The Number 23

At the stroke of the midnight, as yet another mere mortal turns another year older, India shall awake to lead the same-old-chore-of-a-life.

23. Did never like the number. 23, man, how odd could you be – maybe, when you were young, they teased the mother out of you, so much so that little deformed kids and the lisping ones felt relieved when you were around.  They tried making a movie on that with a haggard-looking Jim Carrey and nothing could have been more depressing enough.  Well, from tomorrow and for yet another 365 days, you and I gonna shack up in peace and conflict.

After gradually having lost the charm of celebrating birthdays over the years, No. 23 would be expected to behave as normal as it can ever be. Capturing the little schoolboy’s innocence, whilst distributing Ravalgaon sweets to a classful of toffee-hungry wasted buggers, is just futile; I really envy and at the same time, pity the kids of today.

                       And it was always two sweets for the partner-slash-best-friend. It doesn’t just stop at that. Birthdays in school meant on that day, you owned your class’s ass – even the goon would refrain from beating you up. The day you stood out – while the rest of the classroom was coloured in whites and greys of the uniform, your snazzy multicoloured clothes were the shizz - revolution,man! That day, you were the baddest piece of ass and the teacher’s pet, at the same time!

Circa 2012.  Under the pretext of turning 18, you have bastardized every possible freedom and you stand dumb, thinking, “Yeah, what next?” The day arrives. All the white and grey uniforms have turned into chudidars and pinstripe shirts. You don’t distribute sweets, ‘cuz let’s face it, you already gorged on some yesterday.  Hell, you expect the regal excesses to be showered upon you and that very moment you realize that you’re just another slave to the grind!

The exclusivity has fizzled out.  You are up on a pedestal for 24hours and as soon as the clock strikes a minute past, hell, you’re up high somewhere and nothing beneath. Man, you’ve just lost ground.  00.01 the next day means all your riches have been vanquished, the same person who put you on the throne is running away with it and instead of running after him, you’re trying to gain some ground. 

Cold turkey is worse. The next day, you show up at your workplace all happy-smiley and shit, trying to feed off yesterday’s glory and all your workmates hand you is a ‘what-the-fuck-you-grinning-about’ look.  You keep wondering why have they  suddenly gone all pissed.  You suspect some foul play and try harassing some peeps to explain the sudden change of faces…. Still the same look.

After all those tense and mind-numbingly wasteful moments, you realize : Birthdays are just an eyewash. You were 23 on that day and for 365 days more. However, you’re king just for a day. Pauper the next  -  in this case, a keypunching lesser kind.  For epiphany’s sake - - The birthday is nothing but a tangential universe, where all is hunky dory.  The people are just versions of the ones you know. All those wishes and cheek-pulling are just coded in to feign the ‘realness’ quotient. But for that day, your life was always the same!

This movie called : Sparsh

Sparsh. A film, just, could not have been more apt with its christening.

Before one would want to delve into the dissection of the movie, understanding the significance of the ‘80s is of utmost importance. Downfall was the buzz word. Russia had begun its Afghanistan invasion - which would eventually lead to the disintegration of USSR. The Gulf Wars were in its nascent stage.Mall culture had slowly started gripping the Western milieu. Pop music was born and MTV had started its brainwash agenda. India had already seen itself subject to an Emergency rule and that corruption had started seeping into the system was seen more in public news. Narrowing down, mainstream cinema in our country had,supposedly, entered its ugliest phase ever – where every producer aimed at making the most out of his ‘formula’ films, regardless of the presence of substance in them.

Luckily, for India, all this turmoil got channelized into a new breed of films and filmmaking – arthouse cinema. The urban minds were now experiencing a kind of celluloid culture which spoke of the everyman, had substance in their content, made contextual usage of songs, instead of using it as a tool to increase the viewer attendance in theatres. The common man (and also, woman) was now the protagonist, without any pretense. The fresh batch of youngsters who had graduated from the top two national institutes of the nation dedicated towards cinema studies – National School of Drama (NSD, Delhi) and Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) – took the country by storm with their nihilism and minimalistic portrayals of characters in cinema.  Their presence restored calm and patience in the minds of the many that saw their Dream of an Independent and Prosperous India fade to black.

Sparsh (1980) was one such movie which injected realism and minimalism into Indian cinema by moving away from convention. Directed by Sai Paranjpye and produced by Basu Bhattacharya, this film has Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Mohan Gokhale,etc. putting in a stellar performance. With a runtime of over 2 hours, this motion picture takes its own sweet time showing us a tranquil part of Delhi.

The story is about Anirudh, a visually-challenged principal of an institute for the blind (Naseer) who develops a mutual relationship with Kavita (Shabana Azmi), a ‘sighted’ teacher who has not shed the baggage of her husband’s untimely death. This relationship is composed of love, respect, pity, self-pity, care and egoism. Set in a backdrop of an institute for the visually challenged – where kids would learn to read in Braille, play instruments, prepare handicraft products and have a basic knowledge of bartering change money – the screenplay aims at breaking shackles, moving off the convention that the blind need to stay dependent on the sighted. A beautiful scene in the film tries to show the exact opposite where Kavita feels wronged because of her sense of sight.

A careful attempt has been made to project the presence of self-dependence and male ego in Naseer’s character. This was method acting at its finest – that the role could have been more perfected is a matter subject to sheer chance and ‘what if’s. Not to be left far behind is Om Puri, in a minor supporting role as a blind teacher who loses his wife of many years and feels this sense of dependence and helplessness creep within him. His rolling, oblivious eyes, as he laments on his wife’s ‘release from this jail term’, hit the spot. Also, worth mentioning is the earnest yet innocent performance put in by the visually challenged children who performed an eponymous role, as well as the supporting cast featuring Mohan Gokhale, Sudha Chopra and other acclaimed theatre actors.

The dialogues are woven in simple, text-book Hindi language, laced with English common-usage words and phrases – to make it seem natural. A theatre actor loves to underplay his character and that was what was required. The music score includes three songs and an Ustad Amjad Ali Khan song excerpt, apart from a somber and classically-tinged background score.

Finally, onto my last part. This film has a poignantly charming role portrayed by Shabana Azmi – the perfect foil to Naseeruddin Shah’s character. How could a woman ever look so beautiful yet be so unassuming! Her aura symbolized the journey that a self-aware Indian woman has to embark upon to find the sole purpose of her life.  She undoes her character of the ‘abla, besahara nari’ dogma – a character so beautifully essayed in Mahesh Bhatt’s, ‘Arth’.

It’s really unfortunate that today’s generation has to tolerate such a substandard and crass fare of movies. Nonetheless, a selected few could do with this ‘sparsh’ of nostalgia for decades to come.

This movie called : Rockstar

Saadda haq; what the fuck.

Kid you not, this is what a bunch of people sitting in the back rows were chanting. I couldn’t blame them either, you have to come up with different ways of entertaining yourself while you’re in a theater watching Rockstar. There is something seriously messed up with the word, Rockstar. For starters, it doesn’t make any sense – one is supposed to talk about and venerate a rock musician and not a rockstar. The latter is just a figment of style and glamour.

If one were to review the movie - rather summarise the facts presented - Rockstar (2011) is a movie that attempts at documenting the travails of a ‘rock musician’, right from his college life where he meets a girl and right upto some concert where he still is stuck with the girl. They come together, they part ways and they come again. But somehow, the rock & roll element of the movie is like a weak camphor tablet. Three hours of drab, the movie stops making a point from its early minutes onwards.  The protagonist (Ranbir Kapoor) wishes to turn into an Indian Jim Morrison ( included in the early minutes is a conversation where the ‘hero’ talks about Jim Morrison raising his middle finger to the crowd and turning into a legend). Really???!!

The casting is in shambles; one expects a certain kind of class and aura with names such as Piyush Mishra, Kumud Mishra, Shernaaz Patel – all of whom are theatre greats. The supporting cast can’t be blamed much; a movie is the director’s game, after all (in this case, writer-director). It’s disappointing to see so much of self-indulgence in the core theme (love) and the consequent neglect towards the script and the story. Aditi Rao as a TV reporter looks quite pretty but really, after having a movie like Yeh Saali Zindagi on one’s CV,  this’d look like chickenshit.

Nargis Fakri - the leading lady of the movie – her presence justifies the director Imtiaz Ali’s fetish for pale-skinned beauties in his movies. She makes you wanna go all Ricky Martin and sing, “She hams, she hams”. Damn, the woman can’t act for nuts. You’d have to call the Ghostbusters to pull out an expression from her face.  Yeah man, pretty faces, too, can be a real piss-off.

Ranbir Kapoor tries to hold the fort, but I guess with everything around him going downhill, he gives in. His whole ‘rockstar’ attitude comes off as a very convoluted piece. His facial expressions, body language, spoken dialogues – all of them have a very early saturation point. He tries to come clean with his Look-you-purists-I-actually-learnt-the-chords gig, but his abrupt change of attitude and persistent grim look (that comes out of absolutely nowhere) is a bit too over the top.

The director, Imtiaz Ali, could very well moonlight as the HOD of the Packaging Department of some business house. His attempt at repackaging romantic turdball love for the BBM generation is worse than a quicksand pit for the masses.

This movie might unfortunately, paint a very stereotypical image of a rock & roll musician in the minds of the rural folk. Maybe there’ll be hordes of youngsters in Tier-I and Tier-II cities trying to wanna know about Jim Morrison – only because they heard his name in some Bollywood movie and not for his music.

The saving grace for the debacle-of-a-film was the music; A.R. Rahman manages to belt out some breezy, standard Rahmanesque tunes as well as some decent rock & roll in Hindi language. ‘Jo Bhi Main’ is a personal favourite, ‘Kun Faaya Kun’ too stands out. But then again, at one point, you just glide past the movie from one song to the other.

You will watch it. Of course, you will watch the movie. Negativity, in this case, begets curiosity. So, for the sake of disaster management, let me part with some tips : drag your friends along for this, please. You sure don’t wanna miss out on the dissing bit. Turn your cinema hall into a Gaiety-Galaxy of the heydays!

Words, everlasting words..

Running between prose and poetry has always taken the best of me, Quite often, it's the entire stream-of-consciousness thing that saves me anytime. You just tend to write and keep on writing until the mind starts putting out brain aneurysms as signals for you to give it a rest. Unintelligible talk is what forms the order, most of the days. And by the time you take stock of what has happened, you will already have rambled on for paragraphs worth of shit that can be pardoned only because the government hasn't yet begun penalising the blogger clan for wasteful use of vowels and consonants!

As you know, wasteful usage of words goes well with wasteful downpour of coffee, tea and the likes. Three paragraphs down, what you're left with is a bloated belly and maybe an article/blog. A trick out of this is 'randomness'. Yes,randomness. Especially, when you try using one unique word again and again to heighten the impact. Randomness.

Hank Moody, from 'Californication', would always say, "Blogging is the death of creative writing". Considering this is the current 'content consumption' trend, I would love to see textbooks in the size of tweets - or some other text gauging bracket that might trounce 'tweets' in the near future.

P.S. Knowledge is banal. Application,on the other hand, is key.Apparently.

After the dust settles

What’s gonna happen, after the dust settles?

Welcome another day, after the dust settles?

Overlook the burnt corners, after the dust settles?

Clear the charred remains, after the dust settles?

Look past the teary-eyed, after the dust settles?

Pass the buck onto the next one, after the dust settles?

Dutifully follow the law, after the dust settles?

Wait for answers long due, after the dust settles?

Forget the bad dream, after the dust settles?

Lie in anticipation, after the dust settles?

This movie called: Chillar Party

Innocence is a treasured virtue. It implies the presence of soul in the living being.  In today’s times, when the paucity of such virtues (or maybe just ‘virtue’) hits us right in the face, we turn to celluloid to keep us alive. This Friday, barring the other fare, this movie called Chillar Party was released, which attempts to put some soul, some innocence into the paradox, ’good Bollywood movie’. Yes, this piece of cinema is based on kids, but it hollers back a lesson or two to the elders, too.

Chillar Party is a good-at-heart film that resembles a smile. It features a bunch of zesty kids who befriend a street urchin and his dog, as he works as a car cleaner in their colony. However, all is not well when a minister decides to have the ‘stray’ dog laid down, in order to keep a check on the growing number of vagrant dogs in the city(read: vote bank politics). The gang then eventually tries their best to save the dog from being clamped away, right from uniting all the colony members to vote in favour, upto gaining the support of the media; this culminates into the climax of the movie wherein lies a message for every social element.

The group of kids stands out as the main star cast who deliver engaging performances throughout the movie. A meticulously sewn script with crisp and snappy dialogues is the actual show stealer here. Film schools stress on the fact that the first ten minutes of a movie must be enchanting enough to have the viewer connect to the story; Chillar Party achieves much more than that. By the end of the first half, you are in splits for the most of it. Surprisingly, not the no-brainer, overtly slapstick kind of humour! The second half tends to be a bit inspiring, ergo a bit too overdramatic. A few scenes neatly edited, would have done the trick. Good production qualities are evident and so is the cinematography for depicting plain urban locales. The supporting cast, too, provide a tight performance, thus, contributing to this ‘kiddie’ movie.

All in all, Chillar Party is the cinematic definition of the word, ‘cute’. Comparing it with Taarein Zameen Par comes as very habitual, but very unnecessary. Definitely worth a watch, it also brings out the fact you can show something cool, without mentioning the words, ‘Tarantino’ or ‘Coppola’.

  

The rush

Every life needs a particular rush to move along. An adrenalin rush.

The source could be your work, your fitness regime, your girlfriend, your philanthropy - anything. It should challenge you every living moment, pushing you ahead, to the next minute, to the next day....

And on any given day or for a string of few days or weeks, if you manage to stay away from this challenge, it starts affecting you subconsciously. You feel thrown off your regular course of activities. You might turn cranky or less interested in your daily activities. Your whole outlook towards witnesses a paradigm shift.

Conflict of emotions is indispensable to human life. Every emotion has its purpose of existence. This clash is necessary for every person to realize the roller-coaster ride that lies ahead.

But,most of all, the rush gives you a sense of existence - the reason that extends the meaning of life beyond mere survival.