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The poverty of myths
• Date published: September 10, 2008
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.
The mills and our loss
• Date published: March 8, 2006
A disaster becomes a farce when the underlying tragedy gets buried, for whatever be the reason. That is just what has happened with the Supreme Court order paving the way for more malls and luxury apartments in the congested metropolis of Mumbai that should translate into billions of rupees for mill owners.
It is not just the court ruling which will be environmentally calamitous for Mumbai. The real tragedy lies in the fact that all voices of reason have been drowned in the Babel of eulogies that have been flooding the newspapers and the news channels. Trust the media to slut themselves for the shortsighted interests of the real estate mafia.
Delhi rains: All talk of weather, no talk of climate
For the past one week, it has been the same story every day. It has been raining, pouring, making the city of Delhi a bigger mess than it was the previous day. The newspapers are full of photographs the following morning telling us the hell others have been going through too. Immediate problems beget immediate reactions. The civic bodies are to blame for the mess, we are told. And the blame game goes on.
Now, now, tell us something new, will you? While it is a fait accompli that the metropolitan disorder one has to wade through is only a clinical manifestation of the ineptitude of the Delhi government and its lethargic and corrupt civic agencies, it is a recorded fact that this has been the wettest August that the capital city has seen in 15 years.
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.