Landed in Mumbai yesterday to be faced with the shock of the city under siege. Shook me, after a long time, to write something. Jaded as the pen is, the words still flowed, perhaps all too easily.

My love, hope, peace and support to all who were affected by what hatred and terror of a few.

How To Watch a City Burn

 Land in Mumbai. Complain about the weather.

Make jokes about furnaces and hells and send witty sms to all friends.

Visit far flung campuses, enjoy the bumpy ride.

Make stale jokes about bad roads: “In India you

Are supposed to ride on the left of the road. In Mumbai

You drive on what is left of the road.” Muse about the grim reality

Of the glamour city.

In the evening, fan yourself as you wait for a roadside snack.

Look at the thronging masses and wonder

How so many people can be crammed into such little space.

Wipe tears from the eyes as you bite into a chilli,

Feel the grit on the cheeks emerge like a rash.

Tread through the small streets,

Feel the shrapnel of ages poke at you through

What you thought were comfortable shoes.

Make your way to succulent titbits

And cheap booze

hidden in the heart of the city

To meet friends, make faces, laugh, exclaim,

Point at people who look at you strangely and wonder what they would think

If they knew about what you did in bed the other night

With that person whose name is on the tip of your tongue.

Over dinner, hear about trains and about training inexperienced

Virgins in acts of untold pleasures.  Hear the Mumbaikar

Revel in the double edged consolation of being safe in mediocrity:

“Only the very rich have to worry about the mafia.

For a regular person, it is as safe as your own backyard!”

Hear oft repeated tales about the safest city in the country.

Lament about lack of night-life in Bangalore.

Be shocked, as the tele blasts news of bomb blasts

That have seared through the city,

Hitting the partying posh in the South.

Hear the unspoken horror as everybody stares at the flickering screen.

A reporter is relishing remains of somebody dead.

Images hit you, harder than the fried garam masala in the food.

Sit glued, unchewing, food congealing, as news starts

Trickling in. People dead. Hotels under siege. The police

Helpless. Think how much it is like a Bruce Willis Movie.

And then tap into the collective terror and feel tears trickle down your cheek.

As people are turned into things.

Things are broken.

Realise that there are people responsible for turning people into things

That are broken.

Call for the bill. Relish the cathartic moment of pity and terror.

Scramble towards your hotel. Hear jaded resignation from the seasoned

Citizen.

Snuggle under the sheets and leave the television, on mute,

As you juggle news of hand grenades being flung

With the messages and phone calls bombarding your phone.

Be glad there are people who care.

Realise that there are people who are remains, who must also have people who care.

Shiver at what hatred can do to a city you thought you loved.

Watch, from the safety of your room, smoke and fire.

Wonder if you want to ever bring children in this world.

Make plans for buying island and becoming dictator.

jace

jace

The recent debates and media attention on the two tragic deaths, of the teenager Adnan Patrawala and the young Koushambi Layek, both of whom left traces of their lives and relationships on the Google owned Social Networking System Orkut, have garnered interest in social networking systems, communication on the web, and technology enabled relationships. Both the cases have been dubbed as ‘Orkut Deaths’ and other social networking systems like Friendster, Facebook, Myspace or Livejournal, have all come under new scrutiny. Discussions have concentrated on the dangers of deception and the perils of being online, connecting with anonymous strangers and talking to people behind facades of profiles and avtaras. Is being on these networks and sharing personal information, catching up with old friends and hooking up with new ones, dangerous? Is the web with its anonymity such a huge threat? Are we really a risk when we share personal and professional information online? Is it time to cut off the chord, switch off the computer, lock the door and never step back on the information highway?

Caution is a virtue in the volatile and turbulent times that we live in. We practice it on a daily basis, in all our transactions with people and places. When we go to a movie hall, we make sure that we report any unattended objects. We advice our children not to talk to strangers or accept sweets from people they do not know. When we meet somebody on the train, we don’t give out our personal home address and telephone numbers. We don’t take the person who smiles at us across a bar, to our homes. At the airport we don’t leave our luggage with somebody else to go and buy a coffee. While traveling alone in an auto at night, we don’t fall asleep, hoping that the driver will reach us our destination. The cities that we live in remind us of the danger that lurks beneath the surface and the possibility of fatality that surrounds us – we walk through metal detectors, we are physically frisked, we see ourselves captured on surveillance cameras, we encounter law enforcement representatives, we see signs warning us of pickpockets and mobile pickers, we hear stories about robberies and kidnappings – and hence we have learnt to exercise caution in our daily mechanics of survival.

But there is something about the seductive nature of the internet that makes us drop this long learnt virtue and enter into states of revelation that we otherwise would look upon as unthinkable. Especially on social networking systems, which hold the promise of connecting us to the entire world, with a blind faith that the entire world is made up of people just like us, harmless and interesting, there is an ease with which we reveal our personal information and lives. People who visited Koushambi’s profile on Orkut after her death were shocked at the amount of personal information – her love, her desire, her affections – that she had left for public viewing on her ‘Scraps’. Adnan, who wasn’t marked out in particular but became a chance target for a group of peers who needed to pay up their debts, left on his own profile, traces of his opulent wealth and his blindly trusting conversations with a faceless, nameless ‘Angel’ who eventually lured him to his death. Both these tragic heroes of our times, without the help of signs and warnings, unlearned their behaviour, trusted strangers without knowing them and made these potential threats a part of their lives, leading to sad and gruesome endings.

It would be unseemly, nay, stupid to blame the internet technologies or that one particular site for these deaths. If anything, the public nature of Orkut and other such social networking systems should be celebrated because they hold testimony to the dangers that dropping caution can lead to. In both the cases, the scraps actually served as leads for the police to investigate and eventually capture the perpetrators of the crimes. In both the cases, the public nature of the scraps and the ability to see their profiles, also allowed thousands of strangers to offer their condolences and support to the family and the community that knew these two young people.

Demands that these sites be regulated/censored/shut-down are just voices of people who are steeped in techno-phobia and are unable to understand the nature or aesthetics of these new technological forms. A call for banning Orkut or dragging other social networking systems under the lens of suspicion is the same as looking upon train and air travel with suspicion and considering banning these systems of transportation. While monitoring younger children in their internet usage is a good thing, just like monitoring their television watching habits is desirable, any calls for a banning of either the internet or the social networks that it introduces are a reflection of interalised fear and demonisation of technologies.

We must move away from this headless brouhaha and address the question which is immediately at hand: The importance of being cautious while on the internet. The web has developed as a medium that is casual, close, tight-knit and individualistic, thus giving a false sense of security, safety and familiarity. A dismissal of the web as ‘just the internet’ also dismisses the dangers of revealing too much online. Caution on the web often gets translated as being uptight of prudish. In the accelerated time of the www, caution becomes a barrier in the joy of immediate gratification of imagined intimacies, and hence often thrown to the wind. We need to question our own understanding of these new social spaces. We need to re-learn our need to be cautious, and evolve signs that remind us to be safe and to be guarded while encountering strangers in the night, no matter how seductive, how alluring and how familiar they might appear.

For all those who don’t yet know it, I have been homesick for Taiwan ever since I left it. I do not have rational explanations or emotional confessions to make about that country, but I do know that there is this itch in my essence (this is where I pretend to be a higher being from the other place) to go back to that part of the world again, to be with the people I loved there and made friends with. However, as practical life ties me to being in India, I take comfort in practicing my hard acquired, quickly losing, very limited Mandarin in secret and eating hot pots at the beautiful Korean restaurant (No, I am not telling where it is, I want it for myself, mine, all mine!), and looking at the 2,000 pictures I took in my stay there.

 And in the middle of all that, I came across a beautiful list of English-Chinese translations which I just HAD to share. No, I do not think they are offensive (I would know, You have no idea how touchy I have become about anything even remotely offensive to that part of the world); No, I do not think it is a racial slur; Yes, I really think it is done in very good taste and is funny. So having pre-empted all the objections, here is a list. Say it out loud (the translation) and chuckle.

He was 21, give or take a few months. I remember him as one of the many tall, gangly, slightly geekish, apprehensively fashionable people that my brother spent his four engineering years with. Slightly on the quiet side – ‘you have to see him when he is with friends’ Young Bro used to footnote, ‘he is like an energy tornado. He is just scared of you, that’s why he is silent.’ – and good looking in that awkward way all late teenagers and early twenty somethings are, trying to get used to what they look like and how other see them. I remember him also as the boy (because when your Younger Bro is six years younger than you are, his friends are always boys!) who used to bring mountains of mangoes to the hostel… and some to our home when he visited us in the summers. All in all, I have vague memories of him; a face in a crowd, a voice in a chorus, a smile in a party.

 And yet, suddenly, when we heard the news – non dramatic, matter-of-fact, point-blank, that he died, after staying in a coma following a road accident, where late one night, riding with his brother on a bike, he skidded, hit his head on the road divider and never came back to opening his eyes again – there was this feeling of complete and utter despair; the likes you get when, late at night, you put your foot forward in the middle of a long stair-case, only to find that you are treading on thin air instead of clambering upon a stair. It came with too huge a shock to realise that that young boy, who had just completed his engineering course work and waiting to fly to foreign shores for his further education, was suddenly a WAS – a past tense, a has been and is not.

 I don’t know what the right age to die is. I always thought that I want to die when I am 55, thinking that I would have done all I would have wanted to by then and that it would be a good graceful exit from the drama of life. However, I do also know that 21 is never the age that you associate with death. There is so much hope, so much unrealized potentials, so many uncharted dreams and so much life in a 21 year old that to think of it as having stopped, as having suddenly disappeared, makes you feel ridiculously ancient, overwhelmingly mortal.

And even more than that, I keep on wondering how his family would cope with something like that. How do you face the death of a 21 year old son, the one you loved, you have seen grow up, you have dreamt dreams for, have put in so much of your life in to? How do you bear the pain of knowing that your younger brother – the one who you used to tease about having girl friends, the one who used to bum cigarettes of you, the one who came to you in times of trouble and asked for solutions, the one you shared your books and music with – is suddenly not there… That if you grope in the middle of the night, in pitch darkness, you will no longer touch his tousled head but only the empty ghosts of memories of the brother who has now gone? How do you deal with knowing that the friend you spent four years with, living in the same house, sharing classes, joking about people, sharing secrets, confessing fantasies and chatting over coffees with, is suddenly never going to call you, never going to hold hands with you, never going to listen to brave plans of things to do and life to come? I know that we are all braver than we think we are, that we find resources within us to cope with the pain, the grief and the searing agony of loss of life… but I do know that I am very scared of searching so deep within me to build up resources like this. And I am very scared of imagining what his family must be going through at a time like this.

Death is cruel – not to the people who die, because I believe that they go to a happy place – but to the people who are left behind, reminded, of their indefatigable mortality and the abysmal loss that haunts us, long after the people who have left us dwindled into nothing more than ash and bones, wind water earth fire sky.

This post is for that young man who lived short and will be missed by so many – even people who did not always know him or were a part of his horizons. This post is for the people who loved him, for the people he loved, who are left behind and will have to conjure such great strengths to see themselves through it. This post is for all the people I love and the people who love me, to let them know that I am thankful, even though I might not always say it, that they are alive, with me (even when they are far, far away) and reassuring me, in their presence, that they are still alive, and that so am I.

• Greetings - "How the fuck are you?"


• Fraud - "I was fucked by the bank big time!"


• Dismay - "Oh, fuck it."


• Trouble - "Well, I guess I'm fucked again."


• Aggression - "Fuck you!!!"


• Disgust - "Fuck me!!!"


• Confusion, Curiosity or Disbelief - "What the fuck....?"


• Difficulty - "I don't understand this fucking thing."


• Despair - "Fucked again."


• Desperation - "Fuckityfuckfuckfuck."


• Incompetence - "He fucks up everything."


• Intelligence - "He's a fucking genius."


• Dismissal - "Why don't you go outside and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself?"


• Displeasure - "What the fuck is going on?"


• Lost - "Where the fuck are we?"


• Disbelief - "Unbefuckinglievable!!!"


• Pain - "Fuck ! that hurt."


• Pleasure - "Oooooooh Fuuuuuuck"


• Surprise - "Fucking hell what was that?"


• Agreement – “Absofuckinglutely”


• Stupid person - "Dumbfuck!"


• Denial - "I didn't fucking do it."


• Perplexity - "I know fuck all about it."


• Apathy - "Who gives a fuck."


• Resignation - "Oh fuck it."


• Questioning Authority - "Who the fuck do you think you are?"


• Praising the Lord - "Jesus Fucking Christ."


• Be quiet - "Shut the fuck up."


• Bewilderment or Ignorance - "Fucked if I know."


• Thanks - "Fuck you very much."

The grass collective ;-)
Originally uploaded by aanjhan

The Barcamp Bangalore 4 [Collective Edition] (BCB4) was possibly the biggest autonomous public event that Bangalore has seen in some time now. Taking upon the model of the unconference – a space where every participant is a speaker; a space without hierarchical differentiations between delegates and audience– BCB4 was an extraordinary feat of planning, organization and participation. Traditionally a Barcamp is imagined as a techie collective. BCB4 proved to be much more than just another tech camp which are easy to find in the burgeoning IT city of Bangalore.

As a participant who has seen the Barcamp Bangalore evolve from the small (about a hundred participants) Barcamp that started almost a year ago, to this mega event which became a platform for many other events and groups to come together, BCB4 was an interesting study in formulating a new public sphere. In a city that is slowly losing the public spaces an onslaught of multinational that sell spaces of public meeting, the BCB4 became a unique intervention in the city, to create a free space for people from varied sectors – from programmers to social scientists, from venture capitalists to academicians, from social entrepreneurs to social activists, from bikers to musicians - to come together in an informal collective and talk their hearts out in the space of two days (and nights!) and bring to the fore questions of their lifestyles, choices, politics, ideology and immediate environment. Here is my review of this absolutely mind boggling (for those who have minds) event – accolades, suggestions, threats and future possibilities.

 
Here are ten observations drawn from personal experience of looking at thirty four different houses in fifteen days (if anybody is keeping score, that is!). Look at my work, ye mighty, and realize that your chances of retaining sanity and finding house for rent are very slim. It is easier to get married to daughters and sons of people who are renting out the houses. They will still make you pay through the nose but at least they will be family and hence you will bear it with a grin.

 
1. For the lack of a Window

Have you ever seen a pizza box? I mean those large cardboard boxes that come carrying beautiful pizzas and toppings? The ones with the holes in them? The holes, are meant for ventilation. Ventilation. Noun. The act of supplying fresh air and getting rid of foul air. Apparently, what the pizza packers understood, the people who build houses don’t understand. And so you have houses that do not have windows. The idea is that when you come into the house, there is fresh air trapped in your shoes that replaces the foul air and that is ventilation enough for one day. Too much of fresh air means too many new germs. It is apparently best to keep the place locked up and give the old germs a chance.

 
2. The bathroom the size of a post-card

Abhijat Joshi wrote one of the most beautiful plays when he wrote The House the size of a post-card. But he never (and I am sure of it) meant the title to be taken literally. Unfortunately, there is a breed of new owners in Bangalore who seem to think that a bathroom is basically anything that can occupy one glazed tile and a faucet. The general impression is that you remain more hygienic if you just wash one body part at a time. Also, if different body parts have to be ushered into the bathroom one at a time, it keeps you supple and on your toes, training you for a career in advanced acrobatics and complicated calisthenics.

3. Just behind M.G. Road

Let us face it – Bangalore is a large city that is built around M.G. Road. It is a central landmark, like a physical land mark that guides everybody to find their roads, their houses and sometimes their partners. Hence, no matter where the house is, it is always just behind M.G. Road. When you take a house in Koramangala, the agent assures you it is only six kilometers away from M.G. Road. They never tell you that it would be easier for you to commute from Mumbai to Bangalore everyday, because of the traffic. I now have started wondering what the behind of the M.G. Road is. I mean, it is a road, right? Does it have a front and an end? Does it have posteriors that we might not have located? Is it shaped like a human being? In which, case, if you standing at a cross road, it is like standing at the fork?

 
4. The cook while you shit syndrome

I grew up in a house with some very strict hygiene rules which included complicated instructions about wearing different footwear in and out of bathrooms and a whole lot of different kind of soap to be included as many times as possible in the daily schedule. Most of my friends also have had the distinctions of scratching and picking versus chopping and cooking enforced in their homes. I know for a fact that my grandmother would throw a fit (and probably a couple of heavy brass utensils) at her daughters-in-law if they proceeded straight from the bathroom to the kitchen; a bath in general is considered to be the least you can do. It came as a shock, hence, when I encountered the extended bathrooms that houses in Bangalore seem to offer. If you step here it is the kitchen, and right here, at the other end, is the bathroom. See, so convenient, you can actually put the water to boil and keep an eye on the stove from the pot in the middle of all the grunting. It doesn’t get better than this.

 
5. If you are alone, stay alone

Due to the imbalance in the national sex ratio, young men have lost the upper edge that they used to have in social interactions and negotiations. Apparently, if you are searching for an independent house in Bangalore and you are a single man in your mid-twenties you are: A call centre employee, or a rapist, or a murderer, or a serial masturbator, or a womanizer, or a pimp, or a dealer of negotiable affection. The minute you announce that you are single, a glaze climbs itself upon the face of the owner who then immediately tells you, apart from the rent and deposit: No boyfriends, no girlfriends, no women…

 
6. Chasing water-falls

They say that the average man (or woman, I am guessing), uses about 100 litres of water everyday in the urban set up. However, your landlord, with some advanced calculus formula will immediately prove to you that that is the amount of water you spend in brushing your teeth. Hence, he logically draws, you will have to pay a water bill that is the same as the rent that you pay him. There are no arguments.

 
7. You are not alone

In The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the author pointed out that in New York city, if you think you want to do something, the estimate is that there are about 13,587 people who want to do exactly the same thing at the same time at the same place. Bangalore naturally beats New York fair and square. If you are hunting for a house it means that everybody else who is not selling a house is also doing the same. Hence, you have to take a decision in a split three seconds after you have entered the house. If you hesitate or demand to see anything more than the thirty second trailer, where your nose insists that behind the incense is the smell of something furry and dead and that in that far corner, the design is not a fresco but a termite’s nest, the owner ceremoniously shows you out and brings in another despairing person to the tour de force of the house. If the owner smiles, all you can think of is “Will you step into the parlour, said the spider to the fly.”

8. Who are you?

Apparently, name, credentials and the princely deposits and rents are not enough to establish your professional relationship with the house owners who grudgingly give you the houses that you rent. You are submitted through a scrutiny which couldn’t have been more careful if you were marrying their daughters – all of them at the same time. Your religion, your caste, your parents’ careers, the number of siblings, your eating habits, your sleeping habits, your praying habits, your friends, your job, your profile, your annual income, your visits to foreign countries, your educational degrees, your preference of potato over brinjals and the colour of the underwear you are wearing, are all explored in great detail and it is only when you pass their high standards that they might do to you the favour of renting out a house. I am seriously thinking it might be easier to snog their daughters and get into the family.

 
9. The Contract

The Contract is an epic document that binds you, in blood, sweat and exploitation, to the people who wield the powers of ownership over the house you want to rent. Legally, it is an agreement made between the tenant and the lessee but in truth it is a piece of document that can make you feel like you are caught in a Dr. Who series. Most typical tenancy contracts are designed so that if you break the lease before its expiry in eleven months, you lose money. If you do anything to displease the house owner, you lose the money. If you sneeze too loudly, you lose the money. Also, if the lessee throws you out of the house because he finds somebody else to pay him more money for it, you lose the money. And of course, you lose the cumulative interest of the deposit that you pay them and you have to pay them charges (generally equal to most of your deposit money) for painting and cleaning the house to make it available for the next unsuspecting tenant who walks into the parlour.

 
10. Curfews

When you come from Ahmedabad, as I do, the notion of a curfew is very invested. It is reminiscent of heavily policed areas, cordoned by heavy iron and plastic dividers, smoke bombs, the terror of being cooped inside your own house and own head, wondering at every crack if it is a bullet, thinking every passing tremor in the wind as a bomb, constantly peering across the street to see if there is life beyond the tarred road. All in all, not a very pleasant experience. However, when, as a single person, you try searching for a house in Bangalore, you realize that Ahmedabad was a child’s play and that you’d embrace it any day, because, let us face it, at least, in Ahmedabad, you knew where you stood in a curfew – behind a wall or facing a gun. In Bangalore, as a tenant, the curfew takes a sinister meaning. It means that you are not allowed in or out after a particular time because the ungle or aundie go to sleep at ten and they lock the gates after that. So if you have a late night movie in mind, also make sure you have plans of sleeping at the multiplex. Also, the curfew means no visitors after hours – after hours defined as any time the aundie looks out of the window and sees somebody climbing to your house. Curfew. A fortnight of that and you will start feeling like Rapunzel and make wild plans of growing your hair long and hoisting strangers through the balcony.

 And against all these odds, I finally found a house which fits me, has windows, is in a quiet area and allows me the luxury of walking down to work. Halleluljah home!

I just shared this poem at a couple of communities and realised that a wide range of people enjoyed reading it. When i first encountered it, I was numb, on the verge of tears, my hands clenched as the pain and the love in the poetry coursed through me. It took quite some time to come out of the poem, because even when the words had ended, the poem just continued it for many days.

It has been rare, lately, to be moved so much by poetry. I was almost getting scared I am getting immune. This is definitely one of the most beautiful narrative poems I have read in some time and I know that quite a lot of you might love it as much as I did.

Recent Canadian government research has shown that cigarette smoking not only impairs sexual ability, it actually causes shrinkage of the male sexual "equipment."

Wow! If that is true, we need to get the word out ASAP! Maybe the warning on the cigarette packs should be updated to reflect this new information. How about something like this:

* Warning!: These cigarettes are king size — how about you?

* Warning!: Smoking sections in restaurants aren't the only things getting smaller.

* Warning!: If you don't reduce your smoking, your smoking will reduce you.

* Warning!: Smoking may lead to ridicule on your honeymoon.

* Warning!: Smoke rises, but you may not.

* Warning!: Second-hand smoke can be harmful to children — That is… if you're capable of conceiving any.

* Warning!: Cigarettes get shorter the more you puff — so do you.

* Warning!: How can you enjoy a smoke afterwards, if there's no before?

* Warning!: The only thing left after a smoke is a dead stub.

* Warning!: Don't throw lit cigarettes in the urinal — you might not have the range to put them out.

“He said that she said that he told her about how he is now officially broken up.” A long winded relational theory more complex than the relativity theory of the last century, landed upon my head in the middle of an unsuspected (and, I am presuming, unsuspecting) coffee.  I met TwitterBoi after a long absence. With our work and whatsname, we have been playing some sort of a intercontinental version of Catch-Me-If-You-Can the last two and a half years, always escaping (unintended choice of word) meeting each other.

However, this time, with my prolonged stay in the mater metro ala Ahmedabad, we finally collided, like dwarfed planet being struck by a passing meteorite, and met over coffee. Meeting TwitterBoi is like suddenly getting acquainted with the intimate workings of a whole lot of people by proxy. You feel like you are suddenly caught in a James Cameroon movie, the world sinking around you, and lots of people you have only vaguely registered in your romancing, are suddenly talking to you and fighting with you and making the most of the dramatic encounter. I pointed out to him, when he made the revelation that his girlfriend’s brother told her that he heard from his drama partner that she had heard from her cousin’s wife about how a common friend we had known eight years ago in grad-school has broken up with a woman I didn’t know at all, that I really didn’t know any of the people involved in the story. At that point, he simpered and giggled and announced “Of course you know them all… Anyway, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know them… because they know all about you. I talk to them about you all the time.”

I suddenly felt very naked and violated at the idea that there is a whole gene pool of people who know me, who know of me, who apparently hear other people talk about me and can claim bonds of familiarity and friendship with me. As things are, coming back to Ahmedabad is claustrophobic enough, with people meeting me everywhere and claiming acquaintanceship and demanding my cell phone number- at late night cafes at one thirty in the morning, at movie theatres and multiplexes in the early morning cheap shows, at picnics into far beyonds, at parties where I sometimes don’t know the hosts, at marriages and funerals, at the park where I go for my walk, at the petrol pump where I am getting some fuel, at the ice-cream parlour where I have walked in my pyjamas for a late night binge, at the dance recitals and dramatic performances, at book shops and cyber-cafes… these being the instances where I was surprised by people I vaguely remember (sometimes I don’t remember) stopping me and saying hello, claiming acquaintanceship through knowing my parents, my family, my friends, my cousins, my college, my school, my drama club etc. It is a very strange and warm feeling that so many people should remember me or even take the time out to stop me and reacquaint themselves to me but it is also rather cumbersome to know that there are so many people in the world and that I know them (or pretend to anyway).

I wondered if all these people talk about me to somebody else. I also wondered why a completely non-glam undramatic life like mine would be of interest to anybody who did not have immediate claims of affection, money or lack-of-choice. And most importantly I wonder what they talk about when I am not there. Do you ever wonder about it? What would people be saying when they don’t know you too well but still think that you are talk-worthy? What would they be saying? What? What?

Question: Do you know what your favourite animal says about you?

Me: What? Behind my back?

There is a death in the family. Routine has been suspended into disbelief, schedules have been scrambled, people who have not talked with each other for years now because of what they said about our Pinky and what he did to our Lala, have suddenly been united in their blood, presumably and arguably thicker than water, people claiming relative value have differentially descended upon the grief stricken family, the community at large sends condolences, white clothes, food and queries.

One enters the house of mourning, with a suitably serious face when you are suddenly greeted with a squeal from an aunt “Oh my! You are here? In Ahmedabad? So nice! Why haven’t you told us about it?” One looks frazzled. The repeated phrases of formal condolences absolutely trickling out of the mind. Another uncle, dressed in untainted white, chewing beetlenut, comes and whacks one on the shoulder, “Long time no see, eh?” One apologetically smiles and looks at one’s mother, trying to figure out what is happening. The Mother has unerringly found the immediate family and the next of kin, hugged, held hands, murmured words and gone and found a comfortable group of white clad women to be in. One follows in her footsteps and finds one face to face with the children of the deceased. Two daughters, two sons, all decorously sitting with their legs folded, their faces somber and their eyes downcast. One mumbles incoherent words and proceeds to move on, making space for the next set of people to make their way.

One goes and tries to fit one’s roundness in the square room and suddenly finds a gaggle of familiar faces surrounding one in hushed whispers.

“This is such a bore! I wish we were Irish and drinking at the wake” One hears.

“It is just a ritualisation. What’s the point? You are dead, you are dead!” pointed another in One’s hearing.

 “The family is going to be in deep trouble. Five men, one child, who will do all the cooking? The cleaning? The sorting? The managing?” one next to One said in superior knowledge of the family.

“That’s not white… you should be wearing white.” One was pointed at. “We don’t wear black at our funerals. Don’t you have any whites?” One was stared at.

One mumbles again…. Only white party wear… black is good enough… I am sorry.

One leaves the group of the peers and the cousinly, and moves towards another group. It is the men of the family, moving their mysterious ways, wonders to perform. One pauses in their midst. There is a heated conversation on the way there.

“We need to build a tent you know. More than 250 people will be coming tomorrow. It is going to be a huge funeral. There is so much to look after…” One heard.

“Please make sure it is a tasteful menu! Remember Great Aunt’s funeral? It was such a bad menu….” One heard a heated voice whining.

“Have the mailers been sent? I got them printed in an emergency you know. I have this friend who runs a press… We went to the Derasar, we got the times for the aarti fixed and we printed them. Who is in charge of the mailing?” An uncle, resembling a performing parrot, sans the plumes on his head. Nobody answered but One was caught in his stare. “You, what are you doing?” One looks scared and hastily moves away, making apologetic noises and scurrying away from this committee nightmare.

One dodders and potters and eventually finds oneself in the vicinity of the women – four generations of them sitting around as if they were a part of a floral arrangement; with the grandmothers in the centre and the other branches trailing out. One paused uncertainly, feeling suddenly like a large bumblebee who has ventured into a hot house where he is not allowed. Snatches of a conversation already well on its way to abandoned glee came and perched on the ears.

“And his wife has run off to Canada. She even sent the daughter back. And he says he just doesn’t want her back anymore…” a grandmotherish person was rattling.

“I think I need to find something to do. My daughter-in-law is also going away to the USA this month… and you know how my husband is… I NEED to find something to do…” a peevish aunt was confiding to One’s mother, who was serenely shaking her head and giving me the Alanis Morissette Ironic Look.

“I can wear something in white with pink and purple designs in it for tomorrow, right? I mean I only have two plain white saris. I think from tomorrow I can wear something with a little colour in it. It is such a drab colour. I don’t think it suits me” a petulant cousin was haranguing other bored cousins.

“What are we eating tonight? If it is Khichdi again, I swear I am going to scream! We have had Khichdi three nights in a row now. Can’t we sneak off for some junk… who will notice us?” the three collegians were hatching their own conspiracies, stratagems and spoils.

One was wondering who to talk to, what about, when suddenly a small hand made its way through One’s hand. It was the niece. She is eight. She was dressed as she always was – in a light floral frock, her hair held in a band and her silver anklet making small tinkling noises as she walked. She held One’s hand and beckoned One to give her, like the Romans, One’s ear. One bent down and she asked “Do you want to see something?” she asked shyly. One has been a kind of good, Santa Clause types, chocolate bearing uncle over the last many years.

I nodded and followed her into her play room. She opened her bright red desk and took out a painting. She had painted it last night. It showed a frail tired woman, sleeping with a smile on her face, on what seemed like a bed of clouds. There were stars shining above her and she seemed to be floating in a cradle of sorts.

“It is grandmother. She is happy where she is now. She is, isn’t she?” Niece asked One. “I know she must be happy. Now she wont have to work so hard. And she will have God looking after her. She said she will wait for me in heaven. One day I will be as old as grandmother and then go there too. It is nice, to die, isn’t it? One becomes so happy in the clouds.” She kissed the grandmother and demanded to be told stories. One started a “Once upon a time…” rigmarole till she fell asleep, holding her painting of her grandmother. She was perhaps the only one who cared, not about the people left behind but about the one person who had gone, gentle, into the good night.

It was a bevy of boys, a merry gaggle of cackling, the five points of a pagan pentagon, sitting in cafes with perspectival lighting and the panacea for all postmodern angst against modernism – coffee, in various forms, in white cups on tilted saucers, steaming and frothing in gay abandon, in long stemmed glasses clinking with frosted ice and mellow cream, twinkling in the traffic light of the passing world that drones its way home as we wrapped ourselves in a cocoon of conversations.

It was Hugsbody and his coterie – a group of amorphous (some also amorous) individuals who were thrown together in happy harmony by the relentless efforts of the man. There Was Object Du Arse, the beautiful man who cooks and paints and lives life like it is a stroke on a very delicate canvas; there was French Mynt (Mind the Y) who I met for the first time in flesh and blood but have spent many nights in cocky conversations online and there was Poet Shmoet, he who writes as if it was as natural as breathing and makes an art of it.

“I collect people” Hugsbody told me, as we traipsed from one spot to another, seeking, coffee and conversations and Chinese food on the go. “It is not a neutral collecting. It is a discerning one – and more than anything else, I like to bring them together because I see in them patterns that they might otherwise not have come together.” It was an extremely usual set of circumstances for a Friday night and the conversation was happily traipsing across hilarious, humorous, and effortless cobblestones – movies, books, bitching, stars, fashion, bitching, food, art, bitching, beetching, biatching, bitching.

And then suddenly, out of the proverbial cerulean, we started a conversation. Hugsbody and I, as others smoked their aperitif to parting, sitting together in the dimly lit café, sipping on our cappuccinos, talked about Ethics. Aristotle onwards (and even before that but there is height to how much you can stretch your Histories), every wo/man (oooh look! Political Correctness!) worth his/her (yeah, yeah, it’s there again) weight in brain cells has thought in that limbo between sleep and wakefulness: To judge or not to judge, that is the question.

It was at the question of judging somebody – to label and sort, to classify, point and call names, that the conversation hinged. The genesis, like all great stories was unusual. First there was darkness and then there was light. In this case, first there was Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere kissed her. And as the news flashed on the pedestalised television set in the far corner of the Abercrombie and Fitch stone walls of the café, Hugsbody told me about somebody’s reactions to the entire incident. The Somebody, as people go, is actually quite a SOMEBODY (note the caps, sense the tone!). A rational, extremely eloquent, very intelligent and highly respected friend of Hugsbody; here, queer, out and ready to shout about it, who gave an unexpected reaction to the Kiss a dime, Kiss a dozen incident that apparently not even the Aish-Abhi wedding could not displace from the media limelight.

So Somebody, who otherwise on the left of the middle, claiming politics of non-interference, individual expression and freedom of speech and choice (the arguments by which he would also fight his right to be queer), suddenly came up, a couple of days ago, with an inflamed reaction towards the tinsel town kiss. He demanded, along with the high riding saffron brigade, that Richard Gere produce an apology for offending he sensitivities of ‘our culture’. He also endorsed the fact that an act like that – a public peck on the cheek, was against the sensibilities of ‘our people’ and that both the perpetrators of the heinous crime should be publicly barraged into eating humble pie with slug worms in it. It was difficult for Hugsbody to bridge the gap between this reaction and the claimed politics and that got us to evaluating the premium of rationality and the paradoxes that we all live within.

 
For me, while the Gere-Shetty case is about as interesting as the recap of the latest K-serial, it was interesting to ponder upon the paradoxes that we embody and how we manifest them. Rationality, of course, is something that we all (make that most; ah well some; well at least the deluded undisillusioned ones) aspire towards. However, it is a fact universally acknowledged (and that is the end of the Austenian repartee this post) that we are, when push comes to shove, highly irrational creatures. And yet, within the small bubbles of rationality that we trap ourselves within, we comfortable live in paradoxes that allow us to engage with dialectics of power that keeps us on the top. Hence, paradoxes abound with ease – We can be nine to five politically correct and have a personal view that is our own and private; we think that it is our right to voice our opinion but very easily snub the Other voice that might want to get heard; we shout at the top of our lungs for our rights to live while we very easily endorse (sometimes by sheer negative participation) the actions that bestow upon others, the right to die. The paradoxes are many and can range from the highly philosophical (and viciously abstract) to the very everyday and practically mundane.

 We were still talking about the hermeneutics of the self, as the café closed and we were deposited on the roads, stained with the day and the coffee, the night and the summer. “I do not judge Somebody”, Hugsbody replied after great thought. “Because I don’t like to judge. In my scheme of things, there is nothing that would let me judge somebody and classify them in a particular category.” Which made us both think about the following questions:

1. Can we ever be so fluidly ethical that we can escape the process of judging completely?
2. Are there, even within the fluid ethical code, non-negotiables that cannot be compromised and will help us in discerning judgement?
3. Why is it wrong to judge? Why are we so scared to judge? Even when we can be reflexively aware that the judging is not an absolute or perpetual and that it is only within a particular context that it operates?

P.S. I love Bangalore… It makes me want to write again. Especially the people.

Click,
There is a large pink and blue blur; hazy with the exhaled ejaculations of a million people on a round globe which is largely water but also has some people on it, who, like ants in a deluge, hang on to the ground beneath their feet, living in perpetual terror of sinking into their own heads and eventually in the watery grave that they feel rushing inside their skins.
Click.
There is an almost triangular piece of land that protrudes into the ocean, like an obscene finger to the divine vouyers who have nothing better to do than to stare at the multitudes thronging below. A single star sighs fairy dust and closes its eyes, calling it a day, and crawling beyond the horizons in a way that only stars and other cosmic bodies can manage.
Click.
A large brown chunk of land, interspersed with a river or two (On the human map they appear marked in red instead of blue and purple because they are ‘controversial’) and shrubbery that scars the land like various interesting patched quilts, keeping the hidden spirits of the land alive and safe.
Click.
A whiff of air that reminds you of things that are not natural, not to be burnt and not to be dug from under the land – plastic, neon, wood and crude oil – comes and hits you in the face. There is a glow of a thousand sunsets that come to your eyes when you have doused yourself in a glass of something potent that you know you shall regret tomorrow. The city is high and low, the buildings zigzagging the sky like eczemas and battle wounds that are centuries old but never quite healed. The face of the city is black and silver and grey and a particular kind of green that reminds you, on good days, of words like fecundity and plethora – they mean good but sound something not so nice. A miasma of crowdedness and lives lived in sweat covers the city, hiding it, like a shy bride, from the stare of the many who insist on staring at in wanton lust.
Click.
A house in the city, over looking the railway line that cuts across the city in its straight and willful determination. A square block that looks like it has been made by a child playing with lego blocks, heaping one on to the other, as if waiting to see how much longer it would last. There are curtains on the windows, cars parked out in the front, plants merrily waving to the curious strangers and the indifferent birds, playing with the wind and laughing at the skies. There is a definite feeling of home, of peace, of a quietitude that comes of knowing that all’s well with the world and god’s in heaven, enjoying a post coital moment, covered in clouds and what nots. Now is the moment to do something you shouldn’t be doing because god is definitely not watching you.
Click.
On the second floor of the house, is a blue room. How can we ever be sure that the blue you see and the blue I see are the same blue? Doesn’t matter because there is every type of blue that you and I can ever think of, crammed into this room. It is in bands and swirls and whisks and dabs and splotches. It is in every nook and corner. It disguises itself in different ways but when you stare at it long enough, you know that it is blue. Even the things that are not blue, carry a definitely sense of blueness out of it. If the spirit of Blue happened to pass by, it would have stopped a while and looked at the room and felt pleased at the fact that it was there in all its forms.
Click.
In all this blueness, there is a long body sprawled out, staring at the ceiling, a smile plastered on its face and its arms stretched in a wide arc as if in desire to embrace the whole world. There is a definite bliss on the face, as if of all the merriest maddest mad hatter days ever, this is the best day in the best possible world in the best possible universe in the best possible… what comes after the universe? Who cares? Whatever it is must be the best. Maybe it is a multiverse.

It is a man. He is brazenly beautiful. There are very few people who can wear arrogance like he does, along with a translucent white shirt, muscle enhancing blue jeans and a mandatory black Reebok jacket. He seems familiar, even though most of you don’t know him but he feels like you have known him all your life…One of those people you instinctively want to go and hug because you know that you have known them all your life and because they are shaped so that they fit into any kind of a hug. There is something about the way the nose turns benignly or the way the smile crinkles around the eyes or the way the hair fans itself on his forehead, or just the fact that he is very unboyishly cute and warm.

I call him Hugsbody. I have known him for aeons and centuries and lifetimes in my head. And loved him as I always have, I have never been prouder or happier for him than I am today. He called me yesterday to announce to me that he has done the hardest thing that anybody can ever do – he has claimed himself. He came out about his queer sexuality to his family yesterday and there is bliss and a roaring euphoria because not only did the fairly conservative middle class Hindu family take the news without protest but offered support and happiness and love – the only things that you really need from anybody – and acceptance. There is nothing more proud than to be who you are. And today Hugsbody is right there. I write to tell him that in all the huge planet, over the many canvasses that I have just painted, there is nobody I am prouder of or happier for.

I had almost archived this journal when like reluctant ghosts in the attics, like spurious gossamer in long forgotten shelves, like the epilepsies in the blood, it resurfaces to haunt me again and again.

Today, after a long absence from it – there are some times when you just shouldn’t be writing because what you write in a state of existential angst, like the best of friends, takes you for a long walk, listens to all your woes, hugs you on the edge of a precipice and then pushes you down the cliff towards an immortality – death is also a kind of immortality; it places you outside of time, you can never grow old once you are dead. Hence, once the darker clouds had been packed to welcome the morrow and the birds had been ordered to sing the morning song, I encountered the will to write once again and found myself all scattered (as opposed to splattered on the wall, brains and innards and everything) and swept away in summer lightning and spring thunders, in a world where the words suddenly found a release and I could find space, time and self to write something more personal than movie reviews.

Maybe it is time to come out of the hibernation. I twitch my nose and smell the air and I can sense Spring riding on the back broken spines of the winter of my discontent. I put a paw out and there is no frost threatening to devour my digits in a toothy smile. I peek at the sky above and see puffy cotton candy dandelion seed blooms floating in the air, reaching for the skies, flirting with the wind and playfully ruffling perched birds the wrong way, sending them into flights of gay abandon.

Many friends, in the months of untold silences have questioned my reluctance to talk, to write, to even write to say that I won’t write… and I still don’t have answers to their questions. Never has life been so dramatic that everything in it seems intensely personal, sacred and infinitely too complex to try and put it into words. But things are now settling down. I find my own comfort zones and spaces, people to rely upon and hold hands with, and I am hoping to get back again into the momentum of living the mundane and writing the fantastic. This is a beginning… A kind of veiled thank you to all the virtual and physically more proximate friends who, through the long periods of silences, still kept up with me, just to let me know, without asking untoward questions or putting conditions, that they are around. It feels good to be back and hopefully there will be time and there will be time, for me to open up the dot that holds my universe and start talking again.

I leave you with a song  from Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi that has been making me smile the last few days. Bawra Mann… load it on the playlist and think of me and smile.

Bavra mann dekhne chala ek sapna ..

Bavrese mann ki dekho bavri hain baatein
Bavrisi dhadkane hain bavri hain saanse
Bavrisi karwanto se nindiya kyon bhaage
Bavrese nain chahe bawre zarokhon se bavre naazaroon ko takna

Bavra mann dekhne chala ek sapna

Bavrese is jahan mein bawra ek saath ho
Is saayani bheed mein bas haathon mein tera haath ho
Bavrisi dhun ho koi bavra ek raag ho
Bavrese pair chahe bawre tarano ke bavrese bol pe thirkana
Bavra mann dekhne chala ek sapna

Bavrasa ho andhera bavri ho khamoshiyaan
Thartharati lav ho madham bavri madhoshiyaan
Bavra ek gunghata chahe hoole hoole bin batayein bavrese mukhadese sarakana
Bavra mann dekhne chala ek sapna

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom" Anais Nin

Ni:shabd starts with grey tones – a sound track that resonates with your heart beats, a landscape that is pockermarked with age, a stark and unforgiving camera that nudges at that which nature tries to gloss over, a barren and harsh sky throwing a gray tantrum, and a very fragile and vulnerable looking Vijay (Amitabh Bacchan), narrating to us, in a grave and grave-marked baritone, the reason why he stands on a precipice and contemplates suicide. The story of love between an eighteen year old spoilt brat from a broken house who has come to spend the holidays with her friend’s family and the sixty year old man who, in the winter of his life finds summers of discontent, Ni:shabd is an extraordinary story (ala Lolita and American Beauty) and a brilliant technical crew gone wrong in the hands of a very indifferent director and an incredibly poor screenplay and dialogue writer.

 
Jia (Jia Khan) is a blunt, over-the-top, edgy, hormonal and hysterical eighteen year old who hides her emptiness, her loneliness and her craving for love behind a blatant and smug exterior. She dresses in designer tattered clothes, recreates herself in a certain punk aesthetic, looks like the seductress out of a B-grade Hollywood movie (remember Fatal Attraction?) and believes in living her life beyond the rules and at the edge of reality. She encounters a serious and ‘happily married’ Vijay married to Amrita (Revathy! Oh what were you doing here?) when she comes to spend holidays with her friend Ritu (played by a very vivacious and expressive Shraddha Arya ). Ni:shabd is a movie about what happens when this sassy world weary and steeped in cynicism Jia meets the father-like (all hail Oedipus) man with only one passion – photography and a large estate, married to a nagging and old wife.

 
The first half of the movie seems to be a pale imitation of Fatal Attraction where we are given an extensive view of Jia’s long legs and buxom body; her hair, in the manner of all heroines in paper back romances, unruly and wild in her abandon. The camera completely demonises this brat in her sexuality, in her confusion and in her desire. She starts getting attached with Vijay and on the pretence of learning photography, seduces him and professes love to him. Vijay who, in 27 years of marriage had never deviated from the norm, suddenly finds himself sexually attracted to and charmed at being desired by the eighteen year old Jia and eventually confesses his love for her to his family after his daughter witnesses an intimate moment between them.

 
Technically the movie, as all RGV film factory movies generally are, is brilliant. The camera, with its sweeping arcs, with the tilted establishing shots that come slowly into focus, the close-ups that require such a lot of re-orientation and in capturing the almost pre-lapsarian beauty of the Munnar tea-estates is par excellence. It is sensitive, it plays with a breathtaking fervour with the surfaces and lights and is flawless in its execution. The editor matches the cinematographer in its play and we have a movie that, in its 120 minutes duration, is cinematically accomplished. However, having said that, the rest of the movie and everything about it is a terrible disappointment.

 
RGV seems to be so interested in getting the technique right that he has lost all track of the screen play, the dialogues, the character development and motivation. The performances, barring Amitabh Bachchan’s are ludicrious and flat. Jia Khan is irritating, unbelievable, and more confident than she should be with such very poor acting and enunciating skills. Her continued presence on the screen is one of the biggest drawbacks of the movie because in her best shots she looks plastic, in her worst, she looks like an unsavoury gooseberry. In a character that needed a latent strength, vulnerability, fragility, ethereality and pain, Jia infuses nothing more than an unbelievable energy and a strutting arrogance that is not only unjustified but also severely misplaced. A strong case of horrible mis-casting and a bad choice for the protagonist who has to bear such a heavy burden in the movie.

 
After Eklavya, Amitabh Bachchan gives in another stalwart performance. I think this, and not Black, will be his best performance ever. There is not a single frame where he is anything less than perfect. The scars of ages, the burdens of time, the wistfulness of lost youth, the nostalgia of once-upon-a-time are present in his face, in his eyes, in the way he moves and looks at things. Calm, calculated and very expressive, Bachchan makes Jia khan look even worse than she is. The movie is worth a watch only for Bachchan, who, inspite of some very wooden dialogues and excruciatingly painful monologues manages to convey the grief, the guilt and the problems that the movie seems to nudge at – the institution of marriage, the social conventions of finding partners, the paradigms of love and romance and attraction.

 
Revathy is largely wasted and that is a pity because she has been such a powerful performer in the past. Rukhsar, who has a small role, still manages to leave a lingering impression of hollowness and emptiness in the movie. Kudos to her for making her presence felt even when she was not the central character of the movie.

 
Much has been said about how Ni:shabd is a bold movie or a movie that breaks the mainstream boundaries and talks about a new relationship. I very strongly disagree. I think Jogger’s Park was a much bolder movie which addressed questions and issues heads on. Maybe even Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna had more courage to address the questions than this one. Ni:shabd seems to be a very conservative modern tragedy (As tragedies are apt to be) which, while it does portray an unusual relationship, ends up moralizing and preaching very heavily. The camera, which should have been neutral (Remember Gus Van Sant in Elephant?) is judgemental to the core. It is Jia who is demonized as the seductress and punished for her actions. Vijay, who also manages to transgress the sanctities of marriage and social acceptance of romance, finds his life in shambles, paying for it with probably suicide. The movie, more than exploring the possibilities of such a romance is actually a moral reminder of how happiness can only be sought in socially acceptable circumstances. It made me squirm that something that manages to find space to talk about these issues would end on such narrow and conservative notes that seem to be in compliance with the rising fundamentalism of the right wing political parties in our country.

 All in all, Ni:shabd is worth a miss. If you are a Bachchan fan, you might want to watch it for his unparalleled achievement in subtle acting. If you have nothing better to do, you might hop into a nearby theatre and spend a mightily boring two hours. But if you’d rather play holi, I completely understand why.

P.S. 

priyatam

There is no such thing as a simple love story. The most Average Joe has a story printed on the inside. Love is like Life with the rocks in! Farhan Akhtar (am I the only one or is he really growing on people?) and Ritesh Sidwani after the not so interesting Don, bring Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. I went to the movie with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised to find a really healthy Hindi comedy after a long time. In the days and times that we live in – where sexual innuendoes are considered to be witty, badly timed slapstick is called funny and horribly inane scripts are flung around the place in bad imitation of cheap Hollywood movies – Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. Was a fresh breeze that doth shake the darling buds of May. Twelve people aboard a bus with Myself Sunil, For your service.

First time writer and director Reema Katgi, brings to the screen a comedy that is hilariously scripted, brilliantly directed, flawlessly narrated, mixing desire with destiny and the crude with the ludicrous to such perfection that the movie razzle dazzles you. The story of six diverse couples from different ethnic origins and religions, class and age structures, get onto a private honeymoon tour and what unfolds is a two and a half hour of rip roaring story telling that tickles your funny bone and how. Reema Katgi combines the Hrishikesh Mukherjee sensitivity (Remember Golmaal?) with the Farhan Akhtar chutzpah (I don’t have to remind you of Dil Chahta Hai) to create an exuberant movie that, apart from a very strong screenplay, also has a parodic structure that offers tributes to all the movies the film maker has grown up with. More than as a tale, it is fun to watch Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. as a montage of different predictable love stories all mixed and matched to create unexpected endings. If recycling is an art then Reema Katgi has perfected it.

 
The cast is huge and extremely powerful. Kay Kay Menon (bow you minons, bow) with a gorgeous Raima Sen (when did she learn to act?) are the Bengali couple who are possibly also the show stealers. They own every scene they are in and even some where they are not. Abhay Deol (for once, no bad word for a Deol… that is a first) and Minissha Lamba form the nerd Parsi couple. Not only are they funny but also come with a huge bang at the climax. They never ever fight but when they do, the earth shakes and you realize that with great powers come great responsibilities. Ranvir (the munda from Channel V who comes out with flying colours in the role) plays Hitessssss who is married to an eternally crying Dia Mirza (Ssssilpa… zara zara… ooh where is the cold shower?) who keeps you in guffaws for the first twenty minutes. Vikram Chatwal (who is he now?) who plays a Kannada (I meant Canada) returned NRI married to Mumbai hawt girl Sandhya Mridul. Karan Khanna (To gay or not to gay that is the question) plays the hen pecked cock (er.. ahem) married to a romantic mills and boons chatterbox Amisha Patel. Boman Irani (The chameleon man who can be everything and anything) and Shabana Azmi (need I say more?) round up the dirty dozen. The movie is about these six couples, told in flashbacks and conversations, using radio as the tour de force of the script and fast forward as the general aesthetic, to create a brilliantly woven non-episodic movie that would put Love Actually to shame.

 The songs, though they are slightly lack luster, actually fit into the movie so well that they seem good after seeing the movie. The editing is oh-my-gosh breathtaking and the movie keeps you, your toes curled, waiting for the delayed orgasm throughout its chase. The way the characters unfold, the way the love stories are told, the way hearts are won and broken and then healed, the way the characters get interwoven in a magical journey of Honeymoon in Goa, is awesome. Kudos to the director and scriptwriter for an extraordinary portrayal of same sex characters in Hindi movies ever. Sensitive, passionate, caught in a patriarchal homophobic society and raring to break the confines of their selves, it will indeed come to you as a pleasant shock and a very happy surprise. I won’t say no more because I don’t want to be the spoiler.

 For me, the high point of the movie was the story telling. While the performances are absolutely delightful and the technical crew has been on its toes, it is the director who steals the show. What Farhan Akhtar did with Dil Chahta Hai for the College kids genre, Reema Katgi repeats with the genre of ‘Adult Comedy’ – not comedy that rests on exaggerated puns, hamming and lewd suggestions but comedy that is subtle, sensitive, mature and sensible. Drawing from such diverge experiences, working with such a large and powerful cast and yet managing to portray each character without caricaturing it is a huge achievement. The movie is slightly shorter than the general Hindi movie (I find it a plus point) but this is not a Hollywood wannabe and is rich with cultural referents, Bollywood parodies and insider jokes that will be a Cinephile’s delight. She brings to screen a magic realism that is highly reminiscent of the Italian cinema from the ’80’s, exploring fantasy at the realms of the real, evoking the real that hides behind the fantastic. Unapologetic and exuberant, vivid and real, heart warming and something-in-my-throat-ish, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. is a force to be reckoned.

  It would seem that Eklavya was the beginning of good cinema for the year for me. If you are in the mood of moving away from syrupy romantic melodramas; if you need a vacation from vulgar (in the most judgmental sense of the word) comedies that star three irritating men trying to keep themselves alive through mindless antics; if you think you deserve to serenade cinema as it should be, you will find Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. a very pleasant ride. And remember, myself, Nishant at your service.

One household, bereft of its dignity, In ancient Rajasthan, where we lay our scene, From paternal grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of a Palace Guard And the royal queen, A pair of ill-fated children who kill the king of ages Their father who took her life The queen, their mother, his wife In impotent rages.

 The story of a Royal Guard – as old as time, as strong as rocks, as fragile as heroes, Eklavya, the eponymous protagonist of the movie is a classical Greek tragic hero, caught, not between the right and the wrong but a series of finely balanced Rights. Laid out in a contemporary village in Rajasthan – a place that time has forgotten, Eklavya takes us to the pathetic kingdom of a last king (Boman Irani who kills us, he kills us master with his versatility), who has lost his title, his wife, his family but not yet his kingly temperament. When he discovers from his wife in her illness, that his offsprings were sired by the Royal Guard, he murders her in his impotent range, precipitating from there on, murders, betrayals and pain as the entire household collapses in blood baths and the ghosts of the dead.

 Amitabh Bachchan who gives one of his most powerful performances ever – I did not like him in Black, I was irritated with him in Bunty Aur Bubly, I thought he was a sham in Paheli – and for once and for all, shuts me up in critiquing him as an actor. Give him a role that needs restrained passion and controlled exuberance and there will never be a match for him. Eklavya, the old quickly-getting-blind palace guard, the father of the Royal Queen’s (Played fleetingly by a still gorgeous Sharmila Tagore) children – a sexily brooding HarshVardhan (Saif Ali Khan who just looks more scrumptious with every role he picks up) and a mentally challenged Nandini (Raima Sen who seems to be finally coming of age), battles his way towards a finish as he chooses between two rights. Antigone like in his placement, Eklavya rises to the challenge when he has to choose between his duty as the Protector of the king and his duty towards his son, his duty towards what his heart thinks is right and his duty towards what his head believes to be true. The movie, in its 120 minutes runtime, takes us through a powerful emotional ride as each character makes his/her choices to thrust the tragic plot further. Abetting the narrative is an ethereal looking shy and shimmering, almost like a mythical butterfly that flaps its wings to create chaos in multiple universes, Vidya Balan, who, though she does not have a ‘major’ mainstream heroine role, still manages to create poetry on the screen in her brief presences. Sanjay Dutt as Pannalal Chauhar, a small time Dalit boy who makes it big as the DSP, makes you wish the movie was longer just to see him some more.Jackie Shroff and Jimmy Shergil as the King’s younger brother and nephew respectively, provide the evil scheming Satanic side to complete an excellent casting.

 V.V. Chopra’s poetry, unlike Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s opulence, is restrained and hence the more beautiful. While S.L. Bhansali creates the frameworks and then insists on populating it with stories, Chopra, as in his earlier works – Parinda, 1942 A Love Story, Kareeb – manages to yet again create celluloid poetry that shall linger way after everything else has been forgotten. In creating the neverland, the retrojective oasis of his plot, he etches in perfection, the contours, the shapes, the colours, the shots and the scenes with an aplomb that very few directors can carry off. Chopra reminds one of Peter Jackson at some times, of Van Gus Sant at another. His story telling is perfect – it is a visual feast that frames every shot and scene, it is compact and it keeps you in a sublime elevated mode for the length and through the breadth of the movie. There is not a single shot that is unnecessary, not a flicker of an eye, not a breath of a dove that is not needed. Chopra manages to chop off all excesses and yet creates a plush and rich movie that shall go down in cinematic history with great fanfare.

 The performances have been equally vital to the movie. Each character, without the aid of unnecessary flashbacks or motivations, has managed to establish itself so strongly within the narrative that in spite of the slow pace of the movie, the audience is left gasping, as the present tells the story of the past. Amitabh Bachchan proves that powerhouse performances are not about hysterics or histrionics but about passionate silences and the powerful overflow of emotions through eyes. Saif Ali Khan seems to have the Midas Touch – all that he does turns into gold. Vidya Balan, though she has a smaller role, is still as ethereal, as strong as she was in the glorious Parineeta. Boman Irani is the postmodern chameleon – give him any role and he brings to it the variety and range that would put anybody else to shame. Jackie Shroff, though slightly tripe and tipsy is tolerable. Jimmy Shergil, in his tough boy avtara looks like he is ready for Dhoom 3, if that be on its way.

The music is alluring – even though the title theme sounds like a slow and Indianised version of Abba’s all time hit Fernando. The only song on the sound track – the lullaby is haunting and soothing at the same time. One does wish for a track like the “Jag ja re” number from Omkara, but then that is too much to ask for. One does question the constant Saraswati Mantra as the background music because it does not necessarily gel with the scale and the tempo of the movie. However, the story telling itself is so compelling and the editing and the performances so acute that the score, average as it was, manages to not irk.

 And while I do say all this, it is only fair to declare that the true stars of this movie are the art directors, the cinematographers and the technical crew. The sets are magnificent, transporting you to lands which are strangely familiar because they pulsate with the blood in your veins. The lighting is awe inspiring – blinding till you see it from the other side, with exquisite use of candles and moonlight and a Quentin Tarantinoish absolute darkness. The editing, the splicing, the shooting, the costumes, the looks are all flawless and would be giving a lot of other movies a run for their money at the award functions. The only grouse I have is against the script writers, who, in spite of their chance to place the story in rural Rajasthan, gave their characters a very clean urban Hindi, instead of infusing them with the colours of the local dialects of Rajasthan. Also, the happy ending which seemed slightly contrived. However, those are concessions which one makes for something so splendid to be made within mainstream cinema.

 Eklavya The Royal Guard, becomes the first spell binding Hindi movie of 2007 for me. There will hopefully be more to come.

 PostScript: For Shakespeare lovers, do watch out for the beautifully placed inter-textual references in the movie – the opening of the movie with the sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?’, the very Ophelia like disappearance of Vidya Balan towards the end of the movie, The Hamlet like conflict that Saif Ali Khan faces in the second half, the almost parodic scene where Saif Ali Khan sees blood on his hands ala Lady Macbeth, the King Lear like confrontation between Amitabh Bachchan and Saif Ali Khan… there is a long list. Watching the movie will be a joy if you have your Shakespeare all mapped out.