My feelings about IPL are kind of like that only. If the ultimate fate of the tournament is the happiness of the powers that be, the cricketers and the advertisers, then why, as a simple person, do I watch? Why do I care?

It is because of moments, peerless in their simple yet spectacular beauty, that stay etched in memory. These are moments you would scarcely believe, like attack ships on fire off the the shoulder of Orion and C-beams glittering in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. [Reference]

So here they are, a collection of my favorite moments from this year’s IPL. So far.

1. Yusuf Pathan’s batting:  As a long time KKR fan, there is nothing as delightful as watching Yusuf Pathan flailing his bat in the air, hoping against hope that the ball hits some random edge and flies to an unguarded corner of the field.  But beyond the delight, what makes these moments significant is because his continual presence in the team has become an anthropomorphism of  Bengali business philosophy. Which is lovely because Bengalis, and you can look at our sterling industrial record, are amazing at entrepreneurship. Let me explain why I say this. One of the tenets of Bengali businesses is to invest Rs 10, and then if things go south, to throw Rs 1000 after that Rs 10. Which is exactly what KKR does with Pathan. Having paid over 2 million USD, they are reluctant to cut their losses and make him warm the bench, instead playing him match after match in the hope that God will have mercy and make him score some runs. But as we know, God supports Chennai Super Kings (even plays for it) and so even though Yusuf keeps batting like an aunty at a family picnic, KKR keeps playing him, showcasing to the world the way we Bengalis do business. I am waiting though for the match where he scores a paltry 30, at which point of time, KKR (like any true blue Bengali) will take a bite of biskoot, say “Bolechilam tomake” (Told you so !), feel smug about this little victory and continue to play him for ever, thus completing my metaphor perfectly.

2. Tonting:  Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting. Together.   Watching them bat in a parnership was a fantasy we knew would never happen, like Samantha Fox and Pamela Anderson doing a make-out scene . But thanks to IPL, this is now a reality. What a lovely sight it is then to see  this dynamic duo come out to bat, like two retirees out on  morning strolls, their bats like trusty canes clearing the hedges, as they discuss Carnatic music, the shortening of skirt-lines and the best time to take their Isabgol. And add to them, old Murali when he bowls and it truly becomes  a laughter club at the corner of the park, or a scene from Shaukheen with Utpal Dutt, A.K. Hangal and Ashok Kumar

3. Sreesanth’s Twitter Meltdown: One of the most enduring mysteries of literature is what exactly happened in that cave between Dr. Aziz and Adela. Did Dr. Aziz assault Adela sexually? Or was  Adela’s “heatstroke” actually a flash of her own sexual fantasy?  The greatness of E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” is that it never resolves the question (the original draft apparently did), leaving it open for generations of readers to interpret in their own way. Similarly epic in its dramatic scope is what actually happened between Sreesanth and Harbhajan all those years ago after that Kings XI vs Mumbai Indians game. Most of us were lead to believe that it had been a slap, but since there was no video of the exact act, it was shrouded in great mystery. And so it had stayed buried till Sreesanth, after all these years, has a Adela-type breakdown on Twitter and declares that he was not slapped, but elbowed. In the process, he also says many other things that are as coherent as the mumblings of a man in the throes of a heatstroke. Lalit Modi, not to be outdone, claims to have the only video that would conclusively prove what came to pass but in true E. M Forster style, he holds on to it, thus letting the mystery persist for generations to come.

4. Gambhir vs Kohli: The incident that triggered Sreesanth’s meltdown, though I fail to understand how exactly, was the chest-to-chest confrontation between Gambhir and Kohli, Delhi boys both, playing out a slice of life straight from the polite streets of NCR. It was spectacular, even more breathtaking than Steven Smith’s switch hit, capturing perfectly what IPL is all about, the MC-ing and BC-ing of good taste.

5. Amit Mishra’s arrival at the crease: Amit Mishra never looks truly happy. Looking at the state of his national career, it is not difficult to understand why. What however I find truly endearing is when he comes out to bat, all reluctant, frazzled and angry, like a middle-class uncle in Lajpat Nagar coming out to poke, with his trusty wooden stick, the stray dogs howling at 1 am in the night.

6. Srikkanth and VVS Laxman: Years later, when they make a movie about the success of Deccan Sunrisers, perhaps titled Moneyballs 2, there is no doubt that Brad Pitt will play Srikkanth, one half of Sunriser’s mentors, based on their facial resemblance. VVS Laxman though will play himself, because no one can quite bat like him. However what’s truly epic is when the camera focusses on the Sunriser’s two brain trusts, deep in discussion. Which is usually an asymmetric conversation with Srikkanth incessantly going on and on and VVS sitting with an infinitely bored expression on his face, a scene straight out of a local train, where you always find one reluctant passenger staring out of the window as the irritating stranger sitting at his shoulder, explains to him all the mysteries of the universe.

7. Sir Jadeja, Kohli and R P Singh: There is a scene in Star Trek Into Darkness when Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the icy cool villain, says “I am better …at everything”, a line I believe Sir Jadeja says in front of the mirror every morning. And for good reason too. In the game versus Bangalore it is down to 2 runs off 1 ball with Sir on strike. Mortals would have been eyeing a two or a four or perhaps even a six but then again Sir is not a mere mortal. Using his Jedi-ja control of the force, he makes R P Singh, admittedly a weak mind, bowl a huge no-ball. Then Sir Jadeja hits a catch towards third man, and jogs across for a single. Bangalore celebrate the “victory”, Kolhi does a pumped up run from the boundary-line, with that MC-BC face that he is famous for. Till he stops, and then the expression of his face changes from triumph to despair as he catches sight of Jadeja at the runners end, exulting in pure delight, and the umpire’s arm raised sideways. And it is then that the penny drops for.

Oh what a cruel game to play. Jadeja could have finished the match with one clean blow but that would be too easy an execution. What he instead does is to inflict the torture of hope, the legendary last torture of the Spanish Inquisition. The night before execution, the prisoner would be shifted to a tower, where there would be a  brick in the wall left deliberately loose. The prisoner would “discover” the brick and the passage behind, and crawl through the dark hole, being bitten by rats and other foul things. Yet he would carry on, delirious at the prospect of impending liberation. Till he would come out at the other end, bloody, tired but hopeful, only to find the Inquisition standing there.

And his soul would be crushed.

Kind of what happened to Kohli. [Link]

The sheer perfection of the moment however would not be totally described if I missed out the hapless bowler, the legendary Indian seamer R.P. Singh, and his face  frozen in the cement of terror, anticipating  what will happen once they reach the hotel room.

Neither can  the perfection be captured if we do not conjecture what Chennai captain Dhoni might have felt at the moment. I suppose elation at the victory and sadness at the state of his best friend, with whom he has always shared a special bond, as the video below shows.

Which brings me to why these IPL moments are inherently so fascinating, crystallizing the essence of what makes IPL truly IPL, a tournament in which best friend fights best friend, teammates slap each other,  brothers unite in incompetence, massive cruelty is unleashed, old men try to recapture their youth, and drama is never in short supply.

[A slightly more serious post on IPL for the New York Times India Ink section]

Let me start out by saying what a delight it was to hear you speak.  One never comes away from a speech of yours without learning something new.

And your latest bhashan in front of the captains of industry was no exception.

For instance, I learnt that one could sit on a tide (“We are now sitting on an unstoppable tide of human aspiration”), which led me to look at the laws of Physics in a new light. Which in turn provided me the reference to understand the deep significance of your “India is not a country, it is energy” statement. After all Indian land-Mass multiplied by two successive “C”ongress governments (C-square) does equal to Energy, as per the laws of Relativity.

I also learnt that there are two kinds of systems—centralized systems and de-centralized systems. I could not have guessed that in a thousand years.

I also came to know how you kept yourself busy in the time that you sir, Member of Parliament, were not in Parliament (40% attendance to remind you sir). You, sir, were meeting people by the boatloads. Girish the painter. The Muslim boy. Friend of yours from United States who wanted to do engineering work. People from MIT. Chinese PM’s secretary.

Such lovely stories they are. So illuminating.  For instance, I came to know, from the “the friend with the engineering problem” of the way technical consulting is done in some of the top academic institutions of India wherein someone walks into the room of the professor and obtains a solution for a technical problem for the price of, hold your breath, a couple of thousand rupees. Of course, I understood the moral of that story, namely that the said professor was not aware of the value of his solution (which your friend said was $30,000) because he was, to quote a great 90s song, “Kya cheez ho tum khud tumhe maloom naheen hai”. This was again something I had not expected since in my experience, the best of educational talent in India’s top institutions like IITs and IIMs are well-connected to the global research and industrial community, quite aware of the value of the work they do and hardly “nadaan”. Note to self: walk into the room of an IIT prof with Rs 2000 in my pocket, next time I have a technical problem at work.

And then there was that thing that totally blew my mind: the reason according to you why India will beat US, France and China which is that while guys in the US and other developed nations are trained in simplicity, we are trained in complexity. And that is why we rule. In contrast, China, has no complexity.

When I first heard that sir, I will admit, I was confused. How is the chaos that is India, the red-tape, the lack of transparency, the crazy system of taxes and tariffs,  a competitive advantage for Indians in the US market? How does China being a dictatorship reduce its economy, its foreign policy and the interaction between the two to simplicity? When you say “India is a completely different system than the American system, the Chinese system, the Japanese system. It (Indian system) is a decentralized system…” are you seriously trying to say that America, with its extremely strong notion of states rights and power concentrated in corporations (as opposed to just in the hands of federal officials), is more centralized than India, which still has a central finance minister delivering budgets and five-year plans prepared by the Center?

Are you sir not being too simplistic?

Which is when I realized that this simplicity is actually your complexity.

In that  since I have no idea as to what you are trying to say, it makes you  (and I will quote you here), a “master of complexity”, which I will accept would be a cool degree to have, and hence by extension awesome.

Second note to self: Sir Jadeja is a better all-rounder than Sobers because Sobers is simplicity in his excellence and Sir Jadeja is complexity in that we do not know if he is a worse batsman or bowler.

My mind was also blown by your live demonstration in which you showed, through an actual physical demonstration, where China is different from India. While China gives people a firm handshake, India embraces people. Soft power, the cornerstone of India’s place in the world. Well played sir, though sometimes when people from other countries send back the bodies of our soldiers mutilated or sends their ambassadors of peace into our country on a boat, some of us do wish that our embrace hardens into something else, like Dhritarashtra’s embrace of the iron Bheema.

But forget that for a while. Because your speech was not about such trivialities.

It was about your grand vision.

Which if I understood correctly is this. It is that the real power of India lies with its billions of people and they, only they can, be the masters of their fate. No single person, no “man on the horse” can come and lead the country to prosperity. And that Indians should stop expecting this to happen because it won’t. Your vision is to open up India to its own people, to unblock the blocks, to make sure that “businesses not compete in the corridors of Raisina Hill but in the streets and galis of our towns and village”.

Admirable sir. Most admirable.

But sir, I have a few questions. If personalities cannot solve problems and are, by your logic, not important why do your political posters and cut-outs celebrate the cult of the personality,  looking almost always like a page from your personal family album? Why isn’t my picture there or the face of any of the billions whose power you want to unleash? Forget me and other Girish the painters, why arent there the faces of other Prime Ministers who came from your party but do not belong to your family?

Why, sir, if you truly are “insignificant”, do people in your party sing your paeans and that of those with your surname who came before you? Why sir, if you truly are “insignificant”,  are you giving a talk to adoring captains of Indian industry and not Girish the painter?

Why sir if you truly admire the American system of primaries and are concerned as to how a few thousand actually select political leaders of the entire nation, is there no expression of contrarian opinion inside the party you yourself lead?  Why sir does it happen that inside your party, everyone speaks in the same voice, and leaders always unanimously elected?

Why sir if you want to hear the voice of the people does your government pass laws to restrict freedom of expression online?

Charity starts at home and so do implementation of grand ideas, if I may be so bold as to say.

You say, sir, that your being one of the most powerful men in the country is “accident of fate”. To quote “Happened to come from a chain of people, in the DNA. I have put in this situation. Boss, here you are. Ok.”

Sir, who put you in “that situation?” Don’t you want it? Are you very reluctant? Sir, please do not feel obliged to suffer for our benefit if that is the case. Please.

Finally, let me conclude with your analogy of India not being an elephant but a bee-hive. Allow me to totally subvert the intent of your metaphor. The way a cynical guy like me sees a bee-hive is that worker-bees buzz around to produce honey and then a human being comes, takes away that honey, puts them in jars and sells them in the market. Unfortunately, that is what India is today. The common people, the billions, they work and they produce “common wealth” which is then taken and sold to the highest bidder, with the beneficiaries being those that are not the bees, those that are external to the system:  the in-laws, the cronies and the apparatchiks, who are found to benefit from everything—from the bandwidth in the air to the minerals in the ground.

And that is where I felt I missed something in your speech. To put it as simply as possible (and pardon me for being simple, since you like it complex), there were no new prescriptive ideas. No policy specifics. No records of concrete, measurable achievements. It was the same cliches of people empowerment and inclusive growth and poverty alleviation that we have heard for decades, and through generations. It was the same old straw man arguments like where you paint your opponents in broad black strokes like when you point out that some people say  ”Muslims? You say they don’t exist. We are going to keep them out of the system.”

Not that I don’t appreciate the new garnishings—the TED-talk like moving to and fro and not standing in front of the mic, the importance of having a demonstration (that hug), the folksy style of speaking,  the use of “personal stories” to make a larger point.

But you know, thoda material hota na, to baat baan jata.

Boss.

Err…sorry…sir.

Being held in Kolkata, the birthplace of the Indian Renaissance and the home of Kobiguru, it was but natural (and poetic) that the ceremony should begin with one of his works being recited, in English, by Shahrukh Khan, as Bengali as Ilish maach and nolengurer sandesh.

I might have been carried away but I could not help feeling that somehow, somewhere, we were celebrating the cosmic connection between these two brand ambassadors of Bengal, one who brought the Nobel Prize to Bengal and one who brought the IPL cup. What made it even more poignant were the words “Where The Mind is Without Fear”, capturing brilliantly the state of Kolkata and Bengal today, where those who forward cartoons are celebrated by being thrown into jail, and where those who dissent are tenderly called Maoists.

Truly magical.

And as East-European “Bideshinis” , clad in traditional Bengali skimpy-wear and fake smiles, cavort to Shahrukh Khan’s emotion-drenched voice, one cannot but feel how happy Rabindranath Tagore would be, up in heaven, looking down at the spontaneity and honesty of the performance below.

Of course Tagore is no more. But Ravi Shastri is evermore. A poet among commentators, he is tracer-bullet-like as he sets the cat among the pigeons, calling the captains out to sign the Spirit of Cricket Declaration, a charter of “good behavior rules” that are held in as much esteem and regard as traffic lights on India’s roads. And there they are…the captains as they walk over to the giant touch-screen—Jayawardene (banned in Chennai), Sangakkara (banned in Chennai), Angelo Matthews (banned in Chennai). Oh look there is Ricky Ponting signing the declaration, binding himself to the spirit of fair play, as he has done all through out his career. Did Virat Kohli sign his name? If he did, why does his finger-path look like a giant “Behenchod, teri maa ki” from where I am sitting? Never mind.

Because Deepika Padukone is here,  with this former brand ambassador of Royal Challengers, capturing through her energetic moves, the happiness of Kingfisher employees who were recently paid for the month of June and July. In April.

Which is however but an opening act for Katrina Kaif, the “Kat” inside Kol”Kat”a, known for being to item dancing what Vadhra is to real-estate investing. With the predictability of Gambhir edging to slip or chopping the ball onto his stumps, she executes her “Sheila ki Jawani” and “Chikni Chameli” steps, with the spontaneity of a customer service representative reading from the “Hello sir, how are you doing today?” script.

But wait. Why is the theme from Don playing? Who could it be? Surely not Priyanka Chopra? No.

It’s the Ambassador. No not the white battle-tank that is the vehicle of choice for safari-suited bureaucrats.

But the Brand Ambassador. King Khan. Shahrukh Khan (Banned at Wankede)

The audience is exhilarated by his energy,as he zips from one corner of the stage to another. So frenetic is everything that at least two of the backup dancers seem like they may have a heart attack any second. And yet, they keep on dancing.

Because as the saying goes— You dance Jab Tak Hain Jaan. Jab Tak Hain Khan.

And then he introduces two of the greatest musical talents the country has ever produced.

Bappi Lahiri and Usha Uthup.

Today’s kids won’t get this. Nor will most non-Kolkatans. But seeing this dynamic duo at Salt Lake Stadium, brought back  memories, memories of times gone by. Of Hope 86, the first time Bollywood truly came to Kolkata at Salt Lake Stadium, (organized if I remember right to raise money for striking cine artistes in Mumbai) with Sridevi and Jeetendra and Usha Uthup and Bappi Lahiri and Prabhuji giving us a slice of forbidden fruit. It was the day, many old-timers say, when Bollywood breached the gates of Bengali culture castle. I remembered those tumultuous times, of Left Front strong-man Jatin Chakraborty flying into a tizzy, calling the state-supported (CPM was ruling then) jamboree as “apasanskriti” (Bad Culture) which is possibly the most hurtful thing you can say to a Bengali, and then Usha Uthup in protest singing “Ami shilpi, ami shilpi, ami chai shilpir somman” (I am an artist, am an artist and I want to be respected as one), to which Jatin Chakraborty responded by painting the head of the Ochterloney Monument (called Shaheed Minar) red.

Ah those days.

Maybe it was just my misty eyes but I think I saw Sukhen Das, the tragedy king of Bengali cinema who always danced before he died (so that people do not understand what pain he is in), prance across stage  clad in his iconic jean jacket, stopping for a second to shed a tear before donating his kidney to the Sunrisers with his patented “Bhai, amar theke eta tomar dorkar beshi” (Brother, I think you need this more than I do).

Sukhen-da. Wish you were here.

I guess after the nostalgia unleashed by Bappi-Usha, I am expecting a representative of contemporary Bengali culture—a modern hero like the dashing Jeet or even better the pushing Deb, whose song “Lal juto paaye khokababu jaaye” (“Wearing red shoes, Mr. Boy moves”) from the movie “Khokababu” was reportedly Pope Benedict’s favorite song ( he being also a Khokababu who wore red shoes).

But that does not happen.

Pitbull comes onto stage.

Evidently, the organizers had wanted Jeniffer Lopez. It kind of made sense because if she is facing right she looks, from the side, kind of like the map of West Bengal. But what the organizers had not realized was that while “Love Don’t Cost a Thing”, JLo does.

So they got Pitbull.

I don’t know but I am guessing what probably happened was that someone saw this picture, and decided “Well if not the one on the left, why not the one on the right?”

This is not to imply that Pitbull and his Bald Headed League of Bob Christo Fans are not awesome. They are. They totally blend in like a Rabindrasangeet group from Santiniketan performing on the beaches of Cancun during Spring Break.

And Pitbull gives it his all, like Ricky Ponting did for Kolkata in the first IPL. I would say that with his strategic “Come on”s and “Yeaaah”s and his “Negative to Positive” , Pitbull provides as much value for his Put-Bill amount of $600,000 as the marginally more expensive ($650,000) Mashrafe Mortaza did for Kolkata Knight Riders in the 2009 series with his 21-runs-giving last over to Rohit Sharma. As a matter of fact, the only way we could truly thank Pitbull for this performance would be to make him sit through a 5-hour  presentation of “Invest in Bengal” and then, after that, make him memorize the full “Tum to thehre Pardesi” song before he is allowed to leave.

Now it’s done. Pitbull has left the building. Thanks are being said. The lights are being dimmed. Salt Lake Stadium slips steadily back into silence.

But the fun…the fun.

That’s just started.

Finally.

A male-bonding Bollywood film that does not have 1) Rich men driving down to Goa in a Mercedes for together-time 2) Even more rich men, meterosexual enough to make David Beckham look like Merv Hughes, driving around Spain, struggling with first-world problems of designer bags and commitment 3) Genius men doing a baby-delivery using improvised devices or 4) Angsty men getting into deep depression of the breakup of their music band or 5) Shirtless men running through the fields, high on life.

All right. Kai Po Che does have number five. But it still is a breath of fresh air in the world of  the dick flick (the male analog of the chick) crafting as it does three compelling and relatable characters who, for once, do not inhabit the history-less alternate dimension that forms the backdrop for almost all of mainstream Bollywood’s popular fantasies. History here exists and it is cruel and merciless as it tests their resolve, breaks them apart and unites once again, bringing success, ruin and tragedy to  three friends—the pragmatist, the believer and the idealist.

What perhaps I could not have anticipated, but perhaps should have because no one can talk about Gujarat without evoking strong responses, was this.[Link]

In turning his decidedly political book into a feel-good Bollywood spectacle, Mr. Bhagat has, on the face of it, done nothing less than rewrite history in favor of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi of the B.J.P., who has been dogged by questions over his role in the 2002 riots. Mr. Bhagat has, for the most part, kept the screenplay clear of damning references to Gujarat’s Hindutva nationalist politics littered throughout his book, such as a grand conference of “the Hindu Party,” where the subject of discussion is “until when does a Hindu keep bearing pain?”

To be honest, I have not read “Three Mistakes Of My Life”. Mr. Bhagat may well endorse Modi today, either because he genuinely believes in him or because it is the flavor of the season to be so. I have no way of knowing. And nor do I frankly care. But  to blame Bhagat for rewriting history in favor of Modi in “Kai Po Che” is about as much as much as a bolt from the blue as the ball that Jadeja got Clarke out in the second innings of the Hyderabad Test.

First of all, four people are credited with the screenplay of Kai Po Che, of which Bhagat is just one. So to put the entire blame at his doorstep, if indeed blame is to be placed, is unfair in the extreme.  Second, the grammar of cinema dictates departures from a novel—sequences need to be made more visual, exposition needs to be kept at a minimum,  characters may need to be eliminated, changed or fused purely based on the diktats of the format. And so yes there may be valid cinematic reasons for the nephew for the book  to become parents of the movie, without the need to suppose sinister motives for that change.

Another post in Kafila has a problem with, among other things, the dress that Muslims are shown wearing. [Link]

Every time we see a Muslim character, the males are wearing kurta pyjamas and topees and the females are wearing burkhas. The film only exacerbates a prevalent attitude that Muslims look and dress different. This may be true some of the time but it is not true all the time, as Kai Po Chewould have us believe.

Whoa. So let’s see. If Muslims are shown wearing shirt and trousers, the criticism would be that the only Muslims that are shown to be acceptable are those that un-Islamicize themselves in order to blend into the Hindu-defined “Indian identity. You almost feel that you cannot win.

As a matter of fact, you cannot. Because no matter how you slice it, what damns  ”Kai Po Che” in the eyes of many is the ending. A Muslim boy, damaged by riots, attains fame as a national cricket player, the Indian flag flutters, the accidental murderer weeps and asks for forgiveness, and the…oh my God, are they showing closure? Oh boy. Bring out the air-raid sirens. Achtung ! Achtung ! This is Modi propaganda. I knew there was a subliminal message in that Subharambh song.

Phew. Talk about knee-jerk

The problem that there is only one narrative of Gujarat that can be brought to screen, or indeed be accepted, for it not to be castigated as Modi propaganda. That is movies of the “Firaaq” and “Parzania” type, where Hindus of Gujarat are shown to be, by and large, complicit in the genocide of their fellow Muslim Gujaratis, with the police and the administration being shown to be on the side of the rioters.

It does not matter if the movie is not  interested in going into the politics of the riots, except in the way that it affects the dynamics between three friends and alters their fates.

It does not matter that the movie does not attempt to rewrite history in the places that it does touch it. Kai Po Che does not pull punches when it does deal with the divisions extant in Gujarat society. In one of the most dramatically tense sequences of the movie, a Hindu “right-wing” run refugee camp is shown turning away Muslim asylum seekers after the earthquakes, which brings about a stand-off between two friends, one of whom is eager to keep a distinction between “our people” and “them” while the other is not.

It does not matter if the Godhra violence is off-camera and Hindus attacking innocent Muslims is shown on-camera, in lurid shocking detail.

It does not matter that the villain of the movie is a member of the Hindu party.

If an intellectual environment in which one is obliged to show things only one way else risk being called a shill for a particular politician, is not an expression of the most acute form of cultural fundamentalism,  I do not know what is.

Amidst all the outrage, what I believe is lost is that Kai Po Che does not end with a solution. Nor as is claimed by critics, even a reductionist resolution or the dreaded word closure. It ends with regret. And a message of hope—that in India, true ability, irrespective of religion or social standing , will attain success.

Is that populist? Too simple? Perhaps.

Well if you want complexity, here is an alternate point of view. Maybe the  take-away of the ending is that in today’s Gujarat, the idealist becomes the victim, the believer the perpetrator and the pragmatist ends up successful.

Propaganda film no more? No more feel-good? Eh?

But leave aside the messaging, is Kai Po Che, which firmly tries to anchor itself in realism all through, let itself down with its ending?

In other words, was that conclusion even remotely realistic?

I don’t know.

What I do know is the story of two brothers, Muslims from Gujarat, sons of a muezzin of a mosque, who become millionaires from cricket and one of them, well one of them ends up canvassing votes for….

Yes.

You know who I am talking about. [Link]

Which just goes to show one thing.

That there may be many endings for real stories.

And some of them may not be the ones  you expected.

An Abbas-Mastan is an acquired taste, like single malt or Cuban cigars. Not everyone can appreciate the meticulous research that goes into the making of their crime-thrillers and the believability of their characters and situations. Even those who do often miss the small touches of consummate artistry that is their hallmark. For example in Race 2, a tense sequence in which world-famous stud-art-thief is pulled out through a manhole into the bottom of a get-away-truck (this you have seen in a Mission Impossible movie) is as much as about the heist as it is about comely lass Amisha Patel’s first-day-GABBA-pitch-bouncy  cleavage, delegated as she is, of all the characters in this crime caper, to bend and lend a helping hand to the world-famous-stud-art-thief (this duality I can guarantee you have not seen in any Mission Impossible movie).

Or when at the climax when the John Abraham breaks down and blames his break-up with the Bipasa Basu character for all this evil, one cannot but doff one’s cap to the allusion to the real world.

Or appreciate how Anil Kapoor’s shaven body is a metaphor for the rapid deforestation in the Amazon basin, a criminal heist perpetrated by the logging mafia.

For me though,  an Abbas-Mastan is mostly about learning, like a Discovery channel special on the mating habits of polar bears,  providing as it does a fascinating insight into the world of high-stake crime, a world that we otherwise know so little about.   So here are some of the things I have learnt.

1. Master-criminals are immensely rich. They fly in private dream-liners fitted out like the interior of a honeymoon suite at a 7 star hotel. The homes of Arab Sheikhs are hovels in Dharavi compared to where they rest their heels. They deal  only in billions of dollars— 50 and 100 billion being standard denominations. Picking one of their pockets on a random day would make Greece solvent and what Obama gave as TARP money to investment banks, a successful criminal in the Abbas-Mastan world, would not even get out of bed for.

2. Master-criminals are into a lot of sports. No not something  mundane stuff like cricket or football. He-man sports like no-rules cage-fighting or sexy sports like archery, sword-fighting, gambling, racing cars and horses. And they don’t just play games. They excel in it. In Race 2,  Ranvir Singh (Saif Ali Khan) comes to sword-fight with Omeesha (Jacqueline Fernandez), Omeesha thinks she has bested him in fencing but then when he leaves, her clothes fall off (yes I know you saw this in a Katherine Zeta Jones movie but please bear with me), so awesome are Saif’s skills with a saber. I won’t be surprised if in Race 3, Ranveer Singh challenges Kasparov to a game of chess, Kasparov thinks that he wins and then after Ranveer leaves, the great Grandmaster realizes he was playing with black and not with white, and it’s Ranveer Singh who has taken the baazi (just as the Race theme plays in the background).

3. Super-criminals speak in a criminal lingo that is cheesier than lasagna. Which means they almost always say “Heyyyy baby” and “Come into my lair” and “You are so hot” and “Pop my cherry”. You would think that being as suave and stylish as they are (they drink champagne always), they would show a bit more class. But hey the brothers know better.

4. Master-criminals make elaborate heist-schemes that depend critically on multiple co-incidences which they know will happen in the future. Almost as if the future is scripted.  And, oh yes, the object of the heist is always outrageous. Like the Shroud of Turin.

5. Criminal master-minds extensively sample Hollywood movies for their strategies, drawing from disparate sources like Italian Job, Mission Impossible, Ocean’s Eleven and National Treasure. Despite watching so many movies, they still regularly fall for the “the reams of paper under a layer of actual currency notes” trick.

6. The world’s most dangerous criminals (even white guys who cannot understand Hindi) obtain breaking news from one and one source only. India TV (Race 2). And based on that knowledge, they pull off heists worth billions of dollars.

7. Passwords of the most secure locations in the world are never a random juxtaposition of characters. Hell they aren’t even alphanumeric. The password that protects national treasures like the Turin Shroud are short, meaningful English words that can easily be deduced by the simple “get invisible goo on the fingers of your mark and then  later observe the buttons pressed” trick.

8. Super criminals have their own premier “Superclub” laws of Physics, not applicable to other mortals, ones that can only be accessed by a Black “Players”  Card. This allows their cars to jump up 6 stories in the air, and lets ginormous bricks of gold to be tossed around as lightly as a bra (“Players”) . This special Physics, not to be consumed with John Abraham’s special Physique, also allows super-criminals to possess the kind of technology that one can scarcely believes exist—-pressure-sensors that can “see” through matter and transmit thermo-pressure images to black goggles, vehicles that come standard with parachutes, and cards whose faces can re-arrange themselves. As a matter of fact, the only tech they don’t have are wrist-bands that promote well-being and patriotism.

9. Super criminals never kill their sworn enemies through the simple expedient of putting a bullet through their heads at close range. No. They put bombs underneath their cars which will detonate if the car goes below a certain speed. They hire grossly incompetent snipers. They construct enormous ruses, which includes double and triple crossing and egregious fornication. Basically everything, short of the simplest thing.

10. Criminals get fixated on a certain metaphor. In “Players”, it is the “Let’s play the game” and “We are players yaaahhh”. In Race, it is “tez”, raftaar” and most surprisingly “race”.

11. When at work, master criminals make Bond look like Guddu Rangeela, so suave they are with their impeccably tailored suits, their race-course champagne-drinking and their use of expensive Mont Blanc pens. But the moment they let their hair down, they transform themselves into 19-year-olds on spring-break, singing songs of party-sharty with nothing but mid-riff baring,  talli-dancing “party on my mind”, while doing ass-grinding-into-crotch dance steps.

12. And finally, the world of the super-criminals is full of surprises. When you least expect it, Aftab Shivdasani pops up. Or Aditya Pancholi. Or Bobby Deol in a sombrero playing an “illusionist”.

As a matter of fact, there are so many twists are there that in the movie “Players”, a vital prop used by a master-criminal is the book “Oliver Twist”. Really.

What’s heartening however is that the twists all follow a regular template, so regular that one might even say they are about as “I never saw that coming” as Rahul Gandhi becoming the Congress vice-president.

For instance, those that are “dead” are not—only waiting for a suitable time to make a dramatic entrance, preferably driving a car into a plane or off a multi-storied building.

When master-criminal 1 discovers master-criminal 2 is double-crossing him, he just plays along because otherwise, it would not be a “Race”. Or he would not be a “Player”. Till it is revealed that master-criminal 2 knew that master-criminal 1 knew that master-criminal 2 was double-crossing from the get-go but he also played along because otherwise, yes you guess it, it would not be a “Race”. Or he would not be a “Player”.

And for those that don’t get the pattern, master-criminals are only too helpful, stopping as they do, in the middle of the breakneck action, to explain (sometimes looking straight at the camera)  their motivations and modus operandi.

While all the time, and that is where the true devilish nature of the whole scheme becomes apparent, another major heist is going on, right on front of you.

And you do not even realize it.

A heist of 100 crores. At the box-office.

Truly masterclass.

There have been very few movies that have had as much influence on its genre as The Godfather. When I say influence, I am of course using the Pritamian euphemism for “provide a treasure-trove of characters, situations and set-pieces on which the carrion-feeders of Bollywood can feast on for decades as they produce one aatank (terror) after another, including a movie titled Aatank Hi Aatank”. A part of the blame for being ravaged lies with the victim itself (and how often do we hear that). So epic is Godfather’s scope, so compelling are its protagonists and so eternal its dramatic conflict  that it becomes genuinely difficult to extricate oneself from its influence, even with the best of intentions.

It is easy to forget however, especially in front of the 800 pound Luca Brasi of a  Godfather, that other mafia film, smaller and less grand but as enjoyable. I am talking about, of course, Goodfellas, which is as not-Godfather as one can possibly be while remaining solidly in the mafia genre. While the world of Godfather is populated by dead-serious, larger-than-life characters and its narrative built around epic themes of revenge, sin and moral atrophy, Goodfellas is a colorful mosaic of low lives alternately, and often at the same time, pathetic, foolish, funny, shrewd and murderous. It has, because it is a more difficult movie to understand and hence lift, remained largely unmolested by Bollywood’s celluloid-pinchers,  who have instead feasted on the meaty flesh of the more lowbrow Scarface. (As an aside, when I saw Scarface in 2007, I realized how much of the movie I had already seen scattered in numerous Hindi flicks of various vintage.)

Gangs of Wasseypur may have some elements of The Godfather— the reluctant young man forced to don his father’s mafia chappals after the murder of the anointed sibling, as also a minor variation of the Jones Beach Causeway sequence. However, with its cast of quirky, bizarre, severely psychotic characters and the way it intriguingly walks the line between felony and farce,  Gangs of Wasseypur is more Goodfellas than Godfather. When I say this, I do not want to slyly imply that it is copied from Goodfellas, not even in the “it has been transplanted to an Indian context” originality argument that some film-makers, whose movies get firmly thrown out of the foreign film category at Oscars, use as a figleaf for their transgressions. The reason I spend so much text on drawing parallels is if we are going to be talking about inspirations (which we Indians love to do in a snarky way), we should at least get the most egregious inspiration correct.

For me though, and I love my game of “Who copied what” if only because they do it all the time,  Gangs of Wasseypur is wildly original, with the originality stemming from its characters,  its music (Sneha Khanwalkar thumbs up) its thematic ambivalence (Is this crime or is this comedy?) and, perhaps what I found most intriguing,  its vision.

The Gangs of Wasseypur saga, or rather the heart of it, are the characters of  Sardar Khan (Manoj Vajpayee) and Faisal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). Though they are equally dim-witted, equally murderous and equally filmy, this father and son-duo are polar opposites in every other way. And that is what makes each of them individually and together so fascinating.  Sardar Khan is all braggadocio  all “Bata deejiyega sabko” Bihari-babu swagger, the “haramkhor, bhadwa sala, randibaaz”, predator of women and slayer of men, brought to life marvelously with eyes-and-blades slashing aplomb by Manoj Vajpayee. Faisal Khan is diffidence personified,  breaking into sniffles when the love of his life admonishes him for not taking her permission before holding her hand, as passionately monogamous as his father is not, lazing about like a crocodile in a drug-induced stupor one moment and pumping lead maniacally into the bodies of his enemies the next, sometimes slinking away from battle dragging a broken foot and sometimes striding heroically with guns blazing.  Topping even Manoj Vajpayee’s performance, this is a sensational tour de force from Nawazuddin Siddiqui whose narcotics-addled gaze, vacant and remote, is about as perfect and authentic as one can get to the real thing.

And crowding around are the equally fascinating other denizens of the world of Wasseypur where the flight of pigeons is quite a bit different from the Ruskin Bond ideal. There is the supremely evil blade-runner Perpendicular, the enigmatic Definite, the strong-willed Nagma Khatoon, the voluptuous Mohsina and my personal favorite, the indescribable Ramadhir Singh. If there is one major criticism that I have of Gangs of Wasseypur is that one always seem to want to know more about these characters and many a time one feels that some of the footage, for example Faisal Khan’s long-winded adventure to procure guns, could have been edited out and that time used for more development of the fascinating support-cast.

Then there of course is the humor, which even when scraps of brain tissue are flying around, is never far from the surface. A goat grazes placidly as a romantic scene plays in the foreground. As a hit takes place, one of the hitmen relieves himself while the other seems more fascinated by the items on the mark’s grocery list than on the job at hand. In the midst of great drama, a character returns to retrieve his shoe.  A man pounds his wife in bed, comes out vacantly expressionless, and then goes back in and resumes the pounding. A Mithunda impersonator is used to taunt an opponent. Macho murderers sit around with housewives to watch Kyun Ki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahoo Thi before the TV explodes in a hail of bullets.  A mustachioed Yashpal Sharma sings emotional Hindi songs, in a faux feminine voice, both at marriages as well as funerals. A supposedly evil usurper hatches evil plan and then just when you start getting taken in by his earnest seriousness, you see him dancing dirty, grinding into a skimpily clad human being of indeterminate gender. Before dispatching a man to meet his maker, Faisal Khan has a barber shave his head and then forces he-who-is-about-to-die to wear black goggles just so that he can have the pleasure of killing someone who looks like the legendary filmy villain Sakaal. This transition from the serious to the ridiculous is so sharp that one wonders if Gangs of Wasseypur is a crime drama or a comedy, an homage to pulpy Hindi movies or a savage takedown.

My take-away, and this could well be my personal interpretation, is that it is all of them. In my favorite sequence, Ramadhir Singh (played with heart-breaking brilliance by Tigmanshu Dhulia), once he finds out that his son, with whom he has been disappointed with in the past, had gone to see “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge”, says with infinite sadness “Beta Tumse Na Ho Payega”. (Son, You will not amount to anything). Later on, Ramadhir Singh observes, with more than a bit of quiet satisfaction, that the only reason he has been able to outsmart so many of his opponents, spanning generations, is because unlike them, he never wallowed in Hindi cinema.  It is Hindi cinema, he claims, which makes the people around him stupid, deluding  them into constructing filmy narratives for their pathetic little lives. And this situation is unlikely to ever improve because “Jab tak cinema hain lok chutiya baante rahenge.”

Maybe I am over-analyzing but that is where I believe Gangs of Wasseypur gets in its true punch. The slavishness towards Hindi movies, while being comical is also pathetic, being  a symptom of a much more fundamental social malaise— the lack of hope. Pulpy Hindi popular entertainment in the badlands of Bihar is like a narcotic, providing a fix of scripted dreams to those that have none, creating a morass of comfortable dumbness or bewakoofi that consumes those that remain immersed in it. The battle between the bewakoof (bumpkins) and haramis (smart bastards) that is laid out in the opening voice-over is thus not an external conflict but an internal one, raging inside each and every character in the world of Wasseypur, as foolishness crosses swords with sly street-smartness. It’s a war with unpredictable results—the proudly harami Ramadhir Singh ends up riddled with bullets, his haramipanti bested by the mostly bewakoof Faisal. But then he too gets bumped off by Ramadhir’s DDLJ-watching son, bringing to fruition the prophecy of Ramadhir “Jaise lohe lohe ko kaatta hain, waise chootiya chootiyon ko katega” albeit in a supremely ironic way that old Ramadhir was perhaps too big a bewakoof to understand.

Ridiculous, over-the-top, memorable, and perhaps, just perhaps, quite a bit smarter than it appears, Gangs of Wasseypur remains, without a doubt, the best Hindi movie I have seen in some time.

]]> http://greatbong.net/2013/01/30/gangs-of-wasseypur-the-review/feed/ 37 greatbong Gangs http://greatbong.net/2013/01/23/congratulations-sir/ http://greatbong.net/2013/01/23/congratulations-sir/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:35:44 +0000 greatbong http://greatbong.net/?p=47384 ]]> First of all sir congratulations on becoming the Vice-President. Some may say that congratulating you for this is like congratulating eleven o’clock for coming after ten o’clock, or congratulating an apple broken from its stem for dropping to the ground  or congratulating P K Nag’s sons for  taking over P K Nag and Sons.

But still.

So I read your speech, the speech that you delivered to the party after your coronation…err…selection after studied deliberation by your peers in the chintan shivir.

And I noted a few things.

You said you felt optimistic. I understand why you would sir. I would too if I had a national party as a family heirloom, if I knew I would have an army of qualified courtiers watching my back, an army of guards clearing the road of commoners, and an adoring media to pump my ego. Yes. I would feel very optimistic then. About the future. My future. Which of course I would, using the royal pronoun, address as “our”.

You recognize that power being centralized is a bad thing for the nation. I applaud you sir for realizing what the problem is. But you do not tell us, for reasons known best to you, who the problem is. Overreaching federal power is the very legacy of your party.  Playing favorites with the development of states through the formulation of destructive policies often made without the approval of the states affected, dismissing state governments based on political considerations, subverting private ownership through nationalization, and finally binding industry by magical spools of red-tape of the kind rarely seen outside Communist states.  You of course now take credit for unchaining the very dragon your line once bound,  credit that rightfully should go to a man, a man from your very party who did try to make things right, imperfectly perhaps. I realize he is an usurper, a historical aberration, a Hemu in the line of Mughals. Hence he must be quietly forgotten and his legacy appropriated.

You say, dear sir, that youths are alienated because they know that politics is not for them. Very true. They know that politics, like the Bollywood movie industry, is a system of concentric rings of walled privilege. It’s easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for a normal person, that is one without pedigree or one not willing to kowtow before one with pedigree,  to get into politics, at least in the army you command. It’s a culture where people do not respect knowledge but respect position. I am sure you will agree with me on that. After all you said it yourself in your speech.

Except that when you say it, you say it as if that’s not something which is part of your party’s heritage, as if this culture where lineage is respected over and above all is not something that has a direct effect on where you are today.It fills my heart with wonderment, this your almost creator-like detachment. One might assume, hearing this speech and the others you have made, that you are a prince from some distant planet, perhaps the one shown in Prometheus, who flies down in his alien craft, comments on the follies and foibles of the human race before flying back again to the Great Beyond.

Your troubadours would say that you have merit. And that I am, to quote you “being negative, asking Bhaiyya what is your weakness?” No sir. I am asking “What is your strength?” As a matter of fact, I am desperately looking for it. Your voluble foot-soldiers say that you are an inspiration for the nation. Now I am an old man, even though I am quite a bit younger to you. And the way I look at it, and you can call me an outdated fogey, there are only two kind of people who can claim to be inspirations. One are our parents, who through their personal examples, set standards for us to live up to. And the other are great men whose achievements echo through history— a Mahatma Gandhi, a Tagore, a Swami Vivekanand, an Einstein. Which brings me back to the question, what exactly have you done that warrants the label of “inspiration”?

I do something very simple. I look at your record as a legislator. The part that can be measured. Your attendance is 40% in Parliament. In the world of mice and men, an attendance of 40% in college leads to being expelled, in a job leads to a pink slip. In your case, it leads to elevation. Your supporters, of the type that hail your tryst with destiny in words florid, would say that even Tagore never attended school. Didn’t stop him from getting a Nobel.

Point.

And so I ask—what did you do even outside Parliament? In the last few years, the country has been in tumult over corruption and the safety of women. This may be just something I missed but somehow, I could not find you anywhere on the public stage when this was going on. Nowhere did I find you expressing your opinion. Never did I see you taking responsibility, the hallmark, they say, of a true leader.

I know what they will say in response. They will say that you do not speak or act till you are ready. And all these years, you have been preparing yourself, understanding the problems of the people, in the manner children start solving Irodov problems in Class 6  for their IIT exams.

And there itself lies the crux, the very heart of problem.

You need to “understand” the problem of people, just like we need to understand quantum mechanisms.

You need to “understand the problems” because you sir, unlike us, never live these problems.

You are like a scientist observing a specimen, the “aam aadmi”, underneath the microscope, telling your assistant “Make entry in lab note book. Subject responds to stimulus with tremor in knees and shoulder.”

In a way, this is not your fault—growing up with bodyguards it must be difficult to internalize the collective insecurity of those whose bodies are under attack everyday in the streets and in the fields, growing up with an assured future must make it impossible  to feel the despair of those that do not have such a guarantee. That is why you need to make an effort to be ordinary; to walk without bodyguards, to shake the hand of a commoner on the street,  to stay over at a poor man’s house and break bread. That which is reality for others is for you mere “experience”,  in the same way that bungee-jumping and skydiving is for the yuppie, bringing as it does a sense of comforting danger to his otherwise antiseptic life, not to speak of the opportunity to snap Like-magnet  photos that look good in Facebook albums.

If I have said more than I am supposed to say, kindly forgive me. Blame it on my age. Or my lack of it. Whatever works.

So congratulations again, dear sir, congratulations. Congratulations for just being you.

I did not regret some of the decisions taken without thought, and even the ones I did regret none gave me as much grief in retrospection as buying a Sony camcorder in 2000. But I did regret how cavalier and ill-considered the process that led to these life-critical decisions had been, how little of the way I am that had been factored in to the choice of the path to take.

And so I was determined not to repeat this mistake of mindlessly checking off a box in a checklist when the next big fork in the road came.

Which was when to have a child.

The pressure to have one had slowly been increasing for me and my wife, in the ominous 10-dot-balls-in-a-T20 way. What started out as precipitous conversations like “So-and-so just had a baby daughter, he got married three years after you did…remember?” that just happened to spring up when we were in the room soon graduated to straight hits down to the fence like “So when are you thinking about starting a family?” I have always been tempted to ask why is a married couple not already a “family” just I had been tempted once to retort to a “When will you two become three?” with a “Our religion does not allow two wives, aunty”. But then I have come to realize, through bitter experience,  that it is better to duck some bouncers than to try to hook them. But perhaps not all. Like the time I thought I had given a razor-sharp repartee to one half of a well-childed couple about my age (“Don’t you like children?”) with a “I love children and wives as long as they are other people’s”. I know I was being flip, perhaps even off-color, but the pressure was getting to me sometimes, the albums-full of new-born pictures of the guys I went to school with, and the facebook status updates. But more the pressure, the more determined I became.

To think this through.

Which is of course, fancy-speak for kicking the can further down the road. There was always time to start a “family”, we would tell each other. Next year. After the book is released. After this. After that.The core of this reticence was fear. Fear  that I would not be a good parent. Fear that I would not measure up. Fear that just like I had blamed most of my problems on my parents and on Nehru, my child would do the same and might, horror of horrors, even take Nehru out of that list. And perhaps, though it might be considered by some to be shamefully selfish to accept this,  fear of change, of changing a lifestyle that I have become accustomed rather pleasantly to—-of late mornings on weekends, being able to leave home when I like and return when I want, of “Walking Dead” marathons and the simple pleasure of scheduling my life around what I felt like doing.

Till the stage was reached time-wise when the question was approaching the stage of not “when” to have a child but if to have one.

And the moment the question was framed like this, the answer was crystal clear.

The fear of being a father was nothing compared to the fear of never being one.

And so I became a parent, on January 12th at 8 pm, a parent perhaps of the type I always dreaded, you know the one who sits besides you on a plane with his child with the “Adjust please or else you are a curmudgeon” attitude , the one who counts the “Likes” on his child’s pictures on Facebook, the one who looks at married-and-yet-without-child couples with a glance of quiet judgement, the one that scares parents-to-be with a knowing “Enjoy your sleep for the last time in your life”, the one that fraternizes socially only with couples that have children in the same age -group, the one that wears their daddy-status like a badge of pride.

As the doctor handed me little Anahita  [For those interested, this is what the word signifies, the first alphabet of Anahita is from my name, her last three from my wife's and one of her shrines is in Shehr-e-Ray or City of Rays], I was even more bewildered than the little ball of human-hood that looked back at me. True to form, me being me, a kaleidoscope of images arranged and re-arranged themselves in my pop-culture addled brain, of Alok Nath’s tremulous “Beti ghar ki laxmi hotee hain Radheshyamji”, of the opening bars of “Krishna Krishna” as twin-Anil-Kapoors are born in “Kishen Kanhaiyya”, and a gender-neutral rendition of Gunda’s famous “Pita pe Poot, Baap pe ghoda, Kuch nahi to thoda thoda…”  as I found myself saying, standing in that twilight zone of happiness, fear and hope :

“So many stories I have to tell you. And so many things you need to teach me. “

Hence it is no surprise, that given the tragic incidents in New Delhi and the national conversation triggered over sexual violence in its wake, that Indian popular culture, frequently given the catch-all-label Bollywood, would be the second most popular target of blame (The first being of course the government, an even bigger catch-all-label than Bollywood).

“It’s the exposure”, some say “Semi-clad women cavorting sensuously—no wonder the beast is let loose.” I hear this frequently, from doddering aunties to right-wing traditionalists to shockingly, even some dyed-in-the-wool feminists. This of course is a perpetuation of one of the biggest lies about forcible sexual assault, namely that rape is caused by horny men driven to a state of out-of-control lust by either sensual images on screen or by the clothes of the victim. The hypothesis that porn (and by extension the unclothed/semi-clothed human form or the depiction of sensual acts) leads to rape has been disproved by several studies like this.

Because rape or sexual violence in general is a crime of control, of the strong (the mob, the group, the conquering army, the man with the iron rod or great physical might) over the weak (the young woman vulnerable on the street, the three-month-old-baby, the blind girl in an institution, the seventy-two-year old barely able to walk, the new arrival in a prison) ["The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men." (Pulp Fiction)]. What the perpetrator is getting off on is not the sex, though perhaps he also thinks he is, but the exhibition of his absolute God-like power over someone, whose defining choice, the choice with whom to have sex, has been taken from her. Clothes and cleavage have little to do here.

Many would argue that I am oversimplifying their argument. It’s not the skin on display that’s objectionable, but the imperialo-exploitative context of the “item-song” where the female Chikni-Chameli body is shown to be entertaining the salivating patriarchy. As a matter of fact, the very word “item” is the problem, in the world of commercial entertainment, a woman is not a human being, but a prop. This then is what, they say, leads to rape and sexual crimes, this objectification. While this may be part of the problem, I feel it is too subtle a concept, too academic for those lumpen elements who actually commit these acts to grasp, even at a subconscious level. Or should I say, there is a message which is even more overt, the 800 lb gorilla in the room, a message that truly resonates with a substantial section of the Indian population.

That being the narrative of heroism which embodies within it the total subjugation of women, in which her free-will is not to respected, in which her “No” can always be turned into “Yes” , in which she is to be tamed like Alexander did Bucephalus. More than the rape-scene-as-titillation, fortunately not as popular as it once was, which at least ends with the villain being thrashed or the “Tu Cheez badi hai mast mast” objectification, which at least shows the woman as a consensual partner (some may say the consensuality is a facade but even then), this takes criminal behavior and stamps it with a “That’s the way true men do it” seal of approval. I am not saying that this narrative by itself creates rapists. After all Dussashana did not watch movies. The desire to control exists within, it is a basic human condition. However what the filmi narrative does is that it makes this heroic.

Exhibit A. Aamir Khan in Dil. The song “Khambe Jaisi Khadi Hai”.[Video] The Madhuri Dixit character in the movie rejects Aamir Khan’s advances. To which he says “Hum ne khayee hai kasam, todenge iski guroor hum” (I have taken a vow to break her pride) and then proceeds to do exactly that, with unsolicited physical contact and verbal harassment, in the process of winning her love. What makes this pass for romance, as opposed to the glorification of pure neanderthal behavior, is Aamir Khan’s handsome mug. Replace him with the face on the street, and what you have is a story from the crime blotter.

Exhibit B. Hit song from the Hindi heartland. [Video] The lady is not willing. But the gent cares not. He declares that it does not matter if she pelts him with a barrage of shoes or shouts at him in the middle of the road, she will be his. And follows it up with musical molestation. Machismo has been established. The girl has been subdued.

Exhibit C. This time from the South. [Video]. Asin is a rich girl (as evidenced from the car she pops out of). She is also Westernized (as evidenced from her clothes). She gets molested. Hero, lower middle class (because the association with the target audience must be made) comes in. He scares the molester away. Going by the English subtitles, this is what he tells her: “Live life of a chaste woman. Show your beauty only to your husband. If you keep showing it to the public, everyone will be interested to sleep with you. If you come out wearing a sari, people will treat you like Goddess Laxmi. Now get lost”. Though I have not seen the rest of the movie, I am assuming that Asin undergoes a transformation after this brilliant monologue. While definitely different from the Chiltua Ki Didi narrative, it is about as regressive and as dangerous, using as it does the hero’s voice to legitimize the actions of the molester by making the victim responsible for the crime. For the street sexual harasser, this is the perfect justification for his exercise of control—”She made me do it” and its variation “I want to teach her a lesson”.

Now that we have established that there are elements of popular culture, very popular elements, that allow evil men to lionize their actions, the question is what can we do about it. The practical answer is “very little”. Censorship and banning, a staple solution for those easily outraged, is neither morally justifiable nor is it, and this is perhaps even more important, practically feasible. How do you control the content of Bhojpuri songs? How do you retroactively censor movies made decades ago? How do you wipe out decades of messaging? How do you control videos on Youtube? The short answer: you cannot.

The only way the malaise of sexual violence can be handled, in a way whose effect can be seen on the streets, is at the enforcement-side. That is in terms of higher conviction rates, the creation of an environment where complaints may be freely registered and a faster legal system that ensures that justice is dispensed speedily. Exerting social-media pressure to prevent a Bhangra-rapper, whose break-out song is a pastiche of misogynistic rhetoric culled from the songs of other rappers, from performing at one event might bring about some schadenfreude, but in the larger context will remain an exercise in futility. There will always be more from where that came from. So where do you start censoring? And, even more importantly, where do you stop?