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Lesser known Bollywood clichés of yore

I am bored of my posts. Verbosity, forced philosophical innuendos, too much reading into things and the same dour themes. Hell, I needed a break. So I went back in time and read those dog-eared cinema diaries from my childhood. Back in those days, I had no choice but to sit with my family and watch those films of the 70s/80s and the early 90s. It’s only now that I am this pseudo-intellectual avant-garde cinema snob. Anyway, in this post I thought I’d write about the clichés of yore that are not much talked about, that we all probably grew up watching. We all know about the flowers that cover up the kisses, the kaali mata ka mandir-howling-ghantis or the rich heroine and poor hero clichés. So I thought I’ll write about the clichés that have not been talked about much. However, I can’t promise complete novelty here nor can I promise LMAO stuff that would make Chaplin turn in his grave and fart in appreciation. Okay, here goes:

Damsel in distress jumps diagonally: When our heroine has to cry because the hero cheated on her, she would run wearing a flaring white “nightie”. She would climb up the circuitous stairs. After this short effortless run she jumps diagonally on the bed and buries her head in the pillow, her hair is let lose in this scene. Then she would cry by stroking the pillow with her head. The pace of stroking the pillow is directly proportional to her misery (stop reading between the lines).

The Kodak finale: A parivarik saaf suthri film ends with all the leads of the movie standing in a line just about covering the camera eye. The salt-and-pepper hair maaji, her husband with a black stick and rimmed glasses, the heroine with red wrists after the rope was undone, the hero all bruised fighting out the baddies, the villainous relative who becomes a good guy and the house servants, all of them stand together in a line. At this, the standard comedian would crack a joke to which everyone laughs in perfect synchronization and immediately the credits roll. Sometimes it says” This is not the end, it’s the beginning” (Tip: Raja Babu; Shakti Kapur does the honors here at the end)

Hawas, tapish aur sulagte jism: When a hero and heroine are making out this would most likely be in slow mo with some soothing music so that it doesn’t seem vulgar ( Tip: Dor; Both the couples are making out in separate locations and it is shown in slow mo).

Next is a special category in kinds of makeouts; rape scene. Now when our dear villain is making out with our damsel in a rape scene, it would most likely be raining, villain pouring down a whisky bottle and in all likelihood the damsel will act naïve. The damsel wears a special rape dress for this momentous occasion. Usually white in color, this special dress is such that the left sleeve, the right sleeve, the back is detachable and the villain detaches them in that order. Watch how the camera pans around not to show the actual rape. So you’d see a stuffed tiger head on the wall that is zoomed in and zoomed out (you get the metaphor here, don’t you), thunder and lightning, a squeaky fan going round and round, windows shattering. Watch carefully our damsel here shows the amazing act of irony; she needs to fight back but yet willfully submit to the villain’s force. So she would sway her head left-to-right in harmony with a nahhiiinn but will never kick him in his balls which should be lot easier. In the end, when it’s all over, the damsel will definitely have spread out red sindoor ( even if she did not have a proper one in the start) and she’d walk around like a zombie.

Another kind of make-out is when the lead protagonist is indulging into territories he/she should not have. Like when the hero is accidentally sleeping with the heroine’s friend. There will definitely be a sax playing in the background; highlighting the oncoming guilt trip and also balancing the act of keeping the protagonist’s image clean ( It was all circumstantial, that’s the message).

Wait, how can I forget the make-outs in the semi-porno flicks with names like Adh-nangi-nagan-ka-inteqaam. In every make-out session the lady will be a buxom aunty and she would never let the poor lean guy smooch. 70% of the time you will see lip biting and scratching one feet to another; that should make for a good mosquito repellant viral ( Tip: watch any south Indian masala flick and you’ll know what I mean).

It’s all in the name: Rich people are mostly likely to have last names like; Singhania, Malhotra, Bajaj, Kapadia, etc. Working class people are most likely to have names like: Deenu kaka, Ramu Kaka, Shanti bai, Ramu, Gangu Bai, Phoolwanti, Saku Bai. Don’t get me started on Rahul and Raj.

Professional and cultural stereotypes:

Doctor: Patients are never expected to go to hospitals, doctors do home delivery (well literally). They usually wear a black suit, stethoscope around their necks and a black suitcase that god only knows what’s in there. The host carries the suitcase and the patient is never told what happened to him/her even if it is common cold. Every doctor has some standard lines in every movie: “ Injection de diya hai, subah tak hosh aa jayega”, “Ab inhe dawan nahin, dua ki zaroorat hai” , “ Ab who khatre se bahar hai”, “Mubarakho aap baap ban gaye”

The Law: The cop is always sporting the line “Kanoon ko apne haath mein mat lo”, “chup chap apne aap ko kaanoon ke hawale kar do warna…”, “Kanoon ke haath bahut lambien hote hain” . Stereotype supercop award definitely goes to Iftekhar. He has played a police wala 18 times in his career. Yes I actually googled up this trivia. By the way, Iftekhar has also played the judge in many movies. The judge has one motherhood line “Tamaam sabooton aur gawahon ko madde nazar rakhte huye, mujhrim ko taaze rate hind, dafa 302 ke tahat sazae maut di jaati hai…” . As soon as the judge announces this, some of the stock scenes show up; like the poor pigeons outside the court will fly out and then freeze, waves are shown to smash the shore and then freeze, the affected person will have his image halved or the best is, the insaaf ka tarazu is shown and it evens out.

Catholics: Women are wearing a skirt, usually widows and every sentence ends with “man”. Men are alcoholics and have names like Peter, John, Tony etc. Catholics are shown quite god fearing so much so that they keep uttering god in every statement followed by a “man” of course. Sab rasta god ki taraf jaata hai man.

Goldie Hawn once said “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood – Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy”. Now we have a Bollywood version too: There are only three ages for women in Bollywood: Maaji, Mamta aur Mallika. “Maaji” is a woman in her late 60s; she will either be a shrew or a very naïve old woman. If she is a widow then she gets more screen time so her husband is usually killed in a plane crash or by the goons ( the hero is obliviously taking revenge) There will be a mid 30s-40s Mamta who will be a wife or a mother to two kids. She is a homemaker too like our Maaji but the problem is that she is usually given a small screen time. Either she is shown back in those days when she was a gal or she ages fast to become Maaji. And then there is Mallika, the hot siren, the heroine, the temptress, the babe. Mallika would be wearing cool clothes in college, won’t talk to random boys but would spew venom at the hero and eventually fall for him. Mallika is dumb; beautiful, rape-prone and has no opinion of hers. Just when we were enjoying these women stereotypes Anurag came and ruined it. He killed the concept of Maaji, Mamta aur Mallika with his liberated women in his movies

The fight chase props: It’s either a water filled pot, fruit cart or a vegetable cart that invariably comes in the way of a fight chase. The villain’s sidekicks will be thrown on the fruit cart in slow mo. When the fruits and the villains have fallen off the cart, the hero gets on top of it to continue his chase. In a car chase, there will be a mother who is carrying her baby and crossing the road. In case the car hits the mother the baby will take a parabolic flight and so will our hero, just in time to catch the baby. It may also involve a blind man or a man on wheel chair. Hordes of people either running or on bicycles form the speed breakers in a chase. Even the gang shooting in the middle of all this won’t deter them from crowding the road.

Losers Inc. they all die: Hero Heroine finally coming together at the climax involves many sacrifices. One of them involves the second heroine who sacrifices her love for our hero. So she will have no purpose in life after discovering hero and lead heroine are in love, she is madly in love with the hero. So when the hero is being shot at, she will take the bullet in her chest and following her dying (unending) speech she will put the hero and heroine’ s hands together. Men are in a more bad shape here. Usually if the hero’s best friend is not seeing anyone, he must die after taking the bullet for the hero. The price you pay for being single I tell you. Another kind of sacrifice is by the scheming saas, the rich capitalistic dad, or the vamp. Now throughout the film they will be against our hero/heroine but at the end when they turn good people (this usually happens with one line utterance of “Tumne meri aankhein khol di”) they will take the bullet. All the losers who die in these scenarios get a 3 word climax for them too, an obituary of sorts. It goes something like this. Let’s say Sita, the other woman, died in the hero’s arms. The hero would show his grief in the exact 3 steps: Sita! (Gently as though he is trying to confirm her death), again Sittaa!! (this time there is minor shock) and then with an orgasm like cry he would go Sssssiiiiiitttttaaaaa!!!.

So it would go something like; sita, sittaa, sssssiiiiiiiiittttaaa!

PS: I had initially published this post on PassionForCinema http://passionforcinema.com/lesser-known-bollywood-cliches-of-yore/

Existentialism, the Absurd and Pyaasa

A silver lining in the sky forms shadows on an unkempt man’s face. A bird meanders, treading no path in particular bathed in the bliss of nothingness. Flowers sway to the man’s poetry strewn in ailing emptiness while a bee relishes the sweet life and gently perches on the ground. The bee oblivious to reality is squished to death by a passerby. In an unfathomable instant, the utopian world of momentary happiness is broken; the man shrugs and embraces the absurd of life. This masterful act forms the epoch of a young man’s story in which he is wandering to know the purpose of life but only finds himself battered by the brutal absurdity of our existence.

Vijay (Guru Dutt) is a poet who abdicates romanticism as a form of art. He is on a narcissistic exploration to find acceptance of his oeuvre, depicting hopelessness of mankind. His art is only remained by his poetry screaming from dog eared manuscripts, lying in dustbins and being sold for dus anna in scrap. His brothers detest his presence at home as he is an expense to an already impoverished family. He takes refuge at a friend’s house; a friend who is willing to do anything for money and has just returned from giving a false testimonial for a car accident. His publishers consider his nihilistic works inappropriate in a time when a woman’s beauty seemed to be the only topic of poetry. He stumbles upon Meena ( Mala Sinha), his love from the times of bourgeois education. She had walked out on him to marry a rich man. Vijay alienates from this society that is seduced by the stupor of money, greed and materialism. He is finding the meaning of life through a moral teleological exploration, the absurd of life. He is Albert Camus’ Sisyphus who is led in this world to carry a huge rock atop a mountain, all along he is aware of the futility of this labor, the meaning is the bait and that eludes him perpetually. He is gradually discovering the hopelessness of life. The absurd is a juxtaposition of man’s pursuit to find significance, reason and essence of life and the cold, hopeless world he is pitted against.

His art is understood and appreciated by the most unlikely person, a courtesan, Gulabo ( Waheeda Rehman) who buys his poetry off the scrap market. She falls for him and confesses that there is nothing more to know about him after having read his works as though his art speaks more than his ontological frame of existence. Vijay’s mother hides food from his vicious brothers, in the hope that her son would return someday but he drifts in the hope of recognition. Meanwhile Meena’s rich husband hires him as his servant and tries to humiliate him, a reaction to the suspicion of Meena’s alleged affair. Meena’s arrogance is displayed in the elevator when she confronts Vijay and explains her side of the story and at the end of this fleeting conversation says “Mujhe to upar jaana tha” and takes the elevator to the top floor while letting Vijay leave. His unbecoming comes in the death of his mother, when his brothers deprive him of the ceremony of her departure. This scene of final dissent into absurdity is shot magnificently. Through an arch we see the river glistening with light and Vijay’s dark silhouette fills up the space gradually. He gives into drinking, witnesses the tragic dance of survival by a prostitute who has to intentionally ignore her baby crying for food. He meanders in the by lanes of prostitute areas whose world he earlier considered immoral. He finds meaning in their lives and spends a night at Gulabo’s attic, a la Devdas. His existence wallows and pursues the elusive essence.

Camus argues; suicide is a confession that life is not worth living; it is a choice implicitly declaring that life is "too much". Suicide offers the most basic "way out" of absurdity: the immediate termination of the self and its place in the universe. This is the realization that dawns on Vijay, that sums up the culmination of Vijay’s attempt to end everything. He flees from Gulabo’s attic convoluted by his internal reflections. He attempts to get run over by a train. On his way, he confronts a tramp trembling in cold. He takes off his jacket and puts it around him. This is his philanthropic deed to bring hope, to see life in everything but himself. The tramp realizes his intentions and stalks him to his dissent only to get caught in the tracks himself. Vijay, in his attempt to save the tramp, is pushed off the track. The tramp dies wearing Vijay’s jacket and the world thus knows the end of Vijay. Purists would argue that it is destiny that sends the tramp as messiah. The question then would be, was the tramp ever destined to die wearing a poet’s jacket caught in a train track? It is the existence and the unintelligible truth of life that we are born to experience, born to suffer. We are merely led by our choices and what we make out of them. We are what we can become. This defines the underlying principle of existentialism: existence precedes essence (Jean Paul Sartre).

Gulabo is devastated yet determined to resurrect Vijay’s art which was more crucial than his own existence. She is in contrast to Meena who in her pursuit of money and fame walks out on him while Gulabo begs with all her life’s income to publish Vijay’s works. They are finally published posthumously. His poetry is flying off the racks and he becomes a literary legend. While recuperating in a hospital, he is woken up from a coma by the recital of his works. He claims his poetry and is understood to have gone insane. Here he is again witnessed by the absurdity of his being. He flees the asylum where he has been trapped only to end up at his own death anniversary, a ceremony to felicitate him. He witness the horrifying deed of all his adversaries feasting on his fame, squeezing every penny of his dead worth. His publishers, brothers and friends, all conspire to prove him dead even after discovering him alive. As he is struggling to prove himself alive, in an ironic turn they all turn to become his closest confidants and start to own up to their relation with him, hoping for a better royalty off his poetry. This profoundly changes Vijay’s belief in the system that corrupts our morality.

His belief in absurdity peaks at this point which lyrically explodes on the screen with the legendary “ Jaala do ise, phoonk daalo, tumari liye hai, tum hi sambahlo yeh duniya”. The song is shot with brilliant usage of light, as he walks among mortal plebs with spiritual gusto. He realizes he is not the person who was the poet, who was struggling to make his voice heard. He audaciously confesses he is not “Vijay” ( the celebrated poet). He is beaten up and is called an impostor. He gives up his identity which is the futile labor of carrying the burden of being. He renounces the world, is convinced by Meena to own this fame, this new found identity that he yearned for. He finds it meaningless and returns to Gulabo, the only person who truly understood him. He escapes the world with her and an artist turns into a man and existence finds its essence.

Popularly, this film is hailed as a romantic masterpiece and which for me is to brutally disrespect the art and philosophy behind it. If life is so meaningless and absurd as shown in the film, the logical reasoning then would be suicide. Camus’ ideology negates this argument. On the contrary, he suggests, accepting the absurd is a matter of living life to its fullest, remaining aware that we are reasonable human beings damned to live a short time in an unreasonable world and then to die. We remain aware of the conflict between our desire and reality, and so living the absurd is living in a constant state of unceasing conflict. It is a revolt against the meaninglessness of our life and the conclusiveness of the death that awaits us. Suicide, like hope, is just another possible way out of this conflict. Living the absurd is more analogous to the predicament faced by the man condemned to death yet who, with every breath, revolts against the notion that he must die. We may take Vijay to be contemplating suicide as his interpretation of the meaning of life. However, he doesn’t make a conscious choice to live but is saved from a suicide. The confrontation at the town hall felicitation following his death, changes his interpretation of existence altogether. The meaning of life that he comes to know is of higher dimension and he decides to abdicate everything and start with nothingness, as though on a quest of newer absurdities.

Many instances in the film show Vijay spending his time on a bench overseeing ships that are ready to leave the shore. Those who have known the absurdity of life will know what Vijay was waiting for at the harbor in discreet points of his life. You can hear him scream for freedom. You will probably know what went through Guru Dutt’s mind at the last hours of eternal sleep.

PS: On October 10, 1964, Guru Dutt was found dead in his bed after an alcohol and drug overdose. He was scheduled next day to meet Mala Sinha for his ironically titled film, Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi, and Raj Kapoor to discuss making color films. Pyaasa was a black and white film. I can’t wait to see how Anurag Kashyap adds color to this film. I hear he calls it Gulaal.

I had initially posted this blog on PassionForCinema

http://passionforcinema.com/existentialism-the-absurd-and-pyaasa/

Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys): Film review

This review contains spoilers. Viewer discretion is advised

Dark brooding clouds hover around a couple recovering from an aftermath. Guilt melting on the wrinkled face, hand blithely perched on forehead waiting for an undoing of fate. Smoke emanating from a face hopelessly silent like battered streets following a hurricane, looking at the sky for an answer that has never returned. The couple’s unwilling chemistry awaits the rain or may be an absolution. An image cast a spell on my senses and I had to pick up this film. If the image could talk so much about a film, I wondered what the film would be like.

At the onset you may expect that the three monkeys will be a metaphorical film about the obvious meaning but make no mistakes, this film just borrows a cue from that philosophical undertone and weaves cinematic magic. The proverbial three monkeys are a hapless husband, his guilt soaked wife and his embittered son. See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil is what the family surrenders to when a coercive politician turns their lives upside down. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Uc Maymun is an artistic meditation of relentless guilt, searing imagery and the vicious circle of vice. It won the award for best director at Cannes 2008.

Turkish politician Servet (Ercan Kesal) falls asleep at the wheel as he drives through the woods at night. He runs over someone and is desperate to hide his crime in order to save his political career. Servet's crime is now covered up by his loyal driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), who takes the blame on himself after Servet's promise of hefty lump sum money. Eyup accepts his fate of a year’s imprisonment in lieu of the money. Wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) are coming to terms with his absence in their own ways. Hacer finds her son becoming aimless and unmotivated. She approaches Servet to pull them out of their misery. She falls for Servet and indulges in sexual infidelity. This is witnessed by her son Ismail. One lie leads to a domino of lies, deceit and rage. Meanwhile Eyup, the husband returns and becomes suspicious. In a fit of rage Ismail kills Servet.

The acting from each character is breathtakingly understated, constantly reminded me of Trois couleurs: Bleu. In fact the depiction of mood is similar to Tarkovsky (Mirror and The Sacrifice; the only movies of Tarkovsky that I have seen). Dialogue is minimal but the panting, the pauses, the uncomfortable angst-ridden silence, the loud ringtone; makes you almost hear their emotions even when they are not enacting them out. The sound is perfectly married to the narrative. You can hear the scream for freedom from that loud ringtone, from the train that runs past the house killing silences of waves ebbing from nearby sea, sounds of speeding train and Eyub walking uncomfortably under those tracks. Everyone is trying to come out of their shells of dreary existence.

The camera ellipses are conspicuous by their ‘absences’ and that defines the movie. The opening scene captures the sound of a screeching car and the accident is heard in the backdrop, the camera on the politician’s face mapping his brilliant expression of an oncoming loss in the elections more than the guilt of a hit-and-run. Hacer sleeping with the politician is off camera, while the camera focuses on Ismail’s eye peeping from a key hole. Soon after his rage and his refusal to accept this bitter reality is what the camera focuses on. Ismail killing the politician is again not shown but the cold confession of “I did it” and the fantastic reaction portrayed by Hacer. These three sequences are what define the film’s intent to hide a disaster but to show the reactions and what becomes of the people associated with it. It’s more with how each one of us cope with continuity of a calamity surpassing its transitory existence.

Initially it is not apparent that the couple ( Hacer-Ayub) lacks chemistry but still you empathize with Hacer when she confesses her obsession with Servet. How do you know it? You know this from the director’s eye of subtlety that there was prevailing uneasiness in the marriage even when it does not form part of the mise-en-scene. The shot when Hacer confronts and confesses her love to Servet is interesting. There are no close ups. On the contrary it is an extreme long shot with the backdrop of a cliff overlooking dark clouds foreboding the essence of their ailing chemistry. The color palette is kaleidoscopic ranging from sepia, to green to natural, almost as though the sun doesn’t rise in this city, they are just dark times. The scene with Ismail’s imagination of his dead brother walking in to the house is chilling and subtly conveys the yearning. Both men witness this imagination in their darkest hours. The final scene is a visual feast with his redemption, washing off his sins or is it that they are just passed on? By the end of the movie you feel like you are gradually being released by an unnerving hold of a python. The tension is taut and yet languid in its pace.

The film has a layered spiritual sub text which questions our morality. We end up committing crime which we would have never imagined as though our lives have no control on our actions. Is it righteous of man to denounce his morality to salvage human bonds? Does existence and survival justify the espousal of sin?

This post was originally posted at PassionForCinema : http://passionforcinema.com/uc-maymun-three-monkeys-film-review/

Truth is getting stranger than fiction

A mystic location in the woods, a group of anorexic sadhus invoking cult.. cut.. a young couple being educated about dyslexia while a kid is painting his mind… cut… a star couple and their hickeys with animated figments of conversation.. cut .. a Kafkaesque atmosphere with metaphorical depiction of cigarettes and freedom of expression.. cut.. a besotted jungle, a lion dates a lioness with poetic lines exchanged.. cut… man in alienation plots bombs across the city for survival.. cut.. Graphic depiction of a teenager being murdered by a domestic help in a rage of vendetta.. cut.. a political warfare of power and power plants.. cut.. a mother weeping with dead son in her arms and being asked “aapko kaisa lag raha abhi?”

Did you have the faintest idea that I juxtaposed news ticker scripts and movie plots from the new wave bollywood cinema? Understandably no I presume. This seemingly disconnected array is a depiction of how the news media is gesturing huge pay checks to wannabe film writers/directors and that bollywood cinema is getting real with themes of modern existence and characters are beginning to renounce their larger than life tags. In a way television news media has swapped its role with cinema.

I fail to comprehend the chain of events that triggered this mad frenzy: sensationalism taking precedence over news and information. I think the trend started with sting journalism tapes of some politicians caught on camera under the table. This garnered TRPs that could beat a hundred farmer suicides or our neighborhood in state of emergency. This was compounded by the psyche of people, of getting over awed by calamity and chaos, the urge to propagate fear and trepidation. Specifically the towns and hinterlands, they get traumatized with every false fear and believe in god reincarnating in a kid from Jharkhand or impostors who predict apocalypse from a news room. The media blatantly capitalizes on this unnerving gullibility. The reason for a teen murder case is parent’s infidelity or the teen’s character in question. It could be possible that the cops who make these inane allegations are victims of sensationalized news and at some point they try to internalize the “news” to reflect it in their judgment.

Entertainment from real people as opposed to stereotypical bollywood interpretations is becoming a strong factor for this change. Audiences find a person caught in a criminal case on news channels more interesting than a serial killer movie. 9/11, 7/11 and other such precarious situations have ushered in era of “glorified chaos” as the new mantra for TRPs. It’s a classic equation of self sustaining supply-demand. A news channel throws in some irrelevant but fear inducing footage, the audience with initial resistance, succumbs to it as entertainment. Meanwhile 20 other channels replicate this model. In order to differentiate, the news channel ups the level of its tamaasha factor and then the audience attunes to this new level of atrocity. All along this vicious cycle, the audience is oblivious to this change that is happening to the subconscious.

On the other side of this dichotomy is a new face of Indian cinema resurrecting from small budgets, rational thinking and of course love for quality cinema. With increased exposure to world cinema, multiplexes and multiplexing audience, filmmakers are now beginning to up the level. I can see an undercurrent of French New Wave of cinema which focused on realism. Films like, Johnny Gaddar, Aamir, TZP, No Smoking, Mithya, Vishal’s movies, Kukunoor’s and many others are now bringing the realism in Indian cinema. The masses are refusing melodramatic content and exaggerated emotions of the actors. Which now, the news media is lapping it up. Stereotypes like rich heroine-poor hero, hero wants to elope with already married/engaged heroine etc are dying at the resurgence of fresher characters like working moms, hero-heroine peacefully breaking up because of mutually understanding incompatibility, socially responsible cola-teens, zero-song- great-background-score movies. All of this is changing the society at large. Cinema has a lot of influence on our attitudes, lifestyles and our actions. I feel happy that this effect is slowly bringing progression and reason in the society. For instance TZP raised awareness about dyslexia in many schools for the handicapped. Parents of dyslexic kids are no longer embarrassed of the condition. A school in Hyderabad for the mentally handicapped has had record enrollments form the time the movie was released. Before this they had to go town to town to educate people about the importance of special education for these children.

Incongruous yet dissecting paths of cinema and mass media, and we are here at the joints of time. One is leading to newer cinema improving social beliefs and the other ceasing us, we, the people to a regressive society. There has to be some medium that controls media sensationalism but then that would control our freedom of expression, the objective of mass media. In pursuit of truth, let truth be our guiding force and fiction improve the way we perceive truth.


PS: I had initially posted this blog on Passion For Cinema with the same name (
http://passionforcinema.com/truth-is-getting-stranger-than-fiction/ )

This film was made as an intro for Tech Mahindra. It was to be shown in between films at the New York Film Festival.

Fireflies Zameen par

I grew up watching random things on sidewalks, tour abandoned buildings and places with no meaning, cried my insides when I knew I failed the history test and the same night read world famous mysteries at the end of a torch beam. I rode my bicycle at night to see a thousand fireflies mirroring on a canal, listening to silence and also mildly being aware of the ghost stories that would conjure up over by the creek. I traced silhouettes of calendar pictures, dragged an ink dripped thread from a squeezed book to make images that had no meaning but beauty inexplicable in the conventional sense. As I grew older, existence cultivated the idealist in me, burnt my sketches and smashed my torch against the walls of college library. The fireflies dimmed, the silence became silent. Has it ever occurred to you that a long forgone memory that is buried under the avalanche of your materialistic lives resurfaces suddenly, touches you like morning breeze following a rainy storm, like you have just woken up in the middle of a great dream which could not have been true. I felt it as I saw Ishaan Awasti stare at the fishes that swum the gutters, when he got his knuckles smacked, when he took a day off to watch random things. I returned to my childhood. Those fireflies gleamed in my eyes, those abandon buildings were visible, my silly handwriting, my always undone shoe laces, the torch was beaming at me, the feeling of my grandma’s cold wrinkled hands on my cheeks.

Taare Zameen Par was a time machine to travel back in time and meet your childhood in that exact detail. For a first time director I expected close shots, swaying camera movements, over the top background score etc. I was happy to be proven incorrect. The director was conscious of the soul of the movie. I know Amole and his wife researched for seven years on this movie and I am glad Aamir directed the way they envisioned it or so I think they would have. It’s quite difficult to calibrate creativity when you have too much passion. There is always a tendency to succumb to ‘absolutes’ to the point of exaggeration. Aamir knew exactly how much to put in and that is an “art” to balance understatement and expression of the Howard Roark in us. It’s difficult to curb subside your creative instincts when you have the freedom and the energy to go full hog.

I think the bigger task is now to win another battle or battles if I may call it. I understand Aamir’s ideology in not subscribing to the “No awards, no nonsense suck- up” notion. I do understand why. When I think deep, I see more to it. I think this movie should fight at the awards’ ceremonies. It should fight against inane mediocrity that the glamour demagogues shove upon to us. I was appalled to see how Darsheel was not nominated for a best actor role, and yes the best film award too. This movie should win because it tells us meaningful cinema deprived audience that we shouldn’t take gyrating gestures, chiffons in Swiss alps, dimwit homage to yesteryear movies, threadbare scripts, even so for dexterous camera movements, mindless close ups, morose subjects shown in abject misery, over directed and un-educating messages, movies with Indian poverty or colorful India wanting an Oscar. This movie is a fight against these stereotypes that we have been lead for decades now. It should win because we need to unlearn the kind of cinema, cinema has taught us. It should win because audiences don’t need an award given to Aamir to prove that it’s a good movie but because the award will change mindsets in cinema, there will be a transformational outlook in direction, scripting, editing and everything. It should win to preserve the sanctity of good cinema. It should win because all the mediocre and ridiculed children of the world will get hope that it's okay to be mediocre and yes that "every child is special". It should win to corroborate their faith in their own self. It should win because these kids should win. It should win because the torch is a light beam on the other side of the tunnel.

My sister is pursuing her Bachelors in special education for dyslexic children. She is at the National Institute for Mentally Handicapped Children, Hyderabad. She told me that in a class of over 100 students taking the course, the teachers had this to say one day: “For over decades, we have been trying to educate the concept of dyslexia to parents. For decades we have toured homes, towns and villages to educate masses about the concept, about how making these kids enroll in to these courses will benefit their tomorrow. We are happy to say we failed and that a two and half hour movie did it what we have been trying to do for years together. TZP has created amazing awareness about Dyslexia. We are now inundated with calls from parents wanting their children to be enrolled in our school. Unlike before, they are not embarrassed about the condition. We can’t thank this movie enough for what it has done to so many kids”.

I was moved hearing my sister say this to me. I am glad I didn’t kill the fireflies, I am glad I am seeing light on the other side. I am glad I confronted my childhood once again. I am glad this movie made me confront the freak of my childhood unapologetically. I am all to follow the fireflies.