The most contagious and resilient...

This Saturday was definitely the luckiest Saturday of my life as far as watching movies goes. I managed to see two incredible movies of total genius and total dissimilarity in terms of subject; see it as all movies are meant to be watched, in two huge darkened cinema halls undisturbed by the world outside and with full concentration as I was without the luxury of having a pause & rewind button. In my opinion, its the only fair way to appreciate how good or how bad a movie really is. Even the largest TV screen size, highest quality LCD and the best home theatre sound system while relaxing in the most comfortable of Lazy Boy armchairs are nothing but a poor substitute for what is the magic of something appropriately called the BIG SCREEN. 

What seems a strange coincidence is the importance of the time period of 10 years to both the directors of both these movies. It took "Inception" director, Chris Nolan, 10 years to bring to a satisfactory conclusion to the idea which came into his head (incepted or otherwise :P) and make this brilliant movie. And it also took "Udaan" director Vikramaditya Motwane 10 long years to find a producer for his script. It was only rescued by close friend and fellow path-breaking filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. 

Taking up "Inception" and its beautiful concept of shared dreams, dream architects, totems first, there is no absolutely no denying the brilliance of Chris Nolan's ideas and their supernatural execution by him. The movie lived up to the reputation of the director who specializes in creating deep, dark brain-testing-and-eventually-brain-frazzling blockbusters like "Memento", "Insomnia", "The Prestige", "Batman begins" and "The Dark Knight". With Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, a certain minimum number of drooling, swooning female fans was a guarantee under any circumstances and so was a record breaking opening with all the money the studio had put into promoting the movie & ensuring a world wide opening. That the movie lived up to its hype is a matter of great credit to yet another powerhouse DiCaprio acting performance and the extreme film-making skills of Chris Nolan, but let's face it... after "Memento" & "The Dark Knight", even if Nolan had mucked it up, there would be the usual quota of Nolan/"The Matrix" fan-boys who would end up raving about it all over the Internet and channel at least a few hundred million dollars down Nolan's (or his studio's) pockets before anyone even realized that they were being ripped off. The reputation of the man precedes him and he surely has worked hard enough to deserve such a high pedestal. As I watched in crystal clear detail on an I-NOX screen, the spectacular dream worlds of Nolan's imagination, my thoughts wound back to my experience earlier in the day (in fact just a few hours earlier) about an altogether different setting for an altogether different movie.

I had stumbled my way through the dark of the Metro Cinema Hall, a few minutes late for the 15:00 hours show of "Udaan". None of the multiplexes were playing the movie so I had to buy tickets in one of the oldest stand-alone halls in the historic Esplanade area of Calcutta. No lighting in between the seats meant that I stepped on a lot of angry toes while getting to my seat and the sound quality & picture quality was such that I had to strain both my ears and my eyes to keep track of the story. But I am glad for that. Because in those couple of hours of rapt attention which I devoted to this movie, I was totally caught up in the story like the director would have wanted his audience to be caught. The stark, simple storyline of a 17 year old boy, expelled from boarding school trapped between his tyrannical yet concern-driven father's wishes, his own writing ambitions and the alternately funny & touching relationship that he shares with his little step-brother is not the stuff that song-and-dance candy floss Hindi romances or special effects loaded Hollywood summer releases are about, yet it jumps several levels above all those imaginary scenarios by virtue of its believability, a criteria rarely considered important in the world of movies. The spontaneous applause from the audience at the superbly choreographed climax of the movie, as our guy wins in that one race that mattered the most, was a timely reminder that when it comes to stirring human emotions, all you need is the talent to strum the right strings, not the loosening of the purse strings of some big-wig corporate studios. As I came out of the hall, I was happy as hell and watching the late night show of "Inception" threw further light onto why I was really so happy. 

Cobb in "Inception" famously (Come on, people, you know this dialogue will be part of cinema's golden dialogues) talks about an idea being the most contagious and resilient of all viruses. So it was that an idea came to Vikramaditya Motwane to make a coming-of-age movie, a tale of one guy's passion for writing and concessions to society without any "love angle", a concept unheard of in Hindi movies and indeed rarely seen in any foreign movie too. No heroine or no romance was definitely a no-go in the extra-sweet land of Shahrukh Khan and "Jab We Met". But the idea stayed on in his head, resilient, as Motwane assisted Sanjay Leela Bhansali on "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" and "Black" and established himself as a notable name in Bollywood through his script for "Dev D". Still no takers for his story though, a story based in the dry, featureless locales of steel town Jamshedpur (No scope for Swiss mountainsides or skimpily clad starlets here); a story about driving around in a Contessa round and round a traffic circle in the dead of the night with ordinary looking male buddies, somewhat drunk and laughing at things very ordinary (What? Still no heroine, broken romances, jeep blowing action and multi-starrer guest appearances? Is this even a movie?); a story of how the breaking point is reached and the hero takes flight, his revolt, his deliverance from a life of torture and subjugation (Yawn! Art movie stuff, you think? So just watch this movie... and come back to tell me that you were not moved by it). 

But an idea, as Cobb said, is contagious too. The idea infected Anurag Kashyap's mind and he decided to produce it. So we have it out now, the movie that could never been a movie if popular taste were to be taken into account; a slow paced, timed to perfection movie which seemed as out of sync with today's rushing  age as riding in steam engines. A slight nod from the Cannes jury and we have at least the art house public flocking towards it. This movie deserves both critical and popular acclaim. I am just hoping that the latter part does happen but the fact that the movie even exists is proof that no forces no matter how mighty can keep a beautiful idea out for ever, such is its resilience and longevity.

Touching upon another concept from "Inception", the concept of a shared dream. All those inside the dark confines of a cinema hall, are walking inside a shared dream, a creation of a team of human minds. The film-makers are the 'architects' of that dream, choosing to either create a world of alternate reality or one of stark realism as their wish may be, and the audience, the audience are just visitors but unlike in the movie, the all important ones. All the creations inside the dream may seem to be talking amongst themselves, but all they are doing is putting up a show just for the intruders. Like any other dreams, these shared dreams too have their categories - pleasant dreams, nightmares; ridiculous dreams, plausible dreams and all that flits through our mind when in that nether region of sleep. Not for nothing then, do film-makers also call themselves dream-makers. For in their shared dreams, we are thrilled to find patches of our own reality.
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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-contagious-and-resilient.html]

Sign of the times

It's a move that means everything and yet nothing at all. It is after all only a symbol, an oversimplification of a very very complex reality. A symbol it will become of the irresolvable tangle of history, faith and destiny that forms the core of India, of her long promised and much expected economic boom. Rampant corruption, blood soaked bitter caste/class struggles, a burgeoning population, and simmering communalism/regionalism - hang like a shadow of doom over the symbol, forever threatening to the promise of waking up to a better nation. 

The symbol in my opinion looks very appropriate for a nation that has lumbered on slowly but surely from the start of civilization while other great kingdoms rose all around it to violent dominance and were then reduced to rubble just as quickly. Its simple yet eye catching shape carries within itself a message of deep significance, a lesson which the foolish world seems always reluctant to learn. The swooping half R of the English alphabet or the "Rah" letter of the Devnagri script (Symbolic of the Rupee), topped by two horizontal lines which according to the symbol's creator Udaya Kumar symbolizes the equality of the world economy with solo superpower world political structures very soon becoming a thing of the past. Let's hope that his words come true. An apt choice indeed it would be then for a nation whose people have always embodied the spirit of "Live and let live" and understood the wiseness and justness in walking the middle path. 

Voice of the Almighty

I now know why some people hate taking flights. It's because they have always been assigned aisle seats. My first experience of the incomparable boredom that accompanies being seated next to an aisle came on the 18th of June this year when I boarded the 9:00 PM flight from Kolkata to Ahmedabad. The check-in counter had informed me with sufficiently staged regret that all window seats on the flight were already taken. So I would have to be content with watching both my neighbours doze off before the plane even entered the runway (What a waste of a window seat, I say!), a pot-bellied businessman play Tetris on his Blackberry despite repeated personal requests from the aircraft crew to switch all electronic devices off (Whether he was just a ignorant moron or an arrogant SOB, I leave to your judgement) and be surprised at the huge number of people who had to make multiple visits to the toilet on a 2.5 hour flight (Must be something that they ate just before getting on the flight, I suppose). No wonder therefore that within half an hour or so, I was in that grey area between sleep and wakefulness. After all, there was only so much to keep you engaged in a bus with tiny little windows.

The speakers crackled to life and a booming voice announced "This is your Captain speaking. We are on course to arrive in Ahmedabad at 11:30 PM subject to landing clearance by the local Air Traffic control tower." And I am yet to figure out exactly why all pilots do give out this unnecessary bit of information, but this one too went on to add "The temperature outside is -25 degree centigrade. We are at an altitude of 10000 feet and our speed is 850 km/hr." How about that? We were in a metal container going at speeds unsuitable for human bodies, at heights inconvenient to human bodies and in the freak chance that we survived both, the cold low-pressure outside was sufficient to do us in. And God forbid (here's the real irony), if something happened to the guy who had just spoken to us, even God could not have saved us from meeting a fiery end. Come to think of it, there is no other place where hundreds of people have to put a direct, deep faith in the abilities of a man and his assistant than the trust that airline passengers put in the hands of their pilots. God Himself would have a tough time inspiring such blind faith in his most devout followers. For all practical purposes, at that point in space and time, the voice on the speaker might as well be that of a very old man who lives in the skies.

Fidgety

I feel restless. I feel happy. Can those two things mean the same thing? In fact, I am feeling so disinterested in my day-to-day work that I took a day off from it to sit at home and do nothing. Nothing means thumbing through detailed road maps of Indian states, reading names of small unknown places whose very existence I'll forget once I close the map. Nothing means imagining how those little places must be, towns like Bharuch with no special identity except for those people who live and breathe in them. For them, it means the world. For a car speeding through the highway which is their lifeline, they are just markers, check points which indicate that the direction chosen to get it from Gujarat to Calcutta is correct. Nothing means feeling that inexpressible feeling in my stomach as something totally great or something totally ordinary may lie in wait for me as I venture outside the trials and tribulations of my regular schedule and life. 

The promises of new experiences - mostly bland, sometimes exciting but definitely one of a kind, hang around me like a haze of never ending mystery. I feel mildly pleased but not overly so that very soon I'll be at the wheels of our car driving for endless kilometres through the aforementioned nameless, nondescript places with the wind blowing in through the side windows of our non A/C car. It's a bit like meditation, a deep soul searching experience at 80 km/hr; it maybe deep but is hardly exciting... on the face of it. Yet I feel contentment, content despite knowing that I'll be driving away from what has been my base for almost all my life, the fun & the punishments, the friendships & the rivalries, all of it with the sun and the rain. Maybe it's wrong to feel content... wrong to feel lethargic when there is so much left to be achieved in my life. All I know is that I am in love with this restless feeling of contentment (See the inherent paradox?) that overcomes me whenever there is a trip on my mental horizon, especially a trip which I have never made before and it is not really of consequence whether I am making this trip all alone or with fellow travellers (my parents and dog in this case) as both have their own ways of making life on the road memorable. They have a word for it in the English/German language and I have previously confessed of my infatuation with it (http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/11/wanderlust.html). Wanderlust... sometimes being fidgety is the same as being truly happy.

City of kings and zoos

Baroda (Vadodara for all official purposes) is only an hour away from Bharuch by train but many worlds apart. Back when we were really young (Say class 1, 2 and 3), the school picnic meant only one thing - the Kamati Bagh Zoo in Baroda. We would all troop into the matador or bus, all excited even though we had all been to the zoo multiple times before with our parents. Long lines of children marshalled by teachers at both ends and in between are still a very common sight in the zoo compound. The zoo set upon the royal property of the Gaekwads (the erstwhile royal family of Baroda) came to be the defining image of Baroda for me. There were palace like enclosures where tigers and lions roared, and green, moss covered pools which were studied with great interest for one fleeting glimpse of the resident crocodile. There was the Fatehsingh museum too with its dark, cool display corridors which I visited with great enthusiasm to be awestruck by the massive whale skeleton, Egyptian mummy and the stuffed animals on display every single time.

Baroda is a city with all amenities which can almost be called a large town and I think that is where its charm lies. The Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) with its sprawling campus and set up in palaces (with huge domes) donated by the royals is the first thing that catches the eye emerging from the station. My brother's engineering years at MSU and my sister's architecture degree offered me ample time to get familiar with the events and hang-outs of the University and offered me my first tantalizing glimpse of college life and the promise it held. In Kurukshetra, where I would eventually go to earn my engineering degree, a unique but nonetheless enjoyable variation of 'the college life' was in store for me but my brother's Tech campus, the MSU Fine Arts fair and all the extra-curricular programmes which seemed to take up more time than academics did fill me with anticipation and positive energy about leaving school and moving onto degree college.

Even beyond MSU, the city was very much like Calcutta in that, this was a city obsessed with the arts - be it the performing arts and the fine arts and everything in between. The Crossword book shop in Alkapuri which was within walking distance of the station was a favourite haunt. At one point of time, escorting my sister as she attended architecture entrance preparatory drawing classes in Baroda was an excuse, as me and Jha(attending school, so he had at least half a day of real official work) daily took the Gujarat Queen train to Baroda in the morning just to spend the entire day exploring the bookshop. The little shops right next to the station where second hand novels could be bought and 'rented' were a prime attraction of Baroda too. My brother's buddy, Dibyendu Da who has an excellent voice singing "We will rock you" in chorus with a packed MSU auditorium was quite so very inspiring as I witnessed in person the true power of a rock-star. All the knick-knacks bought from the Fine Arts fair and all the dramas, skits, choreographies and some downright zany things on display there served to make my bonding with this city even stronger, appealing to me because I found that there were people whose thoughts were even stranger than mine! And the crazy fun of living and surviving in a boy's hostel was brought to light when I ventured into my brother's hastily cleaned (probably a minute or two before my family marched in) MSU hostel room!

Then there were so many people, my own siblings, friends from school and from college who had grown up in or shifted to the city causing me to know the city a little bit better every time I visited them: the Bird Circle with the Gupta brothers when Utsav and me had a super-enjoyable overnight stay in Baroda with their parents away in Nashik; the Chandan Multiplex and the long drive to the outskirts of the city to catch a movie there with Srinath; the Inox cinema area and the Goodies eatery in Fatehgunj; the older parts of the city thanks to all the weird stuff that my sister needed to buy for her architecture projects; the buildings of the newly set-up Vidyani Vidyalaya where students who had shifted over from the more well-established Navrachna School (its sister CBSE board school) compared the two experiences; the Railway colony, its well endowed library and my brother's big apartment overlooking the lush green Railway cricket stadium; the games of 12th floor terrace cricket played on the roof of Roy Kaku's flat where hitting the ball outside the 'ground' meant taking a long ride on the lift down to go buy a new ball after a failed frustating search in the parking lot - the images of all these people and places do come rushing up when I think of Baroda.

But what comes to mind first is the memory of the endless boundary walls of the royal palace interspersed with a huge gate (which was not to be photographed, the gate guard said) here and there, with glimpses of the tree tops and the woods behind them so that no one could see the actual palace centred in between them from the road. People said that that there were deer which roamed inside the compound. In my imagination, there also roamed within those compounds, maybe a pet tiger or two. Baroda - the city of kings and zoos!

Bharuch reloaded

As I go ahead and get super-nostalgic about the Bharuch chapter of my life for it draws to a close very soon, I want to write about everything and anything that I enjoyed in that little town. And I sheepishly realize that I have already been nostalgic about those things long before the actual date of our moving out of Bharuch was looming on the horizon. Here are some of my favourites amongst the many blog posts that I wrote on the town and my childhood spent in it. Hope that they strike a chord within you too about your hometown in some way or the other.

Here's one on the most precious portion of the steel almirah shared by my brother, sister and me

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2009/11/toy-safe.html

This one on a physically violent and violently funny incident at recess time in school

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2009/04/life-isnt-fair-no-sir.html

About the experiences in and around a local movie theatre, a much frequented haunt for me and my buddies

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2009/01/monster-fetish.html

Of those wonderful cycling trips we friends made around town early on holiday mornings

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/08/easy-riders.html

A little detail on the role of the tamarind tree that stood behind our flat in shaping our childhood 

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2008/10/tamarind-tree.html

Of wonderful evenings, days, weeks and months spent on designing paper planes which would fly the farthest

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/06/paper-powered-dreams.html

About an unrecognized moment of footballing glory in my severely limited school sporting career

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/07/goooaaaaaalllllll.html

An admission of guilt to the scheming child I was...

http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2007/06/guilty-pleasures.html

I could write all of these posts all over again, gladly... such is the complicated feeling that overwhelms me whenever I think that after the end of June 2010, there will be no more inspiration for new Bharuch stories. All I'll have after that are these memoirs to fall back on and smile at the thought that they really happened.

Langur tamashaas

A uniquely Bharuch experience is that of the visiting troops of langurs which thrived in the abundant tree population of the town though of late, the number of trees have been reduced drastically due to the various signs of 'development' thereby reducing the appearance of our simian neighbours as their super-highway of a continuous network of trees connecting woods to human residences has been broken up into seperate sections. By 'langurs', I mean not the small but aggressive furry plain monkeys that you see in most Indian temples but the silver/golden hued, black faced human child sized creatures that let out a scary 'hoop hoop' sound to announce their arrival, crashing and swinging through the trees before landing up in our flat's verandah or in the garden of the house we used to live in earlier. The Bengali word for 'langur' is Hanuman, the monkey-god of Ramayana fame and the behaviour of these creatures is so human like that the mythical stories of Jambuvan and Sugriva do not seem too far from reality.

From the bedroom window of the fourth floor flat where we used to stay earlier, there was visible and audible a Bhatiji Maharaj (Don't know the details of this Godman. Sorry!) temple. Audible because the devotees there had a tendency to break out into cacophonous devotional songs every evening sometimes going through the night and to our chagrin, the devotion was expressed through a very loud microphone arrangement. On the roof of the aforementioned Bhatiji Maharaj temple was where the langur troop would first set up base camp before exploring our neighbourhood. The leader of the troop would be easily identifiable from the outset. He would be the biggest in the group and the least frivolous. He distinguished himself by assuming a central position casting a stern glance around on all the females of his troupe while they tended to the mischievous baby monkeys which clung to them as if glued and then at the younger males who would take a momentary break from their rough-and-tumble games when the patriarch's eyes fell on them. After all, he was the alpha male and no one wanted to get in his way. Fights would break out between other members, teeth baring and chattering noises included while some of them seemed just too happy at being born a monkey. The carefree running, jumping, swinging and hooping that characterized their movements embodied a philosophy that you don't need no money, no car and no house, when you can scale multi-storey buildings for a joke.

The reaction of people in our neighbourhood to their primate (that word encompasses ape/monkey or ape-like/monkey-like animals for those who aren't clued into Discovery Channel lingo) guests ranged from the nonchalantly ignorant to screams worthy of the Zee Horror show especially when a langur thought nothing of taking a stroll through a human household, sitting on a dinner table and eating a banana from the ones on display. The moment the hooping sound of the approaching langurs was heard, a symphony of slamming verandah doors gave indications as to in which houses the army of Hanuman was not welcome. In fact, one of these langurs managed to make a heavy contribution in breaking my sister's toe. My sister and me were engaged in the usual brother-sister skirmish when she landed a solid blow in between my shoulder blades and ran out of the flat to the roof just above our floor. Blood boiling for revenge, I followed suit but halfway up the stairs, I saw a big langur sitting casually on the stairs and enjoying the show. "Baador![Bengali for monkey]" I shouted to my sister already on the terrace and rushed back to the safety of our flat. My sister came down the stairs on hearing the warning and halfway down the stairs came face to face with Mr. Akshay Kumar (as we nick-named the creature in retrospect, my sister's then favourite hero). She screamed out loud and Akshay Kumar decided to jump onto her shoulder to allay her fears. Turned out that it wasn't a good move to make to impress a girl and my sister out of sheer terror jumped down a flight of 12 stairs in a single monkey like leap with Akshay still hanging on. Her notions about being a langur were a little off the mark though and as she landed on her toe, it was promptly fractured. Akshay meanwhile ran off deciding that this was definitely not his Twinkle.

Not all the langurs were this eager to expand human-langur brotherhood though and most of the time would just sit around on the trees surrounding our flat complex or up on the water tank, watching us play cricket. Jeff  Corwin had told us innumerable times on Discovery Channel that one should never stare into the eyes of a primate as in their language it is interpreted as a sign of aggression. We did try once or twice eliciting a fierce, teeth gnashing reaction from the subject of our testing and came to a mutual agreement that this was not the way to go. The langurs lived happily in their own world of shaky water pipes, precarious window ledges, "I'll eat your ticks and you can eat mine!", multiple feet leaps from tree branches to buildings and vice versa, and if their and our own worlds intersected then it was best to look away and they'd just bound away looking upon us as inconvenient but harmless subjects of their kingdom.

Once in a while, like their human counterparts, there turned up a psycho case. After a first few attacks and bites on unsuspecting people, the word would be be sent out all through town of the mad monkey. When the 'monkey man' scare about a half-monkey, half-man creature throwing people off roofs happened in Delhi and all news channels covered the story, a guy driving a white Maruti van in a very residential neighbourhood in Bharuch, Gujarat was cornered by a mob for being THE "monkey man". Why should people who share space with real langurs think that a human being driving a Maruti van is the guilty runaway 'monkey man' from Delhi is totally beyond logic but it is just an illustration of how much news of a mad monkey (no matter that it was seen a 1000 kilometres further north in Delhi) affected the psyche of Bharuch's townspeople. For us kids, it was especially terrifying. Cages with all sorts of monkey enticing goodies would be set up around the society to trap the aggressor and most of the time end up catching greedy but completely sane monkeys (if there is such a category). Until the main suspect was apprehended, we would walk around with our eyes scanning the surroundings in 3-D. Think of the situation as one where you need to be on the guard from a mad dog that can climb trees or swing down from electricity poles to give you a rabid bite and then you get the idea.

But these rare periods of concern apart, it was mildly exciting and tremendously entertaining whenever the tribe of our ancestors showed up. The crunching sound of sheet metal as the bigger, heavier ones bounded over parked cars chased futilely by barking street dog gangs made for an exciting entry. Kids and even some adults gathered and enjoyed with a broad smile on their faces, the antics which we ourselves might have revelled in were we born a few million years ago.