the books I was gifted in my last birthday (all of which were subsequently read, and hence the post!),

Victor’s attempt to dissuade me from my attempts at explaining my email id to a shopgirl who had wondered about it aloud,

reviews of Billu Barber and Chandni Chauk to China,

the cool ruby script I wrote to make gchat-like conversations from all the smses in my phone,

the bug I discovered in ubuntu-gnome with multiple mice (mouses sounds better, and the bug is probably a feature anyway! :))

- the list goes on.

All that will await the completion of my ongoing exams, however, and here are a couple of pictures from Holi this year.

Putting Ghajini into a genre

Ghajini is not Memento. Ghajini is the boy-meets-girl (and falls in love) story followed by boy-avenges-girl’s death rant. The non-linear unfolding of the narrative is superfluous because there is no surprise in the story and because it doesn’t serve any purpose except for tightening the pace. It’s a different movie altogether, with a different focus and a different niche, and it is entirely unnecessary to keep Memento in mind when thinking of it.

Ghajini is not Bollywood either. It has been reworked to Mumbai, but the screenplay wouldn’t have made much sense without its Southie (I think it’s called Kollywood!) motifs. For example, Asin plays the typical innocent bubbly girl with attractive simplicity (real life bimbo made larger than life on screen!). Obviously this is a character done to death in Bollywood, but they do it with a different kind of sensibility in South which you can see in this movie. The Goody Two-Shoes-ness of Asin might thus be a little jarring to the rest of India, but I am sure they will enjoy the bit where Aamir Khan subconsciously learns to drink tea in a pedestrian manner from her.

Ghajini is Kollywood in Bollywood clothes with the addition of Aamir Khan. It’s almost a scene by scene remake of the original except for a better paced and politically correct (or may be I should say cinematically correct!) ending.

Digression to South

There is a remake of Bommarillu (Genelia plays another Miss Goody Two-Shoes Bimbo) in pipeline, and I’ll quit writing on this blog if the hero doesn’t pick up some pedestrian mannerisms from her in the course of the movie. The original in fact contains this very pedestrian way of drinking tea as depicted in Ghajini.

I am being a little harsh. This transference of pedestrian habits symbolises the hero loosening his tie and all that sort of thing, I know. My problem is, I want somebody to invent a different narrative technique to convey hair being let loose. I am tired of the same old shit being peddled around with upbeat music and sweeping camera movements. Audrey Hepburn blowing her nose into Peck’s handkerchief was funny fifty years back in Roman Holiday, but I am sorry if I don’t enjoy seeing it now after so many rehashes of it in just about every other average chick flick.

I want to see some imagination. Something inventive like Saawariya or Amelie. Content can wait. I want to see something inventive or just pretty.

Now back to Ghajini!

Ghajini is a formula movie in two parts. The formula is simple, but broken into non-linear (in time) pieces to interweave the two parts (which differ greatly in mood) in order to make the transition smooth. In fact, because the transitional difficulties have been dealt with by screenplay, it has allowed the director to exaggerate and contrast the moods of those two parts.

Romance and Revenge.

In the part of Romance, the boy falls in love with a girl who is faking to be his girl friend. It has been done with nice low key humour and perfectly romantic ambience. Something you can take your girl friend to!

And then the girl dies and in the Revenge part he goes on around trying to avenge her murder. The original stylised looks of action sequences have been retained. I have been thinking how they were done, and my guess is that they shot them with the usual jumpiness and jarrings and then smoothed the image progressions.

The Music

While the music is disappointing, the background score is actually good (particularly in emotional/ contemplative scenes). Guzarish had a great potential, but the music director seems to have run out of material and instead of sitting on the simple piano bar (which is what this song really is. it’s a very pretty piano bar stretched to fit some average piece of lyrics.) till it grew to be a decent song, he has attempted to make a song out of it! It reminds of his last movie, “Yuvraaj,” about which I have written elsewhere.

But I don’t blame him for making such a mess out of Tu Hi Meri Dost Hai (of Yuvraaj). Gulzar is solely responsible for that, because I can see that the original music Rehman must have had in his mind was twisted and contorted to fit Gulzar’s crappy pretentious lyrics. That movie is full of some of the worst lyrics ever written.

Moving on, Kaise Mujhe Tum Mil Gayi is a well crafted and well placed song. The high notes of the song might have been unsuitable to the occasion, but Aamir Khan’s portrayal of the emotion is striking and the song and the visuals together capture the mood very well and mark one of the high points of the movie. In fact, without the song and without Aamir Khan, I think the sequence would have been overtaken by its clichéd overdose of mush.

Aamir Khan and Asin

Needless to say, the movie rests on the shoulders of Aamir Khan, and he has some shoulders! I can’t stop gushing about his looks in the movie. For one thing, he has eight packs. But what I like best is the fact that he looks so cute in the songs in spite of all the beef. He looks incredibly cute in the songs, and I can’t help thinking how handsome he is.

And of course he has acted very well. In the romance part, he plays it with a lot of sensitivity which makes it plausible and convincing. But he plays the revenge part with subtle exaggeration which will capture the attention of every action buff. He plays the revenge part with murderous and blind rage. Blind rage overshadows the hatred that is supposed to drive him.

Which is how it should have been, now that I think about it. There is nothing that he can pin his hatred and frustration on. Without memory, there is no focus to his hatred. So it manifests itself as uncontrollable rage as he goes on around avenging the murder of the love his life. And I love the way Aamir Khan does it. It looks spectacular.

Asin turns out to be a decorative piece and bubbles and simpers (yes, she simpers. she tries to giggle but ends up simpering.) on the screen competently but with mediocrity. She doesn’t have a good figure (as yet?!) and is probably a little too fat for Bollywood! She doesn’t have hangups though, and may be she can act.

I must digress here to mention Rani Mukherjee’s character in Chori Chori. It was not a particularly remarkable movie, and I think it didn’t even get a theatrical release because of delays, but it features what I like to call a piece of vintage Rani Mukherjee! She plays an orphan who pretends to be the fiancée of a man in love with another woman and plays her part with incredible nonchalance and helplessness and sweetness. I love her in that movie.

Unique Selling Points

It’s a short movie, well paced and well acted.
Decent depiction of romance and action sequences. Southie style, but still decent.
Aamir Khan.

That makes it three stars out of five!

The Godfather (An obvious digression!)

Before the sun sets on a lonely Aamir Khan on a lonely bench, we see that he sees Asin next to him as he unwraps the gift. This scene has a point. It is expected to magnify and drive home his poignancy and his sense of loss by depicting what life could have been without the bitter unnecessary tragedies. They usually end movies about such dramatic loss with scenes with brief and imaginary happy union, but here it was more useful because it was necessary to show that in spite of his loss of memory, he is acutely aware of what he has lost in life.

It reminded me of the last scene of God Father 3. Every God Father movie ended with a brief scene which somehow managed to capture the essence of what was going on, but it was only after the last scene of God Father 3 was over that I understood and felt the bitterness of Michael’s loss of every woman that he had ever loved. That loss was what had underlined his entire life. Ignoring the thriller plots, the first movie is about his transition, the second about confirmation and the third one about resignation. The point is, the resignation doesn’t come till the very end. He had been working towards that resignation all his life, and it is accentuated in the difference between the way his father died and the way he himself died.

He never got a chance to be happy with the women he had loved (the two wives and the daughter). And the last scene was indeed about what it could have been instead of the last dramatic loss, but they choose to show another man who had not known the pain of losing at his happiest hour.

This is well past midnight and I have started blabbering. I just feel very sad for him when he dies alone in a dusty corner on a dusty chair silently and I realise that he had lost all the women he had ever loved.

Happy birthday to me! :)

That is how I see myself now. I am at the brink of losing my oldest friend. Even if he survives this, the severe strain our friendship has suffered will resolve itself to some terrible conclusion over time, and I can find happiness for the time being only in my incapacity to see ahead into the bleak future.

We can barely look at each other now in the guilty knowledge of what we have done together, and yet, that fateful evening began in the most promising manner.

I imagine people do some particular thing they get fixated on to find solace when they feel lovesick. I eat pizzas. I had just ordered my pizzas when Rainbow called me up to announce his arrival in town. So I packed up my order and went to his house. His folks were away, and we agreed that a late night movie date would not be out of order.

We caught up with our lives over the pizzas and salads, and he proposed me for marriage. Again! To be turned down. Again! He knows I am seeing someone now, and we talked a bit about that too. The pizzas duly finished, we dusted his museum-piece of a scooter and took it for a ride, yelling songs into the night and the cold breeze. Eventually we set out for a movie armed with junk foods to round the night up with.

We went to see Yuvvraaj. I did ask him if we couldn’t go see something else, but he said he wanted to see Yuvvraaj. I was also interested in the movie because from the promos it looked like Anil Kapoor had turned in an over the top performance and I wanted to watch it, and we went in together.

I don’t remember what happened in the following two hours very clearly. My doctor tells me that it’ll be a while before the trauma subsides and I can start to remember the events after I went into shock, and he clarifies that the complete memories of the night might never come back.

But I do remember a few distorted and blurred images of what had transpired before I lost my consciousness to the criminal attacks made on my senses by the movie. I remember people rushing in to lift me from the floor and I remember the long journey from there to the ambulance. I also remember the bright red bulb on the door of the operation theatre, and I have some recollection of the time in ICU afterwards. I don’t remember anything from the movie though, and my report asserts in no uncertain terms that the merest encounter with anything from that movie in the rest of my life time might drive me a raving lunatic.

But above all I remember that one glance Rainbow and I exchanged before we slumped unconscious into our respective seats. No matter how we are going to pretend to each other, we knew that we had reached the point where we couldn’t turn our back on the tragedy of having watched Yuvvraaj together and pretend as if everything was the same as ever.

I guess all good things come to an end. Rainbow has been my oldest friend through thick and thin, through rain and sun, through dangling genitalia to spotted underwears. As I write this now, he is still common-senseless in the hospital. It has often been observed that he didn’t have a lot of common sense to start with, but the movie Yuvvraaj introduces new depths to the meaning of imbecility. Rainbow’s brain damage might be irreversible.

So dear blog readers, pray for my friend’s soul, if not for his life. And as I have often said, the night is the darkest just before the electricity goes out.

—

Note: Unedited. Pestered with exams and no time to edit! Written over a seminar on Quantum Cryptography of which I did not understand one bit (I arrived half an hour late and spent the next one scribbling this one :)). But the one on Boolean Functions was interesting, if you really insist on being told!

When we were buying books for the Library in Chennai, I had looked around for a cheap edition of Lolita. We bought one for the library, of course, but I had wanted one for myself, but there were no cheap Indian editions.

Today waiting for someone, I decided to browse a book store I frequent, a book store now which I like more because it was a very small part of the only lunch date I have ever been to, and there I spotted an edition of Lolita by Penguin. Don’t imagine the ones with glossy covers. This one has the classical green and white Penguin cover and cheap brownish paper inside. But it’s worth it. The typeface is good with sharp contrast between the text and background paper and is something I would not mind looking often at.

Only yesterday I had to borrow two short phrases from the book and had wished I could sink into the first few pages of it. Today I have the book, but the mood is not there! This is what having a girl friend does to you. It replaces your lousy loser of a world full of all sorts of abstract crap with real life experiences so that you don’t have to turn to books to feel that you are alive!

There are some books that you want to read for their sheer beauty, and Lolita is one of them. As you move into the book, you find the language is slightly dated (my next complete reading will be from an annotated edition), but the beauty holds on to you even though you don’t understand the word. And the book gives expressions to some of the things I have always wanted to articulate.

I remember taking refuge in Lolita twice before. When I read the first few pages of Bridges of Madison County (and then put it down. It doesn’t deserve to be called a book in the sense of a work of fiction. I could have written it when I was a teenager and didn’t know how to portray intimacy between two people. Though you could say I still don’t know it! :)), I felt so awful when the nameless woman tells the hero that there is something mysterious about him that she can’t seem to grasp, that I had to read two other books to get over the nausea of having read such a thing.

I read Lolita and An Equal Music. From Lolita I read the account of Humber Humbert’s loneliness and his perversion. From “An Equal Music” I read the depressing account of Michael waking up into her student’s pink room.

I don’t share his sickness of pink, but then I am not a middle aged depressed musician who can’t get over the love he pushed away with his own hands. My room is all pink, though probably my mom is to be blamed for that.

Anyway. Books are sometimes important that way. For years I had been looking for a substitute for the expression functionally incapable. I had to come up with that almost five years back when I had to speak in English for the first time to explain my agnostic stand against God! I kept looking for a better expression, and last year I found it in two books within the same week! I read The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and Kundera’s Laughable Loves back to back, and both the books had the expression constitutionally incapable. :)

Exams are on and they keep me busy these days. Among other things, I took a different route to the park for the evening walk and came right across a marble (or at least stone that looks like marble derivative) statue of a naked woman with thoughtful welcoming gestures which highlights her firm round breasts and erect nipples! And this one is supposedly a family park! How hypocritical are we as a society?!

I like my life at this point of time. Exams I don’t have to worry about. Decent food that I like to eat. Time to work on things I like. Books all around and discovering some new music. Movies every once in a while when I make the effort. A girl friend who won’t let me pay the bills! What else could I ask for?! :D

I don’t really like the tropical green in general, and indeed I was thinking how ugly all the bushes next to the road side looked, when suddenly a miniature version of the Great Wall of China came interrupting the wild growth. It turned out that the institute is going to be inside the infamous reserve famous for its wild, renegade and usually angry horde of stampeding elephants who frequent the nearby villages and have unwittingly claimed human lives before (hence the walls to stop them). This means even though I might one day fall in love with The Pretty Girl and might want to walk under the moonlight in misty nights with my arm on her waist (with a passionate kiss or two in the offing), an elephant’s bone might prove to be too big a haddi in the Kebab to be overcome.

When we arrived, I was surprised when I noticed that I could hear the birds chirp and flutter.

The Director showed us the construction plans, and The Pretty Girl (she has got dimples) asked him if the academic block was modelled after the first letter of his name (the chic of it!). With a polite laugh, he then went on to explain, “No. You see, these are two spirals, and this end of this spiral here …”

As The Pretty Girl once told me, she is allowed to do everything, but her mom once asked her not to do anything that she would ever have to regret. That probably includes boyfriends, because she feels immensely guilty every time she gets close to a guy! This time, she got somewhat close to The Moustache Guy (when he had his moustache) and then felt terribly guilty about it and suddenly stopped talking to him. On the Rakhi Day, she came with a Rakhi and insisted that The Moustache Guy accept it! Through some curious twistings of words and manners and unintelligible gurgles, The Moustache Guy accepted the Rakhi with the declaration that he is accepting it only to pass it on to me!

I pointed out to him that things were probably over between them anyway. He is cool about the whole deal, because nothing much had happened to start with, but I guess they are not going to be seen together in the library for long hours now. :(

There is a small pond inside, scantily filled with dirty water, but I assume that it’ll be put in shape once we move in, given the amount of fuss people make about co and extra curricular activities. Even though there is a lot of room to be spared in the campus, playing cricket doesn’t seem to be an option. After I expressed my scepticism over the chances of locating a ball after I have hit it, the air was thick with all sorts of poor jokes about the ball coming back on the trunk of an elephant (and similar boring variations).

Some were disappointed given the isolation and the seemingly dull environment, but I felt serenely elevated. The mountain lines could be seen in the distance, and the whole place looks likes a tame opening to an overwhelming wilderness. Wide green fields were to be seen past the ugly bushes next to the road, and their stretch undid the damage their shade of green might have done to their beauty. I hope the construction gets delayed, so that I get to stay there for a few months or so, so that I would have moved out and gone on long before they all lost their charm to familiarity.

To be honest, I don’t think I would mind a brush or two with the infamous elephants. May be I’ll rescue The Pretty Girl from them when she ventures out one day into the Forbidden Forests, rendered reckless with the recurring restlessness of her routine (she is that type), when there is no one to save her but I. And then after I have rescued her, in the unnerving exhilaration of her escape, she might even kiss me in a heedless abandonment of grace. It’ll take some work to draw the girl out of the prude, but thankfully it is not going to be my task. Good luck to The Moustache Guy. :)

And then there was the sysadmin who cracks excellent poor jokes, but they are not probably his own.

So the rabbit and the tortoise (of that famous race where the rabbit lost thanks to his overconfidence) decide to study mathematics. They appear in the entrance, and they score the same. But the tortoise is finally selected over the rabbit. Why?

The answer – sports quota. He cracked this when we were discussing about the reservation issue after someone inquired after the reservation policy of the institute!

Talk about not having a life!

I was depressed. The night before, I had watched this funky little movie called My Sassy Girl, which, too exaggerated to be interpreted even literally (it’s a bad old habit of mine, interpreting movies metaphorically, which once led me to state, to the great disapproval of my friends, that Gangster, King Kong and Silence of the Lambs shared the same thematic attraction dressed up differently), made me contemplative about my life nonetheless, and any time I think about my life, I get depressed.

The conversation on the dinner table seemed by and large redundant, and we drifted from topic to topic. Personally, I was left shocked by my recent encounter with the kaamwali bai (the maid servant, who in my frank opinion is too old to be a maid), who seemed to be after my clothes with such enthusiasm that Arun once remarked that she wanted me to strip!

There lies the crux of the matter. My clothes! On my third day in here, I agreed to pay her to wash my clothes. When I informed Anshul about it to confirm that the bai was employed by everyone else too, he gave me an enigmatic smile and nodded his head. I felt uneasy, but I forgot all about it until the bai cornered me three days afterwards.

I am not a man given to violence by temperament, and till the bai pounced on me on the matter of the clothes I was wearing, I had no idea what the usual jokes about women trying to change men meant. She demanded why I had not taken bath (actually I had), why I was wearing the same set of clothes for the last five days (actually it was six days), why I had not given her any clothes at all to be washed, and how did I propose to remain a social proposition with so many bad habits.

Impatiently, I clarified on the only point I thought was relevant, that our arrangement was monthly, that I would pay her whether she washed any of my clothes or not.

Whoever wanted men to learn from experience was a short-sighted fool, because, you see, experience is the worst possible teacher, in that it gives the tests first and the lessons afterwards. I had failed my test, and I do not care to elaborate on the aftermath.

Anyway, the whole encounter led me to remark on the dinner table that romantics aside, the bai was quite like our heroine from My Sassy Girl. Upon this, I was threatened to take my remark back, and I tried to play the suave guy by clarifying that I was merely thinking of intimidating women. But the public, ignoring my quips, assured me that I was going to have to pay dearly for my misplaced remarks.

Such is life!

I got really pissed off in the mathematics camp I was attending (I would have written about that, but the place was ten kilometres away from civilisation in every direction and a computer with a decent internet connection was hard to find). I sent an SOS to Anshul, who said that I could finally come over and start my internship. I made a last minute booking and got on the first train available (it wasn’t actually available, but I got on it anyway, praying for a conformation).

My name was the last item in the final chart, thanks to the newly introduced AC coaches. They have beautiful wood panelling, thoughtfully provided reading lights for those who can’t sleep at night, and most importantly, three (as opposed to the conventional two) berths next to the corridor.

Being the incorrigible romantic that I am, I have always wished to be pleasantly surprised to find some pretty girl next to me. My journeys have always been so long, and it is a tough task to spend them by listening to the polite and content-less chatter of strangers. I am not very partial to talking myself, particularly in a group or to strangers, which are exactly what you get inside a train. So I have always wished for something to see rather than something to listen to. Besides, I have not yet grown out of liking pretty girls.

Anyway, what could be more romantic than being seated next to a girl, face to face, next to one of those corridor windows now skilfully designed to be crowded enough so that the people occupying the opposite seats can not help but feel like being on each other’s face. As the TTI was finally leading me to my finalised berth, I wondered if I was going to be placed next to that nice girl at the lonely end of the coach next to a corridor window. That was as much as I could wonder about before I had to say hello as she moved to make room for me.

She was nice, polite, non defensive and pretty. She looked like she had spent the day all by herself, lonely and bored. I liked her, but I was feeling pissed off at my prof at the mathematics camp and though I would have liked talking to her, because I haven’t grown out of feeling like talking to pretty girls either, I wasn’t sure if I could handle it with good humour if she threw something incredibly stupid at me. Pretty or not, I don’t like to be not nice to people, because that spares me getting involved with them. I shouldn’t have minded that, except that I hate people.

So we stayed awake deep into the night trying to completely ignore each other in spite of the close confinement, at which I think we succeeded admirably. The atmosphere was charged with the typical contrast between sexual tension (of the naive kind) and its social denunciation, and as Agatha Christie described in one of her better novels, atmospheres exactly like these provide with excellent opportunities for murder. But the prof at the mathematics camp was a long distance away, and it was hard to find another candidate for murder at such a sort notice.

One of my usual policies is to ignore the usual hints and subtleties which people engage in their hypocritical politeness. I do not read between the lines, and it has almost always spared me the necessity of meaningful interaction with human beings. That probably sounds awfully self congratulatory to the point of pretentiousness, but I am dead tired of meaningful conversations and relationships. I am tired of human beings. Sometimes I think Darwin was wrong. I can not conceive of a way in which I could have evolved from men.

Coming back to that night, well, I went on reading my book and resisting her indirect hints that I might want to go to sleep (I had the upper berth). In the end she had to just ask me right out. I slept on for the next 16 hours. I sleep an awful lot when I travel by trains (I also don’t take any solid food) to avoid having to talk to fellow passengers. My usual strategy is – read through the night, sleep through the day.

The next evening, I got down at Dadar and after a short encounter with a paaji who wanted to rob me with thrice the usual taxi fare, I hired another taxi and went to Anshul’s place. Tired and messed up as I was, Anshul took me right away to a pub where most of us got dunk while I politely tried to look the part with a couple of Breezers for sometime, eventually falling back to good old Sprite. As night moved on, we danced (if you know me, you know that I didn’t dance), ate, drank, watched some uninteresting eurocup match, and in general sang at the top of our voices (if you know me, you know that I sang like a madman). Well, I didn’t sing like a madman, because I was nervous, but I tore my lungs apart nonetheless. The DJ played a lot of the usual classics towards the end, muting in between in order to let us fill up the smallish room with our songs of buoyant drunken uplift, where we all briefly thought we understood what the artist had wanted his music to meant.

Afterwards, it was a bit of a struggle and a bit of a fun to find auto-rickshaws in the incessant rain of Mumbai at two in the night and get drenched in spite of it all. It was my first rain this summer and I wanted to get wet, except that I had only one underwear left dry.

Then I slept.

Obviously I didn’t expect much from the movie, but it managed to surprise me. In spite of being devoid of any artistic merits, it offended my aesthetics. The movie can be seen as a forerunner to a whole generation of comedy bums that Bollywood is producing now.

The movie is a blatant screen adaptation of O Henry’s One Thousand Dollars (Sau Crore means One Thousand Million), with the requisite plot overheads and song-and-dance routines and the dumbing down for the masses. Stripped off of the sensibility of the original, it couldn’t have provoked me, but the movie goes on and does the exact opposite of what the story did.

While not Kafkaesque itself, One Thousand Dollars is one of the very few stories of O Henry with a Kafkaesque premise. But the story is more human, in that it substitutes the irony typical of Kafka with a dash of irreconcilable tragedy.

Kafka is fond of taking a joke, turning it inside out and then looking at it from the insider’s point of view (the insider who is now an outsider. almost all of Kafka’s stories are described from an outsider’s point of view.). Then it is no more a joke, it is an irony at varying levels of surreality. But it is never tragic, because that perspective inside the joke from which Kafka looks out is not human at all.

That is where One Thousand Dollars is different. It is human. It is a tragedy. May be I am wrong, but I have come to think of tragedy as a very human perspective.

That is why Sau Crore fails. It takes Henry’s rather whimsical interrogation into human beings and tries to look at it from the outside, making a bad joke out of it that it is.

And none of this is conscious. From the movie, it is very clear that Dev Anand doesn’t appreciate enough the pathos of the story to stop from making such a mockery of it.

Considering all the crap that gets thrown at me, I know I am overreacting. But then, why shouldn’t I?

My personal favourite is Ravan and his Pushpak Viman (a flying machine that he used to kidnap women). Whenever priests, old men and the wise old men of the community described to me the greatness of the ancient Indian civilisation, all of them came to this inevitable conclusion – the western science is now trying to rediscover / reinvent / imitate what had been done in India 5000 years back (the number of years varies from person to person).

Look at the aeroplane. It’s not a modern invention at all! Ravan’s Pushpak Viman is proof enough that we had built the aeroplane first (notice the difference – the claim is not that we built a flying machine first, but that we built the aeroplane first). Also, all those arrows we read about in Ramayana and Mahabharata, they were actually missiles. Bramhastra must have been the nuclear missile.

The list is endless, What I have presented here are some of the simplest ones. The list of all the convolutions people work through to get at their desired result would merit a few fat volumes. I could write them here, except that the space in this post is too small.

When I was younger, I felt bad because I thought that this perspective originated from the desperate attempt of religion (or at least a part of it) to survive science by ingratiating itself.

But as I grew older, I realised that the origin was something much more fundamental and universal – our desperate attempt to feel superior in our continued effort not to acknowledge the reality in order to escape it. Religion here is a tool, serving its own need to survive as it serves in our need to protect our ego.

And not just religion, almost every other belief-system based on faith is trying to embrace science in its own way. Astrology, Vaastu Shaastra, Feng Shui, Pranic Healing, the list is endless. As I retrospect my childhood and think about how I was made to lose my faith in human rationality, I do not wonder that I became an existentialist so fast! Time and again it has been proved to me that society and culture can overcome intelligence and wisdom.

My other personal favourite is the one with Arghya (a physics graduate and my friend). In a spiritual gathering he was attending, a speaker talked about “mind-power being like a field that has great energy” (oops! try to reconcile these concepts of power, field and energy!).

His point, described in Arghya’s words, was, “… as it is a field it has waves in it and those waves travel and change peoples’ mind originating from some guy who’s meditating in the Himalayas and so on and so forth …”

At this point Arghya could not help asking that, “Is this field of thought a field in the same sense as used in Mathematics or Physics?”

The speaker very indignantly answered, “Yes my little child, they are just like the Electromagnetic Field and radio waves that your teachers teach you in Physics classes.”

It was only after this that Arghya mustered up his courage to ask – “In that case, what is the field Lagrangian for this field sir?”

He first allowed the speaker to say that he meant it in the same sense as in Physics, which he essential did because Arghya remembered vaguely that the speaker was a lawyer by profession!! But after a little more pick’n poke, Arghya received a full lecture on his lack of respect for the elders, for the Indian culture and the dumb arrogance of his generation in general.

I am sure the younger generation will come up with its own fad (or may be just inherit the old one in a new bottle), but I hope it’ll not be religion, even though the current trends imply otherwise.

To put it simply, I was swept off my feet. I had seen Shakespeare in Love already (which I thought was a great movie), and I had my personal favourites among his sonnets too, but I had not encountered the scale and scope of his genius in his plays (just like no matter how many great short stories you have read from Oscar Wilde, you can’t just begin to appreciate/worship him till you have read the plays). But I will stop short of making this post a critical analysis of Shakespeare.

Around noon today, waiting for an auto at the traffic cross, it suddenly hit me why I had not been able to appreciate Shakespeare. Take the over-promoted Sonnet 18 for instance. Since my early school days, I have read it in about a hundred different anthologies. And how does it start? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?! To imitate Vineeth mildly – summer’s day my ass! Honestly, who in his right mind would like to compare his darling love, more temperate or not, to a brutal summer’s day in India?

Well, the middle aged husband might do that to his wife, particularly in light of the lines to follow – But thy eternal summer shall not fade. But what does a budding high school romantic like me thinks? Well, I am thanking the lord almighty that … summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

On second thoughts, I wouldn’t characterize myself as a budding high school romantic. Yes, my favourite stories from R N Tagore’s Twenty One Stories were Aparichita (The Stranger), Samapti (The End) and Patro O Patri (The Bride and The Groom), but I was yet to be humbled by the touch of affection and love. The years in High School were the last days of complete self-independence, of the arrogance of youth.

Those were also the days complete confidence, when I didn’t censor my critical opinions according to the group I was with. I remember swearing by Ramakanta Ratha’s Sri Palatak (Mr Fugitive – it was considered a failure as a sequel to Sri Radha, but it had some really awesome poems which is all that mattered.). I also remember holding a bonfire to burn Voltaire‘s Candid, a book that I hated from my guts, a feeling also shared by some of my friends who took part in that ritual.

Ending my digression, I come back to Shakespeare and Vivaldi. If you remember Joseph Fiennes (I am a huge fan, and I plan to travel to London some day to see him in some production of Shakespeare. Hamlet, if you’ll please.), well, he is going to portray Vivaldi in the upcoming movie (but beware, there are two movies in making).

Happy as I am that a movie is going to be made on Vivaldi, particularly because it’ll raise awareness beyond the Four Seasons, I am also apprehensive that it might push the idea of program music too far to make for a visually rich but conceptually misleading portrayal of the way music is made (but then, who didn’t love the scene leading to the death of Mozart in Amadeus?). I despise the oversold fad of program music anyway.

Free recordings of the Four Seasons are available from the wikipedia page devoted to it. The recording is perfectly competent, but I personally prefer a higher tempo.

My favourite Vivaldi composition right now is the concerto for two violins.

Some Philosophy
Murder, in all its glorious mystery, can not be the story (mark the word – story, not subject) of a movie any more. The focus must lie elsewhere, in the lives of the characters, their interactions, their crisis, their interpretation of the world around them, so that when a clue is quietly slipped into a scene, the viewers’ll either miss it, or interpret it differently (reminds me of Ram Gopal Verma’s Kaun), like we all have done in the best of Agatha Christie novels. This is how Bhool Bhulaiyaa fails. It has no story. Its characters have no life (except Akshay Kumar, may be). That is also why in the end, when the mystery is over, one fails to sympathise with the emotional difficulties of the characters.

I think the time for such movies is over. You can’t just make a “straight whodunit movie” any more. The cinematic language is dead, stale, and little innovation has been seen over the years. One could experiment with the narration, the pace, the atmosphere, but little is going to get any better. No matter how subtle your composition of a shot is, the average audience will know what it means, and they will know how to interpret it. Because, frankly, it is all there, everything that could have been done has been done. The end has come for closed room mysteries.

The Movie
The principal reason why Bhool Bhulaiyaa doesn’t work, after one succeeds in ignoring the production glitches, the emotive incoherency and the many cinematic liberties taken by the Director, is that the cinematic language all cliche, and the story too thin.

I dismissed the movie as soon as all the mysteries of the movie were formally introduced, because by then I had everything figured out. Amisha Patel couldn’t be the culprit, because she was being victimised. The meek brother and the mute sister were obviously dummies, because the director invested no amount of screen time or focus on them.

Now that Amisha is out of the equation, you suddenly remember that terrible Agatha Christie novel you read years back, and something similar comes back. Now why was Amisha under suspicion? Because she pushed the clock on Vidya Balan, right? Because she set Vidya’s saree to fire? But, if she didn’t do them, who did? Who could?

Exactly. The answer is Vidya Balan! And I start to get depressed about the coming two hours of the movie.

And then, presto! Akshay Kumar enters the screen. His character, while it is caught in the story of the movie, isn’t really a part of it, and therein lies its appeal. His histrionics kept the comic refuges coming, and I didn’t want to miss any of his scenes (except for the ones towards the end). I came out with a favourable impression, because the movie was not a tedious self-indulgent exercise of a director wanting to make his mark, it was a commercialised piece of junk without any pretence at integrity, and it doesn’t fail to entertain.

Music and Background Score
There are very few songs, and they are catchy, short, and mostly take the story forward, contributing towards the pace of the movie. Akshay looks cool in the title track.

The background score is also competent, but sadly misused, to the point of ruining the thrill of the movie.

Consider the scene where Vidya enters the much advertised mysterious locked chamber for the first time with a stolen duplicate. The sequences are good enough, and tension builds up as we start to fear for her physical safety, wondering what is going to happen next. But just before the tension could reach its peak, the ill timed exuberant background score pops up and we instinctively know that nothing is going to happen to Vidya, and all the laboriously built up panic dissolves away. We let the long held breaths out, ease ourselves into our seats, and go back to snoring.

Aesthetics
The most interesting sequence of the movie is towards the end, where Vidya Balan, finally having surrendered to the ghost (of her mind), produces a captivating dance, which was almost the best thing about the movie, along with Akshay Kumar. I wish I could see more of that haunting look, I wouldn’t mind going to the theatre just for that performance.

Apart from that, the movie seems to have a poor sense of Aesthetics. The atmosphere, which is supposed to be spooky, if not scary, is badly constructed. The attempts at interspersing shadows with light doesn’t quite work, and sometimes it sends wrong signals.

Actors
Akshay Kumar, as usual, has an energetic and entertaining appearance/mannerisms, and his performance is competent throughout. Paresh Rawal does deliver his lines, but he is underused. Amisha Patel is okay, and Vidya’s performance is raised from okay to good through some key scenes, some of which have more to do with her appearance rather than her acting. All the veterans (whose names I can’t remember) have turned in competent performances.

The odd one out is Shiney Ahuja, who disappoints. He alternates between wooden stereotypes and screaming fits, and expects us to take him seriously. I would blame the director though, how could he let him get away with those terrible performances? His character could easily have been emotionally consistent and normal if he had only stood there and let the scenes take their course. Instead, he tries to act and we have this high-strung guy who frequently overreacts (by screaming) and whose sense of loyalty towards his father-figure is simply incomprehensible. I like this guy. It’s sad to see him grow complacent like this. He has some serious self-contemplation to do.

Final Verdict
Given the standard of Bollywood movies, I would rate this movie 3 stars out of 5. One for the pace (the movie is not self indulgent, and keeps you mildly preoccupied from boredom), one for not digressing from the theme meaninglessly (like most of the other movies do, no item numbers), and one for Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan.

JO JEET-TA HI REHTA HAI WO SIKANDER,
JO HAARKAR JEET TA HAI WO BAZIGAR,
AUR JO HAAR-TE HAAR-TE JEET JATA HAI WO HAI APNA “JOGINDER ”
JO BINA KHEL KE JEETE WOH AGARKAR