Category Archives: Pop Culture

Hawt

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Potol Babu Filmstar is one of Satyajit Ray’s greatest short-stories.

Its main thesis is that in theater or in cinema, there is nothing like an insignificant role; a truly skilled artist, even if given one word of dialog, can make it memorable.

Sanjay Kapoor is one of our greatest actors. His main thesis is similar.

“Only Indians are bothered about the length of a role instead of its impact,” complains Sanjay Kapoor. [Link]

Very right. As in movies and as in life length does not matter. What matters is whether you can hit, with searing impact that spot which is the nerve-center of all pleasure.

Yes I am talking about the heart.

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Sunny Side Up

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When we were young, the only Sunny we knew was this one guy called Sunil Gavaskar. Some of us knew a  Leone too, some firang director whose spaghetti Westerns like “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” we had seen on bad-quality VHS tapes loaned from Neha Video Library. But we had never heard of the term p***star and even those who had, never knew that this was a legitimate career option. The word adult star was known but in a different wholly innocent context, like what Jugal Hansraj endeavored to be after his lakdi ke kaathi child-star days in “Masoom”.

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Masters of Horror—Part 1

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I have been meaning to do a “Masters of Horror” series at RTDM for a long time, with the focus being  superlative Indian horror movie directors like Mohan Bhakri, Rajkumar Kohli, the Ramsays, Kanti Shah and many others. The way I want to go about this is by profiling one movie of each of these masters of the craft. In this post, I look at the art of Rajkumar Kohli by profiling Jaani Dushman (1979), one of the first superhit horror movies in the pre-80s. Depending on audience interest and of course time I hope to continue this series subsequently.

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Rakhi Springer

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Living in a locality in Kolkata that overlooked a sprawling bustee (an illegal slum), one of the joys of urban life was to witness, from time to time, dog-fights/cat-fights between denizens of the bustee, usually fought out in the vicinity of the Shib Mandir (which housed a Shiv Lingam, a carrom board and a bamboo stand on which was pasted copies of Ganashakti), where in front of a crowd of screaming inhabitants of the said bustee, those in conflict would let loose. Wife beating up drunk husband. Woman shouting at the other woman. Father beating up drug-addict son. Two druggies throwing punches. Mother yelling at daughter caught “red-handed”. Passers-by would stop casually, just listening to the general conversation as the assembled crowd passed judgment, threw out advice, sometimes came in between if the fist throwing became serious  and periodically noisily murmured their taunting disapprobation or whole-hearted approval.

What I did not realize then and I do now is that I was watching advance episodes of Rakhi ka Insaaf, (premiered recently on NDTV Imagine) which has brought to the world of Indian television the cerebral classiness of watching a drunken lout of a husband being beaten up by chappals while he wallows in the drain singing vulgar songs, a show that promises to go where no show has ever gone before. And how can it not? It is after all helmed by Rakhi Sawant, or the “Arundhati Roy of reality television, the God of large-sized artificial things”.

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Indian Television's Finest Hour

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As I watched the first two episodes of “Rakhi Ka Swayamvar”, I realized I was witnessing history—an aesthetic amalgam of Dali-ian surrealism and Dada-ist anti-conventionalism, a monument to the post-DD “India Shiney (Ahuja)” Youngistan socially and culturally conscious media, the kind of media that gives us news like this:

“There are two things that you notice instantly when you see Deepika Padukone. One is that she is pencil-thin; and, two, she has a love-bite on her neck that is still to fade away.”

Make no mistake. Rakhi Ka Swayamvar, now being shown on the appositely named NDTV Imagine is Indian television’s finest hour. In the past, we have been shocked by Tamas. We have been educated by “Bharat Ek Khoj”. We have danced to “Ek chidiya anek chidiya”. We have cried with Haveli Ram. We have dreamt with Mungerilal. We have flown with Shaktiman. We have become “Putrabati bhava” with Mahabharata. But never have we ever been as moved by anything as we have been by Rakhi ka Swayamvar, as classy as a circus freakshow and as spontaneous as Dick Cheney.

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The Greatest. Period.

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It was in 1984. I was sitting in front of the TV when the pre-Grammy awards program came on. In pre-MTV days, state-controlled Doordarshan had almost no Western pop/rock programming except some horrible Europop that acted as fillers.

So I had absolutely no idea as to what I was going to see. I did not even know what the Grammies were. Good Bengali boys were supposed to listen to Rabindrasangeet and not even think about the devil’s music.

And then I saw him.

I did not know his name. I neither understood the lyrics. Even if I did, I doubt whether as a seven year old I would have understood a song about an illegitimate child.

But I was blown away. By the man in the video. The tip-toe stand, the twirl, the way he moved his jacket. The walk. The beat. And the pavement glowing as he put his foot on it.

Who was this mystery man?

My maternal uncle (mama) had just come back from the US. He had a wondrous cassette  player and a few cassettes. One of them was “Thriller”. It was then, over endless loops of that album, that I fell in love with what we then called “Western fast” music (as opposed to the slow Beethoven).

And I also fell in love with the man whose album it was. A man whose name I, and my generation,will never forget.

Michael Jackson.

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How Can You Slap?

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A year and a few months ago, the UK and of course India went into a tizzy about racist remarks against our very own Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. The point that most people forgot to stress upon, amidst all the outrage and the displays of patriotism, was that racism in this context was not so much an expression of a nation’s inherent insensitivity towards minorities but an instrument used by one contestant to mentally harass another contestant on a reality show. If Shilpa Shetty hadn’t been brown, she would have been harassed based on her sexual orientation, her weight, her looks or her intelligence—but since Ms. Goody couldn’t get her on the first three and was too dumb herself to get Shilpa on the last, she had to go on her skin color.

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Explicating the Expletive

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A video that found its way into my inbox is one in which certain lady students of a prestigious Indian management institute are captured on film,walking down the street shouting obscenities at a rival college during an inter-college fest.

Some people are shocked at the language coming out of the mouths of students of one of the nation’s premier centers of learning.  Some people, who are not so naive as the first group, are still dismayed that some of the corporate leaders of tomorrow, pursuing an  advanced degree, would so “give in to the moment”  fully cognizant of the fact that they were being recorded  and that there exists the very real possibility that one of the persons watching this video may be a current or prospective employer/professor who may take a dim view of what he/she just saw?  For most people however it is the fact that  humanoids who remind us of our ma-behen are speculating about the anatomies of other people’s ma behen that is the most disturbing—-what has the country come to?

What would Nirupa Roy have done? Subject to the most terrible of depredations would she have said “Seth Dharmdas, tune ek widhawa ko beghar kar diya, uske beton ko bheekh maagne ke liye majboor kia…..teri maan ki….”?

Possibly not.

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Thanking For Coming Again

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Manish Vij of Ultrabrown has been covering, in detail, the controversy over the upcoming Simpsons movie where one of the Simpsons characters , Apu, is being used in the movie promotion in a manner that is being considered by some to be racist and stereotypical.

For those who are unaware of the Simpsons world, Apu is an illegal Indian immigrant, a graduate from Caltech (Calcutta Institute of Technology) who despite holding a PhD from Caltech (Calcutta Institute of Technology) runs a 24-hours convenience store, Kwik-E-Mart where he speaks in a sing-song “Indian” accent, cheats his customers in various devious ways and is the last word in subservience/boot-licking saying “Thank you come again” even to people who rob his store. He also has eight kids, had an arranged marriage, worships “weird-looking” Gods—you get the picture.

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