doublethink

The thought of this piece came to my mind while reading a passage in Alice Albinia’s brilliant book Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River in which in her uncanny style she seamlessly stitches the history of habshishs (Africans) in Sindh and their negative perceptions in the ‘morbidly skin colour conscious’ north Indian society in which Fair & Lovely is to be found in such scarcely stocked tea shacks in the remostest areas where busses even find hard to ply. Sitting at the Heathrow airport and surrounded by swarms of ‘white faces’ around, I pondered over the skin fascination in Bollywood songs, which Albinia also mentions in passing. The mass production of ‘fair ladies’ is enrapturing – from the advertisements of the fairness creams that sometimes go back to the Vedas to discover the ‘herbal’ (and civilisational?) remedies to probably present-day commercial (racial?) pollution, to that of Bollywod songs that hardly miss to shower praise on ‘gora rang’ (fair skin) of ‘gora ba...

The guy in green played: Nachiket The guy in white played: Samya The small girl played: Soni The man in black: Umesh Kulkarni (director) The man in white churidaar: Girish Kulkarni (producer and co-script writer). More seek than hide : the simple riddles of Vihir Writing a review or even a critical note on Vihir is a daunting task for two reasons: one, the film has such a rich polyphonic repertoire that it is almost impossible for an untrained reviewer like me to do any justice to the film, and second, it has already been brilliantly written about by Shekhar Deshpande on http://dearcinema.com/. The Berlinale 2010 screening has also been reported there . Therefore, rather than a standard review that recounts the basic storyline, this note tries to raise certain issues related to the thematics of the film. In teh post-screening interaction, the first question thrown at Umesh Kulkarni, the director of the movie, was about the fate of Nachiket. The film I guess left a section of audien...

Road Movie : Enlivening cinema, critiquing modernity I was a bit disappointed when I realised that there wouldn’t be any post-screening discussion on the movie. It was so because this brilliant film made me hungry to listen to the words coming from the horse’s mouth. And partly because I also wanted to stick up my neck for asking certain questions that, more or less, are still the first-impressions (yes, its still not more than a few hours that I saw the movie). As the name suggests, quite literally, the film is about two things: road and movie(s). The storyline is simple and elegant: Vishnu (Abhay Deol) is unhappy to support and take over his father’s business of producing and selling Atma hair oil. He got a chance to ‘do a favour to his friend’ (as he kept saying throughout the movie) to drive a truck to Samudrapur) – I guess an imaginative place situated by the sea. The journey then becomes the central focus of the film, as different events and plots unfold in the course. He is stop...

It was quite refreshing to see how ‘excellence’ was given priority over ‘success’ in 3 Idiots . Until now we have been seeing a good number of movies about morality and success, of which the most recent example was Rocket Singh . In the period of recovery from economic recession, the film adds a necessary caveat on how to do business. The film moved beyond the dichotomy of good businessmen and bad businessmen by shifting the focus from the actors to the systems. It brought ethics into the core of economics in a powerful way. However going back to the issue of excellence and success, and without challenging the core idea that excellence should precede success, I was wondering what would have happened if we could change the order of the ‘idiots’. Put Aamir Khan’s character in Sharman Joshi’s shoes without changing their class background. In other words, what is the role of material contexts in defining what success and excellence could mean? What would be the ways to achieve them? Moreov...