Understanding parenting "Reality Bites" Style

Dear Snowflakes,

One of the most amazing things for me to experience is Chuk-Chuk's increasing vocabulary. She is not-quite-three but every time she uses a new word correctly, I find myself just a little bit stunned. Where did she learn that? I ask myself. Each time.

Today's addition: almost.

I know. I know. What a dorky thing to say. What's there to be stunned over when every not-quite-three girl out there is literally programmed to spout new words at this age?

Nothing. Except that parenthood is all about dorkiness. Every parent since the beginning of human history has had the same experiences. But each parent is programmed to experience them as something unique and stunning.

I guess a good analogy to my life before and after kids is the 90s cult-classic Reality Bites. (Because, you love movies).

Before having kids, I was Ethan Hawke. I would never allow anything to surprise me, shock me, thrill me or hurt me. And post-kids, I've turned into that puppy dog Ben Stiller. For was there ever a more eager line spoken on the silver screen than Stiller's: "Have I crossed some lines on the sands of coolness with you?"

But then again, to understand this transformation, we must revisit that uber-cool question that the magazine editor throws at Ryder: How do you define irony?

The answer: "When the actual meaning is the exact opposite from the literal meaning."

I guess, when it comes to experiencing life with irony then it would mean finding something miserable in the joyful and something joyful in the miserable. Which is why it is so hard to be ironic and a parent. Parenting is hard enough (no, there is nothing joyful about its miseries) without you refusing to experience its little joys wholeheartedly.

I guess as for "irony", I will  leave it for the day Chuk-Chuk throws the word at me.

Love
Mumbaikar in Melbourne
PS: So in the pursuit of uncoolness, here's one for you Chuk-Chuk and AJ (minus the French kissing of course). You both make me so proud.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali vs Wes Andersen: Or A Comparative Analysis of Little Consequence.

It was after watching Wes Andersen’s The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou that I first found myself questioning whether I was being too hard on Sanjay Leela Bhansali for his movies set in never-never India. 

After all, both Andersen and Bhansali set their characters in unlikely settings that disoriented our sense of time and place. Both prefer exploring the the lives and times of the priviledged upper classes. Both are acute aesthetes with a particular love for all things vintage. And finally, both litter their creations with myriad references drawn from unlikely sources. 

So why is it that while the sibling protagonists of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited and the father-son explorer duo of the Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou absolutely charmed me, the heros and heroines of Black, Guzaarish and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (particularly the first two) left me a little irritated and confused? 

Was I - horror of horror - one of those people who immediately accepted the pretensions of foreigners but played-down the works of her compatriots? 

It was after attending a talk by Sabyasachi Mukherjee - the costume designer of Black and Guzaarish - about his work in the two films that the deceptively simple answer dawned on me.

Andersen succeeds while Bhansali fails because he makes comedies whereas Bhansali tragedies. 

ANDERSEN'S characters and settings are eccentric, if not outright outlandish. The Tenenbaum family is characterised by its dysfunctionality. Steve Zizou is the last of the seafaring explorers out to discover the mysterious murderous fish that ate-up his friend (I kid you not). And the three foppish American-Jewish brothers of The Darjeeling Limited go on a spiritual journey across India in a Palace-On-Wheels-like train hoping for a life-changing experience. And he gives them all kinds of aesthetic quirks: the clothes, the accesories, the sets, the music hark back to many different eras and cultures at the same time. 

But here’s the thing. Andersen doesn’t ask us to or identify with these weirdos or find them believable. He merely wants us to be amused by them. If there is an emotional quotient to his films, it only ever hovers on the surface ready to recede instantly in favour of the next eccentric twist. The highly stylised sets, clothes and ambience only add to the characters’ alienness. And we, as audience, remain amused observers of these curiously aesthetic, dysfuntional beings throughout the length of the film.  

Andersen doesn't take his characters or his audience too seriously. 

ON THE OTHER HAND, Bhansali demands that we as audience immerse ourselves into the raw emotional experiences of his characters: the deaf, dumb, blind Michelle McNelly’s struggles to express herself, Nandini’s determination to realise a pre-marital love affair, and the quadraplegic Ethan Mascarenhas’ desire for mercy-killing. All this darkness is overarched by a theme of everlasting love. There is nothing remotely amusing about these characters or their situations. 

Yet, Bhansali refuses to give them a recognisable backdrop. All throughout Black, I kept struggling to place McNelly in a specific time period. There was a lovely vintage quality to the clothes, sets and backdrop that pointed towards a rich, Anglo-Indian family living in pre-Indepedence Shimla. Yet, the references limited themselves to cold, inanimate things. There were no British people intermingling with Indians in saris or nehru topis, no references to the political turmoil: anything that clashed with the immaculate European aesthetics of the setting was cleansed-off the frame. The McNellys were basically European, accidentally being played by Indian actors. Ditto, the Rajasthan-Italy combo of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, and the Goa of Guzaarish (which somehow seemed closer to the crumbling Colombia of One Hundred Years of Solitude to me). 

Unfortunately for us, the audience, we are then asked to become one with these outlandish creatures: to cry in fury, misery or sadness with them and for them. But how? All through Black, I kept getting distracted by the unlikely but overpowering sets. And I kept feeling manipulated. Bhansali wanted me to feel urgently for McNelly, but at the same time maintain an aesthetic distance from her life. One minute I was invited in, the other minute decidedly booted out. At least, McNelly shared her ordinary looks with us. The Sofia of Guzaarish in her garters, gypsy skirts, aprons and faux-European demeanour didn’t even offer us that. In fact, my mind absolutely refused to interact with this alien creature. Let Bhansali and Mukherjee cry for her, it said, since they thinks she is so fantastic.  

If you want to evoke human feelings, you have interact with the ugliness of our human lives, right? In fact, some of the world’s most raw, emotional artworks - think The Scream, Guernica or Francis Bacon’s works - are ugly. It is a precarious aesthetic ugliness however, and for that reason, they are deemed masterpieces. 

So tell you what, Mr Bhansali. You give me a character decidedly rooted in a reality (ugliness and all), and I will give you one whole bucketful of tears in return. 

And let’s leave the bohemian aesthetics to Andersen. 

Guzaarish & Black: Or a tale about Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Bohemia and Films

A tale from never-never Goa

Dear Sabyasachi, 

I don’t normally write to fashion designers. But I lost my way around Melbourne Central pondering over your unsatisfying answer to my question at the masterclass yesterday. It was most annoying and I missed feeding my 5-month-old baby girl. After that I felt I owed it to myself to demand a debate. 

My question related to your and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s inspirations and references to the two films you discussed: Black & Guzaarish. Why were the inspirations and references so decidedly European? And if the characters were based in never-never land where to do you begin building a costume language for them? 

You began by saying that this was a tiny sample of your huge body of work, and was not representative of your myriad inspirations and references.  

Then you added that you consider yourself a global Indian, who draws inspiration from anywhere and everywhere and your life and work reflects that. And that if I visited a friend’s house and found his life, travels and inspirations decorating his walls, wouldn’t the resulting bohemia enchant me?

I guess, you were saying that the characters of Guzaarish and Black were a result of your inspirations. And you reserve the right to draw your inspiration from anywhere. And the resulting bohemia is enchanting.

At first, I loved your answer. Mainly because after five years of living in five different countries, I am finally moving into my own home. My thoughts are consumed by how do I use this empty space to create a story about my life, thoughts, inspirations and passions. And your comment encapsulated my feelings.

But then, as soon as you moved on to the next question, I realised that your answer called for a counterquestion. 

Isn’t bohemia for the sake of bohemia meaningless? Bohemia, more than anything else, is interesting if it is organic but not if it is overly-constructed.

I would love my friend’s house if I found that the memorabilia decorating the walls truly reflected his or her experiences, travels and passions. But if they were there merely for aesthetics and effect, I would find it pretentious. Like when a friend, who generally disliked Bollywood and didn’t get irony, suddenly placed a 1980s Bollywood poster on her living room wall. It looked fashionable and arresting, but was it interesting? I thought not because it said so little about her. 

Sure creating a gypsy skirt for a nurse in never-never Goa - as you and Bhansali did in Guzaarish - is fashionable and arresting, but is it interesting? 

Sure putting a Parsi lacing on a Michelle McNelly in never-never Shimla - as you did in Black - is fashionable and arresting, but is it interesting?  

Sabyasachi Mukherjee at Hoyt's Melbourne, June 13

And while films belongs to its creators - and I count you among the creators of Black and Guzaarish - doesn’t it equally belong to the characters of the film? 

I felt that while you and Bhansali were true to your own bohemia, the bohemia of the characters of Guzaarish and Black was constructed, stylised and somewhat meaningless. So while you were true to yourself, you failed your characters in the film.

Why would putting-on a garter on Aishwarya Rai in Guzaarish help her get into her character of a Goan nurse more - as you asserted? No Goan nurses wear garters - regardless of whether they are victims of domestic abuse or not. Most wouldn’t even have access to garters.

Now you’ll say that I am over-intellectualising the costume design. I am not. I am telling you exactly why I couldn’t enjoy the two films with such compelling storylines because try as I might, I just couldn’t lose my way into the character’s lives: they were so alien. 

I’ll end this letter now because my baby girl is crying again, and I am sure you wouldn’t want to be responsible for more of her misery. 

But a debate I demand. You name the place and time. 

Curiously yours

Chatnoir: A Mumbaikar in Melbourne

PS: Feel free to pass-on my questions to Mr Bhansali.

Bollywood Star on SBS Australia: Or why the project is doomed from get go.

The much-hyped Bollywood Star show on SBS channel Australia - which hopes to find, groom and lauch the Bollywood career of six Aussies - is doomed to fail. 

Here’s why.

Because this should be a geneology hunt, not a talent hunt: Whoever came up with the dumb idea that you need talent to make it in Bollywood? 

The most reliable and sureshot way to make it into Bollywood is to possess the right genes. Nearly 90 per cent of the current crop of top Bollywood actors have taken this tried-and-tested path to Bollywood stardom. Think Abishek Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, Abhay Deol, Imran Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha: all made it, thanks to the right sirname and familal connections. 

Even a B-grade actor such as Emraan Hashmi had to find a geneological relation to Mahesh Bhatt before he got casted to his first film. 

So if SBS genuinely wants to help these poor sods become a Bollywood Star, it should be sponsoring a find-your-ancestors show not a talent hunt. The six winning finalists can be the ones who find the closest geneological connection to any of the film families: the Khans of all varieties, Chopras, Deols, Kapoors, Bhatts, Roshans et al.

Because this is not a beauty contest: If genes are not very obliging, the next best way to Bollywood is winning an international beauty contest. Think Aishwarya Rai, Sushmita Sen, Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta and Dia Mirza. All of them beat some seriously white skin to get a crown on their head. 

So another option SBS has is organising a seriously ambitious sounding beauty contest. As you must have noticed, any title with “India” in it doesn’t make the cut. (Sorry Ms India-Australia). It has to be more than that. (Now the titles of Universe, World and Earth are already taken, but Galaxy, Milky Way and Solar System are still available for SBS to cadge). 

Because foreigners have no place in Bollywood: Name one foreigner who has had a successful Bollywood career. 

If you have a white skin, you can only graduate to villains or vamps, no matter how much you profess to love dancing, colours and curries. Why? Elemetary, Mr Watson. Bollywood films are about how great Indians are, and having a white-skinned hero or heroine would defeat the very purpose. 

But... but... what about Katrina Kaif, you’ll say? What about her? She didn’t make it into Bollywood on the basis of being a beautiful Brit of Indian ancestry. She made it purely on the strength of being Salman Khan’s girlfriend - she piggybacked on him in all her initial films. 

Because Mahesh Bhatt is the chosen producer/director to launch the six finalists and Mahesh Bhatt has not made a decent film in more than a decade. In the last five years, he has made three films - all flops. He is also disgustingly sensational. These days he is busy launching the career of Sunny Leon, an international porn star trying to gain respectability as a Bollywood star (Yes, indeed, our six finalists will be joining such elevated company). 

Because one episode down, we are already scraping the bottom of the barrel: Any talent hunt which is reduced to selecting three contestants out of the last six - after going through some 300 contestants - is seriously in trouble. 

Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu: Or the new-found zaniness of Bollywood's heroines

Oh God! Not another "zany" Bollywood heroine!

It was sort of fun when Kareena played the exuberant, irrepressible, rebellious (read: zany) Geet in Jab We Met in 2007. But the success of that film led to an avalanche of bordering-on-mad heroines, almost all of them coupled with long-suffering but essentially sensible heroes.

• Think Aditi from Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na (2008) who Wikipedia describes as "a highly aggressive, impulsive girl. She abuses. She scratches." In other words, zany. 
• Think Aaliya (Deepika Padukone) from Break ke Baad (2010). She was loud, unpredictable, smokes, get drunk and is generally impulsive. In other words: zany. 
• Think Dimple (played by Katrina Kaif) from Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011). Again bold, mischievous, impulsive and good at keeping her hero in a permanent state of alarm. What's that word again: yes, zany.
• And then there was Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) from Tanu Weds Manu (2011) who was practically bordering on psychotic, as far as I am concerned. 

And now, there is Kareena Kapoor in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, due to release in February 2012, threatening us with her "zaniness" again if the trailer is anything to go by. 

Apart from extreme loquaciousness and boundless boldness, the heroines' "zaniness" also tends to include smoking and getting dead drunk at some point in the film (give or take a few films). Luckily, our long-suffering hero is always near by to rescue her when she passes out. Rebelliousness doesn't include rescuing yourself, it seems.

Our hero, in contrast, is sensible, responsible and generally good at toeing the line. This, we are supposed to see as repressed. Our heroine's zaninesss, then, is really about releasing the inner Marlboro Man in the hero. So while our hero rescues our heroine from drunken scraps, our heroine rescues him from life itself. (Also for some reason, it is a role Imran Khan is determined to colonise, playing it in four of the five films I mentioned above).

In most parts, I don't mind the zaniness, except in three respects. 

First, why is it that so many rebellious heroines seem to have no careers or jobs. Geet, Aditi, Dimple and finally the horrifying Tanu: none of them showed any interest in gainful employment. They were all just waiting to get married, hoping to bag a guy through their exuberant personality alone. Between Aaliya and Kapoor (in Ek Main...), one wanted to become an actress and the other a hair stylist. Obviously, careers like law, IT, journalism etc are not zany enough.

Second, zaniness and all is fine but I do mind watching smoking as somehow being emblematic of rebelliousness. It is a generally accepted as a harmful and somewhat disgusting habit and is becoming increasingly unfashionable in the West, from where we picked up the notion that it is fashionable in the first place. In fact, I can't remember the last Hollywood Rom-Com, in which the heroine smoked. Do we always have to remain a step behind the West all the time? Can't we just buck the trend for a change. 

Third, after so many films, zaniness is turning into a bore. 

Let's hope, Kareena Kapoor, who started the trend with Jab We Met, will bring it to an end with Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu.

***
Here's a previous blog, I wrote, about the Bollywood heroines: Dil Chahta Hain: Or Where Have All the Bollywood Feminists Disappeared.

Don 2 or MI4: Which is a more Indian experience?

Last night, in a bid to introduce Sid and my very-soon-to-pop-out baby to some Indian culture, we went to watch the super slick Don 2: The King is Back.  Unfortunately, culturally and aesthetically the film was so derivative of Hollywood that we would have been better-off watching MI4: Ghost Protocol, the twenty minutes-climax of which is set in squalid Mumbai and even features one of its famous traffic jams.

The film reminded me of a corny dialogue from a late-80s Bollywood-starrer Jamai Raja. It had Shakti Kapoor eulogising a prospective son-in-law with: "woh breakfast London me khate hain, lunch Paris mein, aur dinner New York mein. Bus su-su karne India aate hain". (He eats his breakfast in London, lunch in Paris and dinner in New York. He only comes to India to pee). Don doesn't even dignify India with his precious pee.

Everything about this super-villain is foreign: his empire, his clothes, his cars, his toilets, his targets and his ambitions. Only, the language in which he operates is clean, unaccented Hindi, which in turn forces the film to place Hindi-speaking Indian characters in unlikely settings: as Interpol officers in Malaysia, heading German banks, or as computer hackers or contract killers in Berlin.

There is a lot of talk of how the film can match any Hollywood thriller in its production values. Yes, it can. But all of it is great imitation at best: Don 2 never uses the foreign locales, settings or aesthetics to say anything original or authentic. But then again, Bollywood film-makers rarely use Indian locales, settings or aesthetics with any imagination so why should they accord the respect to foreign locales.

The good news for us is that it doesn't matter. Western film-makers are slowly discovering India as a possible setting for its films. (MI4 is the latest example). Once, they discover us and find an aesthetic language to cinematically represent our strangely ugly-beautiful cities, I'm confident we'll quickly rediscover our streets. After all, it only took Farhan Akhtar two years to recreate Bourne Supremacy's (2004) fabulous car chase in Goa for his 2006-film Don: The Chase Begins Again. Others will take even less.

***
Here's a great spoof of MI4 featuring Anil Kapoor. I couldn't resist...

Freida Pinto on T-Mag: Or luck from one brown woman to another

Not much surprises me about India or Indians. But the enduring popularity of Freida Pinto has definitely surprised me.

This fall, she made it to the cover of the T Magazine - The New York Times Style Magazine that comes out every quarter, and the video above of her interview is available on the magazine website. It is no mean feat considering that she has only appeared in one bonafide film Slumdog Millionaire - an Oscar winner, sure, but still just one film. And even there, her total screen time didn't exceed more than 20 minutes, the Jai Ho song at the end included.

Sure enough, I liked her in the film two years ago. She was cute, small and most importantly really, really brown. Not tanned, not bronze, but brown. And being a brown person from a fairness-obsessed India, I was thrilled.

But there were reasons for me to believe that the fame was shortlived.

a) She didn't have Bollywood star looks. She is indeed too brown. So that career was not happening.
b) Slumdog Millionaire hardly tested her acting chops. She was mostly expected to look either sullen or terrified. So there was no reason for me believe that roles would drop into her lap. 
c) There are only so many Asian roles going in Hollywood, anyway.

The fact that she was immediately offered a James Bond film seemed to further my belief that her career was short-lived. Because, honestly, how many Bond girls can we think of who went to have serious long-lived careers as actresses?

But Ms Pinto has shown a remarkable ability to remain in news - and mostly for the right reasons. She has even wormed her way into the ensemble cast of the soon-to-be released Woody Allen film - You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. (Wouldn't it be thrilling if the title refers to Ms Pinto?).

Perhaps, the answer to her popularity lies in her charm. As her interview video evidences, she is talkative, intelligent, good humoured and doesn't seem to take herself too seriously. Fresh, fresh is the word that popped in my mind when I saw her interview.

I still don't believe that her career will be long-lived. Simply because we cannot ignore the fact that she is brown and very South Asian looking. To seem believable, she will have to embody characters that are South Asian. And for South Asian characters to emerge, we will need more South Asian writers in Hollywood. And as we all know, Indians don't write for a living, they become doctors and engineers.

Still, as one really, really brown person to another, I wish her all the luck. She has defied me once, I hope she defies me again.

***
The official trailor of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger:

Charting Chadha

Last Saturday, The Times of India published a profile I wrote of Gurinder Chadha - of Bend It Like Beckham fame - whose latest film is just out. Thanks to the utterly idiotic and complex website of the newspaper, I can't put a direct link to the article. Hence, am reproducing the text of my article here:

Title: Charting Chadha
Intro: Mum’s the word in Gurinder Chadha’s life and Afterlife these days.

At the age of 50, the British Asian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha is a woman focussed on motherhood. It is a warm Saturday morning, and we are sitting in the sunny terrace garden of her posh Primrose Hill house in London. But her mind seems to fixed somewhere between the terrace and the floor below where her tiny three-year-old twins – Ronak and Kumiko – are squealing. “The children aren’t well, and they know I am here,” she explains. “There’ll be like ‘where’s mama..’, then you can experience this motherhood thing when I’ll abandon you half-way through your interview in an abrupt end,” she adds with a raucous laughter.

She doesn’t, naturally. But I hurry with the questions nevertheless.

We are meeting to talk about her latest film, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, a comedy set in the Indian community of Southall, London, about a serial-killing Punjabi mother (played by Shabana Azmi), whose victims come back to haunt her as ghosts. Again, she blames her unexpected motherhood at the age of 47 for the outrageous premise of the film. “When my children were first born, every time I looked at them, I would think about my own death,” she recalls. “I would just look at these things and go – ‘Oh my God, if I die tomorrow, how will they manage? Oh my God, if I die tomorrow, they will never know me?” Her overblown anxiety got her started on the theme of motherhood, death and reincarnation.  Further, as she explains, “even though Shabana is doing these killings for her daughter, it is really a metaphor for how much a mother will do to see her child happy”.

It’s a Wonderful Afterlife is Chadha’s third full-length feature film since the light-hearted comedy Bend It Like Beckham put her on the international charts eight years ago. Made on a shoe-string budget, it unexpectedly became the highest-grossing British films of that year picking up several international awards along the way. Since then, she has made Bride & Prejudice (2005), a lavish Bollywood-style western musical, and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), a small-budget teenage drama set in Eastbourne, England, which was not released in India.  Neither of the films were set in the British Asian community of Britain, which had been the focus of Bend It Like Beckham and most of Chadha’s films before it. Notably, neither achieved the tremendous success of Bend It Like Beckham.

“Whatever I would have done after Beckham would have had a rough ride, I think,” says Chadha, reflecting on the reception of Bride & Prejudice, which ranged from lukewarm to frankly hostile. As she explains, after Bend It Like Beckham, audience world over wanted her to continue regaling them with films about the foibles of the Indian Diaspora in a light, frothy way. “But obviously as a director I can’t keep repeating the same film over and over again,” she explains. Hence, she consciously decided to move away from the world of the British Asian community in her films.

Even with her latest film, Chadha was aware of the looming comparisons with Bend It Like Beckham. In fact, it was particularly likely with It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, set as it is in the streets, shops and gurudwaras of Southall and its loud, lively British-Punjabi community. Thus, though she set her film in Southall, she decided to turn it into a goofy, horror-spoof film in the style of Shaun of the Dead or An American Werewolf in London. “You can’t ever accuse this film of trying to copy Bend It Like Beckham”.

Besides, Chadha mulls, the success of Bend It Like Beckham fulfilled the quest that set her on the path of filmmaking initially. “The reason I went into films was that people like me were very absent from the screen in the UK,” she says.  “Fifteen-twenty years ago, whenever there was an Indian on TV, everyone would go ‘quick, quick.. Mum mum.. there’s an Indian on tv,’” she recalls. Most of her initial films, from her documentaries such as I am British But... (1989) and Acting Our Age (1992) to her features such as Bhaji on the beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham, were more about chronicling the Asian lives in Britain than about filmmaking itself. The success of her films went a long way in making Asian faces and stories common on the British television. In fact, on last Christmas Day, the long-running British soap opera EastEnders ran an Asian storyline on its peak viewing time to no raised eyebrows.

 “I feel I have achieved what I set out to do, in terms of making the British Asian family a mainstream of the British culture” she explains. All her work since Bend It Like Beckham has attempted to take her beyond message-centric, community-specific films to more broad-based genres.  

For the British Asian community of Southall, Chadha remains a much-loved progeny. In fact, her films have a corner to themselves in an exhibition called Southall Story, which is currently on at the Southbank Centre in London. It traces the history, culture and life of Southall, one of the most mixed, vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods of London. As Shakila Mann, one of the minds behind the exhibitions and a Southall child herself, explains, Bend It Like Beckham gave the people of Southall a lot of confidence. “Suddenly you were going to see not just a Bollywood movie, but you were going to the multiplex to see Bend It Like Beckham, which was about you.”

It’s a Wonderful Afterlife has opened to mixed reviews in Britain and the US. However, Chadha herself remains remarkably unfazed by the fate of her films. She again credits motherhood to her new-found calmness. “Earlier I’d watch other films coming out or I’d see the award season and think, ‘ahh.. I should make a film like that’,” she admits. “But now I don’t care about anything like that. I just want to make sure that my children have a good lunch, a good dinner, are happy.”




***

One Lion

Chris Morris couldn’t have asked for a better opening week for his latest film, Four Lions.

Considered so controversial that both BBC and Channel 4 refused to fund it, Four Lion is a dark comedy about four inept, bungling Jihadi terrorists of British-Pakistani origin and their attempts to blow-up London Marathon.




And along comes Faizal Shahzad, the terrorist of American-Pakistani origin, who tried to blow up Times Square last Sunday in an effort that will go down in history as the most incompetent, clumsy terrorist undertaking ever.

Think about it. Shahzad left his car awkwardly parked in the busy Time Square with gunpowder smoke billowing out of it. The car was filled with among other things, two five-gallon gasoline containers, three propane tanks, firecrackers, fertilizer packed in clear plastic bags bearing a store’s logo, a cooking pot, a 78-pound metal gun box, a GC-14P 14-gun steel security cabinet manufactured by Stack-On, two neon-colour alarm clocks and some batteries. And just in case, no one noticed it, he also left the ignition running and the hazard lights on.

Apparently, the bomb he was going for was a Rube Goldberg contraption, or as the bomb expert on the case, James Cavanaugh, explained a “‘swing-the-arm-with-the-shoe-that-hits-the-ball-and-knocks-over-a-stick-that-knocks-something-off-a-shelf” kind of bomb. No wonder, the bloody thing never went off, and left behind a treasure trove of evidence for the investigators. As another officer on the case commented, “This guy left everything here but his wallet.”

If I ever wanted to write a book on how not to conduct a terrorist bombing, this would be my star case study.
***

Here's my favourite scene from the film on "how to blow up the internet".

Holm & Away

The only thing to be said about Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holms is that it ends with the very frightening threat of a sequel.

Pandora vs Orissa

The Cameron film Avatar has overtaken the Cameron-epic Titanic as the highest grossing film ever with global box office receipts of £1.15 billion. (Titanic’s takings had finally petered out £1.14 billion.)

The news has arrived even as I am still digesting the meeting I attended yesterday on how the nexus between the Indian government and international corporations is leading to a plunder of the rich mineral resources of the Indian states of Orissa, Chhatisgarh and Jharkhand. The talk was organised by a bunch of activist students of SOAS at the university itself.

So this is what is happening: Mining companies have found a region with mouth-watering minerals in the middle of India. They’d love to get their hands on it. All’s well except for some pesky tribals who have been living there for centuries. Yes, they want development but one that is sustainable and in which they have a say. The corporations think otherwise. Struggle ensues and abuse of the tribal community follows.

Sounds similar? But not quite. Apart from the fact that the Indian tribal communities are not bioluminiscent blue and are evidently tailless - there will be no decisive war between the evil corporation and the innocent tribals (with some timely help from three-horned rhinos tipping the scales in favour of the latter). Cameron made his job easy by taking us to a foreign land inhabited by aliens. The tribes owned that land, and a company from elsewhere wanted to plunder it. It was neat banal binary.

But what we are experiencing in India is more complex. It isn’t just some alien company arriving out of nowhere taking away the lands of the tribal communities. These foreign companies are coming in with the express permission of the Indian government, which technically represents the tribes as well. It has the authority to decide what kind of development it wants for these regions – and it has decided, rightly or wrongly, that industrial development is the way to go. And we cannot deny that other parts of India, other communities, other classes, stand to benefit from this growth (at least in the short-run).

The struggle in India, unlike the one in planet Pandora, is one about different people in the same country having a different vision for development. It isn’t just a question of throwing one or two British corporations out of Orissa and West Bengal. The government will bring in others, perhaps Indian companies, for the job. Will that be somehow better?

The question is not about corporations. It is about what vision of development do different communities and classes of India have, how to make sure that all voices are heard in the discussion, how do we arrive at a consensus, and when the final decision is made who is asked to sacrifice.

Unfortunately, no timely appearance of three-horned rhinos will help us arrive at an answer to this one.

Channel 4 goes slum-dogging

Slumdog Millionaire was supposed to be a fresh, bold and imaginative narrative about contemporary India. Now, it has become an easy cliché for the lazy western media to approach the country.

Why else would four of the seven programmes that together make Channel 4’s “Indian Winter” series refer to the movie in one way or the other: Slumdog Millionaire, Slumming It, Slumdog Secret Millionaire and Slumdog Children of Mumbai?

Many years ago, I saw a documentary about Dharavi: one of the gazillion films made about the slum with the dubious, and probably untrue, reputation of being Asia’s largest. In it, Bhau Korde, a 71-year-old Dharavi resident and social activist acidly observed that all his life he had seen journalists walking in and around Dharavi with their jholas and notepads, and yet, not a thing had actually improved in the slum.

Danny Boyle was not the first to make his career on Dharavi. Many journalists, writers, documentary film makers, art film directors, social workers made their name off the slum before him. And now Channel 4 hopes to join the brigade.

Will this attention change a thing inside Indian slums? Sadly, I think not.

***
The Indian Winter starts tomorrow on Channel 4 with - believe this or die - Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. (When taking a break from Slumdog cliches, the series will explore another cliche, Gordon Ramsay, who will experiment with Indian cuisine this time.)

The Yes Men Fix the World

Last night, Sid & I went to a watch the Moore-style spoofy documentary The Yes Men Fix the World at a theatre nearby, which was followed by a satellite link-up to a live Q&A with the film-makers, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano (both aliases), from Sheffield.

The Yes Men are a group of activists who pose as spokespersons of powerful organisations - usually corporations, and sometimes the government - and infiltirate conferences and meetings. Once there, they make outrageous presentations on behalf of the company meant to highlight how dehumanizing and selfish their real goals are when seen from the perspective of the victims. The movie puts together many such successful ruses conducted by the film makers, who belong to this group including, speaking on behalf of Dow Jones Chemicals on the BBC announcing that they take full responsibility of the Bhopal Gas tragedy, launching a candle made from human flesh for Exonn at an energy expo, and more.

So far, so good. Yes, we agree that there is something rotten going on and needs a change.

But can Yes Men be that change. The Q&A that followed highlighted the shortcomings of such activism. Beyond saying, go out and protest - which they did interspersed with winks, jokes and self-mockery that somehow diluted the message - they had nothing concrete to advice.

It reminded me of a funny encounter, Sid and I had in Melbourne years ago. We were walking around the Central Business District of the city, when we came across a stall filled with left-wing, smash-capitalism style bric-a-brac. It was being run by two college student in full hippie regalia, who belonged to a group emphatically called Resistance. I browsed through the key chains and posters and then casually asked one of the guys, "but resistance against what, exactly". I had never seen anyone reduced to such utter confusion so quickly. Muttering unintelligibly, he turned towards his mate. She immediately and agressively came to his rescue. "It is resistance against everything!" That helps, I thought.

Yes, I dearly want to change the world. But really, I don't want to hand it over from one set of fools to another.