doublethink

Between Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Raja Babu, the Indian middle class had two versions of liberalisation to choose from – a metropolitan and a provincial. Full piece here

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...

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...

The doomed diva Har ek mod pe bas do hi naam milte hain Maut keh lo – jo muhabbat na kehne paao (There are only two names on each pathways (of life) Call it death, if you can’t call it love) I am sorry for even trying my hands at translating these beautiful verses portraying intense suffering, tragedy and clamour of an individual. Are there any guesses who penned these lines? I am sure very few of us would rightfully identify this poetess-in-oblivion who wrote many such verses and couplets as a personal way of registering, recording and dealing with her grief-stricken short life of forty odd years. She was born on 1st August 1932 in Mumbai to Ali Baksh and Iqbal Begum (renamed from Prabhawati Devi). Her father was an actor in Parsi theatre and also dabbled in Urdu poetry and occasionally gave music direction in Hindi movies. This girl, Mahjabeen Bano, was the youngest of her siblings and in the family mired in financial hardships she was literally forced to work in films. Her career st...