Romancing on the Silver Screen

I was intending to write on this, and trust myself this is not the Oscars.
The Indian film industry brings back all possible enthusiasm of creating ripples on the silver screen.

Life looks astounding and promises of Ghatak, Adoor, Raj Kapoor, Ray, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Mrinal Sen is not dead. The sheer joy of cinema in the seventies is coming back for good.

Managed to see Slumdog long before the release and fell in love instantly.
The first love was definitely for Bombay but what I loved most was Dharavi, the thousand stories that bred in the lanes, in the lives of people, the ghettoisation that’s stark yet subtle. But yet there were perspectives that were missed considering at the end of the day it was a white skin with the help of talented bunch of Indian crew was making the film. Therefore the zoomed out frame of Dharavi was captured in the right essence. There were moments of reality which a few of us know considering the work space we have been into. Definitely it gets worse….. and of course one was creating a film and hence there was a need to filmicize it. The music mostly was typical AR Rehman, and honestly not the best of his scores. But it grows on one, it grows with the film. The sound design was honestly great and now it feels wonderful to have it recognized in the International forum.

The entire debate about Oscars and its authenticity! But at the end of the day what then decides your calibre as a film maker or a creator? Commercial success would not mean anything to those one of us who thinks film as a medium plays too many roles. So how else tangibly does one decipher success of a film? Ghatak by our sensibilities today was a director of a cadre that not people have reached. But what did he get when he was alive? In that reference the film Ek Doctor Ki Maut by Tapan Sinha rightly depicts a man hard work ostracized by the society because of convenience. Any day Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay is a better film maybe if we take this league into consideration. It got a nomination but did not make it. Like if one Dan Boyle wants to win a Filmfare, he will be nominated for a foreign film. That’s something we cannot choose. Why is it so unsettling to accept it? Why does it hurt to accept that somebody from a different region captured some nuances of our walks of life? Things we have turned away from, things we walk pass every other day? If reality is what cinema is, why does it hurt to come in terms of acute poverty that came into the international platform?

Technically the feel of the film thrilled me, right from cinematography to the sheer joy of story telling in its editing. Rest as they say is history!
Gone are the days when Subarnarekha or Ajantrik would remain unnoticed till ages later one discovers the romance of cinema in it. It’s the new age, maybe its yet another neo-liberal trap of the west to capture Indian talent and let it flourish because its cheap labour.

I am happy with the Slumdog Millionaire, its never too late to dream and watch them come true in one lifetime.

Delhi,9th March 2009

From my neighbourhood to Wall Street

A lazy day when the phone rang and concerned family and friends told me of the series of bomb blasts in Delhi. My first reaction was, whats new, yet again, lives don’t matter anymore. It has been a series of 11 blasts since 2001 and nothing concrete ever came out of it. And now blasts in the capital in all the major hotspots and all we will see are media channels giving breaking news with funny dummy stories and visuals. And the ever hungry Indian consumer will watch that raising the channels TRPs. There will be blame games amongst political parties and increased allocation to the Intelligence and security systems of the country that anyways have not made headways in the last 7 years.

Thinking deeper I realized there was unrest in the country in almost all parts and we have become so immune to it. Life seems to be going fine for me, so how does it matter?

But the red alarm reels inside the head some thousand times when even I am flipping through the newspaper or television channels all that is there to the country today is reports of death of innocent human beings, be it as victims of some blasts, pro-freedom movement, police encounters or torching down of minority establishments.

At this level when I turn my attention to rage against the governance in this country, thanks to friends in the financial sector that I delved to read news on the global economic crisis. An establishment as revered as Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest investment banks of the world files for bankruptcy on September 14^th. It was a blow to the global capital market. When PWC was brought on board as administrators they reported there was no cash in the company post the fall. The shock had not been absorbed and Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America. Finally they became bank holding companies and the US government paid $700bn to tackle the worst economic crisis in decades. With the developed north crashing there is not much hope anyways for the developing south. Anyways the Indian aping of neo-liberal economy without much deliberation has brought us at the edge of the blackhole.

The economic crisis as the base of the Marxian base-superstructure theory, now poses a severe challenge to the already dwindling food and fuel crisis in India. As if the governments failure to generate employment for the exploding population of the country was not enough that now there will be major cut down on human resources by the MNCs. The shift of focus though doesn’t change the fact that inflation had reached 12.9%.

I had all of this reeling in my head when I went to attend the National Convention on Union Budget 2009-10. I was left flabbergasted with the numbers. Each sector thrashing out inadequacy in allocation, implementation, even conceptually the sectoral understandings seemed to be unclear and that having high levels of ramifications. I wondered about the complexity in the naivety. If experts even cannot develop a macro perspective, sincerely there is threat, of collapsing without even an alarm. The review of the MDGs at several parts of South Asia does portray a grim picture for India. But panelists here except for two did not give me holistic sense of the economic paradigm shift and its implications.

Though as I write this I realize the grassroots experiences are complex and there are several layers before we reach the policy level. How much can one embrace and how much can one choose to keep at the threshold? But can it be the dead end? Is there no solution to it? Or atleast the promise of respite somewhere?

The blow to Wall Street will have deep impact in India, and here people were advocating against remaining bystanders and fighting for marginalized factions of the society. Do they not know the overall implications? Do they not know that factionalizing at this point will only reap indefinable complexities? As much as it remains a serious concern, it frightens me to not see any able leadership developing in this country to be able to address these multilayered issues and crisis the largest democracy of the world is grappling with.

Coming back home, the encounter where the police apparently nabbed the masterminds of the Delhi blasts, the incident took place two blocks away from the place I live in. In the month of Ramzan when the whole community is fasting, this encounter took place in the bylanes of a crowded locality near Jamia Millia resulting in the death of a police inspector of the Special Cell and established the presence of terrorist cells in minority pockets. When I was on my way back home the eerie feeling in the lanes shook me from the roots. I felt scared of being an Indian, felt scared for the people who are family are Muslims and the majority wrath would not spare them, felt scared because every other young guy in that space resembles the faces which appear on the wanted lists. Scared for the age group thats the promise of the dawn tomorrow,the mighty young brains between 22-25 are taking up arms against global socio-economic discrepancies,I was scared because the area was prone to a communal clash in the batter of an eyelid.

The reports doing rounds of all the convoluted claims of nabbing terrorists comes later to me. What comes out first is the Muslim community is under severe crisis. Though I cannot not accept that communities at their levels have not thrashed one another and that is a blessing in disguise but the Muslim community who were anyways the point of attack by majority extremists is today questioning identities at all levels. With the blasts taking a national character, the global war to curb terrorism going full swing, India today is hiding from the danger that has no face. The communal violence inflicted in eastern, western and southern parts of the country by the Sena has not even received a strong reaction from the centre. I am deeply troubled by the complacent attitude. The backlash against the Home Minister definitely needs to be heard by the people in command. Have the Gandhis forgotten the trauma the country went through post the 1984 riots? Have they forgotten the series of assassinations in their family? So why is there no strong resolution to combat the communal tension in the country?

On the onset it might sound like those several blame games that every one is up against another, I understand this is far more complex than the words actually puts forth, but this calls for action, this calls for concrete ways in which the country can look at violation of human rights and not treat the present situation as a political game of ideology. Lets rise beyond creating opportunities from conflicts for human lives are not frivolous.

The array of natural disasters in the country already is sign of nature backlashing against the human civilization, lets not create spaces for the ugly head of man-made disaster to breathe into us the venom of intolerance and hatred.

24th Sept.New Delhi