Bollywood Hollywood

This one’s from yesterday so I’m giving it its own post. (I’m magnanimous like that.) That Bollywood has been an inspiration — wittingly or unwittingly — for a number of Hollywood films is a realisation that’s been creeping up on us for a while. But listening to Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant lecture on the state of cinema, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, it struck me that what’s happening in Hollywood is a systematic shift towards what we have in the commercial film industry in India. You must hear Soderbergh’s lecture, the video of which is here.  The lecture’s been transcribed below the video, but find 40 minutes and listen to Soderbergh. He’s fantastic. 

So listening to him, made me think of this: 

 

Speaking at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, director Amit Kumar said, “If you use the term Bollywood, it really represents the song-and-dance, credibility-stretched story kind of film. We need to portray Indian cinema as more international and I hope our presence at Cannes will make the world realise that Indian cinema is most than just about Bollywood.”

Kumar’s film Monsoon Shooutout is part of Un Certain Regard and is the only Indian film that’s been officially invited to Cannes Film Festival this year.

Un Certain Regard has been a platform for a number of off-the-beaten-track films from India, like Udaan and Miss Lovely (the latter is yet to have a commercial release at home). There hasn’t been an Indian film in the festival’s competition section since 1994, when Shaji Karun’s Swaham was nominated for the Golden Palm. The fact that our commercial blockbusters are not the films selected by festivals like Cannes is usually interpreted as an indication that the West would like to see Indian cinema that breaks the shackles of Bollywood.

Directors like Kumar may feel warm and fuzzy at the idea of the West greeting non-Bollywoody Indian cinema with hugs and kisses, but here’s an inconvenient truth: not only is Bollywood India’s best-known export, Hollywood is going the Bollywood way.

And considering how well The Great Gatsby, which was the opening film at Cannes Film Festival, has done both in cinematic and financial terms — $90 million in global earnings, and counting — Sanjay Leela Bhansali and gang better watch out. At this rate, Hollywood is going to beat Bollywood at its own game.

Here’s looking at Bollywood, old sport.

The West’s love affair with desi spectacle has been bubbling in Hollywood studios for a while. Remember Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007)? The film was meant to be a tribute toThe Beatles, which is why there were more than 30 songs in the soundtrack. Plus, strengthening the parallel with Bollywood, the film’s plot held together about as well as wet toilet paper. In case you were wondering, many critics loved this song and dance extravaganza.  The New York Times was charmed by its ” oh-wow aesthetic” and declared that “during the time it lasts, the intoxicating passion … [of the film's lead pair] convinces, for a moment, that love is all you need.” Which is what audiences have been saying aboutDilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge for almost two decades.
Choreographed dances, Bollywood’s signature statement, have shown up with increasing regularity in Hollywood films. In Enchanted (2007), Amy Adams sang songs in Central Park and had backup dancers. Recently, Mirror Mirror (2012) ended with a Bollywood-inspired number that was absolutely unnecessary. Baz Luhrmann’s fondness for our dhinchakaesthetic was evident when he used “Chamma Chamma” in Moulin Rouge (2001). His newest film, The Great Gatsby is precisely what you’d expect a Bollywood film to be if it had an estimated production budget of $127,000,000. It’s big, brash, superficial and spectacular.

The kinship between Bollywood and Hollywood in recent times is more than skin deep. Rather than songs and terrible plotting, the hallmark of commercial Indian cinema is the collective worship of the blockbuster and this is the new trend in Hollywood.

“All the studios have decided that big-event movies are a better business,” said Doug Creutz, the senior media and entertainment analyst for Cowen & Company, to The New York Times. This year, between May and August, Hollywood will see the release of 19 blockbusters. Usually, American summers see nine or ten big budget films.
The traditional thinking of Western cinema has been that the earnings from expensive top grossers filter down and encourage humbler, more independent cinema. This isn’t happening quite as much because every studio and its investors have their gazes focussed upon the blockbuster.

This is similar to what happens in Bollywood where most of the time, the earnings from a big film are channelled into another big film. Very few producers take a chance with films that are not obviously commercially viable, although they’ve become a little more liberal in terms of their choices. Zombie flicks (Go Goa Gone) and films about SEZs (Shanghai) stood no chance of being funded till a few years ago.

But where does Hollywood’s Bollywood thinking leave the smaller films that have been American cinema’s pride and whose success has given hope to indie filmmakers all over the world? Speaking at the San Francisco Film Festival, director Steven Soderbergh summed it up like this: “You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.” Soderbergh also said, “Cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience.” He distinguished cinema from “movies”, defining the latter as something whose chief characteristics are generic or arbitrary. Which sounds like how critics have described Bollywood films for decades. According to Soderbergh, the current trend of backing blockbusters is “pushing cinema out of mainstream movies”.

So, as encouraging as it may be for Indian independent cinema to show up in Un Certain Regard, the idea that “intelligent” or “alternative” (read: low budget) Indian films will find a receptive bunch of producers and promoters abroad is a pipe dream. Hollywood likes Bollywood, and it likes our mainstream cinema for its spectacle, exotica and superficiality. That’s what they’re looking to incorporate into their own films and the fact that we’ve been raised on a diet of such movies is what Hollywood studios hope to tap into. Their strategy is working. English blockbusters are no longer niche releases in a few multiplexes. They’re dubbed, sent to theatres all over the country and they’re giving many Bollywood films a run for their money.

It turns out Rudyard Kipling was wrong after all. East is East and West is West, but it seems the twain can meet, at the movies.

Links: Funny terror, art and homelands, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Here beginneth Part Two of Updates.

1. Review of Anees Salim’s new novel,  Vanity Bagh

This book is a really wonderful read. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s sharp and it will hold your attention till the very end.

Without getting on a soapbox, Salim observes how violence becomes normal and an accepted part of our street culture. The novel also looks at youth unemployment and the difficulty of finding your place within the adult world of jobs and expectations. All of these come together to create the world of Vanity Bagh, which is terrifying and yet hilarious because Salim doesn’t deliver any lectures and his narrator’s one aim in life is to keep himself amused.

You wouldn’t expect a novel about home-grown terror, in which a prisoner seems to be losing his hold on reality, to be fun, but Salim manages this feat because Imran is a delightful narrator.

Like many literary losers, he’s endearing and thanks to his descriptions, Vanity Bagh emerges as home to a set of delightful, oddball characters. If there is a weakness to Imran being the storyteller, then it is that everyone but Imran seems a little absurd because that’s how he sees the world around him. It may teeter towards uni-dimensional, but Imran’s worldview is just too much fun for this to be a serious complaint.

You really should get this book. The complete review is here.

2. Review of Homelands, a travelling art exhibition that is currently on display in Mumbai and will be moving to Bengaluru in June.

I wrote this when there was some angry chatter about the World Values Survey, which came to the conclusion that Indians are among the world’s most racist people. Because there’s really nothing like good art to offer a sense of perspective. Steven Soderbergh is so on the money when he says art is elegant problem solving.

Almost every work in Homelands makes the viewer think about what inspires a sense of belonging to a space, a set of rituals or even an idea. There is a drawing by Jimmie Durham that perhaps the economists of World Values Survey would find particularly interesting. It’s titled Our House and chances are, most 4-year-olds you know would do a neater job of drawing a house. But the point of Durham’s drawing isn’t to get a gold star from teacher. It’s a critique of urban life that Durham feels alienates and embeds distrust in citizens.

Our House shows a dark mess of black scribbles, a vertical line and a small, neat roofed building. Under the little building, it says “our house”. The vertical line has “high fence” written under it. Under the black mess, Durham has written “the neighbours”. Of course, this isn’t how anyone wants their street to look ideally. Durham’s scribbly drawing, in which “the neighbours” loom and “our house” is tiny, is a reminder of how alone so many of us feel, how threatened by nothing in particular and everything in general. No wonder then, that in an ideal world, a large percentage of the people who have a history (and a present) of being discriminated against, want less difference and more sameness in their neighbours.

Our House by Jimmie Durham

See the entire review here and if you can, do go see the show. It’s well worth a wander.

3. Review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

In a sentence: Riz Ahmed is excellent, but the film’s a drag. In more than one sentence:

Those who have read The Reluctant Fundamentalist may be wondering whether Nair read the same book they did. The novel is a conversation between Changez and a mysterious stranger who may be Changez’s enemy or protector. Presumably in an effort to be dramatic, when Hamid wrote the “screen story” with Ami Boghani, they decided to add elements like the kidnapping, a CIA surveillance unit and a hash-loving American reporter. Perhaps they felt that the meandering conversation that made the novel intriguing would seem too directionless in a film. It has an unfortunate side effect: whereas the novel was all about Changez’s perspective, the film is an American perspective – we’re shown Changez, Pakistan and all the events of the story from the American journalist’s point of view. You’ve got to wonder whether we needed a South Asian director to show us this worldview when Hollywood is out there.

Read the whole thing here.

Links: Items, The Great Gatsby OST, Khan

Time to update. Actually, I should have updated yonks ago, which is why there will be two update posts today, but, well… *insert shrug/eyelash flutter* (whatever works for you).

So here we go:

1. Why does Priyanka Chopra want to be an item number?

It’s not that I don’t get item numbers. For those not well-versed with the term, it’s a song in which an actress who doesn’t have any part in the film makes a cameo, all dolled up. Item numbers can be fun, they’re a good publicity package for a starlet, they help a film’s word of mouth publicity. But even so, THREE item numbers in a gangster flick like Shootout at Wadala is just unnecessary. Plus, what I don’t get is one of Bollywood’s  I get dancing because you love to dance. I get doing an item number because the director has promised you you’ll look fabulous in it. I don’t get opting to do a song that is pretty unmemorable and agreeing to perform choreography that’s just tacky as hell. It’s not like the costumes and make-up were fabulous either.

So obviously, I ranted.

In one, Sunny Leone plays a kothewaali (i e, a dancer-prostitute) and in a remarkable reversal of roles, her clients do more dancing than she does. She does, however, have an incidental part to play in the plot: she’s the reason Manya Surve (John Abraham) meets Zubair Haksar (Manoj Bajpai) who goes on to play a critical role in Surve’s career as an honest-to-badness gangster. In another item number, Sophie Choudry is given the job of dancing on tables and trucks at Surve’s favourite haunt, Horseshoe Bar. Her real role though has nothing to do with her choreography. The fact that Surve doesn’t have sex with her despite her singing and dancing skills is a sign that Surve is a one-woman guy. (Let us not get into how his display of masculine passion for the love of his life – Kangana Ranaut as Vidya – teeters disturbingly towards rape; that’s another matter.)

But the tour de force of the item numbers in Shootout at Wadala is Babli Badmaash Hai, which doesn’t have even the flimsiest tie-in with the film’s plot. However, it does have Priyanka Chopra, who not only agreed to appear in a song that’s quite obviously trying too hard to follow in the footsteps of Munni Badnaam Hui but also trotted out a spectacularly tacky bit of choreography. Perhaps because there’s been so much gyrating and grinding passing off as dance in recent times, choreographer Ahmed Khan decided that he was going to make sure we didn’t miss the fact that this song is an item number, i e a track that has the singular purpose of reducing its star performer to a sex object. So, the trademark move ofBabli Badmaash Hai has Chopra thrusting her breasts out with finger guns strategically positioned next to said breasts. In case you missed that part of her anatomy in tighter-than-skin-tight clothing, her fingers are there to direct your attention. Add to that the phallic symbolism of guns, and you’ve got to wonder how Chopra thought this was a good idea.

The rest of the post is here.

2. A review of The Great Gatsby OST

This soundtrack is just superbly used in the film. On its own though, a lot of the songs don’t quite hold up. Curiously, the songs that do work well when you listen to the soundtrack aren’t the most memorable so far as watching the film is concerned. Anyway, the review is here.

What could Luhrmann do to the crackling energy of the jazz music that was so lovingly woven into the novel by Fitzgerald?  Bring in Jay-Z as executive producer, for starters.  Luhrmann said in interviews that he felt jazz was now almost classical while hip hop has that edgy rawness that characterised jazz in the Roaring Twenties. “Gatsby was intoxicating everyone in New York with Champagne and music, drawing them into his Venus’ flytrap,” Luhrmann said in an interview to the Los Angeles Times. “Now there’s another form of African American street music — hip hop — that speaks in exactly the same way to our lives.”

3. His Name is Khan, and he’s Benedict Cumberbatch

A whiter shade of brown?

Have you ever watched Sherlock and thought, “Man, that Benedict Cumberbatch. There’s something a little desi about him…” No? Me neither. Clearly, JJ Abrams did though because he cast Cumberbatch as an Indian superman, aka Khan Noonien Singh. Honestly, if he had used Cumberbatch better, I wouldn’t have minded. But when the role’s acting climax involves him throwing himself on a dashboard and howling, as though he’s auditioning for a sci-fi version of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (maudlin Indian soap, for those who are lucky enough to have escaped it), I don’t see why Hrithik Roshan couldn’t have been cast as Khan.

Though what I found interesting was that Abrams had chosen to depict Khan as an almost home-grown terror, rather than a completely foreign hand that wreaks terror upon the American people. It’s interesting to see that definition of the terrorist especially since there’s continuing debate, rage and soul-searching about the Tsarnaev brothers who didn’t stand out as different until they carried out their attacks on Boston.

Just imagine, had Abrams given Issar or Govinda a call, Star Trek Into Darkness could have relaunched their careers the way Slumdog Millionaire did Anil Kapoor’s.

If vintage isn’t JJ Abram’s thing, then he could have considered Hrithik Roshan, who played a superhero in Krrish (2006). In fact, as Krrish, Roshan has done that smoulder-and-stride walk that is similar to Cumberbatch’s pose in the Star Trek Into Darkness poster. And then, to confuse the bejesus out of all those who follow Bollywood, Roshan could have said, “My name is Khan.”

But no, Abrams didn’t look east. Instead of boldly going forth to Bollywood, he went with Cumberbatch. Here’s what’s interesting about the choice that Abrams made: the man named Khan who reduces skyscrapers to rubble and terrorises Americans is a white man and not a bearded chap with an olive complexion who may be considered suspicious by airport security personnel in large parts of the world. He is, as Cumberbatch said in an interview, a “home-grown terrorist”. He doesn’t seem foreign, he’s doesn’t look like ‘the other’; in fact, he looks no different from the others who make up the American majority. But his name is Khan and he is here to wreak terror.

The complete post is here.

Notes from a screening: Shootout at Wadala

The review is here, and below are the notes I made while watching the film. As might be obvious, the film became less note-worthy and more boring as it progressed. 

Notice says this film is both fact and fiction. Why? Because encounters between the Mumbai police and gangsters are “grey areas”. Am trying to remember whether Wadala is mostly grey. Probably, given all the concrete.

John Abraham (JA) looks like someone stained him with walnut juice to darken his complexion. Now if he hadn’t used all that fairness cream…

Ok, there are four-year-olds without iPads who can do a better job of painting a background than these ’70s’ backdrops.

What the eff is Kangana Ranaut (KR) wearing?

There are dried bombil that are smaller than KR’s false eyelashes.

Whoa! Is that Sandeep the electrician getting stabbed by JA and his stepbrother?

Someone make a .gif out of KR watching the knifing.

Of course Manya Surve’s roll number is 302. And of course we discover this just as he is about to be found guilty as per Article 302 of the Indian Penal Code. How would we ever appreciate the irony of life without these subtle connections?

Cop takes off his belt, whips JA repeatedly all the way from college hallway to gate. So much easier to drag the dude to van. Cannot imagine any real cop expending so much energy. Plus, his pants would fall off.

Why does cop also look like he’s related to Snooki?

Wait. Even Tusshar Kapoor (TK) looks like he’s spent too much time in the tanning salon. In fact, everyone (except KR) does. This is like an environmentalist’s dream movie: global warming was worse in the 1970s than it is now.

Need to pick out murderer from line-up? Easy. Follow the jaw that’s jutting out the most. Or look for the guy with the most lustrous locks.

Considering how much that chap who killed JA’s brother grits his teeth, jailed murderers must have amazingly strong teeth.

“Jail mein nirdosh or randikhaaney mein nirodh-ki koi jagah nahin hain.” Audience: stunned silence and then loud clapping. It’s like they can’t believe TK cracked a pun. (Non-English speaking readers: tough to translate because there’s a play on the way two words sound. Meaning: “There’s about as much point claiming to be innocent in jail as there is in carrying a condom to a whorehouse.” Yes, this is set in an era when STD made people think of phones rather than their private parts.)

JA and his bodybuilding teacher are doing tai chi. In Yerwada Jail. Who says we need prison reform?

Arif Zakaria’s introduction to Anil Kapoor (AK): “Inki tehzeeb mein bhi tezaab hain.” Taaliyan! (Non-English speaking readers: Again, tough to translate. Contains reference to one AK’s most popular films.)

Sonu Sood (SS) is playing Dawood? There’s a limerick waiting to be written here.

SS is the only Muslim gangster to not wear kajal/ kohl. Good lad.

They’ve fiddled with the names. Instead of Kaskar, Dawood and his bro are Haksars. Also, Dawood=Dilawar, Shabir (Manoj Bajpai)=Zubair. From the lack of sync in the lipping, seems like they’d shot using the real names but changed in dubbing. Also applies for the cops.

Arif Zakaria suggests the Mumbai police use the Haksar brothers the way Thakur used the two criminals in Sholay. “Since you can’t get Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra, you might as well turn to these two brothers.” There you go. We can blame it all on Bollywood.

AK rushes into his son’s school because he’s been told there’s a bomb in his son’s lunchbox. Finds son and lunchbox and chucks it out of the window. Because there wouldn’t be students outside the building in the school’s compound, of course.

A hardened gangster, used to indescribable violence, is squealing because he’s being thwacked by a pair of wet jeans. Ok then.

What to do when the laws against rape aren’t punishing enough? String up the rapists, naked, in a room. Hand the woman who was raped a belt and tell her she can do what she wants with them.

Somewhere along the way, JA has mysteriously gone from good Marathi mulga to an ace in all things criminal. Maybe this is what happens if you do too much tai chi in jail.

How to tell if a chap’s a gangster? 1. Excessive tanning. 2. Face must be scrunched. 3. Must stare at you as though he’s looking at you over invisible bifocals.

Enter Sunny Leone. What are these outfits?

There was a bar that looked like it should be in a spaghetti Western in the middle of Ballard Estate. Chap next to me: “Ballard Estate mast tha un dino, yaar.” (“Ballard Estate was a blast back in the day.”)

Ten years have made KR’s hair curlier and lashes longer.

When JA and KR do it, sex = pushups.

Why is the word “Ma” being constantly bleeped out?

For a few scenes after intermission, the film looks different. The visuals have the texture of a television serial.

What the eff is that dance move that Priyanka Chopra does in the song, “Bubbly Badmash Hai”?? It’s a thoroughly obscene gesture with only one objective: to make sure everyone stares at PC’s breasts. Why on earth would she agree to do this move? If the top heroines in Bollywood will cheerfully do choreography like this, how is this industry supposed to become any less sexist?

How do you know a movie has gone on for too long? Audience giggling at the sight of a man whose hands have been chopped off.

Manoj Bajpai being shot by lots of people. Except instead of dying, he’s break-dancing.

 

Is Sonu Sood’s moustache unstuck at one corner?

JA running shirtless. Even Sunny Leone wasn’t filmed as lovingly. “Boss! Body!” man next to me sighs. “Abs dekh!” his companion whispers in responses.

Audience loves the line that AK trots out about cops wearing khaki because it’s the only colour on which shit stains don’t show.

Overheard: “Jackie Shroff must have to pay excess baggage for the bags under his eyes.” Cheap shot but fair point.

The moment KR calls the police, one chap in the row behind me moans, “Ladki saali.”

Can’t help imagining an alternative ending in which KR whips off her false eyelashes and stabs AK with them, thus preventing multiple bullet wounds.

Links: Films, booze, books, art and caste

‘Tis the time to update. Here’s what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks.

1. A long interview with S. Anand, founder of Navayana publishing. The first part is all about publishing and among other things, he makes the rather pertinent point that books are not FMCG products so expecting to churn out the same kind of profits is absurd. In part two, he really sinks his teeth into the privileged Hindu. If you haven’t heard of Navayana, click here. Conservative Hindus who believe the caste system is a wonderful thing, Navayana’s books are not going to be your cup of tea (to put it mildly).

2. A combined review of Amitabh Kumar and Dhruv Malhotra’s shows. Malhotra’s photographs of Delhi are unexpectedly gorgeous. Unexpected because he doesn’t photograph the obviously pretty parts of the national capital, but his photographs are still beautiful. Maybe it’s just the fact that we’re entirely unused to seeing our cities without crowds, but Malhotra makes ugly cityscapes look mysterious and poetic.

3. I reviewed Shootout at Wadala. I’m going to put up the notes I took while watching the film in a separate post, but the review is here.

4. When The Telegraph carried a report that Andhra Pradesh had decided its women will not be served alcohol after 10pm (men, on the other hand, can hang around and drink themselves silly till 11pm), I naturally had to blow some steam. So that’s here. As you can see from the headline, the authorities have said no such notice has been issued.

Here’s the truly joyous takeaway from the posts I wrote on Saturday. Everyone thinks Bollywood is what is guaranteed to click with Indian readers. Turns out, booze gets our attention more than Bollywood.

Whaddyaknow…

As always, the comments warm the cockles of my heart. Current favourite is by one Karthik, in the thread for the Andhra-booze-ban-that-isn’t-a-ban:

A women only could write this article. They have a problem with everything, always cribbing about gender equality but are the first to demand special right and privileges for women. Hippocrates all of them.

 

 

What happens in Rediff, stays in Rediff

This is the image Krishnan uses as the profile pic on her public Facebook page.

On her way to a demonstration this morning, activist Kavita Krishnan kindly made time to talk about the offensive messages directed at her while she was doing a live chat session for Rediff. The messages she had to field were extremely crude and it’s appalling that they got past a moderator. Krishnan is remarkably sanguine in face of verbal abuse. “You get called things like ‘commie’, ‘Muslim lover’ all the time,” she said blithely to me and pointed out that comments like that say more about the people making the comments. That’s a basic truth that trolls don’t seem to appreciate. Most of the time, when you’re being offensive to someone, you’re the one who sounds like a bigoted idiot. A few months ago, Nilanjana Roy and I were talking about the hateful comments she’d received for something she’d written. I remember her saying that the ones who spew random abuse don’t really bother her. They don’t make any impression. Then there are those who know how to wield language, who know when and how to punctuate menace into their messages. Those are the ones that become disturbing.

Krishnan’s troll wasn’t a wordsmith. He’s crude and brutal. The reason he lingers in memory is that he was allowed to engage with her in a chat that had been organised by Rediff. You’d think moderators wouldn’t allow someone who shows up with the handle “RAPIST”, but Rediff did and they let him stay even when he threatened Krishnan. She was the one who left the chat, rattled and disgusted. She then went online and recounted what she’d experienced on Twitter and Facebook. Rediff started pouting at this point. Initially, its representatives had promised they would send Krishnan a screen shot of the offensive section of the chat and file an FIR. After Krishnan spoke out online, they stopped responding to her.

Rediff published the transcript of the chat with Kavita Krishnan this evening, a few hours after I had posted this long piece on what happened during and directly after the chat.

Despite the ugly trolling she’s faced, Krishnan is unequivocally against any kind of increased Internet regulation that could be manipulated to curb free speech. “There’s many kinds of hate speech and it exists in the real and the virtual world, but that’s no reason to impose any kind of government regulation of the internet,” she said. “Whatever someone says, I believe they’re free to say it. The difference on the Internet is that anonymity offers security to the victimiser rather than the victim, which is the concern. It falls upon all of us, individually and collectively, to uphold the norms that will ensure security and encourage debate, rather than intimidation. That’s why all I’m asking for from Rediff is a public, formal apology. It’s just churlish to invite me to a chat, to do nothing when I’m exposed to this kind of intimidation and to not even enquire after my wellbeing afterwards.”

(That’s a bit from my post.)

When I was writing and even when my post was put online, Rediff was maintaining its silence. Krishnan knew nothing of what was going on. All she knew was that certain Rediff people were unhappy she’d criticised them on Twitter and put the editor’s official email online. Her stand was very clear: she wanted no regulation of comments, no curbs upon the internet. If people want to say hateful things, then the answer isn’t to restrain them, as far as Krishnan is concerned. It falls upon all of us, as a society, to uphold the norms that we believe are worth upholding.

I’m glad the Rediff transcript is online because Krishnan’s deftly makes her way through a number of thorny topics, including pornography, honour killings and, of course, rape. However, as far as Rediff’s behaviour towards Krishnan remains dodgy. The apology they’ve written into the introduction to the live chat is, at best, cagey. They say,

Unfortunately, a chatter from Denmark brought down the level of discussion — and there were hundreds of serious questions — by making a few offensive posts, for which we apologise to Ms Krishnan.

It’s as though the nationality of the chatter — them foreigners with their immoral looseness — somehow absolves Rediff of its moderating responsibilities. It’s also curious that Rediff is willing to edit the transcript for offensive content, fix the typos in its introduction (they’d referred to Kavita Krishnan as “Mr. Krishnan” at one point), but they won’t fix the typos in Krishnan’s answers. To see them in a virtual huddle, ready to point fingers at Krishnan, isn’t reassuring.

On Bollywood’s side, twice

Maybe it’s because I’ve not watched a Bollywood film in a while or maybe it’s because there are so many idiotic “arguments” floated by people who are supposed to be leaders in this country, but I’ve ended up defending Bollywood twice this week. Usually, I’m thwacking Bollywood left, right and centre for it’s messed up storytelling/politics/fashion sense/publicity campaigns… you name it, I’ve had issues with it. As far as gender stereotypes are concerned, there’s a lot that’s wrong with Bollywood storytelling, but to point to those problems as the cause of the rapes that are being reported is  a pathetic and lazy attempt at laying the blame on someone else’s doorstep.

So this post is about the Rajya Sabha debate that took place on Monday and a ponder about what crimes we can say were inspired by Bollywood.

…it’s difficult to understand how Ek Tha Tiger, which was Bollywood’s top earner for 2012, could inspire rape. Considering the bags under Salman Khan’s eyes, it could inspire you to start using under eye gel. Had there been a rash of gun-toting and shirt-tearing, we could point fingers at Ek Tha Tiger, but the only crime against a woman was suggesting any female would fall for the lines that Salman Khan delivers in that film.

If films really did have such persuasive powers upon audiences, then the crimes we’d have to deal with as a society would be rash bicycling (Barfi!) and jaywalking backwards (Jab Tak Hai Jaan), and more people would adopt girl children (taking a tip from Rowdy Rathore). Instead, what we’ve seen are violent crimes against women and girls. Politicians have been more corrupt than their cinematic counterparts and I think it’s safe to say that the family of the five-year-old would have preferred Chulbul Pandey to the cops they had to deal with in their hour of need.

The next day, there was a report that the UP state government wants its police force to watch Bollywood blockbusters like Dabanng. The hope is that watching Bollywood cops will inspire the real-life cops. Obviously, I had to offer my tuppence.

Dabangg is about a dirty cop whose redeeming feature is that he can make his belt buckle boogie. The hero of Ab Tak Chhappan is a cop who takes the law into his own hands and is decidedly trigger-happy.Singham may have been about a good cop, but considering how said cop was making cars and goons fly, you couldn’t really take him seriously. What do these three men have in common? Machismo, muscles and violence. And entirely inconsequential love interests. Clearly, as far as the ADG’s vision of police and power are concerned, power is a masculine and muscular affair. Not just that, even if they are dirty cops, the fact that they are male makes them good enough to be role models.

Last week’s rants

This past week has been harrowing. Earthquakes, blasts, bombs, manhunt, child rapes — there was no good news. There were, however, rants.

The first is a fluffy one, about a new Dove commercial that a lot of people have loved and I found deeply irritating. The tagline is “You are more beautiful than you think” and shows women being confronted with “proof” of their distorted self-image.

There are three possible reasons for me reacting the way I did:

a) I’m a curmudgeon

b) I’m not more beautiful than I think

c) I’m a curmudgeon who is sputtering at the idea of the brand that would have me buy deodorant that promises fairer underarms tell me what to think of the way I look.

 

This was my so-not-beautiful reaction to the Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign.

Then came the news of a grotesque rape of a 5-year-old who was abducted by a neighbour and raped repeatedly over the next two days. The family went to the police but the police didn’t pay much attention to these claims of a child being missing. Two days later, the child was found by her family in the neighbour’s flat. She was rushed to hospital and doctors were reportedly aghast because her rapist had shoved candles and a bottle of oil inside her. (She’s going to have to reconstructive surgery and remains critical but stable.) Her rapist, meanwhile, had run away. There is speculation that he thought the girl was dead and fled. If this is true, then it would suggest that raping her brutally wasn’t something that pricked either his conscience or instinct for self-preservation. It was only when he thought he could be charged with murder that he ran.

I’ve steadfastly stayed away from following the news today. Even so, I’ve heard of another raped little girl. She’s 4 years old and she was raped by three other minors. There’s also been another gang rape in New Delhi, which raises the tally of rapes in the capital in 2013 to 393. This time, she’s 13 and was raped by 8 men. Someone asked me whether child rape cases are being “dragged into light” by the media — because we must be profiteers of misery, no? — because the Delhi case has caught people’s attention much like the Delhi gang-rape did. To which I replied that there’s no proving or defending against claims like these. But even if the accusation is true, it doesn’t change the fact that these horrible incidents happen. If they didn’t, then we wouldn’t have so much to “drag” into the light.

Anyway, until yesterday, I had it in me to rant. Today, I have nothing but fervent, wordless prayers for the girls and women I know and don’t know.

Cover drive: Filmfare and Cine Blitz

You know how they say you shouldn’t say anything at the moment you get angry and give yourself some time before you react? Well, in my case, waiting doesn’t seem to help much. It just makes me write columns like the one below. This is the unedited version. The edited version — complete with a super headline provided by Firstpost’s Sandip Roy, bless him — is here.

Centennial flop

It’s possibly because I’m abysmally bad at maths, but when I saw the “collector’s edition” of Filmfare on the newsstand — with Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Dilip Kumar on the cover — my first reaction to seeing “100 years” printed in one corner was to assume there is someone in the world with worse addition skills than mine. Because Bachchan’s 70 years plus Khan’s 47 and Kumar’s 90 definitely don’t add up to 100. If it hadn’t been for Vidya Balan, I’d never have figured out what the magazine was trying to commemorate. Because right next to the Filmfare was a Cine Blitz and on its cover, Balan had struck Nargis’s famous pose from Mother India. She too had the words “100 years” printed near her armpit, but thanks to placement, I could read the entire phrase: “100 years of Hindi Cinema”.

The reason these special editions are out is that in 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra, the first Indian film and the one we can blame for being starting a tradition of weepy, melodramatic stories in the industry now known as Bollywood. Contrary to what the Filmfare cover suggests, it isn’t 100 years of Bollywood. In fact, the term Bollywood is just about 40-odd years old. It was coined in the Seventies, mimicking Bengali films’ Tollywood (most of the studios producing Bengali films were in the neighbourhood of Tollygunge in Kolkata), which in turn was a play upon Hollywood. Some could argue that the fact that “Bollywood” as a word is a copy of a copy is rather telling as far as the industry’s output is concerned.

But whatever anyone thinks of the quality of Bollywood films, it’s become as distinctively Indian as butter chicken and like butter chicken, it’s also one of our most popular exports. The impact of Bollywood’s chorus dances and its habit of punctuating a plot with unnecessary songs has found takers all over the world. Audiences love it and it’s steadily infiltrating Western culture. Recently, I saw This House at London’s National Theatre. It’s about how the Labour government clung to power in Westminster between 1974 and 1979. From time to time, in the middle of parliamentary politics and without warning, there were explosions of singing and dancing that would have made Saroj Khan proud. Bollywood’s irrefutable popularity makes magazines like Filmfare think they’re justified when they only mention commercial Hindi cinema while celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema. Forget the thriving film industries in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Never mind the films of Bengal, Karnataka and Kerala. Who cares about anything that isn’t mainstream and Hindi-speaking?

Though even if you think only about Bollywood, the arrangement of the Filmfare and Cine Blitz covers at my neighbourhood newsstand was, unwittingly, a rather poetic portrait of Indian journalistic misogyny and narrow-mindedness. On one hand, you have the Filmfare cover that has three men and no babe. It claims 2013 marks “100 years of cinema”, implying commercial Hindi cinema is all there is to Indian cinema and that glossy heroes define the industry. Look to your right, and there’s the Cine Blitz cover with toil and misery etched on Balan who, despite the strategically placed splodges of dirt and humble sari, manages to look beautiful. To my mind, Balan inadvertently becomes a symbol of everyone whom the Filmfare cover has chosen to ignore: the women, the people who do the heavy lifting in the film industry, the technicians, the unglossy ones.

It’s an irrefutable fact that actors can (and do) sell us everything from potato chips to an entire state. Consequently, it’s inevitable that film magazines would choose to focus on stars rather than the subalterns of the film industry. My inner Leftist may roar in protest, but there’s no denying that star actors have become the most important aspect of Bollywood. Get a star on board for your film and producers will back your project, whether or not you have other minor details like a script or an editor or cinematographer. So a starry cover is not just predictable; one could argue it’s perhaps an accurate reflection of priorities in Bollywood.

What’s unfathomable to me is that Filmfare didn’t find anything odd about the absence of women in the edition of the magazine that’s supposed to celebrate Bollywood. Hindi commercial cinema boasts of some outstandingly beautiful and talented women, both on screen and behind the scenes. Let us assume that the women behind the scenes are ‘unmarketable’. It doesn’t explain the absence of actresses in the magazine. If Bollywood has an international profile today, the ladies have played a significant part in this exposure. After all, the only Indian film stars who have managed to break into Hollywood are actresses. Irrfan Khan wasn’t a star until The Namesake. Anupam Kher and Anil Kapoor play mostly bit parts in American film and TV while Aishwarya Rai has played the lead heroine in five foreign films. Yes, they’re godawful, but she is the lead. In contrast, the biggest Bollywood heroes only do stage shows for South Asian diaspora audiences.

We often complain about how terribly male-dominated Bollywood is and how it treats women and women characters shoddily — all true — but the machismo of the Filmfare cover is particularly laughable because you can’t have a Bollywood film without at least one woman in it. Hers may be an irrelevant role with little dialogue and even less clothing, but the oh-so-awesome hero must have a woman on their arm. How do you know a man is a good character? He cares for his mother and his sister. It doesn’t matter what the genre may be, if it’s Bollywood, a romantic sub-plot is a must. No one dares to make a film that doesn’t have a love scene or two. So how did Filmfare imagine they’d devote an entire issue on this industry without mentioning any of the women who make sure the Bollywood show goes on?

In comparison to Filmfare, Cine Blitz does a decent job of celebrating Bollywood’s leading ladies. From Fearless Nadia to Rekha, the magazine is full of admiration and gossip-fuelled awe at the commercial Hindi cinema’s unforgettable actresses. I ended up fondly YouTube-ing old songs by actresses like Suraiya, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rehman, Dimple and Rekha after flipping through the magazine. These women, however, get no nods of recognition from Filmfare.

In Filmfare, less than a handful of the industry’s women get a half-hearted wave at the back of the magazine, where the popular choice winners are listed. Among the woman mentioned is Lata Mangeshkar, hailed as “Most Popular Playback Singer (Female)”, which is a bit of a joke because Mangeshkar must be the most popular of all Bollywood’s playback singers, male or female. I’m quite certain that if there was a fan face-off between her and, say, Sonu Nigam (no. 2 on Filmfare’s popularity charts for male playback singers), Mangeshkar would win. She’s sung thousands of songs in 20-odd Indian languages in the course of a career spanning approximately seven decades. With her trademark white sari and neatly-plaited hair, she’s instantly recognizable at sight and no one who has listened to Hindi film music can confuse her melodious falsetto with anyone else’s voice. If there’s one living personality who would be the perfect cover model for an edition celebrating Indian cinema, Mangeshkar is it.

As far as Filmfare is concerned, however, she is only good enough for a mention at the back of the magazine.

On the Presidency Attack

Talking to Presidency College alumni after it was stormed by a violent crowd of men carrying TMC flags and weapons, it’s kind of crazy how familiar the students are with the idea of violence. “See, cracked heads, black eyes, that sort of thing is a regular feature. Especially on days of college elections, that’s expected,” one alumni told me. Another student calmly told me about the time he’d been beaten up to the point of falling unconscious. “It was a day of college elections,” he said by way of explanation. Everyone I spoke to impressed upon me that a little bit of violence now and then is regular affair. (Listening to them made me remember my father, a Presidency alumnus, shaking his head when I told him Presidency wasn’t one of the colleges I’d shortlisted. “You’re picking a bookish education over a real education,” he’d rued. Ok then.) The point was that the day after elections, everyone is friends again. April 10th, however, wasn’t an election day and it doesn’t seem likely that any Presidency student is going to friends with the TMC people who ransacked the college, destroyed property, threatened staff and students and injured many.

Here’s what happened on April 10th.

Thanks to all those who spoke to me and to those who put up public posts about what happened that day on social media. It can be dangerous to speak out in Bengal today but it’s good to know the old Bangal saying “daabaay rakhtey parbana” (Trans: can’t keep ‘em down) still holds true for at least some Bengalis.