Random thoughts on Mumbai
(Rajat of Hannover International Film Festival had asked me to write a piece on how my city affects my work – as a part of the workshop I’ve been invited to in Hannover. I thought that writing a book is easier than writing a small piece on a subject like this. This is what I ended up with.)
Every Megapolis is like and unlike every other. They have the same kind of modern histories and the same kind of recurring histories. Heavy industrial growth, labour strikes, student revolts, urban pull, immigrations, displacements, mega shutdowns, multiple languages, social diversities, dramatic economic inequalities, art produced for mass consumption, underground art movements reacting to the mainstream, cultural fusions, (a comparatively more) liberal citizenry, infinite choices, the illusion of infinite choices, cruel pace, corporatisation, monoculturisation, simultaneous existence of many utopias and many dystopias, terrorism paranoia and the need to move on, no matter what. Having been born and brought up in a city makes it impossible to objectively determine how the city influences your work – because the answer is that it does in every single way. The city breathes in my work and is inseparable from it.
A local self appointed “social worker” offers any help I might require for my film “legal or illegal”. A senior cop helps me shoot my film in a public place and in return, he demands that I listen to his screenplay about police encounters, where he suggests that his auto-biographical character be played by the Bollywood star Nana Patekar. Another Bollywood influenced cabbie discuses philosophy with me and surprises me with his grasp of concepts. A man meets me on the steps of a building and we spend four years building an alternative theatre movement together. A friend leaves his job at MIT to fight against Enron in India, almost successfully for four long years of frustration, pressure and threat calls; broke, founds a software company, gets wrongly sued by an American company for a random figure of a billion dollars. A friend of a friend wins a case at the Supreme Court and gets the government release his anti-government film on National Television and even gets them to pay for it.
Everybody carries a story and every story changes yours. Because of the sheer number of trajectories, it is impossible to trace back the line of causality. The butterfly effect in a city like Mumbai has its very own karmic complexity. In my first film, a young man in his haste to go out, shouts at his mother and appreciates his brother’s painting, setting off two cycles of hate and love that pass from one character to another in a domino effect, eventually both affecting his own life. In another story, a man learns from his wife the recipe of a chocolate pudding, which he requests to be engraved on his tombstone after having safeguarded it all his life, a chef reads the recipe, makes the pudding for a guest, the guest gives the pudding away to a poor kid, who finds will to draw that night and gets picked up by an art curator driving past. The two films are highly simplified versions of my concept of karmic causality. The city is constantly giving the answers and I am trying to get my questions right.
The questions of philosophy rose by children that even scholars fail to answer. The city incessantly confronts me with ethical, epistemological and aesthetic problems that I can only begin to understand by laying them out in my work. The great fifteenth century Indian poet Kabeer used to stand amidst the town market and mock it. Zen master Kakuan’s tenth bull depicts a master with his wine bottle in the market. In my more reclusive teenage days I used to fancy myself to be Kabeer or Kakuan, living in the heart of this market of a city, and yet, blessed with objectivity. Renunciation has often been, for me, a reaction to fulfillment. Besides the problem of the ownership of responsibility in an interwoven causality, renunciation has been a central philosophical problem in most of my work.
“On getting shot at,
The first one cried “Rama”
The second one cried “Mao”
The third one cried “Potato”
The postmortem report informs that the first two had their bellies full.”
This small piece by one of my most favourite Hindi poets Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena reflects the lack of a strong collective introspection in India. It becomes, for me, the defining problem of art in Mumbai. When all production is intended to meet the basic needs, all intellectual problems become secondary. Any civilization needs the “potato” in place before it can hope to start wondering about the more abstract problems of life. The central epitome of art for mass consumption in India – Bollywood – is this potato. For me, it’s impossible to think of the culture of Mumbai and not think of Bollywood.
Like most of my peers, I have been brought up on an overdose of Bollywood. My mother and my grandmother are hardcore theatre, pop literature and cinema buffs. My grandmother had even led a campaign against a writer of a weekly magazine fiction series for having shuffled off the protagonist’s mortal coil. The campaign came full circle when a trash, but highly popular soap opera I wrote became front page news – a fan allegedly got a heart attack after watching an episode where the protagonist of the show was killed. In both the cases, of course, the characters had to be brought back to amnesic life following an overwhelming public demand.
India is probably the only country in which even the most serious newspapers carry entertainment news so often on the front page. We are a people defined by our need to be entertained – the need to have a song for every possible emotion and idea, and the need to dance, though quite unlike in the Indian films. When a friend from Vancouver visited me in Mumbai, she was actually surprised that Indians do not break out in song and dance routines like they do in Bollywood musicals all the time. The kitsch mindlessness and ridicule inviting naivety of Hindi mainstream cinema maybe a thing of novelty for the West, but Mumbaikars take their cinema to the heart. So did I, and everyone I knew, as a kid.
My mother had given a local tailor some canvas to stitch three bags for us. I was eight and went along with her to get the bags. The tailor said that he had run out of canvas after making two bags. My mother flared up, searched his home and found a schoolbag he had made for his daughter from our canvas. She tore it up and demanded that he stitch a bag for us from it. I was very sad to see her like this. I recalled film after film where the evil landlord humiliates the poor farmer, whose only “sin” is his poverty. Back home, I confronted my mom, and she gave me my first anti-film analysis. My voluntary suspension of disbelief had been challenged and I understood that things are always much more complex than Amitabh Bacchan insists they are.
Indian mainstream cinema is largely commendable for its secularism and its role in nation building. Most Indian names have meanings and it doesn’t take much time to determine one’s religion-creed-caste from one’s name. So, all the big villains of all the big productions had absurd names, not only giving them an edge, but also making it impossible to bracket them in a race or a faith. Other villains were always rich landlords or corporate giants exploiting the poor. Though it was always through the characters of the sidekicks that cumulative effect of political events were communicated in these films.
I was four when the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot down by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation to her Operation Blue Star. I learnt that Sikhs were people with turbans and beards. That was my first taste of social prejudice and paranoia. Obviously nobody cared to explain to me the politics of the situation at that age. That it was the Sikh community that was being targeted and systematically victimized, and there was no reason to be scared of those large friendly men with turbans and beards, who drove cabs in Mumbai. I remember how I would ask my mom to take public transport instead of taking a cab when she would leave for work everyday. Thousands of innocent Sikhs were massacred post Indira Gandhi’s death in Delhi and other Northern cities. Mumbai remained unaffected, but not untouched. I got my first nightmares of riots, that later recurred throughout my life, 1993-94 bringing the scariest nightmares following the infernal riots between Hindu and Muslim communities in Mumbai.
People of Mumbai are not very good archivists. There is only one museum in the city, made invisible to public by a somebody-else’s-problem-shield. There are no art galleries with permanent exhibitions of any masterworks. No community libraries – no memorials to musicians – sculptures by modern artistes in public places are rare ever to be spotted. But turn any corner, and there are Bollywood memorials all over the place – dingy theatres, seedy film posters, struggling actors, parents wanting to see their kids on the screen. History is polished, simplified, ugly parts dramatized, uglier parts removed, accidental heroes glorified into legends, and preserved on celluloid in my city. The general idea is, “Who has ever learnt anything from history, so why try?”
Once everything about this city – from poor living conditions to badly sanitized hospitals with no slopes and lifts for the disabled – frustrated me to a state of acute depression. Surrounded with so much cruel irony, I have somehow learnt to see humour in it. I write very few stories and make fewer films. I spend most of time meeting people, traveling aimlessly through the city, sharing stories, ideas, music and art. The sheer absurdity of everyday violence of Mumbai has begun to become perversely amusing.
I have simply learnt to dodge bullets now. I get a call from a television producer offering me a show. The money is tempting – enough to buy myself an FCP Studio setup within a month. If I end up putting two years of my life into it, it can even buy me a good house, a car and a good HD camera. Confronted with this choice every time, I am not sure what it is that gives me the strength to make the difficult choice of turning it down. In my more romantic hours, I fancy it’s some internal integrity, yet unharmed by my spoilt urban needs. I know still it’s just a default decision, a survival instinct of sorts that pushes me to total inaction instead of compromised economic activity. Rather choose freedom and poverty over having to deal day after day with myopic television executives, giving portions of my life to the collective dream of McDonaldising and Walmartising India. Ideas resonate in my head. House slave versus field slave. The brown man who pulled the trigger for a meager pay from the East India Co. I am not actively political, but I definitely have no intention to help Reliance sell more crappy services to the unsuspecting kid in Jaunpur. So I politely refuse. Now, I find it difficult to get back to a story I was writing about a vegan animal rights activist confronted with the only option of taking medication tested violently on animals. I check a listings magazine to see if there’s any festival on and I take off to see a documentary about the subconscious art of graffiti removal.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
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
Anand…check ur mail. n congrats 4 hannover filmfest!!
Anand… guru aap ne dil ko chuu liya.:x:x:x
You get a Ishtriwallah, Panwallah, Usal-Pava-wallah, Kulfi-wallah, Pani-Puri-wallah, bombay Sandwich-walleh, tution-wallehs etc at every nukud.
Then you will find a temple, a church, a gurdwara, a masjid, etc everywhere. In fact every ‘gullies’ got a small temple/sai bab on top of the gutter and beside that, you will have sabjiwallehs selling sabjis.
Each main roads are named as either MG Road or SV Road. And those roads are usually straight.. miles long! So you don’t get lost(!) And if you do then there are zillions of rickshaws who will help you out.
People, rickshaws (after andheri they are not allowed), scooters, zillions cars, taxis – they all on one same road. There are ain’t a pavement for people to walk. Rickshaws/Scooters take turn anywhere they want to. When you are driving you just look straight and let other worry about where you driving. They are carefree! Well, this is the case all over India, not just specifically in Mumbai.
Mumbai Trains, I still do not understand how those trains are operated, how all those people fit in a carriage, who the hell checks the ticket at the gate and how does he! Is it run by a God? Beats me!
Mumbai Rain. Every year it causes a havoc in the city. No proper drainage system. Building/houses – hard land everywhere, so there is a lot of flooding always. No-one complains or care about it.. the life carries on.
Mumbai is the only city in India (i think) where in the cinema hall the national anthem is played before the movies gets going. Oh yeah, everyone stands up. And those multiplex cinemas aren’t half bad, but still seats number? There should be one ticket price.
The malls are rubbish – huge malls, though. But the shops in those malls are small. They sell shite stuffs also. The cafes don’t even know how to make a smoothie! It is not same as milkshake. And what the heck is American Sweet-corn?
I prefer desi stuffs and that too from the road. Even if their stall is on top of the gutter.
The chali life essence – some people say, if you wanna cure your claustrophobic, then live in a chali. Just amazing chilled out atmosphere and it is brilliant during festivals.
Living in apartments ain’t that bad; it still got a atmosphere. People still play cricket (football in monsoon) in the apartment area rather than gullies. if you have a clear view from your flat you can see people shitting, smell the gutter, etc. No seriously, you get some good clear amazing view from some flats.
The fly-overs/bridge which would link the east and the west are half built. So rickshawallahs/taxiwallahs reside their – yes, they built a home, i mean, they park their rickshaws/taxis their. they sleep, eat.. in….
The Juhu beach mystery/puzzle: On Sunday/Saturday/any day/any time.. are there enough people on the beach who can drink the entire arabian sea in a day?
There are a lot beaches in Mumbai in the remote areas. There is a lot of open space/gardens as well. In fact, there are a lot of open space/gardens just around Ghatkopar, no Anand?
Everyone in Mumbai can speak at least speak/understand three languages. People keep flogging to Mumbai and the government keeps creating new Mumbais – I reckon, Mumbai will take over all those cities without fighting. So India will be Mumbai!
As Mumbaities say, no-one knows how the city operates; it must be run by God!
And finally, I love Mumbai. Always have enjoyed my summer holidays in Mumbai. I know it is not same as living in Mumbai, but one day, I would like to. Not sure if I would be able to hack the train, etc for over a long period. I wanna find out.
very well written piece..i have brought out my copy of Maximumcity again….
ha ha ha….Anand…damn good man!! n yes…we have learnt from history that we dont learn from history. abt this city….unlike calcutta it severly lacks social communication n thats why i find calcutta more interstng. n may ur romantic hours give u more strength to avoid those shit for long n ever.
i was just watching Bombay Railway and thought of your article, specially this bit: “Everybody carries a story and every story changes yours.”
Because, I would not mind seeing a short film or a feature film about a Train Driver’s life. It would be very interesting. Driving a train that carries 6 millions of commuters every day, bomb blasts, people on the track, dead bodies, etc and yet they keep carry on with their duty.
Really nice post Anand. I could relate to it as right now I’m in that phase of depression over shit happening everyone in this country and glove. Still not reached that period where I can find it funny. I wonder how you attained it.
And do finish that animal activist script. Seems really interesting. Would like to see it tunred into a movie someday.
Thanks Somain, Shatrughan, Indraneel and Tanmay… And thank you so much for sharing your thoughts Honhaar.
Tanmay, it’s just a conscious decision – I do feel frustrated and angry at the state of things and then I remember I have promised myself to laugh.
Ho gayee hai peed parbat si, pighalni chahiye,
Is himalaya se koi ganga nikalni chahiye.