because every blog must have at least one film review...

... and this film is, imo, better than any of the ones i've watched recently. :-/. 

Usually, i look back on most of the things I  write and I'm  unhappy: either that I've not said what I wanted to say, or it's badly written. And once I write something, I find it very hard to change it around and make it better, so I’m stuck with the twisted thing I have. This review, on the other hand, was written in the heat of having watched hka two years ago, and it’s something I'm quite proud of. I agree with most of the things it says (yes, i know, i wrote it so I ought to agree, but that's too often not the case) and i like the way I've said it. Even if in parts it’s voice is that of the upperstall reviewers I used to like at the time.  And find rather stuffy now. 

I sent it to upperstall, btw, in the glow of having finished it. They probably didn’t like it. :-(

why am i putting this up now? because i was reading what sudhir mishra thought of the film here, and that reminded me of this. 

Hazaaron khwaishein aisi 

I last watched shiny ahuja in the unforgettable sins. Unforgettable because it was, in my experience, the worst film I’ve seen. It took Indian-acting-in-english to the lowest depths in history. So, since the time I heard that he was the actor in hka, I must admit that I did not have very high expectations. Because after all, the leopard does not change his spots. The actor whose tremolo on “you cannot do-o-o-o this to me” sent us into splits, could not very well turn into the next naseeruddin shah. And the claims of the rest of the cast? A smita patil lookalike, and the good-but-not-incredible kay kay.  

So. Given the above, why did I even want to watch this film, you may ask. Well, whatever the reason, I did. And I will be eternally grateful that I did. 

This film is about three college students of my parents generation, and it traces their lives from 1969 upto the Emergency. One (kay kay) goes from radical student leader to a grassroots communist. Another (ahuja) dumps his father’s gandhian ideals to become one of the wheeler-dealers of the license quota permit raj. And the third (chitrangda singh) the love of both their lives, enters into and leaves an unhappy marriage to a drunken Doon school-educated IAS officer. That much on the surface. But where the film departs from the cliché is in the fact that the character I felt the most for is ahuja’s, in spite of the tendency in hindi movies to turn people in search of power into either blinkered pawns or crooks. Ahuja’s character Vikram, is neither. He remains, in spite of the bribes he pays and the power he seeks, a basically decent man. there is none of the blinded-by-mad-power-seeking that hindi movies so love.  

And the girl, Geeta, drawn into a world of village India that she does not understand, has the most to become. She is almost the central character—it is her journey, more than anyone else’s, that the movie has to do with. From her initial unwillingness to throw up her life in delhi, to her going to the villages for love of Siddhart (kay kay) to take up the  “feelgood bourgeois” activity of teaching bihari villagers to read and write, to her final complete conversion to a Cause, is sometimes terrifying, but always brilliantly handled.  

The character I like the least, personally, is that of Siddhant. And this only because he does not appeal to me, neither in his constant claim to the moral high-ground, nor in the ultimate falsity of that claim. But this is not to say that his character is badly drawn or incomplete.  

The supporting cast is equally brilliant. i especially liked yasir malik as siddharth’s father, Mehboob Tyabji. To both vikram and siddharth, this man epitomises Privilege, for entirely different reasons. My love of this character comes from his willingness to accept, however reluctantly, his son’s radical tendencies, as different as they are from his own.  

In the cases of both male charcters, their fathers serve as counterpoints to their argument. But in neither case does the son, or the father, give up on the other just because of a difference in ideology. This I find refreshing as well. 

Apart from everything else, this film is one of the few I’ve seen that’s so comfortably bilingual. The English dialogue, that’s so essential to this film about these young middle-classers, is not declaimed in the way that most such dialogue is. (imagine, for example, the crime that a rahul bose could’ve perpetrated on the character of Siddharth). Apart from all this, I love the voiceovers of the letters that the characters write to each other, that do not serve only to advance the plot, but actually tell one something about the characters themselves. 

This film takes hindi film into new territories—one where struggles other than the one for freedom, finally take their place. It does not matter than in the world we live in, much of the philosophy has changed. I do not think that there are as many college students today as then, who are willing to give their lives to an ideal. But I do think that our lives—however flawed we think they may be, and however wonderful—are a legacy of those people, and their beliefs. if communism has lost it’s shine, it is as much because of the failures of the naxalite movement as because of the fall of the USSR.  We have learnt, the hard way, that ideals, lived, can turn out to be nightmares. But we are the wiser for all that, and cannot afford not to remember those events, that time. “total Revolution” may be laughable today, but to forget that it was once a rallying cry would be as stupid as forgetting about Civil Disobedience.

 

 

random, random blues

There’s a community on orkut for ‘fraud mallus’ and among the many reasons I don’t join (from the utter ugliness of that phrase to the realization that communities in orkut are only for people to show off to their friends), is the feeling that I don’t have a right to be anything but a true blue dyed-in-the-wool Malayali young man, of the kind my sister reserves a special loathing for. But the fact remains that in spite of having lived here most of my life, my malayaliness remains highly inadequate (inasmuch as i can measure)

 

Consider the facts: when I left home at 17, I had lived here all my life, heard malayalam on the street every day of my life, and was a devoted viewer of the Sunday afternoon Malayalam movie. And yet, the language I thought in (think in) is english, I grew up not knowing anything about malayalam music but knowing a great deal about kishore/rafi/mukesh, and the Malayalam I speak has always been this hotchpotch of really old usages which I’ve picked up from my grandparents, organized into sentences that started their lives in English and were laboriously translated before spoken. And the result sounds strange, even as I speak.  

 

Of course, I’m grateful for having been brought up English-thinking. Even if my English sometimes does end up in a strangely syntaxed tangle. But it’s still embarrassing when people here ask me “so where’re you from?” and I say from calicut, and then there’s this significant pause followed by “but where are you actually from?”. :-/. (Only the “so when do you finish school” question beats this one, in my experience. )

 

What brought this ramble on? I was bored this morning, so I looked through the bookshelf, and after discarding kanthapura (authors who look like they’re copying cadence from another language irritate me no end), parthibankanavu(in translation) and a wodehouse as reading options,  I looked through our (pretty impressive, considering that they’re hardly ever read) collection of Malayalam books, on an experimental basis. So I took down this book by anand (it’s called maranacertificate?) and two pages in, I have no idea whether this is great writing or merely ordinary, because I have no space to fit his writing into. I started writing a post for this blog wondering whether your ideas of what good writing is are shaped entirely by what you’ve read before (if someone had never ever read anything before in english, would he find the clichéd writing of a mills and boon more appealing than something as nuanced as salinger?!... that sort of thing), but then I realized that my inability to appreciate his writing probably stems mostly from an inability to understand precisely what he’s saying. Which depressed, me and led to these musings.  

 

Ps: I wish I’d written that other post. It might’ve been funny. J

 

Pps: I’m making a habit of ps.