Bombay: urban planning basket case

I like to call Bombay the largest one-street town in the world. 'One street' is an exaggeration, of course, but first time visitors to the city are invariably surprised at how often they go up and down the same roads. Any time a north-south connector is shut for repairs, rush hour traffic goes from slothful to virtually stationary.
On Monday, north bound cars were diverted from Pedder Road so a drain pipe could be repaired. The blockage was supposed to be in place for 45 days. Instead it lasted exactly one evening, before the government took a U-turn on the repair idea. This, after waiting a decade to get all the permissions required. The southern end of Pedder road lies at the bottom of Walkeshwar - Malabar Hill, home to ministers and billionaires, people with direct lines to the highest echelons of power. A few calls from these folk count for more than protests by tens of thousands of common citizens. You can't fob them off saying, these are just teething pains; they'll sort themselves out once drivers and traffic policemen get used to the new route.
While this fiasco was playing itself out, roadworks on another north-south artery were postponed as well. The demolition of a flyover at Lalbaug was was put off citing traffic congestion caused by the Pedder Road drainpipe repairs.
Over a decade ago, the administration decided to build a bridge along the coast to take pressure off city roads. The bridge was supposed to span the distance from Bandra, the southernmost of Bombay's 'suburbs', to Nariman Point, a downtown precinct that, in the 1990s, was home to many of the nation's most prestigious firms. Though Nariman Point is no longer the rental magnet it once was, the southern tip of Bombay remains an office hub, making the Western Freeway Sea Link a worthwhile project.


The initial plan for the bridge included a massive viewing tower with a revolving restaurant at its apex. Not only was in unclear what viewers in the viewing tower were supposed to view (Bombay isn't the prettiest city on earth, after all), there was no provision in the plan for parking. Ultimately, somebody in the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), realised that building a parking lot in the middle of the sea was inadvisable, and having people swim to the tower even more so, and scrapped the viewing gallery idea.
The making and changing of plans cost hundreds of millions of rupees and many months.
The next challenge came from fishermen, who claimed the distance between the bridge's pillars was insufficient to allow them to navigate safely through. In rough weather, boats were likely to dash against the concrete, endangering lives. Personally, I have never seen any such rough weather in Bombay outside of the monsoon, when kolis don't go out to sea, but the state government took the fishermen at their word, shifted the alignment of the bridge and put in a half kilometer long cable-stay section.
This change of plans cost billions of rupees and many years.
Then there were Public Interest Litigations by citizens groups and environmentalist activists, stoppages for non-payment of dues, contracts cancelled, new bids announced, new contracts signed. At the end of ten years, the first of three planned stages remains incomplete, the second is still at the bidding stage and the third, well, that's an absolute zinger.
Let's stick to the second phase for the moment. It will extend the Sea Link from Worli to Haji Ali. After this, it is unclear where vehicles will go. The original plan involved building a flyover traversing Pedder Road, but that was shot down by the same powerful people who got the repairs halted yesterday. Currently, planners are thinking of an elevated road above the racecourse, which looks like a bridge from nowhere to nowhere.
The most priceless bit of plan modification involves the final stage of the project, between Haji Ali and Nariman Point. The sea link here has been shelved because it will block the view of the Shivaji statue in the bay. What Shivaji statue, you ask. Well, there's no such statue right now, but the government's announced plans to build an artificial island on which will stand an equestrian bronze of the Maratha warrior rising a few feet higher than the Statue of Liberty. Why decide to put a statue in a place where there's been a bridge planned for years? Well, when politicians make grand gestures, such trivialities are beneath their consideration. The statue and its island are budgeted at a billion rupees. Most analysts believe the project will cost much more, and that's without factoring in the realignment of the Sea Link. Since that rejigging is happening only because of the as-yet-unbuilt monument, surely the extra expense ought to be factored into Shivaji island' s cost.
The idea now is to blast a road under Malabar Hill, thus connecting Haji Ali and Chowpatty beach, and then dig a shallow tunnel below the sea bed, across the bay to Nariman Point. I'm willing to wager a substantial amount that this will never get off the ground, or, rather, under it. Politicians and billionaires who got drainage repairs halted for slowing their vehicles are hardly going to sit quietly while the rock beneath their feet is dynamited.
My guess is the artificial island will also be abandoned, once serious discussions about its viability begin.

Jail time for Varun

The Varun Gandhi case is getting entertaining. The VHP vigorously backs statements Varun says he never made. His mother claims what he said is mere common sense, tacitly admitting the footage is genuine. The man himself cancels an anticipatory bail application and decides to play martyr by spending a weekend in jail. Uttar Pradesh's Chief Minister sees an opportunity to keep him locked up till the election's over. She gets the police to invoke the National Security Act, which makes getting bail difficult. The BJP, which loves such laws, and refuses to accept they are routinely misused, insists the NSA is being misused. Prakash Karat of the CPM and the civil liberties activist Prashant Bhushan, usually vociferous in their denunciation of laws which allow long periods of detention without charge, strongly support the use of the NSA in this case.
Meanwhile, news comes from distant shores that Varun's degrees from LSE and SOAS are a figment of his imagination. Not only is he a bare faced liar, he's a perjurer as well.
There's a lot to be said for election season.

The Meltdown and Race Politics

Brazil's President, Lula da Silva has joined the list of world leaders making undiplomatic statements as the economic slowdown begins to bite. Addressing a press conference alongside Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Lula brought race into the equation: "This crisis was caused by no black man or woman, by no indigenous person, by no poor person," he said, "This was a crisis that was fostered and boosted by irrational behaviour of people that are white, blue-eyed, that before the crisis looked like they knew everything about economics."
There you have the third world, or postcolonial, view of the meltdown. Lula himself, it is worth mentioning, is white, though not blue eyed, continuing a Brazilian tradition of pale presidents leading a racially diverse population.


American right-wingers have a different take on the matter. They blame the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act, signed by President Carter and strengthened by President Clinton, which encouraged banks to lend in low-income neighbourhoods. Although the legislation was colour blind, the neighbourhoods affected were frequently dominated by blacks or Hispanics, which has resulted in Republicans grumbling about 'minorities' in their analysis of the meltdown.
Republicans have also pointed fingers at the two quasi government companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, established during the Great Depression to facilitate mortgages for low-income workers. Among their main targets has been Franklin Raines, Bill Clinton's former budget director, who resigned as CEO of Fannie Mae back in 2004.


Raines was #2 on CNN's list of ten 'culprits of the collapse', right behind #1, which was 'You', meaning the American consumer. Clearly neither the Republicans nor CNN are going to buy Lula's 'no black man' claim.
The majority of experts reject the Republican contention that the Community Reinvestment Act played a central role in the crisis. A greater proportion blame banks which created and traded in complex derivatives that now go under the alias 'toxic assets'. Matt Taibbi recently published a strongly worded, well-researched screed titled The Big Takeover in Rolling Stone magazine, which includes this passage:
"The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."
OK, so we've blamed blue-eyed white guys; blacks and Hispanics; and now Indians. What about those usual suspects when dealing with matters financial, the Jews? Well, that's the big taboo in politics as well as media. Only crazy mullahs blame the Jews, right? So everybody's been pretty quiet on that front. One can't imagine Taibbi publishing, even as a quote, a line like, "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Jewish guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model..."
This didn't stop the Anti-Defamation League, a body that sniffs out anti-jewish sentiments wherever they exist and in a few places they don't, from conducting a survey and trumpeting their finding that a third of Europeans believe Jews are responsible for the financial crisis.
The Arabs and Chinese appear to have got away clean thus far.

Three Sculptors

For the moment, Bombay galleries continue to underwrite ambitious sculpture and sculptural installation. Three solos on view currently, at Chemould, Gallery Maskara and Sakshi respectively, fall in this category, all from artists who were born outside India's metropolitan centres. The best of them is L N Tallur's Placebo at Chemould. Tallur studied museology in Baroda, and his first show at Chemould back in 1999 reflected his learning. He constructed shelves with amusing displays inside, like one in which the top drawer contained what looked like fossil eggs, while the bottom one opened to reveal realistically moulded and painted fried eggs. After that, he dreamed up a number of mechanised pieces; one that was displayed for Chemould's 40th anniversary exhibition looked like clothes hanging on a line, but periodically filled with air and began to resemble intestines. Tallur's characteristic humour is visible in Placebo, but the work is weighed down by being too literal.


In Souvenir Maker, a massive barb wire fabricating machine occupies one half of a room while the other half is taken up by a long pedestal on which are placed glass tubes containing strands of gilded barb wire. The tubes are inscribed with the message: "Designed in America Conceptualized in India, Made in China, Sponsored by Korea .. ..Yes we are conditioned to think under flags...".
We are conditioned not only to "think under flags", but to think in symbols. It is a habit Indian artists should try harder to quit. My favourite work in Placebo was the least symbolic of the lot: a machine with spiral ducts in which toy animals circulated. The exterior was smothered by what looked like clotted resin.

Narendra Yadav's Pavlov's God at Gallery Maskara is his second solo exhibition. His first consisted of little quirky machines. This one has large quirky machines, reflecting, perhaps, the hubris of the era just ended. Unfortunately for Yadav, quirkiness works best on a small scale. One of the works currently on display, Paper Plane, has the object of the title crashing into a tall steel tower and cracking it open. The echo of the 9/11 attacks is impressive at first sight, but not a profound enough concept to keep one coming back. Even so, it is one of the two strongest pieces in Pavlov's God. The other, titled Celestial Bodies in Conversation, is a life-sized sidewalk of sleeping bodies lying under street lamps, while transistor sets play the music of the spheres, otherwise known as static.

Valay Shende's second solo at Sakshi is as unintentionally funny as his first. In the earlier exhibition he had, in complete seriousness, shown a work called Buddha Good, Marx Bad, in which a gilded Siddhartha makes a 'stop' gesture before a convertible embossed with names of well-known brands. The commies have been at the car hammer and sickle but failed to make much of a dent with their red weapons.


In this show, he pays homage to the lunch box deliverers of Bombay. Since the dabbawalas are renowned for their punctuality, Shende has decided to make their faceless figures out of watches.



Thinking about the violence around him, Shende concluded that humans have failed to evolve sufficiently. To convey this insight, he puts fibreglass nudes in cast aluminium prams pushed by apes made from brass discs, in a peculiar combination of Rameshwar Broota, Subodh Gupta and Ron Mueck.



As a tribute to farmers who have committed suicide, he displays an ornate dining table, on which stand salt and pepper shakers filled with soil and ashes.


The work, which has affinities with Tallur's glass tube souvenirs of golden barbed wire, is meant to critique the apathy of the rich, but threatens to become a critique of itself. For, if we ought not to eat off fancy tables while poor, indebted farmers are killing themselves, surely we ought not to buy, sell and display exorbitantly priced art either.

Road to Hell or Stairway to Heaven?

Barack Obama and Tim Geithner have had a tough couple of weeks, and criticism is pouring in from unlikely quarters. The Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said yesterday the US administration's stimulus plan is a "road to hell". President Obama might have expected warmer words in the run-up to his Prague visit scheduled for early April. Topolanek gave vent to his feelings at an EU meeting just after his government lost a vote of confidence. I doubt his successor will thump him on the back, saying: "thanks a bunch, Mirek, for telling it like it is".
Damage control operations have commenced. The Czechs now claim the translation was faulty: The suggestion wasn't that the US plan is bad, only that it would be catastrophic for the EU to follow that path. Which still indicates Americans aren't on a stairway to heaven.

And its whispered that soon
If we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason.
And a new day will dawn
For those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter.

With each passing day fewer people believe the piper's name is Barack. Chris Rea reflects the mood of the moment better than Led Zep:

And all the roads jam up with credit
And there’s nothing you can do
It’s all just bits of paper flying away from you
Oh look out world, take a good look
What comes down here
You must learn this lesson fast and learn it well
This ain’t no upwardly mobile freeway
Oh no, this is the road to hell

Update March 28: I wasn't far off the mark. Mirek Topolanek today said his remark about Obama's 'road to hell' was subconsciously inspired by AC / DC's Highway to Hell, which the band played during their Prague gig a few days beforethe Czech PM made his gaffe. The song's words don't seem as prescient as the Chris Rea lyrics, but here's the opening stanza anyway:

Living easy, living free
Season ticket on a one-way ride
Asking nothing, leave me be
Taking everything in my stride
Dont need reason, dont need rhyme
Aint nothing I would rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too

Im on the highway to hell

Varun Gandhi: Too Old to be Playing Doctor

"Those are not my words, this is not my voice. The CD has been doctored. I've been a victim of political conspiracy. This is a malicious attempt to brand me communal." That was Varun Gandhi's defence against the charge of delivering anti-Muslim speeches. Since then, he and his party, the BJP, have been doing a strange shuffle between denial and justification. After the Election Commission held him guilty, the party line is that the tape ought to have been sent for forensic analysis before any such decision was taken.
That's hogwash, and more TV presenters ought to be saying so. An impression has been created in the public's mind that video can be manipulated to turn any image into anything else. This is simply not the case. It is true that composite images can be put together with relative ease, but the superimpositions are usually easy to spot. In Varun Gandhi's case, though, it wasn't a matter of a flag or some other element being added to the frame. We saw the candidate in close-up, and the words we heard synchronised perfectly with his lip movements. That's something which is almost impossible to simulate. At the very least it would require dozens of people working for weeks with a budget of tens of lakhs to animate each frame (there are twenty five per second in the format used in India). Even after this, a careful viewing by producers of television news programmes would reveal the fakery.
I'm glad the Election Commission has assumed the video recording faithfully renders what was said in Pilibhit, and put the burden of disproof on the accused. The BJP complains this is unfair, but, had the footage been fake, would it be difficult to prove its inauthenticity? There were thousands of people at those meetings in Pilibhit. Why has no one come forward with a statement like, "I was at the rally, and Varun Gandhi said nothing against Muslims. In fact, he spoke only about the importance of peace and harmony being maintained between communities, which, in any case, is the principle that animates our party." The BJP counts among its ranks a number of gifted techies. Not a single one has attempted to reveal what has been tampered with in those images and how.
It is easy to see why the candidate and his party did nothing to back up their assertions. Such cases usually come up for hearing in court rather than before an election tribunal. After months of procedural delays, the evidence is sent for analysis to one of our forensic laboratories. These labs, as I've shown before, favour voodoo science over proper enquiry. They produce a result that convinces nobody and takes the case nowhere. A fine example of this was the Anara Gupta trial. A woman, said to be Gupta, had been filmed having sex with her boyfriend. Once the footage was leaked, the police charged Gupta with creating and distributing pornography. The victim, in other words, became the accused. Luckily, the inefficiency of the forensic investigators eventually crossed out the insensitivity of the cops. A lab in Hyderabad concluded the woman on tape was not Gupta, while another facility in Chandigarh came to the opposite conclusion.
It wouldn't surprise me if our forensic investigators, having examined the Varun Gandhi tapes, decided the the man in the frame was not Gandhi at all, but an impostor.

Food Exports and Carbon Footprints

At a wedding reception last evening I was seated next to a Danish journalist who looked at everything around him with an anthropologist's eye. Is this traditional wedding food? Is using forks and spoons traditional? Are these traditional dresses? Would you traditionally greet me with folded hands or a handshake?
Traditionally, shaking your hand would defile me, I considered saying. It would necessitate a long bath and a few extra prayers.
He told me he specialised in writing on food. Not reviews of new restaurants, but the impact of globalisation on eating habits and the environment. As if on cue, a waiter stopped by our table and offered us kiwifruit juice.
"Ten years ago, one couldn't get kiwifruit in India", I told him, "they only become available after food imports were liberalised".
He asked me where they were grown. I said I wasn't sure.
"New Zealand, perhaps?" he suggested.
"That's what the name indicates, but maybe it's from somewhere closer".
Back home after the reception, I looked it up, and found kiwifruit originated in China. They were was first planted in New Zealand about a hundred years ago by a returning missionary, and named Chinese gooseberries, though they are not berries. In the 1950s, an American company importing the fruit suggested a name change because anything Chinese was suspect in those days, and because there were high tariffs on importing berries. After one or two failed renamings, 'kiwifruit' was settled upon.
The Danish journalist did not like the idea of food travelling great distances before being consumed. He even expressed displeasure at butter cookies being exported out of his home country. I've come across this attitude often enough since the issue of food miles became a hot topic about five years ago. Brits in particular have gone bonkers over the idea that food transportation contributes massively to global warming and responsible individuals, therefore, are duty bound to eat local produce.
Studies published over the past twelve months reveal that the hue and cry over food miles is a lot of ado about nothing much. Christopher Weber and H Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University found that, for American households, 83% of diet-related greenhouse gases were created during the production of food. Only 4% were emitted during the transport of foodstuff from producer to retailer.
Mere facts, of course, aren't going to turn devotees of local food away from a cause that offers them opportunity to feel morally superior.
But consider the Dane for a minute. If he is an average European gent, about 1.5 tons of CO2 will be spewed into the atmosphere to keep him fed for a year. Presuming the Webers-Matthews formula works for Europe, 60 kilos of this will involve shipping and trucking from place of origin to location of sale. Meanwhile, his personal CO2 account has been inflated by 1.5 tons solely as a result of a return flight to Bombay for a friend's wedding.
I am not arguing that food transport ought not to be an issue at all. There's been at least one instance in the past when the lengths the trade will go to shocked me. Eight or nine years ago, on a trip to Delhi on the Rajdhani, the last time I used that relatively environmentally friendly mode to get to the capital, I was in a compartment with three businessmen. One of them peddled Amway, the second was in real estate and the third, a kid, was partnering his uncle in an ice cream operation. The kid outlined his business plan: since tariffs on food products had just been revised downwards, he would import ice-cream from the US and sell it in India. Crazy idea, I said to myself, they'll never get it off the ground. A few months later, at the end of dinner at a friend's home, the host produced a tub of Blue Bunny ice-cream. That was the brand the kid had spoken of.
As we dug into dessert, I said, "Funny, they're actually managing to sell American ice-cream in India."
"Baskin Robbins is American too, that's been here for a while", the host replied.
"No no, Baskin Robbins manufactures ice cream locally, Blue Bunny is made in the US and shipped across in a giant freezer."
The laden spoon the host was directing to his mouth stopped in mid-air. With his other hand he picked up the tub and examined it. A label stuck on it said, Imported Feb 2001, or some date like that. Looking ill, he put the spoon back down. Both he and his wife are very environmentally conscious. In fact, she's recently left her job in software to run an organic food store. I'd just managed to ruin their evening.
Blue Bunny didn't last long in India. Priced at the top end of the market thanks to shipping costs, it never achieved the scale it needed to be viable. I'm happy about that. Food miles skeptic I may be, but I wouldn't buy ice-cream made half-way round the globe.

Osian's Auction

Just got back from the Osian's auction of art and craft. Neville Tuli, head of the auction house, started off the evening with one of his proselytising speeches about the need to build arts infrastructure, highlighting his own brave, pioneering efforts in that direction. Then the bidding started... except it didn't. Not a single work reached its high estimate, and it was easy to see why. Much of the art on offer was the Bengal rubbish that Osian's has taken to pushing these past few years: Bireshwar Sen, Sunil Madhav Sen, Gopal Ghose, Prokash Karmakar, Sajal Roy: utterly dreadful stuff. Or minor works by good artists like Benode Behari Mukherjee, Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore and Paritosh Sen. When the odd strong work by a major artist came up, the over-optimistic estimates proved a deterrent. The lots that did sell went mostly to proxy bids, only one or two were grabbed by people in the auction room.
Rajit Kapur did a valiant job as auctioneer, and finally began getting a response once bidding began on craft works from Paramparik Karigar's collection. A few of the sculptures, sarees and paintings sold for five to ten times their estimated price.
Then it was back to modern and contemporary art, and the same depressing combination of proxy bids around the low estimate, or else a complete absence of interest leading to the work being brought in.

The Multiplex Next Door

One reason I've been blogging about films so much is that I've seen many more movies in the past couple of months than I usually do. There's a simple reason for this: PVR Phoenix, the seven-screen multiplex next door that opened around the time I inaugurated this blog. OK, it is next door only by Bombay standards, but, before it opened, the closest multi-screen options for me lay in Juhu and VT, an hour's drive from my home in Dadar. I refuse to count in the list of multiplexes that haven of black marketeers, the erstwhile Gaiety / Galaxy / Gemini in Khar, though it now calls itself G7 and has converted its preview theatres into ticketed auditoriums.
PVR Phoenix offers some great deals. Monday to Thursday, tickets are priced at 100 / 150 rupees, and the cheaper of these is perfectly adequate, since there are always back row seats available. If I'm interested in seeing a blockbuster on opening day, I can book online, a facility unavailable for single screeners in my extended neighbourhood like Star City, Suburbia and Globus. I'm so glad I never again have to travel to INOX, with its overpriced tickets and veggie-only food options.
Not everything about Phoenix PVR is great, it has to be said. There are problems with projector callibration, resulting in the frame being cut in some of the auditoriums. As Jabeen said while we sat through a crop-top screening of Gulaal, what's the point of spending crores on state of the art equipment and viewing facilities, if you're going to mess up this simple but crucial step?
Another bad experience I had involved a chicken tikka sandwich I bought before a screening of The Reader. I hit a huge sharp bone, about two centimetres square, in my second bite: luckily, I didn't lose any teeth to it. Afterwards, I went to the counter to show them the bone, expecting nothing, but demanding a refund. A manager was called in, who said, "Sir, since you have eaten the sandwich, I cannot offer you a refund". I replied, "If this was a restaurant, I'd have immediately asked for a replacement or my money back. But I'm watching a film. I can't leave the hall for an hour, and I'm desperately hungry. What d'you expect me to do?" He listened sympathetically enough, but maintained, "If you had even left half the sandwich...". I wonder what leaving the sandwich uneaten is really meant to accomplish? Prove that I didn't get my money's worth? Hitting a bone in a boneless snack is not proof enough, apparently.
Yes, I do hear herbivores chortling it serves me right for knocking the veggie menu at INOX.
The reason food becomes important in multiplexes is the weird timings of shows, without which far fewer patrons would buy the overpriced, calorie dense, flavour-free stuff on offer. In the old days, you had four shows per day in each large hall, usually starting at 12.30, 3.30. 6.30 and 9.30. Late eaters could come out of the penultimate screening and head for dinner, while those who preferred an early meal could finish up and catch the last show. This changed with the coming of late, late shows targetting affluent clients not dependent on public transport. The calculation then began to be made backwards. How late can we expect patrons to be willing to leave the final show? The answer was about 1 to 1.30am. This meant the last show would start somewhere between 10.30 and 11pm, and the penultimate screening, the one with the highest demand, would be scheduled for around 8pm. This shift has seriously messed up moviegoers' meal schedules. Few are willing to dine and get to the theatre by eight. Conversely, even in a late eating city like Bombay, most would want to have a proper bite before 10.30. This means people consume nachos or popcorn and a Coke inside the hall, ingesting at least 500 calories in the process, and then have a meal afterwards, often in a food court within the same mall that houses the multiplex. Absolute disaster for waistlines.
Right now, with exhibitors and distributors locked in one of their periodic battles over revenue sharing, it looks like I might have to take a break from the Phoenix routine. If that's the case, then, so be it, Jai Ho Piratebay.

Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal

In writing about a huge Jitish Kallat canvas a few weeks ago, I suggested artists ought to be careful while quoting classic works, lest their own creations pale in comparison. That's precisely what happens in Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal, where we are treated to a painful rehash of Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye, Sahir Ludhianvi's lament from Guru Dutt's Pyaasa, originally set to music by S.D. Burman and sung by Mohammad Rafi.
A more important failing of Gulaal, which it shares with many indie films, is that its supporting cast is far more interesting than the central character. In mainstream movies, the habit is to sacrifice everything at the altar of the main star's role. He gets the best lines, the best punches, the best tunes, the best love scenes. There is little or no detailing of smaller parts, and character actors are rarely provided roles with scene stealing potential. Indie films have reversed this tendency, Luck By Chance being a recent example.
The most compelling figure in Gulaal (spoilers ahead) is Rananjay Singh (Abhimanyu Singh), scion of Rajput royalty who has rejected that legacy for his own brand of freedom. He's always ready for a fight, or a laugh, or a large peg of whisky. Rananjay becomes mentor to the timid, studious Dilip Kumar Singh (Raj Singh Chaudhary), who discovers in his new law school a terrifying den of hazing and intimidation.
Rananjay Singh, however, is abruptly killed off midway through Gulaal, and the film's energy sags thereafter, lifting every so often in scenes involving Kay Kay Menon, Mahi Gill and Deepak Dobriyal, but never in a sustained manner. The trajectory is a bit like that of the Sensex in 2008. We come to the film from the high of Dev D, and though the trend line starts dropping off fairly soon, there are many flashes of hope providing short-lived rallies. After Rananjay dies, we begin to despair of reaching new highs, but nothing prepares us for the horrible collapse toward the end. The last half hour of the film isn't quite as dreadful as this analogy makes it sound, but it's pretty close.
For a more complimentary comparison, I'd point to Romeo and Juliet. The most attractive character in it is Mercutio, Romeo's reckless, free-spirited companion. Mercutio dies in the third act and, all too often, productions of the Shakespeare play never recover from his death.
Something similar happened in Vishal Bharadwaj's Macbeth adaptation Maqbool after the death of Pankaj Kapoor.
I bring up Shakespeare because Gulaal has pretensions to epic scope in its story of royal lineage, of illegitimate children determined to wrest their inheritance by hook or by crook, and of historical wrongs sought to be corrected by armed insurrection. This part of the narrative, never convincing in itself, is married with a story about student politics, elections for general secretary, and the organising of the annual festival. Two very different themes unsucessfully yoked together. The result is a film that is all of three hours long but feels like a fragment of a much longer tale. I'm not going to rush out to buy the director's cut.
Though Gulaal is something of a train wreck, its language, songs (aside from the Ludhianvi 'tribute'), characters, and visual style (patchy because of the long gaps between schedules, but hinting at something more coherent), convey a nation very different from the one we are served up in the multiplexes week after week, a nation that is crying out for representation and creative interpretation. It is a nation Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bharadwaj understand intimately. They have crafted accomplished movies in Omkara and Dev D, and, with the access to resources that they now have, it may not be long before one of them directs the first truly world-class Hindi film in a generation.