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! :)

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 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?

What made the inaugural Twenty20 final one of the greatest matches we have ever seen is the closely fought contest. The game twisted an tilted all through the game. Nobody had any idea till the last ball about who was going to win, and even when Misbah went on and scooped Joginder Sharma’s fuller delivery over short fine leg, I panicked for a moment thinking it was a boundary when the camera following the ball hovered in the midair. Then, in one exhilarating moment, as soon as the ball started coming down, I spotted Srisanth in the offing and my heart did a flipflop as I realised that India’s dream journey had finally come through.

It does remind one of the 1983 world cup. Underdogs, upstaging some of the biggest powerhouses in the world cricket to reach the final in a relatively new format. And then the enthralling final, where after being restricted to a low total against one of the most formidable bowling side the world has ever seen, we fought back with some champion bowling and fielding performances to win the final we never dreamed of even reaching. That could very well be a description of this world cup.

To say that India held its breath while Dhoni’s squad fought for their honour would hardly be an overstatement, at least from where I see. In my city. not a single vehicle moved. From the abandoned look of the streets, one could as well have thought that nobody lived there, except for the momentary uproars and screams of joy whenever a wicket fell, and, in the later overs, whenever a ball was left unscored.

Only he who has seen that silence of despair can know how eagerly these moments of victory had been awaited, and how special they feel.

I’ll take the messy and messed up tone of this post as a confirmation of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – The purest of emotions produce only the worst kind of writings.

And yes, the unbelievers can now rest in peace. Twenty20 is here to stay.

I have just watched the irritating Heyy Babyy, which tries to pass off a lot of vulgarity in the name of comedy. It is one of the dumbest and most disgusting movies I have (unfortunately) seen this year. I am surprised by the amount of “critical acclaim” it has gathered.

There were some nice ideas, like Prof Parimal Tripathy (but the follow through was unsuccessful, because this was a movie made by the brainless for the brainless), but the sheer vulgarity of the movie overwhelmed everything else. I could grant them the suspension of disbelief and the attempts at crude juvenile humour, but their mindless abuse of the cinematic language to produce counter points to a point just made was too much to handle. At one side they introduce Vidya Balan (at the wedding) as a sharif and khaandaani girl, who is the least likely to engage in freelance romance, and right there we see a sexed up Vidya dancing provocatively, to the point of touching her own b**bs, and I ask myself, what kind of sharif and khaandaani girl did Sajid Khan, the director of the movie, had in mind?!

In case someone is looking for decent (sometimes great) comedies in recent times, I would advise him to try the ones from Priyadarshan and the one-offs like Khosla Ka Ghosla or Bheja Fry.

I saw promos of Om Shanti Om and Saawariya, and I’m sure these movies are going to be big hits. Om Shanti Om is a sure winner, because it does what no other movie has done before, recreating a version of our seventies’ movie culture, and as a result has a freshness that’ll appeal to the average cinema goer. Good luck to the SRK basher (me being one of them), but this is a movie in the right direction and SRK is the right choice for his part. But of course, the seventies’ version we are going to see in this movie is going to be very different then the seventies as we knew it.

The first few seconds of Saawariya were slightly disappointing, but soon I was enchanted by the sheer beauty of the images and the sequences waltzing through. The beats in the background promise a captivating score, and the intricately detailed imagery provoke a feeling of poignant yet joyful emotion that I can associate with love.

However, contrary to SLB’s claim that he is trying to reach back his roots as a filmmaker, trying to relive his early innocence, this movie, or at least the trailer, is a testimony to the maturity he has attained. There are a few stills which reminded me of Devdas and Black very strongly.

Talking of that, I believe this movie will make a kind of trilogy along with Devdas and Black. Devdas was dominated by the colour red, and Black, redundant to say, by the colour black. Whoever has seen the promos of Saawariya will agree to the opulence and dominance of the colour blue. Red – Black – Blue. I am talking nonsense.

Here is a rough selection of ten movies in my to-watch list (apart from Om Shanti Om and Saawariya) -

1. Transfermers -
2. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
3. I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK
4. The Bourne Ultimatum
5. Zodiac
6. Love in the Time of Cholera
7. Vivaldi (Joseph Fiennes)
8. Boyhood
9. The Long Goodbye (Altman)
10. My Wife Is an Actress.

Till about a few years ago I used to believe that banning hate speech in a multi-cultural society like India was a good idea. But I guess I was simply drinking too much of the NCERT Civics text book kool-aid. These can-hate laws, as I like to call them, simply don’t work. If canning all the hate was the idea, why are the Modis and the Advanis of the world still roaming the streets? The ones that have these laws to blame for their jail time are artists and innocent couples. That kind of a track record can’t argue well for a bunch of laws.

What hurts me more is what we are missing because of all this. Look at this guy -George Carlin. He is a stand-up comedian – spiteful, offensive and even brutal. But he is good. He says it like it is. He is smart, charming and damned well knows how to get a point through. He once said something along the lines of the duty of a [stand-up] comedian is to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. And he really does a good job when it comes to that. By these standards Indian stand-up comedy is in it’s infancy. In fact, it is more like a retarded infant.

My point is that when you allow hate speech, you can have a comedy show on HBO whose opening line is this -

[Warning: All videos on this page might be offensive to some and even NSFW. Viewer discretion is advised. ]

And then go on for an hour speaking your heart out against the primary religion of the country and it’s ruling party, it’s a whole new refreshing kind of freedom. I think that kind of a freedom is important for a country to grow and that you can only grow so far with these kind of restrictions on free speech.

Here is George Carlin on the Ten Commandments which was a part of his Complains and Grievances routine -

Life is worth losing is the latest routine of George Carlin. It’s good. And the whole of it courtesy Google Video.

There’s a lot more of Carlin around. May your favourite search engine be with you!

Note 2: To those who received the drafts – The reference to Robert Kolker was incorrect, which I discovered after going painstalkingly through his mammoth book again in an effort to quote him exactly (it contains the whole of GRE word list many times over). That would explain the delay. He said some nice insightful things though.

Note 3: This story, and its prequel, are officially declared to be ficticious accounts incorporating no characters inspired by anyone living or dead.

The Interview with the Professor

I didn’t understand the conclusion of the movie Micky One when I saw it for the first time. In fact, I didn’t understand it till I had seen almost all of Arthur Penn‘s defining works, till it occurred to me that violence was the underlining theme in his movies, violence overcoming a distance of some kind – distance created by blindness in The Miracle Worker (this is one reason I considered Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black plagiarised, he lifted this motif from Penn’s movie), impotence in Bonnie and Clyde (the doggerel was the immediate cue), paranoia in Mickey One (if you never understood the movie’s ending, this is the clue), the list goes on.

If one were to look at the underlining theme behind my fateful interview with Professor SS the next day, he would have discovered Mad Max, women, dope, James Bond, gang rape and Professor KV, all in that order.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.

To put it without much ado, I have never been the man for the bright sunny mornings, partly because I have never been an early riser, but that was a day well worth making an exception for.

I was up early for a consecutive second day. There was sunshine in my heart and there was sunshine on my face, and it made the world outside look more than it was worth. My heart swelled with the scent of the early morning breeze, cold and generously sprinkled with the dust from the construction sites around C**, and when my heart could hold it no more, it spilled out and became music for my soul. I joined it and sang with gay abandon, though my hostel mates later gave a different description of the events, but that might have been due to the quality of my singing. Nothing could get me down that day. Well, almost nothing, till I remembered my appointment later on that day with Professor SS.

That was my mood when I proceeded to the breakfast table. In retrospect, I think Ni(ved)ita and Pad(mav)ati might have been giving me murderous stares on that occasion, which, I am sad to report, were completely lost on me. An(irb)it did cast the hostile glares in my direction as usual, but that he did always anyway; except when he was mad with anger at me, in which case he took extra pains to be friendly with me and flashed all of his white set of teeth at me at every opportunity. Every time he did that, I would grab someone nearby and ask him to take our photographs together. Two old friends dining amiably. Two old friends looking at each other amiably. Two old friends smiling at each other amiably.

But this is not about that.

I took my usual place next to An(shu)l, Sou(men)dra and Riya on the breakfast table. After some moments of uncertain silence, Sou(men)dra spoke.

“You know what, I have a solution that will solve all your problems at one stroke.”

An(shu)l observed nonchalantly that the last time someone had said that, he came up with the nuclear bomb.

This made all of us contemplative for some time, at the end of which I asked Sou(men)dra about his solution, which turned out to be a bunch of excuses, brilliant and intricate but convoluted excuses, to evade the responsibility for my mail. I like to face the consequences of my actions, however, mostly because they are funny, and Riya supported me in this.

“You realise what you have done, right?”, she asked.

I was going to answer that yes I did, but then I remembered the last time I had said that. I asked what had I missed, and was made devastated in return.

To cut a long story short, SS had thought that my remark was intended for the girls, who also happened to be a minority (only three in the entire undergrad program). It wasn’t until much later that Shree[vat]sa remembered what was to us the only known abuse of Rolypoly, and it was a boy who had been the victim. Had this information come out in time, I could have been saved, but the smart chap who observed that comedy is all about timing forgot to notice that tragedy is all about mistiming irrespective of its Greek or Shakespearean or modern origins. Such is life!

I finished my breakfast and started for SS’ office with a heavy heart dragging my heavier feet.

When I coughed and said my slurred “ess-use me” to SS in his office, he was busy checking his e-mail. He looked back with a questioning glance and I introduced myself. He turned off the monitor, wheeled his chair towards me and rolled his sleeves.

“So you are that Mad Max character, eh? What the hell do you think you are?”

I couldn’t say that I was not pleased by that comparison, but etiquette demanded that I look guilty and sorry.

“You think you are smart huh? You think you can get away with this? What did you mean by that letter?”

I thought it was an invitation to explain myself. I am perpetually in the habit of committing this error. I mistake rhetorical speculations for literal questions and proceed to answer them.

“Sir, I think there has been a misunderstanding, I wasn’t thinking of the girls at all when…”

“Shut up,” he roared, “enough,” he paused for breath, “I thought what anyone in his right mind will think reading that disgusting mail, and you have no excuses to defend yourself. You have behaved very very irresponsibly, and you better be ashamed of it.”

He softened a bit at this point, “You see, women are a minority here, and we have to make them feel safe. What you have done is not only demeaning and insulting, it might also scare them,” his temper seemed to rise at the thought. “What are you, an egomaniac bastard? Do you think you are James Bond or something? Do you think you are so sexy that you can insult any of these girls?”

Again, I was flattered by the comparison and the compliment, but couldn’t thank him for it. He went on bellowing at me. Inspired by the excitement of the moment, he even stood up from his chair and started moving towards me little by little as he continued shouting at me. I thought it might be safer to stay close to the door and started inching towards it as he tried to corner me. At the end of ten minutes, we had both moved on to the corridor, and he had moved on to the gang rape part of my mail.

“And how, how could you write about such a sensitive issue like that? You think joking about rape is funny? Do you think gang rape is funny?” From there on, he went on to talk about something related to Dalits and Gang Rapes and the social problem that it is. He must have yelled “sex,” “dope,” “rape” and “gang rape” at least a dozen times within a span of a minute, at the end of which Professor KV, whose room was next to that of Professor SS, came out of his office to take active part in the discussion.

He listened silently for the next five minutes as Prof SS cruised through me. And then came the conclusion, “One should never do such irresponsible things. I think an apology mail should be sent.”

Finally seeing his chance to participate, Prof KV intervened timely, “Yes yes, I think that will be appropriate. You should immediately send a mail apologising.”

Except that he said it to Prof SS.

I was stunned for a moment. So was Prof SS. Then he recovered his speech and started yelling at Prof KV. “What do you mean I should send a mail? Why should I be sorry? What are you talking about?”

As the explanations and arguments grew in length and intensity, I decided that it was time I gave them a slip.

Everyone lived happily ever after.

1)B(han)u and A(rna)b were chatting.

S(hou)vik – A(rna)b, don’t listen to him, he is gay.
B(han)u (indignantly) – I am not gay, I am broadminded.

2) S(hou)vik – Are you changing your room partner to Ramprasad?
Bhanu – No no, it’s difficult to make a new relationship in such a short time.

For the sake of records, Beli was Bhanu’s partner in room (and anything else that we don’t know of yet).

3) S(hou)vik – I am a narcissist. I look at myself in the mirror and masturbate.

The Annie Hall Effect

And this one time in our hostel ;), we watched Annie Hall after I insisted that everyone does so. The following scene inspired us, and a string of comments followed -

Alvy Singer: Oh stop it, you’re having an affair with your college professor, that jerk that teaches that incredible crap course, Contemporary Crisis in Western Man…
Annie Hall: Existential Motifs in Russian Literature. You’re really close.
Alvy Singer: What’s the difference? It’s all mental masturbation.
Annie Hall: Oh, well, now we’re finally getting to a subject you know something about.
Alvy Singer: Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

4) Ar(ghy)a (when An(shu)l suggested that we should have a GBM (general body meeting) as soon as possible) -
What’s the point? Democracy is just vocal masturbation.

5) S(hou)vik (when I asked about his physics experiment report) -
That is experimental masturbation.

6) S(hou)vik (on Einstein and Philosophers and their futility) -
All philosophical orgasms are faked.

7) I don’t remember who came up with the question, but we all seeemed to come up with the answer at the same time, though independently.

Q: What’ll A(nir)bit’s autobiography be called?
A: Physical Masturbation!

8) An(shu)l (when I said I am going to put all that in my blog) -
History will be on your side, because you’ll be masturbating it.

I have always meant to write about him, ever after he commented on Sachin in the most cowardly manner. I did comment on that article in passing in one of my earlier posts (the last para), but Moin’s continued double standards merited a more elaborate treatment.

Then I stumbled across this article in cricinfo, and I felt it says almost everything I could have wanted to say on the Moin Khan. The post wanders a little in the beginning, but soon comes to the point and goes on detailing the history of Moin Khan’s deceptive double standards.

Moin Khan is too much of an idiot to be taken seriously, but we are not living in an ideal world either.

It was an open secret that Anu Malik is an idiot. After today’s episode, it is not a secret anymore. He wrongly commented on the personal life of one of the contestants (to Deepali, your crush is crushing your voice. How cheeky is that?!). When cornered by the righteous Alisha Chinai, he employed three different devices of rhetorics (stalling techniques, more accurately) to evade the issue and justify himself. It could have been four, but one of his techniques constituted of making completely irrelevant statements and my knowledge of rhetorics is too poor to place it.

Anyway, some poor guy got eliminated today, and an ironic performance ensued from the other contestants that could easily have been dubbed hilarious. For the guy getting out the sorrow was genuine enough, and he took it very sportingly. Some of his mates shed some real tears too, particularly one of the girls who was with him in the danger zone. The rest of them were just pathetic, and it was hilarious to see them hide their faces with their palms so that we could not see their faces. I mean, they were supposed to be sad, and they were supposed to cry. But they failed to produce any amount of tears (we can’t blame them, the euphoria of not having been eliminated can be overwhelming) and tried to make up for it by hiding their faces and refusing to look up!

The host, Mini Mathur, however, had an easier time. After joking around with the poor eliminated guy for sometime, assuring him that he’ll be dearly missed, she simply went backstage and put some glycerin in her eyes and came back for the end credits, where she cried her heart out. I hope she gets paid well. She has to keep crying like this for seven or so weeks more.

I find it very paradoxical that a lot of how we judge a man in his own time has a lot to do with our perception of him, whereas in posterity he is judged by the value of his work, and all his personal characteristics go into the making of his legend.

When I was in sixth grade, I happened to have a history teacher who took a real delight in teaching his subject, and never had to refer to the text book. We were confused, however, when he started criticizing Mohd Bin T. as a short sighted idiot and a tyrant when our text books described his as a misunderstood visionary. The diffrence, as it turned out, lied in the text books, which had apparently been changed within a span of 20 years to please the Muslim community, or may be just the Chairman of the syllabus committee was a die-hard Mughal fan. In any case, the perspective of a whole generation was changed to suit the minority-politics of the day.

Let me digress still more.

One of the most interesting book I read was a complete history of India which my cousin won as a prize. It was written by two Russian guys, and it had a very interesting perspective to share about the Indian Struggle for Freedom. By then, I had read many accounts of the same, so I had the experience and the patience to compare and contrast. It convinced me that History is as much a science as Physics is as long as the process of coming up with new theories is concerned, and since then I have regarded History a subject deserving real scholars, because History, far from being a collection of factual data and their unbiased explanation, is a completely individualistic reconstruction and interpretation of past events subject to fluctuating personal tastes.