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...

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...

The many meanings of smoking “Smoking kills” – this is not only a compulsory statutory warning flashed on all cigarette packs but also a fact. And people go ahead buying those packs (by turning blind to that message) is also a fact. Smoking is an act, a habit, and for a lot of people an addiction. On a simpler level, it appears, and in some way it is, a personal and individual habit, of course with damaging repercussions for those who have to keep company with the smokers by choice or by default. I assume this is the logic behind recent spate of bans on smoking in public places, so that the non-smokers don’t have to suffer. But, smoking has also come to acquire a social meaning. It is an act which has moved beyond the realm of individual into the social. It has been donned with certain social attributes over a period of time. The role of media in different mediums like adverts, films, and songs are crucial in this exercise. As a kid I remember watching an advert in which a boy and a gi...

Linking the nation: Bollywood ways In my last post I talked in some length about how newer means of technology, especially trains, have always found a prominent place in the cinematic portrayal in Hindi cinema. The range of emotions that are depicted through trains are wide, varied, and least to say, interesting. From a close camera-shot of tracks and a speeding train signifying escape, displacement, migration, and not the least death to those of scenes of crowded railway compartments in which the lovers’ eyes still managed to meet (for instance Amol Palekar and Tina Munim starrer Baaton Baaton Mein (1979), railways have remained integral to the ways in which individual sensibilities of a character in Hindi cinema has been depicted. But they signify more than that, at least in Bollywood. They signify a link, a connectivity that joins territories and groups. They signify a medium through which a nation is conceptualised. They signify a continuum through which that perceived or real (wh...

More than ten years before, when I think I was still a kid, I heard this song from the movie Hindustani (Kamal Hasan starrer): “Telephone dhun mein hasne wali, Melbourne machli machalne wali…”(The woman who laughs like a ringtone, the woman who gyrates like a Melbourne fish). I don’t know if Melbourne fishes have some special skills to imitate Bollywood jhatkas and matkas but anyways coming back to the song, it further says “Sona sona, cellular phone tum ho na, computer ko lekar bramhaand rachaya kya”, which would translate something like this: Oh Dear you are like a cellular phone, have you created this world with your computer? Funny, isn’t? I simply call it banal. But err, actually it’s imaginative too. Think about this: we have a fairly long and quite monotonous tradition in Bollywood of comparing our heroines with chaand, i.e. moon. Remember the unforgettable “Chaudvi ka chaand ho…” or “Ye chaand sa raushan chehra” from 1960s and 70s? But now, we have something interesting to co...

A few weeks back a friend of mine suggested me to listen to a song sung by Soham Chakrabarty in a recent movie Life in a Metro . A well-known musician, Pritam Chakravorty, has composed this song. The track is called "In Dinon Dil Mera". On hearing it first, I thought it was awesome, and in many ways I still think so. The voice is new and refreshing, the tune is catchy, and the lyrics are simple and elegant. But it is not path breaking. And in no way it looses its charm for not being so. Sometimes I feel it actually odd to even raise the question of ‘authenticity’ in this milieu of technologically-aided rapid transmission of tunes and genres and in light of evolution of ‘fusion’ music which itself is a hash of so many genres. For instance, a friend of mine recently reminded me that another song, "Bheegi Bheegi" composed by the same musician for the movie Gangster , released in 2006, was an adaptation of a very popular Bangla song which was known for its strong politi...