Nehru Place Upargami Setu

Google trends

2006-05-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

Google's stable of things that I can only call aids to procastination increases by the day. Just this afternoon, I have discovered Google Trends, and learnt the following:

The highest proportion of google searches for the word 'boobs' are from Pakistan. By city, however, the top three are: Delhi, Chennai, and Mumbai, followed by, of all places, Mineapolis. Go figure.

Maybe Indians are just slightly more 'refined' in their choice of search terminology, though. We top the rankings for 'breast'.

Astoundingly, the city topping the charts for 'cunt' is Milton Keynes though given their public art, I would have thought that udders were more down their street. The country which tops for cunt, amazingly enough, is Iran.

Yes, Iran.

Indonesia tops for penis. (India is number 2). Saudi Arabia tops for anal sex, as also for gay sex, though the most anal-sex-obsessed city is Ankara, Turkey. The prize for most anal-sex searches goes to Arabic...

Just plain ol' sex? Pakistan, followed by Egypt, followed by Vietnam (!!), followed by Iran. India at number 6.

I suspect that this is all actually more about the relative unsophistication of people using the internet from many of these countries: they're new to using it and therefore are still at the stage where their googling skills are relatively unevolved, so they type in generic terms. You know how the first time anyone discovered search engines, they probably typed in something stupid and generic like 'sex' to see what would come up. Words like sex and fuck are probably some of the first English words that non-English speakers learn. I imagine that it requires greater sophistication, both in terms of felicity with the language as well as internet savvy, to to google 'free porn passwords' than to google 'sex pics video' although the two sets of searchers are probably looking for much the same thing. In fact, the top sources for the former query are cities such as St. Louis, San Diego, Tampa, and Irvine, whereas Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai are the top sources of the latter.

overheard in 1369

2006-03-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

A blog (well, it's not really a blog, but anyway, you know what I mean) that I periodically visit and think is an absolutely brilliant concept is 'Overheard in New York'. Boston isn't nearly as fertile ground for overherd conversations, partly because I actually do think that there's something about it (and perhaps New England in general) which makes people here relatively taciturn: for example, I've had (and overheard) many more conversations on the subway in New York, and I certainly have never, ever had an actual conversation with a random person in the T, whereas large parts of my trips to NYC seem to be spent with some random old man on a subway train telling me about how his entire family of fourteen is now in the US but really, all he wants is to be back in Sylhet. Or something along those lines.

However - and this was the point of this post - even in reserved Boston there are some places, few and far between though they may be, where it is possible, or even normal, to strike up a conversation with people one doesn't actually know. One such is the cafe where I am sitting right now, 1369 in inman square. it's something of a hipster-meets-hippie-holdover-from-the-sixties-meets-graduate-student-meets-anyone-who-dislikes-starbucks
kinda place, and I have spent many entertaining aftenoons and evenings here, eavesdropping on snippets of intense convo which are often considerably more interesting that the 'duuude, did you see what he, like, was wearing?' type of conversation which is by and large all I ever seem to hear on the street. Have also had several entertaining conversations here myself, including one recently with a very pretty half-Iranian-half-Boston-Irish woman who was doing her Hindi homework (!!) and fed me raspberries and told me about her time in Iran and so forth. She also tried to invent a wholly incorrect Persian etymology for my name, which was amusing.

Then there is the middle-aged Englishwoman, probably lesbian (or at leat reasonably butch, but with a femme past) who is often here and talks A LOT. To random people. Including this very nice middle-aged Dutch lesbian academic (I love the way I'm imputing sexual orientation to people solely based on bits of overheard conversation, sso basically based on their look/style/manner of speaking) who I think is really keen to get some work done but loud Englishwoman is intent on disturbing her every minute or two with some remark or the other about the weather (which is, admittedly, lovely). I suppose some things never change: you can take a woman out of England, but you can't expect her to stop talking about the weather.

And then there are the people who border on slightly freaky (but in a non-threatening way). The very obsese old man who talks like a mix betwen a slightly learning-disabled 10-year-old and Truman Capote (by which, of course, I mean Phillip Seymour Hoffman, since I haven't actually heard Capote speak), dances around on his seat, and writes strange poetry. The other obese man who is here all the time and sort of bounces around to the music. He is eitherhomeless or semi-nomadic, since he always carries many plastic bags with all manner of oddities in them.

There's actually quite a crowd of old people here today, as I suppose must be the case on most weekday afternoons. It's quite charming how they seem to treat this place as an sort of social club. Makes me think Cambridge MA might not be a bad place to retire to.

Trust me to think about retirement before I have a career. If I don't get back to work, I won't have one, either, apart from Perpetual Procastinator, at which career I am now a veteran. I was rather amused the other day when over msn an old friend from school, who knew me in the days when I cared about such things as exam results, said 'Oh, but you always know how to get things done'.

Ha. If only he knew how wrong he was. Still, no excuses. Off to work it is.

Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Small Island'

2006-02-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

I've been re-reading this book, which ranks with George Mikes' masterpieces 'How to be an Alien', 'How to be Decadent' and other such (collected in 'How to be a Brit') as one of the most spot-on (and genuinely hilarious) commentaries on the foibles of the British ever written. Bryson is the sort of travel writer I love: his writing is always personal, not afraid of being irreverent and of making fun of what he finds funny (which, as befits a race as doggedly odd as the English, is many things), but his writing is always shot through with understanding and a genuine affection for those he writes about.

I nearly fell off my chair this afternoon as I read this bit. I was in a restaurant, and there was a potted plant behind me, so I'm glad of that 'nearly": it would have been uncomfortable if I had actually fallen off. As things were, the waitress thought I was losing it a little as I chortled into my espresso. Reproduced below is the mirth-inducing paragraph in question. As usual, Bryson gets it exactly right.

"Most of the other passengers evidently couldn't hear the announcements because when the Barnstaple train eventually came in, half a dozen of us formed a patient queue behind a BR employee and asked him if this was the Barnstaple train.

For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that there is a certain ritual involved in this. Even though you have heard the conductor tell the person in front of you that this is the Barnstaple train, you still have to say 'Excuse me, is this the Barnstaple train?' When he acknowledges that the large linear object 3 feet to your right is indeed the Barnstaple train, you have to point to it and say, 'This one?' Then when you board the train, you must additionally ask the carriage generally, 'Excuse me, is this the Barnstaple train?' to which most people will say that they think it is, except one man with a lot of parcels who will get a panicked look and hurriedly gather his things and get off."

Now, substitute either 'London Kings' Cross' or 'Cambridge' for Barnstaple in the above, and I've actually done a version of this, many, many times. And it's just absolutely true: nobody in England ever says something as simple as 'Yes it is'. It's always 'Well, I certainly hope so', or 'Well, that's where I hope it's going', or 'Pretty sure it is mate, but maybe the conductor will know?' or some such. And that bit about the guy who gets off in a panic: there's always one. Thing is, you do need to ask. For example, if you're trying to go into London from Cambridge, should you take the 10.27 that is on Platform 3 and will leave in ten minutes, or should you wait for the 10.43 which isn't here yet? A no-brainer, did you say? Not if I tell you the 10.27 will stop at every little, oddly-named country villager station en route - Shepreth, Meldreth, etc. - and not get into Kings X till 12.41, whereas the 10.43 is the nonstop (which of course means it only stops twice before getting to Kings X, probably at the improbably-named Welwyn Garden City, which sounds as though it should be in Wales anyway, and of course at Stevenage, which sounds like it's a railway dumping-yard) and will get you in an hour earlier. Now combine this with the fact that what's waiting on Platform 3 may not be the 10.27 at all, but may turn out to be the earlier non-stop from 10.13, which, having been held up due to signal delays at St. Ives, whence it originated, and you're in dire need of assistance from the BR man (though in my day he was actually a Railtrack man) walking around looking harassed and bitter at the state of the world.

Which all reminds me of the single most odd, and most funny, railway announcement I have ever heard. During the unfortunate period right before the railways in Britain were re-nationalised a couple of years ago, I was waiting for a train to somewhere or the other at London Waterloo. It was rush hour, and hordes of frustrated commuters stood around the giant display board where every other train was marked as being 'Cancelled'. As if this were not bad enough, every once in a while there would be an announcement along the lines of 'The 5.43 to Milton Keynes, which has been rescheduled to 6.37, is now cancelled.' You could tell that the person having to make these announcements was getting really stressed out by his job, and finally, at one point, he made the announcement which took the cake.

'Ladies and Gentlemen, Railtrack is sorry to announce that the 6.24 train to Exmouth has been cancelled because we can't find a bloody driver' (emhpasis on the bloody).

As Mastercard would say, priceless.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-02-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

I saw 'Brokeback Mountain' when it came out (eh, that pun wasn't quite intended...) and I was very, very moved by it. I've resisted the urge to write about it because I wasn't sure I was up to it. I still am not, but I just read an excellent review of it in the New York Review of Books, which I think is the first review of the many, mostly glowing ones that I have seen, which goes beyond the overused cliches about the supposed universality of the film's themes and recognises what makes it both so different from many other 'hopeless love stories' and, thus, so important.

Mohammed Cartoons Update

2006-02-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

The most sensible commentary on the cartoon fiasco that I have seen thus far, from the Guardian. I particularly liked Gary Younge's bit, but both are well-written and worth reading, though they ostensibly express different viewpoints: in fact, they differ only in whose responsibility they emphasize; I agree more with Younge's emphasis.

Meanwhile, it appears that my comment about the disengenuousness of the editors/journalists involved in this supposed battle to preserve free speech was actually supported by some facts that have come to light: apparently Jyllands Posten was sent some cartoons by a cartoonist which were potentially offensive to Christians. Guess what they did? They refused to publish them, because .... they were offensive. These guys are not the ones one would want defending the bastions of free speech, which do need defending. If you have any doubts, read this.

L'affaire Cartoons of Mohammed

2006-02-02T22:12:00.000-08:00

Having been totally oblivious to this whole controversy (ah, there's that wonderful word again) about the Danish newspaper that published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, my state of blissful ignorance was invaded by headlines such as 'OIC calls for calm in cartoon row' and reports about the boycott of Danish milk products in West Asia. Anyone who's been reading the news knows the story by now, so I won't recapitulate, but I do have a few things to say.

First, I think that (some of) the cartoons were indeed offensive. Not so much because they were 'blasphemous' (I have very little sympathy for any religious strictures on how people must behave; naturally, I respect the right of those who do believe to consider themselves bound by these strictures, but I see no way to justify their imposition of these standards upon others. Thus, if you're a devout Hindu of the RSS dispensation (if I'm not already contradicting myself) you may consider it inappropriate to draw Saraswati in the nude, but you have no right to say that M.F. Hussain should share your stance and censor his art. Likewise, if you believe that the very act of drawing the Prophet is un-Islamic, then don't do it. But you cannot insist that other people do so. This is just my extreme distaste with organised religion coming to the fore, so I'll save that for anotehr rant.

To come back to my original point, I said that the cartoons were offensive because at least one of them suggested that Mohammed was a terrorist, and that by extension Muslims are terrorists. So, I think that the fact that none of the statements that I have seen from the Danish administration have acknolwedged that the content of these cartoons was potentially offensive, or insulting to a group of people, says a lot about the state of Denmark, if I may be permitted to channel the Bard. It says something to me about the view of Muslims that must be prevalent in a place where saying Muslim = Terrorist is an unproblematic statement. I'm not a Muslim, but I can see why this might offend an observant Muslim. In fact, it offends me, particularly coming as it does from within a country where Muslims are a small minority and presumably have little voice in the media, government, etc. It seems distasteful to demonise an entire community of people without basis and particularly where they do not have the power to demonise back. Distasteful, and stupid, and not particularly funny: but - and this is my next point - legitimate.

So do I think the cartoons ought not to have been allowed to be published? In a nutshell, no. And this is because, fundamentally, I do believe that freedom of expression is a very, very valuable right, but also that it's real value lies in its lack of limits. Words, actions, pictures, music all have the power to offend; this power is their true worth. If the only things that anyone ever said were pleasant and innocuous, we would not need to guard free speech so zealously. And we do need to guard it zealously. In my ideal world, nothing would not be fair game for ridicule, satire, or plain offensiveness. Yes, this is an extreme position. Yes, it would make for a noisier, more heated, less amiable discourse. Yes, I do repeatedly take offense at the rantings of the Christian and Hindu right wings, the ravings of fatwa-happy Mullahs, and the idiocy of many journalists. I get mad when Jerry Falwell and his cohorts demonstrate with banners saying 'Fags Must Die' or whatever. The institutionalised homophobia and sexism of the Muslim establishment, for example, makes me deeply uncomfortable. I would be happier if they were to change their minds. I wish that the NeoCons would see reason, would stop demonizing Arabs as terrorists. I could go on, ad nauseam. The content of much that constitutes public discourse is more or less offensive, sometimes deeply hurtful to me personally.

But I do not have any right to ask any of these people to shut up. To not say what they think. To force them to agree with me. I can debate, I can discuss, I can rant back, I can hope to persuade. If all else fails, I can choose not to listen, not to engage, simply to ignore. But I cannot under any circumstances ask for anyone's speech to be limited, however hateful, offensive, or derogatory it may be.

So do I then wholeheartedly support the editors of various European newspapers who have chosen to publish these cartoons? Unfortunately, I cannot say that I do. And this is because it is abundantly clear that these people are not in any way committed to the absolute freedom to offend that I'm holding up as a standard. The editor of 'Die Welt' was on BBC Newsnight and he made it clear that he would not, under any circumstances, permit an anti-Semitic cartoon to be published in his paper. And therein lies the rub. Because what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and I've run out of cliches. But if the 'feelings' of Jews must be respected, so must the 'feelings' of Muslims, the 'feelings' of every conceivable religious/ethnic/linguistic group. My original point was that there should be no limits on free expression, however offensive a form this may take. But no limits means no limits, and unfortunately does not mean no limits only when it comes to Muslims. And here I doubt strongly the bonafides of these journalists and editors. They're no champions of free speech, merely people who want to use the idea of free speech to shield their own desire to offend a particular group of people. Several of the people involved appeared on Newsnight and the line they took was this: 'Look, we have the right to offend. So stop being offended, because you're in our country, and we make the rules'. And this is not acceptable. As instrinsic as the right to offend is the right to be offended. And if you're offended, you protest. So the only acceptable outcome according to me is this: I say whatever I want. You then get as offended as you want, and insult me as much as you want, right back.

Which sounds like a rather unpleasant state of affairs. And it might be. But the point of free expression is, hopefully, to lead to some sort of understanding of opposing positions, an agreement to disagree, at the very least. And positions can only be understood if they are allowed to be stated. What stands out most starkly to me in this entire imbroglio is the cussed immaturity of both sides. The journalists in question need to see why the analogies they make between Islam and terrorism are problematic and offensive. And those Muslims who are offended by the cartoons need to make a reasoned case for why they think they are wrong, offensive or distasteful, while recognising that people have a right to be wrong, offensive and distasteful. Offended Muslims need to recognise that free speech is a fundamental right, and that it includes the right to offend; but at the same time, the 'offending' journalistic and general establishment needs to get off its high horse and recognise that the actual choice of who to offend was consciously made, and owes as much if not more to a prevailing climate of Islamophobia as to the much-vaunted 'commitment to free speech'.

In the end, it appears that the European press, or at least it's right wing, has suddenly discovered Voltaire and his famous defense of free speech. I'd like to suggest that they take a step back and recall the words of anotehr person, who said: 'Everybody has the right to be stupid. Some people misuse the privilege'.

Sarva-bhookh

2006-01-23T16:13:00.000-08:00

I'm obsessed with food, and I'd like to imagine that I have, over the years, tried food from pretty much every corner of the world (most recent extensions to the repertoire of my palate have been Senegalese and Burmese). When it comes to food, i'm the equivalent of what Derek Zoolander called a 'try-sexual' - yup, I'll try pretty much everything (When it comes to sex, on the other hand...). According to my grandfather, who I think I inherited some of this from (I'm pretty sure he would have tried sushi with gusto, which is something most Bengalis, who like their fish but like it well-cooked, recoil instinctively at the thought of), there's a word in Sanskrit which describes me well: Sarva-bhookh (or One Who Eats Everything: ever notice how Sanskrit words, when translated into English, tend to sound really portentous?). My mother, though, has a less impressive word for me: 'Habhaat', which pretty much means 'glutton'. The literal translation involves greed for rice, so as a child I was always prone to declaring that I was 'not a Habhaat, but a Ha-mangsho' (for the non-bengalis, this means, approximately, that I was accepting my gluttony, but claiming that it was restricted to meat and not something as prosaic as rice).

This willingness to experiment, coupled with an inherent tendency towards carnivoria (it's a word if i say it is, okay?) has meant that I've tried, and liked, most kinds of meat. I recently tried rabbit and snails, and loved both, have had superb veal in the past, and can even summon up enthusiasm for something as lowbrow as chicken, though I have to say that chicken in the US usually tastes remarkably like rubber, unless you splash out on the really expensive organic stuff, but I digress. I love beef (steak is something I actually, physically crave from time to time - while on the topic, I have to mention the thin-sliced steak sandwiches at my favourite neighbourhood restaurant/cafe, which is marinated to perfection and served, without further embellishment, on thick-cut Portuguese bread with Portuguese-style fried potatoes on the side - on which more in another post , crave lamb, especially roast lamb (one of the only things the British truly know how to cook), and will happily devour large amounts of sashimi, especially if someone else is paying .

The irony of it, though, is that after all this exposure to every possible variety of livng creature that can be eaten, the king of meat to me remains good old goat meat, preferably halaal. Oh for the melt-in-the-mouth feel of a good goat meat on the bone, on a day when my mother's mangshor jhol has turned out just so (it's always excellent, but there are days when it is truly sublime). So, my point is: after all my wanderings through the cuisines of the world, I am back, like a good Bong, craving mangshor jhol and bhaat. Maybe I AM a habhaat, after all. Or at least a ha-mangsho. As long as it's pathar mangsho...

Dreams Interrupted

2006-01-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

I've been having some pretty fascinating dreams lately, and I could do worse than record the details of some of them for posterity (or the lifetime of this blog).

My current favourite is a dream I had about a month ago. What made it unique, at least for me, was that it was a film. Not one I was watching (in the dream), nor one I was an active participant in (in the sense of being a protagonist). But something I was both conscious and yet unaware was a film, in the way one can only be in a dream. It was as if I was inside the frame, but not visible. A fly on the wall, I suppose. But there was this curious feeling of being both within and outside the frame.

The plot was quintessential Indian New Wave, as was the cast: Shabana Azmi appeared both as her present, older self and as she was in the '70s (but as two separate charqacters, on which more in a second), and her partner (and presumably husband, since there was implied cohabitation, and the film did not appear to be critiquing the norm of matrimony) was, of course, Naseeruddin Shah. There was a flashback to the Oppressively Feudal Indian VIllage (somehow I knew it was oppressively feudal, since all this was implicit), where there was Poverty, but a Happy Family and Hope in the form of the Big City (basically, I dreamt that the mother-in-law/mother of my main protagonists was serving them a dinner of sookhi roti and onions on a mud floor. Curiously, said mother/mother-inlaw was played by an older Shabana Azmi, which gave the film an oddly Oedipal undertone. They say all Indian men want to marry their mothers, an idea the film seemed to have internalised and taken to its logical conclusion.

In the next bit, the action seems to have moved to the Big City. Here, the Oppressive Shadow was not that of the Zamindar, but rather of Big Business, symbolized by a skyline of smokestacks. Cut to Shabana and Naseer (now clad in in the activist costume of khadi kurta and Nehru topi) and earnest, handsome, bearded young man, earnestly plotting union activity, strikes, and such in front of decaying red-brick factory plastered with political graffiti (The mise-en-scene is some combination of the Badarpur Power station and North Calcutta walls covered with anti-Mamata slogans). However, Ma (now unseen) is still around, since they must rush home for dinner.

Then came a bit that showcased the editor's technical prowess. We see our lead pair running across a busy street to catch a bus home. However, Naseer stops on the way to talk to someone, so that Shabana has crossed the street by herself. Naseer rushes to join her, but our (and his) view of her is obscured by a line of buses, including the one they intend to catch. Said bus begins to move just as Naseer crosses the road, so he runs after it and just about gets on, thinking that Shabana is already on it. In fact, of course, she is waiting for him at the stop. As the buses move away, we see her. Camera cuts to intense young bearded man, who is across the road, looking intensely at Shabana. Cuts back to Shabana, looking at hm. Sexual tension is palpable. Will there be an affair?

I'll never know, because just as the plot was morphing from Indian New Wave proper to early Mahesh Bhatt, I woke up. Quite exhilarated by my Adventures in Parallel Cinema-land, I might add.

The Golden Globes

2006-01-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else catch them? I usually have very little patience for these let's-pat-ourselves-on-the-backathons, but I ended up watching the GGs this time around, partly because this meant a reprieve from my excel spreadsheet. In the end, I have to say I rather enjoyed it, and even considered live-blogging. Didn't in the end, because a) nobody reads this and b) it would have meant getting up to get my laptop, and I'm lazy.

Just a couple of comments, then. First off, what the hell was Isaac Mizrahi up to? I can't decide whether I found his antics hysterical or borderline distasteful. Actually, this is all ex post: at the time I was cracking up. Anyway, he played the gay-designer card to the hilt: among other gems, he asked Eva Longoria about her feminine grooming regimen (though it appears she has lately been waxing eloquent (pun intended) on the orgasm-enhancing properties of a brazilian), more or less fondled Scarlett Johannsen's boobs, and looked down Terri Hatcher's cleavage and rifled through her handbag. Wonderfully juvenile and much funnier than the usual red-carpet cooing over the beautiful dresses.

Speaking of which, most of the women looked hideous. Drew Barrymore, for one, took the whole 'Globes' part of the evening much too literally, leaving her (presumably not golden, but definitely oversized) orbs to support themselves. It's called a bra, Drew. They sell them all over the place. And frankly, if you're doing the whole bra-less thing, what's the point of wearing something that comes all the way up to your neck? The other fashion trend of the evening appeared to be the return of the Empire waist. But the worst dress, by quite a margin, was Rachel Weisz's, which looked like someone decided to wrap her up in khadi raw silk and literally tie things up with a little bow. Giving her a run for her money was Gwyneth Paltrow, who looked like she was channeling a costume for an amateur production of the Ugly Duckling.

The awards themselves were mercifully short (unlike the stupid Oscars where the technical awards go on and on) and I was glad Brokeback Mountain won best Picture and Director, because I loved it. Sadly, playing gay, which is allegedly supposed to be a surefire way to rake the awards in, didn't swing it for Heath Ledger, because, I guess, Capote was way, way gayer. I haven't seen Capote, but I thought Heath Ledger was magnificent in Brokeback. I haven't seen anyone draw out a performance from somewhere so far under the surface for quite some time.

Speaking of gay, though, given that three of the films which won awards (Capote, Brokeback Mountain, and Transmerica) had non-hetereosexual principal characters, and two of them concentrated on the sexuality.gender aspect of their lives, it was quite incredible that the 'g' word itself was the elephant in the room: we heard all about tortured romance, difficult circumstances, 'star-crossed love', and so on ad infinitum, but no mention of gayness. In some situations, it appears, we're still stuck with the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, though it may certainly be Rewarded At The Globes.

My name is Gauharjaan...

2005-09-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Well, of course it isn't. I suppose the desire to be a uni-browed turn-of-the-century (the last one, not this one) courtesan in colonial Calcutta is not that odd, or that implausible. Beats being a graduate student in the twenty-first century pretty easily. I would, it seems, have had many lovers (okay, that's not so different), no lasting romantic attachments (also not that different) but also fame, fortune, and an important place in the annals of the history of recorded sound in India....

But I digress. On one of my recent peregrinations through Musicindiaonline.com, I found that they'd uploaded a bunch of very early Bangla recordings which, it appears, have recently been remastered by HMV as part of a series they've released to commemorate 100 years of recorded music in India. One of the most charming (and I can't think at this point of a better word) is what must be one of the very first audio recordings ever to be made in India, in which Gauharjaan Kalkattewali sings 'Phanki Diye Praner Pakhi' - a tappa of sorts, I suppose. Charming, more than anything else, because she claims authorship (in English, at that) of the recording by saying 'My name is Gauharjaan. This is bengali song. Hear my song!'.

I've come across the practice of saying one's name at the end of a recording once or twice earlier, when listening to some old recordings that my grandfather had. One, if I recall correctly, was a thumri at the end of which the singer matter-of-factly announces her name, which is Zohrabai Agrewali. (Apparently there was also a famous Zohrabai Ambalewali, hence the importance of the distinction). It's interesting that the idea of authorship was so important to singers from the outset: I have often assumed that it came later, with royalties and associated financial issues (I doubt very much that Gauharjaan made any or much money from the recording, which HMV is still flogging a hundred years on). Yet it must have been an issue, if not a financial one, from the beginning of recorded sound. 'How do I ensure people know this is me?' cannot have been much of a question when the only performances were live, but it's fascinating that singers caught on to its importance as soon as they came into contact with the new technology of recording. In some ways, they were much smarter than subsequent generations of singers, who trusted studios to attribute authorship correctly: there have been so many disputes about exactly who sang a particular song in a movie. On a different note, think of the whole dispute over who spoke Kirron Kher's lines in Bariwali: Rituporno claimed it was the actress, but it appears that a Bengali actress may have dubbed for her, but has not been given credit. I don't suppose she could have said her name after each line, cinema being the medium that it is...

Perhaps, then, I ought not to have been surprised that the apparently canny Gauharjaan was clever enough to pre-empt any such issues arising with her recording: certainly, I doubt very much that we'd know today whose voice that was unless she had bothered to tell us, in no uncertain terms, that her name was Gauharjaan. But I'm still charmed. More than the crackliness of the recording, the matter-of-factness of her phrasing, the tendency of the recording technology of the time to make her sound higher-pitched than she must have been (only in the elaborate taan-kari does the true quality of the voice shine through), it was those words at the end that made listening to the piece feel uncannily like time-travel.

Limericks: The Planets

2005-09-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

So several friends of mine and I (but mainly one friend) have been amusing ourselves by writing limericks about the solar system. Dirty limericks, I might add. Some of them are truly works of genius (and I can say this without embarrassment because those are the ones I didn't write) so here they are.

1. The thoughtless young man on Mercury
Distressed his damsel demure, he
When the tip of his whip
Took a sip of her lip
It would spill out a can of his puree.

2. There was once a young man from Venus
Who had a very, very, very long penis.
He stuck it in a pond
And the fish clung on
To the penis of the man from Venus.

3. The most jaded soprano on this Earth
Not a man to bestraddle her big girth
Then a rhino forlorn
Rode her with his horn
And she squealed out her musical rebirth.

4. There was a doddering old man on mars
Who masturbated into the stars.
His wife went insane
When those drops of white rain
Streamed into her lime pickle jars.

5. The president who reigned over Jupiter
Stuck a cigar in a girl and then lit her
When they tried to impeach
They all heard him preach
That for sex, he'd have used his transmitter.

6. Life is pretty damn hard on Saturn.
There's never a predictable pattern.
Some days there are tits
Growing out of armpits
And on other days it's best to keep your hat on.

7. The men who loved men on Uranus
Soon tired of the talk of "your anus"
What is sexuality
But a free cavity?
So they learnt how to fuck with vaginas.

8. A nightclub once dwelled on Neptune
The best of its kind that side of the Moon
It had strippers and poles
Stuck inside their holes
And they blew out of those the most glorious tune.

9. The cranky young skank who ruled Pluto
Would trample all men underfoot, oh!
With the stock in her dock
And boy, could she suck cock
(But only when wrapped in prosciutto).

And apparently there's now a new planet called Sedna, so...

10. a randy man travelled to sedna and said,
all this talk of planets is hurting my head
so he went and he fucked
with his shirttails untucked
and found his balls hurting instead.

Right, Left, Authoritarian, Libertarian: The Political Compass

2005-08-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I never posted this here. I'm not sure if anyone actually reads this, but for those who do, I urge you to go to politicalcompass.org and take the test.

This is is a fairly intelligent attempt to guage where respondents stand both on a political and on a social spectrum. The idea is that when we refer to people as 'right-wing' or 'left-wing' we are, of necessity, being highly reductive. For example, a Bushie might be socially very authoritarian but economically very libertarian, whereas a lot of people in the United States or other Western countries who identify as 'liberal' are very socially libertarian but less so econonomically, since they are more accepting of government intervention in the economy than libertarianism allows for.

In the Indian context, for example, parties like the CPM tend to be pretty interventionist economically (classic left-wing politics, pro-government, anti-private-sector, etc;, though of course these days the gap between rhetoric and practice is pretty large, think for a moment of the Left Front government in West Bengal), but also quite authoritarian socially, so that they are in fact quite the opposite of any idea of liberalism. The present version of the Congress, on the other hand, is on the whole reasonably right-of-centre economically but continues to have certain left-wing tendewncies (the Rural Employment Guarantee, for example, is pretty interventionist, and it's hard to imagine it having come from a more straightforwardly right-of-centre party like the BJP), but has social politics quite difficult for me to classify offhand (umbrella parties like the Congress usually have space for all shdes of social opinion, from very liberal to very conservative - think for a moment of the guy banning dance bars in Mumbai, who is a classic authoritarian).

Similarly, as the site argues, whatin the UK used to be a classically 'left-wing' party - Labour - is now significantly right-of-centre economically, and also more authoritarian than libertarian (post-7/7, this is clearer than ever before, with Labour's complete nonchalance when it comes to the erosion of civil liberties being typified by its staunch defence of the Metropolitan Police in the case of the Brazilian-who-wasn't-even-behaving-like-a-terrorist...)

In that sense, therefore, categories like 'right-wing' and 'liberal' and 'left-wing' are not entirely satisfactory. Of course, any such attempt to classify people is bound to have some shortcomings, like any summary measure, but this survey is pretty nifty, I think. Take the test, and report your scores! I'm interested to know where people stand...

Mangal Pandey: The Rising

2005-08-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

'Mangal Pandey: The Rising' is, at heart, a rollicking masala mythological, albeit one where the figure being deified is a human one, and the 'religion' is patriotism. I think a lot of the discussion of whether it is a good film or not, apart from the discussion of its technical (de)merits, production values, acting, etc., misses the mark because it treats the question of whether this film is serious history with more importance than it deserves. In fact, this is popular myth-making at work, not an exercise in academic history. Compare this with Aamir Khan's last pseudo-historical outing, Lagaan. That, of course, was more straightforwardly a fantasy, whereas this one is ostensibly imbued with a grain of truth and based on a real character and real events. However, this is less important a distinction than it might seem. Lagaan, too, was set in a particular period and milieu, so that it could be judged on the accuracy with which it recreated its period. Such is, of course, also the case with the Rising. However, the more substantive point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't really matter, beyond the basics of getting dates and places right in the case of the Rising which was not important in the case of Lagaan, that Bhuvan in Lagaan did not exist and that Mangal Pandey did, and that the cricket match did not happen (ah, but it could have!) and that the events leading up to the Mutiny did. To the extent that we know a little about Mangal Pandey's life and some incidents in it, it is probably important for the film to try not to deviate too much from the bare bones of the story, and it does not. However, it is actually redundant to discuss whether the rest of the film is faithful to history (i.e., for example, to ask whether there was indeed a bhang episode, or a mujra, or whether Rani Mukherjee's character existed (perhaps, instead, one should ask: could it, or could she?), except in the general sense of not playing too fast and loose with the known facts about the environment. The reason is that so little is known about Mangal Pandey that if one were to try to make a film that stuck to the little that is known, it would not last very long. Thus, it is important to realise that it is inevitable that the film will deviate from the 'known facts', and it is also important to understand that what the filmmaker is trying to do is to essentially encapsulate a particular 'type' of person or persons in a single character who will allow larger points to be made in a way that would not be possible in a big-budget piece of popular cinema without resorting to what I will call, for want of a better word, mythologisation. It's perfectly fair, of course, to question whether the intentions of the filmmakers are realised, and what might also be worth discussing is what we think of what they're trying to do in the first place.

The Rising is a pretty typical example of the process of taking the outlines of a historical story and padding it so it comes to encapsulate the themes the makers are interested in exploring, seen through the prism of a couple of larger-than-life characters. In the case of 'The Rising', the story of the Revolt of 1857 is essentially framed as a conflict between an expansionist, mercenary East India Company and its Indian subjects, as filtered through the experiences of a British officer and an Indian sepoy. While weaving the story around what little is known of the contours of Mangal Pandey's life (such as his firing at his superior officer, trial, and hanging), what the scriptwriter has done is essentially use whatever is known about the Mutiny and the events leading up to it to flesh out the skeleton provided by Mangal's life. In fact, the extent to which the scenes and pivotal moments in the film correspond to known details as reported in official accounts of the Mutiny surprised me. Even the scene where the sweeper accosts Mangal and tells him that he, too, will lose his caste because he's going to be biting cow-fat-laden cartridges is reported in official military accounts of the events leading up to 1857. Of course, the real Mangal Pandey had no part in this particular episode, so what the script does is essentially portray Mangal Pandey as an 'every-sepoy', a sort of archetype of the low-ranking native infantryman in the Bengal Army. This is what I mean when I say that what the film, like all films of this genre, does is to mythologise a historical figure. In the film, Mangal Pandey represents all soldiers of his kind, and eventually a sort of Indian 'everyman'. This is exactly in the tradition of films of this sort, and there is therefore little to be gained from arguing about the exact correspondence of details of Mangal Pandey's life as shown in the film and his real life. It doesn't matter. What matters is whether the character of Mangal Pandey is sufficiently successfully mythified so that he does in fact come to represent the situation and aspirations of the 'little people' of the period. I think that it does, and that in doing so it succeeds in getting the audience to empathise with this mythic forbear of their own modern selves.

What the film also does, fairly successfully, is to segue into a delineation of the birth of nationalistic feeling. This is a difficult task to accomplish without become unduly preachy while at the same time remaining gripping. Here, perhaps, is where the ambitions of the filmmaker and the supposed historical basis of the plot diverge most radically. It would be hard to argue convincingly that the real Mangal Pandey was a 'nationalist' in the sense that we now understand the term. Certiainly, he could not have had the understanding of the flaws of autocratic rule and the idea that a post-colonial India was going to be a democracy, as is suggested in the film. Yet the point of making a film such as this is to be able to address these loftier, broader themes in a way that is still comprehensible to its audience. Just as Pandey becomes an Indian 'everyman', he also becomes a vehicle for exploring the birth of a national identity - realistically, an identity that was both mediated by religion (hence the emphasis on the cow/pig-fat), essentially inclusive, and most importantly, defined by what it was in opposition to - the British, or at least the rule of John Company.

This transition, mediated through the growing self- and political awareness of Mangal Pandey's character, from someone who is aware of racism and the injustice of colonial rule on a personal level, to someone who sees its wider ramifications for his entire society, is the crux of the film, and apart from some of the delination of the Company's excesses being a little too simplistic, I think the film handles it well. It does well, also, to avoid overt jingoism by emphasising the injustice of the institution of colonial rule by retaining to the end its sympathetic portrayal of the Gordon character. The personal is political, of course, but it's important always to avoid reducing the political to the personal, and here, for all its many flaws (misplaced, intrusive songs, some historical bloopers, some amount of preachiness, too many underdeveloped sub-plots), Mangal Pandey: The Rising succeeds fairly well, as it does in taking its target audience(s?) on quite an enjoyable ride through India in the mid-nineteenth century in the process. Seen as essentially a non-denominational mythological and not as either a strict historical (what Hindi film, with its carefully-staged dance sequences, or indeed what Hollywood fgilm, with its swelling background score and strategically-chosen set-pieces, can claim to be realist?), the film is pretty successful in doing what it sets out to do. Still, it must be admitted that those looking for a straightrforward history lesson would be well advised to take it with a pinch of salt.

2005-08-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

On cue, a 'leading' British historian and a Tory shadow minister have, according to the TOI, pounced on 'The Rising'. The makers must love this free publicity. I wonder if there were similar outbursts accompanying the release of 'Braveheart'. Pity the likes of John Mason (author of 'The Men Who Ruled India' and other such tributes to the glories of the Raj) aren't around, because I'm sure they'd have weighed in on this and that would have been amusing.

Personally, I'm always amused by people trying to read too much into commercial films, whether from Hollywood or Bombay, whichever side of the political spectrum they happen to come from. I'm not making some kind of general argument for taking films, even popular films, seriously as social commentary, just against judging a commercial historical film (whether Braveheart, Lagaan, Mangal Pandey, or Gladiator) by the parameters of academic history. I'll get around to making a case for taking films like this as exercises in mythologisation, if I may be permitted to invent a word, in a separate post. In the meantime, I am as ever amused that 'leading British historians' think that the East India Company and the British Empire were essentially benign exercises in bringing the light of modernity to the benighted Orient. Actually, I doubt that the historian quoted had as simplistic a take on all this as is being made out by the TOI, which couldn't decode a subtle argument if hit in the face with it (but let's face it, no pun intended, that subtle arguments rarely, er, hit one in the face to begin with). If for nothing else, though, we need to thank the Empire for providing us with the opportunity to relish the spectacle of people frothing at the mouth at the thought that perhaps the Colonies were not quite as happy to have the British ruling them as the British were to be ruling them.

'Rising' excitement

2005-08-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

OK, lame attempt at pun. Going to see 'The Rising' (or, it seems, technically, 'Mangal Pandey - The Rising', since we're watching the Hindi version rather than the English version, which is called 'The Rising: the Ballad of Mangal Pandey') tonight. Very excited because I love Aamir Khan and anything he does, I really enjoyed Mirch Masala, which was directed by Ketan Mehta, who's also directing this, and because I think the Revolt of 1857 makes for a great topic for a film. I've already been reading the few reviews that have been published (the film was seen by some reviewers at Locarno, hence the advance reviews). So far they seem in general to be favourable, using adjectives such as 'robust', 'stirring', etc.

I'm particularly curious (though unconcerned, as in this is something I'm curious about but which I don't really care about, something i thought i should clarify given the Indian media circus' generally asinine preoccupation about 'the reception in the foreign media' , 'crossover potential' and the like) about the reception this receives in Britain. It never deases to amaze me that even supposedly informed British critics (and academics) seem taken aback at any criticism, implied or overt, of the Raj and of the conduct of British people during the colonial era. From another angle, this has been in the news recently for Manmohan Singh's controversial remarks at Oxford where he had the courage to suggest what every thinking person with some knowledge of history understands, which is that for all its flaws, colonialism ended up having some consequences, usually unintended, which impacted the receiving societies positively. Whereas I think that what Singh said was perfectly reasonable - in other words, India is better off today than it had it never had to encounter a post-Enlightenment Britain and its ideas, what he also said was eqwually important, which was that that encounter was inherently unequal and imbalanced (implicit in this critique, I think, being the idea that it is quite likely that a voluntary exchange would have had many of the same benefits without some of the adverse consequences). Yet, in many encounters with British people who should know better, what has always sturck me as profoundly strange (not to mention irritating and infuriating) is their complete inability to acknowledge or even counteance the idea that colonialism was both a profoundly humiliating and in many ways negative experience for the colonised people, and that many of its adverse consequences are being felt even today.

Instead, it often seems to me that even British people who have studied the history of the period see the Raj as one long succession of tea-parties and hunts, punctuated with bouts of energetic and uplifting railway-building and with the most important thing being that in the end Indians were very pleased to be left with the English language and cricket, and that by and large we're 'grateful' to the Raj for something, the something usually being an implied package of English, cricket, tea, and .. civilization, I guess. So it's all very well for Indians to be mature enough to engage seriously with the idea that there were intended and unintended 'good' consequences of the Raj, but equally, it's important for the British to realise that it's ridiculous to expect Indians to look on the Raj as some sort of golden age, and that to do so is, frankly, stupid and wrong: it was not, it had pretty damaging economic consequences which generally outweighed the positives, and the positives thewlselves were less positive than they would have been if the civilizational encounter had been one among rough equals (as indeed it was in the time of Akbar and Jahangir, when the first European traders arrived in India). So I'm curious to see the reaction to the Rising, which is likely to have some amount of Brit-bashing in the form of nasty colonial officer stereotypes.

Aamir Khan is so hot. As is Rani Mukherjee, who I love in all her gravel-voicedness, at least post-Saathiya. She just seems unable to do wrong these days - loved her in Paheli, Bunty Aur Babli, and can't wait for tonight...

Adhchini and Andha Mughal

2005-08-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

Have been reminded, thanks to a comment by thalassa_mikra on another post, of places in Delhi that have interesting names. (S)he mentioned Ahchini, which is of course one of the coolest. I wish I had some sort of idea about its provenance, but I don't. I'm curious whether the 'chini' could possibly have anything to do with China, rather than sugar, which is what I've always assumed is the case. Why sugar came to be called Chini in most Indian languiages is actually something else that bears thinking about. I'm always fascinated by the etymology of words, particularly where the etymology tells us something about a the quirks of history.

Hence Andha Mughal. I am not even sure exactly where this is, except that it's near Old Delhi proper. Old Delhi is of course a treasure-trove of names with interesting associations. Apparently Andha Mughal refers to the blinding in 1788, by invading Rohilla tribesmen, of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam, who if I remember my history correctly, was the one who came after Aurangzeb. The site of the blinding is allegedly the neighbourhood of Andha Mughal today, which quite fittingly is close to Sarai Rohilla, where presumably the Rohillas camped (before blinding the emperor and decamping with a lot of what remained of the jewelled ceiling of the Diwan-i-Khas).

Another place whose association with history I came to know of only several years into travelling past the area itself every day, was 'Camp'. As in 'Mall Road, Camp, Ajadpuuuuur' in the argot of the Blueline conductor working the Mudrika route. Camp, as it turns out, is really Kingsway Camp, which gets its name from where the Durbar of 1911 was held. While on the topic of Raj associations, it's also quite cool that the somewhat downmarket locality named Malkaganj near the University of Delhi is named after the then 'Mal(li)ka' of India, which I presume was Queen Mary. Incidentally, I've heard tell that had it not been for Lutyens' utter distaste for the idea, the brilliant administrators of the Raj considered naming the new capital either 'Georgepore' or 'Maryabad'. I shudder. Apparently Lutyens scoffed and said 'Nonsense, it can't be called anything other than New Delhi', or words to that effect.

Has anyone, I wonder, ever solved the mystery of the names Panchkuian Road and Barakhamba Road? I suppose there were five wells or water tanks or some such at the site of the former, but which twelve pillars does the latter name refer to? it has been suggested that if you stand in the middle of Barakhamba Road (assuming you can do such a thing without being run over, the impossibility of which might explain why nobody has either confirmed or debunked this notion) then you can see exactly twelve of the whitewashed pillars of Connaght Place. This might or might not be true, but I see no reason why it is truer of Barakhamba Road than of any other radial road in CP. Anyway, if you've been to Connaught Place in recent years, you might have noticed a new piece of architecture that plays a self-referential joke on its location: I refer to Gopaldass Bhawan, which is at the intersection of Barakhamba Road and Connaught Circus. It's quite hideous, but I love the little in-joke played by the architect: at street level, all by themselves and serving no purpose whatsoever, are twelve white pillars.

Post-independence planning contributed several other gems, some now (thankfully) lost to the mists of time. My favourite is the four residential government colonies now known, as far as I know, as Rabindra Nagar, Bharti Nagar, Netaji Nagar, and Sarojini Nagar. Those at all familiar with the obsessive hierarchising of the government machinery would know that these were meant for different classes of government employees, sort of in descending order of rank. The original names (in place at least till the late 1960s, as far as I know) were - hold your breath - reflective of this hierarchy. They were Aan Nagar, Maan Nagar, Vinay Nagar, and Seva Nagar. Priceless.

More fascinating Mughal stuff. Any idea why Shahdara is called Shahdara? I'd never thought about it until I learnt that there was a neighbourhood in Lahore also called Shahdara. Turns out it's a corruption of 'Shah Dwar' (or Darwaza, both words have the same root anyway) and refers to a ceremonial gate through which the Emperor and his retinue entered the city. Obvously, they also entered Lahore, and so it has a Shahdara too. Wonder if Lahore's is on the western edge of the city.

One final snippet. There's a place near Jor Bagh/Lodi Colony called, of all things, Karbala. I was always intrigued by this one. Turns out it used to be a major Shia settlement before Partition, and is still the site of Delhi's only (or certainly largest) Imambara, from where the Muharram procession leaves every, well, Muharram.

Names in general are quite fascinating. In a foray through the walled city one Id-time, I found that there is a popular old-city dessert eaten at festival times called 'Hubshi Halwa'. Apparently, this was a recipe brought over by African harem-guards and mercenary soldiers employed by the Mughals. In case the connection is unclear, most of these people were either from, or came through, Ethiopia, which of course used to be called Abyssinia - Hubshi is the Hindi/Urdu for Abyssinian, it seems (apparently even in contemporary Nepali, the word for an African is 'hupshee'). So there you are. Bet you didn't know this one before.

more indian english....

2005-08-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

And damn anyone who claims that this sort of writing is somehow a legitimate exercise in extending the parameters of 'english as she is spoke'.

Just a little while ago, sepiamutiny alerted me to the existence of 'sari strippers'. no, that isn't 'sorry strippers' in a very strong kannadiga/tam accent (saary saar...), but strippers who strip out of saris. It directed me to an article in something called 'India Daily' about said phenomenon and its prevalence in Toronto, which I dutifully went to, but what was truly incredible about this 'India Daily' thingy was the English. If english it can be called...

Consider this:

"The Indian girls in Toronto are busy making big bucks with sari stripping. They wear sari to attract traditional clients from getting rich India and strips in front of them."

Extraordinary. Perhaps one could use this in a course on how not to write? Imagine, maybe somewhere in a country a little to the north of where I am, a young woman (or maybe a not-so-young one) called Tareena Raina is claiming, on the strength of sentences such as the ones quoted above, to be a 'journalist'. The mind boggles. I do have to admit that I love the literal transposition of the word-order from India in 'getting(-)rich India'. Reminds me of a textbook we had in school which had this list of common Indian bloopers, one of which I thought was made up, since I'd never heard anyone saying 'XYZ is a worthseeing movie'. But all these years later, I stand chastened: clearly, the same logic is at work in the construction of 'getting(-)rich India'. Sorry, Mrs Ranjan (my Class V English teacher), if i insisted that nobody ever used phrases like that. I still don't think you should have thrown me out of class for arguing too much though, although now that I think back it might be the case that what you actually (and very good-naturedly) threw me out of class for doing was laughing hysterically for around fifteen minutes. Which is a good chunk of a 35-minute period....

Actually, there is even more food for rolling-on-the-floor-with-laughter on the site i found the above on. For example, an article by Lara Laraani (something about both the writing and the somewhat odd names of the authors suggests to me that both Tareena and Lara are actually a lecherous, middle-aged, pan-chewing, pot-bellied Uncleji somewhere in North America, but anyway, to return to the brilliance of said uncleji/Lara's prose...) begins:

"Antara Mali the seduction mistress of Bollywood who control male desires and passions all around made finally a steadfast confession!"

Apart from the fact that this sentence actually makes no sense, it exhibits a similar difficulty with getting the verb to agree with the number of the subject as the extract earlier, hence my suspicion that they emerged from the same gramatically-challenged keyboard. Consider 'they ... strips in front of them', and 'Antara Mali ... who .. control male desire'. OK, no more on this, just go to India Daily if you want more of this drivel. I have to say this is not quite in the class of my good friend Ramkamal Mukherjee, whose elegant commentaries on Bengali cinema I have posted earlier. Those had a certain lyricism to their idiocy, which I'm afraid these lack. Nonetheless, any EDITORIAL headlined "Antara Mali makes a confession – she likes to sexually excite people but cannot say so officially" is worth a read.

By the way, I'm not a linguistic purist at all. As I hinted in my last post, I do get quite a kick out of the felicity with which Indians incorporate Indian words into English. This may be a good point at which to trot out my favourite example of what some would call bastardisation, and what I prefer to call good old cross-fertilisation. And this isn't a story from the recent past (or at least, not entirely), so that the point of my telling it is to say that there's been this sort of cross-fertilisation between English and Indian languages for as long as India and England have had anything to do with each other. But anyway...

I'd noticed a lot of Brits using the phrase 'so-and-so is (or thinks he is) a really big cheese' and was puzzled by the provenance of the phrase. Surely, I thought, it had something to do with 'cheez' in Hindi? However, everyone I asked had no idea wehere the phrase had come from, insisted it was spelt 'cheese' as in the stuff one ate, and that was that. However, looking up the OED led me to conclude that my hunch had been right, after all: it said that this usage of cheese came from the Hindi/Urdu 'chiz', or thing, and listed its first known use in a book published in the late eighteenth century. So there's always been a huge amount of borrowing and lending going on between languages that have come into contact with each other, which is why those self-righteous French linguistic nationalists railing against the infiltration of English words into their lexicon are fighting a losing battle. And which is why, yaar, we should like totally just learn to chill about this stuff, okay? Just as long as the sort of drivel that gets written by the likes of the 'journalists' on India Daily doesn't try to pass itself off as English of any kind whatsoever. Except Bad English.

A letter from Pakistan

2005-08-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

I mean that literally. A listserv I'm on received this letter, which is reproduced below. Another brilliant example of 'Indian' (I hope Pakistanis will forgive my shameless appropriation of that which is theirs) English gone amok. Enjoy.
================================================
Dear all
First of all I like to congratulate for the fellow of this group.
I am Professor of Urdu in Pakistan. I, with my other Professor fellows planed to visit india, Bangladesh, Sri lanka and Bhutan. Where we like to visit Universities and colleges to see the education and like to learn, We like to see these countries and visits shrines also.
Is there anybody who guide me and send me the information about the address and contact, reponsible person name of the universities and colleges who will arrange the visits of their institution???
waiting for your reply
[[Name Here]]
Pakistan
=============================================

There's actually something strangely affecting about the usage and sentence construction, which I can't quite put a finger on. It reminds me a little of some bits ni A Suitable Boy, as also a poem by Nissim Ezekiel. Let me see if I can locate it (ah, Google).

Found it, I think.

The Professor

Remember me? I am Professor Sheth.
Once I taught you geography. Now
I am retired, though my health is good.
My wife died some years back.
By God's grace, all my children
Are well settled in life.
One is Sales Manager,
One is Bank Manager,
Both have cars.
Other also doing well, though not so well.
Every family must have black sheep.
Sarala and Tarala are married,
Their husbands are very nice boys.
You won't believe but I have eleven grandchildren.
How many issues you have? Three?
That is good. These are days of family planning.
I am not against. We have to change with times.
Whole world is changing. In India also
We are keeping up. Our progress is progressing.
Old values are going, new values are coming.
Everything is happening with leaps and bounds.
I am going out rarely, now and then
Only, this is price of old age
But my health is O.K. Usual aches and pains.
No diabetes, no blood pressure, no heart attack.
This is because of sound habits in youth.
How is your health keeping?
Nicely? I am happy for that.
This year I am sixty-nine
and hope to score a century.
You were so thin, like stick,
Now you are man of weight and consequence.
That is good joke.
If you are coming again this side by chance,
Visit please my humble residence also.
I am living just on opposite house's backside.

-- Nissim Ezekiel

Here's another of his 'Indian English' poems.

The Patriot

I am standing for peace and non-violence.
Why world is fighting fighting
Why all people of world
Are not following Mahatma Gandhi,
I am simply not understanding.
Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,
I should say even 200% correct,
But modern generation is neglecting-
Too much going for fashion and foreign thing.

Other day I'm reading newspaper
(Every day I'm reading Times of India
To improve my English Language)
How one goonda fellow
Threw stone at Indirabehn.
Must be student unrest fellow, I am thinking.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I am saying (to myself)
Lend me the ears.
Everything is coming -
Regeneration, Remuneration, Contraception.
Be patiently, brothers and sisters.

You want one glass lassi?
Very good for digestion.
With little salt, lovely drink,
Better than wine;
Not that I am ever tasting the wine.
I'm the total teetotaller, completely total,
But I say
Wine is for the drunkards only.

What you think of prospects of world peace?
Pakistan behaving like this,
China behaving like that,
It is making me really sad, I am telling you.
Really, most harassing me.
All men are brothers, no?
In India also
Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Hindiwallahs
All brothers -
Though some are having funny habits.
Still, you tolerate me,
I tolerate you,
One day Ram Rajya is surely coming.

You are going?
But you will visit again
Any time, any day,
I am not believing in ceremony
Always I am enjoying your company.

-- Nissim Ezekiel

I'm a little conflicted about whether I like these or not. A note on the site I found these poems says that Ezekiel was trying to capture the rythms of Indian English as spoken, and not to 'make fun' of it or its speakers (though he is honest enough to admit that before it someone encouraged him to listen carefully to the flow of 'Indian English', he did dismiss it as essentially the spoken English of those who didn't speak the language well or 'correctly'. My issue is that I'm not entirely sure his appreciation, if that is the right word, of the 'dialect' he is writing in comes through entirely, but also whether 'appreciation' is the right response (and thus, whether Ezekiel is not being slightly disingenuous). It could be that my own instinct when hearing the common features of Indian English he emphasizes in his poetry - the overuse of the present continuous, the omission of articles - is indeed to dismiss them as wrong/bad/funny. While I appreciate the diversity of influences that have seeped into the language from other Indian languages and modes of speech, my tendency is to be appreciative and supportive of particular modes of usage, particularly additions to the vocabulary of the English language, but to dismiss grammatical innovations as being, somehow, wrong. So I love how we invent words - arbit, for example, or 'black money' or 'prepone' or 'lathi-charge' - I think these are marvellous additions to English and are wholly legitimate. On the other hand, I don't actually know many people who speak in the present continuous all the time, and when I hear someone who does, I tend to be dismissive of them, because to me that just sounds wrong. So I'm all for innovations in vocabulary, but against too much license with grammar. It may also be that I feel that the people doing the grammatical innovating are doing so without an adequate grasp of the rules, and to me rule-breaking has intrinsic value, but not if you do it unawares. Reminds me a little of the quote, attributed I think to Shaw (who else), that 'A gentleman is rude only on purpose. :-)

Anyway, here's my version of the letter above, a la Ezekiel. And I'm actually taking the piss.... :-)

First of all I like to congratulate
For the fellow of this group.
I am Professor of Urdu in Pakistan. I
with my other Professor fellows planed

To visit india, Bangladesh, Sri lanka and Bhutan. Where we like to visit
Universities and colleges
To see the education and like to learn
We like to see these countries and visits shrines also.

Is there anybody who guide me and send
The information about the address and contact
Reponsible person name
Who will arrange the visits of their institution???

Waiting for your reply

'There is porn in Harry Potter'...

2005-07-31T17:21:00.000-07:00

proclaims the TOI in this ridiculous piece of garbage. Seriously, it now has no competition at all in the lowbrow journalism stakes. None whatsoever.

French films and Brazilian Food

2005-07-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

Equal good times. Well, they do if the film is good (which yesterday's was) and the food is good (which today's was). Watched 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped', apparently a remake by director Jacques Audiard of a 1970s Hollywood film called Fingers(unusual, that), which has a truly amazing performance - one of the most physical I have seen in ages - all twitches and nervous tics and tense shoulder muscles and sudden jerky movements - by this very sexy (if hirsute) guy called Romain Duris. He's really very, very good; one of those performances where you can't imagine the actor as anyone else but what he plays in the movie, which is the son of a Paris property shark whose job is basically to strong-arm obstructive tenants into leaving by such methods as releasing rats into their homes or just beating them up. (One of the funniest moments in the film is when a music impresario asks Tom what he does, and he says pretty much what I've said above, only prefaced by the innocuous sounding 'I'm in real eastate'. Hilarious.) The central tension in the film arises from Tom's interest in music (his dead mother was a concert pianist - why she married a property-shark is not clear, but then this eeems, in typically Gallic fashin, to be a rather cultivated property-shark: his apartment is one of those book-strewn, dimly mood-lit places with overstuffed couches and open bottles of wine so beloved of every French film director worth his Bordeaux) and his attempts to get back into a life of serious music-making. There's also an amazing performance, this time relying almost entirely on physicality and the expressions on the actress' face, by Linh Dam Phan, who plays a pianist from China who speaks no French (but occasionally breaks out into Chinese, which is, very cleverly, not subtitled). Well worth watching, if for no other reason than the two performances above. If I were a certain well-known film reviewer who drooled at length over Aishwarya Rai's execrable performance in Bride and prejudice, one of the worst films of all time, I'd give it two (big) thumbs up, but as I am not, I shall merely say that I enjoyed in thoroughly. I have not bitched about La Rai enough lately, so had to throw that in, randomly.

The meal today was this Brazilian stew involving pork, sausages, black beans, collard greens, rice, plantains, and stuff. Really good. We ate at this great little place called Muqueca, which is a recent discovery. Must go back.

Supposedly a sign on the London Underground

2005-07-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

..At Notting Hill Gate, to be precise, according to good ol' Buchu. Very, very funny. Wonder how she knows exactly where it was (the other places I saw this posted were not nearly as precise. Even if it's photoshopped, which was what I initially assumed, it's quite clever.

Don't Run ... You Might Look Like a Terrorist

2005-07-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

It now turns out that the man who was shot to death at pointblank range on a London underground train a couple of days ago, on suspicion of being a suicide bomber was a Brazilian electrician who was late for work, and was certainly not wired or carrying anything, was followed for several miles on a bus and street by several un-uniformed, armed plainsclothes policemen, who never (as far as I can figure out from the news reports) identified themselves as police. He panicked (it seems that his visa had expired and he was worried that he might be in some sort of trouble over that), ran into a tube station, was followed onto a tube train (note that all this time, the plainsclothes policemen are only several feet behind him and could reasonably have stopped and apprehended him), tripped and fell (an eyewitness, a certain Mr Whitby who was sitting on the train he was on, described him as looking like a cornered fox) and was shot at pointblank range, not once, not twice, but seven times to the head and once to the shoulder. He died. As the same Mr Whitby put it " He was shot five times, man. he's dead"

A tragedy, says the Metropolitan Police, with the subtext, stated and unstated, being that mistakes happen. If you were to read the comments on the BBC website as evidence of the general drift of public opinion, it seems that a majority of people in Britain think that because he was stupid enough to run when he saw the police, or because he was wearing an 'unseasonably heavy coat', he pretty much asked for it.

This is the most absurd piece of reasoning I have ever heard. For one thing, the man did not know the men following him were policemen. The were ununiformed. To him, they looked like there were some random, probably large and menacing-looking, men chasing him. Perhaps he had reason to believe someone was after him for reasons totally unrelated to terrorism. Maybe he was a petty criminal. Maybe he hadn't paid his rent, and thought the landlord had sent his goons after him. Okay, that's a bit farfetched, but what is so strange about a man running when three or four men are chasing him? It's not clear that they had necessarily drawn their guns, which makes it even more likely he'd run. Is that not the normal reaction when you feel you're being followed? To get away from them into somewhere safer? Like a subway station?

Secondly, some people seem to think that by wearing 'an unseasonably heavy jacket' the man was bound to arouse suspicion. It turns out, however, that for starters he was not wearing a heavy jacket. A report I read, in the Washington Times, reported speaking to the owner of a cafe where he was a regular, who said that he knew the jacket the guy would have been wearing - it was a denim jacket he wore every day. Secondly, even if he had been wearing a heavy jacket, that is not a crime, and certainly not something for which one can be shot. Some people feel colder at a given temperature than others. It may strike the people who write in to the BBC as odd, but not everyone possesses enough jackets to cater to every variation in temperature. Maybe the guy had only one jacket, and while it was heavy, he wore it because he didn't have a lighter one and felt that no jacket was worse than slightly heavy jacket. Bad mistake, as it turned out.

Thirdly, the initial reports suggested he 'looked Pakistani', as if that were some sort of justification for shooting him. In the present circumstances, it might be an added reason for suspicion, but is every suspect to be shot dead without any attempts to establish his guilt? Now that we know who he was, we can see that he was not even remotely South-Asian looking. Brazilians are a pretty racially mixed population, so it's not unfeasible that some of them could pass for South Asian (I've often thought someone who turned out to be Latino was South Asian, and vice versa)but this guy was a particularly white specimen of Brazilianhood. Also, initial reports said he 'had wires protruding out of his jacket'. It turns out this was not the case. What I'm trying to point out is that people often see what they're expecting to see ("Pakistani-looking", "wired") and in a panicked state, what we remember seeing might have little or no resemblance to reality. So relying on people's impressions on issues like these at times like this is a really, really bad idea.

Given that it seems inevitable that people (and the police are only human, so this includes them) are bound to make mistakes, is it not important to train those who have the ability to turn suspicion into an immediate death sentence in such a way as to minimize the possiblity of such mistakes? Yet the Metropolitan Police Chief is defending his officers being told to shoot to kill without any attempt whatsoever to suggest that they are being trained to be cognizant of the possiblity of such mistakes occuring. If you give people the license to kill on suspicion, you're pretty much ensuring more Menezeses are going to die for no fault of theirs.

Why, if such a policy is in place, were people not told about it? If I run the chance of being shot dead for running away from a random bunch of men chasing me, why have I not been warned about this? What's the solution, anwyay - to walk up to people chasing you, assuming they must be undercover policemen? What if they really turn out to be thugs out to get me? A simpler solution would be for the policemen to have been uniformed - then there would have been no reason to run. Why were plainclothes policemen put on this job, and allowed to shoot on suspicion? Why was the public not warned?

And finally, for everyone who who thinks they would not have run in menezes' situation, don't be so goddamn sure. I'd like to see you faced with what he faced, and decide to confront your chasers. Whatever your views on the difficulty of the police's task at this point, it makes absolutely no sense to blame the victim. And clearly, there has been a severe lapse of judgement, not only on the part of the guy who actyually fired the shots, but of everyone involved in formulating the policy that allowed him to do what he did. Expressing 'regret' without owning up to the enormity of the mistake isn't going to help.

Ba(g)chi Karkaria in good form :-)

2005-07-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

HOME IS WHERE THE BENGALI IS

BACHI KARKARIA

Economic Times [ SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2005 01:54:32 AM]

"There is some corner of a foreign field/ Which is forever Bengali." Ki
nonsense kotha. It's not a corner, it's the whole blaady expanse. Ours is an eenbhasion, a coup. From which the attackee will never recoupaarate, I might add.

It's true. Suddenly the Bengalis are everywhere. So many, taking over so much, in so many places that I wonder if there are any left in Kolkata. Formerly, you saw Bengalis outside Bengal only when you went on holiday. There they were, the men in Fair Isle sweaters knitted lovingly by their mothers, their wives in blue cardigans, the baachcha in monkey cap. Wherever you went, they were always there, a swagger to their step and boxy
camera around their neck along with the matching "maaflar". Whether you werein Kashmir or Kanyakumari, in Nepal or Neyvelli, in Sri Lanka or Sariska,you always found one Bombay Photo Studio, one Madras Cafe, one Tibetan curio shop, and one Bengali family.

When Hilary and Tenzing climbed Everest, did they find a mysterious mishti syrup stain on the snow, irrefutable evidence that The Bengali Was Here? When Jacques Cousteau plumbed the icy deep, did he find a trace of maastard oil on Antarctic ocean-bed and telltale signs of a neatly-picked rohu
skeleton? When Armstrong floated on the lunar surface, had Neel-da already taken one small step for Bongkind in his trusty Bata sandals? I am prepared to bet on it, whatever may be the conspiracy of silence which has prevented the inveterate Bengali traveller from being given his due (LTA already collected, thank you).

When I began to venture abroad, they would be there not just as tourists, but as NRBs. Keep your motel, Mr Patel, Shri Banerjee has spread himself wider, higher, deeper across the globe.

In the suburban Cardiff of the early 70s, there wasn't anything non-Welsh for miles around. Anything except Mr Palit. He was the husband of one of the secretaries of our Thomson Foundation and, taking pity on us for having to face the bland hostel fare, she invited us for dinner. We expected a tastier version of our usual cod and chips. But what a spread we got: course upon
course of authentic Bangla Ranna, whose aromas wafted out of the chintzy windows and unleashed all manner of uncharacteristic urges in the staid neighbourhood of Penarth.

Three decades on, I can still recall that we had a chochchori of very English vegetables, ghoogni, chingdi malai curry, even chaatni. True, it wasn't today's beeay-bari favourite, the "plastic" variety.

Procuring aamshatto anywhere in Wales in those pre-Curry Colonialism days would have defeated even the enterprising Palit-babu but the tomato version he dished up was properly spiked with raisins and suited us fine. There was a fiery fish which could pass off for rui. And we rounded it off with
homemade shandesh. It was amazing. Was it a waking dream, we wondered as we were driven back, gently burping all the way.

Then, of course, came the rising Diaspora, so dominated by brilliant Bengalis that it came to be called the Daspora. It occasioned no surprise to encounter them all over the States, deep in the mid-West or on the farthest Hawaiian island. Somewhere, somehow, one caught the whiff of begun bhaja in
the air. "Is that a narkel bora I see before me, glistening through the Minnesota mist? It is. It is the Mistress of Spices at her magic. And should something go awry, the other Bengali, the Interpreter of Maladies, will Jhumpa up to set it right.

Yes, Bengalis are certainly no slouches, either, in all the English-language fiction that has stewed in Indian creative juices.
Slouches? They're winning both the marathon and the 100-metre dash in the race to literary glory.

It's the same closer to home. There are so many Bengalis occupying pole positions where I work that, if you don't speak the language, you might as well take the golden handshake. Being an Hon Bong, I scrape into the club by the skin of my teeth.

When I left Kolkata - when it was still Calcutta and Jyotibabu was not yet CM - to join The Times of India as a trainee, Sumitbabu, my journalism professor at Cal U gave an introductory call to his in-laws who lived in Mumbai. At least one Sunday a month, I took the bus to their terrace flat in Parel where, to the gentle flap of drying Dhonekhali saris, I would savour posto, papad and payesh and dispel the homesickness.

In later Mumbai years, the Bengali population spread like waterhyacinth in a Beliaghata pukur, so much so that there were almost as many Pujo pandals as Ganapati ones and any market worth the name boasted a sweet-water fishmonger - Anwar, Bishuda, Chanchalbabu - right down the alphabet. The Sunday crowd thronging his stall was there as much for the community camaraderie as for the golda chingri. So it didn't really matter if it was "Bombay bekti" or if the ilish did not come from the Podda, but from the Narmada in nearer Bharuch.

Moving to Delhi, of course, I was in clover and kashundi to my heart's content. Chitto Park is a microcosm - and not a very micro one at that - of para-Kolkata. Oh bliss it was in that den to be eating shinghara, and to be there in Pujo time was very heaven. Boudis in lal-paars, dhakis, bhog, Bijoli Grill's kobiraji caat-let, Nizam's kathi rolls. And crowds to rival Gariahat on Mahashtami night. Bhaba jaye na. If you can't be in Kolkata, Delhi is the next best thing.

Generally speaking, if you want to survive into the future you'd better cross over. Learn the language, buy a Dhakai, get a Bengali son-in-law. Me? I'm changing my name to Bagchi.

Me, You and Everyone We Know

2005-07-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

... Is an annoying new indie film that I saw a couple of days ago. it won an award at Sundance, and the premise sounded interesting, but in the end it was more irritating than anything else.

Actually, it was one of those films that annoyed at the time, but that I've sort of forgotten about in a couple of days. I didn't hate it; merely rued the wasted 90 minutes when I could have been elsewhere, doing more important things....

Like surfing the net.
Or drinking my tenth cup of coffee for the day.
Or considering the important question of whether, if I ever got a job in London, I'd prefer to live in Southwark or in Islington.

Okay, so perhaps I really shouldn't claim that the movie wasted my time. Though that is only if I believe that the kinds of things listed above are equally pointless. And I don't think they are.

So about the film. It's set in some sort of generic dystopic bit of American suburbia, and is (principally) about a lonely woman who is a video-artist (but all she really wants is to connect with someone); a recently-divorced (or separated) father-of-two shoe salesman with a sad face who tries to take care ofb his kids but ... ok, it's not so hard to guess, only wants to connect with someone, the kids, and some random people from the art world who the writer/director/lead actress wants to poke fun at (which is rendered somewhat redundant by the fact that while they're supposedly objects of fun because they are so pretentious and up-their-own-arses, in fact so is the film and allthe other characters in it). Of course, the two lead characters try and fail to conenct (this, of course, we didn't have to watch the movie to know) but maybe, just maybe, they do in the end (happy ending! yay!) but by that time I at least was so past caring thatI was just glad it was over.

Everything about the fim was contrived. Now I'm not someone who is averse to a bit of crafty filmic manipulation, but it needs to be done well. Instead, here was a film where every moment seemed to have been thought through by someone who was constantly saying to herself, 'this would make for a provocative moment on screen'. Unfortunately, it all seemed so premeditated that it fell totally flat.

A film on a scale as intimate as this one must, to 'work', evoke some feelings of either empathy, or recognition, or identification. I always remember the sheer exhilaration I felt when watching Krystof Kieslowski's 'A Short Film About Love', part of his Decalogue series. There's a moment in the film when the central character, a boy who has been spying on a woman who lives in his apartment complex, finally goes to her place on the pretext of delivering some milk, and asks her if she will have ice-cream with him. The next moment, the camera cuts to him, obviously totally elated, running through the grounds of the complex, dragging his milk cart, totally happy. It's totally exhilarating, and it works because although the character is quite ambivalent, you have come to care about him and his pathetic little obsession, and you want the woman to agree to go out with him. It'a quite hard to explain, but that little moment makes the film.

Cut to the Bollywood remake of the same film, the Manisha Koirala-starrer 'Ek Choti Si Love Story'. The equivalent moment is totally ruined, in that version, by being shot in candy-floss colours and punctuated with jaunty, peppy, cheesy background music that makes it seem totally fake. Trying too hard. The comparison of those two moments is a really good example of what differentiates a moment that seems somehow 'true' from one that manifestly does not.

Coming back to the film I was talking about, it suffered from trying to be way too cute. The characters were sort of vacant and unprepossessing (again, I don't believe that characters have to be likeable, but there has to be something about them that makes you care what happens to them). The situations seemed to have been thought up with an eye to either making them controversial, or somehow 'weird', but unfortunately, weirdness by itself is uninteresting, and frankly quite annoying.

Also, I think I have an ideological objection of the Hollywood-ish (and Bollywood-ish, for good measure) notion of the absolute necessity and primacy of romantic love, which this movie, for all it's supposed non-mainstream ethic, buys into fully. Somehow, you are supposed to believe that the emptiness of the life of the characters, which the movie does capture fairly well, can only be remedied by 'falling in love' or 'being in a relationship'. Why? Why not by reading something interesting, making a couple of good friends who you're not dying to have sex with but love hanging out with/talking to? This emphasis on the necessity of perennial coupledom is something that annoys me about contemporary culture in general, so it's unfair to blame this film for it; nonetheless, it does nothing to counter the idea. Wasted opportunity.

So in the end, you ended up with a film with the odd funny moment, but one that was too self-consciously 'indie' to ever let itself be honest. And that was its biggest failing. In its defence, it did manage to convey the detachedness of suburban life to some degree. But this has been done before, and better, and more entertainingly. In ostensibly eschewing the commercial gloss and gimmickry of other movies with similar themes (think American Beauty), this one just ends up being a caricature of independent movies of a certain type: good concept, a surfeit of self-conscious posing, and thus appallingly bad execution.

Why...Kyon?

2005-07-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

No, that isn't an anguished existential question. It's the title of a forthcoming film, as listed on the trusty site www.indiafm.com.

Once in a while, when I have nothing better to do (actually, much more when I have something both important and urgent to do), I amuse myself by looking through the list of new/soon-to-be-released/in-production Hindi films to find particularly impressive examples of Bollywood's trashiness/inventiveness, as seen in some of the titles below.

First, of course, there are the ones which have a one-word Hindi title followed by some words ni English. Sometimes, the English bit is an attempted translation of the Hindi word, with the uniquely Bollywood addition of an article, usually 'the', before it. To wit:
Modh-The Turning Point
Gumnaam - The Unknown
Dand - The Punishment
Vardi - The Uniform
Sauda - The Deal
This 'The' ranks up there with my other favourite bit of Hindi film English (okay, there are several: how about the fact that people are always referred to as 'Mr Karan' or 'Miss Pooja' but never by as 'Mr Singh' or 'Miss Ahuja'), which is the sentence 'It's A (.....) Production'. Yup, sure is.

Sometimes, the English bit adds an adjective or two, or somehow further qualifier, to the translation of the Hindi title, for example:

Jadh-The Root Cause
Bekaraar - Restless In Love
Anubhav - The First Experience
Chhal-The Game Of Death

Sometimes, the translation is, umm, less than grammatical (and we're not talknig about the ubiquitous and unnecessary 'the' here):

Fareibi - The Cheater

Some are just priceless and defy classifcation or any attempts to guess quite what those who picked the title were thinking:

Adaa-Will Kill You

(Did they mean that the (heroine's?) 'ada' would kill us? As in 'uski adaa ne mujhe maar daala'?

This one took me some time to figure out:

Dagaa - The Ditch

And this one is truly inexplicable:

Moonlight - Unfortunately Love Story

And then, there's always a couple that are obviously going to be really, really, really trashy:

Masoom Chudail

Or jingoistic:

Kashmir Hamara Hai

And some are just plain funny:

Shaadi Karke Phas Gaya Yaar
Why... Kyon?

All of these, incidentally, are from Indiafm.com, so I really haven't made any of these up. There were less Chudail ones than when I looked one time, about a year or two ago. Then, there was both a 'Qatil Chudail' and a 'Kunwari Chudail'. Wonder if they ever got released :-)

"Another fresh packed pie from our dearest neighboring country Bangladesh"

2005-07-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

This speaks for itself. More from Ramkamal Mukherjee, the king of bad film reviews.

Bangla Seller from Bangladesh

Ferdous Ahmed as "Suraj""Churiwala" (Bangla Seller) is another fresh packed pie from our dearest neighboring country Bangladesh. The film released only in the suburbs of Bengal.Khemka producers did not even bother to release the film for Kolkata People." This film is not for them" is the straight demarcation made by director Shah Alam. "Churiwala" is just another love story with foreign faces (if Bangladesh is admitted one in Indian locales.)

Suraj (Ferdous Ahmed a poor bangle seller sings melodious songs with his own flute to sell his products. The village bumpkin lives a happy go lucky life and pretends innocent with teen gals. Rupa (Madhumita) the pampered daughter of village feudal lord (Subhendu) falls in love with the Pied Piper of Bangladesh.

As Usual there is a status clash. Feudal lord screams the age-old dialogue- " Being my daughter how could you love a churiwala?" The occasional cry of Rupa, acts as a punctuation to all the ‘hard talk’ her father uttered about Suraj. (The director must have expected applauds from Urban Viewers, but the yawny faces expressed " what’s next")

Feudal lord cum daddy failed to resist the "Jawani Deewani" love affair of Rupa and Suraj. Aptly enters the "Gunda" character Rupa’s brother. He cleverly traps Suraj in a false murder case. Suraj is sentenced to death. (‘Kahani mein twist’)

While Suraj awaits death in condemned cell, his love Rupa knocks the door of reputed advocates. At last the director stored a Farishta advocate (Soumitra Chatterjee) for her. He takes up the ache to solve. The case is reopened and gradually the culprits are unmasked. Last Scene, close shot heroine rests on heros chest.- a typical "tomar bukey amar swarga" style.

Director Shah Alam (heard for the first time) did a very effortless job to give " churiwala" a standard look. Mainly the court scenes and sets are absolutely ridiculous. When will Indian Cinema show an actual court scene? Soumitra was very mechanical. Does the actor really need money so ‘badly’- if not, Then why ‘ churiwala’?

Handsome Ferdous gave normal performance but he needs to work a lot on his Bengali. New find Madhumita gives promising performance in her maiden appearance Her figure and facial expressions are good. Subhendu Chatterjee, Romen Roy Choudhury. Subhasis Mukherjee were all disappointing. Music had no impact.

‘Churiwala’ is a mediocre success in Urban and running successfully. But that doesn’t mean one must feel encouraged in making another "churiwala".
Ram Kamal Mukherjee
28.05.2001

Hysterical Madness

2005-07-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Film-fest season is upon us, and I'm missing it. While this sucks, the whole blogging phenomenon means that, thanks to posts like this one, I can be there in spirit if not in person.

Meanwhile, I recently rediscovered one of the unheralded gems of Indian film criticism online. For those of us who crib endlessly (as we should) about the stuff that passes for 'reviews' in Indian newspapers, you haven't seen anything until you've read Ramkamal Mukherjee, who reviews (mostly Bengali) films for a website called bengalonthenet.com. This man makes Nikhat Kazmi seem like a veritable fount of erudition. But he has provided me with endless hours of roll-on-the-floor type moments, so I may as well share some.

Here, for example, is an article he wrote on Madhabi Mukherjee, star of Ray's quiet masterpiece Mahanagar, and of Charulata, both showing at Cinefan. The laughs begin with the title. I mean, Beautitious Creeper??? WHAT? Then I realise this is his attempt at translating Charulata, which, I suppose, literally means beautiful creeper. But really. And it gets better and better.... His vocabulary is wonderfully inventive. So, something is filmatized (why not, why not?) Anyway, the full text is below..... I need to find his reviews of some mainstream Bengali crap and post them, they are truly works of art in ways the films he reviews can't quite aspire to.

Beautitious Creeper

Endless is the attempt of some strong minded lower middle class housewives who have to go in for office job to feed their family. Arati is one such office going bread earner who keeps her lipstick hiding in her ladies bag – to make herself presentable before the boss.

At the same she is hesitant about how her husband and in laws would react. This ‘very often come across’ feature was picturised by Madhabi Mukherjee in Satyajit Ray’s ‘Mahanagar’ (1963).

Satyajit Ray had hawk’s eye and a master like him could find a great possibility in Madhabi who was almost a dejected fortune seeker in the film world. Ritwik Kumar Ghatak another master mind deployed the famine sticken like figure and appearance of Madhabi in ‘Subarnarekha.’ The directors in the said two cinemas are undoubtedly genius, but preciousness and dimming glow of Madhabi’s figure and acting are not overshadowed by the great director’s craft.

Madhabi Mukherjee in 'Charulata'Ray decided to filmatize Tagore’s tragic romantic novel "Nasta Neer" in 1964 and he could not think of anybody else than Madhabi Mukherjee to appear on the screen as "Charu". "Charulata" as described by Rabindranath was a 19th Century lady whose husband Bhupati loved her but Charu was alone as Bhupati gave more time to his Printing Press.

Tagore wrote this novel as experiment on human character, loneliness, passion, rejection etc. Tagore’s "Charu" was perfectly visible in Satyajit’s selection Madhabi. Perhaps the director became passionate with the actress and presented her on some shots which she beautifully performed. Charu’s loneliness, her passion for boisterous Amal, deprivation of motherhood, women lib, were all very prominently visible through the acting of Madhabi.

Many may not have known Tagore’s "Charulata" in Nasta Neer, but thousands have known and bear in their minds Satyajits "Charulata" cast by Madhabi, for which Government of India conferred on her the "Urvashi" award.

Tagore’s another critical short story was picturised by Purnendu Patri who was originally an artist and whose artistic choice went for Madhabi to be the heroine in "Streer Patra" Tapan Sinha found a suitable character artist in Madhabi to picturise the character of an agonised aged mother in "Antardhan."

During 60’s immortal novelist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s short stories and novels were filmed in series. Different commercial directors like Gurudas Bagchi, Arobindo Mukherjee etc. marked Madhabi as "reserved for" the pinion character like Bindu (Bindur Chhele), "Biraj" (Biraj Bou), Narayani (Ramer Sumati). She was not a stereotyped character artist and exposed her versatility as hot romantic heroine in "Shankhabela", "Chadmabesi", where she paired with Uttam Kumar and Basanta.

Madhabi not only walked along with celluloid avenue, she also stepped on stage and for several nights she starred with Soumitra Chatterjee in symbolic non commercial drama "Fera", directed by the actor himself.

Madhabi thought of presenting her capacity as director of a film and she directs "Atmaja", produced by NFDC, where in Indrani Halder was in the lead. Madhabi proved her effort, but there is no hesitation to say that she could not properly channelize her skill in the sphere of direction and frankly speaking she failed to expose that she learnt something of direction from great directors like Ray, Ghatak, Patri, Sinha and Tarun Majumdar.

Ramkamal Mukherjee
21/11/2000

An Ode to the Underground

2005-07-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, as I surfed the internet to try and figure out which London Walk I should embark on later in the morning, a series of bombs ripped through the Underground (and one exploded on a bus). At least 50 people are now known to have died. Many more were hurt. As I walked home from the post office, I saw the first signs that something was wrong. People were streaming out of the tube station, some with soot on their faces, many of them in hysterical tears. I heard something about a blast, but the scale of the incident (with typical British understatement, the announcements referred to 'several incidents on the Underground')was not yet clear. In a few minutes, though, news began to filter through. A bomb had exploded two stops on the tube from where I was. Not just that, the line where two of the bombs had gone off were on the same line that I took into town every day. Many people I know work in Central London; several of them were likely to have been on one of the affected lines, if not trains, commuting in to work (Thankfully, as far as I know, nobody I know was injured. As far as I know). Never had something like this seemed so close, and so personal. I think this is partly because of my somewhat irrational fondness for the London Underground. In other cities, subways or trams or whatever are just a means to an end, a way to get from A to B with minimum inconvenience. Somehow the Tube has never seemed like that. London never quite feels like London until I've rushed out of the Covent Garden station, trying to outrun others on the way to the lifts up to the turnstiles, readying my travelcard for the inevitable (and ridiculous) rush to swipe and exit, ridiculous because it's actually quite absurd that the exit from such a major station should be so narrow. But that's part of the charm of a system that is so old that it has all sorts of features that the designers of a more modern system would veto.

Being a secret (okay, not-so-secret) public transport geek, there's very little in the world to compare with the intricacy and reach and sheer scale of the London Underground. Unlike other systems, this doesn't just run the length or breadth of the city. It spreads out like tentacles, going to pretty much every corner of a really big city (the track length is around 600km). I love that the lines have names evocative of the places they connect (the Bakerloo line originally connected Baker Street and Waterloo)instead of just being called by numbers or colours. I like the idiosyncratic announcements to 'Mind the Gap'. I love the variety of stations, from the Victorian tiling and panelling of many central stations on the Circle and Piccadilly Lines, to the minimalist glass-and-steel modernity of the newer Jubilee Line stations. My mental map of the city is not about buildings and bridges, though these do feature, but is really a condensed version of the Underground map. When someone gives me an address in London, I think not of how long it would take to drive there, but rather of the quickest way to get there on the underground, and how many changes it will involve, and whether the Circle Line is actually slower than the Central Line. I love emerging from the gloom of the truly underground stations of the Picadilly Line into the filtered light of the Circle Line. It's probably the one thing about London - more than any of the historic monuments or pubs or bridges - that is both a fascinating bit of history and yet completely a part of the fabric of daily life there.

Today's Guardian carries the perspective of someone who feels about London buses as i do about the underground. I really enjoyed reading it so here it is.

Yeh hai Dilli meri Jaan (with apologies to Rafi/Guru Dutt/Geeta Dutt etc. )

2005-06-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

My last post mentioned people not wanting to leave Delhi inspite of their non-stop bitching about it. I, actually, am not among them: I complain, but I don't bitch. Inspite of the godawful weather for much of the year (if you're here, or have checked the temperature - it's been hovering around 45C for some weeks now - you'll know why this is uppermost in my mind) there's no other place in the world quite like this.

I guess it has a lot to do with being from here: I actually revel in many things in many things people from gentler climes (literally as well as metaphorically) find unbearable. Consider the aggression (swearing, crazy drivers, thuggish autowalas). I actually prefer the Punjabi variant of in-your-face aggressiveness to the more passive-aggressive tenor of, say, Calcutta, another city I know and love. To me, Delhi's aggression is just a facet of something that I could call drive, or chutzpah, or ambition, or just plain hustle. Sometimes (okay, often) it's crude, but it gives the place an energy that is hard to come by elsewhere.

Since I'm on the topic, I may as well finally direct you to my favourite Delhi-based blogger

The Compulsive Confessor

who recently blogged about similar matters. I think she said it all rather well (as always, as always) when she wrote about how those of us who ostensibly come from different parts of the country but have grown up in saddi Dilli feel more at home here than the places we're supposedly linked to, by language or ethnicity. In my case, aforementioned link is in any case tenuous, since we have neither ancestral homes nor relatives in the old country, and my family are older Dilliwalas than most Punjabis by at least 30 years. I guess I go through these 'senti' phases where I feel like I need to defend this city, which for all its many flaws (and here, I must confess to feeling lucky not to be a single woman here) I am fond of, as one is of a somewhat difficult friend who has lots of little habits that annoy you, but with whom you go back a long, long way.

In the spirit of compulsive list-making, which most bloggers seem to suffer from, here are the things I love about Delhi, in no particular order.

1. Aandhis. Nowhere else I've lived in has them. Admittedly, they're much more infrequent now than they were when I was a kid, but I guess that makes them all the more special. The clean-up afterwards is a nightmare, but the sudden whirl of dust followed by rain, then the fall in temparature ... aaaaah. Not to mention the scent of wet earth.....

2. The non-summer part of the year. I love the monsoon here. It's probably not as impressive as other places (would love to be in Kerala for the monsoon someday) but it is wonderful, particularly coming as it does after a heat that is truly grotesque. I remember when we were kids, sometimes there'd be an unexpectedly heavy shower. Everyone would rush to the window, yelling 'it's raining! it's raining' leaving our poor class teacher to rant, ineffectually, 'Have you all never seen rain before'? But seriously, when the first monsoon rain happens, it does feel like one has never quite seen this before. Now that I'm thinking about school, I remember a lot else that's rain-related - the dash between classes, notebooks-as-umbrellas, wading through the puddles on the way home. And the smell of roasting bhutta. And this is only the monsoon. Winter's quite special in its own way. There's a certain point in the year - I wouldn't be able to say quite when - when the light suddenly mellows, and you know summer is over. Then the brief but glorious autumn, followed by the winter: razais, mellow afternoon sunshine, oranges on the terrace.

3. Chaat. Okay, I know you get chaat everywhere, but I can still like it best here, right? Besides, have never cared all that much for the Bombay or Cal variants. Give me good old Paapri over Bhel/Jhal Muri anyday.

4. Movies. At film festivals. I doubt anywhere else in India has the smorgasbord of foreign arthouse cinema on offer, and free at that, that Delhi does. Cinefan is probably the most fun that can be packed into ten days, and while I bemoan the absence of a regular arthouse cinema in this city, there's something special about the whole rushing-between-Habitat-and-FCC-and-IIC experience ('shall we watch the Moroccan film at Habitat at 6.30 or the Indonesian one at the FCC at 7? .. Ok, let's try the Moroccan and if it's crap we'll rush over to Augangzeb Road') is something else. Before there was Cinefan, of course, there were the various embassy-organised festivals. I think I've seen some of the best films I've ever seen at these things, and I totally love the hanging out in Habitat and catching up with people you only ever see at film festivals ('So, what is P doing now? Last Cinefan she was in publishing...') that is an integral part of the whole film festival thing.

5. Connaught Place. Nowhere quite like it. I mean, seriously. And while I suppose that Wengers isn't that great, really, but I miss it when I'm not here. And walking around the Inner Circle, people-watching. Watching it rain through the enormous plate-glass windows of Standard Restaurant above Regal. Browsing in Cottage Industries. (When we were little, the ultimate treat, for some reason, was to be taken, after a trip to the Cottage, to eat Russian Salad and drinking cold coffee at Bankura Cafe right outside it. It's not the same anymore (for one thing, the Cottage Industries has moved), but memories are always better than the real thing anyway.) Afternoons browsing the British Council Library. Haggling at Janpath.

6. Speaking of browsing, there are bigger and better-organised bookstores in the world, but the row of bookstores in Khan Market will always be special. Oh, and the Sunday book market in Daryaganj.

7. Food. At Karim's. 'Nuff said? I suppose chaat is food, but Karim's deserves its own little bullet point. Actually, the nehari, sheermal and mutton 'ishtew' all deserve bullet points of their own. As, of course, does Butter Chicken, at Pandara Road and elsewhere. It's bad for you, it's not in the least 'authentic', it's laden with fat ... but it's S O G O O D!

8. Monuments and stuff. I could go on forever, but I won't. I like the randomness of a city where a 13th-century mosque could lie around the corner from a block of flats. Or goats are tethered to the walls of a 15th-century stepwell, which abuts the busiest business district in town (anyone who guesses which one I'm referring to gets a pat on the back). I can think of nowhere else in the world, perhaps apart from Rome, where the past and the present coexist in the way that they do here.

9. The city's unique brand of hustle, exemplified by the eternal question: 'Aapko pata hai mera baap kaun hai?' Amazingly, I've heard this being used by someone trying to get into a fashion show at Fashion Week....

Clearly, some things never change.

You Know You're In Delhi When...

2005-06-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

1. 'Behenchod' is routinely used by people on the street, in every sentence, almost like a puncuation symbol.
2. Everybody honks at red lights. For the longest time, I used to think irritatedly to myself 'Can't you see it's red?', until I realised that what people were honking at was actually the light, as if the noise would make it turn green faster.
3. Autowalas won't even consider using their meters. When you suggest using the meter, they give you this look like you just landed from another planet, and proceed to ignore you.
4. Everybody thinks they're a VIP, or at least that pretending to be a VIP is going to make them get what they want. This manifests itself in the Dilliwala's most favoured line: 'Oy, tujhe pata hai mera baap kaun hai?'
5. People think a place that's 15 km away is 'pretty close by'.
6. You throw a stone, and you hit either a newly-built flyover, or one in the works.
7. Your hairdresser's called Sylvie, and (s)he has the strongest jaw and the deepest voice of any Sylvie you've met.
8. Straight men walk around town in tight, semi-transparent, embroidered white shirts
9. People complain that Italian restaurants do not serve Tandoori Chicken
10. Everybody bitches about how much they hate the city, but nobody seems to want to leave.

So once, on a Delhi road...

2005-06-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

I saw a sign. It was writ large across an expanse of concrete, such as I knew to be a flyover. However, the sign informed me that I was driving under what was, as such, an Upargami Setu. Not, as my autowala (considerably more sensibly than the namers-that-be, it would seem) would have it, a 'pul' (a pul, you see, is a bridge). As in the eternal autowala question in post-Shiela-aunty's flyover-building-spree Dilli, 'Bhaisaab, pul ke upar se ya neeche se'?

No, those in charge of translating the fairly pedestrian (sic) word flyover were not satisfied with something as prosaic as pul. After all, there were already 'bridges' over the river. That, perhaps, is what they were thinking. But whatever their train of thought, it led inexorably (at least I prefer to imagine a certain unshakable certitude about the process) to an Upargami Setu. Come to think of it, the term has a certain something about it. A grandeur. No, a hauteur.

Certainly, it seems to strive for upward mobility in a way that plain-ol' 'pul' could never do. And that is perhaps quite in tune with the mood of a city striving by the day to escape the dusty plain where it finds itself parked. What else, after all, is one to make of the mushrooming - in a place which, if one were to reverse-translate, is called 'Sugar Village' - of apartment blocks with names such as 'Beverly Place' or 'Richmond Square'? Or 'Hamilton Heights'? My favourite ad for one of these tony new escapes from relative chaos into pristine verdure (only barely, for one must negotiate quite a lot of classic desi chaos on the way to one's little piece of West LA) referred repeatedly, in tones of ever-increasing astonishment, to 'Floors from Italy! Kitchens from Germany!! Bathrooms from LA!!!' and so on. As my father put it somewhat pithily, pity the neighbours will still be from Lajpat Nagar Phase III.

So, what's in a name? Try this next time you're in an auto: 'Bhaisaab, Upargami setu ke neeche se left'. Meanwhile, I am off to negotiate the honking and the fumes, for some Evergreen ka chaat. On the way, I will pass under some U.Setus, and drive over some of them. I'll ignore the kids begging at the lights; consider buying a gajra from one of them; wonder where the lady who sold agarbattis at the Sheikh Sarai flyover has disappeared, and so on and so forth. More tales of the city will follow: tales of this and other cities. Lots of pointless discussion of my pet peeves, rants about the latest media report to get my goat, and possibly lots of other random things I feel the need to vent about. In the meanwhile, the bus conductors continue to yell out their chant of 'South Aaax, Safdarjang, Maaadical!'. Welcome aboard.