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23 hours in transit! I step out of the airport with visions of my bed floating in front of my eyes. I take the cab and prepare myself for the 55 kms journey home at the crack of the dawn. The cabbie looks at me from the rear view mirror and I give him my address. That one look should have alerted me. No, he didn’t look like an RGV extra. It was the look of a man warming up to his day and intent on making me a part of the same.

No sooner had I settled down than I was made painfully aware of infinite loops (this is, after all, Bangalore) and Nietzschian eternal recurrences through the mellifluous voice of Himesh “Naak Naak Naaking on Heaven’s Doors” Reshamiyya. I understood what I had seen in the cabbie’s eyes when he had stared back at me – aural murder. Being …

“South has a propensity to elect film stars as their Chief Ministers.”
- TV News Anchor, circa May, 1996

“Chiranjeevi is starting a new party; remember, South has a historical tendency to vote in favor of film stars.”
- Senior Editor, prominent TV News channel, 2 weeks ago

“Yeh film stars ko vote de dete hain. Aise state ka karoge kya?”
- Overheard during a discussion on TN politics

I greeted the news of Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi starting a political party of his own with a lot of enthusiasm. I am not a registered member of his fans’ association nor do I think, unlike his fans, that he has answers to all the problems of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Also, please discount those hoary five years between ’89-’94 when I saw every Chiru movie without understanding a word. Yes, my friends, my eyes have witnessed the Jebu Donga, Manchi Donga, State Rowdy, Gang Leader, …

This is a self-admittedly elitist article. So, spare me comments about it being so.

There is too much democracy all around us. The Janata is the Janardhan. The less talented singer wins the reality show; a government that, arguably, abetted crimes against humanity, wins a landslide at the hustings; a brain-dead comedy inspired from ‘Three Men and a Baby’ grosses over Rs 50 Crs and the Director goes around ridiculing his seniors; Ekta Kapoor continues to make regressive serials which top TRP ratings – all of these become legit because the great Janata has spoken in their favor. Janata or Public, that shapeless, faceless entity, at whose altars, pedestrian talent becomes precocious. Who are you to argue with the freakin’ Janata? Are you a fascist? (note: the Nazi party and Hitler actually came to power via a popular election)

This is what Fareed Zakaria (former editor Newsweek) calls the tyranny of …

I received a text message from a friend last week who had just finished Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The one thing that intrigued him, in this accomplished work, was this line somewhere at the end of the book – “since then, I have felt rather like Kurtz waiting for my Marlowe.” What did that refer to, was the question in the message.

And I was reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its continuing relevance over a century since it was first published. Mohsin Hamid cleverly brings up the reference at the end to round up his view of the bearded narrator, once among the best and the brightest at Princeton, who has turned renegade and his rendezvous at a Lahore café with a possible undercover American assassin out there to settle scores.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (often featuring at the top of the heap of the greatest books …

We’re back again. After the last post of Prof Artha Shastri, we have been inundated with questions. The Professor picks up 4 that caught his fancy.

Q1

Dear Profji,

A few weeks back I watched ‘Mukhbir’ at a multiplex. I noticed that they had an interesting scheme running. You could refund your ticket at the end of the film if you didn’t like it. After I finished watching the movie, I felt I had to get that refund but I baulked at the prospects of standing in that long queue. But I remain intrigued by this ploy of the Producers. Is there an economic rationale to all of this?

Yours etc
“main aaj bhi phenke hue paise nahin uthata”

A1

Dear “main aaj bhi phenke hue paise nahin uthata”,

I share your grief of watching Mukhbir and what’s worse there was no money back guarantee for all of 4 people who watched that movie with me. But your …

I had just finished my Class VIII examinations and was enjoying a break - not entirely well deserved as it turned out later when the results were declared. While I was revelling in, what I would later look back to and refer to as, my salad days (as Shakespeare almost stole my lines and wrote �when I was green in judgment, cold in blood�), the nation was going through, what an average writer would call, tumultuous times.

Mandal, till then the surname of that girl living next block with allegedly malleable morals, suddenly came to mean more to us. That a lot of young men fought over Mandal remained common between the girl and the Report. Mandir was no longer where Amitabh went to vent his spleen at the end of the movie. It now had terms like shilanyas and kar seva tagged with it. All in all, the kind …

This isn?t a post on cinema though I have made some tenuous connections. This is a post on history, Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, global trade and some personal observations.

September, 1833. As the Tuscany, that had set sail from Boston about four months ago, approached the Hooghly and made its way up into Calcutta, there was palpable excitement among the officers of the British Empire. The Tuscany carried a cargo so improbable that many thought it was a prank. It carried frozen water! Yes, Ice!

The improbability of ice ?harvested? from the many fresh water ponds of New England traveling over 15,000 miles to reach the greatest city, then, east of London makes for one of the more interesting anecdotes of global trade. Especially, when you consider mankind had not yet discovered industrial refrigeration. The Ice trade, one of the earliest instances of globalization, was pioneered by Frederic Tudor, a tenacious …

Frisbeetarianism: The philosophy that when you die, your soul goes up on a roof and gets stuck.

Interes(h)ting! The varied uses of Frisbee! I learnt of this tongue-in-cheek term, variously attributed to George Carlin or Jim Stafford, quite recently. And it helped me with a single word description of what I have been seeking for a long time. What is it, you ask?

Let�s go back to Chitralekha (1964), the film adaptation of Bhagwati Charan Verma�s literary classic of the same name. Verma enquires about the notions of value judgment, what determines right or wrong and contrasts desire with sacrifice. The central tenet is similar to Schopenhauer�s attributing the primacy of will/desire over intellect in what drives man to be unreasonable. Chitralekha is a fascinating story set during the reign of Chandragupta where the life of the central protagonist, Chitralekha, is intertwined with the lives of two men on opposite …

I don�t do reviews. So what, you ask? Did we ever ask you to do it? You�ve got a point there. But I wrote that line because it felt cool to do so. People always say that to me when I ask them to review a film. In fact, lots of people I know start their post stating this isn�t a review; it�s merely a collection of their impressions after watching a movie. The world, in their opinion, will be a better place once it has been apprised of their impressions.

Bottomline (Thought for the Day): It�s socially acceptable to be found watching �Tauba Tauba� (IMDB) than seen reviewing it.

Audience (in chorus): Preamble bahut ho gaya, aage badho

I have decided to join the hugely successful group of men and women who are involved in providing the audience with the forensic reports, autopsies and personal deconstruction of narratives in …

A few days ago I realized that my life is on a trajectory that I can�t change. I don�t control the trajectory; rather, it controls me. It�s like being hurled off a canon early in life and following a predetermined path since. What�s all the melancholia for? Well, to establish the philosophical underpinnings of what I am going to do here.

I have realized that I can�t be a professional writer. In fact, I can�t be a professional anything except what I am today. So, what do I do with all the stories that I have with me? Those written over the years, some published, others transferred from one laptop to the other every few years. Do they just die away? The answer is no. Instead of spoofing other filmmakers and their storylines (like I did here), I have decided to put out 3 story ideas here on PFC. …

I�m sorry to follow up my post PFC 6 with another one. But this is important. It proves my power of clairvoyance. This is going to be short.

About 4 months back I had written a post but abandoned it thinking it wasn�t relevant. It was short story of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva coming down to earth for a state of the world survey. In Mumbai, the run short of cash and find the best way to make some quick money is to act in an Ekta Kapoor Saas-Bahu saga. They get hold of a casting director who finds their costumes in total alignment with their latest series �Koi Patthar Se Na Maare Mere Saas Ko�. So he sends them to meet Ekta. The Trinity is ready for the audition but find they are taken into a room which has Sanjay B Jumaani (numerologist) and Sunita Menon (new age spiritualist). …

I am a sucker for intelligent cinema. Therefore, I watch Hindi films. I like my life to be predictable. The virtues of stillness � that constancy of the truant variables in life � they give me the appetite to take intellectual risks (like watching Salman on telly) in other fields. Once you have got the emotional elements anchored right, you are free to spread your wings elsewhere is my dictum.

Therefore, I love them all � YRF, VF, RGV, White Feathers et al. What predictability! The more things change, the more they remain same. After Jannat and Sarkar Raj, I can hardly wait for the YRF summer release, the homicidal-instincts-arousing title of which goes �Thoda Pyar, Thoda Magic�. And I am fervently hoping it doesn�t disappoint me. I hope that every frame of it screams the stultifying formula YRF seems to have discovered to draw family audience in. …

I was once stumped in an interview when the interviewer referred to my three strong interests in life, reading, old Hindi film music and cricket as trivial. My trivial mind thought that in a way he�s right since the etymological origin of the word �trivia� is from Latin �tri� (three) and �via� (way). I relayed that thought back to him. He knew he was being had. So he dug in his heels and remarked about how most Hindi film songs portrayed the same emotions and situations. I was about to extol the virtues of constancy in life to him when he asked the key question �when have Hindi film songs been a reflection of times that we have lived in?� My first reaction was to ask �sir, ek bechaare se gaane pe aur kitna pressure daaloge?� Fortunately, better sense prevailed and I gave him a dose of Sahir�s Phir Subah …

Two recent obits brought back a question that I often get asked outside of India � �why does Hindi cinema continue to purvey the same formula with minimal changes to its audience and why does the audience not tire of it?� It�s a question asked on PFC on many occasions.

The answer is�.Wait. May be I am getting ahead of myself.

First the obits:

Albert Hofmann, Swiss pharmacist and the man best known for being the first to have synthesized LSD and tasted it, passed away on April 29, 2008. He was 102.

Vijay Tendulkar, playwright, social observer and commentator best known for his plays and scripts in early 70s which exposed political and social hypocrisy prevalent in Indian society, died in a Pune hospital on May 19, 2008. He was 80.

So, what�s the connection between them and the original question posed?

The counterculture movement of the 60s has a lot to …

A lot of discussion has happened on PFC pages about alleged pseudos kowtowing to Hollywood/World Cinema and assorted issues of sophistication and tastes. I think it’s time we start serious analysis of Hindi cinema to ensure an even keel in any future ‘Anatomy of Scene’ discussions on these pages. After umpteen requests from millions around the world, I, humbly, take the leadership role in this battle for restoring pride in Hindi cinema (this is where I and Rahul Gandhi diverge in our values who turns a blind eye to Arjun Singh’s requests).

Somewhere in the first hour of Iqbal Durrani�s magnum opus Khuddar (Govinda, Karishma), there�s a scene which has remain etched in my memory. A scene where my samosa clutching hand remained suspended in mid air as celluloid magic took over. Govinda, playing a tough cop, �Inispektar Siddhant� or something of that ilk, takes Karishma to task for dancing …

No! Wait a moment. Don�t judge this post by its title. The purpose of many a lives (and posts) is to make others look better. You ask for example? Ok, Tusshar Kapoor! My Wheel of Time posts serve the same purpose. Just as you are letting off some steam on the Roshans in one post and damning YRF in another, here comes this post which you can conveniently ignore. But you shouldn�t. Read it to understand how a post shouldn�t take itself too seriously or how to write a pedantic post. The purpose of all this is to let ordinary readers know that into each life some rain should fall. And they also serve who wait and bore. So, readership be damned, I have a greater purpose in life (God made me for a purpose et al) which is to dispense such wisdom to all of you. Here we …

The PFC mailbox is often inundated with questions regarding the state of cinema in India. Harried fans, trade gurus, social commentators, dial-an-agitator groups et al reach out to seek answers which have been eluding them. There�s a touching innocence about their faith in PFC, the kind that Mithun�s sister often displays when she gaily prances around in minimalist sartorial elegance despite catching the roving eye of a Bulla or Ibu Hatela in the scene before. Unfortunately for these people with insatiable thirst for knowledge, the powers-that-be at PFC, wring their hands in despair and sing in chorus that Ayesha Jhulka number from Rang (1992) � �har sawaal ka jawaab nahin mil sakta.� � every single time they come across such queries.

But how long can such �anyay� last? Like that Javed Akhtar song in Mithun-Bijlani starrer Yugandhar, whenever the burden of �paap� tends to go over the limit, �Krishna Aayega�. I …

�I�d give anything to be you and hear that for the first time�.

Have you felt that way before? When you want to go back in time and savor again that first time when you read, listened to or watched something which has since become a life-long passion. Or has the relentless march of time ensured that like everything else, diminishing returns have set in. Do you wonder how would it be to go back and start it all over again with a clean slate?

Coming back to that quote - �I�d give anything to be you and hear that for the first time� � credited to Woody Allen when he watched an acquaintance buy his first record of Sidney Bechet. In his authoritative biography of Woody Allen, Eric Lax speaks about Woody�s life-long obsession with New Orleans-style jazz and the way music seeps itself into his cinema. Woody, himself, is an …

At the risk of committing online hara-kiri, let me pose a question � what makes Gulzar, the lyricist, such a figure of reverence, love and loyalty bordering on worship within a certain age group (between late 20s to late 30s) among educated Indians? I use these terms very specifically, the age group and the educated (not merely literate). Among Hindi film aficionados of an older generation, I find an admixture of condescension and mild approval while speaking about Gulzar while a generation later have barely heard of him bar a �Kajrare� and don�t know what the fuss is about. And outside of the educated and dare I say, enlightened class, Gulzar�s lyrics won�t win the popularity sweepstakes. So, what makes this particular sub-set (the Gulzar generation as I have titled it and arguably, to which I might belong as well) so deeply connected to Gulzar?

While I was pondering on the …

I woke up this Saturday morning with a touch of hangover and to Hemant crooning �Yeh Raat Yeh Chandni� from Jaal. It is an interesting song that captures all that is good of Hindi film music. Set to music by a scion of the royal family of Tripura (S.D. Burman), penned by a young revolutionary poet from a feudal Punjabi zamindar family (Sahir), brought to life by a genteel Bengali bhadralok who grew up in Benares (Hemant Kumar) and all brought together by a Mysore born director (Guru Dutt) who reveled, then, in crime capers. I mulled over this some more as Hemant continued to pour honey in his Bangla-accented voice. And I had further reasons to support my long-held belief that the one area where Hindi cinema has been decidedly world class is in its music and the accompanying lyrics. Let me go a step further, while the originality …