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 Woeld 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)

The Death of Fiction July 17, 2009

She of the shiny cleavage and explosive jhatkas pulls the fringes of her sari atop her crown and discusses the recipe of kaddu halwa with one of her five potential mothers-in-law. She says she loves joint families, will give up non-veg for the family and live in partial purdah if that is what it takes to make the family happy. Her five mothers-in-law-in-the-making feel she is a really nice girl, like a “Barby Doll”, and everything that everyone else thinks about her is totally not true. She weeps, feeling loved and pampered like never before. She also weeps because a charming boy from the Ganges coast has broken her heart.

She plonks her head inside a glass jar alive with slithery butterfly lizards. Her lips suck at a vacuum device to pluck a red star from the wall of the jar. The lizards, obviously not used to life in media glare, seek the moist cavity of her mouth. Her lips, juicy and succulent, are suddenly her biggest enemies. If she collects 10 of these stars, from jars full of bees, snakes and other abominations, she gets to earn dinner for her 10 campmates – but it will still be without salt.

At 60, he comes prepared to face the truth, hugging poetry for support, dressed to woe millions, 25 at heart. Proud thespian, prodigal matador, thrice married, still not shy. Dripping intent and courage, he confesses that he believes his third wife married him for money. If he can answer 21 such questions, he will win a crore, and, apparently, atonement too. “Do you have a child outside marriage?” Mercifully, that’s stumps for the night.

They are woken up at 1 in the morning in their tents, the bite in the air making violent love to their every pore. Patently shaken up, they assemble in a ground and are berated for being chutiyas because they took more than the five minutes they were supposed to take to get ready. Their morning starts with spattering chilled water on each other, following which they are asked to run on a bed of burning coal and retrieve some loose change from an urn full of incandescent cinders. They take turns in being called names, till one is kicked out like a cur, cowdung on her face.

Someone is trying real hard to prove that truth is stranger than fiction, what chance did life otherwise have against Marquez?

Who renamed my city?! July 11, 2009

Ravi. The first guest writer at Wordly Ties. Head, I-Osmosis, the premier Indian firm offering English language teaching services to ESL learners (http://www.i-osmosis.com). Has lived in close to a dozen cities around the world, including  some before he was formally born. Anal about language. Fierce traditionalist, Bombay loyalist but compulsive introvert because he still cannot make the tsssssk sound. Upset at governments, to the point of ranting.

The world that I know of seems to have gotten city names right. They’re short, often with just two or three syllables. They can be pronounced differently – “shi-ca-go” for an American or “chi-ca-go” for an Indian who goes about his English-speaking life with spelling pronunciation – but they’re easy to spell and remember.

Strangely, here in India, Jingoistic government officials who should be given straight-jackets instead of policy-making authority have been sane enough to stick to short names when indulging in the contemptible act of changing the names of cities. Thus, Bombay did not become ‘Mumbadevimahanagar’. ‘Madras’ did not regress all the way to ‘Chennaipattinam’. Talk about Best Practices.

So although ‘Bengaluru’, which hopes to become an incurable pandemic of a name like ‘Mumbai’, may thwart any chance of the city underneath the name to develop the aura of history and allure that New York does, the Bangies – if that’s what they like to be called – should be thankful that they are not living in Bendakaalooru.

Michael learns to draw tears July 8, 2009

As of this moment, Bombay has handed over the emotional trigger of my life to Michael Jackson’s brainless remains. These past two weeks, I have been an uninterested witness to a predatory hysteria tearing apart Michael’s anatomy and fumbling about with his reputation, unsure, too excited to be in mourning. I have felt very distant from this; distant and disgusted; distant, disgusted and curious, all at once. The only comparable benchmark I have been able to think of is the death of Rajiv Gandhi, when my mother refused to cook, and I – even at an age when death does not fully make sense – felt a dull ache that our smiling handsome prime minister had exploded into small pieces in such a spectacularly ugly fashion. What has been happening with Michael’s pill-riddled body and his Byzantine mind now is just as nauseating, and I have felt smug in my distance.

Michael Jackson was never my hero. I hoarded a few posters of his as a kid yes, not because I adored him, but because I had a handful of friends who were willing to give good barter value for the glossy centrespreads. I was never a loyal. As a child, the adult world around me in smalltown India taught me to associate a certain feeling of sin and impropriety with the hip-swinging King of Pop. In fact, I have never heard even one complete Michael Jackson song, but I thought my world was none too poorer for it. So, besides the tippling feeling caused by a great and sudden vacuum somewhere farfaraway in the universe, I have not been able to relate to the vocabulary of loss and frenzy all around. I have felt clean and insulated. I knew the man more for his scandals than for his music, so I have understood one part of the postmortem cacophony but not the other. But now, watching Brooke Shields crying while remembering that his favourite song was Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile”,  Stevie Wonder searching for him behind his dark glasses, Magic Johnson saying the fondest memory of his life was sharing a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken with him, and a lot many people comparing him to a John the Baptist to Obama’s black Jesus, I feel a lump forming in my throat. Suddenly, the distance does not feel all that happy. Suddenly, it feels like I am terribly alone in my halfhearted mourning, because unlike his millions of fans, I am not equipped to fully comprehend what is being mourned. Suddenly, it feels like I have allowed someone important to slip away without bothering to find out who and how big. Suddenly, I know there are people out there who are frenzied about the “person and not the personality”. Bombay, probably the only Indian city that daily engages with this duality, is surely an American city today, and I a lonely rancher missing all those LPs I never bought, hung up, distant and indifferent.

Bombay – III June 30, 2009

Considering that it was in Bombay last time that I fell simultaneously out of and into love, the current inning is turning into a bit of a letdown. It’s all one big case of Bangalore redux for me so far – after having resolved that I will turn into a ferocious socialite the moment I set foot in Bombay, reversing two years of moss gathering and self pleasuring in Bangalore, I have not managed to make a single new acquaintance yet, if you discount my ex-colleague’s brother-in-law who was clearly impressed enough by my general knowledge (read: the HSBC stamp on me) to think of me as a matrimonial candidate for someone in his family, till I told him I am actually just a “writer looking for work”. Or my friend’s DJ brother’s DJ friends, they of the relentless enthusiasm to get me stoned and cutting-edge hiphopspeak . I don’t know whether I look like kin to them because of my rebellious unkempt looks, but I am having trouble explaining that it may not be a good idea for them to go Red Indian with me because my stoner jokes still revolve around Neetu Singh, whereas the world has clearly moved on. To save them from disappointment, I have been spending most of my time in theatres or locked up in the bedroom calling up non-existent potential employers. Alone.

The main reason for Solitude 2.0 is perhaps that I am yet unable to make myself a part of the concentric circles that define the lives of every girl I know in the city – circles converging on a maniacal work and party regime. There there, don’t go all ‘awwwww’ at me. I have been doing rounds of the city in crowded local trains (why, I even did a return trip in general class yesterday!) and watching sold-out films all right. The only issue is that my sleep cycle is still a bit screwed to be compatible with those who can give my social life a facelift. I still go to bed at the blasphemous eleventh hour of the night, and I still watch films in the early-evening shows, not to mention my acute sensitivity to collective fun given its implications on my savings.

But as always, time spent in idle self-contemplation ever so often opens the doors of perception (besides making me want to smoke again). Since falling in love was one of the subtle agendas of my return to Bombay, I have been harking back on ALL the SMSs I have ever received with the word ‘love’ in them. It helps that I suffer from OCD and still have all the nine SIM cards I have used since getting my first cell phone in 2002. These do not include the two that were stolen from me, along with the phones, in Delhi in 2004 and 2005, respectively. That’s not a big loss though, thanks to my mirror-shattering geekiness back then. Anyway, it has been an interesting study, because in these past seven years I have fallen and generally been in love and love-like things five times, with women from a range of very different cities in North, West and East India.

What stands out is the peculiar vocabulary of romantic expression used by these women. While women from the north and the east have been quite liberal with the use of the first-person pronoun in their love missives, those from the west, from Bombay I mean, have shown a striking aversion to the use of “I”. And what a world of difference there is between “I love you” and “Love you”! Whereas the former establishes the coda of the relationship in no uncertain terms – “I love YOU (and no one else)”, the latter warns against such complacency – “love you (and him, and him, and him too)”. The missing “I” renders the admission of love eerily impersonal and transient, as in ”you are worthy of my love right now”, ”or I am feeling love for you as of this moment” rather than ”I am in love with you.” It has been too recurring and prevalent a pattern to write off as a coincidence, and I think it makes sense given that Bombay is truly the city of the missing “I”.

Bombay teaches you how to hoard your “I”, lest you distribute it too freely among the clamouring many. It does not prevent ”I” from loving, but it does discourage”I” from loving too easily and exclusively.  ”I” is at once precious and irrelevant in Bombay, because its sweltering public places and parties often do not have the room for and the solemnity to accommodate this demanding vowel. Bombay is more comfortable with “we” or nothing at all channeling love and cheerfulness at a well-defined recipient but choosing to remain a slippery silhouette itself. Love you, Bombay.

Bombay – II June 25, 2009

True to my word, I am writing a post on Bombay from a cybercafe, ie using broadband that I am going to pay for. I hope the Universe is watching, because I am putting the ‘think-you-are-rich-even-when-you-are-shitting-bricks-thanks-to-unyielding-unemployment’ adage from The Secret to some serious test here. I am still jobless, but I am not letting that prevent me from my daily dose of burritos and room-temperature Corona. And now, I am in the middle of a 5-hour marathon session at a cyber cafe @ 20 bucks to the hour. I have already taken about 15 useless printouts, and just when I realised my behind is sore from too much sitting, I decided I haven’t qite spent enough to feel happy today. The Universe conspired, sending Bombay its first round of blinding thick rain. The Secret works, again!

Every difficult city in the world has its own set of  doggery-hardened philosophers who can define the city like no other. Having allowed the city to see them in the most compromising and vulnerable positions, these people develop a stoic inertia that feeds on watching others going through the same treatment. They are minefields of survival information on the city, but they consider it their duty to let the city toy with your vitals as the best form of induction. Basically, they are insufferable sadists, a bit like second-year seniors are with anxious fuchhas. To make matters worse, many of them are misers.

The best thing to do if you are new in the city and coping with an extended period of idleness is to smoke a few cheap joints with these folks, but if you are beyond that age, you could try provoking them with a few strong statements expressing your dislike for the city, and then sit back with your bottle of warm beer. 

My learning from one such session: “Good that you are jobless. Bombay will soon enter you through all your holes. Love will blossom.”

I only hope I don’t have to fake an orgasm, like so many ’strugglers’  in the city have been doing for so many years, desperately trying to keep their marriage with the city alive.