Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Non-PC Joke of the Year

Q: How do you tell a Bangladeshi man from an Indian or Pakistani man?
A: He's the one wearing a life-jacket just in case a flood comes along

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Love in the Time of Maximum Controlled-Chaos

Here’s a piece of advice – if you’re planning to watch Slumdog Millionaire, the indie-sleeper-smash-hit of the year – don’t read this review. Or any other. This is a film that you’ll enjoy thoroughly even if you’ve just seen it the day before (I did) – but watching it with no knowledge of what it is about is a pleasure of a different level. For those not convinced by mere effusive (if non-specific) praise, read on and I shall do my best to get you interested in the movie without revealing too much about the plot’s highlights.

Three minutes in, Slumdog Millionaire will literally shock you into paying attention. Paying attention with your mind that is, because chances are good that you would have already averted your eyes from the screen in horror. Then faster than you can say Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the film takes off, starting with a break-neck chase through the permanent dusk of Dharavi’s gutter-alleys. In a giddy romp, exhilarating and horrifying in turn, and lasting nearly two hours and several film-years – the movie tracks the lives of three slum kids Jamal (Dev Patel), the love of his life, Latika (Freida Pinto), and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal)– as those lives intersect, then diverge, then intersect again. And no, its nothing like Salaam Bombay.

As the three protagonists collectively jump over slum-walls and into open septic pits, escape marauding rioters in dhobi-ghaats, climb up hills one would never want to scale and fall off train roofs; take in an open-air opera in Agra before busting a nascent mujra back in Bombay; fall in with the mob, fall out with each other – director Danny Boyle reveals life in modern India as might be experienced by her marginalized masses. The film shines the light on the country’s newfound but still fragile promise and its often brutal beauty (Think of a view of the Taj Mahal with homeless kids playing on the dried-up Yamuna bed in the foreground). Boyle manages to do so without succumbing either to Hollywood’s impulse to exoticise the Orient or to Bollywood’s impulse to filter a reality that can be truly difficult to see.

Slumdog reveals every piece of grit under modern Bombay’s beautifully painted finger-nails. Dharavi looks like nothing you’ve seen before, perhaps because the film was shot in Dharavi and not on a set resembling it. Two of the child actors are actually from the slums. Yes, it leaves you in a bit of despair. But even more than that, in awe and a strange pride at the slum-dwelling Mumbaikar’s ability to love and laugh and her ability to dream in circumstances where one might perhaps imagine being able to cling to one’s humanity – but only by a thread. And it warms your heart at her ability to feel happy for someone else when they are close to winning a million bucks and a ticket out of the underclass’ collective misery.

That ticket is the million dollar jackpot available to the winner of the Indian version of the game-show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal’s getting on to the show sets the story into motion and the question-answer interludes provide the only relief from the sensory overload of the three musketeers’ adventures. The interludes last only long enough to let the host, Anil Kapoor (doing a great job of channeling Amitabh, the host of the original show) take unseemly pleasure in making fun of the Jamal’s humble origins and light of his chances. The reason behind Jamal’s presence on the show and the secrets behind his success in answering the increasingly difficult questions, power the story through to its ultimately crowd-pleasing denouement.

Slumdog is perhaps the first, and certainly the best cinematic offspring yet, of globalization. Englishman Danny Boyle who gained fame with the gritty cult hit Trainspotting led a largely non-Indian production crew to create a film set mainly in Bombay and with an ensemble cast that’s wholly of South Asian extraction. Beyond that, Boyle manages to mesh the best traditions of Hollywood – use of innovative scripts, taut drama, and slick production values - with those of Bollywood – controlled melodrama, fantastic musical score, and an ability to unabashedly tell a story about true and truly star-crossed love. Screen-writer Simon Beaufoy and composer A. R. Rahman along with Boyle have deservedly won Golden Globe nominations.

This might seem like heresy when Milk is still playing in the theaters – but if there’s only one movie you can squeeze into your packed Holiday calendar – it should be Slumdog Millionaire.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Simply Put

Sourced from a Facebook profile

Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot,
who calls you back when you hang up on him,
who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat,
or will stay awake just to watch you sleep...

Monday, December 1, 2008

A Prayer for Beloved Bombay

Children in Ahmedabad offer a Candle Light Vigil for the Victims of the Bombay Terrorist Atrocity (boston.com)

The Silent Sunset and The Strange Symmetry of The Three Signs

TONGUE SOMEWHAT IN CHEEK

I want to take you back, dear reader to a past tale from my time at the Jikoji Silent Meditation Retreat way back in June. You might remember, that we left off with me walking at a rather determined pace up a forest trail that led to the top of a ridge, diligently meditating all the while, trying to catch up with the rest of the group. I've been meaning to tell you about what happened after that for some time now but never quite got around to it. So here's the rather curious tale.

As I mentioned, I kind of ran meditatively up the trail. But partly due to the uphill climb and partly because I couldn't convince myself that running and meditating really went together, I slowed down soon enough. And as I slowed down, the silence in its varying degrees, became noticeable. There was the muted crunch of the dew-damp fallen leaves under my slippers. The whispering of a gentle, still-warm breeze as it weaved its way through the upper layers of the forest canopy that fully sheltered the trail from the setting sun. The sound of a deer's half-step - as it stopped momentarily upon spying me coming up the path and then placidly rustled its way away through the shrubbery. The sunlight only filtered through a couple of feet through the leaves - turning the upper layer an early autumnal red-brown and the lower layers a deepening, darkening shade of green. I felt the calm seep into me...even the rather meditatively-unhelpful sign warning about itinerant mountain lions only caused a momentary flutter in my pulse. My steps slowed further.

Three quarters of the way up the hill, I stepped into the sun, as the canopy gave way to knee-high sun-dried grass glowing warmly golden-brown in the sun. With another few steps I turned a corner so that the crest of the hill lay directly behind and above me. A vunderful (Yes I'm Indian and proud that I economise on my v/w sounds) vista opened up before my eyes. A grassland stretched lazily rampant across the landscape, covering rolling hills and dipping valleys - besieging the occasional clump of trees before itself being restrained in its reach by the forest that formed its irregular border. An Olympian discus-thrower's stone's throw away from the freeway - I had reached a sanctuary seemingly untouched by civilization. The quiet of the surroundings stilled my thoughts. I spied the dark-tan silhouette of a deer against the grass on the opposite slope - his antlered head turned towards me. Still. Unmoving. Which is when I saw the first sign - of civilization. A weather beaten bench just the right shade of dark brown - the kind that one would pay quite a handsome sum for in Crate n' Barrel. Placed at the center of the ridge - capable of seating up to three (Vegan...read malnourished) meditators - it was placed at just the right angle for watching the sun as it set in the western sky.

I sat down and as I turned to look at the great big ball of fire in the sky - that had obligingly hung around despite my tardiness - I saw a slow-moving, red-bellied SouthWest Airline plane making its way to San Jose airport. I continued to contemplate deeply about nothing and sometimes about whether this was the wrong ridge - because I couldn't see anyone else there. Soon the rest of the group file silently into view. It seemed, I had beaten them to the top. The realization, that they must have had a short meditation session in the zen temple before starting up the path, wafted into my conciousness. There were more than 20 people in the walking meditation procession. None of them acknowledged my presence. Each one silently found a vantage point from where to see the sun finally set. Some sank into the inviting grass. Others joined me on the bench. Others still, stood scattered across the slope. Look, I wanted to say - Isn't that setting sun beautiful. But I held back. Look there, I wanted to point, at that unmoving deer - providing the relieving speck of fauna to the flora-rich landscape. My hand stayed by my side. Gathered together on that ridge - each one alone - we watched as the sun completed its descent below the distant horizon. I'm guessing some of the others saw the deer and some didn't. I'm guessing some of them saw every change in colour that the section of the sky hugging the horizon went through. While others missed some of the transitions because no one pointed them out.

Let me ask you, dear reader, is a sunset beautiful if no one watching it says it is? The answer I realized that evening is of course, a definite maybe. The twenty of us watched a beautiful, beautiful sun set without once commenting on how beautiful it was. How purple the sky was right at the end. How, the unnaturally still deer, looked more like a shadow in an Indonesian puppet show than a living, breathing being. Or how the landscape, brown grass and green trees, took on a deep cool blue hue once the sun had set. It was a bit of a strange, and strangely fulfilling, experience.

Without a word or a sign to one another, we started our way back down the trail. I felt engorged and sluggish with all the beauty I had taken in. As I savoured this new way of feeling full - I spied the third sign - a white plastic bag - caught in the upper branches of a tree - fluttering noisily in the cold breeze that had now started blowing. I hadn't truly linked the bench and the plane in my mind beyond making the connection that they were the two man-made things in that otherwise natural scene. But seeing the bag - brought me another realization. This one didn't waft through - more like rushed in and screeched to a halt in my mind. I realized that the three signs were not a coincidence. That I had gone beyond communing with nature - to communicating with nature. The signs - in their weird symmetry - contained a message. Just for me. For only I had seen all three - the Southwest flight having disappeared before the others arrived.

I understood what the elements, the powers that inhabit the ether, were trying to tell me - I was neither the well-grounded bench nor the crimson aeroplane that had already attained soaring heights. I was the plastic bag caught in a limbo - struggling to rise sky-high but in just as much danger of falling into the mud below. What finally happened to me would depend on whether I was able to figure out what the branches of the tree represented - for that was what was restraining me. And what I did to free myself. I had another day of silent meditation to do that. I was thrilled at having had Mom Nature or other higher beings take it upon herself/themselves to personally deliver a piece of zen enlightenment to me. And that she was sophisticated enough to use a riddle that needed to solving versus an akaashwani that spelled it all out. (Plus I wouldn't have understood Sanskrit anyway!)

We were back under the canopy on our way back to the lodge. The air was considerably cooler now that the sun had fully set. I saw the T-shirt clad guy ahead of me shiver slightly in the breeze. I hadn't noticed the cold myself - warmed as I was by the cloak of narcissism that had fallen lightly over my shoulders.