Nidra

Let me start with a confession – I walked out of the theatre in quite an ambivalent state of mind after watching Siddharth Bharathan’s Nidra. I suppose I was kind of upset and angry but still unclear whether the anger was with the movie or with what the movie told me. Some movies talk to you consciously – they tell you things on the face and make you react instantly while some others work at a sub-conscious level – you don’t necessarily know what the movie meant to you, atleast initially. Probably Nidra has such an impact…

I haven’t watched Bharathan’s original Nidra; in fact, not even heard of the movie, so there are no comparisons that I can make. On second thoughts, it is not even needed – every movie has to talk for itself and not for it is supposed to stand for. Nidra is about a man’s descent into a world of insanity, watched helplessly by his wife and the society as it looks at him half in jest and half in bewilderment at a condition that they don’t understand or even don’t want to understand. It isn't an exploration of what drives him into this quagmire but an observation of how he sinks continuously into it with no support.

In the initial scenes, we are told that Raju (Siddharth) has had a past where he suffered from a mental illness after the death of his mother. The doctor Vijay Menon (who played Raju in Bharathan’s original movie) explains it as a feeling of extreme paranoia where the character is extremely fearful of everything around him and cannot trust anyone. He sees his brother and friends as aggressors who interfere in his activities and don’t allow him to live life the way he wants to. He is intelligent and talented but there is no one who understands or appreciates him; his scholarship abroad or money spent on projects are only to ensure that he does not go berserk.

Aswathy (Rima Kallingal) enters into this world - maybe as a substitute for his mother – and is at once sucked into the vortex of this issue. Now, I did wish that the movie explored the mother-son relationship more so that we can try to understand his anxieties more but it leaves that idea to our imagination. Raju needs love to protect him from the outside world that his mother may have provided for earlier and now his wife hoped to do but she’s alone in shielding him from emotional taunts of the society. They share a passionate and sensuous relationship and her support helps him to sail in the boat of normalcy for some time. She throws in a cloak of protection on a couple of occasions and hopes against hope that things would change, but they go worse till it hits rock bottom.

She realizes that Raju lives in a different world in the bed of Nature, away from the human population. Raju’s idyllic land is an allegory for a place where Man and animals live together and there is no fear of each other (even a snake is seen as harmless in his eyes) unlike the real world where he faces being hounded by hundreds of eyes all gunning from him. It’s probably true that there is more to be afraid of the human world with all its avarice and terror than the rest of the universe which goes about its life obeying the laws of Nature.

Raju is ultra-sensitive, which is a disqualification in a world that puts a premium on being tough and street smart (killer instinct as we take pride in saying). Every glance or remark is interpreted by his muddled mind as an attempt to chain him down and push him further into a state of madness. But there is a thin line between sanity and insanity and at times, it is difficult to separate the two and then the mind asks the question who is truly insane – someone who seeks to destroy the tranquility of Nature forest or somebody who protects it and finds peace within it. In one of the scenes, when his anger reaches a crescendo, he is even willing to kill but even then a part of his sub-conscious mind prevents him from doing so.

The movie largely operates from his view point and so everything is mostly seen as a violation of his freedom. His piece of land which is decorated with books and his inventions is far away from human existence and the only place where he can find his peace of mind. Through Sameer Thahir’s lens and Prashant Pillai's BGM, Chalakudy is exotic but there is a deliberate attempt to shoot Raju’s world in all its romantic colours to magnify the rift between his house and the world that he seeks refuge in and also raise a concern towards environmental degradation.

There are two worlds in the movie and in Raju’s mind – his sane secure free world and the insane greedy world inhabited by the rest of the populace. There is a stretch of water that separates the two worlds and the twain can never meet; eventually, when his place is being ripped apart, the dam of emotions breaks loose and it comes to a point of no return. There is bound to be an element of ambiguity and lack of clarity when a movie deals with a subject that it cannot totally explain and I'm willing to give benefit of doubt to Siddharth when we find ourselves lost at times in the movie.

Siddharth looks and plays his part as the mentally-disturbed Raju but I think he has the makings of a better director than an actor and the audience may connect to the character with a better performer. He is raw and angry inside but I was searching for a sense of fear and insecurity that I did not find in him. I wanted to empathize with Raju but could not get myself to do that – the repeated bouts of insanity and our necessity to rationalize every act makes it difficult to take that extra leap of faith, I suppose. Rima shakes off her normal urban sophistication and gets down to playing an anxious wife, unable to handle her husband’s frequent outbursts. She pleads, cajoles and compels him to listen to her and make him understand his follies but the panacea is not so simple.

Even though the film plays out through Raju’s viewpoint largely, it does not isolate the rest of the cast as negative. His brother and relatives do not get along with him well but there is a concern that is shown between them and we are not looking at a black-and-white divide between a man and his greedy family. They try to help him out at times and are tolerant of his unusual behaviour but are equally weary about it. The family is helpless and after a point of time desperate to turn its back towards him but this is also due to their inability to handle the situation – after all, it is not just the patient who struggles but also his near and dear ones in these circumstances.

Mental illness is a theme that people are not very uncomfortable talking about – maybe if you paint it as a melodramatic piece as Blessy's Thanmatra did, they find it easier to handle. If you can manipulate the audience and get them to sympathize with the character and get a good actor to play the part, most of the work is done. But if it is raw, disturbing and inexplicable, we don’t want to face it; we want to rationalize it but putting on a logical cap in a world where logic has no role to play makes it difficult to appreciate the problem. No one really knows for sure what causes mental illness, and why it happens or what is its cure. Is it genetic, social, circumstantial, sheer grit or something else?

From an audience perspective, the deal breaker is their lack of emotional investment in Raju's character. In Thanmatra, we are exposed to Ramesan Nair's aspirations and are involved at multiple levels with his family, his work and his attempts to get his son to fulfill his dreams. In Sibi Malayil's gut wrenching Thaniyavarthanam, we relate to Balan Mash's victimization as he is pushed to the edge of his sane self (remember the poignant scene where the students are scared of him in the school) and we root for him in all his suffering.

Or think of Lohithadas' brilliant debut Bhoothakannadi where Vidyadharan's mind, within the
claustrophobic walls of the prison, is unable to differentiate between the real world and an external fantasy. We know his fears are exaggerated and irrational but the tragedy plays in our minds too as we sense the wilderness of his mind. There are defining moments in these movies that we hold close to our heart, enabling us to transcend their state of mind. But to many of us watching Raju's agony, he comes across as a remote figure with little sense of his emotional upheaval and the trials and tribulations in his mind - maybe it is deliberately done but I think you can only empathize with the character when you know him sufficiently enough.

As someone who has seen mental illness from a very close range, it is difficult for me to look at the issue in its entire sense of objectivity. There are memories that play back to and froth and it is difficult to express that anguish on the wider lens and it is understandable why people find it difficult to sit through a movie like Nidra. There is no redeeming factor and no prescription for the issue and you could argue that it is pointless to indulge in self-flagellation. It’s difficult to say what I felt about the movie even now – maybe it was disturbing is a good enough thought - and I don't expect too many people to warm themselves to it….

PS: Also sharing a few thoughts here on mental illness that I had written a few years back as I observed it from close quarters….

Originally published in MadAboutMoviez - http://madaboutmoviez.com/2012/03/13/nidra-2012-movie-review-through-the-eyes-of-raju/

Kaiyoppu

Ranjith was a name synonymous with larger than life super star personas and macho characters until a low budget film named Kaiyoppu came by. Yes, Nandhanam and Mizhi Randilum were soft romantic movies which went against the audience perception of the man but these were largely conventional works rooted in a familiar Kerala cinema milieu. It was Kaiyoppu that broke away from the Ranjith school of film making and made him a director whose craft begged to be taken seriously.

Kaiyoppu positions itself primarily as a creative struggle engulfing the protagonist Balachandran’s life as he overcomes his writer’s block. He is on the threshold of completing a novel that is expected to change the face of Malayalam literature but his mind goes blank and he is unable to complete the novel.

As his mind wavers in a sense of restlessness and frustration, he meets Sivadasan (Mukesh), a struggling publisher who is in search of a novel that can help his company to stay afloat. His book house Kilippattu Books survives primarily on school children guide books, cookery and environment books but his love for literature leads him to Balan. Sivadasan realizes the potential of the novel and nudges him to complete it with the help of Balan’s erstwhile lover, Padma (Khushboo).

The writer’s block serves as a stumbling block for the emotions that are embedded deep inside him; the words that have deserted him slowly return to his grasp as the tender relationship between two very lonely individuals, connected by the world of books, warms up. Padma, his college sweetheart, has gone through a divorce after an unhappy marriage but philosophically accepts the failure (Manassu ozhinju veedu pole shantham she says after the divorce) while Balan has never got around to get married in his struggle for livelihood. This is in sharp contrast to the viplava dampathi kilikal Sivadasan and Lalitha (Neena Kurup) who elope and get married and start a publishing house with the gold that Lalitha steals from her home while running away.

Balan is a loner who owns neither a mobile nor a clock and lives in a sense of timelessness with only his books for company. He lives in a small lodge surrounding himself with the sweet smell of books but works as an accountant in a fertilizer factory amidst the stench of heaps of filth and garbage. He has no great notions about his literary ability; in a nice little scene, Sivadasan wakes him up late at night to praise him for his brilliant work but realizes that Balan has scarcely registered the approbation and has gone to sleep again. Even when writer CP Vasudevan gushes about his work, he is reluctant to bask under the accolades.

When Balan and Padma bond again after many years through a series of phone conversations, they realise that the fires of the past may have been extinguished but the smoke that emanates from it has not yet died. A romance that was quietly shelved away due to class differences about two decades back remains just as fresh, without a hint of remorse from the past. As they open up to each other, the initial doubts vanish (Balachandran becomes Balettan within minutes) and they realize that they have a second chance to fill their moments of solitude with love.

The romance is delicate and mature befitting the age of the protagonists and the soft music that plays whenever they converse tugs at our heart strings gently. The silent, introvert Balan jokes and laughs in her presence while she opens herself to him about her failed marriage without a trace of uneasiness; no great words are exchanged but the glow on their faces says it all. In a delightfully composed song sequence, Ranjith pays a tribute to Talat Mehmood's haunting melody Jalte Hain Jiske Liye by getting Padma to sing the same song on phone just as Sunil Dutt had sung the original song to Nutan in Sujata; the voice that sings has aged but so have the ears that hear the song.

Towards the end when he plays a Good Samaritan and sells his land to fund a poor Muslim girl’s operation, Balan refers to this act as a proclamation of his new-found independence. He has found his Muse and is no longer constrained by geographical boundaries because his mind is now free. He has Padma by his side and the world looks differently through this perspective. It is to Ranjith’s credit that he re-discovers Khushboo who has a quiet elegance and dignity that ensures that both the characters are evenly matched. (I can only think of Urvashi and Khushboo who can still hold their own against the 'aging' superstars and appear convincing for that age.)  

While the writer’s block forms the crux of the movie, Kaiyoppu also strives to be a gentle critique on Kerala society and the social and culture norms that have made us what we are. Without being preachy, the movie sets an ambitious social agenda for itself, hinting quietly at the Malayali’s attitudes towards literature, marriage, roots and the terror around him. It takes potshots at the Kerala society with its skimming observations on politics, suicide and alcoholism. We have given up our literary moorings and embraced technology (Mobile phone illatha Malayali parayunna pole rare aayi pustakam vayikkuna Malayali) and have no time to indulge in the world of books. All that matters is money and even if sleaze makes money, then we are glad to embrace it (Aminnu paal kondu paysam vere undakki vilkunna bheekara Malayaliyude specimen).

Ranjith’s scenarist roots are the foundations of his work and so Kaiyoppu is largely a literary film with the writing leaning on to the world of literature for support, which is probably the reason why the movie is not scripted by him but by a writer like Ambikasuthan Mangad (in fact this is the only movie which he has directed but not scripted). 'Writer's block' is a term bandied about frequently but it must have been a challenge for a writer to sense of vacuum that he finds himself in. It is very easy for a movie that is set in a literary atmosphere to walk into a trap of self-importance and masquerade as serious cinema where characters start speaking in a verbose and complicated manner, filled with 'meaningless' pauses.The initial scenes involving CP and Balan discussing Pamuk or people in a road stall discussing Israel-US relations makes you wonder whether the movie is trying too hard take itself very seriously, but thankfully Ranjith is aware that he has a story to tell us.

Nevertheless, the essence of literature remains in the dialogues; sample the scene when Balan tells Padma that his dedication to her is not a A Hundred Years of Solitude or when Sivadasan compares their destiny to Shelley's or when even the caretaker Babu talks about Jameela’s autobiography – the references are not forced but flow along with the overall theme. But I find it curious that most of the literary references are to foreign writers only and the Malayalam sahitya world is given a miss. Maybe the idea was not restrict the concept to a local milieu but give it a more universal feel.

The movie falters in the last 15 or so minutes when it tries to cleave in a terror angle into the plot. On paper, the twist in the plot is possibly appealing but when translated onto the big screen, it finds itself on a slippery ground. The tone of the movie changes abruptly to a harsher one but I don’t think that the transition comes through as smoothly on screen. Wasn't there an attempt to thrust in a moral in a plot that did not need one?

Mammooty is impressive as the struggling writer but looks out of place and almost unsure on how to pull off this last moment twist by Ranjith and it spoils the texture of a carefully crafted movie that was walking unhurriedly towards its destination. When Balan is manhandled by the cops and he breaks into some sort of a soliloquy, it looks like a contrived attempt to reach out to the audience and gain their sympathy. For somebody who’s written a novel that Sivadasan describes as karutha haasyathinte itihaasam (a nod to O V Vijayan’s Dharmapuranam?), Balan comes across as a rather naive character who’s not at ease with the ways of the world, especially in the final scenes.

These are probably minor quibbles in a movie which was a landmark movie for Ranjith and his first step in his journey to re-invent himself. When Balan quotes Pamuk and says I read a book one day and my whole life was changed, was it Ranjith speaking to us explaining what prompted him to alter his cinematic style?


Originally published in MadAboutMoviez- http://madaboutmoviez.com/2012/03/05/kaiyoppu-writer-director-ranjiths-turnaround-film/

Notes from a Workshop on Film Criticism

Being alone in Maximum City gives you sometimes the time to indulge in passions that you may not do so otherwise. Last weekend, I found myself enrolled in a 2 day Workshop on Film Criticism, conducted by popular literary and film blogger Jai Arjun Singh, organized as part of the annual Kala Ghoda Art Festival. So, I have attempted to jot down a few of the ideas that we academically debated (yes, cinema and academics!). Some of the thoughts have just been left hanging without taking them into any conclusion...

What is the role of a film reviewer? If you think that people are going to watch or atleast judge movies simply based on what you write, you are taking a trip down the ego lane. There are hundreds of opinions floating around in social networks, even before you have got down to the basic task of watching the movie. Beyond the courtesy of providing a plot summary and casting arbitrary iron clad judgments on the movie, the reader needs to be offered something more substantial. What you experience, at a normal and subliminal level, in those few hours when you see the movie and decide to put it on paper is a valued perspective that can be communicated by you and you alone.

There is no absolute movie review – the same movie that cast a spell on you earlier may leave you embarrassed when seen a few years later. Many movies fare poorly in theatres but become classics later on through the DVD circuit like The Shawshank Redemption and Hotel Rwanda while many others lose their sheen over a period of time (American Beauty?). An experiment like Psycho was largely ignored by critics initially but became a cult-movie primarily because of the positive buzz it generated among the New Wave French Directors of the 60s. Expecting reviewers to know all is a fallacy; the system of star ratings is primarily for customer consumption and cannot be an indicator of the artistic merits of a movie.

Reviews will always be subjective but at the end of the day, good writing is fundamental to it. When a motion picture shakes the fluids in your cerebrum, can you capture that zigzag movement of the brain cells and translate that into words that people can relate to or better still, visualize? Does a particular shot remind you or tell you of something that you’d want to communicate with the reader? On many an occasion, you want the movie to tell you what you wish to hear instead of trying to interpret what the director wants to tell us (sub-textual interpretation as Jai put it), forgetting that you are not its creator.

But it goes beyond the choice of right words; it requires the ability to empathize with the subject. When a reviewer of Khalid Mohammad’s stature goes berserk and vitriolic in his review - actually tirade -  against Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking, it defeats the very purpose of the exercise. His review talks so little about the movie and is extremely caustic and vindictive about the film maker, with no apparent interest in the movie. It’s just so easy to trash a movie, ridicule it and you’d easily find people cheering from the sidelines if you find the right words to tickle the reader’s funny bone.

How many times do you hear reviewers talk blandly about a mediocre script or a poor performance without actually qualifying their comments with any observations? Cinema being an egalitarian medium attracts all kinds of people who want to offer their wisdom for whatever it is worth. Since we rarely discuss cinema on the basis of its craft unless you are a serious drab academician, a lot of the criticism is purely focused on the story and dialogues and very less on the story-telling technique. Is it possible that a certain story can never be made into a good movie? People will tell you that there are just 7-8 basic plots in the world and every story is fabricated from these and if you agree with this cliché, it leaves the auteur very less space to manoeuvre with the plot. However, Shakespeare dramas have been adopted in celluloid by directors as diverse as Kurusawa, Vishal Bharadwaj, Polanski and Jayaraj and each has brought a different sensibility to the same basic story. If a film cannot tell you anything new that its source has already done, then why make the movie at all?

In that context, look at Gus Van Sant’s Psycho which is the closest shot-by-shot remake of the original but it was panned by critics. Roger Ebert writes ‘..it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.’ Even Van Sant admitted that it was an experiment that proved that no one can really copy a film exactly the same way as the original but his attempt must be seen as a creative rather than a commercial endeavour.

Typical reviews organize a review into basic elements like acting, cinematography, script etc and discuss these as stand-alone threads.  However, they act in unison and need to be understood as the sum total of the impact created rather than as islands of performance. A movie like Urumi with Santosh Sivan at its helm sparkles through his lens but it is so narcissistic that it forgets that it has a story to tell. A more positive example that Jai referred to was George C Scott’s performance in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove; Kubrick and editor Anthony Harvey while picturising scenes on George C. Scott who acts as General Buck, snipped his scenes just before he completed each of his shots making the performance abrupt and creating a more cartoonish character than was intended in the performance. The famous shower murder scene in Psycho was pictured as 70-90 separate shots and stitched together on the editing board to give the scene a gory feel which does not exist when the same scene is seen in slow-motion. Would Scott’s performance or the shower scene have had the same impact without the editor’s scissors at work?

Cinema is essentially a visual medium (pure cinema as Hitchcock called it) and what you see or even sometimes don’t see on the screen plays on the senses of the viewer in a subliminal fashion. Hitchcock uses visual echoes in Psycho (as Jai mentioned) to draw a parallel to the two main characters –similar gestures or scenes playing out at different intervals that evoke a déjà vu. The repeated stabbing of Marion vis-a-vis the movement of the windshields in her car, the camera zooming into Bates’ eyes as he peers into her room and zooming out of her eye as her cold body lies in the shower and similarity of their gestures like their palm movements. It is arguable whether the director ever meant to provide such an interpretation and if there is any significance in this interpretation. Well, art, at a basic level, can be reduced to a mathematical theorem but the beauty of it is not just in the logic but in the aesthetics surrounding it. A film is more than a story told at a superficial level - its ideas are ingrained in the way it is composed. 

Form and content cannot be split and discussed separately – the content is the base template and the form comprises the layers that are put on it to give it a feel that is needed. Take for instance, Christopher Nolan’s Memento whose talking point was the way the entire movie plays backwards. The treatment of the movie leaves the viewer confounded and unsure of what to expect next but this puts him at a similar wavelength with the character who is supposed to suffer from short term memory loss in the film. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the Dogma style, followed by certain auteurs in Denmark, which aimed at purifying film making by refusing expensive and spectacular special effects, post-production modifications and other technical gimmicks and concentrating on the story and the actors' performances. This is in stark contrast to the world of Goddard or Aravindan where the audience is confounded as to what the director means.

Critics are generally kinder towards subjects that tackle real life stories but it is a moot point whether realism is class specific and only consists of cinema that tells stories reeking of poverty and small town crimes. If a Wake Up Sid or Aisha shed a few of its props, would we be kind enough to also refer to it as realistic? Yes, a movie bred in a real location or a real story speaks to viewers easily but a critic should view a film from a prism of its existence and not what he views as logical reality. A Lord of the Rings cannot be dismissed just because it is a science fiction movie and not grounded in our definitions of reality. But then is there even a need to judge a movie based on whether it is realistic or not? If literature is not bound by these invisible norms, why strangle cinema with these chains?

Should a reviewer judge a movie by the merits of the movie alone or consider even the intent of the film maker? The German movie Triumph of the Will (1935) is a Nazi propaganda movie made by Leni Riefenstahl. Her innovative techniques earned the movie immense acclaim but the movie poses a classic question of the contest between art and morality: Is there such a thing as pure art, or does all art make a statement? After viewing the controversial film Kick-Ass which was lauded by several critics, Roger Ebert says - Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? When kids in the age range of this movie's home video audience are shooting one another everyday in America, that kind of stops being funny. At a much lower level, the same criticism can also be applied to the Godfather series which unabashedly celebrates the gangster cult (those were my impressions when I saw the movie as a kid). I suppose a reviewer must analyze a movie for its craft but at the same time, make his stand clear on what he thinks of the intent of the movie too - they cannot be divorced from each other.

Finally, before sitting on judgment on others, it is imperative to love cinema. Restricting yourself to a certain type of cinema probably narrows your vision of what constitutes good cinema, assuming that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ movies exist separately as if in the classic definition of Yin and Yang. We have sub-consciously classified cinema that talks about poverty, suffering, conflicts and other ‘larger’ serious issues as good cinema and movies that tickle our funny and action bones and talk about ‘lesser’ emotions like love as poor cousins who receive our love but not respect. I have never got around to this philosophy of watching all kinds of movies and been partial to a certain genre, unlike another friend and fellow blogger who is game for all brands of cinema. The first step to appreciate the world of cinema possibly is to be open about it -From Fellini to Ray to Manmohan Desai to Sathyan Anthikad!

Image courtesy: http://rickgershman.com/2011/03/20/red-riding-hood-freedom-of-speech-and-curious-interpretations-thereof/

Soup Boys Down Under

With the Indian cricket fan screaming from the rooftops of social networks and baying for the blood of the humbled Indian cricketer, the UPA Government finally caved in and formed an expert committee to probe into the pathetic performance of the Men in Blue in Australia. Disrupting the monthly aestivation period of the MPs, an emergency session of the Parliament was called despite threats from Agent Fog and Agent Snow, and it was unanimously agreed through a voice vote that while cricket will take its own course, the Parliament must do what it is expected to do – setup committees.

A four member working group was setup in due haste with Rahul Gandhi as the Chairperson and self-nominated loud mouths Suhel Seth, Asaduddin Owaisi and Arindam Chaudhari as its members. Suhel’s ability to mumble incessantly, when placed in front of a TV camera or a microphone, on sensitive topics like the mating habits of ostriches or the folk dances of Andaman was considered a plus point. Owaisi’s standing as a modern rabid fanatic Muslim who swears by his beard and is inspired by the gentle Taliban provided the secular perspective that Governmental committees needed while Arindam's  reputation which soared after the success of his classic Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch (described by The New Yorker as a work of post-modern surrealistic pastiche existential angst) gave the committee the intellectual celebrity quotient that it needed to make it acceptable to gossip hungry audience, who swore by the Mumbai Mirror.

In response to critics questioning Rahul Gandhi’s cricketing acumen to head this panel, Congress spokeswoman Renuka Chowdary, in her animated petite coquettish style, bloviated that Rahul was a natural leader and had captained the Toddlers United when it toured Guinea-Bissau as part of his granny’s efforts to promote democracy in the mid-70s. Unfortunately, since no statistics were available in Cricinfo to prove this claim, this could not be verified prompting Arun Jaitley to remark that Rahul Gs chequered career as a batsman was only limited to ducking Opposition bouncers and he was as clueless about the sport as Katrina Kaif was about acting.        

Nevertheless, acting with an exaggerated sense of responsibility, the committee (christened Kingfisher India Against Cricket or IAC in short) made a trip to Napier immediately after the Perth debacle. An ocean facing villa was taken on rent with a facility to travel daily to Australia to carry out the investigation; critics who pointed out they were too far away to do any meaningful work were scoffed at by angry Mumbaikars who said that it takes more time to travel from Virar to Churchgate and such an opinion was an insult to the famed resilience of the Marathi Manus.

The month long secret assignment by the IAC was covered extensively by the local news channels and India’s biggest entertainment channel Times Now. Videos of the panel members in various strip bars and pubs were widely circulated on YouTube, demonstrating the serious nature of the trip. The committee went around the length and breadth of Australia, spoke to the Twitterati, fans and the cricketers themselves and finally returned home to a grand welcome. Fearing the ire of the ever vigilant Election Commission, they were immediately frisked away by Home Ministry officials at the Delhi Airport to ensure that no information was leaked to the public.

Nevertheless, uninformed sources Wikileaks revealed that a copy of the slim 700 page report had found its way mysteriously into the lap of Arnab Goswami, the barking powerhouse conscience of the Indian media. We managed to bribe Arnab Sir and get a copy of the glossy looking report titled Soup Boys Down Under with a cover page photo of Dhoni's boys regaling themselves in a drunken stupor (The Hangover?) and Clarke pulling the strings (of his guitar) to the tune of Why this Kolaveri, Mite (sic)?

Tendulkar’s perennial wait for his 100^th ton received wide coverage in the report. The IAC analyzed hundreds of videos of SRT, probed through all the widely trending discussions on Twitter, spoke to Aussie fans high on beer and finally concluded that there was an international conspiracy behind this (specifically not an Italian hand). As a one man entertainment industry who still caused dedicated office goers like 'Kodali' Dasan and 'Kattapurathu' Vilasini to bunk work and watch Test Cricket, there was wide spread fear that the moment, the ton-ton was reached, he would retire, people would switch off TV sets and start living normal lives and even be misled by the senile St. Anna.

The report suggested a cartel comprising democratic governments and media channels had paid off cricket boards across countries to prevent this catastrophe from happening in the cricket world. The IAC, however, recommended that SRT must be given an honorary ton, his name changed to Ton-dulkar and gifted a Bharat Ratna so that he can ride to the sunset gracefully.

It branded the seniors of the team as the Axis of Discontent who were determined not to contribute in Australia due to jealousy in the team over the share of brand endorsements that the captain had captured which was totally disproportionate to his abject dismal performances. Plotting a bewildering assortment of graphs and curves that would put even Vidya 'Entertainment' Balan to shame, the report showed how the seniors spent more time planning their post-retirement financial strategy than the actual playing strategy. The IAC also lambasted the selectors for modeling the team on a Brahmin Bania party like the BJP with minimum minority representation and suggested that they follow the England model which had a global all inclusive multi-racial line up.

The IAC absolved the team of its inability to face the rising ball, saying that that if the Finance Minister had no clue on how to handle rising interest rates, how could you single out the Indian team for a similar folly? The report attributed the lethargy shown by the team on the field to poor dietary practices and suggested that the solution to this may lie in Arindam Chaudhari's forthcoming book Count Your Wickets Before They Fall. The book advocates an Arindam diet comprising Beef and Toad Legs Soup, concocted with  aphrodisiacs from China (can't just ignore those bu****s) and sprinkled with cow urine to help cricketers to rise to the occasion and deliver; this delicacy is reportedly being served in IIPM canteens (except in Madhya Pradesh) to encourage students to dream beyond the IIMs. 

The report also underlined the importance of following the stars in the sky than in the team while deciding on cricket schedules. Quoting renowned astrologer Attukal Radhakrishnan, it said that the tour had been played when the Saturn was in retrograde in the 7th House – an inauspicious time to travel abroad. It recommended that a full time astrologer should be part of the Board so that such mistakes do not happen again. Additionally, it was pointed out that playing an important Test Series in the midst of the World Go Karting Championship was a blunder (especially with some of the cricketers having stakes in it) and the Board had not done its homework properly while preparing the itinerary.

To improve the team morale, the IAC report made several other recommendations including banning all Indian cricket jokes in the social space, doing away with post-match press conferences when the team loses, inclusion of the cricket team under the Janlokpal to ensure accountability (to placate the real IAC members  miffed at not being nominated to the panel), increasing the team strength to include a PR Manager, an investment adviser and a fashion consultant to take care of the interests of the players and present them in proper light, cross-culture training for youngsters like Kohli and Ishant Sharma (they had assumed that the middle finger salute was a way to cheer crowds in this part of the world) and very importantly, recalling Poonam Pandey as the Brand Ambassador of the team (Fans may recall her inspiring presence in the World Cup but since it is widely believed that she only exists virtually, this may not be possible to implement).

An additional point was added in fine print at the bottom of the report recommending that the IAC be made a Constitutional body and allowed to tag along with the team in all future foreign junkets. Rumours suggest that this may be the only recommendation that will be accepted when the report is tabled in the House since Constitutional bodies are widely accepted as the only Game Changers in this country. Also, the general opinion is that after plummeting to such depths, we can only go up now, as Virat Kohli had indicated so gracefully to the Sydney crowd. 

The report contents are too damaging to reveal and so only selective portions of the report have been leaked here; readers may keep in mind that care is also being taken not to hurt the sentiments of the Loyal Indian Cricket Fan –a species that is rap(b)idly going extinct.  Since most of the report talks about either Owaisi defending Salman Rushdie's right to offend the Prophet or Suhel Seth’s discovery of the promiscuous nature of Australian women or Arindam Chaudhari’s management quotes, we used our discretion and decided to publish only the cricketing facts and be loyal to the oldest profession in the world………. journalism. 


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A Question of Food Security

Amidst all the brouhaha of the Lokpal Bill, the UPA Govt has introduced arguably an ultra-ambitious food security programme that strives to put food into the thalis of lakhs of famished Indians. The Bill was introduced in the Parliament and referred to the Standing Committee immediately. It has far reaching implications but has not attracted sufficient national attention or media eye balls, like the Lokpal, maybe because it deals with hunger – a theme that has lesser TRPs.

So what does the National Food Security Bill provide for? The present draft of the Bill seeks to provide legal entitlement of food grain to 75% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population.  Eligible households will be divided into two categories – priority and general – wherein the priority group will consist of atleast 46 percent of the rural population and 28 percent of the urban population. BPL (priority) families will be entitled to a monthly provision of 7 kg food grain per person and APL (general) families will be eligible to 3 kg per person, at half the Minimum Support Price. The 7 kg will comprise rice for Rs 3 /kg, wheat for Rs 2/kg and coarse grains for Re 1/kg.

In addition to this, the bill envisages maternity benefit of 1000 Rs per month for 6 months for pregnant women and lactating mothers, free or affordable meals to destitute, homeless and disaster-affected persons and nutritional meals for children upto 14 years. In effect, this would translate subsidies worth almost Rs 1 lakh crore for close to 75% of our population (an additional cost of 40,000 crore over the existing food subsidy Bill of 60,000 crore, making it 1.25% of the GDP.

The Bill in its current form looks like a Utopian drug that doctors would like to administer to a dying patient so that he is up the next day.  The moral imperative behind such a law is agreed to by everyone; a country with 45% malnourished children and a lowly ranking of 66 among 88 countries on the World Hunger Index, below even sub-Saharan countries is a pretty damning statistic! The problem of hunger is a national shame and so while we must be careful of the fiscal implications of such a solution, a decision cannot be driven by economics alone – what is the price that we can pay for a human who dies of hunger?

To quote Sainath -

The corporate giveaway in the current Indian budget is 18-19 billion dollars in direct income tax and if you add other corporate concessions under excise and customs, it crosses over a hundred billion US dollars. According to UNDP, that’s the amount you require every year to solve all the basic problems of the human race. But the same Indian budget cuts 4,500 million rupees from food security. Last year the same amount, nearly 10,000 million rupees had disappeared in 24 months from food subsidies in a country which has the largest number of hungry people in the world.

The primary concern of the Bill deals with identification of the target groups to whom the scheme is to be directed at. Umpteen committees like the Tendulkar Committee, NC Saxena Committee, the Planning Commission (remember the 32 Rs starvation line) and other smaller groups have come up with figures which quote different definitions of what it means to be poor in this country. The Bill has left it to the wisdom of the Govt and the Parliament to sort this out but the experience of the Lokpal does not indicate that the Parliament has any Solomons to provide solutions. Until we really know the quantum of people to whom the scheme is targeted, the real cost and strategy required to handle this cannot be estimated.

Nandan Nilekani’s UID Project (which still has no Parliamentary law to back it) has run into rough weather and the Standing Committee on Finance has come down heavily on it for being a badly designed scheme with no clear objectives. The Home Minister is not comfortable with its working and the socio-economic and caste census to determine eligibility is well behind schedule.

One way out of this target based conundrum suggested by most experts is in looking at the success story of the Universal PDS popularized by Tamil Nadu. Here, population segregation for distribution of grains has been done away with and every family in the state, BPL or not, has a colour-coded card that entitles it to draw rice under PDS with a provision that those under the ‘needy’ category get a larger amount than the others. The task of minimizing diversion and reaching rice to about 2 crore cardholders across 31,439 outlets in 32 districts is being carried out using technological interventions, drawing up innovative fool-proof delivery mechanisms, proper policing, surprise checks and constant reviews, efficient supply chain management system including a GPS tracking of trucks carrying food grains to tackle pilferage and fixing responsibility at each.

The FSB requires large scale foodgrain procurement, storage planning and construction, creation of a distribution system from scratch and strengthening the existing PDS. Currently, the Government procures close to 52 million tonnes of food grains every year and the new entitlement would lead to an enhanced requirement of close to 25 million tonnes. Such a massive exercise of procurement and distribution will be handled by the Food Corporation of India but does it have the capacity and logistics to handle such large volumes? When food grains go rotting every year due to storage problems, where will this additional procurement go?This is assuming that every grain of food procured is actually distributed to the stakeholders - RBI data shows close to 50% leakage in the PDS and corruption estimates of around 20,000 crore every year! Reforming the existing leaking PDS structure is probably a better thing to do than rather than increasing its size beyond controllable limits.

Govt data about a decade back estimates the cost of procuring wheat at 134 Rs/quintal and transportation of the same at 289 Rs – a massive expenditure involved merely in the to and fro movement of food among states! Does the Centre have to be involved in such an activity? Each State must decide the best way to carry out such programmes locally and even here, a decentralized design where the Grama Panchayats can act as the agent to carry out these activities will ensure a lower cost and proper delivery to people. Schemes like free kitchens run by villagers and mid-day meal have done more than any Central driven scheme in handling the issue. States like Chhattisgarh and Gujarat have devised working mechanisms like door step delivery and computerised PDS which can be emulated in the rest of the country.

Alternate solutions in the form of food coupons or cash transfers directly to the needy have also been discussed. Bihar uses a system of food coupons which unfortunately has very little to show because of the corruption nexus between dealers and Govt officers while the cash transfer scheme is largely untested in India. Access to banks and markets is still pretty low in rural India and so the cash transfer is possibly too early an option but it makes sense to run pilots based on these schemes in various regions so that empirical data is present while making a final decision.

There is also a larger question of whether hunger and poverty can be eradicated by legally ensuring dole outs in this manner. The adage of ‘teaching a man to fish rather than giving him fish’ is equally relevant; state interventions which put grains or cash in the hands of struggling individuals can only ensure that they can survive but in the long run, they are  dependent on the State to bail them out. Dipali Rastogi, Commissioner – Food Supplies (M.P.) writing in the Indian Express refers to South Korea’s Saemaeul movement where the Govt strived to eliminate absolute poverty through harnessing the labour of the poor to carry out development and infrastructure projects – something on the lines of NREGS but in the form of incentive-based programmes to fund high capital concrete development of villages instead of beneficiary based entitlements that provide no incentive to tackle the real problem.

There is a danger that any discussion on this Bill will degenerate into a fight between the rich and the poor. It is imperative that we put aside the political background of the Bill and judge it purely what it is trying to implement – right or wrong can be debated even without judging the affiliations of the people who have drafted it. Most of us agree with the fact that it is a well-intentioned bill but then as they say ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ and it needs all the debate it can to make it effective..

There is no readymade consensus strategy to combat this alarming situation – the Left talks about Govt subsidizing food similar to wages for labour in NREGS while the Right talks about growth being the only natural panacea to deal with the problem (actually, looking at the way FDI in Retail and the Pension Bill have gone, the current polity looks too confused to decide on whether they are on the right or left side of the debate). The solution has to lie somewhere in between, similar to all other solutions that India needs to tackle its gargantuan problems.

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Beautiful

Anoop Menon has a fascination for moral anarchy and his movies stretch the elasticity of marriage before releasing it just at the end to allow the institution to survive the stress of the demands on it. Just as an unmarried Stephen Louis (Jayasurya) questions the sanctity of relationships in his column in the women’s magazine he writes for, eligible bachelor Anoop Menon probes it on the larger screen – both of them have the benefit of objectivity while looking at it.

Mohan Lal in Pakal Nakshatrangal is extremely callous and skeptical about relationships, Anoop Menon in Cocktail looks for fun outside marriage while Jayasurya in Beautiful knows that he has no future in a marriage and Praveena suggests that ‘marriage is just a license for an extra-marital affair’.

Stephen Louis is a lonely millionaire who does not allow his physical limitations to undermine his state of mind. He spends most of his life on a wheelchair and knows that the people around him only care for his wealth but reckons that this wealth ensures that he has nothing to worry about. He does not ask for any sympathy and is content to enjoy the beauty of life in his own puckish and voyeuristic style, impishly smiling his way through it.

A chance encounter with a struggling artiste John (Anoop Menon) in a restaurant draws Stephen to him. John needs money to finance his music album and sister's education and he is willing to play the role of a singer-cum-friend but soon, they manage to cement a deep friendship. Their idyllic life goes on without ripples until the beautiful Anjali (Meghna Raj) appears on screen.

And what an appearance she makes! As Stephen and John watch Jayakrishnan visualizing the wet and beautiful frame of Clara amidst heavy rain and Johnson’s haunting music in the immortal Thoovanathumbikal, a rain-drenched Anjali makes an appearance on the screen that leaves them gaping in wonder at the sight of this enticing seductive woman. No words are exchanged and the silence says it all and the director breaks off for the interval followed by a funny reference to the song Anjali Anjali. Picture perfect!!!  

Stephen and John share a wonderfully unique chemistry that is brought to life by the humour in the script. If Thoovanathumbikal brings Anjali, the director uses Sholay to welcome John into his life. The need for such a friendship is conveyed but there are no great words exchanged – it is simply implicit. 

Their lives are a perfect contrast – a carefree differently abled millionaire who has no qualms about what the future has in store for him and a struggling artist who is worried about an uncertain future. One man’s need for company is matched by the other’s need for money but over a period of time, the relationship grows multi-fold and John is reluctant to tap his friend for his fiscal problems. Stephen demands no sympathy and is keen to love life in the company of somebody who can be trusted but John has his own demons to be exorcised.

Now this may have been a melodramatic tear-jerker or even a feel good story of touching friendship but the plot takes a quick turn towards the end turning into a crime caper. The movie has an airiness of a dark, quirky little short story set in a remote little town in Europe. Now transport this backdrop to Kochi and visualize the plot and it works quite well (the feel of a Coen Brothers film sans the violence). 

The climax arrives quite suddenly reminding me of the Hitchcock classic Rope where the whodunit mystery is unraveled in the spur of the moment. (I am not comparing it to any Hitchcock movie but simply recording what I felt while watching the climax). However the film sputters when it tries to manufacture motives for different characters to commit a crime. The director makes a deliberate attempt to mislead the audience by playing up the troubles of the surrounding cast and their actions but this is not convincing. But to be fair to VK Prakash, the whodunit part is not the most important part of the narrative but just a culmination of events that drive the plot that far.

Beautiful lives up to its name as we soak in the splendor of a world that is extremely beautiful. The camera repeatedly stares at Stephen’s spotlessly white mansion which is lashed frequently by the spraying rain; John lives in a furniture shop but the interiors have a classy feel, the lens lingers lovingly over a ravishing Anjali accentuating her beauty, the music wafts gently on the surface (lyrics by Anoop himself) and the rain sweeps across unhurriedly creating an atmosphere that is at once dark but blissful.

It rains incessantly in the movie but the rain is not a disturbance, it builds the atmosphere gently and creates an aura of lush emotions which are unexplored and gentle (whether it is Stephen experiencing rain for the first time or when it caresses Anjali as it comes down). This external beauty is however in contrast to the moral ambiguity of its characters who have their own dilemmas and compulsions in life which mars their beauty.

The movie is sensuous but the sensuousness lurks in the background and the camera does not play Peeping Tom. Witness the scene where Anjali takes bath; we hear the sounds of the door opening and closing and the water splashing, coupled with a brilliantly rendered dialogue (Nee kulichivo da..illa..Njanum kulichitilla..Aval kuli thodangi...). Or when Stephen stares in anticipation at the maid Kanyaka (Tesni Khan in a nice little cameo) mopping the floor, the song Poykayil from Rajashilpi plays on the TV screen; no skin show or double meaning dialogues is used but the intensity of the male desire is conveyed effortlessly.

Beautiful is beautifully written and there is no torrential downpour of words when a drizzle is needed (in contrast to The Dirty Picture); infact, it is quite economical with words. Short pauses, lingering music and a moody background showcase the emotions. John and Anjali share very few words and even when he proposes, it is an abrupt on the spot reaction that is unanticipated. John, Anjali and Stephen form an odd little alliance, with sexuality bursting at its seams and when it finally ruptures at the end, there is a certain irreverence in the way it is accepted.

Through Beautiful, Anoop Menon cocks a snook at morality in Kerala, without being too judgmental. In his own words – ‘There are people who are still strung to obsolete principles of morality, about what should be welcomed and what should be ostracized. But we too have changed with time and the average Malayali too is aware of the switch in social scenario. The Malayali who has read OV Vijayan and VKN knows about all the shades of life. Only a minority sticks to the format of primordial morality and the rest are ready to face life as it is. For me Beautiful is a revolt against the moral norms set by this minority.’

Beautiful is yet another New Generation Malayalam movie, continuing the trend of  Traffic, Salt N’Pepper and Chappa Kurishu – movies that are creating a new grammar in Malayalam cinema..Does the redemption of Malayalam cinema lie in its youth and urban roots?

The Dirty Picture

There is a scene in The Dirty Picture when Reshma urf Silk tells her bête noire director Abraham that movies sell only because of three reasons - ‘Entertainment, Entertainment and  Entertainment’. It is a dialogue that probably symbolizes what director Milan Luthria has in mind when he creates this supposed biopic that would have unraveled the phenomenon called ‘Silk Smitha’.

The Dirty Picture is supposed to be India’s answer to Boogie Nights (atleast that’s what Ekta Kapoor would like us to believe) but it limits itself to Silk's ascent. The movie invests in entertainment – it has loads of punch lines which ensures that every minute the audience has something to holler about and Vidya Balan has the chutzpah to carry out the role with aplomb. But beyond the entertainment, it fails to create an emotional connect to the character – her tragedy is a private one (just like in real life) and it’s a pity that while the director takes interest to show her rise to the top, he is not too keen to help us understand the decline. It’s a bumpy fall that happens suddenly and no explanations are sought – the audience is expected to understand that what goes up comes down one day.

The difficulty of making a movie that speaks in one language and telling a story in another creates an identity crisis. It’s worth wondering whether the movie had to be based in Tamil Nadu when the only thing that seemed Tamil were the posters, hoardings, costumes of the supporting cast and junior artists while all the main characters seemed to revel comfortably in Hindi (the way names like Muthu and Selvaganesh are pronounced is annoying).The movie speaks in Hindi (and I don’t mean the dialogues) and exudes the language in all references which are divorced from the realities of what you see on the screen.

Since a decision was made to base it in the South, the movie attempts to create the the Tamil tinsel world of the 80s. But Milan is not interested in depicting reality; you see it is entertainment that he is after. So, what emerges is essentially Bollywood cloaked in the guise of Tamil cinema and the result is a mishmash that purely entertains. Stereotypes abound and caricatures role the roost but Silk is an exception; she sounds impeccable even in English despite her not so urbane background. Suryakanth (Naseeruddin Shah) is an aging superstar with numerous amorous escapades who looks like a wannabe Quick Gun Murugan and fits to the T perceptions of superstars from the south (Exactly the same issue that I had in the buffoonish depiction of the principal in The 3 Idiots).

Since the movie would be seen primarily by an audience not familiar with the backdrop, it may not matter as a whole. But I’m amused when someone in the audience finds ‘Selvaganesh’ a funny name while someone else thinks that the hero is modeled on Rajinikanth (for no apparent reason but his gun fighting scene). When you have painted all these men as caricatures whom the audience would love to mock at, is there any possibility of objectively analyzing Silk’s actions?

There is no way you can root for any other character and the director is clear that Silk and Silk alone matters in the movie, at the expense of others. When she launches into a tirade against the hypocrisy of people in a stage function, she is suddenly thrust into the role of an embodiment of a heroic woman who takes on the entire industry, which sits uneasily on her. Being brash and street smart maybe, but as a symbol of a victimized woman, it does not cut ice.

In a first half that encapsulates the rise of a plain but ambitious Jane into a starlet with an attitude that borders on arrogance, Vidya pulls of a casting coup and makes us want to believe that Silk actually traversed this path as she rode to the top. In a well-crafted scene, where the audience troops into the theatre just for her song and leaves the hall immediately afterwards, she realizes the hold that she could have on a sex-starved audience (this is immediately after the star Suryakanth tells her that the crowds only care for him and she has no relevance at all). She is gung-ho of her ability to draw audiences to the theatre by her asset display but at the same time realizes that being an actress is just a dream that is beyond her.

The potentially most interesting phase could have been between Silk and the avant garde director Abraham who detests her as somebody who represents everything that is wrong with commercial cinema. But their interaction is fleeting and while the chemistry works we do not know how the transformation happened? Where did the love angle come in suddenly? Is it when Abraham realizes that his cinema never connected to the masses (‘Mein apni hi picture dekhte so gaya') and compromises or was it just an after- thought that emerged when the director realized that Emraan’s character was going nowhere? It was an opportunity to explore this connect between these two persons who worked in two different spectrums of cinema and are separated by social and class perceptions of good and bad but sadly, this thread is left hanging.

The below-the-belt humour is funny but I was tired by the number of over written one-liners inserted in the plot. Why was it necessary to throw in a punch line every time a character spoke; can’t you have people talking normally, without always wanting to suggest something voyeuristic? Being subtle is clearly not the writer’s strength but there is a limit – was every alternate line in the script written in Comic Sans Font Bold and Underlined 36 Size font so that the audience understands that they are watching a Dirty Picture?

Vidya Balan puts in a brave performance that will win her awards (breaking stereotypical roles = winning awards) but the limitations of the script limit the scope of the performance. She learns the lessons of the trade quickly enough and leverages her abilities to the maximum – witness the brazen usage of her sexual power as she stalls the traffic at a journalist’s party. She’s Erin Brockovich magnified in the first half who loses steam after some time because she has nothing more to add; as she spirals rapidly downward (very rapidly in the movie), we are unable to empathize with her character. The cleavage and the boobage are there for people to leer at often (thankfully without being vulgar) but the soul of the performer is missing.

Yes, there are hints of financial problems, competition from other vamps and even other heroines but we are unable to sense the insecurity that she feels. Why does she torpedo a perfectly going life for no apparent reason? We do not invest in her emotionally, especially in the second half, to connect to her demise and so when the end comes, I’m busy looking at my watch rather nonplussed at the death. We know her as a brash uninhibited starlet who is not prone to strategizing but we don’t know her as a person; her fears, her turmoil, her loneliness and the things that would help us understand better are set aside to depict only an external manifestation of her problems.

The tragic life of Silk Smitha needed more attention but just as her screen presence was limited to only the fleeting lust value she gave in a movie, the movie merely skims over her true self. While people discreetly watch scenes that border on titillation (and we are not talking of men alone), we refuse to acknowledge it but are quick to paint these women as loose characters who have no place in our civilized society. Those who exhibit themselves to the audience are sluts but we are ‘honourable’ because we enjoy these only in the darkness. Well, this movie is about ‘entertainment’ and Silk as an entertainment object only, so the tragedy is lost somewhere deep inside..