Archive for the 'Pop Culture' Category

Hawt

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.

Continue reading ‘Hawt’

Sunny Side Up

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”.

Continue reading ‘Sunny Side Up’

Masters of Horror—Part 1

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.

Continue reading ‘Masters of Horror—Part 1′

Rakhi Springer

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”.

Continue reading ‘Rakhi Springer’

Indian Television’s Finest Hour

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.

Continue reading ‘Indian Television’s Finest Hour’