Hey Ram: Sanity, Love, Pretty Eyes & a Better Tomorrow
The first reaction is an implosion of the senses. The ugliness of the news flash assaults you like a charged bolt of lightning and the fever-pitch commentary fills your head, cramming in like a high tide of so many disjointed fragments. Shock-awe-reality-unreality-fear-disbelief. The calculation is quick, an almost frantic juggling, as your mortal human head reels in the sounds and the images attempting to assimilate them, if not into perspective atleast into a viable emotion. Tears-mad laughter-clutch a fist- kick the pet dog-rant.-sigh. There are times when reality not just outwits that brain of yours but tires the very soul. A strange sickening emotion descends on your being and hardens in your heart. The mind spins in all orbits- tired, failed and drawing blanks. The worst of your 5-paise-worth caf'©-table prophecies have come true and you can’t look it in its terrifying eye. You are helpless. So very mortal. Brittle. Impotent to boot. The world seems a void. All existences meaningless.
These are the most sensitive times. Your ego is wrecked along with your reality. You are on the brink of an unthinkable unforeseen chaos, dragged along by an invisible force that knows only destruction. You need to know more. Where are you at the present moment in the scheme of things? Has the horror passed? Are your loved ones safe? What is to be done of your helplessness? What is to be done?
Tragedy. Betrayal. And a continuing nagging disbelief. Is it really happening?
These are times when one needs a surge of sheer empowerment. Where to look for an affirmation- that is the question.
Fuck the Politicians. FUCK THE POLITICIANS. Two bit horse trading slime of the country probably hatching despicable schemes trying to make most mileage with their beady seedy eyes and dirty paws fixed on the coming elections. The fucking gall of these fucking geriatric liars and crooks who I fucking bet are busy calling up their hired speech writers to cook up something real special for National Television because anything more than a ‘no comment’ is stretching their moronic barren crooked intellects.
Fuck the News. FUCK THE NEWS. At such a sensitive moment, it is difficult to say what’s worse- blatant sensationalism, going at the juicy tidbits with mad mongrel instincts or the pretense to be to actually ‘care’. Not even the solemnest of the solemn seem to hide the fact that it is all about eyeballs, about fucking bottom-lines, even at a time like this. Empower us, you fucking losers, don’t turn me into a raging voyeur. I would like to trust you just this once you but………………. Bangalore Mirror came up with the headline with typically sensitivity- ‘A Wednesday’. Cheeky Ha Ha. How the fuck am I going to put my faith in that tosh?
But what disappointed even pained me the most were the Internet discussions. They were raging battlegrounds seething with almost barbaric rage. What was surprising is that at a moment when humanity and existence seemed to be at stake, the world seemed to be replete with morons ready to pick sides even among the accumulating carrion. Take a stick and draw a line through the blood and guts. Just then it began to feel like the apocalypse. Intricate blame games were played. History is evoked. Emotions, sympathy, anger, even intelligence and education- all channeled and debased into an equation of hate. Solidarity as a concept, as an emotion, as hope, as the need of the moment was all but lost. Just pathetic bastards groveling in the tragedy of the day. Aided of course by the inept political brass and the mad dog news channels.
What followed in the wake of one of our greatest tragedies was plain noise. There we were, raw with our private and public melancholy amidst a un/reality where even good common sense was kept at bay with an assault on our senses. They were not just trying to get you to pay attention they were projecting it straight inside your consciousness. It was like being trapped in the middle of a howling maniac scream.
My search was for sanity. Even if just a modicum. When I heard of the tragedy I had Linklater’s Waking Life playing on my laptop. All that the movie talked about… alternate universes, arcane philosophy, the future of mankind, the essence of reality now suddenly seemed to ring with a cheap hollow. When confronted with a jolt of brutal reality like we received Wednesday night, the universe seems much more visceral and straightforward than a romantic eternal and infinite mystery. I never thought that such a moment would arrive but ‘Waking Life’ angered me for some reason. Why did it even have to exist? What difference does it make to anyone? Who fucking cares?
My search continued. I seethed in an anger that went in no particular direction. I fought with myself in mumbles that didn’t add up to any kind of sense. I was frothing at my mouth, my psyche wrecked and unable to function………..
When reality itself lacks all rationality, at such times, we may find sanity in the strangest of places………………………………..
He passes her a piece of right-wing literature and tells her it’s HISTORY. She quips back-
“I hate semi-fiction”
Nothing made more sense yesterday.
This scene comes late into the first half of Kamal Haasan’s fascinating magnum opus- “Hey Ram”.
It immediately established a perspective and made a pertinent lucid comment on one of our greatest and continuing follies.
History is one of primary reasons that we find ourselves in these fucked-up times. Yesterday, a perusal of several discussions threw up a disturbing trend- history is constantly evoked to provide a justification for hate. When all sense fails, revert to the past and rest assured, there will always be enough dirt and blood to dig up and fashion into a convincing rhetoric of hate. Remember the text-books at school- they weren’t just facts and dates and time-lines, they were packed with a sense of pride. A pride that has come back to haunt us as the politics of hate and our pathetic superficial egos and identities. What they don’t teach you is that it is not to be referred to as ‘history’ but rather ‘histories’, that perspectives of events may defer, that it has always been chronicled by questionable persons for questionable reasons, that it is stream of knowledge than a source of pride, that one has to learn from it and not repeat its follies rather than mindlessly ape and repeat with the past as a blueprint and provocation. What they don’t teach you is forgiveness.
‘Hey Ram’ plays out as a critique of history and a parable of forgiveness, both essential for these turbulent times.
Set in the bloodlust of the partition, Kamal Haasan portrays Saket Ram, a common man who is turned on to a path of violence and retribution following the rape and murder of his wife. The night of the violence is harrowingly etched with the air of a surreal tableaux that effectively conveys the absurd irrationality of the times of war and bloodshed. On witnessing his wife’s death, Ram is first overcome with an animal rage in the heat of which he becomes a murderer but as the night wears long and he bears witness to the brutalities of man against man, his rage flounders into a sickening confusion. He stumbles through the burning labyrinth Calcutta during the partition- lost, confused, shocked, afraid, unable to articulate either his emotions or his thoughts. He runs into his namesake Ram Abhayankar, a staunch right wing zealot who will lead him deeper into fanaticism, ideology, politics, history and hate. Abhayankar’s right-wingers have but one root cause for all of the country’s turbulence- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. And their only hope and aim is to do away with him. The duty of killing Gandhi falls on Saket Ram who all charged up on ‘Somras’, violence and sex hallucinates first a Hindu Swastika morphing into a Nazi swastika and then in a Cronenbergian flourish, his wife turning into a gun. In this brilliant psychedelic episode, Haasan not only comments on the simple and straight line that can be drawn from history and religion to fascism but also brings in the element of the relationship between the masculine identity and religious violence.
A chance encounter with an old Muslim friend that ends in violence and tragedy causes Ram to reflect on his actions and a subsequent meeting with Gandhi makes him see the light of forgiveness and find the humanity within himself. Gun-case in hand, Ram arrives at Gandhi’s final sabha to seek ablution and forgiveness for his past but the busy Mahatma asks him to visit at a later time when they can talk in peace. Ram steps back.
Nathuram Godse shoots Gandhi. Gandhi’s last words were ‘Hey Ram’.
That much is history.
Gandhi’s followers grab the assassin and proceed to trash the living daylights out of him. One voice, barely audible, cries out in helpless agony,”Ahimsa! Ahimsa!”
Ram watches this absurd circus knowing that it is all too late for his redemption and all he can do is spend the rest of his life in the darkness of repentance.
‘Hey Ram’ is far from a great film. It is flawed, sometimes almost to a fault but in the madness and noise of yesterday it not just offered sanity but a perspective, a critique and above all, it was probably the only document in our instantly digitized world which had a lucid, searing vision. Unlike of course, religion, politics and the media. Those departments were too busy marking the lines of separation and calculating how each segment tallied to a neat profit and if not that, playing juvenile penis games.
Following ‘Hey Raam’, I returned once more to ‘Waking Life’. It began to make sense. It was imparting to me knowledge of the unknowns, the great mysteries at the essence of life. There was a certain beatific mystique about it, it was leading me to believe and respect in a force within and without that is greater than me. What it didn’t ask me to do was build an ego, identity or pride. It was telling me the most fantastic stories but never once did it ask me to believe in it. It spoke in love and as a friend. I could embrace it, critique it, mold it as per my own wish. I could feel barriers disappear and spaces open up. I could see……………………..
One blue-green planet with us all aboard, drifting in a vast infinite eternity. The great beautiful mystery at the heart of it all that we tried to unravel only to draw borders and separate one from the other. If the pursuit for truth only divides this exquisite unknown and sets us against each other, I settle for the beautiful lies.
Let us hold silence for the dead and the dear departed….
Let termites chew away the holy books. Let the places of worship fall into ruin. Let thieves sell the idols of the deities to eccentric private collectors. Let the ballot boxes run empty till we don’t have to choose ‘the lesser evil’. Let a rogue alien satellite infiltrate our television set with beautiful visions of the yonder. Let history become a joke. Let us draw strange long genitals to our ‘heroes’ of the past. Let’s forgive. Forget. Lets call the past a whore. Let the future shine a light on us all. Let’s go beyond survival. Let’s be alive as we have been once long before.
Let the new ideas we believe in be…
FREEDOM, LOVE, PEACE…
and CINEMA
Lawrence Liang’s Word’s After Violence
(pics courtesy Journey around the Skull, pilgrimageindia, flikr)
Anurag Kashyap
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Hansal Mehta
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Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
True.
wow! the most beautifully written piece on PFC. yes, escapism is the reality we need to choose. it sheds light on the intelligence of Hey Ram.
reality drives us insane. it’s random, chaotic.
semi-fiction makes us a little more comfortable. we pick and choose our version of reality; follow an ideology and find purpose in life, however ill-fated and violent it may be.
fiction is all we have left. maybe we can’t contribute to finding the truths about the universe by philosophizing about absurd ideas such as the meaning of life, death, soul etc. but we are not participating in the barbarism of the world, the reality, the concrete.
A very pertinent article. There has to be some outlet, for the believers and non-believers, haters, preachers, and as unreal as it seems in these polar times, in-betweeners. I am an in-betweener. I can’t decide. I can’t react, nor write with fire. Do this do that or why the fuck do this or why the fuck do that or let us not speak or lets vouch to not indulge in any hedonistic routine or let’s all sit and talk,
Let’s see who has the highest wisdom of us all, let’s see who is the old debate cracker from 7th grade, bring it on.
Let’s invent adjectives of hate, or critical slogans in eastmancolor.
Let’s put the television on and let’s rip them apart,
let’s give ourselves some room for responsibility.
Let’s call it consciousness.
Let’s educate our children,
let’s replace their idols with good and evil and explain them the turn of events in a language they can understand.
Let’s curb creativity for it inspires a wild imagination,
and wild imagination can’t enter these gates of polarity.
Let’s call names, call our homes, call our loved ones, tell them that we care.
And let’s not yet change the channel.
It is still on…
Let’s have Taaza Tea or whatever that makes you feel like a man about town.
And please let us not watch an exploitation film or a film with a strong political message. It might fizzle the polarity you attained so miraculously.
Feel any better? Well, I don’t. I am still an in-betweener.
Hey Ram. What a film. One film that has matured like none other in this decade, may be Water or Thakshak or East is East or Iruvar…
It will always be incoherent, ill-timed, flawed, and disturbing, and thank god for that. You brought back those images – the harrowing Calcutta night, the follow-up phase, Aakashe Jyotsana, sanyaas, bairaag, tyaag, abstinence, those pre-marriage sequences shot in the south, Saket Ram, what a name, then the Maratha phase-asaka madan baan ghusla kasaa(or something similar to that effect, translates to ‘ye tera prem baan aisa chubha), the Ramlila parallel imagery, all them mind trips and a reticent protagonist for all of that, then the Delhi phase, a pleasantly hamming Shah Rukh, the sleazy hotel bits(Jaanki Ram types), then Mahatma, the burden of ideology, the ‘always works’ theme of a build-up of an assassination and how it deconstructs back to innocence in a flash, the futility of a life gone empty for one wrong decision, one quick decision, and that eternal song –
har koi samjhe
prem ki bhasha
zarra zarra hai
prem ka pyaasa
prem pooja hai
prem eeshwar hai
and check these lines-what sense of irony-
Sapnon Ka Har Darpan Toota
Har Mausam Lagta Hai Jhoota
Kitna Gahen Hai Samay Ka Saaya
Dil Ke Ujaale Ko Be-noor Paaya
Saathiya
Janmon Ki Jwaala Thi Tan Mein…
and that wonderful song that sums it all its very sense of flawed expression-
jahaan khush-haali hogi wahaan diwali hogi
andhera jaayega nahin
ujaala aayega nahin
savera gaayega nahin
Very pertinent. I don’t know when will we revisit Hey Ram without a reason. Or wait till the next weekend, some TV channel might show it, for all their collective bursts of social obligation and humanitarian leanings. But wait! this is the film with those gross images of female body, ain’t it?! No Way. Let’s stick to Attenborough and Aaj Tak.
MS Subhalakshmi is the brilliant track throughout the film and the vaishnovajanato at the end is a moment of such delicate, frail catharsis..
in case of a collective amnesia:-
del·i·cate (dl-kt)
adj.
1. Pleasing to the senses, especially in a subtle way: a delicate flavor; a delicate violin passage.
frag·ile (frjl, -l)
adj.
1. Easily broken, damaged, or destroyed; frail.
ca·thar·sis (k-th'¤rss)
n. pl. ca·thar·ses (-sz)
1. Medicine Purgation, especially for the digestive system.
2. A purifying or figurative cleansing of the emotions, especially pity and fear, described by Aristotle as an effect of tragic drama on its audience.
3. A release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit.
Vaishnava Jana to was also used brilliantly in Water. The train slowly departs….
I feel like watching these films.