Munnabhai MBBS (MMBBS) and Rang de Basanti (RDB) – Flawed Beyond Recompense

Both are, in a manner of speaking, super-duper hits. Both are targeted at the Indian youth and makes pretenses to be different cinema. Both have captured the imagination of the Indian youth who swear by the originality of both movies, not realizing that both movies are flawed beyond recompense, at least, to me, a minority of one.

RANG DE BASANTI (RDB)
RDB was shown on Independence Day, probably to incite patriotic feeling in citizens. Patriotism? Is killing your own father – as one of the protagonists does, although, the subject is a corrupt politician – patriotism? The message here is that murder is good and that would include parricide. Are we back in the dark ages? Amir Khan in a scene from the film is clearly shown giving money to a policeman to stay off a fight that his friends had started. The message here is that bribery is also very good and worth emulating.

In another scene which I found very objectionable, the character played by Amir Khan is shown standing on a high wall bending backwards and drinking beer, a hit song sequence, I guess. Drinking while bending backwards down into a precipitous pond is a juvenile and dangerous exercise for a youth, of that everyone is aware. But the movie is absolutely insouciant about the wrong images it is sending to the youth. Firstly, the impression created is that drinking is good, and drinking and doing risky things are even better.

What sort of message does this convey to the youth? I will summarize: Parricide is good, bribery is good, drinking and doing foolish stunts is good. How can such a movie not even be panned by critics who rave about its great qualities and even confer awards on it? How can a censor board – which has been constituted for this purpose – not object, at least, where the politician is shown as being bad and killed by his own son?

There are many more flaws in this supposedly youth cult film which I am not mentioning here. One of them is lewd remarks made to a white girl which she cannot understand. It is clear that there is sexual harassment involved. The movie left a bad taste in my mouth. Are our youth so cynical as to applaud all these bad qualities in themselves? The stereotype here is youth of the north somewhere around the Punjab. Do they behave so grossly, if so, what can the nation expect from these citizens? Peace or violence?

This is over the top, way too exaggerated, and made with a view to appeal to the baser instincts of viewers. Is it an ironic reflection of the state we are in that this movie is a huge hit?

MUNNABHAI MBBS (MMBBS)
Here's another flawed film that is a super box-office hit. Here the protagonists are Central Indians, most notably Bambaiya, and talk the language of the Bombay hoodlums. The character played by Sanjay Dutt is admitted to a medical degree college to train as a doctor. There is a shortage of bodies to be dissected and the hoodlum phones his sidekick to bring him a body from somewhere. The sidekick played by Harshad Warsi clobbers and kidnaps an oriental-looking man and brings him to the dissecting table.

Okay, okay, what went wrong here? Raju Hirani, in an interview said the film portrays some of the problems that MBBS students face during their training. Yes, there is a shortage of bodies in medical colleges, but, can it be solved by clobbering a foreign-looking oriental and bringing him to the laboratory in a sack? Again, what message are you sending across Raju Hirani?

Munnabhai doesn't know a single letter in the proverbial three "r's", even to spell or sign his own name and forces a doctor to impersonate him in the medical college entrance examination. And, surprise, surprise, he is admitted. He is doing all this to take revenge for some slight against his family's honor. Message: cheating in exams is good for your family honor.

The irony doesn't end there. Munnabhai becomes a doctor in the end. That means cheating, lying, impersonating, threatening teachers; all are accepted behavior in Indian medical colleges. Believe me when I say freaky messages are being conveyed here, messages full of bitterness, insubordination, deprivation, and the use of violence.

Would the people of India trust the medical fraternity after seeing such gross exaggerations of their profession? Why didn't they speak out? Is that again an indication of some malaise at the root of the medical system that extracts millions of rupees from students seeking admission into medical colleges?

And this film too is a box office hit. It raked in enough cash to encourage the director to make a sequel with the same theme. The sequel goes a bit further and hints that hoodlums should be treated on the level of national figures – with pictures of them printed on currency notes. What an insult to the nation's leadership! I can only say, what guts and gumption these directors exhibit to the public, and that when it comes to exaggerations Indian films recognize no boundaries.

As they say, "Whither, Indian Cinema?"
Tags: RANG DE BASANTI, Amir Khan, sexual harassment, MUNNABHAI MBBS, Raju Hirani, Indian films, Bollywood

Khali pili, khali fokat ka boma bom!

Yesterday I made that journey to South Bombay after the forced absence of a year working for a BPO unit in New Bombay. Now this unit, no malice intended, considers that once an employee joins them, s/he does not have the right to a life of his/her own. I believe work is worship, but work shouldn't be forced worship. So I quit.

And, lo and behold, South Bombay held some pleasant surprises, nay, some shocking surprises. First of all, I look around for the familiar sights around Victoria Terminus. Where is all the noise and shouting gone? You know the types who shout, "Whole lot, whole lot mein, raste ka mal saste mein." God, I miss those hawkers, where are they? And, yes, they are still around, slinking, chin on chest, defiantly eyeing everyone.

Guess they are hanging around in the hope that the ban on hawkers would be lifted, as everything in "Gormint" is lifted after a while. Poor sods, they don't realize that the "Gormint" has demarcated "hawking" and "non-hawking" zones and their chances of erecting a stall is equivalent to Sakti Kapoor winning the Filmfare award for best actor.

A lot less noisy, and a lot cleaner, a lot less "jhan jhat," as a Bombayite would say. And those hawkers, "khali pili, khali fokat ka, boma bom Martha tha." Meaning those hawkers used to shout for no purpose. Now I can navigate the streets better.
Tags: BPO, New Bombay, Bombay, South Bombay, Hawkers, Filmfare, Sakti Kapoor

Going a bit easy on the raves and rants!

Hey, am going a bit easy on the r and r, meaning raves and rants. Some rest and recuperation (r and r!) required on sundry health issues. Came down with a heavy bout of, don't-know-what viral fever (that's what the doctor says when he prescribes antibiotics). Headaches, body pains, partial hearing loss on left ear (ringing sound), drowsiness, disorientation, the works. Going deaf?

The mouth feels like a meadow full of dry grass, and the ear is ringing like a hundred orchestras playing at the same - simultaneously. Am full of morose thoughts that wouldn't quality for even a personal blog. Fervently praying that I would get over it soon. Job offers are coming, coming, coming, but don't know how I will go to work somewhere in Andheri, in the state I am. Glad I quit the job, as their being 24x7 made them assume that I was 12x7. Yes, I was practically working 12x7.

It's tough work, these BPOs I mean. I wasn't working in one but I could see them through the glass partition. The pressure to perform was clearly visible, and the average age was quite low, around the twenties. What hope do the generation of today hold if they are made to work like this, I ask.
Tags: Raves and rants, rest and recuperation, headache, body pain, hearing loss, 24x7, 12x7, BPO, India

Jane Bhandari's Detailed Reply on England's Lake District

Here's Poet Jane Bhandari's detailed reply about England's Lake District, where poet Wordsworth lived and wrote. Thanks, Jane!

Dear John,

A small village indeed. I had no idea that William's grandson had lived here, or that he was a poet. Would any of his writings be available?  Yes, Wordsworth's poetry was rammed down our throats, and other great writers were simply introduced too early. I have a particular distaste for 'Daffodils' because our school choir had to sing a song for the local festival that used the words, and it was musically too sickly sweet for words. Courtesy my parents, I had grown up on Palestrina, Bach, and Mozart, and found the late Victorian music boring and the harmony too predictable.

I think the Lake District produced more than poets, it also grew engineers (railway and bridge builders for the most part, but also ship-builders) and philosophers. The geography was difficult and isolated, so that philosophers used their legs as much as their minds, and I have a book by John Bolton (a weaver who was also an amateur geologist and wrote several books on the subject) on the geology of the area where I grew up which tells us as much about the local gentry and their eccentricities as the appearance of the landscape and its underpinnings. It is fascinating because my father's family lived here for centuries, farmers who intermarried to such a degree that my great-great-grandfather determined to marry a scottish lady. (Scots have been a part of the pamily ever since.) There are local names that appear in every geneaology, and in a village it is dangerous to insult somebody who may be related to you in more ways than a spider has legs. Bolton muses on the tendency of inbreeding to produce either geniuses or idiots - I wonder what he would have thought of the Parsis - and digresses to observe the flora and fauna, equally inbred due to extreme isolation. Many parts of the Lake District were inaccessible except on foot, and some villages were visited by the priest only once or twice a year. It was not uncommon for a man to take a wife in a barn-wedding attended by the local residents: by the time the priest came to legalise the ceremony he often performed a baptism (or two) at the same time!  

As for local poets, my favourite was probably Norman Nicholson, who lived only seven miles from our village and worked alongside of his uncle in the iron-works in the early 20th century. The Furness area had both iron and copper mines, and I remember the red glow in the night sky as the slag was poured into the sea. Unfortunately the haematite reef (mentioned by John Bolton) ran out under the estuary in a limestone reef too badly fractured to sustain underground mining. Eventually the iron works closed down, after bringing in ore from Sweden for some years after the mines closed. The great slag tip remains, running out like a pier into the estuary. At one time they had thought to connect it with a similar tip on the other side, and run a branch line of the railway across it. This never happened, and I doubt it would ever be followed up now. You can still see the great holes and pits throughout Furness where they dug open-cast mines, and where they tunnelled underground, the land has caved in in some places, sometimes taking a couple of cottages with it.

We used to go fossil-hunting along the limestone reef that ran out into the estuary, and for years picnicked on top of a huge fossil of a nautilus-type shell, which was eventually discovered by fossil-raiders and taken away in the dead of night. It must have weighed a couple of tons, and I wonder how they transported it across the quicksands. Perhaps they used a donkey and a sled at low tide, and towed it along the beach until they were close to the road.

Norman Nicholson wrote about his area, only ever went to London once, by train, and having seen the sinful city returned, never to go more than ten miles away. His poems about the plant life, the birds, and the local community are fascinating, to me a nostalgic look at a life that has all but vanished, the industrial life that flourished alongside of rural England, mingled in it, even - often farmers grew coppices, small woods, beech or hazel, that were pruned to produce even thickness of branch that was then made into charcoal for the copper-smelters. That was a cottage industry - and many farmers also had a little copper-mine on their land which they used for additional income. Copper ore smelts easily in the intense heat of charcoal. When they had enough 'pigs' they would take them to sell to the big foundries to be purified. Incidentally hazel-nuts only grow on new wood, so there was a double benefit - after harvesting the nuts in autumn the coppices were cut, and the branches trimmed and stacked to dry out and be made into charcoal as required. Our neighbour made an especially fine charcoal of thin twigs that he sold to artists. The stacks smouldered for days, and required meticulous attention to be sure they did not burn too quickly, which would have left ash, not charcoal. A burnt-out stack was a great financial loss.

I keep digressing, (I have not thought of these details for years), but my favourite Nicholson poem is that of the pebble that rolled right around the coasts of England till it returned to its origins as a speck of sand. John Bolton too investigated the huge boulders on a shingle beach in South Furness and found that they had been moved  from the Western Scottish coast by the sea, as they were mostly of granite, which is not a Lake District mineral! Sometimes I feel like that pebble. I should post the poem, it is a fine piece of writing with a sly humour.

Okay, I have run on long enough and still have fifty or so emails to look at. Sometimes I am tempted to delete them unseen...and occasionally I do.

Jane
Tags: William Wordsworth, Lake District, Jane Bhandari, John Bolton, Norman Nicholson, England

Jane Bhandari is a poet who lives in Bombay and writes, edits, and lives poetry (after she was widowed and children are happily settled). I would like to live like her, alway full of vim and zest, and read ans write poetry as she is doing. Originally she hails from the Lake Districts where William Wordsworth lived and wrote poetry. I wrote her recently, on the group mailing address of Caferati, how proud we are to have someone from the Lake District in our midst.

"Jane,

You had Wordsworth rammed down your throat? Exactly the same in our schools. We had to know "Daffodils" by heart or we were failed in English class.

By the way, Wordsworth's grandson also named William Wordsworth was principal of the Elphinston College in Bombay, and was himself a poet. He was present as an observer when the Indian National Congress was founded by Allan Octavio Hume.

Now we have someone who lived in the Lake District writing poetry in our midst.

Who will contradict me when I say that the world is a small village?

John"

Tags: Jane Bhandari, William Wordsworth, Caferati, Allan Octavio Hume, Lake District, England, UK

Want to eat a chicken roll at Hitler's Cross?

This seems too awkward for words. But a restaurant opened up close to my home named Hitler's Cross. It seemed they didn't get a better name to attract customers, so decided on the Nazi who killed six million innocent Jews. Coming shortly after Guenter Grass's addmission that he was a member of the Waffen-SS, Hitler's elite fighting force that was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Nazi Trials, this set my grey cells thinking.

Our own Salman Rushdie defended Grass's disclosure. Yes, after all, why not, a  man has a right to repent, whatever his station in life. Opportune, as it might seem, it comes before the release of Grass's wartime memoirs, and may be a publicity stunt, who knows. The more notorious the book, the more people would want to read it.

Outrage apart, I see a lot of Hitlet's Hitler's (I keep mistyping his name) autobiography selling at pavement bookstalls. Is it the resurgence of Facism, considering that Rushdie called Islamic terrorists as Islamofascists?

Am recovering from an infection and flu or some sort, so am a bit weak and groggy. May be, I am being hazy in my own thinking. Blame it on the weather, will you please?

Tags: Hitler's Cross, Nazi, Waffen-SS, Nuremberg Nazi Trials, Salman Rushdie, Guenter Grass, Islamofascists

Order, order, in the house!

A visit to the Lok Sabha's (the lower house's) live telecast is uplifting, to me at least. I was surfing channels at home as I am between jobs - I change them once in a while, you see, for a change. The cable operators – damn their lot – were on strike, post police raids for showing movies with explicit content. Their contention is that the channels should be raided and not the cable operators. This, when they are the ones showing adult movies in the late night segment.

I wouldn’t comment on the goings on witnessed in the lower house of the Parliament for fear of “lowering the dignity of the house.” But I will venture to mention this. Our representatives need a crash course in deportment and gentlemanly behavior. Why do they all have to stand up and speak at the same time?

Somnath Chatterjee the speaker was saying, “Nothing will be recorded,” again and again and was seen trying to pacify the unruly elements who kept walking around as if it was their own private room. Through all this Sonia Gandhi sat stoically silent.

I have seen the British Parliament in action and there is a line marked on the floor in between the ruling and opposition benches. And, these benches are close together, and not very far apart. Imagine! No matter how much they heatedly debate issues, if they cross that line marked on the floor they are punished by being banned from the house – I don’t know for how long.

Considering the mayhem I have seen in our houses (they uproot mikes and fling them at the opposition), I dread to think what would have happened if the British form of seating and debating was adopted here. The nearest hospitals would have had steady stream of VIP visitors every day.
Tags: Lok Sabha, Sonia Gandhi, Somnath Chatterjee, lower house, Parliament, VIP

Poor, poor, technical writers. This is the kind of work our ilk do!

Came across this article on this website. Must say the author (Joel Spolsky) has a sense of humor, don't know how to classify it. But, do trust me this is what happens to technical writers in software companies.

"When you don't have a spec, what happens with the poor technical writers is the funniest (in a sad kind of way). Tech writers often don't have the political clout to interrupt programmers. In many companies, if tech writers get in the habit of interrupting programmers to ask how something is supposed to work, the programmers go to their managers and cry about how they can't get any work done because of these [expletive deleted] writers, and could they please keep them away, and the managers, trying to improve productivity, forbid the tech writers to waste any more of their precious programmers' time. You can always tell these companies, because the help files and the manuals don't give you any more information than you can figure out from the screen."

Must visit it more often for its, whackier, um, engagingly written sense of content.
Tags: Joel Spolsky, Technical Writing, Spec., Software, Programmers

In the kitchen...

Here's what I found on Google Video when I was surfing for AR Rahman's rendition of "Jana Gana Mana." Look and see if there is a message here! And how can such videos be blatantly available on Google? Do comment!

The kindness of strangers!

It’s raining outside. May be a repeat of the July 26, 2005. Today, getting to office was a miracle. A real miracle. Actually I am wearing short to office because it is an Indian holiday (Gokulashtami, or the birthday of Krishna, on which day, people form human pyramids to break an earthen pot full of curds). I had to wait a long time for a rickshaw to appear. None of them seemed to be around. It was pouring and mercifully, my shorts saved me the trouble of being drenched and cold. Then I tried to hitch a ride. Most of them didn’t stop. Ultimately, dejected, I was about to go back. No point in venturing out in this rain, I thought.

Then a Chevrolet Tavera stopped for me. Imagine, a luxury sports utility vehicle like Chevrolet Tavera stopping for a drenched-looking man in shorts, wind cheater and umbrella. Imagine the kindness of the man when he knows I would drip water on the seat and floor of his expensive vehicle. That’s kindness for you, the kindness of strangers. I got inside and he, the owner, sitting beside the driver, asked me where I wanted to go. I told him. He dropped me at the Bombay-Pune highway from where I board a bus to the office.

People in the office see the shorts and smile. I say, “Can’t help it, can’t you see the rains.” Colleagues say, “Yeah, I am going to wear shorts too.” Poonam suggested the Lungi. But Karthik (Poonam is the girl on extreme left in the picture in the bottom and Karthik is the seated guy in the picture above) says, “The lungi will be on the floor when you get into a Bombay bus.” All laugh. This is because nobody wears shorts to the office except the big boss. I guess wearing shorts on holidays and weekends should be allowed. Anyway, I am daring when it comes to clothes and that’s it.
Tags: Gokulashtami, Krishna, Chevrolet Tavera, Rickshaw, Lungi, Bombay, Rain, Miracle