let’s learn how to kiss, please

What I’m wondering is what will happen to Jai (Saif Ali Khan) and Meera (Deepika Padukone) once they do get married?

Their ‘Aaj’ love is so bland, their kisses so like the Rubber-Duck raincoats of school days, dry in a squeaky, rubbery way, the smell of rubber obfuscating the smell of the rain.

Jai seems like a man with no practice in kissing, and if he has had practice, hasn’t learned much on the job. Doesn’t forebode well for their marital life. (Or is it just that he’d rather have been kissing his beautiful girl, Bebo?)

I liked Meera only in the last scene when she cried with relief once Jai did come back, and then drew away from a kiss, awkward after the long separation. At least, she stopped smiling.

For the rest of the film, I was wondering about her parents, wondering what they had done to her that she needed so much to be so nice, so understanding, so ’smiley’ all the time?

She was no less mute than the ‘Kal’ girl from a small village, Veer’s (Saif Ali Khan) love Harmeet (Giselle Monteiro). The ‘Kal’ girl at least metamorphed into ***** ******, and had a reason to be mute (Brazilian playing Punjabi, cut all her dialogues, please!).

Anyway, to come back to kisses, my friend Tanmay Agarwal, who’s been having a set-to with the Censor Board for a couple of kisses in his indie film ‘Chal Chaliye’ has devised a table of censor guidelines set for a kiss. Check that out and more on kisses at his site http://www.chalchaliye.com/ and don’t forget to take the poll.

it’s called taking the piss

You’ve been doing a subtle version of the twist, jig and fox-trot for the last 13 & a 1/2 minutes. You’ve been loosening your facial muscles while contracting other ones in an effort to look normal. You finally manage to find a public toilet and then the gatekeeper demands that you pay up 2 rupees before you enter. You flap your hands wildly and nod your head vigorously and hiss, “I’ll pay you later.”

In the corridor, the gatekeeper’s aunties and nieces in various stages of age, weight and nudity, are sprawled in large pools of water, washing themselves and their clothes. You leap and bound across all of them, in imminent danger of slipping into one of the pools, and adding the contents of your bladder to the soapy torrents of water rushing towards the drain.

Inside the toilet, there is no hook for your bag or your dupatta. Your sunglasses hooked on to the front of your kurta fall off, and you catch them just before they fall into the dodgy contents of the Indian style toilet, immensely relieved that you haven’t had to face the moral dilemma of renouncing them or fishing with your hands to procure them back because they are so very, very expensive. Of course, the toilet door doesn’t close, so you hold one stem of the glasses in your mouth, roll the dupatta round and round your neck, sling your bag across your shoulder, undo your pajamas, all with one hand, while keeping the other firmly on the door.

Then you semi-sit-squat-stand, and pee, grateful that you learned this trick long ago, much to the chagrin of your more conservative mother. 

And it feels more wonderful than anything else on earth. In your relief, you relax a little, and your hand falls off the door. You remember with a fond smile how your insouciant younger self regularly walked into a 5 star hotel in your hometown only to use the facilities. But the security checks at hotels now could be your undoing, you think. Someone pushes the toilet door from outside and jolted out of nostalgia, you push it back with a loud growl of proprietary anger.

Then you complete all the earlier manouvres in reverse, i.e tying up your pajamas, etc., with one hand and now with one leg thrust against the door as well. Ah, someone may say, “what about washing uhmm your uhmm or dabbing with toilet paper?”, and you say “the least said the better, this is as far as things can go with one hand and one leg out of requisition”.

You come outside, and your spine is a little straighter, and you could be humming if you didn’t see the gatekeeper again signaling for the two rupee coin. “This is supposed to be a free urinal”, you shout, pointing at the notice. The gatekeeper feigns a contemptuous ignorance of any written material. You fling a coin down and walk away, thinking well, you are going to be OK for a few more hours at least.

(Would love to see Paro’s film ‘Q2P‘)

gutter water and ajinomoto

I said to Hasan & Husein: “Why do you swim in the canal? The water is filthy.”

Hasan said: “We find good stuff here. A plate, or a bowl. Sometimes a metal pipe. We can sell it for 100-200 rupees.”

I said: “What do you do with the money?”

Hasan said: “We give it to our mother.”

Husein said: “We play dhab.”

Hasan said: “We hire a cycle to ride around.”

Husein said: “I spend it on Chinese food. I like to eat fried rice everyday.”

I said: “But don’t you fall ill in that gutter water?”

Husein said: “No, we like it in there. I like being in the water all the time.”

Hasan said: “We go and wash up with clean water at the Pump. We wash our clothes too.”

Husein said: “Yes, we wash our own clothes.”

* Dhab – A gambling game

the difference between plastic and tin

I said to Bai: “Do you know any other hut we can use, like the one we did for your interview?”

Bai said: “That was not a hut. That was a house. It had tin walls and a tin roof. You can’t just pick it up and run. A hut is two plastic sheets that you can tie up anywhere. I can make you a hut anywhere you want in 10 minutes.”

That’s what it’s come to, folks.

There we were, sauntering along, hand in hand, on our way to ‘The Proposal’. We met a schoolmate of Dhanno’s, exchanged ‘hi’s’ and ‘hello’s’ and carried on.

Dhanno said: “My friends always say, that we saw your mom and you walking around, hand in hand.”

I said: “Oh!”

Dhanno said: “Yeah, they tease me, do you still need your mom to hold your hand to help you cross the road?”

I laughed.

Dhanno said: “I tell them, no, my mom needs to hold my hand to help her cross the road.”

True enough.

and then what happened?

A relationship between a film maker and his subject and my two-pice at

getting up close

What, indeed!

Dhanno said: “Yeah, there’s this guy in her coaching classes who likes Bijli.”

I said: “And does Bijli like him?”

Dhanno said: “Naaah! He’s ugly.”

I said: “So if someone is ugly, you can’t like him?”

Dhanno rolled her eyes and said: “So now you want us to look at the guy’s internal beauty and all? Analyze whether he is marriage material? What, Mom?”

Mom effectively silenced.

torture garden

Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) was raped as a child by the Jesuit priests who were supposed to educate him.

He wrote, “The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture garden. Passions, greed, hatred and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism and religion; these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.”

Not surprisingly, he embraced anarchism, which aimed to sweep away organized society, and replace it with a culture of equals. He did so, despite the fact that as a businessman, investor, journalist, novelist and dramatist, he was extremely rich.

Mirbeau claimed that he wrote ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ to expose the plight of French domestic servants,  preyed on by employment agencies and brutalized by their owners. He used his inside knowledge of the upper classes to attack them.

Celestine, the protagonist of the book, is a cheeky, voluptuous maid, exploited by men and women alike for their sexual fantasies. Celestine moves through various upper class homes, with barely concealed contempt and disgust for her employers. She sees it all – shoe fetishes, women with dildoes, a dying boy’s sexual urges, sadomasochistic frenzy, pornography, bestiality, never losing her own perverse sense of humour.

In a scathingly cynical end, Celestine chooses to marry Joseph, a gamekeeper, a virulent anti-Semite, a sadist and probably a sexual murderer. Joseph steals their last employers’ silver and uses the money to open a bar in a small, seaside town. Celestine and he settle down, become rich, and Celestine with ‘upper class’ fastidiousness, begins to complain of her “thieving, shameless” servants.

In 1900, the book was taken as erotica rather than crusading fiction. Celestine was too robust a heroine to be identified as a victim. She took too much pleasure in the cruelties perpetrated on her.

- Taken from John Baxter’s introduction to the HarperCollins 2006 edition of ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’.

While I was reading the book, a daylight robbery occurred in our housing complex. Four men knocked on a door, entered the house by force, and holding up an old woman, went off with her jewellery and cash. The fact that they entered this particular house on a Sunday afternoon, indicates that they must have inside knowledge of it, they must have known that they would find only an old woman there, and plenty of loot.

Security was beefed up, the security agency got a stern warning, the lift-men and watchmen were scolded harshly for failing to provide adequate security. I am sure all the residents wondered at least once, secretly or openly, as to which one of the security personnel was party to the robbery.

What surprises me about Indian society today is not the amount of crime, and violence that exists, but the fact that there is not more. One only has to look at the inhuman conditions that the people who work for us live in, particularly in cities like Mumbai; their unfairly low wages which ensure that they will never get out of those living and work conditions; the day to day treatment meted out to them, usually rude indifference coupled with an expectation of gratuitous politeness or humility from them; a 365 days per year work schedule; to know that there is something skewered in our system, and sooner or later it has to collapse.

As for sexual exploitation and abuse, there is no dearth of that either in our society. Is there? Sexual needs in our employees, particularly those who live with us, make us uncomfortable. We actively discourage the girls working in our houses from having boyfriends and turn a blind eye to the measures taken by the male workers to fulfill their needs, most of whom live away from their families. However, our own sexual need of our servants is taken for granted. When found out, it could be understandable, forgiven as a momentary lapse or condemned, depending on the manner in which it comes out. The shame is in the nature of the proof, and not the deed itself.

The relentlessly unforgiving stance of Celestine in ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ makes for an effective critique of the bourgeoise, their grotesqueness hidden under a thin veneer of respectability. Perhaps in 1900, the book did shock French society out of its complacence.

But does Indian society today react any more to such expose´s? Has not the intrusion of the media in every aspect of our lives, made us more insensitive to any portrayal of stark reality? Does not every new expose´ make us more cynical, more thick-skinned, even abetting us in our own evasions of morality?

Each employer that Celestine works for, insist that they will call her ‘Mary’, as ‘Celestine’ is a name too fancy for a servant. What they of course seek to do, is stamp out any trace of her identity apart from being a maid. While in our society, we do not change our maids’ names, a ‘Sunita’ is easily replaced by a ‘Lalita’. Extreme poverty ensures that there will never be a shortage of servants in Indian society, at least in our lifetimes. The few days of hardship suffered by us while the turnover takes effect is to be grumbled about, a calamity rocking our domestic peace.

The hardship of our servants is perhaps pitied if we are sensitive souls, but usually dismissed as their ‘karma’ even by themselves. We all know that the poor are poor because they drink, because they are superstitious, illiterate, lazy, stupid. If only they had been clever enough to be born as us.

hopelessly off-key

“You don’t have to be a Bengali to resonate” – Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, Observation 1 on making ‘Anuranan’ after years of ads for Britannia and the like.

“I’m not so sure about that.” – Banno, Observation 1 on watching ‘Anuranan’, having relinquished the habit of ducking Britannia biscuits into tea since years, in a bid to count calories.

“There is a certain kind of film making that seems to be peculiar to Bengali cinema. Mystical talks about nature, emotions sublimated in abstractions, poetry posing as ordinary dialogue between people in the most humdrum situations. Visual elements include Kanchenjungha, intellectual women in spectacles and handloom saris, moonlight, old trees, old houses, a copy of ‘Love in the time of Cholera’, whisky being quaffed in every other scene, a living room party where everybody dances and people air kiss each other. While the protagonist looks at bookshelves.” – Banno, Observation 1 continued.

‘Anuranan’ is meant to explore the resonance between two individuals, between man and nature, between freedom and marriage. An architect Rahul prone to spouting poetical observations into a dictaphone (Rahul Bose), a wife Nandita, who is loving but childless (Rituparno Sengupta), a cold, indifferent business man husband Amit (Rajat Kapoor), a romantic yearning wife Preeti (Raima Sen). The four meet each other in various drawing rooms, and the empty space outside marriage, between Rahul and Preeti begins to resonate. It takes them first to an old tree, that Rahul calls Kanchenjungha and then to Bagdogra where Rahul is designing a resort for Amit’s company. Rahul is moved by the moonlight on the mountain, and Preeti follows him there in her quest to be a bird.

“But why does resonance happen only between two intellectual souls? Why can’t Amit and Nandita resonate? Why does the businessman necessarily have to be unfeeling towards nature? Or relationships? Why can’t the poetry spouting architect actually be cold and cruel to his wife, as in many instances of real life? Why must the wife suffer only because she cannot have a child? Why can’t she be just fed up and bored of his philosophical allusions and his relationship with his dictaphone?” – Banno, Questions 1 to 7, Observation 2.

The film brings to mind Satyajit Ray’s ‘Kanchenjungha‘, perhaps is influenced by it. Of course, the master’s touch is in the completely identifiable characters, dialogue that reveals the innermost workings of their minds without being facetious and unreal, the use of light, shade and mist to enhance the human drama, nature in fact colluding with man to create an unique narrative of a particular day in the lives of several people.

“Is there a single Bengali film made in the history of cinema without reference to Tagore or Satyajit Ray?” – Banno, Question 8, Observation 3.

“If so, can anyone please tell me about it?” – Banno, Question 9, Observation 3 contd.

“It is tough enough to sustain the interest of the viewer in a hyperlink film, as there is no one character or plot that one can identify with. To create a further disenchantment by making the characters unbelievable is to be deliberately yawn-inducing.” – Banno, Observation 4, full and final, on ‘Anuranan’.

Am racking my brains to remember what Rahul’s full and final observation was, the night he died, before he reappeared as a ghost meditating before the Kanchenjunga. Rahul died with his dictaphone in his arms.

I cheered myself up with Anjan Dutt’s ‘The Bong Connection‘. Raima Sen seemed more believable as the rich, young strong-headed girl, Sheela than she did as a bespectacled suffering wife.

Ray and Tagore did come up, but in a palatable way. Except when Apu’s (yes, Apu!) boss says with grudging admiration of him, after a huge showdown between Apu and himself, “Aparajito“.

Anyway, this is what I get up to while Dhanno has a posh dinner with her friends, and Teja earns a living. Watch films that no one will ever watch with me. I remember as a young woman emotionally blackmailing my boyfriend to go to a re-release of ‘Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje‘ with me. My mother, usually indulgent, refused to go see this one. She as a rule, disliked actresses with flamboyant facial expressions and heavy duty ‘ada’s. I, on the other hand, loved flamboyance in all its forms, and sulked and sulked until I did get the requisite company for the film.

“With the years, I’ve become kinder to my loved ones and don’t expect them to prove their love for me by seeing all the films I would like to inflict on them.” – Banno, Observation 5, in vain attempt to resonate.

* ada – accomplished, beauty, blandishment, charm, coquetry, fulfilled, grace, paid, performed, posture

hopelessly off-key

“You don’t have to be a Bengali to resonate” – Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, Observation 1 on making ‘Anuranan’ after years of ads for Britannia and the like.

“I’m not so sure about that.” – Banno, Observation 1 on watching ‘Anuranan’, having relinquished the habit of ducking Britannia biscuits into tea since years, in a bid to count calories.

“There is a certain kind of film making that seems to be peculiar to Bengali cinema. Mystical talks about nature, emotions sublimated in abstractions, poetry posing as ordinary dialogue between people in the most humdrum situations. Visual elements include Kanchenjungha, intellectual women in spectacles and handloom saris, moonlight, old trees, old houses, a copy of ‘Love in the time of Cholera’, whisky being quaffed in every other scene, a living room party where everybody dances and people air kiss each other. While the protagonist looks at bookshelves.” – Banno, Observation 1 continued.

‘Anuranan’ is meant to explore the resonance between two individuals, between man and nature, between freedom and marriage. An architect Rahul prone to spouting poetical observations into a dictaphone (Rahul Bose), a wife Nandita, who is loving but childless (Rituparno Sengupta), a cold, indifferent business man husband Amit (Rajat Kapoor), a romantic yearning wife Preeti (Raima Sen). The four meet each other in various drawing rooms, and the empty space outside marriage, between Rahul and Preeti begins to resonate. It takes them first to an old tree, that Rahul calls Kanchenjungha and then to Bagdogra where Rahul is designing a resort for Amit’s company. Rahul is moved by the moonlight on the mountain, and Preeti follows him there in her quest to be a bird.

“But why does resonance happen only between two intellectual souls? Why can’t Amit and Nandita resonate? Why does the businessman necessarily have to be unfeeling towards nature? Or relationships? Why can’t the poetry spouting architect actually be cold and cruel to his wife, as in many instances of real life? Why must the wife suffer only because she cannot have a child? Why can’t she be just fed up and bored of his philosophical allusions and his relationship with his dictaphone?” – Banno, Questions 1 to 7, Observation 2.

The film brings to mind Satyajit Ray’s ‘Kanchenjungha‘, perhaps is influenced by it. Of course, the master’s touch is in the completely identifiable characters, dialogue that reveals the innermost workings of their minds without being facetious and unreal, the use of light, shade and mist to enhance the human drama, nature in fact colluding with man to create an unique narrative of a particular day in the lives of several people.

“Is there a single Bengali film made in the history of cinema without reference to Tagore or Satyajit Ray?” – Banno, Question 1, Observation 3.

“If so, can anyone please tell me about it?” – Banno, Question 8, Observation 3 contd.

“It is tough enough to sustain the interest of the viewer in a hyperlink film, as there is no one character or plot that one can identify with. To create a further disenchantment by making the characters unbelievable is to be deliberately yawn-inducing.” – Banno, Observation 4, full and final, on ‘Anuranan’.

Am racking my brains to remember what Rahul’s full and final observation was, the night he died, before he reappeared as a ghost meditating before the Kanchenjunga. Rahul died with his dictaphone in his arms.

I cheered myself up with Anjan Dutt’s ‘The Bong Connection‘. Raima Sen seemed more believable as the rich, young strong-headed girl, Sheela than she did as a bespectacled suffering wife.

Ray and Tagore did come up, but in a palatable way. Except when Apu’s (yes, Apu!) boss says with grudging admiration of him, after a huge showdown between Apu and himself, “Aparajito“.

Anyway, this is what I get up to while Dhanno has a posh dinner with her friends, and Teja earns a living. Watch films that no one will ever watch with me. I remember as a young woman emotionally blackmailing my boyfriend to go to a re-release of ‘Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje‘ with me. My mother, usually indulgent, refused to go see this one. She as a rule, disliked actresses with flamboyant facial expressions and heavy duty ‘ada’s. I, on the other hand, loved flamboyance in all its forms, and sulked and sulked until I did get the requisite company for the film.

“With the years, I’ve become kinder to my loved ones and don’t expect them to prove their love for me by seeing all the films I would like to inflict on them.” – Banno, Observation 5, in vain attempt to resonate.

* ada – accomplished, beauty, blandishment, charm, coquetry, fulfilled, grace, paid, performed, posture