A Good Samaratan March 7, 2011

Samara white wine 180 bucks in a green bottle, take a bow. Don’t hog the whole stage though, leave some room for this blog, since it is this blog that I have returned to under your influence, fighting off dearblankpleaseblank and textsfromlastnight, the two undisputed linchpins of the season.

Why, you ask, have I adopted you though, especially since I seem to have arrived in life – enough to start thinking disdainfully of the Borivali local and sticking only to the Andheri variety? You are cheap, you taste like cough syrup, and you do not even have a name that is difficult to pronounce. But you are in many ways like this blog – a convenient means to an unglamorous end. A bit like my early morning date with the commode whose seat could do with a repair job, but whose unflattering touch makes me feel all’s well with the world nonetheless. Nothing in comparison to how I felt on those profligate afternoons back from Alibaug and taking a dump in the Taj loo, but 15 stations closer and that much more instantly gratifying.

Birth Buddies January 30, 2010

Those who don’t know me, behold, and draw a mental picture of me.

Those who do know me, behold, and understand how much of me you never knew.

This is what has made me what I am. As I count down to my 27th birthday, it’s finally time to own up and show the world who I am all about. These are my birth-buddies. I am particularly thrilled by the first and third entries. Happy birthday buddies, let’s totally do this thing again!

________________

Tallulah Belle Willis, 3rd daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore

Maitland Ward, born in Torrance, California, actress, Jessica-Bold and Beautiful

Karen Bradley, Miss Rhode Island USA 1996

Maria Itkina, U.S.S.R., sprinter, 9 world records

Charlie “Pretty Boy” Floyd, FBI Most Wanted criminal

Camille Bombois, French circus wrestler/painter

Joseph Gordon Coates, Prime Minister of New Zealand, 1925 – 1928

Charles VI, King of France, 1380-1422

Cry Baby and Resul Pookutty January 24, 2010

Am I losing it? Why are films making me cry so much?

It was sporadic at first. A scene here, a dialogue there. Now, it’s like I cannot watch any kind of film without breaking out into loud sobs at the slightest provocation. This is not just strange but rather inconvenient as well, given that I mostly watch films while eating dinner.

But first a slight correction: it takes not just any provocation but a happy provocation to cause such outbursts. Sad scenes, people dying, poverty, failures, Fardeen Khan, these things don’t affect me. But whenever there is a moment of epic happiness, that’s it! Take today for instance. I was watching Chak De India while eating tandoori aloo and pulav. (I have been down with a most terrible fever and cold that makes me cough out scary looking phlegm for the past few days, so I was fully relishing my hot meal.) Suddenly, India went a goal down. Nothing happened (I only helped myself to another serving of aloo.) Then suddenly, with about 2 minutes remaining, India equalised. The audience in the stadium went berserk. There was a great deal of fist thumping. I sensed it coming.

In the tiebreaker, India messed up the first two-fifths. Nothing happened (I merely helped myself to some leftover daal). And then they scored three consecutive goals and saved three consecutively too. That did it for me. Just as Shahrukh Khan turned to cast this vague glance at the Tricolour, I started bawling (aloo still in mouth). Trust me, when you have a cold, it’s not a good state to be in.

PS: Quite separately from all this, I “heard” a film for the first time today. Each time the stick hit the ball, cut through air and hit the back of the net, the image became completely irrelevant for me, so rich was this experience. All thanks to Resul Pookutty, whom I had the good fortune of chatting with for almost three hours today. I am just sad that I didn’t do it before he won the Oscar, because now I feel like every other wannabe who wants to get a piece of him. The man is a delight. More about the meeting when the chat is published. Now I must go and cough.

PPS: Gymming is overrated.

Wasteland January 6, 2010

Tanmoy Goswami loses his way in no man’s land.

“When the sniper reached the laneway on the street level, he felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed….He wondered did he know him. Perhaps he had been in his own company before the split in the army. He decided to risk going over to have a look at him…. A machine gun tore up the ground around him with a hail of bullets, but he escaped. He threw himself face downward beside the corpse. The machine gun stopped.

Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face.”

I first read Liam O’ Flaherty’s war story The Sniper in 1999 as part of my tenth board syllabus. I could swear the dead brother in the climax felt mine, such was the awe and shock of that last line which stayed with me for years. Events around the world only added to the macabre feeling. On 1 March 1999, days before my final exams, Rwandan Hutu rebels killed and dismembered eight foreign tourists in Uganda. On 24 March, while I was cramming up the history of the Irish civil war (1922-23) to prepare for ‘reference to context’ questions based on O’ Flaherty’s story, NATO started bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On 7 April, even as I was mourning the end of my favourite language and literature section of the exams, Serbian forces were sealing Kosovo’s border crossings to prevent ethnic Albanians from leaving the region. And on 26 July, when I was trying to convince reluctant parents that I mustn’t be forced to study science, India declared victory in the Kargil war because our army had supposedly killed more Pakistani soldiers than they had ours. In the middle of all this, some people were predicting the end of the world owing to some computer bug. I was struggling to make sense of things. The twentieth century was drawing to a close.

In the final reckoning, and in spite of the best efforts of the global media, it was war and not Y2K that claimed the twentieth century as its own. In the process, it picked up many adjectives, ‘absurd’, ‘insane’ and ‘needless’ being only few, but the truth is this: war was the only phenomenon that had stayed relevant right through those 100 years. Nothing had managed to unite human beings with greater finality than war, not man landing on moon; not the fall of the Empire; not the progress from vacuum tubes to microchips; not even global warming. It was war that had birthed the twentieth century, and only war had the right to lay it to rest.

So the war in erstwhile Yugoslavia and its aftermath (1992-99) came at just the right time, giving the century an apt laying-to-rest as it were. Decades after the world thought it had seen the end of ‘ethnical cleansing’ with the dismantling of the Concentration Camps, thousands of Bosnians (and later, Kosovar Albanians) were murdered in a systematic genocide. The UN, that delicate angel born out of monstrosity, was reduced to nothingness. And the once-formidable Yugoslav nation splintered into tiny pieces ill-equipped to do anything but maniacally wage war to assert their sovereignty, each piece a little no man’s land lobbed about along the trajectory of violence.

Right after the end of the century, Danis Tanovic chronicled a part of the spectacular madness of it all through No Man’s Land (2001), which won the 2002 Oscar for being the best foreign language film. If there were any doubts about war’s continued stranglehold over public imagination, that victory over four feel-good films from India, France, Norway and Argentina should have annulled them. By the time I watched the film five years later though, I was tiring of war. I had realised that war was a pretty good bet to stupefy anyone who had grown up in the twentieth century, a most unfortunate revelation because it immediately deflated the awe and shock of reading the O’ Flaherty story. I had also realised why ‘absurd’, ‘insane’ and ‘needless’ had gotten the better of ‘relevant’ as an adjective for much of what war came to be associated with.

That is not to say No Man’s Land is not a relevant or a well-made film. It is very relevant, if only as a document on the Bosnian crisis, and there is no denying the richness of its dark comedy. But in a world where war has become the ultimate metanarrative, the film’s little jokes and allusions appear staid, like a déjà vu which actively tells you it will show you nothing new.

Three soldiers––one Serbian and two Bosnian, one of them lying on a bouncing mine––are trapped in a trench between their lines, inventing charades for help that never comes. It is not too difficult to read the parallels with a certain pair of tramps waiting for Godot (Beckett’s existentialist outcry was published in 1952), or with the marooned American and Japanese soldiers forced to partner each other for survival in the World War II film Hell in the Pacific (made by John Boorman in 1968). There are other references straight out of a soldier’s diary: sample the scene where an anxious guide asks a bunch of lost soldiers to put out their cigarettes in order to stay invisible in the night fog. Remember Hector Hugh Munro and his alleged last words before being shot dead during World War I: “Put that bloody cigarette out!”? Or for those who have read it, even the sniper in O’ Flaherty’s story who gives in to the temptation of lighting a cigarette in the darkness of the parapet, only to be shot at from the opposite terrace? Then there’s UN bashing galore, a glimmer of friendship between two bitter adversaries, soldier banter around women and their photographs, media inanities over war and even a joke on another war (the one in Rwanda)––all of which together feel like a point stretched too far, even straight out of a JP Dutta canvas. Yes, war is evil, and yes, no one cares for the puny soldiers stuck in no man’s land, but is that really an education for someone who has studied a history textbook half-full of accounts of Nazism and Fascism? Or who used to have nightmares after reading Eliot’s Waste Land?

But perhaps I am being harsh on the film because I am generally done with all things war. Perhaps the point is exactly that war restricts expressive choices, stunts your ability to receive the ‘message’ and drowns you in fatigue. You set out to write about an acclaimed war film, and you end up rambling about the wars you remember from your lifetime. So you give up, and you wait for the next emblem of apocalypse, and you can only hope it rides on a different evil, one that can shock like the face of the first brother you killed.

Published in the UTV World Movies Magazine, December 09 issue, as a companion piece to the cover story on No Man’s Land.

Also Ran January 6, 2010

Lola reminds Tanmoy Goswami of another common-man runner, who scampered through the business of life as if it were a box of chocolates.

The first time I sat down to watch Run Lola Run, I kept expecting to see Tom Hanks.

The name of the film had floated into my consciousness years back, most probably during one of those depraved post-dinner soirees in the college hostel when names like ‘Lola’ made unique sense. Just the title—invoking images of a running Lola customised to suit our individual fantasies—made us look for the CD in the neighbourhood video store. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t have it, although we did return with a few close matches featuring Bo Derek and Kimi Katkar.  I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because you simply did not get German movies in video rental stores ten years back, not even if they had names like that.

After I left college—and the hostel—my fantasies became more accessible. For starters, I now had my own laptop with my own superfast broadband. Suddenly, the world seemed to be exploding with all manners and forms of running women. Lola stayed on as a hazy, fond adolescent memory, like an obscene joke only your closest comrades are privy to, but she was still faceless.

It was at this time that films began to claim all my nights. After five years of reading English Literature, books had started to repel me, and cinema cashed in on this vacuum. Aided by IMDB, I drew up a list of 250 must-watch films, one per night, hoping to end what seemed like a lifetime’s cinematic starvation. A week after starting this regime, I encountered Forrest Gump for the first time.  He had been running for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 16 hours.

Forrest Gump won hands, or rather, feet down when it came to my generation’s runner heroes. Remember that running scenes in Bollywood films mostly involved a little street-hardened boy running away from the bad guys and ending up as a full-grown Amitabh Bachhan by the end of the credit sequence. Compared to this high-voltage saxophone-and-banjo routine, Forrest Gump’s sprint looked almost mundane—but he made you want to run with him, if only so you could also join him when he said “Now you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows.”

I owe not a little to Forrest Gump for helping me rush through those first 250 films in a little over three months. Soon, I was looking for more like him. Someone told me Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams aboard Chariots of Fire could come close, but it turned out they were too grandiose for me to relate to them. Then suddenly, serendipity struck through the unlikely route of the Bengaluru Goethe Institute, and Lola came running back into my life. She had only 20 minutes to reach the finish line.

That gap of 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, 15 hours and 40 minutes aside, there isn’t much separating Lola from Forrest Gump. Comparing the cinematic merit of the two films they inhabit would be as ridiculous as comparing Carl Lewis with PT Usha, because they ran—and won—very different races. One ran in the midst of the Vietnam War, the other merely across a nondescript German town. One ran to defy bullies and win rugby games among other reasons, the other with the singular aim of saving a life. But they both ran because that’s all they could do and not to establish any heroic agenda. If anything, Lola could do with a meeting with Forrest Gump. He would tell her how she must put her triumph aside and learn to run “for no particular reason”, and maybe years later she would be found telling her friends “…[f]rom that day on, if I was ever going somewhere, I was running!”

Published in the UTV World Movies Magazine, January 2010 issue, as a companion piece to the cover story on Run Lola Run.

Memory Game October 25, 2009

Tanmoy Goswami presents a primer on the relationship between culture and memory.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Thus spake Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It is common currency that memory is the most powerful tool of cultural transmission in traditional societies that have undergone centuries of repression. Take the Caribbeans or Native Indians for instance. It is largely through generations of storytelling and oral mythmaking that these communities managed to keep alive a coherent sense of their past, free from the self-centred narratives of their colonial masters. For each Eurocentric version of their history, there is a voice like that of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, which reclaims that history and creates room for it in the mainstream. Naturally, most of this tension is located in the arts, in a Guernica by Picasso or a Beloved by yet another Noble laureate, Toni Morrison.

The struggle between memory and forgetting, between transcendence and cultural erasure, is now finding alternative battlegrounds, and sadly, the battle is turning out to be rather lopsided. How else does one view the mass closure of single-screen theatres around the world? Why go around the world though? Mumbai, the capital of all things filmy in India, alone saw the decommissioning of 49 single-screens in the five years leading up to 2007. It did not help that while these dinosaurs of cinema reeled under a 44 per cent entertainment tax, a municipal tax based on the number of viewers, a 12 per cent education tax, a 15 per cent road tax and a variable property tax, the government serenaded investors in multiplexes by offering a slew of tax breaks.

The onslaught of modernity has not affected single-screen theaters alone. London’s iconic music venue, The Astoria, was sold in June 2006 for £23.75mn, allegedly to free up space for a complex of shops, flats and offices and to cash in on the real estate boom before the 2012 London Olympics. Opened as a cinema in 1927, The Astoria was converted into an exclusive concert hall in 1976 and hosted gigs by Nirvana, Radiohead, Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam and Oasis among a constellation of others. Part of London lore, The Astoria’s demise is a classic case of how a myopic agenda of development can deal a death blow to cultural memory. Savi Munjal, former lecturer at the Delhi University and current student resident at Leeds and London, says “I pass The Astoria quite often and there’s nothing but a scaffolding there. Many people who arrived in London after January 2009 (which is when the venue was finally shut down), myself included, have never seen a gig in it and will never know why the old-timers are so emotional about it.”
Back to Bollywood, Madhuri Dixit’s 2007 comeback film Aaja Nachle may not have busted the charts, but it did raise a meaningful point about a fictitious poor Indian cousin of The Astoria, the Ajanta Theatre in the small UP town of Shamli. To its credit, Aaja Nachle did not confine itself to exploring the angst of the theatre employees and patrons, but also made a case for public participation in cultural performances using the venue as a melting pot.  No matter how ‘comfortable’ our futuristic multiplexes are, they will never allow the kind of silly amateur stage-shows an Ajanta can effortlessly call its own, bringing people closer in the process.

So when Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders make a movie named after an obscure Cuban music club and resurrect a band of musicians hurled into oblivion by Fidel Castro’s regime, it resonates at a level that far exceeds its immediate cultural milieu. When Buena Vista Social Club (1999) opened to international acclaim, many an embittered soul was offended that it took two (white) Westerners to give Cuban  music its due. Isn’t that an utterly irrelevant question though in relation to what a movie like this manages to achieve? Michel Gondry would agree. After all, it took the ghost and a fake biography of the long-forgotten Black American Jazz performer, Fats Waller, to salvage community pride in the Western town of Passaic. For those on whom this reference is lost: Be Kind, Rewind.

Published in UTV World Movies Magazine, Oct 09 issue (a companion piece to the cover feature on Buena Vista Social Club).

Please, Is There a Nurse on Board?! October 25, 2009

The thing that primarily kept me away from the blog for a couple of months is my job as the editor of a world cinema magazine. Here’s whatever I can share with you from my work in that pompous role.

“Why do the keywords ‘nurse patient movies’ typed in Google yield the most shamefully predictable results?” ponders Tanmoy Goswami, as he revisits three films on the subject that go beyond the usual.

“For a medium that feasts on relationship dramas, cinema has strangely shown poor taste when it comes to the nurse-patient bond. In fact, if you want to research nurses in movies, you might as well type ‘silk stockings and sheer lingerie’ in your search engine. Maybe the problem is that characters falling sick has never been a major trope in films, as if there is only life and death and a mostly confounding but always healthy in-between. Ergo: not much need for nurses in this world, unless they are invoked for “sleaze therapy”. Occasionally though, a Jack Nicholson here and a Ralph Fiennes there have needed good old nursing, helping the nurse’s cap and belt restore some of their lost pride. Our movie of the month ‘Zelary’ is one of those rare films that have dealt with the subject with sophistication, and it prompted us to dig out three other gems that can lay a similar claim.

1. Deep Jele Jaai (Bengali, 1959) – Long live madness, for without it director Asit Sen couldn’t have given us this masterpiece on the human mind – and those burdened with looking after it. Suchitra Sen (remember her Indira Gandhi turn in Aandhi?) plays Radha, a nurse in a psychiatric hospital tasked with healing patients suffering from emotional trauma. The brief is clear – fake some love, keep it ‘real’, but watch your own heart. Merely a beautiful (and hence, convenient) tool in a cold experiment, Radha is forced to romance Tapash (Basanta Chowdhury), a scorned lover and painter, only to succumb to love herself in spite of her best professional efforts. The patient recovers and the hospital raises a toast to the miracle-working nurse. Fate has other plans though, wiping off her every memory from the revived painter’s mind. In one of the most numbing climaxes ever, a devastated Radha is admitted in the same ward she once used to reign over, mumbling “I wasn’t acting, I couldn’t”. The film was remade by the same director into the Waheeda Rehman-starrer Khamoshi (1969), and the audiences cried again.

2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – So you thought all nurses are tender souls who can be easily manipulated? Allow Nurse Ratched to change your view. Essayed by an awe-inducing Louise Fletcher, Nurse Ratched believes a sick mind needs strict control. Her asylum is the picture of order, and all her charges are well-behaved barring their minor eccentricities. It is at this point that director Milos Forman unleashes the evil genius of convict McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) on her world. A wicked choice, seeing how the result was the Oscar big five – best picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay – the first film to achieve this in 41 years. The film gave the nurse-patient relationship a radical spin by introducing questions of morality. You get the feeling that Nurse Ratched believes a part of her mission is to turn the madmen under her care to people who can live with ‘propriety’ and not just ‘normally’ in the outside world. Her ego gives her the conviction that she can wipe away all impurities from their souls and make them anew. Calls for a dose of McMurphy, decides the director. Enter rebellion, debauchery, gambling, drunkenness and the whole shebang of deadly sins, as the lunatics indulge in all the delights the sane world reserves for itself. You sense that the conflict between the nurse and the pretending lunatic is too consuming to leave both unscathed by the end of the film, and the director proves you right.

3. The English Patient (1996) – Looks like scriptwriters and directors ignoring the subject have missed a link here. After ‘One Flew…’, here’s another nurse-patient saga that won Oscars by the bagful – this time a stellar nine, including one for Juliette Binoche’s nurse Hanna. Conventionally speaking, there is little ‘madness’ in the film, setting it apart from the other films in this list. For a change, Hanna is shown tending to the fleshly wounds of Ralph Fiennes’ Count Laszlo de Almásy. But as the narration progresses amid World War II, civilization’s greatest act of madness, things inevitably move over from the physical to the psychological. The English Patient is a story of discovery and loss. As the plot thickens, director Anthony Minghella takes us through the labyrinth of the patient’s mind. The whirlwind flashbacks into the dying man’s life reveal a doomed love affair with a married woman Catherine (Kristin Scott Thomas), even as Hanna gradually heals herself of her fear of emotional attachment, falling passionately in love with a Sikh soldier. Once again, here’s a film riddling the benign relationship between a nurse and a patient with images of destruction. The charred body of the patient serves as a constant metaphorical reminder that some scars cannot be healed by even the most devoted hands.”

Published in the UTV World Movies Magazine, Sept 09 issue

Overheard in Delhi October 25, 2009

A 20-something at Archies, Kamla Nagar: “Bhaiyya, yeh watch bisexual hai naa?“

In other news, I am feeling rather welcome, being back that is.

Why Love Aaj Kal made me feel good about myself August 2, 2009

I watched Love Aaj Kal with two deeply lovestruck souls today, and if that left any feeling of incompleteness in the experience, the Friendship Day SMS from one of those unknown numbers during the interval certainly made up for it. More than completing the cheese extravaganza all around though, the SMS made me think about why I – an opinionated and brutally frank friend of these two mushed out people – was watching Love Aaj Kal with them on this very day.

Chew on this. The young Sardar Veer Singh from the ’60s Delhi is sorrounded by a bunch of fawning friends, who are basically sponges without any independent personality. Yesmen all, they barely speak except to express approval or empathy for whatever their heroic buddy whips up. They always stay in the background, like a chorus incapable of disagreement or contrarian advice. At least one of them is always a buffoon, whose stupidity helps the hero feel good about himself. This is indeed a recurring trope in the “yaar/saheli”-infested world of Bollywood from the 60s through the late 90s.They are ciphers, a waste of screen space except for the relief provided by their motley clothes and make-up and their total lack of brains and/or beauty which helps project the hero/heroine in all their glory.

Now think about Love Aaj as opposed to Love Kal. Jai and Meera play out their destiny in a virtually friendless world, and only a handful of friends get screen space alongside the protagonists, but not before proving that they are real and not types. There’s one who thinks the idea of a break-up party is ridiculous, there’s another who starts flirting with the ‘liberated’ Jai the moment the break-up is officially announced, even as Meera encourages Jai to go ahead and try his luck. Love today is characterised by its aversion for  sheep-like friends who are agents of someone else’s will. Today’s surefooted heroes and heroines indeed have no patience for thoughtless loyalty, neither do they need to feed on someone’s inferiority to feel good about themselves. Friendship can in fact come in the way of love (think of Dil Chahta Hai), and though that temporarily dents things, it emerges stronger on its own and not using someone else’s romantic life like a spineless creeper.

Good for me, I say.

When Freud Ruined The Match July 31, 2009

Sweets, five varieties, each the size of two ping-pong balls, alive with crunchy dry-fruit toppings, about 100 in number, arranged in neat circles on 10 porcelain plates.

Mangoes, diced and lush, served chilled, the fibrous skin peeled off with expert care, no one piece smaller than the other.

Bananas, allowed to ripen just right before being chopped into small cubes and served as the arc around the mangoes, not one piece the black hue that besmirches many a cut banana in this country’s acrid climate.

Dhoklas, flush with juice and riddled with tangy mustard seeds.

Kachauris, kneaded for royalty and stuffed with a smooth powdery-paste of peas, lentils and heeng, engineered into ovoid balls to set off the drone of gluttony 10 miles afar.

Icecream, vanilla-flavoured and not kept in the fridge to avoid sullying it for the ladies observing their ritual Tuesday abstinence.

Cola, poured in glasses drunk with its beady fragrance.

The appetisers were beyond blame.

The hosts submissive and only too keen to play slaves in their own house.

The bridal candidate coy and putting the floor of the old house to test with her uninterrupted downward gaze. Pretty, like a cutout you wish were alive.

Naturally, not many in the entourage of 10 were happy the outcome was a ‘no’ simply because she didn’t know Freud despite her degree in psychology. She has a degree at least, plus look at the hospitality!

You disgrace, you could not play a simple game with a straight backbone that millions of men with far less than your fancy degrees have excelled in before you. It’s called shaoovinijm, you airhead, never mind the pronunciation.

It is clear you want a “readymade” girl who will not require any “training” and tending to. So much for your social service zeal.

It is clear you do not have the family’s happiness in mind, for which girl the type you want (able to talk about her own graduation syllabus you know) will ever respect her in-laws?!

Go to hell, you clearly belong there with your infernal thoughts (why on earth would you otherwise want your woman to enjoy a True-faught film with you?!)

Thank god low-cost airlines fly to this hell on short notice. That, plus the consolation that at least my friends are all curious. Spare me the pain of retelling this guys, its Freudian overtones embarrass me.

(Based on a true incident)