Film Review: Prakash Jha's Rajneeti (2010)

In a word, Prakash Jha's latest venture was obvious. Perhaps it is the nature of Indian politics, nothing changes for the better. Perhaps...but my grouse with the film is not just the fact that it didn't have a uptoic vision. It is not even the gross miscasting of Katrina as a Bhopal girl, Arjun Rampal's wooden acting, or the ripoffs from The Godfather. It is the absence in the film of any moral center. There is no critique, no character who can critique the decaying Indian polity. Just oppressors and the oppressed. These are the only two positions that the film makes available.

There is no outrage over the fact that the Dalit driver who could have had a meteoric rise in the political arena is reduced to chauffeuring the very family that murdered his son. Instead there is maudlin sentiment for Arjun Rampal's death, for Katrina who remains, until the very end, a pawn in the hands of her male relatives and, then, the party (whoever is in any doubt about Indian women making canny, and often corrupt, politicians should look at Jayalalitha and Mayawati as real-life examples), or even Ranbir Kapoor's character for having lost his fiance and his unborn child.

There is a sneaky hierarchy operating in the film. It encourages us to identify with and sympathize with the fictional counterparts of the Gandhi family. Their death matters. Their victories are valorized with "Vande Mataram" playing in the backgroud. The death of Ajay Devgan's character, the dalit leader who was capable of toppling the oppressive feudal hold of the ruling family, does not get the significant treatment it deserved. There is a void at the center of the film. It is representation emptied of any ethical core.

Splinters

“They are my uncles, my cousins,
my loved ones oh Krishna,
how do I fight them?”

The mirror cracks
A strange omen they say
Shards of reflected faces
Each distorted and incomplete
A wholeness lost;
A simplicity denied
A cacophonous sonata unleashes
The screeching of vicious sirens
Images of the dead
Painted with the life-blood of the living.

My poem is a response to the 26/11 events in Mumbai, India.

Habitation by Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

The edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

The Balancing Act

It’s a difficult task

Precariously balancing

My face on my neck

Will it fly away

Like a balloon without a string?

Will it fall on the ground

And break into unsymmetrical pieces?

Will it evaporate into hot air?

Sublimate into nothingness

Or will the water I pour on my head

Erode it gradually?

A tightrope act

Lest the disembodied features

Float in mid-air.

The Toilet of Venus

The National Gallery in London has over 2500 paintings. Obviously, when one goes around trying to absorb it all, the images start to collapse into each other. Yet, I remember this one in particular by Diego Velásquez. As the guide positioned our group in front of this painting, I had several facetious thoughts at once which is I guess bound to happen when one comes from a country where only religious mendicants and very old people avail the liberties of bare flesh and stands in front of a classical nude. In any case, I remember thinking of nudes as sophisticated pornography for the rich. It is, in fact, not completely erroneous to think the rich men who commissioned these paintings for their boudoirs and the male artists who painted them shared in the male gaze directed at the female model who never returns the look but always looks away. This painting, however, has so much more going on than any of the Susannah bathing series which is so much more voyeuristic in its perspective. The Venus depicted here does not possess classical features but if you look in the mirror appears to have a more ordinary, low-brow if you will, face. To place this subject in a tradition of classical nudes was quite revolutionary. What is even more interesting is the history of its possession. It survived the Spanish Inquisition hidden behind curtains and secret doors. The curtain, of course, enhanced the voyeuristic effect of the painting. It made its way to an individual in Yorkshire who, having spent a lot of money in acquiring this painting, wanted to display it proudly to the public. However, the problem was that displaying such a painting would be offensive to ladies that would be present in his house. His solution was to hang it above his six-feet tall fireplace. This decision was based on the assumption that women, following the respectable code of behavior, would only either look down demurely or look up to meet the gaze of the men. Under no circumstance would a respectable woman look all around her--that would be considered unseemly! The painting and its placement together are such an interesting commentary on the privilege of the male gaze. It gets even better. During the suffragette movement, when British women were demanding the right to vote and were being imprisoned, a suffragette came in an hit this painting with an axe! Her explanation was that she wanted to destroy something "beautiful." The newspapers went berserk and spoke about it almost in terms of assault. Bruise on the shoulder, the wound...all such phrases seemed to indicate that the violent feminist had attacked the beautiful, passive woman. Even today, despite the repair work, we can see the area where the axe had torn the canvas apart. The fine lines are the marks of history, of male ownership of the female form and the feminist revolt.

Proserpine by Rossetti

Went to Tate Britain today, especially for their Pre-Raphaelite collection. All the magnificent paintings I'd always seen in print and wondered about were there in front of me and the effect was stupendous. The painters and their women; their poems inscribed on the frame...some on my mind made it process where past and present collided. What I like best about their paintings is their narrative quality which I guess is not surprising considering I've devoted the best part of my life to narratives. Look at 'Proserpine' by Rossetti and how he uses the myth of the maiden trapped in the dark underworld for six months of every year of her life and spending that time longing for light. Look at how the painter captures the pensive expression in the model's eyes. Of course, it is Jane Morris, the wife of Rosetti's best friend William Morris who Rossetti was in love with. Maybe it is Rossetti's subjectivity at work here: seeing Jane as Proserpine, trapped in marriage. I love how Dante uses the burst of color in the pomegranate to contrast with the lush darkness that envelops Proserpine on all sides. Yet there is a hint of light...as if spring is almost here and she will be free again. Did I say I loved the Pre-Raphaelites?!!

the sad skin lady

While centuries have gone by with men looking at women and producing "art" or "pornography"...in the case, of classical nudes, it was both at the same time! In a post-feminist daze, I believed that it was finally over. Men could look at women, women could look at men, we could look at ourselves and in the this culture of visual equality, there was no longer any scopophilic domination. And then I found myself watching skin commercials on TV...all those anxious women tugging at their eye lines, their laugh lines. Did we take the gaze back just to turn it on ourselves? If we look in the mirror, do we replicate the sad skin woman?

Conversations

"Conversations"

I thought that we would talk
Like we always do.
Inconsequential chatter,
High-sounding dead-end phrases.
Instead I find myself,
Confronted with an alien language.
The mind assaulted
By a barrage of undecipherable ciphers.
You seem to spin around yourself
A web of ideas like a defensive spider.
And I am scared to come in.
Frightened because I do not comprehend
Your words, your thoughts, your signs.
It breaks my easy complacency;
Shatters the illusion of harmony;
Face to face with a stranger
Who I thought was a friend.

election fever

I know that I have no voting rights in United States. I am not even a permanent resident for crying out loud! But everytime an election comes around, I get involved despite my best attempts to not let that happen. This time I'm rooting for Obama. He's smart, he's articulate and it'll be a first time that this country will not have a white man as a president. If it were any woman other than Hillary, my loyalties would've been split. I think I don't want Hillary as the president because it would be like having Billl Clinton back in office and playing puppet master. But then again maybe it's just because I don't like her face! She never makes eye contact with people she's talking to and she's too gaurded in that terribly WASPy way! All she talks about is her politics without ever rooting it i her personal experiences or convictions. Now, Obama is a different cup of tea! He connects with people, he expresses his ideas with the full force of his personality behind it and he is able to think through complex issues without making intellectual bargains. Some may say that he's a better performer but I guess the Democrats could do with some dynamism after Al Bore oops Gore. This time, I hope the best man wins.

scattered alphabet

eyes swell and subside
laughter flows from the quill
when did living become overkill?
schedule time to kiss, to hold, to breathe
schedule pain too

outside the window
into the green and yellow void
life's scattered alphabet
creates a routine
of expectations and dreams
fading at the seams

aaaah chai, tea, cha, even tea latte...so many names and so many forms but completely essential to the existence of civilization. But for this tea, we would all want to kill the person who drones on in front of us or turn the frenzy on ourselves! Tea allows us the comfortable, slurpy silence. It makes the inanity of social banter bearable, even pleasurable. The bengalis have made tea drinking and conversation almost ritualistic. "Adda" is synonymous with penurious surroundings and the completely disjunctive, highly intellectual exchange of ideas. Where would Alexander Pope's world of intricate faux pas and delicate morals be without the ornate china tea sets to give it a beautiful center? In fact, one can tell that a person has completely given up the desire for any human company when s/he gives up drinking tea!

Introduction to Poetry

"I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means."

-- Billy Collins

holy matrimony!

Indian marriages are insane. Period. There are no ifs and buts about it. There is no joining of souls and soulful gazing into each other's eyes while reading self-composed vows like American sitcom characters do. There is a lot of watery eye contact with the priest's eyes as he chants the mantras while you try your level best to turn your head at strange angles to avoid the "holy" smoke. One doesn't exchange rings and swear to live and die together. Rather, at least in Bengali weddings, the bride's father puts the ring on the groom's finger....and only death shall part the father and son in law! You look around trying to spot a familiar face but you don't see anyone because, well, they are all busy running around, getting everything right for the three hundred people who you really don't know and will probably never meet again in your life. In short, after having fed on all that fluffy western romance, getting married in India is like a hearty kick to your mental backside! You realize that weddings are not romantic, they are not meant to be. They are public events of gargantuan proportions that remind you that your getting married is a social fact. Everybody's involved and interested and there is no escaping it. There is no riding away into the sunset. To a certain extent, the winter smog in Delhi pretty much kills the sunset but largely because those three hundred people you don't know might also want to ride along!

India Shining?

living in modern india leaves one slightly out of breath; the nation cranes its neck to try and finish the race just in time; our cellphones, our cars, even our film stars have the "imported" veneer--the flashy, brand-new feel that makes things seem unreal much like the plastic smell that came of toys freshly unwrapped.

And while we strain every breath and every muscle to prove to the world that we are "modern"; that we get it, we are indeed "down with it," the rest of our population, the people who unfortunately were only oppressed and exploited in British India, those who never got a chance to learn the "global" language, those who do not know what "post colonial" means and maybe do not care while we, the middle-class, English medium school products whine about our cultural angst, those masses go on tilling and battling failing crops, killing themselves with mass suicide that is mentioned for ten minutes on national tv before another reporter prances around a film star's house trying to get a peek of what they will wear when she will marry another film star who is similarly besieged by reporters who want a peek at what he will wear...

it seems as a nation, we moved from the dark ages to a postmodernist existence without ever having a true enlightenment. a desire for truth and rationality, a moment when we evaluated the real worth of our morality, our conventionalities. we simply shifted gears into acknowledging the relative worth of everything we cannot explain as "tradition," gift-wrap our country as exotic, as a mish-mash of socio-temporal realities.

Totally like whatever, you know? by Taylor Mali

In case you hadn't noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you're talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you're saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)'s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren't, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences - so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not -
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don't think I'm uncool just because I've noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It's like what I've heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I'm just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we've just gotten to the point where it's just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we've become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

vikram seth's ...

sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
you're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
no need for wit; just talk vacuities, and i'll
reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

the world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
this twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
to sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

Sharon Olds' "Sex Without Love"

How do they do it, the ones who make love

without love? Beautiful as dancers,

gliding over each other like ice-skaters

over the ice, fingers hooked

inside each other's bodies, faces

red as steak, wine, wet as the

children at birth whose mothers are going to

give them away. How do they come to the

come to the come to the God come to the

still waters, and not love

the one who came there with them, light

rising slowly as steam off their joined

skin? These are the true religious,

the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

accept a false Messiah, love the

priest instead of the God. They do not

mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

they are like great runners: they know they are alone

with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-

vascular health--just factors, like the partner

in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

single body alone in the universe

against its own best time.

the encounter (an incomplete short story)

She looked at him for a while. Verbal bile rose in her throat, she swallowed it along with her urge to destroy the false shibboleth of ideas he was building out of his life. His voice droned on in the background while she sipped her tea with all the concentration she could muster. “I had my GRE the day she got married. I called her and she spoke to me as if everything was normal…as if…” He turned away to wipe his tears and she smothered the laughter rising from within by a violent bout of coughing.

green, blue and cigarette smoke

He lit another cigarette. She looked at him reprovingly. “You tempt me to smoke more than my quota.” The statement received an apologetic glance and smoke floated away into the still evening. “I should hook up with a man who has a car. Its hard to get around in this place without a car!” He looked shocked and said with a sigh that wasn’t too hard to interpret, “Women!”

I don’t know why I said it! Why do I want to be cruel?

She had hated his emails. They were pompous and studiedly literary. The kind of mails you wrote to heads of graduate programs if you wanted in – the kind that tripped from Kafka to Toni Morrison to Rushdie, the kind of mails that were a little out of breath with all that intellectual running around. Yet, she had written back. It was nothing more than a token of belonging; the false comfort of knowing, of comprehending and of being comprehended.

a shell of known realities, an experiential ghetto

She found his note tucked in the crevice between the door and its wooden frame. It said that he had come to meet her. It said that it was a long walk from his place to hers. It said that the airlines had lost his luggage. And it said that he was sorry to have missed her. She left him a note too. When she had returned his call and had similarly missed him, she had said that they were star-crossed.

an endless deferral of expectation

The waitress spoke much too fast. The syllables dropped from her lips and scattered in air before she could gather them into sense. Her response was calm and self-assured. She was irritated by the confusion in his eyes, a blatant mirror of her fear. She closed her order with a fake smile. She had been told to smile. “Always smile.” So she did, continuously and meaninglessly. Whenever her eyes met with a stranger on the road, the waitress at the table, the cashier at the supermarket, she footnoted her words with that smile. The space where she could have just comfortably ignored the other person was no longer available in this world filled with smiling strangers.

She stood near the telephone booth and pretended to look into the street. A car stopped at the light and the man driving it looked curiously at her forcing her into a realization that she hadn’t chosen a very appropriate place to stand and wait for her companion. He spoke to his mother as if he were a child of ten. He alternatively whimpered and giggled; he spoke loud enough so that she could hear him even if she stood at a discreet distance.

My mother is the most important woman in my life…even my wife will be second to her.

He was overjoyed when they had met because she shared his language. Accustomed to a metropolitan Babel, she had trouble participating in that enthusiasm; he spoke to her in their language so her friend could not follow a word of what he spoke. Her friend called him a cultural chauvinist and she remained silent.

Its almost as if he tries to create a private zone with you in it…

It was embarrassing to acknowledge him. Someone had whispered that he stank of cigarette smoke. Someone else had said that he was crazy. They were part of a sort of an orientation program. Everyone there was nice – it was mandatory to be nice, most were paid for it, for the others, it was the only interaction they had in that city and they didn’t want to fuck up. Close to three days, the strangers had formed a minor community, complete with its likes and dislikes, who it included and who it wanted to leave out. She was liked and included…

She avoided his gaze when he had asked her if she was angry. She had said, “of course not!” in that fake, high-pitched voice and turned away. She spoke on the phone for an hour as he waited for her to end her conversation. She was afraid to talk to him.

"abyss" by tee

The parched hopes stumble on
Stretching their fingers
To touch the mirage
It dilates
Enmeshes you within
The invisible is unbreakable
You stare in horror
At the image in the mirror
A dead embryo mummified
A gasp for air
Enmeshed within

"adieu" by onjus

So it was another adieu

Said with much a ado

I still hear those sighs and soft murmurs,

My skin still tingles with hands tightly clasped,

Kohl smudged eyes are still heavy with those unwept tears,

Heart is still heavy with those sweet nothings and

Mouth is still parched with the refrain “what to do?” “what to do?”

Ah I loved that delicately cooked ravioli,

Yes the kababs were a little hard.

But…

Didn’t you wear that shirt at tabby’s wedding?

Yes I love your skirt! Skirts in New York are so expensive!

But…

I still have to pack the cumin seeds,

Yes I will miss you after you go to jabalpur.

But…

Baba thinks you are too funny,

Yes I too want to come to Syracuse.

But…

I am getting married in September,

Yes piggie you are like my sibling

But…

Do you remember?

Yes, I will remember.

Will you?

Yes, I will.

You do?

Yes, I will.

Me too,

Yes, I will miss You.

So it was another adieu?