swanky Nehru Place mall for a meeting with an old acquaintance, and to the Humayun’s Tomb, where he takes his students on a field trip; from visiting an aunt in busy and cluttered Mehrauli to meeting a landlord about renting a flat in gated-community Noida.<br /><br />One soon realises what an appropriate setting Delhi is for this story. As an old and multi-layered city of ruins, with the ghosts of many pasts and many kingdoms jostling together in it, the capital is a reminder of how pluralistic this country has been. But as Hasan tells us, more than once, this is also a city made “so insistently, so noisily, of <i>now</i>” – full of lessons if you care to look, but ignored by people who are caught up with the chaotic present. (“<i>More real than the histories of a thousand kings is that girl’s precise voice discussing her cooking […] certain her flimsy moment in time is the only one there is</i>.”) <br /><br />And so it is with history in general too. Alif frets that most people have only a superficial interest in his subject – only to the extent that it can give them convenient narratives and serve their purposes. He worries that the detritus of history is everywhere, with the modern age having created a rift from the past. And he wants to make history surprising, unexpected, non-linear – to show a dynamic India, not a monolith with one destiny (which, though the book doesn’t belabour this point, is what the fantasies of a Hindu Rashtra are geared towards). But Alif can scarcely afford to look away from his own “now”, for as the story opens he is about to get into trouble because of a student who has provoked and insulted him.<br /><br />If you read the jacket synopsis of <i>History’s Angel</i>, you might think this is a straightforward dramatic narrative with an A-to-Z arc and a clear political position: about a Muslim teacher who, after a nasty exchange, twists a boy’s ear, rendering himself vulnerable since the new school principal has a barely buried prejudice against his community. And yes, this <i>is</i> the anchoring incident of a story that is also set against the background of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) controversy of 2019-20. But <i>History’s Angel</i> is a subtler, more searching book than can be described in such terms – it is less interested in being “relevant” in a ham-fisted way to the current Indian political situation (where a community is continuously being vilified), more interested in the inner life and circumstances of a specific man. The reader may be primed for an unpleasant confrontation when Alif decides to visit the schoolboy’s father (who has presumably been filling the child’s head with bigoted ideas about Muslims) – instead we end up in an unexpected space where it is possible to see the boy as a victim of circumstance in another sense. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8RIKMm3ZJf8EYGasykS9rUpfvLBlQZk7F2UencPpDx-JwqCrNcdwEvmSvM0IEufvFBJCX8qRx3UeWqYNhb_6iHXSb9kvlLA9AzPB5QWL6LSJWLX6otbi5YmgsLADDS48ETIDOvS-quTbLqFrwupDlYvP6OQubgHDP2ktRpvQOXPEjCvugRWOh/s1081/Screenshot%202023-09-22%20at%204.08.39%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="1081" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8RIKMm3ZJf8EYGasykS9rUpfvLBlQZk7F2UencPpDx-JwqCrNcdwEvmSvM0IEufvFBJCX8qRx3UeWqYNhb_6iHXSb9kvlLA9AzPB5QWL6LSJWLX6otbi5YmgsLADDS48ETIDOvS-quTbLqFrwupDlYvP6OQubgHDP2ktRpvQOXPEjCvugRWOh/s320/Screenshot%202023-09-22%20at%204.08.39%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">There are other thing happening around Alif, other vignettes that add up to reveal a good deal: a clearly Hindu puja taking place in school not long after the principal cautioned Alif not to bring religion into education; a passage where Alif and Tahi go flat-hunting and mildly uncomfortable banter grows into something passive-aggressive and then outright menacing. And paralleling complicated national histories, there are complicated personal histories too – as in Alif’s friendship with a man named Ganesh, and an incident in their distant past involving a woman named Prerna, who now reappears in Alif’s life. Or the gradual radicalisation of a man named Ahmad, who has worked for Alif’s parents for decades. <br /><br /><i>History’s Angel</i> is a very interior work, since we are tied to Alif’s consciousness and privy to his thoughts as well as his elaborate, conflicted conversations with others (such as his one friend in the school staffroom, Miss Moloy). This means it isn’t always an easy read – it can feel weighed down in places, which is perhaps understandable since it is about someone who feels oppressed and lost, sometimes even by his own thoughts; Alif spends a lot of time arguing with himself.<br /><br />And yet, despite this, the book not only casts a quiet spell through its chronicling of Alif’s days and encounters, it also demonstrates how othering can happen in a gradual, insidious rather than dramatic way. And it leaves us with the question of whether any of us – this history’s angel included – can fully understand the workings of history, and how it pertains to us and our lives. <br /></span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-26753139924705413202023-08-05T16:12:00.014+05:302023-08-05T18:42:15.240+05:30Garam to naram: how Dharmendra went from energetic he-man to vulnerable grandpa (and how do fans cope?)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(in my latest Economic Times column, thoughts on watching a favourite actor, now in his late eighties, in Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahaani)</i><br />---------------------<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxSmvpZ4_5TGwHErYplymcaLwyOsDBDRql_zwMpb9AfR9oBLuF-Vq5lJTCw3Kzoq6-DM50ABRLdBgcBGqZVYzZqDY3B7gtM4tHNegOQvAXbgz6gAJVzg2IT0QmtSpg7pLyKRWjNhU9VL27nY6IIrtWLJmVeiYfpl2pxwRpUSUZzNEjDga8j4PE/s539/Screenshot%202023-08-05%20at%204.04.56%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="539" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxSmvpZ4_5TGwHErYplymcaLwyOsDBDRql_zwMpb9AfR9oBLuF-Vq5lJTCw3Kzoq6-DM50ABRLdBgcBGqZVYzZqDY3B7gtM4tHNegOQvAXbgz6gAJVzg2IT0QmtSpg7pLyKRWjNhU9VL27nY6IIrtWLJmVeiYfpl2pxwRpUSUZzNEjDga8j4PE/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-05%20at%204.04.56%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Though I don’t spend much time gaping at celebrity social-media pages, one of my favourite discoveries during the early months of Covid-19 was Dharmendra’s Instagram account. In his mid-eighties, he was having a splendid lockdown, mostly stationed on his farm, tending to plants and animals, putting up videos of himself driving tractors, introducing us to new-born calves, talking about “ant castles” and such. And responding to fans – as he still does – with a “<i>Love you, dear</i>”, best read in a Veeru-atop-the-water-tank voice (the tremulous one of an octogenarian, though). In his prime he was one of the most desirable men in our cinema, but the personality revealed in these short videos was that of a son of the soil (in the most authentic sense of that cliched term) returning to his roots after decades in the glamour world. And <i>still</i> very much an entertainer. <br /><br />Dharmendra in boisterous mood (and with the right director, as in <i>Sholay</i> and <i>Chupke Chupke </i>– or in the right scene, e.g. the climactic fight-cum-song in the otherwise unremarkable <i>Teesri Aankh</i>) is one of my favourite things in Hindi film (though I can certainly appreciate his more subdued roles in films like <i>Satyakam</i>, discussed in hushed terms whenever his deeper legacy is discussed). It was with some ambivalence, therefore, that I watched him play the almost-catatonic grandfather Kanwal in <i>Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani</i>. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKxTvd1elkugpjgJcwOp_zHo9kWMMSCVopHjJgNQJNygeZAhBh6_wZ2yNhttMv0x67PVB6aN0sLcvdqVdZaBHGJPGQDGMKjD1LtS26G7dMm3s58d6RmpRY9bcqbc_Umxlb_z_LpoTukn16oPDzs8jjI3pbRlGNX0p0ZjXWvfqmbbbhx5tX7xQV/s382/Screenshot%202023-08-05%20at%204.03.43%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="258" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKxTvd1elkugpjgJcwOp_zHo9kWMMSCVopHjJgNQJNygeZAhBh6_wZ2yNhttMv0x67PVB6aN0sLcvdqVdZaBHGJPGQDGMKjD1LtS26G7dMm3s58d6RmpRY9bcqbc_Umxlb_z_LpoTukn16oPDzs8jjI3pbRlGNX0p0ZjXWvfqmbbbhx5tX7xQV/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-05%20at%204.03.43%20PM.png" width="216" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">On the whole I enjoyed Karan Johar’s film a lot, even the over-cooked final bits with redemptive arcs for too many characters. There was plenty to relish, including the nudge-wink at the nepotism debate – this being a story about two young people who come into each other’s orbits, meeting and falling in love, only because their grandparents had done the same thing decades earlier; and who now play out an updated version of what the oldies did in their time, often to the same classic Hindi-movie songs. (It becomes even more meta when you consider that in real life just a few weeks ago Dharmendra’s grandson married Bimal Roy’s great-granddaughter.)<br /><br />Dharam’s Kanwal briefly comes alive in an early scene (almost guaranteed to draw applause and whistles… along with snatches of uncomfortable laughter, perhaps, from younger viewers), but for most of the film the actor has little to do. Watching him was a reminder of the last time I met an affable grand-uncle, at a (big fat Punjabi) wedding reception. I had taken many long walks with this man in my adolescence, listening to him talk about everything from history to science – and now, in his dementia-afflicted nineties, he sat there smiling vacantly, dimly registering things one moment and fading away the next. <br /><br />The actors one grew up with are family too, in a different sense, and watching them age makes us recalibrate our ideas about them <i>and</i> our own personal histories. On one hand, I wished Dharmendra had a juicier role in the new film. But on the other, the worried fan in me didn’t want to see him pushed into doing things that he is not up to at this age, possibly drawing mirth or condescension from the audience (the red-eyed Dharam of the kuttay-kaminey phase has already been a soft target for “sophisticated” viewers for too long). Or endangering his health with an over-strenuous part. Which is a way of saying, look how strange the fan-star relationship is, and how it shifts with time and circumstance: here I am being protective of someone who was once a larger than life, wish-fulfilling, macho man of my childhood. (Veeru was always <i>Sholay</i>'s alpha hero for me, even though the other fellow shared my name and was played by the biggest superstar I knew.)<br /><br />One can appreciate that casting Dharmendra in <i>Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahaani</i> was an affectionate gesture (while <i>also</i> being a coup, a legendary figure used as a totem or for sentimental value). Besides, given the bullying authoritativeness of the Jaya Bachchan character (Kanwal’s wife), I knew I would rather see a quiet, barely functional grandfather sitting in a wheelchair than another iteration of the booming Johar patriarch. But it is still troubling to see a much-loved actor, who you know is in his late eighties and in fragile health, play a role that’s close to his reality. It was especially so to watch Kanwal’s final appearance, which felt almost as much like a valediction for a performer as a diegetic goodbye to a character. <br /><br />I hope I’m wrong, and that Dharmendra has another couple of meaty parts left in him: maybe someone should take a cue from those Instagram videos, where he gets to be himself, chatty and focused, in his comfort zone, and a magnetic screen presence at the same time.<br /><br /><b></b></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCNy7uApHeJioCxmCbHXeNxMYSAri8lDlE5OPnn34J70-hUYqnRFdl9z-U1FsQvXanBNgfyJ-X-4Y_bdp25c0FRk4jZXObsBrc1_Xwa6TRVzu-9e99YJ-RVIWsApygS0TFDoIfgD63ySu7l0f5CDJ3TEuSeOI36218K9KlbDA-nes08xm25yN/s709/dharam%20et%20column.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="348" data-original-width="709" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCNy7uApHeJioCxmCbHXeNxMYSAri8lDlE5OPnn34J70-hUYqnRFdl9z-U1FsQvXanBNgfyJ-X-4Y_bdp25c0FRk4jZXObsBrc1_Xwa6TRVzu-9e99YJ-RVIWsApygS0TFDoIfgD63ySu7l0f5CDJ3TEuSeOI36218K9KlbDA-nes08xm25yN/s320/dharam%20et%20column.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>P.S. </b>Watching this film, and Ranveer’s uncontrollable-force-of-nature performance, I kept wondering if the 1975 version of Dharmendra would have kept pace with him energy-wise. (I like to think so, though that’s a purely hypothetical, unworkable-time-continuum argument, like imagining Borg vs Nadal on clay or Laver vs Djokovic on grass). I also wondered what Ranveer and Alia would be like when they are in their eighties or nineties, if they make it there – and always assuming the planet is still somewhat functional when that distant time arrives.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(<i>One of a few earlier posts about Dharmendra <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-pros-and-cons-of-being-movie-star.html">is here</a>. And here is one <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2011/04/mat-jaane-bhi-do-yaar-idealism-and-self.html">about Satyakam</a>, one of his favourite films. And another post <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2015/08/age-cannot-wither-them-or-can-it.html">about watching actors being, and "playing", old</a>)</i> <br /></span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-63803399040291427902023-07-24T08:41:00.000+05:302023-07-24T08:41:03.252+05:30The Dogs of Saket files: goodbye little Kaali (and thoughts on old dogs)<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">A loss from a few days ago: this sweet, gentle creature who was known mainly by the much-too-generic name “Kaali”. After many days of blood tests, ultrasounds, drips, and much monitoring of/despairing over food and liquid intake, she succumbed to a kidney + liver issue that had become irreversible. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyTVtAIggj-zfptFC1mA90M38BG05YtbgqgI9bwPKuefqKDsJFE--0mJoHSnsAfy6TndjI1j8v5L_ynYHBxo5Mo6uO2M_JfJWF6GZhuD2JOvCz9WDUrlRfgcCLi3buGHIRX7vS8_XdWLCf5L0wq5sYWnn5iYgRJyVOBMS__wsFrOaoiGuHAPEy/s945/IMG_1039.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="945" data-original-width="709" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyTVtAIggj-zfptFC1mA90M38BG05YtbgqgI9bwPKuefqKDsJFE--0mJoHSnsAfy6TndjI1j8v5L_ynYHBxo5Mo6uO2M_JfJWF6GZhuD2JOvCz9WDUrlRfgcCLi3buGHIRX7vS8_XdWLCf5L0wq5sYWnn5iYgRJyVOBMS__wsFrOaoiGuHAPEy/s320/IMG_1039.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Like many other street dogs in our immediate neighbourhood, she was being looked after by a wonderful feeder-carer named Chhavi; but in recent months I had become involved, in a very small way, with Kaali’s care, and I got to know her briefly during her tough final months.<br /><br />It began in early February when I learnt that Kaali (whom I had only known by sight till then, as one of the more delicate-looking members of the pack that hung around outside the CISF area in D-block Saket) had been hit by a speeding car. A hind leg was fractured in a very dicey spot – the initial prognosis at Friendicoes was that amputation was the only way out. This changed after a couple of further opinions, and eventually Kaali’s leg was plastered and a long, slow healing process began – there was no question of her being out on the streets during this period, and none of the local dog-carers could keep her at home, so we got her admitted at the recently established Soul Vet clinic in CR Park, where my paravet friend <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2020/04/animal-feeding-updates.html">Ravi</a> works. During the month and a half that she was there, I went across a few times, mainly to supervise the changing of bandages and check on the state of the wound. (The dressing that was done just before Holi was a particularly colourful one, two shades of orange used to stylish effect.)<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjBDNBdFHzrVmMp84UiTJsOwRR26wtbEaYYm-sqGQHQXkGWcuAV3UUFOCEf2LmGmvp8ZTB2MH63YJzXk8aq_m2_nJUfLmcHsHCiLv2h00aSyfiGkIl3orOUw3QSbl1oFNGa0UqItbSyculSDr8S-lYlAxEZdorXzB2xdCzjmo_8v9OAKOGOhDn/s1020/IMG_8948.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1020" data-original-width="765" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjBDNBdFHzrVmMp84UiTJsOwRR26wtbEaYYm-sqGQHQXkGWcuAV3UUFOCEf2LmGmvp8ZTB2MH63YJzXk8aq_m2_nJUfLmcHsHCiLv2h00aSyfiGkIl3orOUw3QSbl1oFNGa0UqItbSyculSDr8S-lYlAxEZdorXzB2xdCzjmo_8v9OAKOGOhDn/s320/IMG_8948.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">After she returned to her home turf I would see her occasionally, limping around, sometimes putting her weight on all four legs – and staying as close as possible to Chhavi’s building, where she must have felt secure. (A few times she strayed into our lane, probably scavenging for food, and was chased away by other territorial canines, including my own ancient 15-year-old.) Then, early this month, it became clear that her health was deteriorating – a tick-fever diagnosis was followed by the realisation that there was a problem with her inner organs. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(We could never say for certain, but it's likely that the liver failure was precipitated by the heavy load of medicines – including antibiotics – that she had to be given for a long time after her accident. That was unavoidable, of course, given how bad the fracture was. Of course, the fellow driving that car so rashly in a residential area got away and was never identified or called to account for the huge amounts of pain and suffering – plus inconvenience to human caregivers – that he had caused. This is how it goes. Meanwhile, if a *dog* shows the slightest sign of aggression – regardless of the provocation – most RWAs jump down the throats of any animal-feeder or carer they can find.)<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitW7dcYzgo8dwMeQxalm8wNZM-u7vq2yqzFlMwwNPnszhyW9CZ7go5h3nAMEGB6nfLliTKZv_EArfD71e7LrS-DfXMhYQFh4LBEcF5P5oE-9_s8RjW-OSG6yLQ9rwHIiMUKLclHGe1x2Q8lQV12z2293F1-7kATwKUsmJXvThT7UcqEqi4UnHS/s1323/IMG_9057.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1323" data-original-width="992" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitW7dcYzgo8dwMeQxalm8wNZM-u7vq2yqzFlMwwNPnszhyW9CZ7go5h3nAMEGB6nfLliTKZv_EArfD71e7LrS-DfXMhYQFh4LBEcF5P5oE-9_s8RjW-OSG6yLQ9rwHIiMUKLclHGe1x2Q8lQV12z2293F1-7kATwKUsmJXvThT7UcqEqi4UnHS/s320/IMG_9057.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">With street dogs, there is a lot of trial and error involved in these complicated medical cases – going to multiple vets, looking at various options for serviceable shelters – but Chhavi and her son Armaan unfailingly took time out from their office schedules to take Kaali wherever needed. I helped out a couple of times, and though that was a very small contribution, it gave me the opportunity to renew acquaintance with her. It never became a close relationship as such: she barely seemed to register me during the car drives, possibly because she was in a lot of discomfort, or dazed; when she snuggled close to me it felt more like a mechanical response, to deal with the disorienting movement of the vehicle, than anything else. I did get to carry her around a few times though – having lost a lot of weight in her final weeks, she felt like nothing compared to the 36/40-kg dogs I have lifted out of cars or onto vets’ tables. And I watched in despair as she first lapped up a huge amount of water, then vomited it all out within minutes, while we were waiting for her ultrasound (just at a point when we thought she had started to retain liquids again).<br /><br />As I mentioned in my essay about “part-time dogs” in Hemali Sodhi's <i><a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2021/12/two-new-anthologies-cat-people-and-book.html">The Book of Dogs</a></i>, an occupational hazard of keeping an eye out for street animals in your neighbourhood (including the ones you aren’t officially taking care of but need to be around for in case an emergency arises) is that many relationships aren’t clearly defined: one spends pockets of time with this or that dog, becomes a little attached, even, but without ever being able to think of the creature as one’s own. When Chhavi called me a few days ago to say that Kaali had died overnight at the latest of the many shelters that she was staying in, it didn’t feel like a potent personal loss, but it felt like… something. I thought about one of the first times I had really noticed her, months before her accident, when I found her moving around in our building stairway late one night, rummaging around in the garbage bags our upstairs neighbours had left outside their flat – and how I wished it were possible to take her in, except that our house dog was barking her head off already. (There is a similar issue at my other flat, where Lara, normally the meekest and most nervous of dogs, turns into a ferocious snarling hound if a colony dog is let into the house in her sight; the last two Diwalis I have struggled to keep different sets of dogs closeted somehow in different rooms at night while the firecracker terrorism has been on.)<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRG8m1WjPVbvbMxei--4pqEWWbCM5V7Qk6uJGlOTJ67QbGGTsAYk-J0hkH5wcxhb9eTdsARWoGRhvYd0REOMS3Y94H8NWry7__IcK2qEuVxtDxas_POyt7IdG5B-xTfEhQ8TbuMlHhuFX_ntyYTVil2AUC1t37B2uA5M8GKHc8VvRHCOblXUE/s1512/IMG_1031.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="1134" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRG8m1WjPVbvbMxei--4pqEWWbCM5V7Qk6uJGlOTJ67QbGGTsAYk-J0hkH5wcxhb9eTdsARWoGRhvYd0REOMS3Y94H8NWry7__IcK2qEuVxtDxas_POyt7IdG5B-xTfEhQ8TbuMlHhuFX_ntyYTVil2AUC1t37B2uA5M8GKHc8VvRHCOblXUE/s320/IMG_1031.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the things I have become most aware of in the past 2-3 years is how vulnerable old dogs are (especially old street dogs), and how much more imperative it is to look out for them once they reach a certain age where the eyes and the joints aren’t working well, and movement is impaired. This, unfortunately, is precisely the stage when many of them are most neglected: at an advanced age they aren’t as attractive or personable to human eyes as younger dogs are (I’m talking about the humans who don’t already have a long-time bond with them); many of them no longer even make eye contact, something that is usually the first step in the forming of an intense human-canine relationship; and their last few months are often difficult ones. (Kaali wasn’t all that old – probably 10 or 11 – but she was old enough that she may not have been able to cope with the heavy doses of medication after that completely avoidable accident.). Increasingly these days, when I speak to people who are showing interest in street-animal welfare for the first time, wanting to understand more about the challenges and responsibilities, I ask them to look out as much as they can for older animals and to do whatever possible to make them comfortable. It’s never going to be easy, of course – there are way too many challenges facing animal-carers even when the animals are fit or active – but it’s something that should be prioritised. And yes, for those who need it, an incidental benefit is that taking care of old animals (or even just opening your eyes and noticing them, becoming sensitised to them) is good preparation for similar contingencies – caregiving for older people, looking after yourself as you age – in the human world. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Related posts: <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2020/07/sona-in-remembrance-2015-2020.html">Sona, in remembrance</a>; <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2020/06/animal-chronicles-contd-rescuing-coffee.html">rescuing Coffee</a>; <a href="http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2020/05/lockdown-chronicles-reunion-of-old-foes.html">lockdown chronicles - Lara's mother</a>) </i></span><b><br /></b></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-88170373506640807562023-07-21T20:10:00.004+05:302023-07-21T20:10:50.531+05:30Prometheus, Icarus, Vishnu: thoughts on Oppenheimer<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this review for Money Control)</i><br /><b>-------------------</b><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvow2Cu36XqHrL3kW7bO-f3XpwaIPABrwM5SHMGKLfJdS5QXDM3Rf6LxHqkFiTYVreykr2Dp3WvyVMyCA_a_BtJyFtqtf3LwKKekenz6sdRXssu_0VjI-2f2un3Pz51OALdDN4W8xI_47ciM7gVgCTNmKUo_VAw03egT1n2rB7wY1KgPpYHZBu/s805/oppen%20poster.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="805" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvow2Cu36XqHrL3kW7bO-f3XpwaIPABrwM5SHMGKLfJdS5QXDM3Rf6LxHqkFiTYVreykr2Dp3WvyVMyCA_a_BtJyFtqtf3LwKKekenz6sdRXssu_0VjI-2f2un3Pz51OALdDN4W8xI_47ciM7gVgCTNmKUo_VAw03egT1n2rB7wY1KgPpYHZBu/s320/oppen%20poster.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Early in Christopher Nolan’s busy, non-linear telling of the life and work of the physicist who played a central role in developing America’s atom bomb, there is a dramatised depiction of a true story about the young Robert J Oppenheimer (played here by Cillian Murphy): at Cambridge in the 1920s, a frustrated Robert had laced his tutor’s apple with poison, before coming to his senses and hurrying to prevent damage. <br /><br />The Kai Bird-Martin Sherwin biography <i>American Prometheus</i>, which is the main source material for Oppenheimer, describes this incident as an astounding act of stupidity, one that could have halted the young man’s career before it took off, and indicative of his emotional distress – “his feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy” – at the time. In the film the moment is depicted more casually, even with a little humour (and is also conflated with Oppenheimer’s first meeting with the celebrated Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr) – but it still carries a strong charge. As presented on screen, gleaming in the foreground, the apple is a menacing thing – a reminder of another lethal fruit, in the Garden of Eden. But as Oppenheimer continued, moving into ever darker moral terrain, that early scene felt to me like a reminder of how the shiny green apple of science and rationality can be laced with doom: of science itself as a poisoned fruit of knowledge, and how the people who practice it, in a rapidly changing world, have many personal and political compulsions.<br /><br />“<i>It was no accident that the young boy who would become known as the father of the atomic era was reared in a culture that valued independent inquiry, empirical exploration, and the free-thinking mind</i>,” reads a passage in <i>American Prometheus</i>, “<i>And yet it was the irony of Robert J Oppenheimer’s odyssey that a life devoted to social justice and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud</i>.”<br /><br />In other words, here is a rational man whose life’s work feeds into the most primal and atavistic of human impulses: the impulse to wreak mass destruction that will eventually consume everyone, including the aggressor; the impulse to look for new enemies or “others” after the first lot have been silenced. This see-sawing between rationality and irrationality – in ways that leave it unclear which force is dominant – has been dealt with before in one of Nolan’s better films, <i>The Prestige</i>. But the canvas here is much larger, involving the nature of realpolitik (and scientific progress) at a time when the US, having used the Bomb to end the Second World War, now casts its gaze on the new bogeyman, Communism – with Oppenheimer caught in the crosswinds. <br /><br />With its many narrative threads and tangle of characters and allegiances, this is a demanding, sometimes confusing film if you don’t already know something about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (I was a little lost despite having sped-read portions of the book in preparation). Nolan moves between the regular narrative scenes (shot in colour) about Oppenheimer’s life and the later interrogations (in black-and-white) conducted by those who are concerned about his supposed Communist sympathies, or that a spy may have carried nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The paranoid ravings of AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), who became hostile to Oppenheimer, provide a framing story, an outside look at the film’s protagonist. But we do get up-close views of Oppenheimer and his inner life too, and much of this hinges on the casting of Murphy, and his marvellous performance. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_fQ4UXnjdDUEfFl4-9JnzdgFwOK8AbmTbgTY7eQ41_s-gnEqjbl7r2nsFFbE_swvzNj-X2phP7jVU8dB-zrJ7TQT8hPPUD1DAU2D1kH5ZBcaedzTelTvnRcWpG7pd00Tja1l9KG7bSqi9WDqVjwzXpKFh1rsdkinlNAA6D3hP5_3RkO0lG-6y/s581/prometheus%20boy.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="581" data-original-width="496" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_fQ4UXnjdDUEfFl4-9JnzdgFwOK8AbmTbgTY7eQ41_s-gnEqjbl7r2nsFFbE_swvzNj-X2phP7jVU8dB-zrJ7TQT8hPPUD1DAU2D1kH5ZBcaedzTelTvnRcWpG7pd00Tja1l9KG7bSqi9WDqVjwzXpKFh1rsdkinlNAA6D3hP5_3RkO0lG-6y/s320/prometheus%20boy.png" width="273" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Though Robert’s childhood isn’t depicted, watching Murphy it is easy to see what he might have been like as a boy, and the portrait gels with the one in <i>American Prometheus</i>: an eccentric, lonely, laconic child, prone to being bullied, whose “seemingly brittle and delicate shell disguised a stoic personality built of stubborn pride and determination”. We do see a young Robert who learns Dutch in six weeks to deliver a talk at a seminar, (“because quantum physics isn’t demanding enough?” someone quips). We meet the man who is a Jew with strong personal reasons to be appalled by what is happening in Nazi Germany (the bomb is initially developed to deal with Hitler), as well as the man whose political consciousness is awakened through close friendships with Communists (and who reads lines from the Bhagwad Gita to his Communist lover while they are in bed together). The husband, the passionate adulterer, the cold, distant-seeming scientist who is capable of feeling the horror of what the bomb does in Hiroshima. Hamlet was Oppenheimer’s favourite Shakespeare character, the book tells us, and one can picture the delicate, dreamy-eyed Murphy in a version of that role, struggling with indecision and melancholy about the world he has helped reshape.<br /><br />Despite the introspective man at its centre, this is very often a muscular film, with some of its most lucid and direct moments involving the straight-talking army-man Leslie Groves played by Matt Damon (You might feel, as I did, that the Groves scenes come as a welcome break from the evasiveness and double-talk elsewhere.) The women in Oppenheimer’s life – his wife Kitty, and Jean Tatlock, with whom he apparently had his most intense relationship – don’t get much screen time, though they are played by fine actors like Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh. (Blunt does get a brief scene where – as a wife confronting a husband grieving the death of his lover – she gently ticks Robert off with a statement that will carry a much wider resonance in his life.) In India the explicit sex scenes between Robert and Jean have also been censored, so we are probably missing something of the <i>junoon</i> in this tragic romance, the sense of true passion in Oppenheimer’s life in a realm other than physics. <br /><br />The film moves from shots of men in uniforms sitting in closed, sterile rooms talking endlessly and academically (what cities can the bomb be used on? How far along might the Soviets be in the arms race?) to the kinetic preparations in the great outdoors of the Jornada del Muerto desert (an updated version of the American Wild West) – leading up to its big visual setpiece, the tense nuclear test on an early July morning. The sequence delivers everything you’d expect from a big-budget film by one of the world’s most ambitious directors, but Nolan also seems determined that this shouldn’t be the “money shot” for the viewer, the massive climax that everything is geared towards. And this is a notable choice, because the visceral excitement of watching a skilled filmmaker using his resources to create a stunning action scene can run contrary to the inward-looking tone of a film like this. <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiKeM6AmHXSjRTaLhivRP-nGqcuimmDNOPwKEKM-tX00ALl99UaF_qVFJO65gnr6FkhHoh99u9WF03f4ot8rF1uZWedJzdKyvYTiZduG8OV33-ZZ1c04VO2Bh9IDyYFHxCtVACeiIHuemVCSdTjnI72Oz2ZupWjIFn2PF_MtQDQ9mWsjn-KsGo/s791/book%20oppenheimer.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="791" data-original-width="510" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiKeM6AmHXSjRTaLhivRP-nGqcuimmDNOPwKEKM-tX00ALl99UaF_qVFJO65gnr6FkhHoh99u9WF03f4ot8rF1uZWedJzdKyvYTiZduG8OV33-ZZ1c04VO2Bh9IDyYFHxCtVACeiIHuemVCSdTjnI72Oz2ZupWjIFn2PF_MtQDQ9mWsjn-KsGo/s320/book%20oppenheimer.jpg" width="206" /></a></i></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">If anything, after the Los Alamos test sequence, a sense of inertia enters the film – a reckoning, a pulling back. The news of the Hiroshima bombing is conveyed without much fuss; whatever celebrations there are culminate in a muted scene where Oppenheimer seems to confront the implications of what he has been part of. In its final stretch the film returns, almost as if deliberately choosing monotony over pace, to scenes of men debating in rooms. And to the great conceit that many people who helped build the nuclear bomb must really have believed in – that the ultimate destructive force would help create an idyllic peace. Of course, we can look around us and know better now. (The question “Who are we at war with?” is pointedly asked in the film at one stage – this when the US and Russia are still reluctant allies – but a question running below the surface of the story is: “Is it even possible to <i>not</i> be at war with anyone?”)<br /><br />For Nolan acolytes it sometimes feels like this director can do little or nothing wrong. For many of the rest of us, there is a messiness, bordering on incoherence, in some of his work (and not just in the narratives that are innately convoluted like <i>Inception</i> or <i>Tenet</i>). At the same time, even for Nolan-sceptics, the grandness of vision, the boldness, the willingness to go all out, can be breath-taking. I wasn’t gripped by <i>Oppenheimer</i> from beginning to end, and felt it was overlong, but it achieves depth and poignancy when it cuts through the clutter and focuses on the enigmatic figure at its heart – a Gita-quoting Prometheus bringing a new fire to the world, an Icarus flying too close to a nuclear sun… and at heart perhaps even a pacifist, but who can know for sure?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>(Earlier Money Control pieces <a href="https://www.moneycontrol.com/author/jai-arjun-singh-18211/">here</a>) <br /></i></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-15613009590417241792023-07-17T20:13:00.000+05:302023-07-17T20:13:00.635+05:30In Your Blood I Run: a murder mystery (and a tale about emancipation) set in the 1930s<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Did this review for Reader's Digest) </i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>--------------------<br /></i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The murder mystery can be a tough genre to work in, but it’s even more of a challenge if you locate the narrative in a distant period, adding historical research to the mix. In her fine debut novel, Sonia Bhatnagar juggles these two tasks. Set in 1930s Shimla (and briefly in Bombay), <i>In Your Blood I Run</i> is about a young man named Ratan who is forced to go into hiding after his employer and lover – a married Englishwoman – is murdered. Also caught in the thick of the subsequent investigation is Ratan’s estranged childhood friend Lavanya, and much of the narrative moves back and forth between these two protagonists until their paths gradually converge.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSLdoJmA8Zdd7EZRB_R9F3qdCaFa0aWiTrJqImViCjg8KvJINE5uu8bqeXMLXSjhnUFf1zfa2bWlpug8BIUZPBFp5eFftHy_VilIifDqC7gZJMu3KsW2S_IqD0k8rFTWCCRWjrJvTPckXrZJ6BUQ69bUg4D5F0aLgPL59C16i4RtzEbqy3WzCs/s659/Screenshot%202023-07-17%20at%208.11.51%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="497" data-original-width="659" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSLdoJmA8Zdd7EZRB_R9F3qdCaFa0aWiTrJqImViCjg8KvJINE5uu8bqeXMLXSjhnUFf1zfa2bWlpug8BIUZPBFp5eFftHy_VilIifDqC7gZJMu3KsW2S_IqD0k8rFTWCCRWjrJvTPckXrZJ6BUQ69bUg4D5F0aLgPL59C16i4RtzEbqy3WzCs/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-17%20at%208.11.51%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Though Lavanya is not a suspect in the case herself, she is useful as bait to lure Ratan out. Besides, a collection of her transgressive short stories had been found near the body, and the publicity directs a lot of attention to her book. Many people – including the men leading the investigation – are not pleased about these “dirty” tales in which women express desire, reach for autonomy, slip across the boundaries that society has set for them. <br /><br />In a sense, then, <i>In Your Blood I Run</i> is also about literature’s power to provoke and to emancipate. One startling passage is from Lavanya’s story “Sitara”, in which a young widow, being forced to commit Sati, defies her entire village in her final moments by pleasuring herself even as the flames begin to consume her. (She is thinking of her English lover while doing this.) Here is an image of a woman ensuring that those who have murdered her in the name of tradition will never be able to feel comfortable or self-congratulatory, that they will be haunted by her memory. It also serves as a reminder that different types of freedoms and constraints can intersect, or run counter to, each other – for instance, an Indian woman, bound to a traditional social order, achieves some self-actualisation and freedom through a relationship with an “Angrez”, even though her country is fighting valiantly for independence <i>from</i> the Empire. <br /><br />The basic premise of this thriller – two people, one on the run, the other being bullied and under threat but trying to help her friend – lends itself to a few cliches, and there is a bit of repetitiveness in how it plays out: for instance, on two separate occasions a suspenseful scene involves Ratan trying to escape pursuers by getting to his car on time; and on both occasions he momentarily can’t find his keys (the first time they are fallen on the floor of the car, the second time they are in his pocket). Such passages are a little flat and stretched out, but Bhatnagar is on firmer ground when it comes to the characters’ relationships – in the way, for instance, that Lavanya’s interactions with a Shimla policeman named Amrit Singh start off as antagonistic but soften into something resembling understanding.<br /><br />And, throughout, there is the question of the effect that Lavanya’s stories have on various people, and on what has transpired: might they have influenced the actions of the victim or the murderer, or both? For conservative readers, the Sitara story is made obscene by what the protagonist does, and by her extramarital affair – not by the ghastly practice of forced Sati. For other readers, Sitara becomes a lodestar, possibly showing them the way out of their own traps. Little wonder that the book also invokes the spirits of real-life figures like Jaddanbai and Amrita Sher-gil, known for their determination to compete on equal terms with the men in their fields.</span><br /></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-45506987742352168332023-07-01T13:29:00.000+05:302023-07-01T13:29:17.369+05:30Emotional time-travel (and play-acting) in ’96 and Blue Jay<p><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUSZCH5b7CVVJsAjwuJW28q-P1YXHbKIpZ39QB7BCS4QO0tedfuNyFV3v08pkP1KM8qLx0hv4Wh4fPjqHwEjmyAXfwwvqMQF6HXGZsMmqtgebYN5tAn34kUCHLvUWspAIQt_rLdXIRRVO0ow6CLNZ3Cg0AFMPvrXQRlFWPCEhv7Gz31VLEoLkQ/s793/pink%20jacket.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="657" data-original-width="793" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUSZCH5b7CVVJsAjwuJW28q-P1YXHbKIpZ39QB7BCS4QO0tedfuNyFV3v08pkP1KM8qLx0hv4Wh4fPjqHwEjmyAXfwwvqMQF6HXGZsMmqtgebYN5tAn34kUCHLvUWspAIQt_rLdXIRRVO0ow6CLNZ3Cg0AFMPvrXQRlFWPCEhv7Gz31VLEoLkQ/s320/pink%20jacket.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Wrote this for my Economic Times column. Please note the AI-generated columnist image for this edition, giving me a pink jacket of the “John Jaani Janardhan” school.)</i><br /><b>--------------------</b><br /><br />Favourite old films – the ones that evoke nostalgia or remind us of where we were at a particular time – are often a portal to another dimension; a place where we were different people, with many possibilities ahead of us. So there is a special frisson to be felt when a good film gives us characters who are doing the very same thing – being overwhelmed by a rush of memory or regret. Or even using the engine of the narrative as a means of returning to a supposedly pristine time. <br /><br />I am thinking about two films – about comparable situations – that involve a form of emotional time-travel. In the indie movie Blue Jay, the protagonists Jim and Amanda run into each other two decades after their high-school romance – and then spend the day together talking, reminiscing, divulging (and concealing) things about their current lives. Meanwhile the lovely Tamil film ’96 is about a school-reunion encounter – and the hours afterward – between Ram and Jaanu (played by Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha Krishnan), who were very close as classmates 22 years earlier (even “boyfriend-girlfriend” in the loosely defined small-town Indian way) and may have ended up together but for a few simple twists of fate.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSLfYjMYsGqmp45LLntd9MtjaT_Dx-cO5brprIqfMdYG86FYUEJEOF5ibrf15gDO9F6WBLWJVB8EfXzVM3rh0BwfZx2PFlVXMYRQPq0og71c2gxo3Ij_ULB_eeeQACDfJAMAU6jp8cqA5ufDDP2PZ50Pw9lvj6ZKrdg4FsIjlIY6t70k56WCD2/s707/Screenshot%202023-07-01%20at%201.22.13%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="707" data-original-width="619" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSLfYjMYsGqmp45LLntd9MtjaT_Dx-cO5brprIqfMdYG86FYUEJEOF5ibrf15gDO9F6WBLWJVB8EfXzVM3rh0BwfZx2PFlVXMYRQPq0og71c2gxo3Ij_ULB_eeeQACDfJAMAU6jp8cqA5ufDDP2PZ50Pw9lvj6ZKrdg4FsIjlIY6t70k56WCD2/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-01%20at%201.22.13%20PM.png" width="280" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Both films have striking moments where play-acting temporarily creates a new reality. In a moving scene in Blue Jay, Jim and Amanda find and listen to an old recording they had made when they were together as teens, madly in love and acting out vignettes about an imagined future (where they are married for decades and finally have time to themselves after the children have left the nest). On the tape – itself a sort of time machine – the precocious youngsters perform their fantasy; in the present day the jaded adults listen to the performance, exchanging glances, amused and sorrowful in turn. <br /><br />In ’96, Ram and Jaanu end up spending a few hours together before her flight back to Singapore (where a husband and child await her). There has already been some clearing of misunderstandings, a realisation of how fate had tricked them: what if Ram didn’t suddenly have to leave school because of a family situation? What if a message had been properly communicated to Jaanu when she was in a hostel three years later? And now, there is a little moment at a café, late at night, when they chance to run into his students who immediately assume that the woman he is with is his wife. How did your love story begin, ma’am, they gush, in the manner of kids who believe love stories can never end – and Jaanu plays along, responds seriously, telling them what happened all those years ago but amending it to supply a happy ending. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigW1ddbg3tzVRrUKrij2SixdSX13Dzx_C9QuyVJmpEkY-tGIb8kFRmYlXz5s_OTlHC-M53ihhtG8pZu3BRx0H28mXXi1I-t_kQf1qzrpek6yxHeD1h3Hl_4JZ_OPhzwXLe_bLVi3tUzj0f36LM2SQiXnCN8aJu_heB0fWITAvFSn1U6L869YqP/s1049/Screenshot%202023-07-01%20at%201.21.13%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="1049" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigW1ddbg3tzVRrUKrij2SixdSX13Dzx_C9QuyVJmpEkY-tGIb8kFRmYlXz5s_OTlHC-M53ihhtG8pZu3BRx0H28mXXi1I-t_kQf1qzrpek6yxHeD1h3Hl_4JZ_OPhzwXLe_bLVi3tUzj0f36LM2SQiXnCN8aJu_heB0fWITAvFSn1U6L869YqP/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-01%20at%201.21.13%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: trebuchet;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ram and Jaanu’s movement into the past had really begun a little earlier, with her taking him to a salon and getting his bushy beard shaved off – a playful way of passing the time, but also a way of reanimating the boy she once knew. (Years fall off Sethupathi’s face when that beard goes; when I first saw the film’s trailer, I thought he played Ram in two different periods.) Later they chat in his balcony, a space where they might have spent much time together as a couple in that alternate universe; in a poignant visual gag, they briefly “sleep together” (in a non-sexual sense); at the end, they even enter the airport like a couple going on a holiday. But that’s the last gasp, before reality intrudes. <br /><br />These scenes in both films also reminded me of the great final stretch of the 1937 classic Make Way for Tomorrow, perhaps the first major film on the “parents neglected by children” theme: in the sequence, two old people, knowing they must soon part, go out on the town by themselves, visiting the places they saw when they first got married – reclaiming their lives and autonomy by returning to an idyllic past when the children weren’t yet born. <br /><br />But in both ’96 and Blue Jay, there is also this subtext: the “what if” is built around a longing for an idealised past, combined with degrees of discontentment about the present. (Both Jim and Amanda are depressive; though Jaanu says good things about her arranged-marriage husband, but one senses she would turn the clock back if she could.) Yet it is by no means a given that they would have found pure, lasting happiness if that alternate world had come to pass. Time travel may allow us to imagine endlessly, but in life – as in bittersweet cinema – happy endings are hard to come by. <br /></span><br /></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-43605599555339705512023-06-04T11:29:00.000+05:302023-06-04T11:29:11.994+05:30On ways of worshipping, and being offended: deities and devotees at a film festival<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(From my Economic Times column, a shout-out for three films I recently watched)</i><br /><b>-------------------</b><br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lNlFFVoiKx8s6XtfHFv6TJhtu6hPBJM509YfhH3BGTB0Y3SUvBUHo8CnMAjJusB1rN0702qS4ZDBsbxJjQPxCc5UAwCS3c8oiI1zsKH9m9E7KY1nAxl2M_OTXXKtTVHzESz9OuJ_r7qKvrR7iS7ytbl5toRrXwxJS3Cl2UrMN25r6qI4DA/s596/Screenshot%202023-06-04%20at%2011.11.33%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="596" data-original-width="482" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lNlFFVoiKx8s6XtfHFv6TJhtu6hPBJM509YfhH3BGTB0Y3SUvBUHo8CnMAjJusB1rN0702qS4ZDBsbxJjQPxCc5UAwCS3c8oiI1zsKH9m9E7KY1nAxl2M_OTXXKtTVHzESz9OuJ_r7qKvrR7iS7ytbl5toRrXwxJS3Cl2UrMN25r6qI4DA/s320/Screenshot%202023-06-04%20at%2011.11.33%20AM.png" width="259" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">How many ways are there of representing Gods on screen – both the supernatural ones that have existed for centuries (if only in myths and in the human mind) and contemporary figures who have become Godlike? And how many ways are there of being irked by such depictions? I was thinking about this during a few screenings – and a couple of post-show incidents – at the recent Habitat Film Festival in Delhi. <br /><br />One instance was after the screening of Don Palathara’s <i>Family</i>, a quietly observant, slow-burn film about a Keralite Christian community being infected (in ways that are not always spelt out) by the presence of a seemingly helpful young man named Sony. Much of this narrative is organised around images of priests, nuns, or rituals which maintain a grip over “regular” people; an undercurrent is that religion can bind groups in conspiracies of silence, keeping unsavoury things hidden.<br /><br />Were you concerned about offending religious sensibilities when you made this film, a viewer asked Palathara afterwards. “No, I wasn’t concerned about that at all,” he replied evenly, “When I was growing up, no one worried that they might be offending <i>my</i> feelings by imposing religion on me.”<br /><br />This response begat applause, and the audience seemed to be on the side of the film’s view of organised religion. But a slightly more abrasive mood followed the screening of Siddharth Chauhan’s debut feature <i>Amar Colony</i>, a drolly funny film about another community – the residents of a Shimla building, including a pregnant woman who sometimes has romantic fantasies involving a young garbage collector. After the show, two or three agitated people – from different sections of the audience – demanded to know why the director had shown “disrespect” to Hindu gods and devotees (mainly Krishna and Meera) by associating their names with characters who indulged in sexual peccadilloes. They also objected to what they saw as insensitive religious iconography. <br /><br />What had briefly threatened to turn into an outroar soon died down, but there was something notable about the insistent, bullying tone. All of us can get offended by different things (as Palathara implied, it is possible to be very offended by the hegemony of religion and the way children are subjected to it from an early age), but these viewers weren’t just voicing hurt, they were behaving like they were <i>entitled</i> to get a clear explanation (one that would fully satisfy them) from the filmmaker. They were also ignoring the more positive religious imagery elsewhere in the film, such as an old woman, a Hanuman devotee, imagining a mace as her weapon of choice when she has to deal with trouble. <br /><br />The most enjoyable film I saw at the festival, though, dealt with another type of relationship between Gods and devotees. Geetika Narang Abbasi’s lovely, empathetic documentary <i>Urf</i> is about movie-star “duplicates”, focusing on three men – Firoz Khan, Kishor Bhanushali and Prashant Walde – who made a name and a living by impersonating Amitabh Bachchan, Dev Anand and Shah Rukh Khan respectively, in low-budget films and in live shows. After years of doing this, though, they also yearned to find an independent identity for themselves, or at least to not forever walk in the shadows of giants.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXMd7BRC3HRrDONl93KwFgQ8XFJnzd0qiwYN_eNwYxLwwM0lcUr9Sd0cowQRfCDDpqWjMp6naofsgir2iW2omNshT5L4HVskTvJ4E7DhIma85F7SPk5dj-tVn-L-MPC-KZbSFGLKGPAWaXFeGOFiuq-_xVVwUbMzQeC2hRvGB5-Pq_Rgu8A/s945/Film%20Still%202%20-%20AKA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="531" data-original-width="945" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXMd7BRC3HRrDONl93KwFgQ8XFJnzd0qiwYN_eNwYxLwwM0lcUr9Sd0cowQRfCDDpqWjMp6naofsgir2iW2omNshT5L4HVskTvJ4E7DhIma85F7SPk5dj-tVn-L-MPC-KZbSFGLKGPAWaXFeGOFiuq-_xVVwUbMzQeC2hRvGB5-Pq_Rgu8A/s320/Film%20Still%202%20-%20AKA.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">As a youngster, when I watched films or TV skits featuring celebrity imitators (including Firoz and Kishore, whom I remember well despite not knowing their real names), I felt uneasy. As a Bachchan bhakt, or as someone who had admired the black-and-white-era Dev Anand from a distance, I may even have been offended: mimicry of these screen Gods – often done to get facile laughs – seemed in poor taste. Abbasi’s film made me rethink my feelings by depicting the real-life struggles of these doubles, and by letting their own distinct personalities slowly emerge from beneath the masks (though the film does also derive some charming humour from their impersonations). We see the hint of something bittersweet creeping into the otherwise relaxed and sweet interactions between Prashant and his family – first when his wife jokes that she forgot to clarify to God that she wanted to marry the <i>original</i> Shah Rukh; and later when, despite having expressed pride in his work, Prashant also makes it clear that he wouldn’t want his son to be a lookalike. We see Kishore, still looking like Dev Anand but finding a new niche as a singer who goes on foreign trips and performs songs from old movies. <br /><br />After the screening, when Firoz Khan appeared from the audience, announcing his presence by delivering a line in the Bachchan baritone, everyone applauded But by the time he was on stage, answering questions about his life and career independently of being a double – including his recent work in serials like <i>Jijaji Chhat Par Koi Hai</i> – it was possible to see him as a star in his own right. <i>Urf</i> had reclaimed the dignity of people like him, liberating them from their Gods.<br /></span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-43693675875836605272023-05-29T07:53:00.000+05:302023-05-29T07:53:39.651+05:30Revisiting a neglected thriller: a Nazi in London lives, works, loves and worries about being caught<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi66XKGm3toyDHyTDJoBBsu2XByC9j-1v6Xvx8nb8Ouaw_X1rz6G4HznUGTbNr0at6UOmX7W_J2Heju1bfqIfwQixrSHJSMaMQxuVCXiUUl1Rnwx-Q1a2SHAX9qmoceS4q-gSLwlQZ5YBfWNoDDPE4PyMaUdd55fdDkijAvG36qoNG7HSUx_g/s800/glasspearls.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="521" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi66XKGm3toyDHyTDJoBBsu2XByC9j-1v6Xvx8nb8Ouaw_X1rz6G4HznUGTbNr0at6UOmX7W_J2Heju1bfqIfwQixrSHJSMaMQxuVCXiUUl1Rnwx-Q1a2SHAX9qmoceS4q-gSLwlQZ5YBfWNoDDPE4PyMaUdd55fdDkijAvG36qoNG7HSUx_g/w260-h400/glasspearls.JPG" width="260" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Emeric Pressburger is one of the greatest screenwriters ever, and I am a huge fan of his work with Michael Powell, but I hadn’t heard about Pressburger’s 1966 novel The Glass Pearls – a thriller about a former Nazi doctor in terror of being caught – until last year. Wrote this review <a href="https://scroll.in/author/1977">for Scroll</a></i><br />----------------------------------<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It is well known that conversations about films or books with “problematic” characters often get confrontational, depending on ideological stances, identity politics, or personal triggers. For one among many possible examples, if you’re a male reader or viewer expressing any degree of empathy with a character who exhibits “toxic masculinity” (and who is therefore judged exclusively along those lines), then you might expect to be informed that the only reason you felt that way is because of your gender privilege; or because (<i>Sweeping Assumption Alert</i>) you have never yourself been on the receiving end of such toxicity. White Saviour allegations are routinely directed at films or books about caste oppression that were created by upper-caste people. Entire theses have been built around the idea that it isn’t okay for an author to write an underprivileged protagonist whose experiences he doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of – and that, by extension, a reader who lacks such experience is also an inadequate reader. <br /><br />These are strange positions, given that one of the often-stated functions of art is to put yourself (and “yourself” here can mean both artist and audience) outside your comfort zone, and to at least temporarily occupy the mind-space of someone whom you would ordinarily not identify with, someone whom you might even find repulsive.<br /><br />I was thinking about all this while reading a reissue of Emeric Pressburger’s 1966 novel <i>The Glass Pearls</i>, a book I hadn’t heard of until last year (despite the fact that Pressburger is half of my favourite filmmaking collaboration The Archers, a.k.a Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger, who made a stunning series of British films in the 1940s). Because here is a deeply involving portrait of a murderous former Nazi (assuming one can ever be just a “former Nazi”) in hiding in England – a book whose effectiveness as a thriller depends on the author making us identify with and even care about this protagonist. And yet… <i>The Glass Pearls</i> was written by a Jewish man who spent his life tormented by the memory of his mother dying in Auschwitz, and haunted by the thought of Nazis coming for him. (In the words of Pressburger’s grandson, the film director Kevin MacDonald: “<i>When, delirious after a bad fall towards the end of his life, he was taken to hospital, he fought against the ambulance crew, thinking they were taking him to the gas chamber.</i>”)<br /><br />Briefly, this is the story of an unobtrusive middle-aged German named Karl Braun who is working as a piano tuner in London in the mid-60s, but who also – we learn early in the narrative – conducted grisly operations on concentration-camp victims twenty years earlier. Karl – formerly Dr Otto Reitmuller – is constantly in fear of being caught, constantly looking at the papers and despairing at news of Nazi trials and the extending of the deadline for prosecution of war criminals (at one point he thought he would be safe once he made it to May 1965, which was the initial deadline; now he realises he will probably never be out of harm’s way).<br /><br />We follow him as he lives his new life: bantering with his flatmates and with his colleagues at work, displaying courtliness and humour, beginning a reticent semi-romance with a much younger woman named Helen. Yet he has to be alert all the time, antennae raised, prepared to be suspicious of everyone around him, holding arguments and counter-arguments in his head about the potentially suspicious behaviour of this or that person, analysing the workings of his own mind – all the while having recurring nightmares about a trial where he is eventually set free (except that he then finds himself in the dock again the next night, night after night). And he must contend with the possibility of having to escape to South America to join the rest of the fugitive Brotherhood:</span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-size: medium;">“He shuddered at the thought of spending the rest of his life among disgruntled sexagenarians who had one single purpose in life: to become octogenarians. Still there might be others like himself, interested in the sort of life he was, who loved books and music […] on Sundays they could make music, take long walks, the air would be clean and sharp – suddenly he knew that all he was yearning for was peace. Rest, after twenty years of running.”</span></blockquote><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s very likely that anyone who becomes involved with this narrative will, at some point, at least, feel for Braun. The success of <i>The Glass Pearls</i> as a paranoia-story – an excellent one in my view – hinges largely on this. How does Pressburger pull off this empathy? There are a few possible answers. One of them is simply that when a good novelist leads us deep into a character’s inner space (and does this with conviction and honesty), our moral senses take a back-seat to the process of becoming interested in a particular individual, in the many conflicting facets and impulses that can make up a life. <br /><br />Since this narrative is subjective third-person, we are tied to Braun’s thoughts and feelings (except for a closing chapter that serves as a coda, allowing us to draw back and take a look at the whole canvas). Keeping us thus latched to his consciousness, letting us feel his fear, Pressburger leads us through a series of pulse-racing incidents. Hearing from a colleague about the complaints of a xenophobic visitor who doesn’t like the idea of foreigners being given jobs when so many Englishmen are unemployed, Braun worries that this mysterious man may be a spy trying to ferret out Germans. Arriving at the Albert Hall for a tuning job, he thinks he hears footsteps followed by a whispered “Herr Doctor!” from the shadows; shaken, he is nonetheless willing to dismiss this as a phantom of his fevered mind… until he learns from the doorman outside that someone had indeed come asking about him.</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP7n2q4ZGWSUrtR2i1nmpgixDNFPTpgsw4fNHbvOriumk_3w0glTzHf75z1XmGVT6ntZS4dkK0qnFidh7hoU98Vi3JbAzVfidG-zznuoPAS2fs9RsKaePqrw3_7soAvsVdjLUxL02nqLu5w9ie-NQgiqLjD0PhvDw0XJnnIWcHfCwvKaA7Yw/s498/Screenshot%202023-05-28%20at%206.35.04%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="425" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP7n2q4ZGWSUrtR2i1nmpgixDNFPTpgsw4fNHbvOriumk_3w0glTzHf75z1XmGVT6ntZS4dkK0qnFidh7hoU98Vi3JbAzVfidG-zznuoPAS2fs9RsKaePqrw3_7soAvsVdjLUxL02nqLu5w9ie-NQgiqLjD0PhvDw0XJnnIWcHfCwvKaA7Yw/s320/Screenshot%202023-05-28%20at%206.35.04%20PM.png" width="273" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">If there are famous cinematic examples of a viewer being manipulated into the “wrong” moral position (hoping, for instance, that the car with a murdered woman’s body in <i>Psycho</i> sinks all the way into the swamp), <i>The Glass Pearls</i> builds such moments through Braun’s valiant effort to escape his pursuers while trying to stay composed. In one passage, when he finally reaches the Zurich bank from where he has to withdraw his secret hoard of money, he can’t locate the building, and briefly panics at the thought that the bank may have gone bust. I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader who experienced a momentary sinking of the heart at this.<br /><br />****<br /><br />At one point Pressburger matter-of-factly drops in an important piece of information about Braun’s past – the fact that his beloved wife and his infant daughter were killed in an air-raid in 1943, that he loved them and mourns them still. This is not done as a sentimentalising device to “explain”, much less “justify” his actions – it is simply there, a testament that it’s possible to have done hideous things and to still have loved deeply, or to be vulnerable in other ways. In his own way (very limited, of course, compared to the suffering he caused), Braun has also gone through a sort of penance: living his new identity over the previous two decades meant cutting off from things that were enormously important to him once, such as practising medicine, or playing the violin, which he was addicted to. (The poignancy of this comes through in a scene where he unexpectedly has to move a violin out of the way while at work, and we realise what it means to him to even touch the instrument after so many decades.)<br /><br />The very process of humanising Braun raises the stakes in some ways, makes what he has done in the past much more disturbing, and sets us up for the carpet to be pulled out from under our feet. How different the effect would have been if he had been presented, unambiguously, as a monster whose ethical compass or sense of “values” was completely different from ours – or missing altogether, like a psychopath without an empathy gene. Instead what we get is a man who is capable of love, grief, self-pity, indignation, or the excited, school-boy-like feeling that can arise even in much older people when the possibility of a romance arises. <br /><br />One can also point out, pedantically perhaps, that the book never exculpates Braun. Towards the end, as he thinks the net is closing around him, he does something that allows us to see how self-centred and merciless he can be when the stakes reach their highest point. But, wait… might this not be true for most of us as well, Nazi or non-Nazi?<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh3QiCteUnAn9szT-S5XgGEvlezRQsqixoyc1T3F_Qme13xYra7RPofB2s1dKvgko8cqE0VH6A0vnBf8MNju-2kUbTJKgfidovxqRnqA-Ix53AoxR_ljBk05_8W5QA2PlTS7c2kJwySLumDpOhq8n8SGrgwYb2tpzPavli2oM4TnS7aWNHLw/s973/pp%20collage%202.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="973" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh3QiCteUnAn9szT-S5XgGEvlezRQsqixoyc1T3F_Qme13xYra7RPofB2s1dKvgko8cqE0VH6A0vnBf8MNju-2kUbTJKgfidovxqRnqA-Ix53AoxR_ljBk05_8W5QA2PlTS7c2kJwySLumDpOhq8n8SGrgwYb2tpzPavli2oM4TnS7aWNHLw/s320/pp%20collage%202.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In the films that he wrote for Michael Powell in the 1940s, Pressburger repeatedly gave us morally ambiguous situations as well as characters who lived across a conservative-progressive spectrum: in <i>A Canterbury Tale</i>, a man who uses a very questionable, even criminal, method to preserve “tradition” in his village is a sympathetic figure by the end (even as the film as a whole is on the side of the forward-looking young people in it); in <i>The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp</i> the protagonist goes, over four decades, from being a likable and charming young soldier to a </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBjbvipfw5x3SUf7KCQ7yum4Q7FMtRS_ILmHYGU6O7JvC4Q3ufA5M8_aT64_RgO2439-QWpmpE6YoB9alYMmdeQTKSBBDsfVwko_dyawjoHjTkSm3mcfDSwHtZZEqkXjZxTcuD_QsdTtAE-SJSKMu1oK-4ZXZYEk7mVkNivZyPiQN5im8UvQ/s512/powellpressburger.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="472" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBjbvipfw5x3SUf7KCQ7yum4Q7FMtRS_ILmHYGU6O7JvC4Q3ufA5M8_aT64_RgO2439-QWpmpE6YoB9alYMmdeQTKSBBDsfVwko_dyawjoHjTkSm3mcfDSwHtZZEqkXjZxTcuD_QsdTtAE-SJSKMu1oK-4ZXZYEk7mVkNivZyPiQN5im8UvQ/s320/powellpressburger.JPG" width="295" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">harrumphing old walrus mocked by youngsters of a new era; a celestial trial in <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> celebrates the English way of life but also finds time for a pointed statement about the evils of colonialism (even making the chastening remark “Think of India” – this in a British film made in 1946!). Crossing the line between reality and fantasy, and exploring the strange and unknowable workings of the mind, these films remain unclassifiable. In its own special way, with its loathsome but recognisably human protagonist, <i>The Glass Pearls</i> belongs with them. </span><br /></span><p></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-264802142233281822023-05-28T08:53:00.002+05:302023-05-28T08:53:50.650+05:30On NT Rama Rao's centenary, remembering the early NTR<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>It is NT Rama Rao’s birth centenary tomorrow. I wrote this little tribute for Money Control (through the lens of a north Indian viewer who came quite late to some of his superstar-making 1950s films)…</i><br /><b>----------------------</b><br /><br />One of the pleasures of watching the 2018 biopic <i>Mahanati</i> – about the celebrated actress Savitri – is the film’s affectionate, detailed recreation of famous scenes from 1950s Telugu and Tamil films. Playing the title role, Keerthy Suresh channels the Savitri spirit in musical sequences of the era, including an uproarious one from <i>Maya Bazaar</i>; Dulquer Salman plays Gemini Ganesan; and Naga Chaitanya has a small part as his real-life grandfather Akkineni Nageswara Rao (ANR). Here are legends of a rich period in South Indian cinema being paid tribute to by contemporary actors.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiISQiFky-n949GuGxwbT6lGOh4huOE-3pMD0tgYmpXaqJcM2UGTci6M4cpLWQqORuYmUJEUB1DJqryzutQ74102Mc2z5tLNQHTr9cfpmDjkFV-dxN9x8xZWeQmAarzzOFCL63r4s7c34rZ9xHhU5JFa8xf8QkLcGOH2WlFrIYd5adeEskTyA/s850/Screenshot%202023-05-28%20at%208.50.53%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="476" data-original-width="850" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiISQiFky-n949GuGxwbT6lGOh4huOE-3pMD0tgYmpXaqJcM2UGTci6M4cpLWQqORuYmUJEUB1DJqryzutQ74102Mc2z5tLNQHTr9cfpmDjkFV-dxN9x8xZWeQmAarzzOFCL63r4s7c34rZ9xHhU5JFa8xf8QkLcGOH2WlFrIYd5adeEskTyA/s320/Screenshot%202023-05-28%20at%208.50.53%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">With one exception. In an early scene – where young Savitri visits the set of <i>Shavukaru</i> (1950) – we see a muscular actor doing an action shot. At first he is shown only from the back, but as he turns around the camera zooms in, the colour film fades into black-and-white – and the face that appears in close-up (aided by computer-generated imagery) is unmistakably that of a people’s superstar in one of his first lead roles.<br /><br />Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao.<br /><br />In this moment, it is almost as if Mahanati is saying: when it comes to NTR, we have to show the original – nothing else will do. It feels like a form of darshan – the real NTR “blessing” this film with his presence – that is part of the cult surrounding movie stars in India (especially with south Indian superstars who often played mythological Gods onscreen while being adored like deities in their everyday lives). Watching the scene, even as a north Indian who did not grow up watching this superstar, I could feel the magic; I could imagine how his first appearance in a film, back in the 50s and 60s, would have affected viewers. <br /><br />As a boy, my only encounter with NTR was through a glimpse – on Doordarshan’s Regional Cinema slot – of <i>Daana Veera Soora Karna</i> (1977), which he directed and in which he famously played Karna as well as Krishna and Duryodhana. Enthralled though I was by anything Mahabharata-related, this felt like overkill and I wasn’t much taken by the portly middle-aged man preening on his chariot and declaiming sentences in a language I couldn’t understand. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje8JMDG_t9VY_b_-tXo-UJjmQfqJbhuIxIcjo2q3wd_ze6Bjcg1o9eQcTPqeFLQ1EgMYJzAE2ToKl4vMQriBmrujik_7wkcxDAJYsjWH36X-l5sIOt2PdvIUqlvgtL5ZD8KKuGh9FhvQi8p0yjsRKFKyep51MjF8czibOGGNIEEzL88ci0pA/s709/Screenshot%202020-08-27%20at%2010.12.22%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="709" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje8JMDG_t9VY_b_-tXo-UJjmQfqJbhuIxIcjo2q3wd_ze6Bjcg1o9eQcTPqeFLQ1EgMYJzAE2ToKl4vMQriBmrujik_7wkcxDAJYsjWH36X-l5sIOt2PdvIUqlvgtL5ZD8KKuGh9FhvQi8p0yjsRKFKyep51MjF8czibOGGNIEEzL88ci0pA/s320/Screenshot%202020-08-27%20at%2010.12.22%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But it was a completely different matter when, decades later, I watched his first Mahabharata screen performance – as Krishna in the masterful <i>Maya Bazaar</i> (1957). There is a startling early scene where Krishna – seated with his family to watch a stage show about his own boyhood adventures! – is distracted by Draupadi’s cry of distress from faraway Hastinapura (where the dice game has led to her attempted disrobing). Within seconds, NTR shifts from one rasa to the next: relaxed enjoyment – beatific smile on his face as he watches his own mythologising – yields to a perturbed state as he processes the new signals coming to him; anger and pity commingle; he channels his inner divinity, performs the long-distance miracle; then shakes out of his trance as his concerned family members ask what is going on.<br /><br />For a Mahabharata acolyte, the scene was fascinating because in all other movie or TV versions the “vastra-haran” scene takes place in the Hastinapura hall: we are with Draupadi and the Pandavas and Kauravas, and Krishna appears as a sort of hologram on the wall. But in Maya Bazaar the perspective is changed completely. We see Krishna’s everyday life being interrupted by the demands of godly intervention.<br /><br />Vamsee Juluri’s book <i>Bollywood Nation: India Through its Cinema</i> notes how the Telugu mythological films of the 1950s and 1960s moved between the mundane and the divine: when required there were the “big moments” where the Gods revealed themselves in all their glory; but for the most part the stories were intimate, like drawing-room plays, focusing on a minor side-story from the epics. NTR’s charismatic but approachable Krishna fit this scheme very well.<br /><br /><i></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2-P-dvk-CEHHSeie67VpkqgE4QTA4XH6ARyWFVYypicMMBCzXCrG8OKH0mwo_ApLZs1-MId3WUUzjUh3cBT22szrWRG0YGEWjcoh1G6sucAbf9tp6nse0YEXvUJnjGknYVbtBptBh1pZHQFjD6mN3-FIIqSwPS3lcJuKe8_E4aA6VPfERlw/s567/Screenshot%202023-05-17%20at%203.12.18%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="567" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2-P-dvk-CEHHSeie67VpkqgE4QTA4XH6ARyWFVYypicMMBCzXCrG8OKH0mwo_ApLZs1-MId3WUUzjUh3cBT22szrWRG0YGEWjcoh1G6sucAbf9tp6nse0YEXvUJnjGknYVbtBptBh1pZHQFjD6mN3-FIIqSwPS3lcJuKe8_E4aA6VPfERlw/s320/Screenshot%202023-05-17%20at%203.12.18%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Maya Bazaar</i> can be seen as a culmination of his early work in the 1950s – a decade that showed the gradual evolution of a star-actor with many possibilities open to him. Two wonderful examples are in the fantasy <i>Pathala Bhairavi </i>(1951) and in the comedy-drama <i>Missamma</i> (1955). In the former – almost as if in preparation for playing a relatable God – NTR is Ramu the gardener’s son who transitions into a dashing action man (and looks very good shirtless) when the situation demands it; Ramu is fated for larger-than-life encounters when he falls in love with a princess and gets involved with an evil sorcerer. In the film’s second half, NTR is somewhat overshadowed by the great SV Ranga Rao’s juicier part as the antagonist, but his easy-going charm anchors the film, and much of Patala Bhairavi’s lasting power depends on our identification with this hero.<br /><br />As an actor, NTR didn’t have the reputation of being a heavy-lifter in the way that Sivaji Ganesan (for instance) did, but he had a real knack for light comedy in different settings. He could pull it off while playing Krishna bantering with Balarama or Ghatotkacha, or while playing a dashing, Errol Flynn-like lead in <i>Pathala Bhairavi</i>, but he also did it in the modern story </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2PELwmRbelmC2EPQifwjVQaBANb2q4EGyATW0LtGiNZ8QLxtQX-c9clVXLGiwFW2mO2avTCmdbU3Nwge0ChjVkt3HKpSMdtUMH7J3dcrSZkSmu2JAjgoagG0Kybk_b_blw5fMukyHX4lW6JwrvUPhpdeB95KRRCIP2JLtBGvcZpi9MfrEtw/s567/Screenshot%202023-05-28%20at%208.48.50%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="423" data-original-width="567" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2PELwmRbelmC2EPQifwjVQaBANb2q4EGyATW0LtGiNZ8QLxtQX-c9clVXLGiwFW2mO2avTCmdbU3Nwge0ChjVkt3HKpSMdtUMH7J3dcrSZkSmu2JAjgoagG0Kybk_b_blw5fMukyHX4lW6JwrvUPhpdeB95KRRCIP2JLtBGvcZpi9MfrEtw/s320/Screenshot%202023-05-28%20at%208.48.50%20AM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: medium;">told in <i>Missamma</i> – about two young people of different religions who masquerade as husband and wife to get a job. As the earnest, sometimes goofy MT Rao, he revels in the many comical double-takes necessitated by the film’s plot, but is equally persuasive as the romantic lead slowly falling in love with Mary (Savitri) while also indulging the attention of Sita (Jamuna). Or the unemployed young man who ruefully tells a conman that as a BA graduate he doesn’t have the option of using underhanded ploys to get money. <br /><br />Later in life, like almost every big male star with a long career in Indian cinema, NTR fell back on familiar mannerisms and tics, offering variations on earlier performances (with a few inventive choices along the way). In his three roles in the aforementioned <i>Daana Veera Soora Karna</i>, one sees the intuitive ability to tap into this or that mood depending on the part – along with the hubris of a superstar who believes he has earned the right to do anything. However, to watch his first outings as a screen star on the cusp of becoming a screen deity is to see a performer who moved easily between the big gesture and the intimate one – someone who could be mischievous God, vulnerable human, intrepid adventurer, or all of these at the same time.</span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8204542.post-67079909043418949902023-04-29T13:16:00.000+05:302023-04-29T13:16:08.096+05:30About the Khabar Lahariya journalists, and the documentary Writing with Fire<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibgMg7kDSYzSQN673Tlhk7J8XKEdw2qyXj_CpPqephdTwvNTqfMxbI76u7WKllGNefiNdXDRHDGlH-J418CqddQHjnLtzUX55XS6e8fu_vVjUBLh6XgHZwZbFUTysYqTntJ8a1Di6sU9zMwTOSh_QMl0icfIthXtD-bL5qXHzY-FuFxhK03g/s318/Writing_With_Fire.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="318" data-original-width="220" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibgMg7kDSYzSQN673Tlhk7J8XKEdw2qyXj_CpPqephdTwvNTqfMxbI76u7WKllGNefiNdXDRHDGlH-J418CqddQHjnLtzUX55XS6e8fu_vVjUBLh6XgHZwZbFUTysYqTntJ8a1Di6sU9zMwTOSh_QMl0icfIthXtD-bL5qXHzY-FuFxhK03g/s1600/Writing_With_Fire.jpeg" width="220" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;">(Wrote this for my Economic Times column) </i></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"><b>--------------------------------------- </b></i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Tell the Truth.”<br />“Is it Interesting?”<br /><br />These are words on newspaper-office boards in two 1950s Hollywood films, <i>Ace in the Hole</i> and <i>The Tarnished Angels</i> respectively. In both films, especially the former (which is still among the most caustic narratives about unethical journalism), the words carry an ironic charge – a warning that the reporters will play fast and loose with the truth, or make things extra “interesting”. <br /><br />Mirroring life, cinema has never lacked for stories about compromised or corrupt media; if you watch a current Indian film or web series with a scene involving journalists, you’ll almost certainly see parasitic reporters or shrieking TV anchors. Only rarely does one find movies that show journalists doing their jobs in a principled, straightforward manner. It comes as a relief, then, and a reminder that such possibilities exist, to watch the Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary <i>Writing with Fire</i>. Directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, this film chronicles the ground-breaking work of the <i>Khabar Lahariya</i> newspaper started by Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh in 2002. <br /><br />For these journalists from unprivileged spaces, uncovering the truth – and speaking it to power – is paramount, and the film follows chief reporter Meera and members of her team, including the likable, outspoken Suneeta and the initially diffident Shyamkali. It chronicles their reporting on everyday issues facing the poor, including relatively common crimes and miscarriages of justice – an old woman weeps that for decades the girls in her family haven’t had a toilet; a raped woman’s complaint is ignored by the police; a TB-ridden village has no doctors or medicines – before moving on to larger political developments in the state, around the time that the right-wing Adityanath government comes to power.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCktbkDmtXBt9PO-6hKAFdv1NUdLEB7WJMV6FqCJhredQBxBEWzzLcH1PXQLN3nwOqtHotlqtPw2jbra5evMFwCvfkJ3cOA8jgCeiscqZtZwNIjlQMfL1sOvBIA1hY_ftOcJXnRCb6AWETga_nWO4auoCZeozpzkelfwqJWBeeWLT92fFufQ/s850/Screenshot%202023-04-22%20at%209.23.09%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="454" data-original-width="850" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCktbkDmtXBt9PO-6hKAFdv1NUdLEB7WJMV6FqCJhredQBxBEWzzLcH1PXQLN3nwOqtHotlqtPw2jbra5evMFwCvfkJ3cOA8jgCeiscqZtZwNIjlQMfL1sOvBIA1hY_ftOcJXnRCb6AWETga_nWO4auoCZeozpzkelfwqJWBeeWLT92fFufQ/s320/Screenshot%202023-04-22%20at%209.23.09%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Even the most rigorous documentaries have their own lenses – they aren’t “objective” depictions of reality (as if such a thing were possible). Writing with Fire makes its political stance clear, stressing <i>Khabar Lahariya</i>’s attempts to look the BJP’s paternalistic nationalism in the eye. One striking scene has Meera interviewing a Hindu Yuva Vahini leader who, when asked about his vision for governance, pauses and says solemnly, “Dekhiye, gau-raksha, gau-seva toh meri pehli prathmikta hai” (“Cow protection and cow service are my first priorities”) before segueing to an explanation of why he always carries a sword around (his “Muslim bhai” are praying for his death). It is both a comical moment and a scary one. Another scene set in Srinagar, where some of the journalists go for a fun trip – posing for photos in the snow, feeling independent and in control – becomes the setting for a discussion about the UP elections, and the fear that women’s rights will be curtailed in the name of “keeping them safe”. <br /><br />At a more intimate level, though, what’s compelling about this film is its depiction of the individual journeys and struggles of these women. In one scene, involving reportage on illegal mining that resulted in workers being trapped and killed, Suneeta recalls the competitive spirit of her childhood when she tried to fill a tractor with pebbles (to help with the mining) as fast as possible, so as to not fall behind the other girls. We see that this same competitive spirit has now been transmitted to her journalistic work, as she goes forth to report in the same area. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoBU_XMw-oHTlZdHKTUgGe0__WWnFVU0D3_Ajx_S7qZBdigcFV5cO6BO91N6ZELkSTRd0JUd4ZyyowhdWgVVDx4xoOdTH4-D8p8JomJAAySexqcYJLzTgLuQva_Bcmyv7MG0-d904ZmC7D9bjUH0wt5GciSjW3Rm_FPkvNiyczFOH9MXQJ1A/s992/Screenshot%202023-04-28%20at%207.01.44%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="992" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoBU_XMw-oHTlZdHKTUgGe0__WWnFVU0D3_Ajx_S7qZBdigcFV5cO6BO91N6ZELkSTRd0JUd4ZyyowhdWgVVDx4xoOdTH4-D8p8JomJAAySexqcYJLzTgLuQva_Bcmyv7MG0-d904ZmC7D9bjUH0wt5GciSjW3Rm_FPkvNiyczFOH9MXQJ1A/s320/Screenshot%202023-04-28%20at%207.01.44%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Most of these reporters have not led lives that have equipped them to do what they are doing here; they have to learn on the job, often in dire circumstances. How to negotiate the complicated world of smart-phones, as the shift to digital news begins? (At a meeting, a young woman says she doesn’t even touch the mobile phone in her house, and is afraid of damaging it.) How to keep a phone charged when there is hardly any electricity at home? On a personal note, I remember what it was like, even as an urbanite who was very conversant with the internet, to begin self-publishing on a blog for the first time 20 years ago – choosing templates, figuring out HTML tags. How much more daunting it must be for someone who hasn’t learnt how to decipher written letters, to press a series of keys on a device to generate meaning. <br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp5gdfW8H_8pzU122uSywJSoOobzElX9k2sKSPg8O5baJLgKVo7VsShPDTbdEonKNskeDPsfC6QOmspGKzBs73hxclhkYEjUhm0r9HHS231njf9gcvXX2tFkNcT7qGV302TnagUSsjBeENaXS-s7U59TQSMTrZjVpxMY5pDa9bhoWOFTo-VQ/s992/Screenshot%202023-04-28%20at%207.01.14%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="992" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp5gdfW8H_8pzU122uSywJSoOobzElX9k2sKSPg8O5baJLgKVo7VsShPDTbdEonKNskeDPsfC6QOmspGKzBs73hxclhkYEjUhm0r9HHS231njf9gcvXX2tFkNcT7qGV302TnagUSsjBeENaXS-s7U59TQSMTrZjVpxMY5pDa9bhoWOFTo-VQ/s320/Screenshot%202023-04-28%20at%207.01.14%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></i></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But it had to be done, and the <i>Khabar Lahariya</i> story is, apart from anything else, about self-empowerment in the social-media age. One is always aware of the constraints and pressures in these lives – whether it is through a scene where Meera’s husband talks pleasantly but patronisingly about the newspaper (“we didn’t expect it to do well but it has, which is good – now let’s see how long it will run!”) while she peels vegetables, or a glimpse of the ambitious Suneeta yielding to societal pressure to get married. But in the end, it is our knowledge of these constraints that makes the hard-earned triumphs sweeter and more satisfying… and a universe removed from the media world that so many of us take for granted, the eight little windows full of yelling faces that might amuse gurgling two-year-olds at dinner-time, but achieve almost nothing of news value.</span></span></p>Jabberwockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10210195396120573794noreply@blogger.com0