Bollywood And The Art Of Complex Emotions

Bollywood And The Art Of Complex Emotions

Great film-makers are also great intellectuals. But the challenge for them to is to represent complexity in a manner which is simple to understand, yet profound in its impact and meaning.

Bollywood, over the years, has captured various real life themes and conflicts on celluloid with panache They have ranged from love triangles to social conflicts to relationship complexities. While good film-makers over the years have handled love triangles and socially relevant movies with great deft and subtlety, for the Hindi film connoisseur, fascination lies in the drama that unfolds when two people are entangled in a complex set of emotions, where there is a tussle between what the heart says, the dictate of circumstances, and the unpredictability of personal nature.

While many films over the years have tried to build plots around emotional complexities, only few writers, directors, lyricists, musicians, actors have combined to produce a classic which leaves an indelible impression on the viewer, and stands out as a paradigm of sorts even years later.

One such film is the Gulzar-directed 1975 release Aandhi, with the amazing Sanjeev Kumar and Suchitra Sen in the lead roles. Aarti, played by Suchitra Sen, harbours political ambitions, whereas her husband JK, played by Sanjeev Kumar wants to remain a commoner and lead a normal family life. Aarti gets caught between her love for her family, her father who is upset with her decision to choose marriage over career and her own ambition to lead a public life. As a viewer, you wonder how love overruns ambition, leading to marriage, subsequently waging a battle with the inner personality which just a while back had consciously chosen to subjugate `larger desires` for a life of love and family bonding. While you feel JK is right that he had set the context well enough before marriage, and Aarti knew while she could have the joy of marrying her love, the price would be a life away from the public glare, yet you can't help but take notice of Aarti's side of the story too.

If this be a real life situation and you view it as an outsider, you will probably empathise with both the husband and the wife. The wife may seem apparently wrong at having gone back at her commitment so to say, but life as a process often does not stop just at the altar of love or statements of intent; it forcibly extricates the suppressed desire for expression of social identity, creating a conflict between personalities, thereby shunning love to a corner of life from where it becomes a mute observer of people involved in a crisis of pain, elusive pleasure and betrayal. The beauty of the climax of Aandhi lies in the way love stages a fightback of sorts, and how two people give away some part of their long held identities so that both love and the individuals can co-exist harmoniously without endangering either love as a common binding factor or their identities/beliefs as an anchor for self actualisation.

Great film-makers are also great intellectuals. But the challenge for them to is to represent complexity in a manner which is simple to understand, yet profound in its impact and meaning.

The other film which has fascinated me with its handling of emotional complexity is Yash Chopra's 1981 release Silsila, starring Amitabh, Rekha, Jaya Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar. Yash Chopra is the master of love contexts and has made films which capture complexity of emotions cutting across age groups. While Silsila is a mature love story where adults grapple with intense head-heart conflicts, his 1997 Dil To Pagal Hai, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Akshay Kumar and Karisma Kapoor is a more racy film involving the emotional pyrotechnics that go with such a plot.

Of course, while love triangles have an inbuilt emotional complexity, irrespective of the quality of the script and film as a whole, it is films like Aandhi, with just two central characters involved in a complex process of life, which fascinate with their inherent class, timeless contextual relevance and artistic brilliance. Such films not just entertain us, but also provide us with incredible food for thought from time to time.

So keep watching Hindi films and also this space for more insights and commentaries on Bollywood.

Autobiography Of A Married Man

Autobiography Of A Married Man

 

On our 16^th wedding anniversary, I dedicate this blog – an anniversary present -- to my wife Rita.

Sixteen years ago on this day, my life changed forever, and every passing year has seen our lives change forever. Sometime in 1995 I lost my heart to a wonderful girl, but on January 22, 1996, I lost a significant part of me, and in the process I have only become better and better as a person. 

The biggest context changing event in my life – my marriage – has led to many context changing events in our lives, the reason being, from a nice, normal guy next door at the time of our marriage I have got transformed into somebody who exhibits consistent crazy behaviours. Every passing year, my life has got more and more exciting, whereas my wife’s life has got more and more tumultuous. End of 1998 saw the arrival of our daughter Diksha, who too over the years has been mirroring my personality, which means it is double trouble for Rita, who has to not only manage our crazy behaviours, but also ensure she doesn’t go off balance.

Over the last 16 years, she has not just stood by me, but also developed herself into my most ardent critic. My male-cum-husband ego has often resisted attempts at receiving forthright feedback, but like every assertive and well meaning wife, she has ensured somewhere her words of improvement rankle in my mind and heart, more often than not leading to me making certain critical changes in my behavior. But when you meet her, you will wonder whether she is capable of being assertive, but trust me, all married women, irrespective of their pre-marriage personality, have an inherent capacity to become assertive with their husband at least after marriage! I suppose, men being men, have this nasty way of provoking their spouse to assert herself as a critical emotional and intellectual self defense mechanism.

One of the greatest lessons in the last 16 years has been just how critical it is to have an understanding life partner, who very often also has to pretend to understand, not because of her timidity, but because of how women are at their core – patient, always willing to question their own opinion, and quite adept at giving their husband multiple chances. The importance of having an understanding wife cannot be underestimated, as over the years I have seen many marriages struggle to keep the harmony alive, leading to a life where the struggle for keeping the relationship going consumes one’s energies. Even if a couple let go off each other and try to move on, the scars are too deep to heal in a lifetime. 

Since our marriage, I have changed five jobs (including a career switch and two attempts at entrepreneurship) and as a result forced my wife to live in three different cities -- Kolkata, Bengaluru and Kochi, with Delhi almost featuring in the list. This is too much to handle for a person who is very Mumbai-prone and likes to stay within her comfort zone. In the thirteen years of her life, my daughter is attending her fourth school and that too in a third city. Though she is much like me, she has threatened me with dire consequences if I dare pull her out of this school till she finishes her Std X.

Trust me, my wife would have not complained if I had just stuck to one company and one career, and would not have minded if I had stayed just the way I was when we got married. But she had not budgeted for what she was going to get into and definitely not for the paradigm shift my personality underwent over the years. Of course, as a result, she too has changed for the better, however, I had not told her what I was up to – but the truth is even I did not know what life had in store for us.


My wife does not write a blog, and so I do not know how she would describe this journey in words, but one thing is for sure, it has not been easy for her. She has also been very good at not always expressing the pain of my decisions and the change I have imposed upon her, thereby providing me with the space to move on relentlessly. As we enter the 17th year of our partnership, this is one consistent support I seek from her, for as things stand now, life promises to be more exciting and tumultuous than ever before.

Apart from managing our home, us and our lives, what my wife has done most brilliantly is accepted both her husband and daughter as they are – crazy, unpredictable and temperamental at times. While admittedly, we are difficult to handle, I suspect she also likes the energy we provide to her and others. 

Accepting me as I was one quality I desperately sought in my wife, and I am immensely lucky that I got one such person to marry me. I am extremely grateful to God and her for that. While I continuously change and experiment, she has just been much of what she was before marriage, watching me at times with awe, at times with concern and at times aghast. In a partnership context, change from all sides is not welcome, as that can upset the applecart of that relationship, and in that sense, Rita has been like an unshakable anchor, yet she has never failed to enrich herself and us. 

Women are known to make sacrifices – often their own happiness. My wife too has made some serious sacrifices so that I can fulfill my dreams. I can never give back the things she sacrificed, but one thing’s for sure, whatever I do is also because I want to ensure that the three of us can constantly enhance the quality of our lives and be useful to the world at every step of life.
I thank her for being in my life. Without her, my life would not have been incomplete, actually, there would have been no story to tell. 

Rita is my wife, and I am proud of that!

Dude, Language Is Not Dead, But Communication Is Alive

Dude, Language Is Not Dead, But Communication Is Alive

Today, language matters to the extent it communicates.

The success of Kolaveri Di is not just because of good music, but also because of its communication philosophy – short, catchy and to the point. A country dominated by its youthful population, this is what sells in the marketplace today. First we had Hinglish and now we have Tamglish.  In a world full of options, choices and information explosion, to get across you need to get them across to your communication style. For this, you need to be consistently and persistently creative and innovative.

Today, language matters to the extent it communicates. The classical understanding of communication is: when the receiver receives the message in the same manner you intended he/she should receive, communication is said to be completed. If the classical lovers of language concerned themselves more with quality of language as a necessary attribute for good communication, today, what matters is the result, it doesn’t matter how you spell words. Short Messaging Service itself lost its identity to SMS, and words like `see you` have shrunk to `c u`, `right` has become `rite`, and `love you` has become `luv u`. `Hello` has made way to `hi`, and words like dude and cool are part of common usage. 

The connoisseurs of language are probably aghast at what’s going around masquerading as communication. But this trend is here to stay – there are no two ways about it. Communicating in two languages or more in one communication is also an in thing. For example, sentences like, `when are you calling me – kal ya parsoo`, is commonplace. Short form of communication (Shofo), like talking in acronyms and referring to film titles by only mentioning their alphabets are also a trend. In a multicultural and multi language society like ours, where, now, not agriculture, but technology is a greater binding force, reinvention of day-to-day communication was perhaps kind of just waiting to happen.

Communication patterns in society reflect the society itself. Pre-liberalisation, we lived in a slow paced world and waited for things to happen. But now, you cannot be passive and hope that you’ll be unaffected by your surroundings and changing behavioural and communication patterns in society. The world keeps moving all the time. The youth are defining, deciding and deciphering the pace of life, and there is no getting away from this reality – their sheer numbers are overpowering.

The increasing trend of parent-children conflict is a result of old versus new patterns of communication. In pre-1991 years, children had to be `told`, had to be `made to understand` and had to be `tracked`, a reflection of the times limited by choices, but with an abundance of time. But today, there is an abundance of choices, and therefore limitation of time. Today’s generation don’t mind being told, as long as they are not lectured. They don’t mind being made to understand as long as they have the freedom to take the final decision, and they don’t mind being tracked as long as they are given a mobile phone.

So, what then is the future of language? While the language purists may fume at the degradation of expression, the fact is there probably was never greater marketable potential of good language. Today, language, especially in the form of writing, be they through blogs or books, has great eye-catching and money making potential, as long it is racy, creative and contemporary. No doubt, quality of language is very important for the intellectual evolution of society, but in a world ruled like never before by technology and innovation, what is called for is racy intellectualism. Yes, in the serious writing space, allowing dilution of spellings or construction of sentences could severely jeopardize ideation of substance, and in that sense, turning a blind eye to such a possibility would only create a much avoidable intellectual slide.

While I am not an advocate of SMS language as a culture, I am empathetic to its presence. But the beauty of language lies in the choice of words, framing of sentences, expression to context, and providing simplicity to complexity. But importantly, words and language give life to thoughts. Just imagine how we would let the world know what we are thinking if there was no basic orientation on our language of expression? Without words and language, would we be able to think even?

So, just get this dude! language can never die. Just as humans go through turbulence, this is the age of turbulence for language, but just like humans, it will emerge more enriched. So, rest assured, language is not dead, but communication is alive. 

     

`Dirty` Vidya Makes A Definitive Statement

`Dirty` Vidya Makes A Definitive Statement

Watch `The Dirty Picture`. It’s a cleansing experience.

Vidya Balan has arrived, as a star. She was always a good actress, but with her `dirty` role in `The Dirty Picture`, she has made a definitive statement not only about her acting skills, but also about how one person can carry the whole film on her shoulders. Yes, here we are talking about a female lead and not Amitabh Bachchan, who, in his heydays, made co-stars look like a juggernaut grafted into the script just to keep the superstar entertained. 

`The Dirty Picture`, to my mind is one of the cleanest films made in recent times. Of course, you need a different thought process to appreciate just how clean it really is. It exposes the double standards that prevail in our society and threatens to break open the darker side of people. One of the dialogues in the film – and there are many such gems – hits you hard: Jab sharafat ke kapde utarte hai to sabse jyada maza sharifon ko hi ata hai. In an instant, it cleanses you of your dirty thoughts and makes you see the film in a totally different light from thereon at least. 

Utmost credit must be given to the dialogue writer Rajat Aroraa for coming up with many gems in the film. If Amitabh Bachchan over the years lent credence to many memorable dialogues with his heavy baritone, Vidya Balan has immortalized each one of them with her subtle delivery and an expression of `delightful sarcasm` few actors or actresses before have ever dished out.   
   
Actresses over the years have indulged in sensual scenes. Many of them even carried out those scenes with grace, but Vidya went miles ahead to meet the genuine needs of the character, and invited not ugly glances, but awe and respect for being honest to the core about the character she was essaying on screen. 

Often, a good script is said to get the best out of an actor, but to my mind, in this film, the actress got the best out of the script. Vidya Balan elevated a good script to a space of immense substance. Vidya, through her thoroughly soaked-in-the-character performance, elevated every element in the film to a space of cinematic immortality, despite the film running the risk of looking crass, sleazy and vulgar in several of its frames.  Yes, it must also be acknowledged that such a film is unlikely to have passed through the censor board in its current form even 10 years ago. Physicality and sexuality in urban society have undergone a perception shift in post-liberalisation India.   

Vidya, it seemed, was not just playing a character, she imbued the late Silk Smitha, from whose life the film is inspired, with dignity and respect. She almost seemed to be on a mission to do that. The mission was not to make Silk simply turn in her grave, stand up and take notice, but to provide the world with `the other perspective` about such `other people`. 

For a lot of actors, a great performance is also a time for reinvention, as bettering your best is nightmarish stuff. But for Vidya, this one is a `breakthrough performance` and not a `peak performance`. She has raised the bar like few can ever do. The only reason she could do it was, she risked extinction. If even for a few seconds she had come across as vulgar in any part of the film, she would have been relegated to the archives of `the unglorious`. In the film, she did not walk on the edge, she walked the edge itself, and in the process gained an edge her competitors could probably have never foreseen.

Vidya Balan, after much struggle (Do you know that she was sacked from 12 Malayalam films? To know more about her inspiring story, please read the Brunch issue of The Hindustan Times, dated December 18, 2011), has arrived on the big stage of Bollywood. I don’t know whether she will essay another such bold role. But one thing’s for sure, she will always be hailed as `the pioneer and demi-God of bold roles with substance` in Hindi films. Watch `The Dirty Picture`, if you haven’t already. It isn’t really dirty, you see! It is just frank, on-the-face and says it just as it sees it.

As we rapidly move towards the close of 2011, the top three questions being asked are:
1. Will Anna Hazare get the Lokpal Bill he wants?
2. When will Sachin Tendulkar score his 100^th international hundred and
3. Did you watch `The Dirty Picture`?

Well Done, Vidya!

Will India Catapult, Or Capitulate?

Will India Catapult, Or Capitulate?

This piece is a reflection on the India-Australia test series, which has started on Boxing Day.

The much awaited and talked about India-Australia test series is well and truly on at the MCG. India, slow starters in test matches, especially in away series, are hoping to upset the applecart of the Aussies in their backyard. It is a tribute to the team and captains of the past decade that pundits and cricket lovers in India are actually expecting the team to win their first ever series  in Australia. This, despite the 4-0 drubbing at the hands of England in England recently.

After the drubbing in England, the `tigers-at-home-lambs abroad` tag has resurfaced in more than just hushed tones. But people are still willing to believe that it was an aberration, and things are going to be just fine in Australia. There are reasons to believe that this could happen. 

Firstly, they will play for pride – for the loss in England and also for Sydney-gate. If not for Sydney-gate in 2008, India may well have ended the series with honours even. Secondly, the legends -- Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman -- are most likely on their last tour to Australia, and, if so, destiny will not grant them another opportunity to win a series Down Under. Thirdly, MS Dhoni, who has been hailed as India’s best captain, stands his true test as skipper. The loss in England highlighted yet again the timeless theory that a captain is only as good as his team. To make matters worse, key players in the side suffered injuries, and two of the legends – Tendulkar and Laxman – were off form. However, amidst all the ruin in all three formats of the game, Dhoni showed character and kept navigating a sinking ship to the best of this ability. But not winning the series in Australia will only raise questions over his ability to raise the stakes for his team abroad. 

There is no doubt that perhaps after a period in the ‘80s, this is the weakest Australian team to face India, and if it is not plagued by injuries, this is the strongest Indian contingent Down Under. India’s brief surge to top of the test rankings however had a glaring hole – no series win in South Africa and Australia, without which some pundits maintained, and rightly so, India did not deserve to be called the best test playing nation. Of course, the ranking is now gone, and so India can just concentrate on winning in Australia. If they win the series, as they should, at least given their strengths on paper, they are likely to create enormous self confidence for themselves, and awe and respect from people around the world. 

There is no doubt that the team is aware of both the expectations as well as the opportunity. If India win the series, for Tendulkar, if he scores his 100^th ton too, this would be the climax of a dream career – longest test career spanning over two decades, 100 international hundreds, test series victories in Pakistan, England, West Indies, New Zealand, and Australia, and a World Cup win. I don’t know whether Tendulkar should be compared with Bradman, but surely, there will not be another Tendulkar, and that is what colossal institutions are all about – there cannot be another one like them. For Dhoni, it would mark the culmination of what Saurav Ganguly started – the habit of winning test matches abroad. A series win in Australia will also mark a new beginning for Dhoni, as he would now be more on cue to create his own legacy as a Indian cricket captain.

But as they say, cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties. After all the analysis, what really matters at the end of the day is what happens between the 22 yards. While there is great anticipation about India going to the next level as a test playing nation, for all you know, Australia are planning a revival which could mark the beginning of another dominant era for them.
At the end of it all, we will know, whether India really catapulted, or capitulated, yet again!