Pyaasa – Poignant, Painful, Profound

Pyaasa – Poignant, Painful, Profound

Pyaasa highlights the classical human failings of envy, deceit, greed for money and power, and opportunism with such poignancy that you feel the film was made for the times we live in.

I finally watched Guru Dutt’s 1957 classic Pyaasa, considered a text book in film-making, and thereby eradicated from my life the stigma that comes with not having watched this film if you call yourself a Hindi film lover. 

Films that get elevated to the pantheon of the great are given that status because of the timeless relevance they depict. Great film-makers seem to have the ability to latch on to certain supreme human behaviours that haunt society with their negative influence for ages and weave a story around them that shakes the very human conscience. Pyaasa highlights the classical human failings of deceit, envy, greed for money and power, and opportunism with such poignancy that you feel the film was made for the times we live in. Fifty years from now too, a film like Pyaasa will look contemporary and relevant.

Hindi film-makers over the years have tried to depict pain on celluloid by providing that emotion a standing of its own. In Pyaasa, Guru Dutt elevates pain to cult status as he marks out pain in its various forms as effortlessly as an artist marks out the various figures on canvas. Pyaasa highlights the pain of loss in love, the pain of being used for the gain of vested interests, and the pain of living in such an opportunistic and unjust world, where people change colours faster than a chameleon.  

The film, released just ten years after independence, served notice to the internal contradictions of Indian society. India’s challenge, after the British had left was not external, it was internal. The challenge pertained to remaining united even in the face of immense cultural diversity. Being a large country with a huge population, besides cultural contradictions, the crass side of human nature also manifest themselves quite noticeably, but their effects are not always obvious due to the depth of tolerance and apathy that run simultanoeusly in our veins. The twin qualities of tolerance and apathy have provided an imperfect, yet enigmatic backdrop to defining the great Indian character.    

India’s independence came with a huge price in the form of partition and riots, but the greater challenge always was to stay united, which the country has achieved with remarkable grace and maturity, despite the various internal and external threats it has faced since 1947. There is therefore no taking away from the fundamental strength of the Indian democratic fabric, but Pyaasa haunts you at the core of your nature. It provokes you to look within and drive away  enemies inside like jealousy and opportunism from your system.  

Maybe Pyaasa is good remake material too, as Bollywood is in the midst of a season of remakes. But the film and the message -- highlighted in such painful detail, and with such poignancy and profoundness – have the capacity in their original format too to arouse the better side of our nature and send us on a self-introspection trip. 

Watch Pyaasa, if you haven’t already. It will make you thirsty to contribute towards building a more humane society.

Cantankerous Sons Versus Composed Daughters

Cantankerous Sons Versus Composed Daughters

Oh! my God, I thought, you don’t need a gym to lose weight,
you only need sons, who are up and running -- literally -- without serving any notice.

My daughter turned thirteen last December. When Sachin Tendulkar was struggling to get his 100^th 100, many people simply consoled themselves by saying after all, 100 is just a number. But try telling that to my daughter that 13 is after all just a number! The four alphabets t-e-e-n which translate into teen is what got her going. It is just so incredible how much kids want to grow up fast, and even more incredibly, after a few years they wish they hadn’t grown up. That’s the game life plays with unsuspecting humans.

It is also incredible how quickly kids grow up. She is 13, so what’s my age? Well, let’s not bother, simply because children these days not only push your age consciousness hard, but also push you hard as a parent. But really, I am not the right person to make statements about just how difficult parenting is, simply because I am a single child parent, and that too of a daughter, who grew up without much noise and fuss. 

For a while, I really thought parenting was easy, till I ran into live situations of parents managing their son or sons. Oh! my God, I thought, you don’t need a gym to lose weight, you only need sons, who are up and running – literally – almost even before they have learnt crawling – exaggerating of course, but you got the essence of it, right?

I don’t know who is from Mars and who is from Venus, but one thing’s for sure, sons and daughters, in their growing up years, seem to be motivated by diametrically opposite sets of objectives. Sons are cantankerous, loud, and masters of the art and science of `misbehavior` (the English language is so funny, it attaches `mis` to describe behavior, though the female gender is actually the more composed one), whereas daughters are comparatively more composed and caring -- of course, here I am discounting the views of parents with cantankerous, son-like-behavior daughters, or those with daughter-like-behaviour sons (Uff, it is quite complicated to put exceptions in perspective!). 

A lot of couples these days pray for a daughter as their first child – and very often for many the only child – as they feel the girl child is more understanding and more likely to take care of her parents in their old age. I know, I know, that’s not a fair statement on all the wonderful sons who are taking care of their old parents. But then why complain if after centuries of male domination women are beginning to assert their identity, or are at least enjoying the benefit of better perceptions? 

Based on my limited observations about growing up children’s behavior, I have come to the conclusion that boys belong to a highly vibrant and unique club called `keep my parents on their toes`, whereas  daughters – the elder sisters that is -- seem to belong to a club called `why my parents can’t handle my brother all by themselves`. You will hardly come across parents who say that their son help manage their daughter’s tantrums. If the sister is younger, she is advised not to behave like her elder brother – poor soul! The culprit and victim and are more or less determined at birth itself.  

The joke for some time has been that it is better to have daughters as they would get married and move into another family, whereas sons would not only stay on but also fight for your property. Clearly, the male folks need a serious image makeover.   

While sons and daughters display distinct kinesthetic behaviours, one thing however is common; with their FI (Fantastic Intelligence), IAS (Information Assimilation Ability) and TQ (Technology Quotient), they push the limits of their parents’ FI, IAS and TQ, very often causing embarrassment to people of my generation, whose ability, or the lack of it, to come to terms with the dynamics of living whose context is set by the youth can potentially cause a self esteem crisis. Sons and daughters alike today are razor sharp, communicate effortlessly and hate the word `stereotype`.

I think, irrespective of whether you are a parent of a son or a daughter, it is a privilege to be blessed with such children, whose combined energies can create a world of substance way beyond our collective imaginations. The tide has turned friends, children are our vibrant, fast paced teachers and we their reluctant-to-change, slow paced students! Every day spent with your child is like being in school at home. 

It’s not just parenting anymore folks; school has come home. 

Rahul Dravid – A Legacy Of Classical Batsmanship

Rahul Dravid – A Legacy Of Classical Batsmanship

`The Wall` has left behind a legacy of batsmanship where he taught the world,
well left is also well played!

 

Rahul Dravid’s exit has not created a vacuum just at the No 3 position, it is also a vacuum of classical batsmanship. Dravid based his entire game around the twin foundations of technique and temperament. In that sense, he emerged as the true batting successor to Sunil Gavaskar. The talent was there, but it was asked to flower under the stewardship of technique. While technique is a means to an end, for Gavaskar and Dravid, the means were also critical, for they had based their ability to score runs entirely on the way their feet moved, the way the bat met the ball, the way the body swayed to a short delivery, etc. 

For Dravid, spending time at the crease and scoring runs were equally important – that was his game and he stuck to that even as he saw a certain Tendulkar and a certain Sehwag maul the opposition with audacious strokeplay on their day. Dravid’s soul lay in just the joy of executing his craft on the 22 yards for long hours. 

I suspect Dravid called it quits not just because he perhaps felt he may not be able score runs heavily and consistently anymore, but maybe also because he felt he would no longer be able to romance the cricket pitch for as many hours as he could at the peak of his prowess. The smell of the cricket pitch and the red cherry when he met it close to his body must be the elixir he looked forward to while participating in the drama of a cricket match.  

Yes, Dravid was not just in love with the game of cricket, but also equally intensely with his craft – the Dravidian art of batting. Right from the time he took guard, the technician in him took over. Everything -- his stance, the tap of the bat as the bowler ran into bowl, the shuffle, the movement of his hands and legs, hand-eye coordination, timing, ability to leave the ball and duck, the classical cover drive and straight drive, the flick through midwicket, and many more -- had a technical base and batting education attached. It was almost like while many of his colleagues chose to play the game the commercial cinema way, Dravid seemed to have come out of the National School of Drama to practice his craft not in the song and dance way, but in the `boring` but meaningful arena of parallel cinema.

While he shared the same 22 yards with his team-mates, he seemed to be batting on a different wicket, sometimes almost giving a feeling that he did not belong, as his piercing drives would find the fielder, whereas some of the other batsmen would simply hit through the line or even over the top. When they got it right, Dravid looked less talented and unexciting, but when they got out and Dravid pulled the team out of yet another crisis, his copybook style and classical batsmanship got vindicated. 

Others often inspired, but Dravid mostly educated. He belonged to a genre of batsmen who survived the rigours of long years of test cricket ultimately not just because of their talent and reflexes, but because of the school of batsmanship they represented. Reflex players will always be more exciting to watch, but due to lack of a game based on technique, they may be found wanting when their reflexes slow down. Technique is an insurance against a longish period of decline, which every sportsman and every human being in life goes through. If you are technically correct, you can limit the damage and even bounce back with greater competence.

Dravid has left cricket, but has left behind a legacy of batsmanship where he taught the world, well left is also well played!

Take a bow, Rahul Dravid.    

Sachin Tendulkar -- History, Historic, Hysteric

Sachin Tendulkar  -- History, Historic, Hysteric

On the day of the Union Budget, Sachin resolves one of the biggest contemporary national problems – his 100^th 100 

None of the pumped up reactions after reaching a sport’s greatest milestone. Just a grateful look at the bat that scored that all important 100^th run, an intense look towards the heaven, and the customary but very important acknowledgements to his team-mates and spectators. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar was as dignified in glory as he was when under intense pressure for the last twelve months to satiate the appetite of a record crazy nation.

What is it about great people that they can come back ever so strongly to answer back critics or doubters in the same manner in which they built their credibility in the first place – through professional excellence? Sachin belongs to a nation which has a poor ability to handle failure. A typical Indian reaction to failure is apathy, a sense of resignation, and bitterness towards self and others who let them down on their expectations. Sachin, over 22 years of his international career has seen it all – the highs, the lows, extreme adulation and extreme criticism. We are a country which can create an incredible aura around people, and incredibly, even before they figure out the reason behind the exaggerated sense of adulation, `put them in their place`. So, no wonder that Sachin’s external demeanor was one of quiet acceptance, though internally, he would have been relieved and happy like perhaps never before in his life. 

In the past year, Sachin had `failed` not just by his standards, but more by the standards the nation’s media and people had set for him when he scored his 99^th international hundred in the 2011 World Cup. There ensued a raging debate regarding whether the nation’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, should be conferred on him. The whole nation got talking on the 100th 100 as well as the Bharat Ratna, except one man – Tendulkar himself. He had seen it all. He perhaps knew he was just a few failures away from being demonized, and that’s what happened; he failed over twelve months – not given as a sanction to people like Tendulkar who feed the nation with success way beyond their own expectations. But ironically, Sachin, through his achievements seemed to have constructed a `demon of success`, which he himself found difficult to deal with in the past year. 

But there is no denying that the longish wait for the 100^th 100 had the nation breathing uneasy. It had become a problem of monumental proportions. There seemed something seriously missing in the daily life of India. In terms of daily life, which is full of struggle in our country for lakhs of people, Sachin’s 100^th ton is a tonic which is all three -- history, historic, and hysteric. He has just added himself to the list of immortals who rule the consciousness of the country. He was already an institution, but he has now perhaps placed himself in a league of people like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Lata Mangeshkar and Amitabh Bachchan who reached a summit in life where no man may ever reach.  

But if you think the nation is finished expecting things from Sachin, wait a minute! He still has unfinished business. Today, he scored his 49^th One Day International (ODI) hundred. Waiting for his 50^th, which will make it 50 in test matches and 50 in ODIs. A perfect icing on the cake I suppose! 

Congrats Sachin, Congrats India.

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.