Secondsaturn's Blog

Newton’s third law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Going by this law the worldwide unchallenged spread of neoliberal globalization should have by now had an equal and opposite force standing up against it. Unfortunately this has not been the case. The reason why the middle class has failed to come up with a consistent critique of neoliberalism is because the intelligentsia has been badly co-opted into its projects. The film Tum Milo To Sahi is a successful attempt at bringing about a consistent critique to the neoliberal project. It is tightly scripted and deftly edited so that apparently unconnected events and characters are seen to be interwoven into a web of relationships that are sometimes also logically tied up. The film has three sub plots and weaving them together is the story of one of man’s worst lies, namely development through the unbridled forces of the market.

The film tells us of heritage cafes being taken over for coffee chains, custards with raspberry sauces being replaced by muffins and trouffles, and what is even more, private greed being pushed over and above a vast web of human relationships, emotional bonds and social networks, all of which constitute the basic identity of the middle class civil society. The heritage café emerges as the grand tree of Avatar, and the discourse of greedy and mindless profiteers tearing through societies is presented with remarkable punch. What is scary is that in case of this film, the greedy capital does not attack some fictive tribe in a faraway planet in another solar system, or a hoary lost tribe in the thick Dantewada jungles, but our own middle class society that has led the Indian Freedom Movement and in whose image the Indian Constitution emerges as a guarantor of liberty for the world’s largest democracy. It is this middle class that is under the shadow of the global capital, its own members write the script of its own death and destruction.

The middle class is thus destroyed by none other than the middle class itself, by a small set of individuals, who are fallen not with anomie but infused with values of achievement and performance. The CEOs are bought through home loans and the images of homes that are sold are bought with moneys that require the heads of companies to remain slaves of the owners. The middle class that emerged as controllers of capital and who in the aftermath of the Wars had been more powerful than the owners because of their superior knowledge and skills, today find themselves again as mere prefects of capitalists, blindly following them without soul and in bad faith. Loans are at the core of such soul selling and indebtedness is created not by opium or alcohol but by selling ideas of ideal living, namely posh cars, four bedroom apartments and ofcourse café latte. Debt is the chief means for the circulation of the neoliberal capital.

The middle class who cannot be co-opted through loans are first offered bribe and then diminished through dismissals, life threats, court cases and even plain indifference and non-cooperation. The government is bribed through and every letter of the law can be twisted with money that corporates use to burn, pillage, maraude and rape the society which they purportedly call them as their consumers or customers. But middle class resistance is low; they fall to money baits because in the neo-liberal framework of shameless inequality, unknown to themselves, middle class fall in the ladder of relative income because a microscopic minority earns huge incomes pushing prices of essentials into a high inflation zone. Hence savings deplete, old age pensions dwindle in terms of purchasing power, old houses are sold, heritage sites are demolished, and cities lose their memories and the civil society its continuity. In this hugely apolitical and ahistorical times as ours, the film does well to locate its stories in the city of Mumbai plagued by nativism on the one hand and heritage issues on the other, both in their own way trying to stop the onslaught of money that is imposed on the city and inorganic to its life.
The heroes and villains of the story are well laid out; the old typist thorough in his work yet who remains in the background is the hero over the suave and clever younger boss; the simple north Indian who is taking a detour from his military career into mass communication in order to understand his society better is the hero while his father who can only look at the army as an independent constituency is the bad one; the heir apparent to a large property is the villain while the kindly and matronly unwed mother of a young NRI is the hero; the woman who pines for an emotional stability of the home and yearns for a simple respectable life is the hero over her husband who is competitive and ambitious. The rock star who sings for his career and sells his soul to the corporate sponsors is the villain while the child who crashes out because he still has love for a father who does everything to destroy the child’s world is the hero. These oppositions clearly resolve into a coherent thesis – society is based upon cooperation and not competition, on compromise and not achievement, on continuity and not contingency, on compassion and not aggression.

Tum Milo To Sahi is a film in which every bit of the montage has a significance for the frames to follow and the narrative logic. For instance when the wife waits for her husband to return the latter’s mobile rings on a vibration mode indicating that he has left his phone at home because he is in a place in which he does not wish to be contacted. The vibration mode means that he had just been out from his office where mobiles are usually kept this way and headed straight for this place where he would not wish to be seen. The CEO orders for salad at a restaurant indicate the life style of high flying executives who are conscious of their frames and demeanour. His agitation with his son’s reading habit tells us that cultivation of intellectual faculties is no longer a value with the middle classes and surely the way professors and scientists are now being taken into police custody for questioning, it is true that there is a scare for liberal education in the country. Every inch of the frames in the film oozes with symbols, icons and meanings that must be read over and over in order to get a clearer idea of what neo-liberalism is doing to the middle class as social beings.

The film does not fail to note that change must come and in directions in which we would have improved relationships. This is why, elderly men and women can just be friends without the sexual and love angle, there can be a freer public space in which the young and the old can mingle equally without having to attach a affinal category such as uncle or aunty; road rage can be turned into amity and adversaries can be long lasting friends. Society should enhance mechanisms of cooperation, either through a freer mixing among the sexes and/or through relationships without the hierarchy of age. Change is imminent but in which direction? The film asks and answers, any change which increases human interaction is good but any change that creates inequalities, exclusions, dispossessions and appropriations must be resisted and if possible reverted and thus morally puncturing the halo of the unquestionable authority of free markets.

The month of August is supposed to be majestic and powerful, as its name August suggests. The Western month of August corresponds to the second half of the Indian month of Shravan, also supposed to be ritually the most active month in the Hindu calendar. The rains descend in torrents, there are floods, the sowing season gets over and we watch with prayers in our lips our crops grow towards a full harvest to be reaped at the end of Autumn. In India it is a dangerous month, a month when many things are supposed to come to an end but also begin. Lord Shiva, the grand destroyer of the cosmos is born in this month of Shravan and many pilgrims through long and arduous journey go to temples and shrines of Shiva to propitiate the deity. In Bengal, Bipattarini, a deity representing the protective powers of the planet Mars is worshipped in order to deliver us from danger and death. August is also the month when the diameter of the moon is often the largest when seen from the earth; it is the month when ties of blood and bonds of friendship are reasserted through the Raakhi ceremony. Historically, August is the month of Independence and also of Jinnah’s Direct Action Day, full of murder and mayhem, it is also the month of the Quit India Movement in 1942, seeing both heroic assertion and brutal suppression. In short, it is a month of extremes. 14th August is also remembered because in the year 2004, Dhananjay Chatterjee was hanged to death at Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata. It is an anniversary that the Anandabazar still celebrates.

August Obituaries

I associate August with deaths; I lost three of my prime relatives on the 13th of August of various years and whenever July draws to a close to August, I tremble at the thought of demise of many near and dear ones. Not to forget that 22 shey shravan is also the death anniversary of Tagore. This year too August has been a month of demises.

I lost my girl cousin on the 25th of July this year. She was brilliant and cheerful aesthete but suffered acute mental depression, partly due to her congenitally weak heart and consequent obesity. She succumbed to her condition leaving behind her husband and adolescent son, both who depended on her pathetically.

A week before that my mother’s school friend who was also my teacher in the University died a lonely death at her residence where she lived all by herself. She had been widowed quite a few years ago and now lived all alone as both her children are settled abroad. I remember her as yet another person in my life who used to be overawed by me !!! and I resented that. I used to tell her, you should be my teacher maashi, you should goad me to do even better even as I am getting the highest marks in my class. But she was an ordinary soul, who despite her academic brilliance wasted her life in a permanent job and a permanent marriage.

Then went my mother’s friend’s husband, fell to cancer which when detected gave him only a few weeks to live. All of us are clearly shattered by this. Arun mesho was a man who God rarely ever makes, a soul as pure as he is a rarity. I consider myself to be fortunate to have come across a man of this purity. He was God’s gift to us. As we are all shell shocked at Arun mesho’s death, I cannot but think in the opposite direction. I never believe that people cease to exist when the die because it is through their existence that their souls always live among us. I think that we are fortunate that we met a man like mesho and have his memories to live with. His death is merely an end of his visitation among us and no one, not even death can snatch him from us.

The next one to depart was Ratri’s mother. Ratri and I are class mates since school and then into college. Whenever I think of Ratri I associate her as a trio, herself, with Ruma, her beautiful and smart older sister and her tall, slim, straight gaited mother, Mashima. Ratri’s father used to be busy and he also suffered from asthma. Mashima was both a father and a mother to the girls. Mashima used to come to school to pick Ratri up and my parents were relieved to know that Mashima acted as all our guardians. When Ratri was older and no longer needed to be chaperoned, Mashima used to visit the school on special occasions. Ratri’s father died thirty years ago and since then Mashima cast her shade over the sisters, their spouses and later their children. When I heard of Mashima’s demise, I suddenly remembered Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield where people often were assumed to go out with the ebbing tide. I remembered the scene from the novel because we were made to read out these scenes and also write answers to questions around these passages.

August Anniversaries:
The other day Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a young friend from the media called me up. Susmitadi, he said, can you give me some insights on August? August? I jumped out of my skin. Yes, August is also the anniversary of three landmark films in India, Satyajit ray’s Pather Panchali, Mughal-e-Azam and Sholay. It is the 55th year for Pather Panchali, the 50th year for Mughal-e-Azam and the 35th year for Sholay.
Pather Panchali caught the world by storm for its subtle aesthetics, its imagery and its story telling shot in one of the most basic cameras by a debutant. It was almost like Tagore winning the Nobel Prize or Mohun Bagan’s victory in the IFA shield. Ray’s accolades became a matter of Bengali’s national pride. But Bengalis could not really digest the film despite the fact that the novels on which the Apu Trilogy was based were the basic text of every Bengali household. We loved Bibhuti bhushan’s Apu and Durga for the picturesque land they lived in, the exquisite plants and bowers they played about, the pink sunsets that they saw, the small wonders of the earth they revelled in. The world of Apu in these novels was full of fun and zest. But what came out in the film was pathetic unsurpassable poverty, poverty so deep that humans would feel it difficult to wholly remain human. Every emotion was vulnerable to the despicable destitution that threatened human existence. When elders of the family went to watch the film, the verdict was uniform and universal – unwatcheable.

Nargis commented on Pather Panchali that Ray was trying to showcase India’s poverty and I somehow felt that she was right. I would never have felt bad about a film that showcased our poverty today but in those days, we all were repulsed. We were too close to poverty then, the Bengal famine happened not long ago, and our family incomes were not as secured then as it is now. The middle class forever remained in fear of poverty, of falling into it or falling back in it. Poverty could only be tolerated when there was a clear capability of overcoming it. Nargis was one who played the lead role in Mother India, released in 1957, a film that showed poverty in its abjectness perhaps as never seen before; the family in the story was perhaps poorer than in Pather Panchali, but in that family, albeit unrealistically, neither values nor morals were compromised and soon enough with determination and diligence that poverty was overcome. It was not the poverty so much that upset us in Pather Panchali but the fact that it was so insurmountable that it got the better of us. Today when we are not threatened by poverty it is so much easier to sit back and enjoy it.

Mughal-e-Azam and Sholay were both blockbusters and all time hit films. Both are intensely dramatic and time defying. But they represent two opposite properties. Mughal-e-Azam is predominantly an agglomeration, an accumulation, maturation, a fructification of many forces within cinema. The actors perform as if it is their final call, music moves towards classicalization, photography is at its ornate best and the arguments emanate out of a long maturity of discourses. No wonder, its setting is the palace, the characters are regal, and the drama is as one that moves history. Mughal-E-Azam is like a grand wrapping up, a great show that is put up with all of one’s savings.

Sholay is just the opposite of this. The films opens you up, burns the past, cuts the ties that bind lose and is a great journey into release. Sholay faces the future, perhaps unknown, perhaps uncertain. It is a film of emptiness, one that carries no baggage; it is a film of new found lightness of being, of new experiences, new vistas. This is why; Sholay always seems like a beginning, an investment, a promise and a prolegomena, of things to come, of things to begin anew.