Secondsaturn's Blog

Not every day do we get a film in Bollywood that sears through the contented middle class views on the two most fundamental social institutions – family and marriage. Not every day do we have a typical Bollywood formula film that using the peg of the familiar story of NRI trying to find a bride and bride’s families falling head over heels to pursue him, tells us the rather unnoticed, unspoken and inarticulated story of India’s women and what has happens to them as the country’s economy has progresses and society changes. The film Whats Your Raashi tries to tell us the woman’s side of the story in the Gujarati middle class as it tries to marry off its daughters to NRI Gujarati boys pursuing MBA degrees in American Universities. The location of the story in a middle class is typical of Bollywood because it invariably locates its stories in the middle class even when it shows the poor and the lower middle class. This is the formula of “hegemony” at work as Bollywood tries to create and recreate a middle class India by defining its values and cultures continuously. The middle class is what the poor aspires to be in and the rich try to win over in its attempt at consolidating its moral power and respectability that wealth does not automatically guarantee in the Indian society. The choice of Gujarati community is useful because it is this community that seems to have benefited the most out of India’s economic liberalization and hence can be considered to be in the frontline of the new changing India.
The story is about a NRI boy who is the sole heir of his maternal grandfather’s property because he is the only one who visits the old man regularly and never fails to wish him on his birthday. However, the grandfather will part with his gift only when the grandson marries. Meanwhile the hero’s older brother has lost massive sums of borrowed money to the busted bourses and is caught between the devil of going to prison and the deep sea of facing the wrath of the underworld. The father decides to marry off the younger son in order to be able to access the legacy due to the younger son. Since the wealth that would accompany the marriage is a legacy and not dowry, the director has been able to present to us a cross section of the Gujarati society, albeit all from the Hindu middle class.
The theory of marriage according to the director is a means to access money for boys and escape for the girls. Men seem to benefit one-sidedly from marriage and though women imagine that being married would release them from the prisons of their fathers, yet images of married women in the film shows them as silent spectators who simply go along with the wishes of their husbands. Marriage is a negotiation between two men, the husband and the father-in-law in which the husband gains access to the father-in-law’s property through the wife. In the everyday affairs of the home even when that concerns marriage of children especially of girls, the women are silent. She acquires agency and voice either when the husband cheats or she cheats on another woman’s husband.
The Indian girl is placed before us as a young adult who enters the world as a bride-to-be and marriage is to be her rites de passage into the adult society and public space. The groom to be is also to be married off because his family must access a large amount of money to clear off debts. For once, the protagonist of the film is not an eligible bachelor but the unmarried “kanya”, the girl with twelve facets to her personality expressed through twelve different characters, each belonging to a sign of the zodiac. The Indian girl is trapped one way or the other sometimes directly by her father and at other times by the very institution of marriage itself. Were girls to be empowered, given a choice to run their own lives, to be in command of their selves, no girl would have ideally married. The director turns this comedy into a merciless critique of the institution of marriage. He weaves the characteristic of the zodiac moon signs to use them as metaphors that would exhaust the condition of the Indian woman, especially the unmarried girl.
The Mesh Kanya has been forced into tradition, various kinds of fasts have been imposed upon her and she appears to be pale, frail, undernourished that so many Indian girls appear to be. She slouches, she drags her feet and of table manners and other cultures of civic life she has none. Her parents have disallowed her to pursue education, a tragedy that marks so many of Indian girls, because that would have required her to move out of the house all by herself and “mix” with boys. But despite her incarceration into the walls of her home and tradition, she imagines a life of empowerment in which she moves out with friends, drinks wine and smokes and what is most important, eats “non-veg” food. This is a great insight into a woman’s mind as her lack of access to good, exotic and interesting food is a hitherto unnoticed but an important aspect of her overall deprivation. Sohini Ghosh made a film on some prostitutes in Kolkata and almost all of them said that they wanted to be able to have their own money because they wanted to eat, not merely food but good and exquisite varieties of food. Woman’s desire for food has rarely been addressed and one of the most empowering aspects of woman’s liberation is her being able to sit at a restaurant and order food for herself. In the film, the Mesh Kanya was very interested in marrying the NRI because she was eager to see snow in Chicago, something that she will never get to see all her life except through marriage. Aries is the sign of the new born and the Mesh Kanya desires to be born anew into a world of her fantasies that a NRI marriage would help her realize.
The Taurean, or the Vrish Kanya is the only child of a filthily rich business man. She has everything that one can possibly ask for. She is also never bound in the house. But she realizes, in case of marriage, men want her wealth and not her and hence she puts on the act of being a mad girl who any right thinking individual would reject outright. She is empowered because of the wealth she has and because of her wealth she is otherwise protected from the “ordinary street life” that the Mesh Kanya and other girls are not. The Vrish kanya seeks liberation from her own wealth in order to test whether what empowers her are the material opulence or whether as any other girl she could really enjoy the quality of life that she does. She embraces austerity and like Sarojini Naidu’s observations on Mahatma Gandhi, the father says that the daughter does not the costs that go into paying for her austerity. Marriage, for this girl is highly dispensable but she enjoys putting off men when they gravitate towards her wealth and not her. It is through the Vrish Kanya that the director also centrally locates his arguments against marriage by repeatedly showing that it is a conduit of transfer of wealth, where parents of girls would ideally love to buy off grooms and grooms to access money through marriage. True to the zodiac essence of the sign of Taurus, the Vrish Kanya pursues authenticity and is essentialist and sees no merit in marriage as an institution that in the disguise of being an occasion of meeting of minds and hearts turns out to be a platform to transfer wealth from women to men.
The Gemini girl, of Mithun Kanya is posited as an antithesis to marriage for money and this girl looks for romance. She appears to be a welcome change to the viewers as marriage seems to be indeed a pursuit of romance. This girl seems to have interested our hero because she is willing to look for and find romance in marriage. But as she wants to savour her romance, she finds marriage to come in the way of pure love. The zodiac meaning of Gemini as being a split personality is used here to split romance and marriage and to show, through this independent minded and spirited young woman that romance and marriage are mutually exclusive.
The Cancerian, or the Kark Kanya is not the homely one as zodiac wisdom insists but she is the girl who has been left behind at home, having nowhere to go, rejected by her lover and her family being totally incapable of retrieving her life out of the mess. This girl looks to the NRI as a passport to go beyond her moorings, to leave home and to be away from all that that defines her moorings. She is clear that marriage is not for love but to wipe the taint off her life of no longer remaining a virgin. The Kark Kanya is mentioned as being the niece of the associate of the hero’s grandfather. At the beginning of the film when the grandfather was making his gift of wealth it was this associate who suggested that the old man should make marriage of his grandson as an eligibility criterion for receiving the gift. It is quite possible that the associate was also eyeing the money in order to bail out the ex-boyfriend as the Kark Kanya seemed to be still in love with him. Kark, in the Indian zodiac is also a keeper of deep secrets, a metaphor that may help us get the hang of the tale better.
The Leo girl, the Simha Kanya is a drama artist and says clearly that she is already wedded to her profession and her only reason for getting married is to have a rich husband who can finance her hobbies and projects. She is the only avatar of the bride-to-be where the woman and not the man are looking upon marriage as a means to access monetary wealth. The Simha girl gets turned off by the hero as soon as he hesitates in eating the ice lolly that she offers him as he is skeptical of its hygiene. She finds in him the arrogance of a typical NRI, who tries to prove a point by considering his native home as sullied and foul and hence, walks off deciding that she would want nothing from the man who looks down on his native land. Simha, the sign of the King rules like a queen for who the NRI groom, irrespective of whether he is rich or not, is merely a subject. In any case, this marriage would never have worked because the girl would have made sure that she would have had the control over money and not the groom’s family and which would have defeated the reason why the hero wanted to get married, namely to use the wealth acquired upon marriage to clear his older brother’s debts.
The Virgo, the Kanya in many ways is the ideal woman. She neither looks for nor needs a mate but would not mind if someone just came along. She is happy to have a husband around but that husband is not necessary to her journey. He is a pillion rider as she drives her own life and helps her by keeping her world in order as she attends to the tasks at hand. Though the hero falls in love with this girl yet finds it difficult to marry her because he has to come into her life and thus completely giving up his own. The Kanya says that if a woman can leave her moorings and go along with a man why should it be so difficult for a man to do the same? Talks break down as the director helps us notice that a sustainable marriage is one which is tilted heavily in favour of the man, virilocal and in which women serve men and not the other way around. The director establishes the fact that marriage is extremely disadvantageous to the career woman dedicated to her profession.
The Libra, Tula Kanya is the corporate leader, who looks upon marriage literally as a contract wants to plan every bit of a relationship. She is clear that marriage is invariably one of convenience and need not involve emotions. Even within the marriage the Tula Kanya creates space for the partners to retain their entities as single persons. The hero does realize towards the end that such a marriage would have been the best suited for him because it would serve the purpose of inheriting his grandfather’s money and also would have been free within two years of the marriage as per the clauses of the contract. Despite such huge advantages, the hero feels totally controlled and dominated by the Libra girl because of her ability to look ahead, take charge of the situation and plan effectively. She also interprets marriage as a contract literally and thus exposes the underlying core of arranged marriages where material exchange and not emotions count.
The Scorpio, the Vrishchik Kanya is passionate about her career and looks upon marriage to the Chicago-based NRI as her passage to the world’s modeling capital. She lives her life in disguise as a domesticated, quiet and an obedient girl who is not the real glamorous model that she aspires to be. This is perhaps the only girl vis-à-vis who the hero emerges as the liberator. It is only for this girl who is so passionate that the intensity of her passion can set her free that the hero feels that he has no role to play in her life and it is she who seems to benefit the most through her date with the protagonist.
The Sagittarius, or the Dhanu Kanya quite the reverse of Gemini believes in pre-marital sex and has no qualms about wanting to “taste” the potential groom. Sex and not marriage was on her mind and she believed that to have the real experience of sex, one had to have it outside marriage. This destroys the great Indian assumption that people marry to satisfy their physical needs. When the satisfaction of the erotic is taken out of marriage, the Dhanu Kanya feels really no need to marry at all. The archer in the zodiac sign is used to hit straight at the point and thus expose the hollowness of marriage as an institution that legitimizes sex.
The Capricon, the Makar Kanya, one which the zodiac says will go far in life has been depicted as an underage girl who again the hero “rescues” and sets free, much like the Vrischik. Her father was marrying off the underage girl because of his inability to pay dowry. The tender age of the girl was supposed to be a perquisite to offset dowry, a ghastly indication of sexual abuse of children within Indian homes through the institution of marriage. This is the only case in which the girl did not wish to leave home and the zodiac essence of the Makar, as a sign of strong grounding probably is used to metaphorize the young girl’s need to continue her education and also her grooming into an adult.
The Aquarius, the Kumbh Kanya, the one who the hero eventually marries is a girl who is herself looking to arrange her own marriage. She wants to be rejected by the hero because she wants to be able to marry her Ugandan-Indian boyfriend, who unfortunately cheats on her. Her marriage to the hero is “arranged” by the marriage broker because the latter realizes that while the young people are genuinely in love with each other they are unable to realize it themselves. The Kumbh kanya is one who is genuinely on a marriage mission and her marriage to the hero is a crossing of paths. The sign of the Aquarius is often depicted as one which is matured, detached and independent and also somewhat resigned.
The Pisces, the Meen Kanya, whose father is a culmination of the rich businessman of the Taurean and the conservative one of the Aries and also the repressive disciplinarian of the Cancerian allows no space for the daughter. He insists on being with the daughter all the time and answers every question on her behalf. The father of the Piscean is the crudest instance of Levi-Strauss’s thesis that marriage is a contract between men carried out over bodies of women. The groom needs the money and the father needs a modern man for his daughter to be able to redeem his wealth into respectability and education. When the Piscean Kanya finds some space to talk to the hero alone she appeared to live in an imaginary world of dead humans, souls and reincarnation. Her imagination of her beau is that of his being a dead body and it is only with the dead that she can interact. Since she is to be a conduit for exchange of money between two sets of men, what else could she be but dead?
A point that seems to intrigue the hero is that while he takes so much time to decide about marriage how is it that the girls seem to have all decided one way or the other within few minutes of meeting him? A possible reply to this could be the fact that women are very clear what purpose marriage serves for them, for most it is a route to escape from the father’s domination, for some, a strategic move and for almost all, marriage as an institution does nothing for their personal growth, their professional excellence or for their physical and emotional needs. One cannot help noticing that given a choice no woman would have married except the Aquarius, the most detached and also the most self-absorbed sign of the zodiac. Marriage, as the older brother of the hero puts it cannot be successful should honesty and transparency be its foundation. For the woman, marriage serves no purpose except to ease the reigns on her a bit by transferring the hands that hold it namely from the father to the husband.
But the director’s concluding comments are that a system that binds women as conduits of exchange between men and fractures women’s minds, hearts and souls and ensnares her into silent acquiescence of her husband’s deeds and misdeeds cannot emancipate men as well. The conclusion of the film in which the marriage broker takes over the hero’s agency, arranges his marriage for him to the extent that he remains clueless as to who his bride is till she arrives at the ceremony, or the way the money is arranged without the hero having any chance to display his heroism, shows how the “rule of the father” liberates neither the girl nor the boy. Systems that are based upon asymmetries of power and agency and freedom can help neither the deployer of that power nor the victim over who the power is deployed. Released the day after the 24th September, the day of the girl child, the film is a strong statement to release women from patriarchy and then watch India transform into the superpower that it yearns to be.
“Hath jaa tau….”

Aparna Sen’s film The Japanese Wife is a text book case of what happens when film making styles of Kurosawa are married into the Satyajit Ray style. The Japanese Wife provides for an occasion to marry these two styles as the film narrative has that a Bengali school teacher marry a Japanese girl only through an exchange of letters. The crux of the story is that they never meet and yet carry out every bit of married life only through written and remote communication. Such a life as this helps the man live in a world which is neither contained nor constrained by his immediate reality and its demands. It frees his spirit into a realm of “pure marriage” that has devotion, dedication, intimacy, longing and loving and on one occasion also infidelity. The scope of transcendence and yet longing to find a “home” creates a tension in the film which gives the director ample scope to put to use the styles of the masters.
This distance marriage does not have the possibility of a physical consummation of the relationship but that hardly ever comes in the way. Pure marriage is not about physicality, the tenderness of love, nights spent in anxious concerns over each other’s well-being and the overarching feeling of being loved that keeps you covered all the time constitutes, according to the director, the real sense of marital bliss. The camera touches and goes all the time, a rhythm that is made possible through the repetitive routine life of the middle school mentor of the village where nothing really ever happens, except severe violence in the form of raging storms and ravaging floods. The atmosphere of perfect bliss which has the minimum tendency to change creates a chance for the director to use the styles of the two masters, namely Kurosawa and Ray whose essential artistic labour was to maintain a peaceful equilibrium that had the minimum punctures as the haiku of Japan as in case of Kurosawa, or the light sway of boats tied in the shade of peepal trees on the banks of wide rivers of Bengal, as for Ray. The only thing that sometimes stretches this peace is longing of the letter writers for each other. The lavender blossoms against a light sky of Japan and the dried stubs of paddy in the aftermath of the harvest, or the vastness of the Matla that looks like the end of the world provide the necessary montage, perfect occasion to blend the masters and proceed towards invoking the third, Ritwik Ghatak in his films about those whose lands and homes are in a never never land of Partitioned Bengal.
The location of the protagonist in a village of Bengal lends opportunity for the director to explore the light and shades, the pace and rhythms, the concerns and the emotions of what is a quintessential Bengali life and hence use the styles of Ray. The atmosphere of Japan, its ethos, the stoicism of its people and the gentleness and yet expansiveness of its universality creates an opportunity for the director to explore the style of Kurosawa in filming the expanses of Matla river, its swell in the monsoons and the boat rides across the waters as the main means of transport.
The man from Bengal never goes to Japan because he cannot afford to do so; the woman from Japan never visits Bengal probably because she is not allowed to do so. But they are so contained in each other that never once in the film one gets to see the man as anything but married. The Japanese wife is present is her absence, probably more present because she is absence. In a sharp contrast to her is the young widowed Bengali who comes to live in with her infant son in the man’s home. She is the temptation of that physical urge that the absent wife cannot fulfill and yet it is she and not the Japanese wife who has to prove her presence all the time in the frames.
The spirit of the marriage is consummated when a large box from Japan arrives full of kites. These kites are her fathers’ who is no more and her legacy which she passes on to the man in celebration of their 15 years of marriage. She says that since he learnt flying kites at the age of 15, were they to have a child he would also have been 15, just old enough to fly kites. To this unborn child, she sends the large box. The child of the young widow inherits the kites and on the kite flying day, kites of exotic shapes, colours and sizes cover the sky as Japan’s love for Bengal. In many ways, this is the climax of the film and also its only spectacle. The reach of the kites high into the limitless sky is expansive and euphoric. The envy and jealousy of the competitors who have the run of mill kites puncture this sublimity and the competition ends when the Nagasaki kite is severed from its tether and sent floating away into oblivion, foreboding the death of dreams in the cruel reality when spiritual unions are loaded with divisive politics, again a Ghatak component into the camera lucida.
For Aparna Sen, the style is the hero and the camera is the story. For the viewers, it is an experience in pure aesthetics, which like the Kantian pure reason, is a world in itself, not necessarily in resonance with reality. As for the images, they are there for themselves, self-referential and self-absorbed.

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.