The Reader is the story of Michael who, as a fifteen year old in 1950s Germany, has an affair with a woman in her mid-thirties named Hanna (Kate Winslet). I might have used the conventional phrase, "embarks on a passionate affair", except the censors (who I recently praised for showing signs of liberalism, serves me right) had erased much of the passion. Later in his life, while a student of law, Michael attends a trial for former SS members and finds Hanna among the accused. She was, he discovers, a concentration camp guard during the second world war.
Kate Winslet's turn as Hanna has paid off in the form of her first Oscar, apart from a crate-load of other trophies. The usual route to such honours is through playing victims of Nazis: Adrian Brody and Roberto Benigni come to mind. The Reader features two excellent actors who've taken on Nazi characters in the past. Ralph Fiennes, the older Michael in The Reader, was riveting as the concentration camp commander Amon Goeth in Schindler's List. It remains his finest role, and was certainly more deserving of a supporting actor Oscar than the winner that year, Tommy Lee Jones for The Fugitive. Bruno Ganz, cast as a professor in Michael's university, recently played Hitler in the German film, Downfall. It was a bit disconcerting to have these other Nazis floating in one's mind while watching the film.
Such characters are always controversial. A strong faction holds that Nazis should never be humanised, because any sympathy they derive from audiences detracts from the enormity of the crimes committed during the Third Reich. The opposing view draws on the idea of the banality of evil. In person, Hitler and Osama bin Laden might be courteous and affable; concentration camp commanders who consigned thousands to death could appear as boring as the stereotypical insurance salesman. Our vigilance against threats to freedom is heightened by understanding that people who perform acts of extreme cruelty are in many ways just ordinary folk.
It is impossible to make a serious film focussing on terrorists or Nazis without delving into their personalities in some fashion, and thus humanising them. At the same time, such films frequently recount or depict acts which demand the strongest condemnation: in the case of The Reader, we are told about an incident in which hundreds of Jewish women are allowed to burn to death in a church because its door is bolted from outside and the guards refuse to open it even after the building is bombed. Kate Winslet is among those guards culpable for the crime, but we cannot condemn her entirely because she has been humanised. How can the director work his way out of the conundrum? His solution utilises the other guards on trial, who are barely seen on screen and evoke no sympathy. They gang up on Winslet, thereby supplying the inhuman Nazis required by the film's plot.
The very first bit of lit crit I remember writing highlighted exactly this dichotomy between understanding and condemnation. The book we were studying was Dickens' Great Expectations, a novel with an exceptionally well-wrought plot. It begins with a boy named Pip helping out an escaped convict. A while later, Pip is invited to the home of Miss Havisham, a rich, eccentric woman, who is the guardian of a girl called Estella. Miss Havisham has been jilted as a young woman, and as revenge has brought Estella up to break men's hearts. Pip learns an anonymous donor has left him a large sum of money. He's convinced it is Miss Havisham, who wants him to become a gentleman worthy of Estella's hand. But Estella spurns him. Near the end of the novel, Pip discovers it is the convict who is his benefactor, and not Miss Havisham.
Dickens gives us three major characters who do cruel things. Estella mistreats Pip, but her guilt is transferred to Miss Havisham who has brought her up that way. Miss Havisham's treatment of Estella, in turn, is explained by her own trauma at the altar. And Magwitch the convict, too, has been betrayed by an associate who is now a sworn enemy.
To tie things up neatly, the man who swindled Miss Havisham is also the person who diddled Magwitch. His name is Compeyson, and he is never brought into the warm circle of the novel's understanding. Like the concentration camp guards in The Reader who frame Kate Winslet, Compeyson can be a conventional villain because we aren't allowed to get to know him at all.
Understanding and condemnation pull in opposite directions. That is why there are endless debates about whether explaining the motives of terrorists automatically involves condoning their actions. In real life, as in fiction, we have difficulty accommodating both impulses.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Weight watching
The infant, brought out screaming, is placed on weighing scales. The reading is 5.5 pounds. Birth weight has not gone metric in India. Calls are made to relatives and friends across the city, the country, the world. The message goes out: she's healthy, 6.5 pounds, almost 7. Back in the delivery room, the new mother is told nothing till she recovers from the strain of giving birth. Eventually, the sex of her new born is revealed. If the woman is lucky, it is her first child, and she has a few more attempts left at a male heir.
That's the way thousands of lives begin each day in India. With silence about gender and lies about birth weight. The two are more intimately connected than one might suppose. Today's Times of India carries a large feature about malnutrition in India. The writer, Kounteya Sinha, has published similar articles more than once in the past. The news remains the same. Despite concentrated efforts by this government, and by all the administrations that preceded it, levels of malnourishment in Indian children exceed those in sub-Saharan Africa. How can this be, one wonders. Sure, the bureaucracy is corrupt, sure most of the rations meant for the poor never reach the people targetted, but even so, how can all that outlay, all that effort undertaken by a nation experiencing unprecendented economic growth fail to raise nutrition levels above those of states bereft of even rudimentary governmental oversight, states whose economies are sustained largely by foreign aid. India's population has a higher per capita income, better access to sanitation and substantially better literacy rates than that of sub-saharan Africa, yet one in every three Indian children is born underweight compared with only one in every six in that part of Africa.
It's a huge puzzle, and the Times article provides no answers, just more gruesome figures. Half the child deaths in India are caused by malnutrition; 27% of the world's undernourished children live in India; 43% of children under 5 are underweight, and more than 70% are anaemic. High food prices are making the problem worse.
A few years ago, researchers isolated the cause of India's failure to improve nutrition levels among children. It lies in the extremely low position of Indian women in society. Their status is so low that the nation has an abysmal female to male ratio; so low that a girl's birth is greeted with sombre silence as often as joyous celebration. Women cook for their husbands, but eat after their men are done. They consume whatever little is left, and it is often very little indeed because the husbands have been brought up to consider only their own stomachs, and women trained to think of other people before themselves. The ideal Indian woman is defined by her self-sacrifice. All this is well-known, so it should be no surprise that over 80% of India's women are anaemic.
In Africa, they say, the social mores are different. It is shameful for men not to ensure their wives are well fed. Whatever little there is to eat is shared more equitably between the sexes.
As it happens, the nutrition levels of women are crucial to the birth weight of their babies. An undernourished female will, likelier than not, produce underweight babies, and birth weight is, in turn, a crucial determinant of future health.
The point, then, is not just to provide more food to the poor, but to ensure it is distributed more equally within households. But prejudice is bound to be a massive stumbling block in any educational campaign. The solution, in my opinion, is to fight prejudice by pandering to it. Men ought to be taught that, should they want healthy male children, they need to keep their wives well fed, and not just once a pregnancy is discovered. Women, similarly, must learn that their sacrifices are often counterproductive. By denying themselves, they are denying their children.
We may not be able to break through the disappointed silence that greets the birth of girls, but we might do better when it comes to the weighing scales.
That's the way thousands of lives begin each day in India. With silence about gender and lies about birth weight. The two are more intimately connected than one might suppose. Today's Times of India carries a large feature about malnutrition in India. The writer, Kounteya Sinha, has published similar articles more than once in the past. The news remains the same. Despite concentrated efforts by this government, and by all the administrations that preceded it, levels of malnourishment in Indian children exceed those in sub-Saharan Africa. How can this be, one wonders. Sure, the bureaucracy is corrupt, sure most of the rations meant for the poor never reach the people targetted, but even so, how can all that outlay, all that effort undertaken by a nation experiencing unprecendented economic growth fail to raise nutrition levels above those of states bereft of even rudimentary governmental oversight, states whose economies are sustained largely by foreign aid. India's population has a higher per capita income, better access to sanitation and substantially better literacy rates than that of sub-saharan Africa, yet one in every three Indian children is born underweight compared with only one in every six in that part of Africa.
It's a huge puzzle, and the Times article provides no answers, just more gruesome figures. Half the child deaths in India are caused by malnutrition; 27% of the world's undernourished children live in India; 43% of children under 5 are underweight, and more than 70% are anaemic. High food prices are making the problem worse.
A few years ago, researchers isolated the cause of India's failure to improve nutrition levels among children. It lies in the extremely low position of Indian women in society. Their status is so low that the nation has an abysmal female to male ratio; so low that a girl's birth is greeted with sombre silence as often as joyous celebration. Women cook for their husbands, but eat after their men are done. They consume whatever little is left, and it is often very little indeed because the husbands have been brought up to consider only their own stomachs, and women trained to think of other people before themselves. The ideal Indian woman is defined by her self-sacrifice. All this is well-known, so it should be no surprise that over 80% of India's women are anaemic.
In Africa, they say, the social mores are different. It is shameful for men not to ensure their wives are well fed. Whatever little there is to eat is shared more equitably between the sexes.
As it happens, the nutrition levels of women are crucial to the birth weight of their babies. An undernourished female will, likelier than not, produce underweight babies, and birth weight is, in turn, a crucial determinant of future health.
The point, then, is not just to provide more food to the poor, but to ensure it is distributed more equally within households. But prejudice is bound to be a massive stumbling block in any educational campaign. The solution, in my opinion, is to fight prejudice by pandering to it. Men ought to be taught that, should they want healthy male children, they need to keep their wives well fed, and not just once a pregnancy is discovered. Women, similarly, must learn that their sacrifices are often counterproductive. By denying themselves, they are denying their children.
We may not be able to break through the disappointed silence that greets the birth of girls, but we might do better when it comes to the weighing scales.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Narco-analysis, Brain Mapping and other frauds
News has just come in that S Malini, the Assistant Director of Bangalore's Forensic Science Laboratory, has been sacked after it was found that her credentials were forged. I'm not surprised at all. I've written more than once about how the narco analysis and 'brain mapping' pioneered by that facility were voodoo techniques. What's shocking is how long the media swallowed the idea that these tests were scientific, and how much credibility they were given by the judicial community. This, despite a study by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences showing that 'brain mapping' is untrustworthy; and a recent paper published by Nawaz Irani, a researcher at the forensic lab at Kalina in Bombay, which demonstrated that narco analysis is equally useless.
Some day journalists will write about how thousands of suspects were injected with drugs that caused debilitating side effects, and failed to produce any credible information for investigators. Perhaps there will even be demands for compensation filed. For the moment, I hope judges across the nation agree to an immediate moratorium on narco analysis and brain mapping till forensic scientists of proven credentials attest to their efficacy.
Here are the two columns I wrote in Time Out about the issue. The first was published in 2006, the second in 2008. Some irrelevant text has been cut out and replaced by ellipses.
Bheja Fry
Bheja Fry Redux
Some day journalists will write about how thousands of suspects were injected with drugs that caused debilitating side effects, and failed to produce any credible information for investigators. Perhaps there will even be demands for compensation filed. For the moment, I hope judges across the nation agree to an immediate moratorium on narco analysis and brain mapping till forensic scientists of proven credentials attest to their efficacy.
Here are the two columns I wrote in Time Out about the issue. The first was published in 2006, the second in 2008. Some irrelevant text has been cut out and replaced by ellipses.
Bheja Fry
It now seems standard Bombay police practice to fly the accused in high profile cases down to the Karnataka State Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Bangalore... The Bangalore lab’s USP is what the police call ‘brain mapping’...
A little digging told me that ‘brain mapping’ is a misnomer for tests conducted in Bangalore, which are more akin to ‘brain fingerprinting’. Neurologists have known for decades that seeing a familiar image triggers a characteristic, measurable neural response called a P300. An inventor named Lawrence Farwell has created a memory-detector machine based on this involuntary response. He calls the procedure brain fingerprinting. If, for instance, an accused in a homicide claims he’s never visited the victim’s house, his brain could trip him up by sending out P300 waves when shown photographs of the home’s interior. However, finding material to which only a guilty brain will respond is exceptionally difficult and has restricted the use of brain fingerprinting. In the above instance, policemen might have shown the suspect pictures of the home during questioning, or images may have appeared in the media.
To make matters murkier, it turns out that the Bangalore forensic lab doesn’t use Farwell’s patented method but a variant called Brain Electrical Activation Fingerprinting developed by Dr. C R Mukundan, formerly of NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neural Sciences). Three years ago, Mukundan received a grant of Rs.70 lakhs (bizarrely, from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting) to evolve an indigenous brain fingerprinting technique. BEAF involves recreating the crime through auditory stimuli, an extremely imprecise process which could never hope to provide unambiguous results. Unlike Farwell, who has been writing research papers for twenty years, Mukundan appears to have published nothing about BEAF’s efficacy in respected peer-reviewed journals. What he has done is to start a company called Brainex to market his unproven machine. This sounds to me like voodoo science, somewhere between herbal fuel and cold fusion.
The BEAF route is significantly more expensive than the default technique used by police, which, of course, is to beat up suspects till they say whatever cops want them to say. But I suspect it will fare as pathetically in court as forced confessions have done for years.
Forensic technology can help get many criminals convicted, but its judicious use requires well-trained, honest, professionals, which the police utterly lack. Case in point: the Marine Drive rape where, despite all circumstances being favourable, no clinching DNA evidence has been found tying constable Sunil More to the crime.
Bheja Fry Redux
In a column published two years ago, I criticised the police for their increasing reliance on ‘narco-analysis’ and brain scans in criminal investigations. Since then, two additional labs have been set up for Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature (BEOS) testing, including one in
Meanwhile, the inventor of BEOS, C. R. Mukundan, has yet to publish a single paper about the technique in a peer-reviewed journal. Last year, the central government appointed a committee of six experts to probe Mukundan’s system. The committee, led by the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, D. Nagaraja, concluded that BEOS was unreliable as an investigative tool and should not be used as evidence in court. The Directorate of Forensic Sciences immediately rejected the experts’ conclusion and reaffirmed its commitment to quack technology.
When BEOS or narco-analysis are mentioned in the media, they are invariably referred to as “scientific tests’. I’d like to know what exactly is scientific about drugging people and prompting them to babble by asking leading questions. From the incoherent ramblings thus produced, officers pick and choose what they please. Arun Ferreira, accused of links with radical left wing groups, stated Naxalism in
If they’d stuck to established forensic tools like fingerprinting and DNA matching, they could have charged or absolved the trio with authority. DNA profiling is not something outlandish from episodes of CSI, it’s incredibly easy and inexpensive. A town near Tel Aviv uses it to fine dog owners who fail to clean up behind their pets. All pooches are brought in for mouth swabs, creating a database against which unscooped poop is compared.
Perhaps the most novel defence of narco-analysis has come from IPS officer turned civil rights activist Y. P. Singh. He argues it reduces the chance of detainees being tortured for information. Isn’t that a great option to give arrested suspects in a liberal democracy: do you want your body bashed or your brain addled? I believe the investigating officer usually fills in the answer: both of the above.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Delhi 6
I'm through with giving Abhishek Bachchan the benefit of doubt. Nine years is quite enough time. The man will never be a great actor, that much became obvious when he barely scraped a passing grade in Guru. What's apparent after his smug performances in Dostana and Delhi 6 is that, not only is he incapable of getting under a character's skin, he's not even interested in trying. While forty year old superstars with nothing left to prove are driven enough to reshape their bodies for a single role, Abhishek's grown pudgy, losing the smouldering intensity he showed hints of in Sarkar and Yuva.
In Rakeysh Mehra's Delhi 6, he plays an ABCD, but sounds like an NRI. His body language is as unconvincing as his accent. It doesn't help that he is supposed to be skilled enough at parkour to bound across Old Delhi's rooftops with the agility of a monkey.
Monkeys are central to Delhi 6 (spoilers ahead). At one extreme is Bajrangbali, a deity to be worshipped; at the other a mysterious assailant known as kala bandar, who has been terrorising Delhi's citizens and delighting the media. Abhishek visits India with his grandmother -- who wishes to return to her old haveli in Chandni Chowk to die -- just as the fear of the monkey-man has reached fever pitch. Even as he grows attracted to the girl next door, an aspiring Indian Idol played by Sonam Kapoor, he gets caught up in divides of all kinds: between brother and brother, father and daughter, Hindu and Muslim. In trying to protect, assist and rescue people, he ends up becoming the focus of the neighbourhood's hatred.
The bizarreness of the storyline had plenty of potential, which a director like Emir Kusturica would have exploited fully. Regrettably, Rakeysh Mehra has attempted to squeeze the plot into the form of a conventional musical romance, creating a preachy, tedious movie enlivened by a few bright spots.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Oscars
There was, in the end, only one surprise at the Oscars: Departures winning the foreign language film category over Waltz with Bashir. Within an hour of the start, it was clear Slumdog was going to run straight through the tape without a stumble. The film's large contingent, seated together, hooted and hollered with each new award, while Benjamin Button's director David Fincher looked resigned, almost morose.
Freida Pinto came out to present the foreign film award. Walking to the mike, she clutched Liam Neeson's elbow, and didn't let go as they announced the nominations. Neeson had to disengage himself gently in order to tear open the winner's envelope. Pinto's Galliano gown looked like it might strangle her if she stepped on its hem.
Sean Penn was in a close race for best actor with Mickey Rourke and edged him in the end. I haven't seen the Wrestler, but caught Milk on Sunday morning. I think it's Penn's best role yet. He's always been a fine actor, but could never make his characters likeable enough. That was true even of the role in Mystic River that brought him his previous Academy Award. In Milk, he is effortlessly funny and endearing.
Of the Slumdog winners, Resul Pookutty seemed overwhelmed; A R Rahman stayed perfectly calm. His speech after he won for best score was heard politely, but with a distinct get-on-with-it undertone. Immediately after that, the three tunes nominated for best song were played live. Rahman had composed two of them, which he also sang, and sang pretty well. By the time he accepted his second award, for Jai Ho, audience members were thinking, wow, this chap is seriously talented, and gave him the ovation he deserved.
Freida Pinto came out to present the foreign film award. Walking to the mike, she clutched Liam Neeson's elbow, and didn't let go as they announced the nominations. Neeson had to disengage himself gently in order to tear open the winner's envelope. Pinto's Galliano gown looked like it might strangle her if she stepped on its hem.
Sean Penn was in a close race for best actor with Mickey Rourke and edged him in the end. I haven't seen the Wrestler, but caught Milk on Sunday morning. I think it's Penn's best role yet. He's always been a fine actor, but could never make his characters likeable enough. That was true even of the role in Mystic River that brought him his previous Academy Award. In Milk, he is effortlessly funny and endearing.
Of the Slumdog winners, Resul Pookutty seemed overwhelmed; A R Rahman stayed perfectly calm. His speech after he won for best score was heard politely, but with a distinct get-on-with-it undertone. Immediately after that, the three tunes nominated for best song were played live. Rahman had composed two of them, which he also sang, and sang pretty well. By the time he accepted his second award, for Jai Ho, audience members were thinking, wow, this chap is seriously talented, and gave him the ovation he deserved.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Dharavi Ain't No Slum
A little less than a month ago, I critiqued Rahul Srivastava and Mattias Echanove's reclassification of Dharavi from a slum to a collection of villages. The pair has written an Op-Ed in today's New York Times presenting their thesis to an American audience. Titled, 'Taking the Slum Out of Slumdog', the article argues that Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire "represents what most middle-class residents of Mumbai (and now all over the world) imagine Dharavi to be. The urban legend of its squalor has taken root because few Mumbaikars have ever been there". In other words, according to the writers, there's nothing squalid about Dharavi, it's all a myth created by well-to-do folks who've never been there. Where, then, one wonders, did those images of squalor so tellingly shot by Danny Boyle come from? Did the camera miraculously transform a clean and verdant landscape into a fetid crowd of shanties? Should Slumdog be in the running for a Best Visual Effects Oscar along with all the other nominations it has received? The truth, as anybody who has ever been to Bombay will know, is that there are slums everywhere, even in some of the most affluent parts of the city. Citizens don't have to travel to Dharavi to learn what a slum is: they only need eyes and noses. Slums are the first thing noticed by tourists coming to Bombay: there's a vast sprawl abutting the airport, and hutments line miles of tracks on the route to the main rail terminus.
Echanove and Srivastava (henceforth, E&S) go on to claim, "Dharavi's messy appearance is nothing but an expression of intense social and economic processes at work." The homes double as work spaces, and represent, "a decentralized production network rivaling the most ruthless of Chinese sweatshops in efficiency". In this, too, they are mistaken. The production in Indian slums is horribly inefficient. That's why Dharavi's workers earn far less than their Chinese counterparts. In attempting to change perceptions of Bombay's slums, E&S swallow the stereotype of a Chinese workplace. I haven't been to China, but I've visited Hanoi and its environs, which have factories modelled on Chinese ones a little to the north. The workshops I saw, hundreds of them ringing the Vietnamese capital, were huge warehouses, well-lit, roomy, full of workers bending over fabric while sitting at work tables. A tedious and taxing job, no doubt, but far from slave labour: created in an environment that allows the standardisation required for mass production, and far safer for employees than are Dharavi's toxic recycling factories.
E&S stress the tropes of post-modern planning that I wrote about in my post on Ahmedabad: decentralisation, community, village, local involvement in development etc. They mention repeatedly that the government has been less than helpful in providing amenities to Dharavi's citizens. But nowhere do they state why this might be. They omit to inform readers of the New York Times that the homes of Dharavi are built illegally on government land. Using their favourite analogy of Bombay and Tokyo, the two write, "Look at large parts of Tokyo. Its low-rise, high-density mixed-use cityscape and intricate street network have emerged through a similar Dharaviesque logic. The only difference is that people’s involvement in local development in Tokyo was seen as legitimate." The only difference? Surely they jest. Their argument is, in any case, disingenuous, because the Tokyo developments they speak of were entirely legal. Citizens had rights to the land on which they built their homes. That is why they were 'seen as legitimate'.
I should stress that S&E aren't mavericks. Crazy as it may seem to some of us, the idea of Dharavi as village rather than slum, a community to be celebrated and cherished, is catching on. Prince Charles, who has become an emblem of anti-rational, anti-modernist architectural thinking in Britain over the past two decades, recently praised Dharavi's "underlying intuitive grammar of design", and held the place up as a model to be emulated. There are no signs, however, that the Prince intends forsaking London's Clarence House, his private estates in Gloucestershire and Scotland, and his new 192 acre Welsh property, to make a home in Bombay's finest village.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Censorship: small mercies
The Sean Penn starrer Milk, about the first openly gay man to be elected to a major political position in the US, is being released in India without cuts. An sms doing the rounds urges people to see the film in its first weekend as a way of supporting the progressive intent behind its release. I'll be glad to see Milk on the big screen rather than taking the Piratebay option.
In a nation where strict censorship is approved by all political parties, the stance of one government is not hugely different from that of its predecessor. Nevertheless, to those not inclined to the Gore's-the-same-as-Bush attitude, signs of liberalisation have been visible during the UPA's term in office. Sharmila Tagore, the current censor board chief, has consistently spoken up for artistic freedom, and lifted the board from the ridiculous depths it had sunk to under Anupam Kher during the NDA's reign.
The most egregious acts of censorship in the past five years have originated outside the ceritification body. Some of these came from the government, like Health minister Ramadoss's injunction to ban images of smoking, while most originated from extra-legal pressure groups. These groups have become a serious threat to free expression, and I hope some sensible judges come down heavily on them soon.
For the moment, though, one can savour the release of Milk (that sounds a bit gross, sorry), as also of Dev D a couple of weeks ago. Anurag Kashyap's film didn't come through completely unscathed, but considering the rough rides he's had in the past, this must have seemed like a holiday cruise.
Meanwhile, a fracas at the opening of Bangalore's new National Gallery of Modern Art gives an indication of what we can expect if the BJP returns to power. The Medical Health Minister Ramachandra Gowda, speaking at the museum's inauguration (the very fact he was deputed to attend tells us a lot about the Karnataka government), tore into "pseudo-intellectuals who have distorted the tradition and culture of the country".
I await NMGA Director Rajeev Lochan's repudiation of Gowda's statement, but I'm not holding my breath.
In a nation where strict censorship is approved by all political parties, the stance of one government is not hugely different from that of its predecessor. Nevertheless, to those not inclined to the Gore's-the-same-as-Bush attitude, signs of liberalisation have been visible during the UPA's term in office. Sharmila Tagore, the current censor board chief, has consistently spoken up for artistic freedom, and lifted the board from the ridiculous depths it had sunk to under Anupam Kher during the NDA's reign.
The most egregious acts of censorship in the past five years have originated outside the ceritification body. Some of these came from the government, like Health minister Ramadoss's injunction to ban images of smoking, while most originated from extra-legal pressure groups. These groups have become a serious threat to free expression, and I hope some sensible judges come down heavily on them soon.
For the moment, though, one can savour the release of Milk (that sounds a bit gross, sorry), as also of Dev D a couple of weeks ago. Anurag Kashyap's film didn't come through completely unscathed, but considering the rough rides he's had in the past, this must have seemed like a holiday cruise.
Meanwhile, a fracas at the opening of Bangalore's new National Gallery of Modern Art gives an indication of what we can expect if the BJP returns to power. The Medical Health Minister Ramachandra Gowda, speaking at the museum's inauguration (the very fact he was deputed to attend tells us a lot about the Karnataka government), tore into "pseudo-intellectuals who have distorted the tradition and culture of the country".
I await NMGA Director Rajeev Lochan's repudiation of Gowda's statement, but I'm not holding my breath.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Dev D and other Angry Young Men
I saw Anurag Kashyap's Dev D last weekend. It's a very good film, though not, I think, the masterpiece some people are making it out to be. While it departs substantially, and refreshingly, from previous cinematic adaptations, it cannot overcome the central flaw in the novel as well as its many film versions: the weakness of the main figure.
If Dilip Kumar couldn't make Devdas a believable and interesting character, there's no way Abhay Deol was going to come close. Unfortunately for Deol, this performance is a step backward from Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye. He plays a rich industrialist's son possessed of an urge to destroy himself and everybody close to him. There is no reason for him to be like that, it's just the way he is. His emotions, then, seem in excess of the facts of his cushy life. I've written about such excess previously, in connection with Picasso's paintings and Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Playing Kashyap's Dev convincingly was a matter of conveying an inner intensity partly masked by outward cool. Deol manages the cool (though not as effortlessly as he did with Lucky), but largely forgoes the intensity. It's a difficult thing to convey, that inner anger which exists for no clear reason. Jack Nicholson did it consistently in the seventies, before beginning to ham it up in the next decade. He went from being a volcano ready to explode, to one spewing lava and gas everywhere. Amitabh Bachchan, too, had that power, although in his case script writers usually provided enough motivation for characters he played to feel the way they did.
When a character does plumb those depths of anger or anguish, he can become a proxy for the feelings of an entire generation, precisely because there isn't enough in his individual tale to justify his emotions or actions. This is true of Jimmy Porter from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and of many iconic angry young men in the half century since Osborne's play was performed.
The main victims of the anger of these young men, it should be mentioned, are frequently lovers who've done little to deserve it. We have Hamlet and Ophelia, Jimmy Porter and Alison, Jack Nicholson's Bobby Dupea and Karen Black's Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, and Dev and Paro.
Kashyap's film left me with many questions: what if Abhay Deol had, miraculously, made Dev's actions credible through the force of his acting? Would he have become an iconic figure in the manner of the predecessors I've mentioned? Or would the fact that he plays such an affluent character have disqualified him? Is there the kind of generational anger in India now that there was in the seventies?
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Budget and the Broadcasters
Today's interim budget was a fine moment for India's democracy. The government could have used the excuse of the global emergency to push through politically expedient policies. Instead, it stuck to the rule book and presented a simple vote on account. This is in sync with Manmohan Singh's insistence on keeping important appointments such as ambassadorships in abeyance till the next government is sworn in.
The TV channels were not swayed by the display of propriety. They, as always on budget day, were focussed on one simple question: would the market rise or fall? Since it fell, they drew the conclusion that the Finance Minister had messed up. 'Damp Squib Budget' was the headline on CNBC-TV18. The clamour of presenters faulting the government for providing no 'big bang' proposals drowned out sensible voices like Deepak Parekh, Nandan Nilekani and Uday Kotak.
Stocks in real estate companies were among the hardest hit, after their chiefs were denied the 'sops' (a favourite word of Indian journalists) they had lobbied for. I'm particularly glad about that. For years these people charged extortionately for accommodation, pricing most of the population out of the market and encouraging a speculative bubble. Their net profit margins were outrageous, over 50% in the case of big companies like DLF, Unitech and HDIL; and that's without factoring in the black money involved in most transactions. Yet, the promoters of some of these firms were so greedy in leveraging their gains that, once the price bubble burst, they found themselves on the brink of insolvency. Imagine that: a company makes a profit of hundreds of crores of rupees one quarter (these are not fictitious profits like Satyam's), and a couple of months later is almost bankrupt.
What's their response to the crisis? Instead of lowering prices to push sales volumes, they hoard their stock, waiting for the market to turn, all the while complaining the government isn't offering enough tax incentives to buyers. In fact, the buyers are out there. When MHADA offered 3800 reasonably priced flats in January, it received 430,000 applicants for the ballot, more than a hundred per apartment, a sign of how desperate people in Bombay are for a decent place to live. But the likes of DHL, Unitech and HDIL aren't interested in those five lakh citizens, or the many millions like them across India.
On the business channels, anchors looked at the market's falling graph, shook their heads and said, "Unfortunately, Pranab Mukherjee merely did what the constitution stipulates". So there you have it: 300 points on the Sensex on one side, and the nation's constitution on the other. Which is more important? The broadcasters have made their choice.
The TV channels were not swayed by the display of propriety. They, as always on budget day, were focussed on one simple question: would the market rise or fall? Since it fell, they drew the conclusion that the Finance Minister had messed up. 'Damp Squib Budget' was the headline on CNBC-TV18. The clamour of presenters faulting the government for providing no 'big bang' proposals drowned out sensible voices like Deepak Parekh, Nandan Nilekani and Uday Kotak.
Stocks in real estate companies were among the hardest hit, after their chiefs were denied the 'sops' (a favourite word of Indian journalists) they had lobbied for. I'm particularly glad about that. For years these people charged extortionately for accommodation, pricing most of the population out of the market and encouraging a speculative bubble. Their net profit margins were outrageous, over 50% in the case of big companies like DLF, Unitech and HDIL; and that's without factoring in the black money involved in most transactions. Yet, the promoters of some of these firms were so greedy in leveraging their gains that, once the price bubble burst, they found themselves on the brink of insolvency. Imagine that: a company makes a profit of hundreds of crores of rupees one quarter (these are not fictitious profits like Satyam's), and a couple of months later is almost bankrupt.
What's their response to the crisis? Instead of lowering prices to push sales volumes, they hoard their stock, waiting for the market to turn, all the while complaining the government isn't offering enough tax incentives to buyers. In fact, the buyers are out there. When MHADA offered 3800 reasonably priced flats in January, it received 430,000 applicants for the ballot, more than a hundred per apartment, a sign of how desperate people in Bombay are for a decent place to live. But the likes of DHL, Unitech and HDIL aren't interested in those five lakh citizens, or the many millions like them across India.
On the business channels, anchors looked at the market's falling graph, shook their heads and said, "Unfortunately, Pranab Mukherjee merely did what the constitution stipulates". So there you have it: 300 points on the Sensex on one side, and the nation's constitution on the other. Which is more important? The broadcasters have made their choice.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Darwin: A Bicentennial Tribute
Charles Darwin was among my first heroes. As a primary schooler, I read a Ladybird account of his life, and was deeply fascinated. Beagle, Galapagos, iguana: the words felt wonderful on the tongue. I dreamed of discovering unknown creatures in malarial swamps far from civilisation. As I grew older and realised I had capacity neither for the self-sacrifice nor for the meticulous persistence required for explorations of that kind, my admiration for Darwin and those who followed in his path was reinforced considerably.Darwin's central thesis of natural selection acting on random variations is very different from, say, the Theory of Relativity. Anybody of sound mind can understand it. It is so simple, in fact, that that any intelligent person living in the early Victorian era might have hit upon it independently, given the right circumstances. The reason nobody did is that, while the mechanism Darwin proposed was elegantly simple, its consequences were so far-reaching as to overturn all traditional notions about how trees, reptiles, insects and humans came to occupy Planet Earth. The idea was so radical that even today, exactly 200 years after Darwin was born, in the 150th year of the publication of his celebrated book On the Origin of Species, and after a century and a half of discoveries that have proved his idea true beyond all reasonable doubt, a majority of people across the globe reject its validity.
I never had a mental block against the idea of natural selection because I didn't believe any of the explanations religions provided for the origin of life on earth. My immediate family members were not religiously inclined. The only time I attended prayers was when an uncle or neighbour installed a Ganapati during the annual festival. I gorged on the modaks made in that period, but the fervent chanting always struck me as faintly ridiculous. I found it mind-boggling that intelligent, well-educated adults could actually believe their prayers would be answered by a deity with a human body and elephant's head.
It was evident that the world was very unfair to some individuals and extraordinarily kind to others; and that the unfairness and kindness did not correlate with any discernible external factor like religious faith, goodness or intelligence. Those who worshipped Ganapati were no better off than devotees of other gods. Why, then, believe in the dogmas of one faith over another?
Once I understood Darwin, life made sense. The facts as I saw them, and as they were observed by people everywhere, could be explained in ways that did not create an infinite regression of questions ("If everything must have a creator, who created the Creator? And who created that Creator?"), or unsolvable contradictions ("If Allah is omnipotent, it follows that he made me a disbeliever. Why, then, will he condemn me to hell and an eternity of torment for my disbelief?"). By the time I turned thirteen or fourteen or fifteen (past years coalesce in memory as one gets older), I was convinced that natural selection was the driving force behind the creation of the varied forms of life visible on earth, and nothing I have read or experienced since has shaken that conviction in the slightest.
I have written this post without using the word most associated with Darwin: evolution. It is, in many ways, a misnomer, implying as it does that some states of being are inherently better than others. It places Darwin in a category that includes a number of misguided thinkers who came before him, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and leaves the door open to criticism that he was not the 'father of evolution'. He wasn't, just as Gandhi was not the 'father of non-violence'. Gandhi's originality lay in demonstrating how non-violent protest could be the basis of political struggle. Darwin's resided in his explanation, backed by hundreds of practical examples, of how life began with extremely simple forms and changed over hundreds of millions of years, without any external impetus, to the mix of simple and complex living things we observe today.
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