amrita shergill.

The lady with gumption.

                Kate Winslet strikes hard in Revolutionary Road. Her Oscar win as lead actress in BBC film production directed by her husband Sam Mendes seems vindicated. The ironical depth of the film's title itself stands for the essense of the movie's storyline."Revolutionary road", has a deeper truth in it beyond being the name of the street on which the Wheeler family (Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet and their two children) try hard to live out the happy middle class life; it symbolises the revolutionary path that they never took. 

The story revolves around a close knit weave of details of a series of subtleties of family life and seemingly minor issues that in reality bore into our lives and before we know it, leave us as mere empty shells, mere pretences. With its intense script and dialogues that edge on the idealistic , the film takes us into it slowly and in steps.It takes refuge in the small thoughts in an average person's head and elevates it to its rightfully deserving contemplation, through the medium of Mrs. Wheeler,who is the crux of the film.

                 The small thoughts, the little ideas in your head ; that make you day dream , give you the escape door to fantasy land, are an indispensible dosage require to live. I dream of going to Paris . Yes , it is a cliche, a whimsical fantasy , image driven and very eluding. the thing that incurs sniggers from your fellow mates. Nevertheless , my thoughts are my own.

So when the Wheelers decide one fine day, (actually it is Mrs. Wheeler who decides) to move to Paris in the hope of 'living' again as the 'special' couple they had always considered themselves to be, I couldnt help but feel like getting into the tv screen and hugging her! She is the strong woman, the one who values every thought in her head, the one who believes that one must be able to do what one always wanted to do. She wants to do things, get things happening, and cant stand wasting away into a mechanical existence. I like her !

                   In front of her, Mr. Wheeler seems faded, jaded, a person who is trying too hard at the wrong things and has lost himself in the process. He is the cliched and rubbed over concept of the middle aged family man who has taught himself to think that his teenage ambitions were mere fantasies.In one of their numerous high voltage arguments she says " You need guts to live the way you want to live and you dont have it!" , which  more or less rounds him up.

                   The most intense anti-climax is the morning after their most distrubing fight. Kate winslet stuns with her acting, and Mrs. Wheeler stuns her viewers by appearing in the kitchen smiling and dressed tip -toe like the ideal  housewife and asks her husband "Good morning! would you like scrambled eggs or fries eggs for breakfast?" It is the most tense and yet visualy the most calm sequence of the film with the apparently happy Wheeler couple having their daily breakfast together. She seems so old and wisened while he still seems satisfied to enjoy this make believe pretence of happiness. it is an unmatched pair of great zeal  and timid acceptance.

                  What entails is, of course again, another cruel irony .You could watch for yourself.

Though she lives in the wrong time for herself, perhaps the time needs people like her to get some gumption back into living.

The kabootar khana

The kabootar khaana buzzes

At the junction with

Pigeons willfully

Caging themselves in

The hope of being fed.

In hope of being

Revered

As the plump businessman’s

Ticket to salvation.

To vindicate his salivation.

A thirsty tongue

Lapping up gold and diamonds

And stubby fingers

Caressing pigeon feed.

 

The railings of the the khaana,

Once a rusty red,

Now gleam white in pigeon poop.

 

(Ambassadors of peace ,

Who decided on the poor pigeons?

Now they fly on roof tops

Of the Taj Hotel with black soot

Choking their nostrils,

Blackening their glistening green-blue manes

Now they must wear ear plugs

If they have to nestle on the top

Along with gunshots and grenade shrapnel.)

 

The air smells of damp feathers ,

Grey stench and the smell of stained peace.

 

(Masakalli , sits on the terrace parapet

The white pigeon has its wings clipped.

Vain in white, it sits in Chandni Chowk

Far from black soot, gunshots and freedom)

 

It is a free cage

Just like the maikhaana.

Where he comes,

To cage himself

And relish the anticipation

Of  unchained freedom.

 

Did you see that?

Right there,

The street urchin crosses the street,

With a handful of stolen grains

And takes flight with

The well fed birds.

What went wrong with Delhi 6?

Delhi 6, entered , with hopes, promises of delight and of course, Masakalli and her white freshness perched on top of Bittoo’s head. Something got lost , however, while R.K.Mehra tried materializing metaphors. From being a “Burger-chaap” centric plot ,
It has took a wrong detour to becoming a Monkey Chaap danth manjan that’s a little too ruddy to chew.
The black monkey, we understand , has been conceived as the dark, wild, animal within each of us who acts on no rhyme or reason. Yes , we understand that personifications, metaphors, messages must drive the movie , but , in Delhi 6 , theres been either an oversimplification of things or a ridiculity of taking some aspects over seriously that leads to a shoddy climax.
When the victimized Monkey man is shot in the end, and in deep agony Bittoo lets out a scream , whats more heartbreaking, is to hear the audience laugh out in amusement at the melodrama unfolding in jerks before them, in , what was supposed to be a new age contemporary urban edged film.
The rustic theme, the fresh sounds , the feel good start, are mired by jerky transitions, an over dosage of ‘ yeh hai India’ sequences.
It all seems to take confused montages into an even more 90’s style climaxes where all the cast is crammed into the frame , and all the loops(if any) are tied up one by one, in sequence, like the abrupt closing of various files. And the audience is left in the seat after ‘the end’ trying to digest, ‘What? That’s it? And was that heaven by any chance? Give me a break!’
The song though never fails to give you a good morning smile!
Ay Masakalli masakalli, tu matakali matakali…

Measurement of time , units of life

The new year buzz just zoomed past the last corner. Two days are up already. What has changed? 2008 + 0001 = 2009 . so in all the four-lined notebooks of school children , the excitement of writing a 09 in the date on the top left hand margin , instead of 08 , is about as far as it goes for the kids. Well, when in school all I remember was that I felt like something significant had happened somewhere somehow , but never could reckon what exactly , except for the change of the dates and exams coming nearer.

I wonder how orphaned or unaccounted for , we all would feel if this unit of measuring our life with time was absent altogether, which trickles down to the very absence of the basic ticking of seconds, milleseconds,nanoseconds….

May be we would all feel so lumpy and massive in our existence like a huge porridge sploch, formless and misshapen as opposed to this lean, sorted out , categorized and sequential noodle living that we have today.

To add a year to your life may mean a lot more to the middle aged adult population of the world.(its too trivial to notice when we are in school or college, when our homeworks , tests and our classroom crush seem like the ultimate driving force of life!)

So imagine the several thousand billions of the aging adult population all over the globe adding up an extra unit of worry , expectations , schedules and responsibilities along with the new year.  What you get is an additional indissoluble , emotionally loaded layer right above the skin of the last year, and the one before that. Quite a suffocating global scenario isn’t it? Like global warming was not enough, I’m guessing we wouldn’t want a global aging phenomenon…

Years seem to be good measuring tapes. These timelines that help us look at our life graphically and make us aware of the full impact of our living till date..we may end up with loads of junk , each with its own sentimental attachments, but junk it all is.

I saw ghajini this week, and its original, memento(a 2001 Hollywood flick) last week. Psychologically thrilling as they were, the very nature of the amnesia, the 15 minute short term memory loss leaves me quite stunned. It is such a modular existence, where 15 minutes are relived from the same start point of nought and with the same ending of nought but what fills them up is what he has lived. The irony being that it will be measured only by people around him. While he still conceives his living at point zero. The very thought leads to quite chilling and unnerving tangents.   

 

So we continue to measure more of time with our tapes and keep changing dates on our diaries. Waiting for one moment when time will freeze and all we know that we live solely by the sound of our heartbeats.

 

2009.. come on in.. 

The ridiculous and the sublime?

There is this phrase that goes, referring to certain situations,- the ridiculous and the sublime ; hinting at what’s mundane in any bourgeois life and what actually passes by as another moment in an ocean of momentous actions . However , it is only in retrospect, that we generally frame and glorify , mystify and demystify the moment or event. In retrospect, everything plays with a delay, of lets say for expression sake,  5 seconds. Every act plays out like a scene and those who can see well , amuse themselves of the frivolity that passes them by. Like many wise men say, one has to laugh it all away. Like Chaplin did with his stark satire, like the quadriplegic Ramon in the movie ‘The sea inside’ has learnt to cry by smiling. Even the gravest moment can, in fact, be turned upside down to seem like the most absurd and ironical comical situation. That is the wonderful machine the human mind has made itself to be. The mix and match of the ridiculous and the sublime create a delicious mocktail for us to savour.

For instance , the movie ‘Little miss sunshine’ and ‘Jerry Maguire’ are full of such satires of bourgeois life. Little miss sunshine evolves around a mediocre middle class Albuquerque based American family with an apparently assertive father who always counsels about winners and leaders. Then there comes the moment when the little one of the house is short listed for a beauty pageant , he makes the painful decision of agreeing to it against his personal disinclination. Their journey takes its bizarre turns and twists of idiosyncrasies and black humour; what with a drug abusive grandfather, a gay suicidal uncle , a teenage rebel who has stopped talking for good, and the father with an obsessive compulsive winner’s disorder along with their defunct lime coloured van which needs to be pushed around all the way.

Whether it is the girl dedicating her stripper ‘s dance number on stage to her granddad who is in the trunk of their car (dead);or whether it is the moment when the son walks out in the middle of their journey and only comes back after a little hug from his sister, the movie has brilliant moments of sublimity suspended unseemingly into the middle class routine.

Jerry Maguire with its popular hero, Tom Cruise plays on a more Hollywoodish note , with a corporate set up but nevertheless weighs down with similar ridiculities not to ignore the faithful golden fish flipper who remains faithful till the end.

While , in this case, the situations play out on a guilt-free platter for the ordinary viewer to sit back , watch and laugh, in the former case the viewer feels a tad guilty beforehe can laugh at any of the situations because he knows very well, how the situation may feel in all its actualities.

There is a scene in the recent Bollywood flick ‘Fashion’ , where a cocaine addict super-model Shonali (played by Kangana Ranaut ) is hit in the face by her abusive boyfriend. All that she retaliates with, in that moment of frustration , is that, she has a show the next day! So simplified has today’s urban working logic become that such ridiculous moments also have gained a certain credibility to an extent that the ordinary spectator can be easily gullible to them.

In a way ,  I believe , it is a good exercise, now and then , to look at the world upside down, and know what colour and what brand of ‘andar’ wear does the world wear.

 

But then of course, who would want to risk their social image? So we keep sublimating the ridiculous and ridiculing the sublime and the show goes on.

we stand strong

defiant and undeterred.

'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind'

                                                                          -Bapuji