[Long post warning]
[Figure 1: Clip with sub-titles from the movie "Bow Barracks Forever"]
In the long list of grouses (the marginalization of Subhash Bose in the Indian national Congress, the policy of freight equalization, lack of funding for Bakreshwar power plant, Sourav Ganguly’s treatment at the hands of the BCCI, Soumitro Chatterjee being overlooked for the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and “Ami Kolkattar Rosogolla” not being made the national anthem being some of them) that we Bengalis have nurtured over the years like festering wounds that refuse to heal, nothing perhaps rankles more than the fact that Moonmoon Sen was never given the iconic status in Bollywood that she so richly deserved.
People who closely follow Bengali movies noted amazing flashes of brilliance in her performance in “Baidurya Rahasya “where she played a no-nonsense lethal detective who goes undercover as a sexy Vaishnavite priestess with a craving for fish (her famous line “Mamu ami maach bhaja khamu” [Uncle, I want to eat fried fish]) still gives me the shivers whenever I hear it). Soon her flawless pronunciation, unaffected manner of speaking, acting prowess [video] and her overdone femininity (called “nyakamo” in Bengali) had made her the darling of what Taran Adarsh calls the “classes and the masses”.
I am, by nature, not a violent man and so do not believe in retaliating angrily to every provocation or perceived injustice.
Readers at RTDM would be aware of my ceaseless quest to understand the Hindi heartland, its society, its politics and its people through the study of subaltern visual/audio art as found in the caves of Youtube. History is written by the conquerers, editorials are written by those who can pay for them—it is only in the non corporate embodiments of popular culture that the truth of its times lie. And may I also say a lot of its beauty.
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