A hearty Welcome to Sajjanpur !

Just finished watching the movie. And I have only one question, 'What is wrong with the movie?' I liked it!

The plot is quite simple. Shreyas Talpade, plays the part of Mahadev who aspires to be a novelist. But lack of good plots and avenues force him to take up the job of a letter writer in his village, Sajjanpur. It is a 'hot' job in Sajjanpur where the majority is illiterate.

From here, Shyam Benegal weaves a river like story that along its course takes digs at almost every aspect of Indian life. I cannot call it a satire because it is not scathing. But humour has been used to temper the disappointment|despair caused by the state of affairs. Be it the surge in the number of religious gurus in TV, or the as yet unstemmed organ trade, or the adption of mobile phones, or widow marriage, or the candidature of eunuchs, or the capitalisation|criminalisation|regularisation of elections, or the prevelance of superstitions|customs, the tiff between two generations, the SEZ policy and the not-so-convincing resettlement|rehabilitation|compensation policy, migration to urban areas - Shyam Benegal has covered it all.

He has ensured that he does not make it too filmy by making the ending of every sub-plot happy. He also shows us what is happening around us through the eyes of his protagonist but never goes to the extent of making a hero out of him. Reminded me of Laxman's Common Man. On the one hand he shows how marriage of a widow leads to honour killing, on the other he shows a eunuch being a successful politician. The balance in his story and the detail in his direction is impeccable. The one point that could have stopped it from endearing itself with the audience was the north india based story setting and language dialect. People who are not even remotely familiar with the colloqiual usage of the language may find it hard to appreciate the humour based on language and local customs. 

Sans this aspect, I do not see anything lacking in the movie. All the actors perform well. Shreyas and Amrita do not disappoint. A good movie!

Stop and see the smaller picture !

I have been wanting to watch Shwaas for quite some time now. Thanks to my friend, Abhishek, I was able to watch it today. During and after the movie, I was thinking what was the movie all about. What did it want to convey, if it did want to convey anything at all? One thought that struck me and stayed with me after the movie too came during the end.

With almost everyone goading everyone else to "See the Big Picture", are we losing sight of the "Smaller Picture". Shwaas is the story of a 7 year old kid, Parashuram, from a village in the Konkan Region of Maharashtra. He is diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. Operation is the only way to save the kid's life but it will take away his eyesight. The movie deals with Parashuram and his family's travails as they try to come to terms with this reality.

This is where I realized that everyone is so busy being successful and in "Seeing the Big Picture" (apologies for the liberal use of quotes) that they fail to see the smaller picture. These pictures then come back to you as a phantasmagoria when you are nostalgic or sad. Parashu's granpa takes him out of the hospital so that he can see as many things as possible before he gets operated upon. During this time, the doctor and others have despaired to the extent of verifying new suicide cases. On the duo's return, the harried doctor, gives the granpa a piece of his mind. His solution to granpa's plea that the kid was restless and cranky (the operation was postponed for a day after full preparation) was a sleeping pill.

This is when the granpa reminds him that the sleeping pill would have simply put him to sleep but would have taken away the only chance the kid could have to take a look at the kind of colours the world has to offer.

Often, and more often now, we brush routine things because they are routine. A beggar on the road, your maidservant, your colleague - all of them have a story. I am not saying go all out to help them. But once you make a habit of removing your shoes and stepping into theirs, you will see your perspective change- wider and more accommodating then before.

Taare Zameen Par - A Review

If I say the movie was spectacular, well, it would not be very different from any other reviews. But, do I have a choice! Over a period of time we have come to identify a genre "classic Aamir Khan"; He has played the Producer, Director and Actor with aplomb. He has done it again!

A brief outline. The story is about Ishaan Awasthy, a 9 year old boy, who is outrageously bad at studies. Things are worse when contrasted against his elder brother who is an achiever in academics and sports alike. Ishaan's father, thinks this is a childhood idiosyncrasy that has only one solution - Boarding School. Boarding school has, but, an adverse effect on Ishaan. Unable to cope up he withdraws into a shell. Things look really bleak. Here steps in Ram Shankar Nikumbh, as an art teacher who teaches at a school for differently-abled children and has been hired temporarily. He has non-pedagogic style of teaching and invariably notices Ishaan's strange behavior. It doesn't take time for Ram to realise that Ishaan is suffering from dyslexia. That what is being passed off Ishaan's kiddish obduracy is actually a medical problem. Rest of the story deals with Ishaan's fight with the disease.

After college there have been very few times when a movie has moved me so much. Taare Zameen Par is one such time. One reason could be that I, for that matter most of the people of my age, can relate to Ishaan's predicament - not necessarily by suffering with dyslexia but by being burdened with parents' expectations.

None of us have to look far to see that, nowadays, anything less than 95% is considered a crime. I see kids on standard I or II carrying bags which weigh as much as them - if not more. I see parents unhappy with their kids because they are not as smart as the neighbour's kids. I vividly remember the time I dropped a year after XII so that I could 'prepare' for IIT. That did not materialise and here I am, happier, if I dare to say.

The way children are being characterised as "special" and normal - the same way normal children are being put into "Engg/Medical" and "Hopeless" buckets. Any sports that you play, must be to win trophies and not for recreation. In such a place, what is the place of a dyslexic child. Even parents seem to find it hard to spare time for the lagging child, what to say of the outside world.

Many a times, the parents having such high expectations from their kids are themselves and educated but do not realise the importance of proper all round development and the need to allow the kid to choose his path. Or may be they realise but do not have the guts to face the outside world and its rigid benchmarks. Kudos and thanks to Aamir for selecting a pressing topic like this one.

"I wanted you to see what real courage is....."

Ah! The pleasure of reading a good book. There are books and then there are books. Of those that I have read, there have been a few which I simply had to finish once I had started - Freedom at Midnight, O Jerusalem, Shantaram. Without doubt, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' belongs to that list along with many other lists, the Pulitzer Prize of 1961 being just one of them. For the record, Harper Lee received the Presidential Medal of Freedom this year(2007).

To Kill a Mockingbird is Lee's only published book and I think I can see why. It is very difficult to write a book as good as this one. My opinion is corroborated by the fact that Lee started writing a couple of books but did not publish them since she was not satisfied. A movie based on the book was released the very next year after it was published and is deservedly considered a classic.

Lee explores the America of 1930s by creating a microcosm called Maycomb and exploring it through the eyes of young Jean Lousie, lovingly called Scout. A wide range of subjects are touched upon. The prejudice held by whites against their colored fellow-citizens; Ladies' preoccupation with ensuring that other ladies behave in a lady-like manner; A few upright men and women who live in the same society but rarely meet with success in their endeavours to bring about change and justice. The innocence of children who do not hold any prejudices on the basis of color or social rank but on the basis of smell and looks.

Centered around Atticus Finch - Scout's father, Jeremy Finch, Scout's brother and Scout herself, the novel's main story lines are the mystery of Arthur Boo Radley, who seldom comes out of his house and Tom Robinson, a black man who has been wrongly accused of raping a white women.

Atticus is protrayed as the "Raymond Man" - the complete man. He is a liberal father and reasons with his children rather than asking them to follow his orders without questioning. He gives both his children their space. He is a principled lawyer who fights Tom Robinson "nigger's" case tooth and nail. A case which he loses, a case he was expecting to lose. It is heart-breaking to see the jury pronounce Robinson guilty on the basis of circumstantial evidence and despite the light of evidence to the contrary. Though, it displays the white man's deep rooted prejudice against the blacks.

Jeremy is in the process of growing up - trying to realize his calling and getting answers to seemingly simple things that are going wrong in the world. Scout, precociously intelligent, provides a novel and refreshing take at things.

A few gems in the book that you should look forward to: Atticus' concluding speech in defense of Robinson, Lee's criticism of the hypocrisy the ladies (not necessarily of the 30s) exhibit - during Aunt Alexandra's missionary meeting, a lady who oozes with sympathy for the low people is unable to understand why they do not accept white people as their savior, Scout's teacher goes red with rage when Hitler is mentioned but is overheard deriding the blacks and angry that blacks have the galls to consider themselves at par with whites -, Miss Maudie's insistence that there indeed are good people left in Maycomb though they may not be more than a handful. I really like the way she proves her point.

My favourite part- Atticus' word to Jeremy on courage.

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what". The context in which Atticus says this is equally inspiring.

One of my best reads in recent times. Looking forward to watching the movie tonight.

"India - A Wounded Civilization" by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

It took me nearly a month to complete this book. Of course, I was reading it in tranches of an hour or so, at a time. The fact that I was reading a commentary on the state of Indian affairs, added to the delay. Now when I think about it, this book seems to be the first one of its kind that I have read. Most of the books I have read so far were either fiction or dealt with history. I remember buying "Hegemony or Survival" by Naom Chomsky but have not made any decent progress in reading it. Back to the book.....

While I was reading the book, one thought that repeatedly came to me was "I have to read this book again at least once to get a hold of its idea". May be I will need to read more on the themes touched by Naipaul to sift the facts from the assumptions from the inferences. "India: A Wounded Civilization (1975)" forms the second part of Naipaul's "Indian Trilogy"; "An Area of Darkness (1964)" and "India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)" being the first and third constituents, respectively. To be frank, the author's handling of the central theme - India and its history, its people, their attitudes, the national psyche and the reasons behind it - can give an rush of nationalistic fervour to even the most candid of readers. This could be reason why Naipaul is is much disliked person among "laymen".

The book has been written at a time when a lot of things were terribly wrong with our country - Emergency, laying of foundations of the Naxal movement, maturing of the system of sycophantic politicians and political families - Naipaul has extrapolated these phenomena to predict a very bleak future.

For a person cut off from India by a spatial distance of thousands of miles and a temporal distance of many decades, Naipaul does exhibit knowledge which is wide in its range but, I feel, shallow in its depth, at places. He uses examples as long as they serve his argument.

Naipaul also shows an exemplary knack for belittling personalities who have been hailed by "ordinary masses". In one place Mahatma Gandhi's work is described thus "The difficult lessons of South Africa were simplified and simplified in India: ending as a holy man's fad for doing the latrine cleaning work of untouchables, seen only as an exercise in humility, ending as a holy man's plea for brotherhood and love, ending as nothing". To allay any misunderstandings, here Naipaul actually tries to explain the watered down South African Gandhism that was followed in India. The author does give adequate explanations for this conclusions, though at times, the reader begins to feel that "Indianness is bad because it is not western".

Giving Naipaul due credit, I would say that this book is a must read as many sensitive topics are discussed. And discussed in such a way so as to challenge the hitherto unquestioned beliefs of the average reader. A positive aspect of the book is that for a change, the Indian hubristic mindset is posed with difficult questions - questions which are not always unanswerable.


PS: I found a reference to the book the very next morning in a review of India A Journey Through a Healing Civilization by Kishore Singh in Business Standard. Talk about co-incidences!