One Year Later

The Nov 26 anniversary carried all the accouterments of the "usual" sort of tragedy that happens in India. Some people held candle-lit vigils, some people released press statements and the news channels carried interviews, doubtless with such security experts as Simi Garewal and Shobha De or prominent Mumbai-residents such as Salman Rushdie or Suketu Mehta. The importance, or lack thereof is highlighted by the absence of the PM himself, who was out on diplomatic missions.

Did we really learn enough from Nov 26 to prevent a second attack? I don't think so, considering pieces like this one by Vir Sanghvi. We are as vulnerable and likely to lose our collective shit as we were last year. But here's the thing. Is there a choice?

Consider India without the specter of Islamic terrorism. Are things quiet and peaceful? Hell, are people safe? Not in the centre and east, with the threat of Maoist insurgency. Not in the North East, with that of regional insurgency. Not in Bombay, with the threat of Raj Thackeray carrying on his Hitler-loving uncle's work. Not in Bengal, with either Mamata or Buddha sending goons to enforce party diktat. Not in Gujarat, where being Muslim can get you killed. Not in UP, where not salaaming Maya Memsahib can get you killed. Not in Chennai, where the same would apply for the Kalaignar. And forget these regional threats (if you could). There is nowhere in India where you can rely on the protection of the law if your words, expressions or actions (otherwise legal) anger someone in power. The fear of reprisals is something people have to face every single day (and I'm just talking city folk). When you're used to living with fear like that, what's the threat of someone storming your city with guns and grenades? A bolt of lightning, which you simply hope will not strike the same spot twice.

This is the big difference again between India and the US. It isn't the thought of their army that makes Americans feel safe. It's the knowledge that their police, their courts and their lawmakers are with them ever single day that makes them feel safe, which is why America lost its collective shit on 9/11. Someone slipped through all those barriers and carried out such an act of terror. Every other in India is a 9/11 or a Nov 26 in miniature, considering the reasons people get killed. So it is shameful, but we have no real instant response that can be given to events like the night of Nov 26. All we can do is change, individual by individual, bit by bit, till we are strong enough to feel fear and demand not to have to live with it everyday.

Review: London Dreams

The Cast:

1. Ajay Devgan as Arjun. A struggling “young” musician, Arjun is a London School of Music (??) graduate who forms a band and stocks it with the first two people he meets, a dancer he’s simply got the hots for and his childhood friend from Bhatinda. He’s then surprised when these decisions bite him on his clenched-throughout-the-movie ass.
2. Salman Khan as Mannu: The love child of every over-exuberant Surd stereotype you came across, Sallu Bhai plays his man-child character with shades of Raja Babu and Coolie No.1 to boot. This is quite apt when you notice his puffed cheeks and sagging chin, causing him to resemble his Dhawan-partner of yore. He’s Arjun’s childhood friend. He joins the bend fresh off the flight from Bhatinda, walks through the movie wearing a kurta-sweater ensemble, and steals the lime light from Arjun till the latter “hooks him on drugs”, making you wonder what the hell he was on before joining the band.
3. Asin(gam) Thottamkal as Priya: Like every Tamil girl who’s grown up in London, Priya’s been raised in a “caaunsuruwaytiew Iyer family” as a result of which she’s an amazing Bharatnatyam dancer, has a bald father who wears vaeshttis all the time, and secretly pines to grind away on something to tune of “Smack That”, “Promiscuous Girl” or something. Upon entering movie/band, her job is to recite dialogues with varying Tamil accents (She’s just-Mylapore-returned one scene, accent-less 5 minutes later and puts on some Palakkad at one point), sway her hips sinuously every five minutes, fall in love with Sallu Bhai (shudder) and get her heart broken through the most insidious scheme ever.
4. Two Arbit guys as players for the band: That’s all you need to know
5. Every gora in London: Hit hard by the recession, spare cash was doubtless why this mélange of extras dance spontaneously – if surprisingly well organized, almost… choreographed – to every song that plays in this movie. They also play the news people, who amazingly speak Bob Christo-accented Hindi, the band manager who threatens to walk out of the audition just to test their desperation, some women who come onto Devgan himself after his first performance at a Trafalgar Square corner (YUCK!!) and Sallu later on (DOUBLE YUCK!!) and the huge crowds gyrating at Wembley Stadium, and Paris, Florence and Amsterdam (which curiously all look the same, as though the director took one long shot and simply slapped on titles to tell you the city)
6. Om Puri as the sort of chacha who, upon seeing a long-lost nephew who ran way 10 years ago, comes up, smiles and pats him on the arm. He then dispenses sage advice through the film.
   

The plot:

Arjun’s family has a special hatred of music, as much as he loves it. Apparently his granddad was hit with stage fright when performing at Wembley, and committed suicide afterwards. He prays for some way to be able to continue learning, and gets his chance when his dad drops dead of a heart attack. Flying to London (his uncle runs a kabab stand there), he runs away from his uncle right off customs, and somehow dodging every security officer in Heathrow, finds himself in the heart of London, which we all know is right next to the airport. He then plays the flute in street corners and makes enough to enroll himself at the London School of Music, which evidently does not look for any ID amidst its pupils. He then promises God he will never lose focus till he has avenged his granddad at Wembley in exchange for success. Growing up to resemble Ajay Devgan with his hair slicked back, the guy plays one fine afternoon at Trafalgar Square, drawing spontaneous dances that look oddly choreographed, the arbit guys to play in his band and the lecherous looks of a gori raand (apologies to any women reading) who, like all women there says “Your place or mine?” first.

When they have another audition, Arjun also ropes in Tamil stereotype mentioned above. There’s a cut to her life, with her Tamil Dad walking about with lit Tamil flames on a Tamil plate as she Tamil dances and he waves the Tamil smoke towards her Tamil saris and speaks 5 Tamil words. They all do amazingly well and hang out to some song. The girl hugs Arjun at one point, upon which he gets the sort of rapturous look an Engineering student would get if Asin hugged him. He louwes her. But, seeing as he’s promised God (No distractions) he has to relieve himself by – no joke – whipping himself with his belt. One wonders if V.A. Shah is making some sort of oblique point about maaring (click link if you don’t get it). If so, he seriously beats about the bush.

Anyway, enter Mannu, fresh off the flight from Bhatinda. He’s specially gifted at making an ass of himself. Joining the band as he’s Arjun’s friend, he proceeds to steal the spotlight from him, AND come on successfully to Asin, whom he fondly calls “Chennai Express”. All this causes Arjun to clench his face tighter and tighter till you want to point out to him:

• Mannu’s about as talented as Rakhi Sawant, in that his singing’s nothing special. He’s just a thick-skinned media-friendly moron
• There are very good Isabgols available on the market, some Ayurvedic even
  

When his prayers have no effect, Arjun then plots to ruin Mannu by hooking him on “marijuana, coke and methane” and positions Priya at the correct angle so that a fan touching Mannu’s feet looks like she’s about to (gasp) perform fellatio (un-gasp) on him. All this before a grand performance at Wembley where despite Arjun doing his darndest, the audience screams for Mannu. Seeing as about two hours have passed, you’d think Vipul Shah would end the film here, with a sort of Twilight Zone twist. But no, he has Arjun describe to the audience all he has done to perform (the hook and the crook, just in case there are cops in the audience) and walks off stage. An Om Puri lecture later, he repents and goes back to Bhatinda where Mannu is. They all come back to Wembley and perform. It being midnight, we all walk out of the theater and I curse heartily the absent boyfriend of a friend of mine who recommended this movie.

Verdict: What do you think?

Oh, and if the plot seems familiar to you, it’s because you either saw Milos Forman’s 1984 classic “Amadeus” or Suneel Darshan’s 2007 desecration of the same named Shakalaka Boom Boom (!!!) featuring Bobby Deol, Upen Patel and more Himesh music than you’d care to hear. Amadeus was about devout Vienna court composer (Salieri) who realizes upon the arrival of Mozart that his skills are nothing compared to Mozart’s, who is blessed with infinitely more talent despite his boorish behavior. Distraught at God seeming to favor the irreligious and libertine Mozart, Salieri vows to destroy him. The voice over narrating, the anguished close ups, the plotting and backstabbing and even a sort of God confrontation – in the original, Salieri burns a crucifix, here Devgan stares menacingly at a church altar (you’d think he’d be Hindu) – are all ripped off Forman’s movie. Even Sallu’s behavior is ever so slightly reminiscent of Tom Hulce’s Mozart in that film. Poor Forman, Schaffer, Hulce and Abraham.

Oye Sibal-JEE!!

Kapil Sibal has a problem with the "coaching class" culture that has permeated those who take the JEE. Yes, someone has finally taken offense that people have to dress only in plain shurt-pant /salwaar-kameez and plain chappals or sandals and come to class with plain notebooks wearing a plain watch and plain pens. Not only is this distracting from JEE, but it's anti-poor apparently. Hence the new rule of 80% cutoff in school, in addition to JEE.

Now, I am no fan of coaching classes. I look back on my two years in high school and regret every day I went. Hell, I even hate my repeat coaching class in retrospect, and they're the dudes who gave me hope and got me through the damn JEE. Speaking for Hyd at least, I'd wish a thousand plagues upon the hallowed institutions of Nallakunta, Barkatpura Chaman , Narayanguda and so forth. And I do think it's disturbing that JEE requires 4 years of prepping apart from high school. Nevertheless, Sibal's proposition smacks of supreme idiocy. The wrong activist screamed hoarse at him, and he chose to listen to her/him of all people.

To begin with, how long have coaching centers been around? My cousins cleared the JEE in the late 80's and early 90's, and they didn't need to go to classes. Some subscription material (Brilliant's level stuff) was enough. This was 10 years before I wrote it, when classes were a must. My guess is, look back 10 years before my cousins wrote it, and you'll find being a cut above the rest in math, physics and chemistry was good enough.

So what changed? Put simply, the fucking population. Before IIT Guwahati, the newest IIT was Delhi, which was established in (drumroll please)..... 1961!! 4 institutes of caliber were set up for the entire goddamn nation. It took 30 years to establish a new one, and that was more for political considerations than anything else. So how surprising is it, that as the pie stayed the same and more people wanted a piece, the competition got worse? How surprising is it that professors at IIT had to design JEE so as to (this is something one of em told me) keep students out? The Institutes were around 40 years and only in 2000 did anyone do anything by way of expansion (KGP's expansion basically added a couple of schools, more cream but no base). You have to give the Insti's or the HRD Ministry credit for keeping the JEE - that's why getting in means something. But seriously, 40 years and they never sought to expand the Institutes? Or build more? Were they counting on Sanjay Gandhi to nasbandify the population?

Which brings me to the solution. Like I said, the problem is simply so few seats for so many. The solution is to have more IITs, which they're doing. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. We need more colleges whose degrees mean something. Most colleges have degrees worth a damn only because they're affiliated to some University over the hills and far away. And most of the remainder are outright fakes, one cut above the ICFAIs and IIPMs and Amitys - who by the way continue to do business for this reason. We need more autonomous Universities that carry out both teaching and research, which satisfy the requirements of someone seeking a degree., and which are numerous enough to require only high school marksheets and not quotas or entrance tests (In other news, you can't take the KCET as an instate student unless you write it in Kannada). We need more people to have access to a basic - if not premier - quality of higher education. I mean, the University of Southern Mississippi is obviously not in Purdue's league, but a degree from there in Aeronautics is good enough to get you hired. That requirement is what you need to fill, Mr. Sibal, not sit and fret about student culture.

A spot of humor in all this, though. Sibal wants to push this forward on the basis that coaching classes are both "anti poor" and elitist. Lalu Yadav on the other hand, has taken up cudgels against it, saying that this proposition is both anti poor and anti Bihar. Whatta joke I say.

Arbit Thoughts

Nobel Thoughts:

The most prominent theory emerging from the blogosphere on Obama's getting the Nobel Peace Prize (his achievements for the same listed nicely here) is that it's for all the awesome things he's going to do now to justify the prize. My own view - it's no coincidence that people have stopped talking about American healthcare since the man won the Nobel. So lost are they in "Obamaaye namaha" chants that they have forgotten their daily exploitation at the hands of Big Insurance. So how'd he get it? Through the secret cabal of Aetna, BlueCross, Humana, UnitedHealth and co., in one of their many ploys - see this and this - to keep health care reform from happening.

Censory Khed:

1. Karan Johar apologizes for referring to Mumbai as Bombay in his new film (Better and funnier coverage here). He apologizes publicly for doing what half the people who live outside Maharashtra and all the people who live outside India do. And who does he apologize to? Raj-I'm keeping the same Anglicized name as my guerilla uncle-Thackeray.
2. The I&B Ministry clears a film about Jawaharlal Nehru on the conditions that 4 scenes - ranging from the two going at it to Nehru saying "Edwina, I love you" be deleted, because they "show Nehru in a poor light". To be absolutely sure of high quality illumination wrt Nehru, the film must state "This is a work of fiction". Detailed here.
   
3. The Censor board bans 'Postman Always Rings Twice' for portraying "life which is not healthy to Indian society" and 'Matlabi' for being full of "violent gangster incidents and lewd and obscene dances". And this is way back in the 40's. (More details here)
   

That goonda-parties such as the MNS, the Shiv Sena and BJP do not respect freedom of speech is clear, hell even understandable - they are medievalist morons, Talibs sans the circumcision and beard. The question is, do the people who actually form the Government?

Then and Now

".... greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed - you mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA"

So said Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) in 1987 in Wall Street, a movie Stone considered an extension of Scarface.You know something's wrong with the stock market system when its portrayal has any connection to a movie about cocaine dealings, dismemberment with chainsaws and a record number of f-words per minute. Be that as it may however, Wall Street was not only an accolade winner for Stone et al, but remembered as a significant "expose" of the stock market, the sort of thing Madhur Bhandarkar keeps trying to do and failing.

The funny thing though, is that it actually inspired stock market careers. Stone mentions here how people actually wanted to become stock brokers and investors, because of the film and of Douglas' Gekko. You see some idea of its influence in Boiler Room, a film about fraudulent investors who dream of stock broker life and have prepared for it by watching Wall Street over and over again. In some weird way, Gekko's "Greed is good" mantra influenced a generation. A generation which from the look of things came into its own within the last two-three years, and made the investments that sank the market, put the world in a Recession, made life hell for H1B seekers and finally made I-banking and stock-trading similar to what Stone originally envisioned it as - dealing an addictive little powder that makes you self-destructive.

Why all this ramble? Two reasons. Firstly, Stone isn't done with Gekko. He's bringing him back for a sequel set in the present time. The story is covered in the same article above. Gekko is apparently going to try to be a better person now, maybe say "Maybe greed isn't so good after all". What resonance this story will have with the world around us is interesting to think of, specially for someone who loved the original Wall Street - watch it if you haven't already.

The other reason is this story that released around the same time. Seeing as home-owner mortgages aren't so hot to invest in, and seeing that people are locked in a major gridlock over health insurance, Wall Street execs have come up with the perfect solution. They'll buy your health insurance policy, chop it up into securities and bundle em, and sell the bundles on the market. The kicker - the sooner you die, the higher the return on the bundle from your packet. That's right folks, Wall Street now wants to bet on whether you can beat the yerumai, and is putting its money on the yerumai.

"Greed is good". Except of course when it's bad.

Little Kids, Big Mistakes - II: Little Krishna and Big Animation

As I'd mentioned in my last post, children's television in India has reached an all time low. The question now is what is being done?

A key step in the right direction is "Little Krishna", a show airing on Nickelodeon India. That it was Nickelodeon that picked this show up, and not any of the zillion Hindi/regional channels tells you a lot. The show was set up by BIG Animation, a subsidiary of Reliance Entertainment. You see the BIG when you see little Krishna's animation all right. For the first time, we get animation that compares favorably with the West (or East for that matter, the Koreans animate Simpsons). I can't compare it to Pixar or Dreamworks, but it's a major improvement on such nonsense as Bal Ganesh or Little Hanuman. Compare the three:

Little Hanuman:



Bal Ganesh:



Chota Bheem:



and Little Krishna:



The difference is all too obvious. Where the first two go for "Oh it's cute enough for kids to pick up and it's mythology so that's good enough", the third does create this world where Krishna and his pals play while fending off Kamsa's continuous assaults. I could further attest to the latter after viewing several episodes. Which is where Krishna scores. Craftsmanship.

This is the first requirement for any good TV show, specially for kids. Like I said, most animation houses in India don't care what their final product even looks like. It's impossible to get them to improve corresponding content. Clearing this baseline requirement, Little Krishna and its ilk are in a position to confront the next one.

Creativity. Here is where Krishna faces a bit of a problem. Doubtless to minimize rioting and blasphemy FIRs (see this btw, it's hilarious), BIG Animation went to ISKCON for the stories. The result is the televised equivalent of those pies one got at ISKCON bakeries - gooey, dripping and hoping to make up for lack of crust with a ton of sugar.

Consider for instance, the whole blue thing. Krishna was said to have the complexion of a raincloud, and hence paintings showed him as glowing purply-blue, a motif much much repeated in any ISKCON religious text. While suitable (I suppose) for paintings, it's weird to see a blue kid running about amidst a bunch of normal complexioned people. He ends up looking like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. Couldn't BIG have gone with a dark skin? Similarly consider Kamsa's demons. None do more than strike an evil pose and leer at Krishna, saying something on the lines of "Ha ha ha, I will kill you because I'm an evil demon and you're only a little child". In addition, not one of the demons is shown to really pose a threat to Krishna. I know the source material dictates that Krishna triumph over them, but does it have to be so easy? A tornado demon carries him off, only to succumb to Krishna's mass altering powers. A monstrous stork and python attack him, only he has super-strength. Kaliya comes up, but is no match for his super Kathakali/Taekwondo powers. And when a living-flame type demon tries to burn the forest about him, what does Krishna do? Make an ever so slight poopy face and suck in the demon. That's right, he has flame-ingestion powers too. This of course brings up the question as to whether Krishna makes for an interesting animated series, but that's a digression again. The point is that for now, BIG is afraid to veer off the safe-and-cutesy side of Krishna tales. Hence the implied innocence in all the girls of Vrindavan dancing to his flute despite the quasi-sexual tones of the Rasa-Lila.

The requirement as I see it is for creativity. Of the type that pushes boundaries. Something like say this clip from the Ren and Stimpy show [look it up here]. And before you protest the violence in it, think Tom and Jerry. Even if that extreme is avoided, consider a show like Animaniacs. The source of the "Pinky and the Brain" cartoons, this show was famous not only for its smart slapstick but also for naughty little jabs, as recounted here. Jabs that make reference to giving people the bird and fingering amongst other things.

My point in all this is not to ask for more vulgarity in kids shows. Heaven knows they get enough of that from their song and dance shows. What is needed is the assumption that kids are smart, and write shows that nurture their sensitivities while stimulating them in some way. Because kids are smart. See shows like this one to realize what can be done with their entertainment:



This post has meandered a bit. I didn't really know of a way to end it, so I decided to call for some discussion. What shows did you watch as a kid and find entertaining without being dumb? Let's discuss readers.

Little Kids, Big Mistakes - I

Among the many things wrong with Indian TV these days, perhaps the worst is the absence of good children's programming. What are the choices available to kids (toddlers to twelve year-olds) on television?

There are game shows like this, which inculcate a filmy fifteen minutes of fame mentality. at least, and a propensity for vulgarity at worst. There are laughable shows such as "Hero: Bhakti hi Shakti Hain" (!!!!) about a Durga bhakt who is given a boon that transforms him in a poorly animated flash into a red-coloured Shaktimaan-type when he chants "Bhakti hi Shakti hain" enabling him and his hyper-cutesy children friends to engage in poorly-animated laser battles with Darth Vader's poor cousin who could only afford cardboard for his Sith helmet. And there are hyper-cutesy animated shows like "Little Bheem" (here) about which the less said the better. Among the features carefully removed from these programs are good animation and narrative imagination, lest they strike an aesthetic or intellectual chord in their viewers. Kids TV in short lobotomizes children so as to prepare them for MTV's Teen Divas and Roadies during their teenage years, the Big Boss/Rakhi ka... type reality shows during their early adulthood and Ekta Kapoors K-series when their brains are ready to call it Alzheimer's.

The thing is, it was not always like this.

People who watched Zee in the 90's will remember "Aavishkar", an engaging and criminally underrated game show that required its contestants to - believe it or not - out-science each other. They had to know stuff for a quiz round, figure out how stuff might be expected to work in a different one and most impressively had to build some sort of contraption for one of the rounds. The show was hosted by a less annoying kid than always and his 'Professor'-type uncle., who was always entertaining. That this show was made for kids goes to tell you what Zee once thought of them. Similarly engaging was "It's Wild" on StarPlus. A sort of teenage quiz show, this one was ecologically themed and had contestants who actually knew and gave a shit about wildlife. Unfortunately, Subhash Chandra decided one fine day to out-Rupert Murdoch, who in turn dumbed down his content - specially children's content - to moronic levels.

Perhaps the most consistent channel as far as good kids shows is concerned is Doordarshan. Sure, it ripped off ideas from the west (there was a ridiculous Star Trek clone named Antar Shoonya or something) and its special effects were passable at best, but its writing was something. And there was someone there with the brains to realize that people could get all their special effects from Hollywood cinema. Hence for example, the use of puppets to make a miniseries of the Arabian nights. Similarly smart were the tales of Hodja that were written by Gulzar. And does anyone remember "Indradhanush", about a bunch of kids and a supercomputer? What an idea!! Kids having adventures with a computer. Even with the silly effects and so on, it was exciting then and deserves kudos in retrospect. DD's monopoly may have caused boredom at large, but it helped it come up with programs that didn't have to dumb down for TRPs.

The trouble I guess started when all these people began competing, and big time. Hindi /Regional content of course is logical. What wasn't was the decision to either dumb down en masse, or rip off Western ideas en masse.

I doubt people remember any original Indian kids shows from the mid 90's or so. The reason was simple: dubbing was in. DD began with Disney's Hindi-dubbed Talespin and Duck Tales and Zee brought in Japanese stuff. Star in the meantime stuck with its original line-up, slowly replacing all kids programs with adult stuff. Cartoon Network took a lead at this time, with its line of entirely foreign-made shows. By the way, Hindi dubbing could not destroy the greatness of Batman: The Animated Series on DD. But I digress.

Dubbing has become rather passe, as now there are hajaar regional channels doing it - hence Batman in Tamil. Cutesy is the new buzzword, hence shows such as "Hero:BHSH", "Chota Bheem" (shudder) and "Ghost Bana Dost" (just read the title, no way I'm ever watching this even by accident). Another buzzword/paradigm is "15 min of fame", which is seen in all the dance shows kids do now, in place of quizzes or science shows. It ain't Carnatic or Kathakali they do on these shows. And it ain't MS or Aruna Sairam they dance to.

Kids TV in short is abysmal. Is there hope? Well yes. What and how? Next post.