“The mob song”

I am the mob, I change destinies, I am the gust of wind, I break through every layer of sanity, I am irresponsible, for I am deprived of qualities, I alter the path of the rivers, and its tributaries.

You fit into the mould of nationalism that I made; You caress the scriptures that I made you read; You adorn my different appearances all along the centuries, You remain crushed along with your individuality, under my collectivity.

He who kills, be killed, He who mauls, be mauled, He who treads my path, remains the chosen one, He who falters, curses his existence.

I bay for the blood of criminals, and more often than not, I mix up criminals and crime. I am usually right or at least inclined towards the Right. I crush any opposition, I destroy ideals; I bury ideas… I am progressive in my own way; the only way I know: regressivity.

I fornicated with crusaders, slept with monarchs, made peace with a like-minded herd. Intellect won’t impregnate my sterile womb, meditation won’t contaminate my blood lusty existence; I contemplate within my comfort zone, without it I am perplexed. I am rusty and rustic, impervious to any thoughtfulness.

The only thing that dare oppose me is another mob: I am the mob.

Raanjhanaa- Where only dreamers dare tread...

Today a ‘good movie’ has become a very subjective statement; a movie’s success could be measured through various factors, not necessarily cinematographic: commercial success; critics’ ratings; viewers’ ratings; and if everything fails, the scandals that it has managed to garner pre or/and post release. Simply put, it’s difficult to find a good movie that’s deprived of all those above etiquettes and still fall in the purview of entertainment and art. These two options might not even gel in the contemporary cinema even though late 90’s have seen such good attempts in the form of Satya, Roja and even to a certain extent Rangeela, not in this chronological order though. The late 2000 came with many experimental attempts too as the rise of multiplex culture ensured a window to these experimental non-formula movies, Dev D and Gangs of Wasseypur for instance.

            Raanjhanaa by Anand Rai claims the attention from viewers on various grounds: it’s a romantic movie (off late there has not been many good ones), and the plot advances like a story in a novel, well detailed; technically correct and yet chimerical. And to complete the picture, the ‘hero’, unlike Hritik Roshan and Shah Rukh Khan, resembles many of us blog writers. It’s on that point perhaps that resides the strength of a ‘real’ love story as in many reel stories the lovers are straight from the encyclopaedic images of Greek gods. Lest the protagonist, Kundan (played marvellously by Dhanush) forgets this reality, his man-Friday Murari (played by Md. Zeshaan Ayub), reminds him of this reality: “Ab Shah Rukh Khan to tum ho nahi…” As a viewer, your sincerely is smug: “thank God it’s not SRK”, especially with the kind of movies the latter is churning out recently.

 With Kundan, Murai and Zoya (Sonam Kapoor as good as she can get), the plot begins in the by lanes of Varanasi; an imperfect love story in real jargons with the differences of class and religion. In a traditional Bollywood potboiler, it might have ended up differently: everyone opposing to such a union (in the climax scene) getting a pedagogical taste of maintaining “religious harmony” or even love being pure “above all the notion of class and religion”. Raanjhanaa however differs on that point; it breaks the myth of a romanticised love and enters into the realm of unpretentious straightforwardness. The director uses the symbolism “pyar ek bachpana” (the concept of juvenile love) in its literal sense: when our love birds decide to break social barriers, they are both school going adolescents. Later, the lady ‘improves’ to shun it as kindergarten infatuation. However, the black sheep incarnated by Kundan never ceases to get ‘real’ about it, he is a Believer.

There are many turning points in the plot, mainly the discoveries made by Kundan in relation to his lover-to-be in love with someone else and the role played by religious identities intermittently throughout his life. As the lead character, the religious barriers do not seem to bother him, as a matter of fact; they do not exist for him. He only discovers the ephemeral nature of his bliss when he realizes that Zoya is in love with someone born in the same variety of cradle. Yet, it doesn’t destroy him; a fact owing to his infallible affection towards Zoya. It’s only latter that he would discover the transcending power of his own love; the truism that has been passed through generations by intellectuals to poets.    

There are certain impressive moments; in a scene when Murari tells Kundan that “all object of desires has been taken away from these rural guys by engineers and doctors residing in cities”. This realism could be the subject of sociological study of an India marked by its difference between what Urban is and what is not. The character of Murari impressively makes forays into the domain of realism, something that the gullible mind of Kundan fears to tread. The latter’s poetry won’t ‘contaminate’ the former’s crass reality. The only moment he is seen to be overwhelmed with sentiments is towards the end when Kundan is admitted in a hospital. It speaks a lot about a rational mind that has got no refuge from hardship as opposed to a romantic spirit that doesn’t know it.

The protagonist’s entry into JNU (Sic.), an epitome of liberalism, doesn’t change his approach much. He won’t become a Che Guevara overnight, yet he gets himself involved into issues, incomprehensible to him, just for the sake of proximity to Zoya. The physical and psychological distance that he has travelled for his object of affection would guide him in his pursuit. There is a certain element of postmodernism to his character; certain recklessness towards life, an unassuming nonchalance towards his actions. In the 70’s cinema this would have been the characteristic of a Dandy, in the 21^st century it’s an odd-jobber, no cigarettes or cigar in hand, no taste for art and music, he is the representative of 70% of Indian male, today’s ground reality. It was also a necessity for JNU to be the central point of Kundan’s quest as it is one of the very rare locations in India where he would ever get a due: no matter what his fantasies are, there is always an underlining connotation of class attached to his struggle against odds, JNU would help him get rid of that baggage. A geographical location, in its semiotic sense, transcends into warfare for this classless village guy. It’s at this same location that he discovers his Zoya as a free being, beyond any family shackles, in her own element and he realizes that it won’t be, if it is at all, the same juvenile love encore that he had few years back in Varanasi.

Since the realist cinema is more about finding a theme as opposed to its commercial counterpart, there needs to be one in this movie. This time it’s unadulterated and unconditioned love. A notion on which the Indian cinema relied heavily in 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, later, however, it started manifesting itself as more pragmatic and convincing. Raanjhanaa flirts with realism and fiction. It might not be very credible on many issues but it certainly manages to keep certain volatile issues, like religion and ‘faith’, in the backburners rather deservingly. Kundan’s love wages its own battle again refusal (by Zoya), it ignores radically the aspects to which a rational mind would concede defeat. 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Other end of the smoking pipe.

A provocative title; the writer calls himself Mohsin Hamid; and September 11 as background. What else would you ask for to complete your Metro ride(s)? . Ever wondered what is being like carrying the burden of a certain name in an aggressively volatile situation? That’s Hamid for us. In his semi-autobiographical novel, experimenting with the narrative: a monologue laced with heavy irony, his narrator-protagonist treads the path of a presumed fundamentalist, expression invented by the Vilayati press to categorize all those people not “fully co-operating” in its war against evil. Well, all this is déjà-vu. The novel is about a Pakistani student, having studied at Princeton and worked in the USA finds himself in a state of schizophrenia after America’s handling of Afghanistan and India’s posturing at the Pakistan borders after a militant attack on its parliament. “…America was maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favored, of course, the larger and – at that moment in history-the more belligerent of them.” These few lines are enough to fill many of our Indian readers’ hearts with a brazen notion of pride and jingoism. Hard to skip the irony though, at the time when peace was mainly required, these two nations chose not be very forthcoming with it.

This novel deals with the concept of Identity crisis; the protagonist doesn’t have any problem per se with his Islamic identity and name, typical “Changez”: he manages with an outstanding performance at Princeton, rated continuously as the top employee at the quarterly review of his company, and is successful with the fairer sex too. As the hero puts it decently “I was a perfect breast, if you will- tan, succulent, seemingly defiant of gravity- and I was confident of getting any job I wanted”.

The novel is not about weakness, not even meekness, no surrenders, only priorities shifted, worries inherited, sense of culpability induced. In brief; a South-Asian male context, parphrasing Adiga from his last Man in Tower: an India (rather South-Asian) male doesn’t live for himself; he is condemned to live with many other responsibilities. Moreover, this boy Changez has opted himself for both the versions of his life: the American and Pakistani. As a matter of fact, he is the narrator, narrating from Pakistan, the story of his life to an alleged American interrogator, presumably there to interrogate him on his activities. This part also symbolizes the American intrusion deep inside the Pakistani territory; another obligation to survive. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not only a title; it’s also a posturing against India and the USA. It’s a confirmation that belligerence is not only the prerogative of the almighty America and some tin-pot terrorists. It’s a universal malady, not confined to rich countries.

The modesty of this article is not at all a reflection of the book; it’s just the inability of yours sincerely in expressing his sentiments regarding a novel that ridicules the whole idea of Westernization in the aftermath of a reactionary reaction by the same West that was supposed to be faith keeper of the free world (sic). This notion was/is also applied to our great India (sic). Although I am not in a habit of quoting passages from books on a blog site, don’t know what could be the infringement of someone’s copyright, yet, there are certain passages, very humanist in nature, difficult to avoid.

I was struck by how traditional your empire (US of A) appeared. Armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry; being of a suspect race I was quarantined and subjected to additional inspection; once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer.

Calling America traditional tantamounts to pushing that country notionally into anachronism. In other words, the basis of modernity are not KFC’s and Wo

rld Trade Center, they are the ideas of equality, riddance from slavery and individual liberty. America failed at all these levels in the aftermath of 09/11 tragedy, it ceased to exist politically for those who did not belong to it. Hamid and his ilk were not some illegal immigrants filling up the American pastoral, but educated guys have sensitivities that surpass the day-to-day efforts to earn the bread and butter, in other words, a large chunk of immigrants.

And then, as if not to make things better, Changez gets into nostalgia, contrasting it with the American primitiveness:

In fact, they (comparisons) did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.”

Lost South-Asian civilization, or lost a lost civilization to live with for ages to come, something to feel nostalgic about; the age long remedy for many evils that our societies have collectively, undergone, and they keep us feeding with the superiority complex, with which we could have indeed lived had we been that superior. It’s an American dream shattered along with a mixture of culpability on the part of the narrator, the guilt of living in a country far away from his; the terror inflicted upon his country by America in the name of terror inflicted by his community on the ‘free world’.