Molestation

A lot of women are sharing some of the bad experiences they have had and needless to say, there aren't many or any who don't have something to say on the subject.

I don't know whether India is the only country where women are molested, probably not. However it is perhaps the only one where it happens so shamelessly frequently, and infects almost every young girl with its poison.

While rape demands some sort of personality disorder, molestation is a lot more commonplace. A grope here, a handful there. With a side-order of a lewd remark or two. The men who perpetrate these actions are cowards of the highest degree and my belief is that they apprehend mostly only young girls because they know that these girls are scared, easily embarrassed and less likely to raise hell or chase after them.

What sort of mentality does the man on the street have to think it is okay to grope a girl, secure in the knowledge that she won't scream? It is crucial to find out.

Because therein lies our problem. The man who thinks it is okay to thrust his groin into a school-girl in front of him on a crowded bus, thinks so for a reason. And I am not talking about why he thinks it is okay because he will not have to pay for it; I am asking why his personal sense of morality allows for it. We all have a line we would never cross. The man on the street will not condone murder, maybe not even rape. But molestation or as it is sickeningly called 'eve-teasing', he is okay with. And therein lies our problem.

Apathy

The world, my friend, is ending
With shootouts & rapes
Shady, shadowy shapes
Who cares, every person is pretending
The world is yes, ending

A neighbor needing tending
Or his children failing tests
They disinterest us like the rest
Each to his own fending
The world as-sure-as-hell, is ending

It is so heart-rending
To see this indifference snowball 
Into heinous acts affecting all 
Reaching a point beyond mending
Nothing to do, but watch the world ending

Mumbai today

I have never understood why mere qualifiers of one's accident of birth should incite such intense emotions and actions. A sense of belonging is probably essential for humankind to survive, but it is also the biggest weakness it has. However, such philosophical debates on the nature of humans aside, it takes a special kind of delusion and perversity to be actively inciting factionalism, encouraging it to grow to dangerous proportions, where only destructive action can bring closure. Even if Mr T only caught onto Hindutva and Marathi-manoosism for the political mile-age it would give him, I cannot shrug it off as a rational decision made by somebody wanting to be in power. It requires a madness and baseness of spirit.

Jab Takk Hai Jaan - movie review

Ok. Since none of the reviews I have read so far have been able to suitably convey the ridiculousness that is 'Jab Takk Hai Jaan', I have decided to pick up the gauntlet. Considering I have not been bribed or threatened by any member of the expansive Chopra or Khan fraternity, I still retain the prerogative to think and question, a privilege which few have these days.

So here's a list, in no specific order. Yes, I am too riled up to fashion these fallacies into beautiful prose. That is the forte of the Chopra khandan.

1. Anushka Sharma's look seems to have been designed with the intention of making her look like a 15 year old..boy. Although considering her unnatural skinniness, maybe it wasn't the designer's fault. Perhaps they just couldn't make/find clothes of that aspect ratio.

2. While on the subject of Anushka Sharma, her performance has drawn mixed reviews. I think she has potential and hence my heartfelt plea to her is as follows: Dear Anushka, please run like the Milkha whenever anyone mentions the following words in your half-presence - spunky, vivacious, punjabi, dilli-wali, lively, bubby and assorted other words and phrases meant to portray the same personality type that you have played (successfully) in your last few films. In case you have no option and have to grin your way through such roles, please try to remember the last time you met somebody (not pumped up on coke) who was THIS peppy all the time, everywhere. The constant joie de vivre of your character, Akira Rai, can be likened to the buzzing of a persistent mosquito.

3. The writing. Wait, what writing you say? Well, on the basis of recent ventures namely SOTY, Aiyya, the eponymous JTHJ and many others, you would be forgiven for thinking this word doesn't exist in Bollywood. But I have it from reliable sources that an attempt is certainly made to put head to paper and come up with a story, screenplay and script, if not before, then organically during the making of a movie. And here is my question - what was the writer (Aditya Chopra, I am told) smoking?

To demonstrate the point, here are few of the major plot devices -

- Conversations with God. What a simple world it is, seen through the eyes of Chopra junior, where a promise broken to God incurs His immediate wrath. Or he actually believes there are people who think so. Or he actually thinks there are people who believe there are people who think so.

- Road accidents. The characters are pretty Shakespearean in behavior in that they seem to think that the whole world is their playground. What is a road, if not more space for them to jump, wheelie, dance around on?

- Amnesia. What our protagonist gets when two accidents happen at different points in time, and the second one causes his brain to rewind its clock to the first one, so that when he comes to, he has forgotten everything that occurred between the first and the second accident.

- Doctor's counsel. When your patient has forgotten everything that has happened to him for the last ten years, instead of taking him to familiar environs, take him to a fabricated, make-believe set-up. That will help him remember. After all, reality is the biggest illusion.

4. While one shouldn't speak ill of the deceased, and Yash Chopra has given us some wonderfully directed movies, I can't help but mention that the direction in this one is lacking. Apart from actor performances, it is direction which can turn a mere story into flesh - creating bonds between characters, between characters and the audience - none of that seems to be in play here.

When Raj in DDLJ decides to pursue Simran to the end of the world, without even knowing whether she likes him or not, we root for him. When he employs one of the silliest (and oft-used in Bollywood) ways of determining whether she likes him – her turning around to look at him for one last time - we all want her to 'palat'. There is tenderness in Kabhi-Kabhi, unarticulated emotions, poignancy, grace. Shashi Kapoor doesn’t need to tell us in so many words that he has figured out the thing between Rakhee and Amitabh Bachhan; we see it in his expressions, his body language, and our gullible hearts go out to him.

I could not detect even one-tenth of that chemistry between the lead actors here. Even when they shout out their love. The interaction between SRK and Katrina is cold. That between him and Anushka, forced. One minute the intense Major and the ambitious journalist are diffusing bombs, the other they are high-fiving each other on how great a girl-friend the journalist will make for the reclusive, death-wish-ridden Major.

5. This last example is also an example of bad screenplay. Many of the scenes on their own are ludicrous.

Sample this (not quite verbatim) -

Journalist - “Where has the Major gone?”

Bomb Diffusion Squad Team Member – “Sir likes to have some quiet time after diffusing a bomb.”

Next thing we know, Journalist sneaks up on ‘Sir’, sitting on a river bank, singing lustily.

6. Katrina Kaif is not an actress. Undoubtedly she is one of the hardest-working women around. One look at her toned body and you know that. But she CANNOT carry-off such nuanced roles. A big part of the reason why we don't care about/believe what happens between the lead pair, apart from the direction, is she. The ad-wallahs have it right – give her a script where she needs to look drop-remote-dead gorgeous and NOT SPEAK A SINGLE WORD.

Phew. I am exhausted. And there are things I haven’t mentioned like SRK’s journey from a 25 year old waiter in London to the super-specialist bomb-squad-chief for the Indian Army, like the length of the film, like AR Rehman’s mostly lack-luster music, like Anushka Sharma’s random and inexplicable love for the Major.

Well, after watching what could be alternately branded as an extended docu-drama on the adverse effects of irresponsible road-behavior, I wish I had retrograde amnesia and could forget the last three plus hours.

The opposite of Nostalgia

A decade or near, lost in a haze
A rush of sweetness and silliness
It was a mini-era, a defining phase
Of judgement errors and confusion

Now your walls are fortified with bones
Yet their ghosts walk the corridors
Mocking you in their silly-erring tones
Giggling madly, these pathetic shadows

So break bread with them, forgive their silly hearts
And they will climb into bed, forever go to rest
Leaving you as more than a sum of many parts
As strong as good, and best of all - You, just you

Hope

The train pulled out of the station just as she tumbled onto the platform. Resignedly she started weaving her way through to the ladies' spot. The next train would be a ten-minute-wait away.

This happened to her with alarming regularity. She attributed it to a well-oiled failure to plan well. She knew how long it would take for her to reach this blasted station from her office. She also knew what time the train was scheduled to arrive and miraculously, it always did arrive at that time. Admittedly mathematics wasn't her strongest suit, but nobody could deny that a simple calculation would reveal to her the time after which lingering around in office wasn't advisable, train-wise.

It is widely acknowledged by experts that doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results, amounts to insanity.

She definitely didn't consider herself insane. A failure at planning, yes. Oh, to heck with it, just a failure would suffice.

She got to the ladies' section and looked around for some space to sit. The area seemed well-packed with women of every shape and size. Innocuous-looking, the layman would have confused them with working girls, students, fisherwomen and the like, gathered for a spot of train travel. But she knew better. These were battle-ready women. Train-catching - a sport, nay, a means of survival in this break-neck city where the old refrain of Time being equal to Money came alive with disastrous results.

While looking for a place to sit down, she realized that she was hungry. The bhel-man was standing at his usual spot, sourrounded by a throng, dishing out variations of the simple bhel at super-sonic speed, dexterously, almost robotically. She joined the crowd and no sooner than five minutes later, she was in possesion of some delicious looking bhel.

Another three minutes to wait till the train was due, she went and sat down on one of the benches below the Bhojpuri posters. Almost content, she plunged the puri into the mountain of bhel and was about to toss it into her mouth, when a sullen looking boy appeared on the horizon.

It was almost like he came out of nowhere. A nobody. Emaciated, anguish pouring out of every atom
of his unexistence. He had bruises all over his body. Somebody had beaten him up over something or nothing.

She didn't like to give money to beggars. She hated them - their neediness. She had enough problems of her own and could do without beggars pressing on her their implied right to her money just because they had even lesser.

After hovering in front of her for a second, he moved to the next person, aggressively appealing, palm perpetually outstretched. As she watched him go, a whistle pierced the clamor and her train came into view. People around became infected with motion, poised, flexing.

She made a sudden decision, leaped up and hailed the walking form of the boy; she turned him around and thrust the bhel into his astonished arms. Without waiting to see if the urchin threw it away, for bhel ain't money, she walked briskly towards her compartment and succeded in getting in without loss of life or limb.

She felt happy-ish. Yes, it was a good-ish deed. But what could it solve for the poor boy? Bhel and then a beating. Life was too complicated. A good-ish deed was equivalent to a candle in the Milky Way.

* * *

His life was a misery. The memory of previous night made his skin crawl. Although, the beatings were not the worst of it; that constant ache in his belly was. Always around, the Hunger.

Especially nowadays. Business was slow. People weren't as charitable.

He had nowhere to go. He was a city boy. His parents had sold him to Mammu for a small sum of money. What had become of them, he knew not.

As he neared the end of his regular beat, he realized the earnings from the day would be less than meagre. That meant no food and a beating - at best.

He did think of running away sometimes. But fear of the unknown kept him from doing it. He had never known another life. What if it was even more undignified? And where could he go? With little money of his own and no worthwhile skill to live on, some other Mammu would get hold of him and life could get worse. People weren't great. Apathetic at best, evil, many of them.

He walked onto the platform and decided to work the Churchgate-Virar line. Lots of women there.

Ten minutes, less than ten rupees. The train was due anytime now. He walked around aimlessly and then spotted the girl. He had come to dislike her. She was a regular at this platform and the two times that he had tried to solicit her, she had looked like she would like to hit him.

Still, business was slow. He walked towards her, unable to put on a look of abject appeal this time. She gave him the same smouldering look. As the train whistled in the background, he started to move away from her.

That is when it happened. The girl called out to him, then turned him around and almost threw her bhel into his gaping arms. And as suddenly, she was gone. Clutching onto the Bhel, he watched the train ebbing away, aghast.

People did give him food sometimes. But this..this was different. 

He started to walk away from the platform in a daze. He was feeling light-headed, almost dizzy and it wasn't because of hunger for the first time in his life.

It dawned on him that maybe the world wasn't such a bad place after all. Maybe people changed. Good things happened without begging for them to. Things changed. Fortunes changed. A beggar could, maybe-just-maybe, think of becoming somebody else, somebody non-beggarly.

I'm no manager, or am I

Yesterday while watching Scrubs, I realized how different the creative oeuvre is from the 'managerial' one.

I love Scrubs. I am sure a lot of you out there do too. We can all go on about the things we love about it - the characters, JD, the madness, the Janitor, the verbose insults, Perry Cox, matter-of-factness with which problems are shown/dealt with, etc etc.

What I love most about Scrubs and not just as an audience member, but as an interested party in the creative process, what I find dazzling is the tedious limit to which Bill Lawrence will go to, to get a teeny-tiny point across.

Cut to an episode in the early seasons where JD has been entrusted with recording the birth of Jordon's friend's baby. JD forgets to rewind or something and the recording does not happen. Dr Perry Cox, to save himself from 'My ex-wife will hold this over my head for so long, I may never see the sun again' kind of situation, tries to pass-off a recording of another baby in its place. But both these babies have one critical difference - the one on camera has hair, while the real one, as was presented to the mother, didn't. JD jumps in to say that he had shaved the baby. As all eyes rivet onto him, Dr Cox makes what I think one of his funniest statements ever - 'Yes, we shave babies to remove traces of any prenatal lice'.

Jordon looks at him like a suspicious mother who knows her precocious child is lying to her. And then there is this delicious little scene - Jordon standing at the check-out counter, holding a book with a jacket which says - 'I shaved the baby to remove prenatal lice, by Dr Perry Cox' - she says to the guy at the counter - 'I am not buying it'. Then cut to reality in the Scrubosphere.

That's it. This little scene would have necessitated the making of a jacket and creating an additional scene set-up - not that very much admittedly. But think of what the scene is trying to say - that Jordon doesn't believe Dr Cox. Could that have been said verbally? Yes. Would it have made Scrubs the quirky, funny show that it is? No.

And this is just one of the very-very-many such scenes that the show is littered, nay, embellished with.

Now have a 'manager' direct the same show. He would identify key storylines, build scenes around them, cut out the superfluous, not realizing or considering that it is the little flounces and deviations that make a name - a signature.

Point is, creativity is not to achieve a purpose, a return-on-effort or return-on-investment. It is because it can be.

God's little Irony

A: I know you don't believe in God.
B: That's not entirely true. I believe there is something/someone.
A: Then why don't you like to pray?
B: Because He/She (let's call it an It) is supposed to be Omni-potent, Omni-scient and all those ominous sounding things. Why would I need to pray? It will know when I am in trouble and need help. Why should I have to ask?
A: Because It has many things to do and many people to listen to.
B: But It is OMNI-SCIENT! Is this supposed to mirror your relationship with your Bosses, where prudence has it that you put on a show for your superiors? Or perform that all-pervasive ritual of corporate-dom called 'saveyourass-anam' entailing keeping your superiors 'aligned'; in the hope that should the house-of-cards fall, you are able to SYA?
B (on a roll now): You know, in fact, I have never understood how in those mythological stories, any rakshas could fast for a few days and God would descend and happily give him some killer boon! How could He not have known that the guy was a rakshas and would use it towards evil?
A: How could he have known?
B: Because he is OMNI-POTENT! Man, it seems like I am the only one who does believe! 

Midnight in Paris

A whiff of a memory

A nugget, no more

Opens flood-gates of sorts

To the glorious days of yore

Tis an addiction my love

Of the very worst kind

The present’s a bastard

Crushed by your wandering mind

Like holding sand in your fist

Like caging warm sunshine

Like trying to preserve bubbles

Nostalgia’s a futile past-time

The past may well be a frog

Only Prince from remote

Yes, it offers a bitter sweetness

Of lost young dreams and old love-notes

Richness of a mirage-like past

Will paint a drab today and morrow

So beware of this craving, my loveliness

Tis the road to inexplicable sorrow

Kolaveri

I am sure what I am about to refer to will resonate with a lot of girls who blundered their way through adolescence in the mid 90s - adulation for that devilishly-dimpled-derring-do who took over the country and whose fiery courtship in DDLJ established itself as benchmark for all teenage romance.

Till a few years ago, it would seem as if SRK had gone from strength to strength - one commercial success after another. His business sense was to be applauded - so what if he danced at weddings - show me the manual on '101 things a movie actor should not do' and I will show you one on 'Have pull, will make money'.

However, I am now beginning to get ticked off. How dare he contribute to something like Ra-one, the way he did? Minimal research and lack of attention to detail - for example on how a Tamilian Brahmin might behave or more importantly, not behave - and extreme caricaturization. The movie raked in some money because of the hype and curiosity created. Similar case with Don-2. It's almost like he thinks he is the Super-hero himself, he is Don - the guy who can get away with anything, because the audience swoons every time he throws a lazy smile its way. Or so he would like to believe.

Moving on from SRK to other rotten tomatoes found around aplenty - it angers me when film-makers dish out any shit in a predictable, formulaic manner - with the requisite number of high-speed car chases, semi-bad-dudes-with-an-underlying-intention-of-doing-good and glam dolls (given enough screen time to display their assets from every angle).

Yes, I am talking specifically about - Players. It made me mad. Millions being foolishly spent on an unoriginal idea, which if left to itself may have saved the day, but was made worse by doing that thing in hell which film-makers like to call Indianization. This sub-par movie has protagonists who decide to carry out a  heist so that they can then use the Gold to build an orphanage. Abbas-Mustan - do you two really think that your multiplex audience, for whom this movie is obviously made, has the constitution of a particularly sappy fifteen-year-old girl? That you need to trot out the good old 'childhood-spent-in-poverty-sister-got-raped-so-I-turned-into-Robin-Hood' kinda crutch for your heroes?

Shame on you guys - your audience whom you insult so generously, will repeat the favor next time by ignoring your slickly-made advertrailors and preferring to spend their time and money on others with more brains and balls.

P.S - I haven't watched Players - this kolaveri has been generated after speaking to people who have and reading a couple of reviews. If that made me so angry, I shudder to think of what might have happened, had I actually decided to spent good-hard-earned money on it. Thanks your lucky stars, A-M.

A question to myself

..and while the seasons pass me by
the tides, they go mellow and high
pictures of sunsets, seas and serenity
play havoc with my hardened equanimity
but resolutely I sit nailed to the chair
and think 'bout another place - anywhere
City rat - drink to that
that someday perhaps, perhaps you will
like the future to just be a thrill
of ways unknown, jobs small and galore
where success would be a by-product, no more
so will you have the heart, my friend
to drop the ball and buck the trend?

The anatomy of Anger

The hot volcanic burst
A manic lusty blood-thirst
Eyes aglow and ablaze
A snarling baying cannibalistic gaze
A clogging intake of breath
Like the silence of a suffocating death
An increasingly-deafening throbbing vein
Blood like molten lava mixed with pain
Pities to the victim of such an attack insane
The misguided sod who houses this cancerous bane