Please Baba, aar five minutes khelbo...

Unlike my friend, the Mutinous Scribe, I care deeply about Imtiaz Ali's filmography.

I have, since the day I stumbled on to Socha Na Tha on t.v*.
In one scene, the hero and heroine are in Goa and facing the prospect of sharing a room together. (They aren't in love yet). The heroine tells the hero, "Ghabrao nahi, main tumhare izzat pe haath nahi dalungi."
That nonchalance, the non-drama was refreshing then to a child of the nineties for whom the Hindi film heroine was always a bit of a tight-ass paragon of virtue.
Geet in Jab We Met was even better etched, with lovely shades of so many people I knew. Self-obsessed, talkative, feisty, and armed with a healthy sense of adventure. And then came Veera**, who on the outside, was in the same mould as Geet. When she hides herself in the truck during the police search, and Aadu, the genial goon asks her why, I didn't need her to answer. It was just what an Imtiaz Ali heroine did.

Except it wasn't. While Geet's flight came from the protected, indulgent child-hood she had had, Veera's was a result of her cloistered one. And it wasn't a sense of adventure, as I came to learn a bit later in the film, it was a need to escape, a need to enjoy her new-found freedom. I wouldn't say that this need or feeling resonated with me, because it didn't, at least not at the time I was watching the film. There was so much else to take in-the characters, the acting (thanks to the casting-everyone, down to the creepy molester goon, was perfect), the visuals of the great Indian countryside (which I admittedly wouldn't care for, in a lesser film), the music (it is all I listen to, anymore), the world that Ali transports us to (so much so that the police shooting, in spite of its inevitability, felt like an intrusion in an otherwise idyllic life),  the "neat" story-telling (Mahabir dying before he was put on the stretcher). But the reason that all of this came together, the reason that I understood and accepted Veera's longing for the journey to continue (even if it was with her kidnapper), was possibly because I have wanted the same at different points in time.
Did I have a traumatic childhood? Far from it.

But who as a child has not wanted to play for "five more minutes", because home was boring place in your sister's board years? Which child hasn't dreaded the last week of the summer holidays when all the pending homework would have to be squeezed in? Which harassed masters student has not wanted to run away before a game theory/ econometrics exam? In fact, I only realised why I loved Highway the way I did, four days after I had seen the film, as I listened to "Patakha Guddi"on my way to office, in the white cab that dutifully carries me there and back every working day.


*And not since the day I realised I went to the same college as him.
**Yeah, I just pretended that Love Aaj Kal and Rockstar didn't happen.

What I want to be when I grow up

I want to be rich.

Upper middle-class won't do.

Upper middle-class can get you branded clothes, access to expensive restaurants, high-end technology, a reasonably fancy car and an occasional foreign holiday. None of which I particularly desire.

Rich will get me the mansion in New Friends Colony that I have had my heart set on, since the age of twelve. Rich will get me the holiday home in Goa.
Most importantly, rich will get me my private movie theatre.

I don't mean a home theatre. I mean a proper theatre that you have to commute to, the one with the darkened halls and the giant screen, screening the newest trailers (and the anti-tobacco lectures).
Just minus the people.

Okay fine, I am perfectly happy watching Dhoom 3 or Phata Poster Nikla Hero or Chak de India with other people. I can even ignore the crying, screaming children then. But not all films are given to collective viewing. Or maybe not all movie-goers are given to watching all kinds of films. Children certainly are not. Nor were the adults at the theatre where I caught Highway.
What is with all the talking? What is so important that people have to immediately tell their friends, during Veera's  (Alia Bhatt) outpouring about a childhood trauma? (I would understand if they were sniggering about the dialogue, in a film like Prince or Love Story 2050 or Race 2, I really would). And what's with the inappropriate laughing? Twenty minutes into the film, when a goon is pawing Veera, there was laughter from the audience. The scene wasn't even being played for laughs (There was a brief sequence earlier with the man, that was). Here, Veera was visibly disgusted. And so was I, with my co-audience. That apart, I loved Highway. Even though I went in expecting a love story, and got...I don't exactly know what.

I can't possibly talk about the film giving the crucial bits away (I know because I spent an hour on that post). Just go watch, preferably by yourself, in a theatre.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be

able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

                                                                                

                                                                         -Aristotle

“If you keep an open mind, people will throw a lot of trash in it.”

-Anonymous

 

“When the facts change, I change my mind.

                                             What do you do, Sir?”

                                                                            

                                                  -John Maynard Keynes

You Know You're Growing Up When^...

·         You have insurance.

·         You use the insurance premium to save taxes.

·         Rebellion means watching television beyond 11 pm on a weeknight. And then feeling guilty about it the morning-after.

·         You exhibit withdrawal symptoms after skipping the morning cuppa.

·         You understand that job satisfaction is not the abstraction that social workers have, and investment bankers don't.

The social workers don't have it either.

·         You are comfortable being called a nerd. Or any other label you may have dreaded during your school-days.

·         You frequently have trouble recalling the names of actors/ Big Boss participants/ regular panellists on We the People/ News-hour/ Big Fight.

“What's the name of the hero in that Parineeti Chopra movie?”

-“Dhruv something, no Varun-something, arrey the tall guy in the Karan Johar movie with overgrown school-kids.”

·         The only bit of gossip you have heard through the week is that of the corruption charges on a business tycoon and a Minister being true.

·         You are alone in the elevator with a CCTV camera and you resist making faces into it.

·         Your mother hints vaguely at "settling down" when you share your rambling, long-winded, career plans with her.

·         You tip the waiter.

^Didn't she say she wasn't doing these bullet-point posts anymore?

*Deafening silence* 

There has been a lot of incredulous snorting at Raghuram Rajan’s speech to students of his almamater- Delhi Public School, where he said that his parents could not afford a blazer for him, during his high school days. The contention is that his father was an IFS officer, who sent him to a famously elite school. Surely, they couldn’t have been poor. I have no idea whether Rajan was fibbing for dramatic effect or not. I do know however, that at least till the end of the 90s (and certainly when the current RBI governor was growing up), you didn’t have to be poor to be unable to afford a blazer. You simply had to be middle-class. Which you could easily be if your family had only one (self-made) earning member on a government salary, many familial responsibilities and a (home) loan to pay off.

And lots of middle-class people sent their children to elite schools. Mine did-borne out of the belief that a better education could guarantee a better future.  And the entire family made some sacrifices for that-my parents the most, my sister and I, relatively few. No we didn’t go hungry (we ate as much non-veg as any self-respecting Bengali family would), and I certainly did not study under the light of a lamp-post. We just ate out less frequently, and never at a really expensive restaurant. We bought all the textbooks and the “essential extra-reading” (Panchatantra, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, A Study In Scarlet, Oxford English Dictionary, a children’s Encyclopaedia), but for anything beyond (and I read a lot of that), we used the library at school or the government one near home .  We used public transport (gasp!) and didn’t have a personal computer at home. Frequently, my clothes were hand-me-downs from my sister. And I didn’t have any fancy birthday parties like some of my classmates did (I had the regular ones-with cake and puri-chhole). Our holiday destinations were dependent on the availability of an accessible government guest-house there (and no, we never travelled abroad).

Honestly, these didn’t even seem like “sacrifices”. In fact, were it not for the hard-thinking we did before making a big purchase then, our relative financial independence now, would be much less fun. Would I feel as happy as I now do when buying a book (which I do quite frequently, these days) if it weren’t for those days of thoughtful rationing? Or as delirious with excitement, when a flight with me sitting in it, takes off? Would my parents feel as proud as they do now when my sister treats them at a fancy restaurant? 
Of course, there are some drawbacks-like I am the least willing among my friends to continuously upgrade to more expensive versions of phones and laptops and other gadgetry. 
I guess being middle-class was more educational than the over-priced, elite school I went to.

Sherlock Season 3: A fan laments

Bollywood hardly makes masala films anymore. By masala, I don’t mean the films starring Salman Khan or Akshay Kumar, based on scripts originally written in the South that make astronomical amounts of money. I mean the masala films that are theoretically the pinnacle of entertainment forms. These have everything in just the right proportions-intrigue, action, humour, romance, films that can make you both laugh and cry within its three-hour runtime. The last Hindi film that did that for me was 3 Idiots (even though admittedly it was short of any action). The last and only television show that managed the same (and more) was Sherlock.

What did the show not have?

• A charismatic hero? Check. (It had two).
• Friendship, camaraderie and humour? Check.
• A strong emotional core lined with familial conflict, love and sacrifice? Check.
• Suspense, action? Check.
• Romance? (Hmmm…I am going to say yes.)
• A terrifying villain? Check.
• Loved ones to be saved from the clutches of the villain? Check.
• Unbelievable, twisted plots? Check.

In fact, with the intensely clever writing added to the mix, Sherlock was the greatest masala film that Bollywood never made.

What went wrong with this season then? For starters, it just wasn't that clever. More frustatingly, and at the risk of taking a metaphor too far, the writers got the proportioning of the ingredients wrong. I have seen bloggers elsewhere blaming the online fandom for this. But it’s really not the fandom at fault, as much as the writers’ willingness to tailor things to please the fans. Who I think got misread. Every review (or fan-girly blogpost) I read (or wrote) about the first two seasons talked positively about the titular character, the chemistry between the two male leads, the canonical references and the witty dialogue. The reason that that the actual plot may not have got adequate columnspace was that it was taken for granted. What is after all, Sherlock Holmes without an interesting case? 

Character development is of course important, but is no excuse for the mess the Sign of Three was. Character development does not require love to be explicitly professed periodically. The primary reason I loved the John-Sherlock friendship earlier was that so much of it was unsaid. You didn’t have to have John telling Sherlock that he was the “best and wisest man” he knew to his face. The trust he reposed during Reichenbach Fall was enough to tell the fans (and Sherlock) that this was true. Sherlock did not have to say he loved John for us to know that. His suicide “note” was proof enough. The fact that he had traveled to that point where he was ready to die to protect his friends, from the time he could hurt a dying man without flinching, was character development. Season three was not about character development. It was about showing us how Sherlock was just a big cuddly teddy bear (with the exception of his betrayal of Janine in the Last Vow, which was slightly redeeming).

PS: Lest you think I completely hated everything, here's a non-exhaustive list of things I did like:

• Billy (!)
• The mind palace when Mary shot Sherlock
• Mary shooting Sherlock (though this was really not used as effectively, as it could have been)
• The Elephant in the Room
• "I am a high-functioning sociopath. With your number"
• The female fan-club member's interpretation of how Sherlock faked his death
• Tom
• "Everybody's a critic"
• "I am not lonely"                                                                                                                                -"How would you know?"
• Most importantly, once a Cumberbitch, always a Cumberbitch.