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The Poetry of Cinema
“We have reached a time when we must open warfare on mediocrity, greyness and lack of expressiveness and make creative inquiry a rule in cinema.”
His oeuvre rests on this simple rule, which lies framed in his study. On the wall opposite is a poster with a pigeon nesting on tangled strips of film. And for Buddhadeb Dasgupta, too, his concerns zoom through the mesh of life to explore the inexorable truth of life and living.
But, as Dasgupta himself says, “If creative inquiry is a rule for cinema, then a filmmaker never makes one in expectation of an award. But when one gets one, the feeling is good.” And this reaction comes after his latest cinematic essay, Lal Darja, was adjudged the best feature film for 1997.
The poverty of myths
When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) launched its India Shining campaign, it had a fertile ground on which to sow the seeds of its electoral sloganeering. Newspaper editorials were going dizzy with India’s forever rising gross domestic product (GDP). Pundits were engaged in animated discussions over India being the economic superpower of the new century, nay millennium. Headlines every day would hysterically tell us that the Sensex had scaled a new high. Everyone was happy. Everyone was richer today than the day before. If what you saw or read in the media was anything to go by, India was indeed shining. Quite brightly at that. What the BJP-NDA only did was prop up an effort to capitalise on the apocryphal myth of resplendence that was already being perpetuated by the news media.
To save these people, you need to keep them out of our sight
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The most recurring, quoted number in India today is 1,411 – the mean count of tigers ostensibly remaining in the wild in the country. Everyone knows and everyone seems pretty upset. The number, of course, can be disputed and refuted too if needed; but that can be the topic for another discussion. What is evident is that given the rate of decline, it might be just another 20, or maybe 50, years by when tigers would vanish from our landscape. This number, till the other day, remained in the knowledge domain of wildlifers – conservationists, activists, enthusiasts. Thanks to the biggest ad campaign of the year, most people now know that 1,411 is too small a number in itself. Alarming, is how most ordinary people have been describing the number as.
This is one of India's most blacked-out stories
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It ought to be counted as one of India’s most downplayed stories of the day. It is about the struggle to save an ecosystem called Niyamgiri in Orissa from mining, deforestation and devastation. It is about indigenous people and the rights over their land.
Vedanta Resources, a stinking rich British company owned by NRI Anil Agarwal, intends to dig an open-pit bauxite mine in Niyamgiri. This mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. The Supreme Court has given the go ahead for the project, but the battle rages on. Albeit silently. This project, by the way, will also see the death of the centuries-old sacred groves of these people. The Dongria Kondh do not live anywhere else and there are just 8,000 of them left.
Retelling India’s fashion story
There’s a beeline for India – from publishers of magazines and newspapers to manufacturers of garments and textiles. Not quite without reason – its ever-growing affluent section is bigger in numbers than many European nations put together.
If you care to look beyond the obvious, you will realise those making this beeline have not just been taken in by speculative hype alone. Numbers scream realities, and the numbers indicate that the Indian fashion market is huge, it is growing, it is vibrant. The rich are getting richer, and the number of the rich is also increasing at an alluring rate. This lure is for all those who see India as the promised land for fashion and retail.
So what is it with fashion in India? What is it with sportswear in this country?
Memories of another death
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Sometime in the second half of the 1970s there was this frail boy who one fine morning fell heads over heels in love with cricket, a game he could not play by any measure. Because he could neither bat, nor bowl, or field. He loved the game, nonetheless. For its sheer grace than anything else, perhaps. The more he realised that he could not weild the willow or hurl the cherry, the more he grew passionate about the game.
He loved the game because of two players who used to be the favourite Sportsweek pin-up boys at the time – two of the Amarnath brothers – the stylish Surinder and the gritty Mohinder. He rooted for the former more than anyone else donning the India flannels. It was just because of him perhaps that he had begun loving the game that those days only gentlemen played.
Courts have refused to be the moral police. Politicians should follow suit
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A week or so back, a court dismissed a public interest litigation. It was no landmark judgment in that sense. But it had a message for many morally-upright people in this hallowed land.
The Delhi High Court on July 29 dismissed two petitions that sought a stay on the reality show Sach Ka Saamna. The court was clear in what it said, "Our culture is not so fragile that it would be affected by one TV programme."
The point is not whether the reality show is good, bad, or ugly. But why many in this country have this innate, burning desire to play the moral police. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are many shades of these morally-condescending lot. Either they indulge in rampant, wanton violence. Like ransacking art galleries. Like tearing apart film theatres. Or, they go to court. You know, like very urbane, urban people. After all, they can take recourse to archaic sections that still lurk in the Indian Penal Code.
The Northeast and its Bandhs
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We have seen two, virtually spontaneous, bandhs in the Northeast in the days just gone by. One was a relatively-short 12-hour Assam bandh called in protest against the letting off of the accused in the botched-up Parag Das murder case. The other was a much more gruelling 48-hour bandh called in Manipur over the cold-blooded, fake encounter of a former militant.
Bandhs have been so rampant in the Northeast in the last 20 or so years that people have become inured to them. And bandhs, more often than not, are a success without the advocates of the bandhs having to drum up much support for them.