The Chasing Iamb

The dumbing down of WikiLeaks

2011-09-21T19:24:00.001+05:30

DID ANYONE else get the feeling that the Mayawati- Julian Assange exchange this fortnight sounded like the trailer of a romantic comedy? A trailer for the kind of film that has a raging, warring couple whose defences break down only in the last 20 minutes. The kind with a fiery Beatrice-like heroine who, when asked if Benedick was not in her good books, replies: No; and if he were, I would burn my study.

Listen to the rhythm of it. Julian Assange: She has a big ego and she likes her shoes too much. Mayawati: You, anti-Dalit, I will put you in a mental asylum. And I will give more power to my pals Shashank and Satish, what you going to do about it? Julian Assange: Go fight with Hillary, you betrayer of Dalits. And if you wanna fight more, pick me up from my house arrest, I will bring you British shoes. Is this a lovefest or this a lovefest?

Perhaps this cinematic encounter between Mayawati and Assange was inevitable. Perhaps all WikiLeaks is waiting for is a Nora Ephron screenplay. Certainly an encounter between WikiLeaks and Bollywood should not have surprised us. This week’s revelation was that Siddharth Roy Kapur and Akshaye Wadhwani, heads of huge Bollywood production houses, said to someone, “Following the Hollywood model, many film and entertainment companies are moving away from an actor or star-based system to a system more reliant on the production company’s brand, and its stable of producers and directors.” (Bollywood stars are overpaid. Surprise!)

Imagine this. Someone heard this tidbit somewhere and then someone sent this information via diplomatic cable to the US State Department, which then placed this information in the default setting of classified. As classified as the information that has emerged from other cables such as the Sultan of Oman being too busy these days to read, or that a diplomat ate sheep innards at a picnic in Eritrea. The security classification system that protects this information is said to have cost over $8.8 billion in 2009 alone but let’s not worry about how much money the US is spending. What is more relevant is why are the dregs of the leaked cables being given the gravitas of national security? And have we forgotten that the cables are less holy writ and more Chinese whispers?

If we stop being distracted by the gossip, we may notice the shallow analysis being unearthed by WikiLeaks. How disorienting to find diplomatic cables filled with sociological rubies such as “iconic celebrities such as Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan attract legions of fans, while millions of Muslims languish in poverty. Since Independence, three Muslims have been appointed as President of India, but Muslims are grossly under-represented in Parliament and other elected bodies”. That the West thinks it can understand non-western cultures with such clumsy juxtapositions is troubling.

Often diplomatic cables such as the one above bring on a vague sense of déjà vu. Where else have we seen such evidence of cognitive dissonance in the western cerebellum? Could it be something you read in the first few pages of Lonely Planet India? No, perhaps it is more like the writings of poor hard-worked Abbe Dubois, the 18th century French missionary writing of south India and troubled by ‘paradoxes’ such as Brahmins refusing contact with Dalits unless it is the height of summer in which case they do not mind accepting buttermilk from the hands of the same Dalits. A couple of hundred years later, here we are still reading the unfiltered marginalia of compulsive Caucasian note-takers to find ourselves.

Having made all these grim pronouncements of Orientalism, let us celebrate. WikiLeaks seems to have found its ultimate destiny — recycling celebrity gossip. We look forward to the WikiLeaks that ‘reveal’ the evergreen Dev Anand’s youthful appearance, the cable on Sonam Kapoor’s fashion sense and Ranbir Kapoor’s family connections.

If It is Sweet

2011-09-10T00:03:00.000+05:30

THE THIRD World is so useful. Like that shirt you wore for 10 years and are now using to mop the kitchen floor, you can always find one last squeeze. In 2010, American giant Kraft Foods acquired old rival British confectionary Cadbury globally (including the Indian operations) for $19.6 billion. India is one of the big reasons Kraft wanted Cadbury. According to the Wharton Business School, acquiring Cadbury gave Kraft access to 70 percent of India’s $425 million chocolate market as well as a distribution network that reaches 1.2 million shops. Access, trust and cachet that Cadbury acquired by importing chocolates into India since 1948. At the other end of the pipeline is Ghana, the second biggest cocoa producer in the world where Cadbury has been buying cocoa beans for over a century. Ghana and its neighbours in West Africa have had a complex and bloody modern history that is tied closely to how much cocoa it can produce for export. Even after independence, West African cocoa farmers are fighting corrupt governments and greedy companies to be paid fairly. As in highly profitable businesses in India, unpaid or ill-paid young children form the bedrock of Ghana’s cocoa business. In 2011, Cadbury adopted a fair trade agreement with Ghana’s cocoa farmers. All good? All good. (Shut up, you sceptic in the back bench.)

So here we are in mid-2011 and Cadbury is making a heated attempt to sell Bournville to India — a market rather suspicious of dark chocolate. Picture a bunch of highly educated, smart copywriters getting together and saying: Yes, dark chocolate equals sophistication. Sophistication means exclusion. Hmm.

Then somehow, in a process that shall always remain mysterious (and as we find out, oblivious) to history, the creatives arrive at two television ads for India. Ad #1, shot in Sweden, in which a butler is grouchy because his employer has criticised him for being unsophisticated. He eats Bournville while his master is away. A piano falls on his head. A punishment from the cosmos because “you can’t just eat a Bournville, you have to earn it.” This ad, its creators said, was in the Wodehouse spirit. Strange homage since the success of the Jeeves books lay in the butler’s omnipotent sophistication. Old Plum would have slit his throat before putting Servant’s Pratfall as a gag. Even in a first draft.

Ad #2. White buyer in Ghana village at table is examining cocoa bean under a loupe and pronounces: “He will become a Bournville one day.” The next one he rejects, saying, “He is nothing.” The strange pronoun is explained when the bean suddenly turns into a weeping humanoid baby. European buyer says, “Tell him I am sorry,” looking less sorry and more embarrassed for the baby bean’s social solipsism. Gathered villagers, particularly an old man, looks troubled. Young man next to him (clearly an extra from Blood Diamond still in character) sweeps crying cocoa baby onto the ground and does a short rakshasa laugh. “Only the Finest Ghanaian Cocoa goes into making a Bournville.”

Ad films are often banal. They are sometimes sublime, gripping their tiny claws into culture in a way cinema is too hulking to. This Bournville ad is not clever or funny. It is cruel. And more troubling, it is incredibly ignorant.

The glory of globalisation lies in its amiable, ironic nested narratives Paul Auster would envy. So in 2011, the new emperors are not just squeezing Ghana and selling cocoa to India. It is also so comfortably assured of India’s amnesia that it can even use the process of squeezing Ghana to pimp chocolate.

This isn’t a call to ban this ad. That’d be boring. This is a call to fix an education system so myopic it allows smart copywriters to create this ad without a hint of the painfully revealing Rorschach test it is. This is a call to fix an education system so limited in its culture capital, it is producing us — people who conflate sophistication with good old-fashioned oppression. Us who will look at this ad and say, “So cute. Cocoa bean is crying.”

You can’t just buy cool. You have to earn it.

Sometimes, even the darkness insists on speaking

2011-09-06T23:59:00.000+05:30

A Kenyan folktale tells the story of a Sultan's wife who wasted away in the palace and a peasant's wife who was plump and strong. The Sultan interrogated the peasant - what was he feeding his wife? The peasant replied, “Meat of the tongue”. But no fancy-shmancy meat of the tongue that the Sultan ordered by the ton made the Sultana robust.

So, he sent his wife to live in the peasant’s house. When the switcheroo happened, as it does in folktales and reality shows, the Sultana grew strong in the peasant's hut and the peasant's wife became hollow-cheeked in the palace. Marina Werner writes in From the Beast to the Blonde: “The tongue meats that the poor man feeds the woman are not material, of course. They are fairytales, stories, jokes, songs; he nourishes them on talk, he wraps them in language; he banishes melancholy by refusing silence.”

The newest Dastangoi performance (on 4 September at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi) from astonishing duo of Mahmood Farooqui and Dan Husain was a tribute to storytelling and a refusal of silence. First, the silence of Chouboli, the inscrutable princess who refuses to marry any man who can't make her speak four times in a night.

Chouboli is the heroine of a long Rajasthani folktale, one among many brought from the tongue to the page by the late Vijaydan Detha. Next, the silence around Vijayadan Detha himself, arguably Rajasthan's greatest writer (who told TEHELKA in 2006 that he had managed to avoid the press until his short story was made into the SRK film Paheli.) Two volumes of Detha's work were translated into English in 2010 by Christi A Merrill and Kailash Kabir.

It is unusual for Farooqui and Husain to perform stories outside the Dastangoi tradition. The few precedents are their popular Partition Dastan, and more recently, a superb story about the imprisonment of Binayak Sen. Word has it that a Dastan about Rabindranath Tagore is in the making.

As marriages go, the Detha-Dastangoi one looks fruitful. The witty register of Detha's Hindi was what dominated this production instead of the fabulous (fabulous of fables, as opposed to the absolute variety) Urdu of the regular Dastangoi evenings. The combination was satisfying even to some of us who understand only one in five words (as opposed to one in ten on a regular Dastangoi evening). Detha and the Tilism-o-Hoshruba are alike in the tallness of the tale-telling. The thieves are outrageously larcenous, the friendships are set like cement, the swords flash, arrows fly sky-high, the limbs scatter, the women are golden.

Detha's interpretation of moustache-twirling manly valour as slightly dim only gave the actors another layer of human folly to enjoy. So a minute after the performance begins, you are left marvelling at the fine thakur whose chief hobby is to shoot 108 arrows through the nose-ring of his terrified wife every morning, and then one night, by moonlight. And an hour into the performance you don’t think about the stamina required by two men sitting in white achkans to hold our fragmented attention. You don’t think too much because in the craning of Farooqui’s long, sardonic neck and in the dimpling of Husain’s roguish cheek is the next joke and you are damned if you miss it.

Farooqui and Husain are training a younger lot of dastangos, and blessed be their venture. However, right now the performances are rare and their performances blindingly brilliant enough to leave you with only two meta-thoughts—I am so lucky to be watching. Someday I will tell my grandchildren that I was lucky enough to watch.

The dastangos insist that applause is a dissolute habit and that civilised people should only utter waah-waahs of appreciation. But in the performance, even the darkness that falls when Chouboli's lamp is snuffed insists on speaking, insists on responding to the Portia-like cross-dressing thakurain storyteller. So who could blame the two ladies in the audience who yelped, “Arrey, arrey!” when it seemed as if a female protagonist was about to confess her intended adultery? They yelped “arrey-arrey!” The rest of us were silenced.

The dastangos paused. Then they said, “Waah-waah!”, kyunki hunkare ke bina kahani kya?

Who's Your Papa CJ?

2011-09-03T00:58:00.002+05:30

FIRST, THE warm-up. The MC comes on and introduces the opening act. The comedy crowd in Delhi takes the conventions of stand-up seriously. As many as six open mike nights a week, lots of professional shows and a great ton of interest — stand-up is hot right now. Hence the embarrassing Tata Docomo ad with Ranbir Kapoor against a brick wall. It’s a weekday night at the International Diner, a south Delhi restaurant. The postage-stamp stage area has been empty 45 minutes. It’s hot, verging on sweaty, but the 100-odd audience is cheerful. A bit smug, even. They have seats because they came an hour early. Those standing at the back try to catch a waiter’s eye before the show starts.

And here comes the opening act. Young Abish Mathew is small, boyish and strained. Only one out of every three lines work. The crowd is generous and responds kindly to his nervous air. They laugh a little harder.

Abish leaves. Here comes the headliner. Paaaaa-pa CJ! Lots of international gigs. An agent in England where he earned his chops. Does the Edinburgh festival every year for the lark and a bit of money. Has a great story about getting almost knifed after performing in a Birmingham mosque. Beat thousands to the final round of the Last Comic Standing show in Las Vegas. Papa CJ is the biggest we have yet.

Papa CJ, 34, is very slender and has an energy forcefield like a superhero. His long hair is sprinkled with grey and his face is an arresting mix of cunning and sweetness. He announces upfront that since this is just an open mike gig (and not a professional evening, though that doesn’t mean it’s unticketed, just that the finish is rough), he’ll be trying out his worst material, his rawest lines. He’s holding a sheaf of papers and peeks occasionally. Within minutes the unmistakable patina of the headliner shines through. Set-up. Delivery. Boom! Set-up. Delivery. Boom! The crowd brays happily. If you’ve ever told a joke, you know there’s a moment in the telling when the universe hangs in balance. With Papa CJ, that anxious moment never comes. When the occasional joke is fluffed, he is relaxed: “That didn’t really work, did it? Will make a note of it.” And even that makes the nowpliant audience laugh.

But Papa CJ’s true power lies off-script, in his creating instant humour in his audience. His front row usually consists of the brave and the innocent because they are sure to be skewered. A pretty girl and her plain boyfriend come in for a lot of pokes. Papa CJ’s wife Neha is in the back taking photographs. She’s also set up a video camera in front to record audience reactions. (Not her husband, you understand.) Like some comics, Papa CJ makes fun of his audience. But when his 45-minute segment ends, the room is a warm, intimate bath of love. His mysterious gift seems to be in knowing where to stop and leave his poor subjects with silly grins on their faces. In making the back row strain forward half-wishing, half-afraid they’ll be the next victims.

He talks about treading this thin, thin line. “In London there was this female comedian performing with a largely Asian audience and she went after a really old white couple in the front row. Asked the woman, ‘When was the last time he gave you good sex?’ The comedian was booed off stage in 10 minutes. It was pointless, you know.” He is disapproving. She clearly didn’t get how the game is played.

Here is how it is played. Papa CJ was recently invited by some corporates to their CEO’s birthday. Papa CJ roasted him all night long. All manner of lines crossed here. The executives watched in awe as social protocols were busted. The CEO lets loose his power corsets a bit and gets aforementioned silly grin. And young Papa CJ, who in a previous life as a MBA-wielding corporate trainer would have killed for such shoulder-rubbing, went home smug. His pocket full of business cards of the high and pin-striped mighty.

Papa CJ wields power from behind his mike and enjoys it — there is a lip-smacking satisfaction about it. But no malice. And perhaps this is why the audience laughs. When he addresses the audience singly or en masse as ‘f**kers’, it’s an affectionate caress from an old pal. It doesn’t have the shock value of the motherloving, sister-loving expletives of many stand-ups. “It’s too easy to get that laugh,” shrugs Papa CJ. He doesn’t like easy. He once went on stage and wickedly described Indian standup comedians’ crutches: “Bengali comedians make Bong jokes, Punjabi comedians make Sardar jokes. Some cricket. A bit of politics. If you’re in your 20s, Facebook and Google jokes. If you’re in your 30s, marriage jokes.” The aftermath? “The guys supposed to come on after me were like: ‘Bastard, what do we do now?’”

He loves Indian audiences, he says. “Afterwards, 60-yearold men come up and tell me some long, filthy joke and say I can use it in my next show. I love middle-aged Indian women. They laugh openly. They don’t look around to see who else is laughing.” Papa CJ careens away from any truly provocative material. No religion, for instance. It would be interesting to see whether in a few years he’ll rock you back on your heels, but for now it’s more vigorous massage than right hook. He has a big nationalism shtick, both on and off stage. “I come from the land of the Kamasutra and I can screw you more ways that you can count,” he often signs off with a strut and a toss. The only discordant note is his distinctly American faux hip-hop name, given all the ‘I’mproud- to-be-Indian’ routines. He sternly refuses to reveal his real name. Perhaps it’ll give away where in India he comes from. Like Rumpelstiltskin, he knows it’ll give someone somewhere power over him.

HERE WE are in the second segment. Another 45 minutes but nobody is complaining. Papa CJ is even better than before. His audience is super lubricated and adoring, like masochists longing to be whipped. A teen pierces the haze after an off-key joke and says: “That one didn’t work.” Papa CJ replies instantly: “Then you are not helping, f**ker. Hear that silence? That’s you.” The audience laughs. “Hear that laughter? That’s me.” Everyone explodes.

He is pure, distilled confidence, the source of which is a bit misty. He didn’t grow up a wisecracker. Telling jokes to friends is not the same as stand-up, Papa CJ will tell you contemptuously. Perhaps it comes from his affluent tea-plantation background, you might surmise after much teethpulling. What is openly offered: Lawrence School, Sanawar and an Oxford MBA. Earlier in his minimalist but gilded Delhi apartment in a gilded Delhi neighbourhood, he had said, “I live simply.” He is being sincere and perhaps relatively accurate.

Perhaps the confidence comes from individualistic and white-knuckle sportloving parents and grandparents. Perhaps it’s because he loves his job — travelling the world with his wife, making people happy and getting paid for it.

Perhaps it’s come from his early grind in the cut-throat stand-up scene in England that involved single-meal days, long commutes to obscure towns and hanging around drunkand- hungry for five minutes on stage. Then driving back and going to bed at 4 am. Every day. For two years.

So when he scoffs at Indian stand-ups who call themselves professional after 10 shows, it makes sense. Being a know-itall is an occupational hazard in stand-up, but Papa CJ’s patriarchal air is unbreachable. He’s done his time, f**kers.

The New Indian Fog

2011-08-20T00:44:00.002+05:30

IN THE third of the four sections of The Beautiful and the Damned — The Factory — the author speculates on why a young migrant describes his chronic illness merely as ‘pain’: “Given the lives that migrant workers lived, someone like Pradip had no choice but to abandon the nuances of illness for a broad, catch-all word. The same was true when it came to the story of his life, which was often empty of descriptive detail and rendered in thick strokes.” Two hundred pages in, one worries about Deb’s ability to interview people. Compassionate and earnest though he is, he does not hesitate from assuming the poor man is unable to describe his life with colour or metaphor. Perhaps, honey, he was just not that into you.

Deb’s essays set out to tell the truth about New India and work hard at it — over five years, taking on everything from the bizarrely litigious Arindam Chaudhuri to Andhra Pradesh farmers to Bengaluru software engineers to Delhi waitresses. Long interviews, close observations and accidental encounters all feed his explorations. This is the kind of ambitious project non-fiction readers long for. Alas, it isn’t enough to just leave Delhi to become Ibn Battuta. Indian readers are not as cloistered in their socio-economic class as our writers, and you are likely to be baffled by Deb’s stating of the obvious. Why is it that when we’ve just got rid of the italics-strewn madness of Indian fiction, we’ve to now deal with the determinedly sulky alienation of our non-fiction?

Deb largely animates his subjects with that old party trick of ‘discovering India’ — easy juxtaposition and easier paradox. He skates over religion, sex, love, prejudice, rage, terror leaving you with ghosts. You’re also likely to be annoyed by Deb’s easy assumptions. He believes a Maoist union organiser when he says his Infosys employee daughter is fine with his radical politics. (He doesn’t ask her opinion.) In Bengaluru, when he annoys software engineer and poet SS Prasad, his contrary-minded subject says he doesn’t know what global warming is. Deb believes him. That this quixotic man who integrates poems in binary code onto computer chips and hopes they’ll be found by a future archaeologist doesn’t know what global warming is.

Deb is a little surprised that a Bengaluru auto-rickshaw driver knows how to use the iPhone he finds. He forgets his earlier expositions on the greasy pole of social mobility in New India — that you can be in a computer course today and be a bus conductor tomorrow. This is a particularly vexing class blindness since this chapter is an exploration of how technology has changed us. (Also: Wouldn’t Ibn Battuta have heard of an electronics grey market?)

The book is logjammed with formulations such as Priyanka Gandhi, “the heiress apparent of the Congress Party, a woman descended from a long line of prime ministers, part Indian and part Italian”. Or “He was a Dalit, or an untouchable in the taxonomy of the caste system”. Or “Bhagat Singh, the Indian socialist hanged by the British”. Or “the sacred texts of the Vedas”.

You have to struggle through the fog of defamiliarisation Deb deploys. Here’s a small but distracting example. Deb is waiting for the district collector of Nizamabad in his home office. He writes: “It was a large room, with rows of empty chairs facing the collector’s desk, as if he was in the habit of giving lectures or performances from the desk.” I paused here for several minutes. Is Deb making a small joke? It couldn’t be that he doesn’t know why a government officer would have a bunch of chairs facing him. Has he never witnessed the trapeze act of simultaneous audience-granting babus do across India? The reader is as lost as she’d be if she tried to ‘get’ India by reading the meticulous petticoat wearing Victorian chronicles.

DEB IS such a prim participant observer that when he’s moved to nostalgia by a pillion ride in a rainy small town, you feel more bad for him than for poor, battered India: “There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop... There was no escape here except through human relationships.” But mostly, he restrains from any sentiment. His is the joyless tone that’s often mistaken for detachment. Pity, because as wracked and broken by tragedy as India is, what it isn’t is morose. Suddenly, you realise how the ‘thick description’ of academic writing, the baffling memoirs of IAS officers and the amused knowingness of dyed-in-thewool journalist P Sainath have been more fruitful engagements with the subaltern’s interiority than this book. Perhaps because they didn’t take themselves so seriously.

Being tight-lipped and dispassionate might assure the reader of your good intentions, but as Bernard Williams said: “Amateurism is not heroism.” Deb will send you running back to the louche Suketu Mehta with his wonderful ability to bring the wooden puppet into glorious, perverse 3D. Here is a Suketu Mehta bargirl — no listless, moping figure — “And the girl rolls up all the windows of the taxi and opens the door of the cage and all the birds fly out and fill the small dark taxi with their energy and their music. She laughs with delight and asks her man to play a game with her: Catch the birds. They reach out with their hands to grab the birds, who are small and quick, and they have to wave their arms wildly about even to touch them. As the girl and her ardent suitor reach out to catch a bird, they sometimes, accidentally, can’t help touching each other… Half an hour later, the door of the taxi opens and half a dozen or a dozen dead birds are thrown out on the road. If there are any remaining alive, they fly out over the great dark sea, free at last.”

I Will Never Heil Again

2011-08-13T01:38:00.000+05:30

The Plot
Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler addressing him as “My Dear Friend”, suggesting he mend his ways. All manner of narratives could have addressed this historical Ripley’s Believe it or Not item. The one chosen is college-circuit drawing room tragedy. Gandhi walks about. Hitler rants as the Reich collapses. Indian National Army (INA) soldiers run about hungry and angry. Eva Braun tries to Make the Best of a Bad Situation.

-10 For Being An Unintentional Parody. But plus three for having greater ambitions than Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, the historical blunder freshest in our memories.

-5 For Letting Nikita Anand As Magda Goebbels talk in English. This cast pretending to be German was weird enough without Nikitaji asking her troubled husband (Nalin Singh) in penetrating accents: “You mean traitors?”

-8 For The Badly Patched Plot Strand about INA officer Balbir (Aman Varma) missing his wife, remembering their Happy Holi times and their disagreement about Gandhian ways

+5 For The Astonishingly Retro Soundtrack full of clanging emphases and maudlin strings. Thankfully, Bollywood has done away with the orchestra-as-metaphor.

+10 To Neha Dhupia for playing a fun-loving Eva Braun who smokes, dances and sort-of kisses Hitler without looking stupid.

+3 For the line:Eva Braun tumhari saali hai. It may inspire a David Dhawan film.

-5 For Hitler’s Sudden Discursion on Marxism, capitalism and national socialism. It has the strange twang of King Henry telling Thomas More that his ideas are too utopian.

-5 For The Inexplicable Couple saying goodbye (fatally) next to an unmanned cannon. Where are they and why are they the most idiotic cannon fodder ever?

+10 For The Crazy Maggi Noodles Interlud with the arrival of the Goebbels children and the woman who chirpily offers them “phataphat khane ka intezaam”.

+5 For The Scene In Which Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect, apologises to Hitler for not following his orders to destroy all the infrastructure. This scene gives you a hint of the ambition with which this film was conceived.

+2 For The Boring Bureaucracy of the wedding.

Why Are We Such Angry Birds On Twitter?

2011-08-13T01:08:00.000+05:30

IF YOU are addicted to the British tabloids, you will know that between 2002 and 2007, British confessional columnist Liz Jones and husband Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal had a very public courtship, marriage and break-up. Jones’ widely read Sunday column had a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened in her love life. During the marriage, Nirpal told curious journalists: she’s a writer, who am I to tell her what she can’t write?” After the split he spilt, “Of all the problems that have plagued my marriage, the issue that has most bothered me, and been the most constant, was the one Liz never mentioned in her columns: the columns themselves. I hated being written about.” After the split, Jones too wondered aloud in her column whether she should have written about her relationship. In 2011, Jones continues to have Murdoch’s England in a frenzy — now about who her new boyfriend, only known as The Rockstar, is. The difference is that now anyone with an understanding of narrative can construct and offer readers the same addictive shots of voyeurism, anger and bitterness. On Twitter.

Now you might say you use Twitter only for political news and cricket updates. Never mind, what comes below will probably happen to you sometime soon. Just stay online.

Twitter is not Facebook. Sounds obvious,right? Twitter is not Facebook because it liberates you at various levels and the first one is the liberation from your Facebook shackles of friending/ - unfriending and liking, and all the parents and children and schoolmates you ran away from all these years. It is just you, your spray can and the empty walls. It is the wild, wild west of the IRC chatroom days, but shinier. You are as big as P.Diddy. Your parties are as important or as sucky as P.Diddy’s. Your party did not happen unless it happened on Twitter.

When the hashtag #ihadanabortion began trending, many feminists in antiabortion countries debated: Is this Twitter trend trivialising a major life choice? Is it provocative? Is being provocative necessary to push prochoice politics online? To choose whether to thus tweet, whether to support such hashtags, is a choice that can only be made from thinking on your feet, from some non-herd thinking. This is systemically difficult, considering that #hashtags are meant to create herds.

There is something about Twitter. People like to call it micro-blogging but Twitter bears as little resemblance to blogs as a Vespa in outer space does to the Titanic. Twitter is nippy, agile and gets in there. It is happening under the table, on the phone while you are on a date (another bitch #FML). It is happening on the table, on the phone while you are getting a wax (Mmm. Hot wax. Cool knife. Hot girl. I am getting wet #secretpleasures). A lot of tweets strain towards these two ends of the spectrum — either self-glamourisation or self-pity — best characterised by the hashtag #FML (F**k My Life). The self-pitying tweet has also acquired a sub-genre with a slightly politically incorrect name — White Whine, or problems that only privileged people tweet about: “Wish people would stop getting hit by trains and make my journey so much harder.” Or: “My second maid hasn’t come to work today.” Or: 14 tweets to complain about a one-time rush-hour commute.

Mostly your loins are girded into allizzzwell cheer to deal with modern life, but Twitter can make you dizzy in unguarded moments. Why are nice people you know or think you could know posting things like “I hate my boss”, “My colleague ruined my presentation”, “I knew my colleagues would struggle to eat sushi. That is why I ordered it. Stupid f**ks”? The self-confessedly chilly Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah bursts out: “A young man was shot dead in Sopore yesterday for no apparent fault of his. Where the hell are all the irate voices? Bloody hypocrites.” A friend says she’s working late and can’t meet you, then promptly tweets every moment of her wild evening out. A teacher tweets: “Have three Asperger boys in S1 class: never a dull moment.”

Privacy is a fraught word, full of small print and million-dollar lawsuits. Intimacy, on the other hand, is a terrain we have to rapidly resurvey. Who are you intimate with? What demands of intimacy can you make from your casual friends and loved ones? If you slag off, your colleague on the office whiteboard in a fit of rage, you may even be fired. On Twitter, though, nobody seems to know the rules.

There is some hazy acknowledgement that rules of social engagement are changing, have changed, under our feet. What is really going on? What is it about Twitter that makes otherwise-conventional folks promptly lose their manners when they log on? Why does there seem to be no social cost to tweeting?

IF ONLY she had known it — Liz Jones’ columns were proto-Twitter. The boyfriend is downstairs hanging out with his friend. I am upstairs crying into my pillow. It’s my birthday and he’s dumped me. And so on. Snappy, conflictridden and oh-so-gloriously indiscreet.

A few years ago, I discovered myself on my former housemate’s Twitter timeline. There, among some great recommendations of music and meal descriptions that would do Anthony Bourdain proud, was… me. What my housemate thought of me, my attitudes, my boyfriend, how we were engaging her in domestic servitude, my tardiness in getting the gas cylinder refilled and much, much later, near the end of the downward spiral — how I had stolen her books. OMFG. Her version of my life was being broadcast to the world, unchecked by any social restraints, 140 characters at a time.

As Trollope said, who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself? I spent several delicious and hair-raising hours reading my housemate’s past rants on Twitter. These particular tweets about ‘the flatmate’ in the next room went back six months. (Little did I know then, there were already many popular Twitter accounts exclusively for airing hatred of roommates.) I confronted her a month later to ask why she didn’t rant about me in a non-public space — if you must do it online, I suggested delicately (and naively, as it turned out), perhaps you could do it on a Twitter account set to private. She replied with complete sincerity that she merely thought of Twitter as another blog where she could write whatever she wanted. The truth is that I myself was unconvinced of the inappropriateness of it all. What I was convinced about was: if my housemate had printed leaflets about me and plastered them all over the city, I like to think she’d have been censured by her friends and mine. (An unexpected side-benefit of the whole thing turned out to be my friends’ hilarity when I mentioned my bewilderment… they still call to ask sweetly: Have you refilled her gas cylinder? Have you returned her stolen books? Why don’t you go back to living together?).

What is Too Much Information? Can too much of it expose you to social discomforts? The lines seem to shift online all the time. A member of a surgeon’s team excising a cancerous tumour from a patient tweets: “Dr Rogers is saying because the tumour is so large he may have to do a radical (total) nephrecnephrectomy.” Which could be educational — or panic-inducing — for the poor family waiting outside… who have nothing better to do than catch up on Twitter.

Here is the thing. Most often, your name is on your Twitter account. And anonymous, secret accounts are notoriously not very secret or very anonymous. Sooner or later, the subject of your micro-rants is going to read them. Or be told about them. Sometimes it’s astonishingly soon, since your subject is also tweeting from the next desk. It seems unlikely that these intelligent people assume that they are “getting away” with it. Probe a little, and you get the sense that actually there is no desire to “get away with it”. You tweet because you want it to be read.

A friend, a young Mumbai professional, provides a hint about what might be going on. “I don’t feel confident expressing my disagreements or conflicts with people anymore,” she confesses. “So when I’m angry with them, I post indirect allusions about it. Then usually that person calls me up and indirectly asks about it.” There is a power play, she acknowledges, in making the other person work for it. Face-to-face confrontations in our increasingly American, increasingly politically correct world now come with the ugly epithet of ‘drama’. This woman isn’t confident enough to bring up her grievances. Her friend, who suspects she’s being tweeted about, isn’t confident enough to openly air her suspicion. So is Twitter merely a tool for passive-aggression rather than a lowering of our social guard?

It’s difficult to quit Twitter, regardless of what part of your personality you display on it. You’ll miss the acupuncture comfort of your tweets being published a moment after you thought them up, and of the so-prompt replies. You’ll miss the hypersocial sixth sense gained from the grain-by-grain of information that others supply you on Twitter.

These granular advantages are the final click of the handcuffs. They are at the heart of the conspiratorial silence outside the world of Twitter. Tweet all you want, tweet whatever you want, but once you log off you must not hold what you wrote or read to your — or my — chest. This isn’t about breaking social norms, it’s about creating new ones. And the biggest faux pas in this shy new world is: When you meet someone in the flesh, you must not acknowledge that you remember all those naughty details about them that you harvested on Twitter yesterday. We are all swinging together in this bird-blue masked ball, all of us with our pretty, tiny masks that don’t hide anything. It is the price of admission.

As for the jealous scolds waiting for their turn at the witching hour, they might take heart in the fact that every public tweet, ever since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, is being archived digitally at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

The ladies have familiar feelings

2011-07-30T00:18:00.000+05:30

THE DELHI launch of Granta’s feminism issue — The F Word — took an unprecedented, iconoclastic course. All four panelists including sole contributor from India, Urvashi Butalia, what is the right word now… dissed the book for leaning heavily towards the experiences of the straight, white female. After reading the book, one is inclined to think that the panelists were being polite.

Granta has suffered from a faint greenness around the gills for a while but this issue is positively comatose. It must take a special skill to put together 21 pieces of feminist writing (fiction, poetry and essay) from around the world without a single one that is polemical, destabilising or maddening in its impossible moth-to-flame-like desire for justice. Compare this to Greer’s collected works The Madwoman’s Underclothes that runs the gamut from sappy through fabulous to enraging, the gut-wrenching heartbreak of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, the fuzzy, prickly poetry of any Jeanette Winterson novel or the straight lines of Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth. Or the anachronistic shock of any piece from Women Writing in India. (hello, Volume 1.) Or the sharp-elbowed, online pointiness of the ladies of Feministing.com.

Let us sample some of the wares in The F Word. AS Byatt and Franscine Prose retrace their awakening to gender and political consciousness. Being Byatt and Prose, these pieces make tolerable reading even though they are template. The usually funny Helen Simpson has an outrageously tacky piece of role-reversal fantasy in which men lie awake in claustrophobic marriages to violent, farting, belching women. Julie Otsuka and Urvashi Butalia both have gentle, contemplative pieces animated largely by the unfamiliarity of the worlds they describe. Butalia writes about the legendary hijra Mona Ahmed and her ability to be man/woman/mother/father all at once. Otsuka (writing in the rarely deployed first person plural) tells the story of Japanese women and children labouring in the farms and small towns of early 1900s America — an excerpt from her forthcoming novel The Buddha in the Attic.

Perhaps this book feels like a letdown because we always need the shock of defamiliarisation for epiphany — religious or political. Take the unexceptionable excerpt from new Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi’s coming-of-age novel Ghana Must Go. After reading the excerpt you may look forward to her novel but you are bound to feel sympathy for critic Stephen Marche who once wrote, “Every time I receive a copy of a new novel about growing up Russian or growing up Portuguese or growing up whatever, I have the same desperate thought: Can’t we all agree we’ve written this book before and that we don’t have to write it again?”

Caroline Moorehead’s compelling piece describing the gallant sisterhood in the concentration camps will not make Simon Schama cry again for a moratorium against Holocaust novels (as he has this week) because this is a true-life story by an able historian. Instead one might want to add a coda to the moratorium suggesting that editors with vast resources look further afield for examples of female solidarity. It isn’t as if civilisation has run dry of courageous women or murderous intent towards courageous women.

Denise Riley once wrote: It is not possible to live 24 hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. This last adjective for an on-again, off-again illumination is the kindest thing you can say about this book.

A revolutionary artist. How the British burnt his shocking images from the 1943 Bengal Famine. And how we can finally see them today.

2011-07-23T01:13:00.000+05:30

SOMETHING OF the thrill of reading the Pepys diaries is awakened at the new Chittaprosad retrospective at the Delhi Art Gallery. It is an enormous show with much to see and much historical frisson to invoke. First, several stunningly produced books, including a collection of his political portraits and a selection of the artist’s letters — filled with kindness, anecdote, curiosity and bitterness about a resolutely bourgeoisie world. Then, on the walls, the most exhaustive collection of Chittaprosads ever assembled together since the death of the artist in 1978. It includes rows of his black and white sketches, his political posters (reminiscent of the highly original, witty Polish film posters of the 1960s), his charming interpretation of the Ramayana, his sexually charged series of lovers, his paintings of and for children, some indifferent landscapes and a few paintings that a viewer joked looks like an ‘impression of Impressionism’.

At the heart of the show is a small, tattered book preserved behind glass. It was also at the heart of the man Chittaprosad was. This is the only extant copy of Hungry Bengal containing what we would call graphic reportage of Chittaprosad’s tour of Midnapore in November 1943 during the Great Famine. All other copies were burnt by the British because the truth was too incendiary to be allowed free passage.
The shriveled, the dispossessed, the naked, the insane, bodies eaten by dogs. Twenty eight-year-old Chittaprosad saw all this and animated them briefly in the Communist Party of India’s weekly newspaper The People’s War with his sketches and the stories of who they were, where they had come from and the suffering of their final hours. Young Chittaprosad was already a fiercely political, full-time Communist Party worker but the tour of Midnapore was to change him forever.

The elder son of a Chittagong civil servant, he chose incredible asceticism from then on. He decided he could not afford to marry. He was deeply suspicious of the self-indulgence of the bohemian and the fat comforts of the bourgeoisie, leaving him a thorny bed of principles to lie on. But Chittaprosad was stubborn. India could change, but he wouldn’t. (Delhi Art Gallery’s head of exhibitions Kishore Singh does an affectionate impression of this hair-tearing stubbornness as he talks of the artist).
CHITTAPROSAD’S LETTERS to his mother and friends are passionate discursions of ethics, art, money, friendship, betrayal and longing. He died in obscurity in a single-room flat in Mumbai at the age of 63. In his lifetime, though, Chittaprosad had created an enormous oeuvre all with the visible scaffolding of his dreams of revolution — even in the painting of a child driven mad enough to heave a rock at the viewer or in his vision of the Black Christ.
It took Delhi Art Gallery’s director Ashish Anand years to persuade Chittaprosad’s niece Gargi Chatterjee — herself dwindling in squalid gentility in Kolkata — to even show him the artist’s lifetime of work. It was only when the family lost hope that the state would acquire Chittaprosad’s work, and enshrine him in posterity as he deserved, that Gargi finally succumbed to the curiosity of the gallery in search of a lost master. It took a few more years before she told the gallery one last secret about her uncle. That she had one surviving copy of Hungry Bengal — locked away in a bank vault.

Now with the gallery’s carefully produced facsimiles of Hungry Bengal, the famine comes terrifyingly alive again. And with it a particular variety of young, undiluted idealism.

Well played Zoya, well played

2011-07-20T23:46:00.001+05:30

You understand that we don’t think women can only make ladies-type films. Understand also that we don’t have problems with ladies-type films. Ah, so now all that hedging has been done let us ask this question. Why didn’t anyone tell us Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is a chick-flick?

This is a movie that has all the hallmarks of a chick-flick. It has close friendship, marriage, dappled leaves, sunsets and landscape shot like Lancome ads, long shots of moony-faced infatuation, a male character who knows enough about jewellery to identify a mummy-ring, suit up scenes in front of the mirror, fantastic settings. It has friends who will intervene to make romance happen. It has childhood pacts and superb decor. The clothes are a step below Aisha but definitely a presence.

It manages a feat that Sarah Jessica Parker and the entire SATC franchise could not manage. It made a Birkin bag an almost full-fledged character. Like classic chick flicks, the settings are clean, shiny and sensual. Like classic chick flicks, the protagonist (Hrithik in this case) is transformed by love, not merely checking off ‘love interest’ as a plot requirement. (No, Delhi Belly, go stand in your, grimy, boyish corner now)

In many ways ZNMD is better than many new chick flicks. Unlike recent Hollywood romantic comedies (also known as ways to make Katherine Heigl more hateful) the protagonists are not subjected to gross public humiliation. It does not centre around a star that necessarily makes the heroine’s best friend look bad. (Aisha was a very baffling in this aspect because it gave everyone except Sonam Kapoor fun things to do).

Of course, the very best way in which this movie beats classic chick flicks hollow is one that bends the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel test is generally a three-step, foolproof way to decide whether women have an active presence in a movie. Are there at least two women in this movie? Do they talk to each other? Do they talk to each other about anything other than a man? Big fail on all counts. Katrina Kaif is very likeable and even Alison Bechdel would think she is cute on a bike but this is not a movie about Katrina, the Spanish chick or even Kalki Koechlin. But the handy-dandy Bechdel would actually be misleading in this case. This is a movie for women viewers except that the protagonists are all male.

The women sitting next to this writer certainly didn’t need any convincing. They gasped, they sighed and they sank into the joy of the objectification of the three best looking men in Bollywood. Acres of bare chest. Lingering shots of brown, male nipple. (some terrible haircuts but let’s ignore that). Rajesh Khanna may have wanted Pushpa to stop crying but Hrithik has never looked as beautiful as he did when he was wet and teary, as sad as the Little Mermaid. Do you really care that Katrina Kaif and Kalki Koechlin did not have self-actualisation?

Now you can decide that this is a terrible political travesty because what is this film industry which has Saif Ali Khan playing a Dalit and men edging women out even in a chick flick. Or you can settle into an experience as close to a spa as cinema can get. You can almost smell the aroma therapy. You know Zoya did.

Bosedk, which way is Punjab?

2011-07-16T01:03:00.000+05:30

IT IS unfortunate that the Gurgaon- based artist duo Thukral and Tagra are at this moment best known for their copyright intervention with the Delhi Belly song Bhaag DK Bose. Returning from a long trip abroad, the pair were outraged to see the song popping up in search engines instead of their Bosedk, a phrase they’d trademarked in 2005. DK Bose. Bosedk. Similar enough and both based on the childish anglicisation of a Hindi invective. The Delhi High Court dismissed the lawsuit but a few days later, in a joint press conference with the artists, Delhi Belly producer Aamir Khan pronounced a light-hearted mea culpa and the artists returned to Gurgaon comforted.

What is truly unfortunate is that even those who follow Indian art a bit only know the duo as those pop art/kitsch boys who scored Rs 1.5 crore in 2007 when Christie’s auctioned their triptych Somnium Genero-Turbo. Never mind that they weren’t the ones who took home the money. Suddenly everyone was talking about them in terms of ‘zany’ — like Thunder Thighs glasses and autorickshaw- shaped cushions and T&T’s bright, retro suits. The two-dimensional, slim space of everyday art reporting has reduced their work to pretty, vacant images and their earnest claiming of Bosedk is not going to help. It makes you suspicious at their studio when a warm Jiten Thukral offers you Rooh Afza singing praises of its rosy delights. Are we going to be assaulted with hipster irony and reclaiming of all things retro?

It is unfortunate because Thukral, 35, and Sumir Tagra, 32, have successfully created an idiom, which is original, playful and, most importantly, invested in contemporary India. Their work — installation, video, graphic and product design, painting and sculpture — plumbs much deeper than the occasional pun or strained attempt at irony of kitsch. Their curiosity and engagement with the world around them makes Rooh Afza assumptions embarrassing.

IN THEIR STUDIO, between calls from their miniature-manga drawing, fashion-designing wives, accountants and fond relatives, they are both superb raconteurs. Those who call them rootless cosmopolitans have not encountered T&T’s river of local anecdote and song. Over years of working and living together their memories, sentences and sensibilities have fused into a which-is-which twinhood. Sumir tells the story of how they began painting Gurgaon architecture and recording the experiences of young Punjabis. Soon after they moved to alien Gurgaon in 2006, they went to a mall. As they entered, Sumir was convinced: “I could smell blood.” He laughs at this moment of superstitious dread but their worry about the tragedies hitting farming communities in transition (as in Gurgaon) is real. It is a worry that feeds their art and nonprofit work in HIV prevention.

Jiten’s father Mahinder Thukral is a wrestler and bodybuilder in Jalandhar. (In his day-job, he is an artist who has trekked to Delhi several times to hand-deliver painstakingly drawn portraits of prime ministers on rice-grains.) Jiten grew up a small, underweight child eyeing with comic alarm the massive bodies rolling about nearby in the pit. He watched every boy he knew in the akhada turn listless with what India offered. Everyone had their eye on their West. School. College. Art. Love. None of these mattered so much as going abroad. Jiten saw uncles leave in borrowed jackets after feasts and inexplicable bouts of tears. Years later, he realised the uncle in the borrowed jacket had an illegal visa and was afraid he’d never see home again.

Last year, Jiten and Sumir were hanging around in Delhi’s Khirkee village. They were about to go live with a Put It On installation (an ongoing safe sex project which is travelling to Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome in 2011) and a 13-ft beast made of Bosedk bottles. There arrived one of Jiten’s father’s akhada pals. A man with seven sons each of whom had successfully achieved immigration. For Sumir, who had grown up in Delhi with a businessman father and gentle artistic mother, here was the personification of all that animated their work: the loud, warm, brave, fearless Punjabi. A man from a state whose young people are ready to do any work as long as it is not in India. A man from a state whose drug addiction and HIV epidemic is spinning out of control. A state that is transplanting in Ludhiana and Gurgaon, its visions of English mansions just a teensy bit wilder. This is the landscape that pushes T&T to their effervescent representations of popular culture.

T&T’s work is an excellent starting point to debate the blurring lines of kitsch, art and design. Jiten and Sumir studied design and worked as designers in Delhi’s ad agencies. They are still interested in the visual world of advertising but with their fake brand Bosedk. It is difficult not to feel deflated when you see the half-cocky, half-desolate faces of Punjabi boys on fake Hershey’s bottles. Though T&T uses nostalgic elements, they don’t stop there or dwindle into the self-cannibalising, hollowing pop art tendencies of their favourite, the Japanese phenom, Takashi Murakami. Like Jasper Johns advised, they take an object, do something to it and then do something else to it.

So kitsch or not? Peter Nagy of Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery who was the first to exhibit their work in 2005, says, “One man’s sublime is another man’s kitsch. It depends on how much the artist does with it, to create a philosophical or critical paradigm that is worth examining.” T&T’s work seen live speaks to you on multiple registers in a way kitsch is never going to. The airiness of their work is misleading. Take Match Fixed, their elaborate 2009 installation in Beijing. First, a kabbadi maidan in a faux Punjabi living room where NRI boys are the goldplated trophies. It is a 360 degree installation planned to the last detail over seven months: lush upholstery, airplane windows through which you see faces of departing NRIs and looped video interviews of grieving women left behind by NRI grooms. Pathos for a community that’s almost always a comic stereotype.

This is the direction in which T&T’s work is headed — large-scale, obsessively planned, installations about social themes. Perhaps this was the direction in which it was headed from the beginning. Nagy talks of meeting T&T in 2005. He suggested they exhibit their Bosedk shirts during a group show. They asked if they could create an installation for the T-shirts. Nagy says, “They went nuts, creating a very complicated installation, with the T-shirts being the least of it.”

The installations T&T favours are still rare in India and almost impossible to sell. When foreign museums invite them to create such large-scale installations, they embed individual objects and elements, which can be sold separately. For instance, their 2009 work Escape for a Dream Land explores the world of the Punjabi diaspora. In a plush room, a dining table is see-sawed towards the sorrow of parents living without their children. There is something a bit PC Sorcar about the levitating table legs — a lightness of touch, an exuberance that is characteristic of all T&T work. The carpet is silken phulkari. Curator Ranjit Hoskote adds, “One of the basic gestures in T&T’s oeuvre is that of embellishment, which connects their work with tapestry and embroidery. Through this, they signal their engagement with the world of the domestic interior, the mingled comforts and disquietudes of homeas- enclosure. And since this forms one of the basic assumptions of their installations, it destabilises the default whitecube expectations of many viewers.”

Hanging on the wall of this installation room is another statement — Dominus Aeris — The Great Grand Mirage. This painting is what is sold to raise revenue for the artists and the gallery. Dominus Aeris seems simple. A Gurgaon home floating dreamily on clouds. Floral decorations. It’s not parody or a lecture about consumerism but you’ll never see Gurgaon the same way again.

The explosion in the poverty lab

2011-07-02T00:49:00.000+05:30

OUR GRANARIES are overflowing. Foodgrain stocks have scaled to an alltime high of 65.60 million metric tonnes. This is frustrating news for everyone worried about the nutritional status of the poor in India. With the Food Security Act hanging in the balance, this would be the perfect moment to suggest the poor be given more subsidised grain. However, a new book, Poor Economics, suggests we rethink this received wisdom.

The book cites studies in India and China to indicate that when rice was subsidised and when income rose, people actually ate less rice and consumed less calories overall. Which leaves us stymied for a bit but also curious about what a real solution to nutritional poverty is. And this kick-start to thinking will happen to you over and over again as you read Poor Economics, an important book that has emerged out of the partnership of two economists — one Indian and the other French in origin.

The authors, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, are like concert pianists who decided to look under the hood and figure out how each string works. Poor Economics encourages you to get under the hood too. Why does a man, who doesn’t have enough to eat, save for months to buy a television? Does having more kids make you poorer? Why do the poor have more children? Is microfinance a failed dream? Do the poor not value anything they get for free? What should India do to improve its educational system?

The authors sought answers for these and other questions by founding the Abdul Lateef Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. In a series of studies across 18 countries, Duflo, Banerjee and other J-PAL economists applied the rigour of Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) techniques to poverty interventions. The technique is the same approach used to determine if a drug is effective — study two identical groups, one that has received the drug and one that hasn’t. Bringing this process to the human realm is complex, fiddly and full of surprises.

Is a kilo of dal enough to make more parents in Udaipur complete an immunisation programme? (yes) Are families in Kenya, who had received a free mosquito net, likely to buy a second a mosquito net? (yes) If free healthcare is in the vicinity,will the poor choose it over an expensive private doctor? (no) Why do children drop out of school in India? (not because of child labour as you imagine.) Why did the NGO Pratham find the government school teachers conscientious and effective during summer remedials and despair-inducing in the school year? Each case study trots like a murder mystery from red herring to red herring to cunning clue to the ‘aha’ of discovery. The results are fascinating but the methodology — so far, from the Grand Unified Theory tendency of economic theory — is also making news.

BETWEEN THE pair, Duflo and Banerjee have won every award in sight. At 50, Banerjee, has won the inaugural Infosys Prize (2009), the Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics. At 38, Duflo has already won the MacArthur Genius fellowship and been named one of the best economists of the world by the Economist. In 2009, she was the youngest woman ever to be asked to lecture at the 500-year-old College de France. Hundreds, including former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, found themselves crowded out.

None of this means their work hasn’t been accused of being naïve, of lowering the ambitions of economics (by focussing on mosquito nets rather than the impacts of exchange rate policies) and, of course, of ignoring the big picture. Duflo shrugs these critiques off. “You cannot study the sun with a microscope, but microscopes are useful nonetheless,” she says. “A more important critique, from Nobel prize winner Jim Heckman is that organisations or governments that agree to do RCTs may not be representative. They may be better run. So, the results may not generalise to less efficient organisations. However, RCTs are a wonderful way to understand what drives people — by creating different conditions, and seeing how people behave under them.” This may seem like an huge amount of work for policymakers but definitely preferable to wondering why your milliondollar, well-intentioned project nosedived.

The authors have been influenced by Amartya Sen’s nuts-and-bolts approach. Banerjee jokes, “As a student at JNU and something of a left-wing activist, I’d argue with my co-conspirators about why Marxism had to be a complete description of reality rather than just an analytical framework. My friends thought this was a sign of my not being pure at heart.”

For Duflo, too, it has been a slow shift in perspective. She talks of one of her earliest images of poverty: “People in Calcutta who’d die of leprosy without Mother Teresa. When I was 13, I was shocked by images of Ethiopian kids with their distended bellies. I thought being poor meant starving, helpless victims. One fundamental way in which my work has changed me is teaching me how sophisticated the poor are, and how far their lives are from my clichés.”

And this dogma — that the poor are passive victims — is what the book dismantles. “The fact that they have so little to work with and are subject to so many conflicting demands, does not mean that they do not make choices,” says Banerjee. “It is the opposite. They often have to make difficult choices (should I buy the expensive medicine for my mother by selling my only cow? Or should I just leave it to fate?) and these decisions have to be made under conditions of extreme stress, whereas we (the non-poor) pretend to make choices, when we don’t care much one way or the other.”

Poor Economics is startlingly fun to read. Partly it is the excellent writing. Partly it is the realisation that conventional economics is based on the most unreliable baseline: the rationality of humans. Poverty Lab offers a future in which economists factor in stress, self-actualisation, hope and resilience. And far from making it touchy-feely and vague it could make economics more accurate. One of the poster boys of this — the behavioural economics movement — Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, is now serving in the Obama administration.

Their evidence-based approach and lack of condescension have liberated the pair enough to draw some politically incorrect conclusions without apologising for them. That the poor lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true. That governments may need to make many paternalistic decisions on behalf of the poor and reward them for making decisions that are good for them. That health insurance does not make sense for the poor. That the poor are not cool, barefoot hedge-fund managers as the MFI-rara crowd would have you believe. That good policy may happen in bad regimes.

There is an infectious optimism about Poor Economics that leaves you feeling the contradiction of the poor and the overflowing granaries can be resolved if we look for small, localised interventions.

No moral, just another story

2011-06-25T23:53:00.000+05:30

The Plot
Amy (Kalki Koechlin), unhinged by childhood trauma, moves to Mumbai from LA with her rich family. She befriends KC (Gulshan Devaiya) and debauch company, an angsty bunch with money to spend. One night, they accidentally kill some people. Then the rest.

-5 For Anurag Kashyap’s Grim Face issuing statutory warning about drugs and alcohol. Please.

+5 To Amy For Refusing To Wear Those Salwar Kameezes. No wonder she feels disturbed.

-10For The Endless Foreign Film-Style Shots: pausing objects mid-fall and the annoyingly retro entry of mystifyingly angry cop Arvind Mathur (Rajeev Khandelwal).

-5 For The Squeamishness Most Of The Supposed Bad-Asses Display during truth or dare. Oh Amy, you are so much badder than them even in your Girl, Interrupted phase. You at least joke about Tanya’s rape.

+6 For Zubin’s Casually Tossed Of ‘Suck my dikra’.

+1 Because You Are going to need all the points you have later. We won’t even bother deducting for the scene in which KC in a Hummer struggles to beat an Audi in a race.

-6 For Amy Saying her father will send her to a convent if she behaves badly. Get thee to a nunnery, LA girl. Sure. Even Madhur Bhandar - kar is more up-to-date.

+7 To Arvind Mathur for using the corpse of the kidnapped tourist as protection against bullets. First surprise in the whole film.

+2 For Mathur’s Autorickshaw kick. Meet Mathur, president of the Meter Down campaign.

-8 For The Random shifts in perspective. Mathur is running into the church to save the day but we suddenly see glimpses of the cuckoo house inside Amy’s head. Salim-Javed would brain you with a television for such sloppy story-telling.

-10 For The Worst denouement in recent times. Why is Malvankar (Raj Kumar Yadav) getting the stick and the lecture from the police force for trying to make a quick buck from idiots? Because the police force is noble or corrupt? Who knows. Pavan Malhotra as police commissioner swings between playing Rakesh Maria and one of the Borgias so that’s no help. Watch out as Malhotra struggles to say maa ki aankh.

See you in the hot flash club

2011-06-25T23:28:00.000+05:30

IN 1984, when Namita Gokhale wrote Paro: Dreams of Passion, she was 27. Her equally youthful heroine Priya lived vicariously through the excesses of Paro, a woman the Victorians would have called an adventuress. Paro revisited reveals itself as something of a genre bender. It’s too cynical to be chick-lit and too familiar to be literary and too smart to be forgotten. Paro herself, though beautiful and ambitious, is too fat to fit neatly into that ’80s sex-and-shoulderpads subgenre most familiar to us through Judith Krantz or Shobhaa Dé. Paro is a bit of an odd bird.

Twenty-four years later, Gokhale has returned to Paro’s hunting grounds. In the sequel Priya: In Incredible Indyaa, Paro is dead and the narrative has shifted to Priya living in Lutyens’ Delhi as the wife of a minister. The prose is indifferent but you may want to read it anyway for Priya’s batty, vague, frequently funny voice. You may want to read it also because Priya is a rare occurrence in fiction — an older woman with a libido who is not seen through the MILF or cougar lens. Early in the novel, Priya has a quick romp with her former lover BR in a hotel room and later even quicker ones with her husband. With the former, it is enthusiastic and a bit ditsy like a Goldie Hawn movie. With the latter, she is detached but fond.

Would Jilly Cooper approve? The 74-year-old British best-selling author’s racy 2010 novel Jump features a grandmother, who apart from her age is indistinguishable from any other Cooper heroine — impetuous, red-hot and perpetually crushing on someone unavailable. Cooper said afterwards that for the first time she had found writing the sex scenes difficult: “I just think I was a bit tired and it’s quite difficult to write sex scenes when you’re tired.” Unlike in Cooper’s taut, firm world, Gokhale’s protagonist acknowledges her ageing body but without the fearful hatred (or worse cute-ification) of young novelists describing old people having sex.

Writing fiction is largely about putting yourself in the minds of people who you are not. But the intersection of age and sex seems to give novelists heebie-jeebies about mortality. There be dragons. (Bigger dragons than the schoolboyish Bad Sex award, which has now corralled Anglophone writers into either never writing a sex scene and certainly never, ever using a metaphor when writing about sex.)

Philip Roth certainly has been getting his share of the hate of the gerontophobic recently. In May, publisher Carmen Callil objected to Roth receiving the Man Booker International award saying his writing made her feel, “as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe”. Callil’s description (the kind of clinical description the Bad Sex award judges must approve of if she had been talking about sex) got a lot of ‘poor, old feminist’ sniggers. It also recharged all those who disapprove of 78-year-old Roth’s protagonists — increasingly older men with active sex lives (and minds, people!) The critiques sound less like David Lodge’s endearing position (‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round’) and more of the atavistic ‘dirty old man’ variety.

One critic said condescendingly that Roth’s early novels had verve. Sure, Brenda dove into the pool, swam, climbed out and flicked her wet swimsuit back into place. A snap that resounded around the world. The daring of Goodbye Columbus was as imagined by a young, shy man. When you are in your 70s and you can conceive a scene (as in The Humbling) with an old man, a tipsy young woman and a green strap-on dildo, does that automatically make you the subject of comedy? Doesn’t it make you a writer who can (ahem) swing for the fences? Priya would think so. But then, she is an odd bird. Fiction could do with some more.

Tiny problems

2011-06-23T23:31:00.002+05:30

The Plot
A gang of little boys live in a housing society, their lives largely unruffled until young Fatka arrives. Fatka cleans cars for a living and only has a dog Bheedu to love. The boys hate him until they love him. But by then the housing society bans him and his dog (thanks to an evil politician). Now the kids must fight to keep their two new subaltern pals.

+10 To that super-senti,Surf Excel ad placed just after opening credits, in a classroom setting making you worry that this is the pap you are going to be watching for two hours.

+10 For making the preoccupations of children largely believable: annoying dogs, boring adults, being routed in cricket, bizarre nicknames, the grossness of milk.

-5 For losing a grip on the children’s dialogue swinging from pert to creepily adult and back. Fatka particularly talks in the insane ‘apun-bole toh’ retro tapori-Creole that invokes not Munnabhai and when we were young but Anil Kapoor and when your dad was young. Though it does get a little bit funny when the other kids pick up the lingo from him.

+7 For The Moment when Fatka is told that he should join the cricket team because the colony team is missing a bowler.His response — Toh main kya nachun? — is one that Che and Marx would have approved of. Bring on the revolution and let it be full of tough little 10-year-olds.

-6 For making the politician an automatic dog-hater. This is not Cruella de Vil who wants the dalmatians to make a hip outfit. This is assembly-line villainy. Frankly, dog-hating is the biggest Mcguffin in this film. The kids start out hating dogs too. And for no real reason.

+5 For not resorting to hopeless sentimentality and twisty manipulation and sticking to a little sentimentality, a little manipulation and decent pacing.

+4 For the invisible presence of Salman Khan through the incredible subtext: such as the shirt-removing macho 10-year-old child labourer Fatka. We get it man, you made this movie. It's all good.

+4 For the plot point involving the feminine- voiced man first known as Googly and then as Manisha (and the moral lesson of how being different is okay). Nicely done.

+2 For The Chaddi Revolution which was good, silly fun, we thought. But then we are very biased.

We can never manage what we cannot measure’

2011-06-11T01:27:00.000+05:30

Interview with Jairam Ramesh

JAIRAM RAMESH, 57, is perhaps the most visible Minister of Environment and Forests India has ever had. His decisions in project after project have had industry and activists play a ‘he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not’ game. In a brief interview at his New Delhi office, a visibly tired Ramesh talked of why India needs green accounting for strong environmental governance. Excerpts from an interview.

In an earlier interview, you talked about going from being a gung-ho growthwallah to just a growthwallah. What happened along the way?
It’s my job. I have to be true to my job for as long as I have it, which may not be for long. I have to do it with transparency and clarity. Mind you, I do not promise to be consistent. When I clear projects, environmentalist Ashish Kothari doesn’t like me. When I block projects, Ashish Kothari likes me. I can’t do anything about that because I am not promising consistency. But the factors that prompted each decision are detailed in 100-page speaking orders on the ministry’s website. And that is what my job requires me to do. That is my karma.

You must be sick of being told that a nine percent growth rate and the environment are incompatible choices.
I don’t know about nine percent growth and the environment. Those numbers will have to be examined. But any growth involves difficult choices. If you are pushing for growth, the energy consumption has to grow too. Currently, we have a great dependence on coal. So how do we create energy sources that are sustainable? These choices will have to be debated and made explicit. But growth is never going to be painless.

What do you think of economist Pavan Sukhdev’s idea of a green economy for India? He says India has the potential for an economic boom through an influx of green jobs, particularly for the rural, unindustrialised sector.
Creating jobs is the first step. Green or any other colour has to be the next step. India adds eight to 10 million people to the workforce every year. China, the only other country that has a comparable demographic to India, adds only 1.5 million to the workforce every year. So the big challenge is to create the right economic environment where there are more jobs.

Are green jobs at the rural level — forest conservation, waste management, clean energy generation — something the environment ministry can push for?
We are not in the fatwa business. People have an outdated idea of the way the environment ministry functions — it is a remnant from a Soviet era of governance, which, thank god, we are not in anymore.

Do you think the idea of a green economy is a slippery slope? In a race to monetise the environment, will we devalue what is priceless?
Not at all. We cannot value anything we cannot measure. And we cannot manage anything we cannot value. That is why we have constituted an expert committee under the Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta to calculate a Green GDP — a GDP adjusted for environmental costs. If there was a Nobel Prize for environmental economics, Partha Dasgupta would get it. The expert committee begins work in July and by 2015, India will have both a green GDP and savings adjusted for environmental costs. And that is just a beginning. We need to make new laws, review old ones and rethink environmental governance. We need to ensure that those who follow the law gain from it and those who don’t are penalised.

Pirates have feelings, you know

2011-05-28T01:33:00.000+05:30

IN ALAN Bennett’s novella The Uncommon Reader, Queen Elizabeth becomes an obsessive reader when her beloved corgis wander by a mobile library near the palace. She’s transformed from a bored, frankly amoral monarch into a sentient being. In one episode, she flummoxes the visiting French president by asking him about Jean Genet.

Recently, Bollywood too offered a tribute to reading. (Perhaps for the first time, but do send angry mail contesting this.) Not to say Hindi cinema ignores the arts. Bollywood often allots characters its outdated conception of the artist’s life. A love for dance, music and pastel landscapes inevitably bring on the head-clutching Bohemian In Decline. Writers are rare, except 2005’s Shabd where Sanjay Dutt plays a Booker winner who prods wife Aishwarya Rai to have an affair so that he can work it into his next plot. But readers — when have we ever seen readers?

Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s recent film Shor in the City traces the sentimental education of a book pirate. Tilak (Tusshar Kapoor) runs a mini empire pirating bestsellers at traffic lights. His best friends are baby goons and he doesn’t know what to do with his alluring new bride. And so, for the best reason in the world — social awkwardness — he begins reading. “The boy’s name was Santiago,” says the first line, and little by dictionary-enabled little, he’s hooked to Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. It helps when he discovers that his wife is a reader and they have something to talk about. His goon friends are appalled — what does he mean he’s done with the old life? Now he is a new kind of menace — someone who will recommend books to any victim.

It was minor genius for Shor to enshrine reading through a) The Alchemist, b) a non-reader and c) a book pirate. Alan Bennett may die if he comes to know he has been out-commoned but Coelho would be delighted. A few years ago, Coelho’s publishers had a cardiac arrest when they found he was pirating himself — posting links to pirated editions of his books on his own website. Coelho argued convincing-ly that his sales soared in countries where readers first encountered him through pirated online editions, sometimes translated by fans. Perhaps those reports of pirated Hindi translations of Chetan Bhagat —a rage in UP before any official translation was even conceived — were true after all.

It was minor genius for Shor to enshrine reading through a) The Alchemist, b) a non-reader and c) a book pirate. Alan Bennett may die if he comes to know he has been out-commoned but Coelho would be delighted. A few years ago, Coelho’s publishers had a cardiac arrest when they found he was pirating himself — posting links to pirated editions of his books on his own website. Coelho argued convincing-ly that his sales soared in countries where readers first encountered him through pirated online editions, sometimes translated by fans. Perhaps those reports of pirated Hindi translations of Chetan Bhagat —a rage in UP before any official translation was even conceived — were true after all.

Dude and babes must die

2011-05-21T23:47:00.000+05:30

The Plot
Sincere teen cutie Rhea (Shraddha Kapoor) finds out her billionaire boyfriend Luv (Taaha Shah) is planning to deflower her and make a sex tape to get points in a rich boys’ contest. (Did anyone say frat party?) Rhea and friends plan revenge. What’s a little John Tucker Must Die between friends? Especially 13-year-old friends.

+3 For the stop-motion fun in the opening credits. Watch those T-shirts.

+7 For the most accurate war for teengirl-speak in years. Thank you, director Bumpy. Umm... minus three for same. People have to stop saying dude, woah, babes, chill. And Bumpy.

-2 For the queen bees. Those who customarily haunt corridors of filmi schools/colleges, have to stop channelling Mean Girls now.

+5 For Archana Puran Singh’s wannabe-cool mom entrance. She’s still got her fingernail scratching a blackboard quality to her voice.

+5 For Rhea’s mother’s accurate stuck-but-stoic-between-generations character. Lots of mums nodding right now.

-10 For ‘don’t lose it in the backseat of a car’ and other 30 paisa xerox copy dialogue.

+7 For the ‘enter password and da, it’s Karthik’ sequence. On such slender pleasures are our geek lives made.

-10 For laxatives and itching powder for revenge. Plus five for a car smashing the girliness of which has only been surpassed by the models’ petrol fight in Zoolander.

+6 Because Rhea smiles and bawls like a teenager. She looks so pretty when she says, “I will have your balls.” No points for boyfriend Luv because we have already forgotten what he looks like.

+2 For jugs (Pushtie S). “Come on Rhea, 50 percent India aise sadak pe sota hai.” In her abrasive fat girl role, she has many good lines.

-5 For the climatic scene for making us think of the sins of the fathers — someone threatening Shakti Kapoor’s daughter with rape. And a fake accent. Plus five for her unceasing glare and self-rescue.

+5 For film ka the end because every teenage girl must make out with Ali Zafar.

Ekta Kapoor will see you now

2011-05-21T23:43:00.000+05:30

THE INTERN is sniffy. When she was hired, she’d thought Ekta ma’m was going to ask her for ‘creative inputs’ into the TV shows. She isn’t at Balaji Telefilms to do “just this”, she gestures vaguely at the office around her with Facebook-weary hands. Does she watch the shows? No! She is horrified. “I keep telling my sister. How can you come home from work and watch them? These shows are for aunties.” What does she watch? Roadies. Reality shows.

A little later, two young TV writers enter the common room. For the next two hours, the plainly dressed men earnestly discuss how to establish a new character’s attributes without making her too simplistic. They’re speaking in Hindi, writing in a mix of Hindi and English, stroking their chins, looking limpid. There’s none of the cynicism that makes the average non-viewer smirk about saas-bahu shows — that enormous meteor shower that Ekta Kapoor created before she turned 25. Those shows changed television, fashion, weddings and claimed a giant space in our popculture history.

To those who haven’t met her, Ekta is a parody — just like her shows are to those who haven’t watched them. Her multiplying rings with soaring gemstones, her many gods, her easy success, her sexual orientation, her cell phoneflinging tantrums, her obsession with astrology and the letter K, her jogging with a phone-toting retinue — everything has become as legendary as her show’s aesthetics. In the vast plains of online fan forums, viewers address complaints directly to an omniscient Ekta — “Ekta, I didn’t understand this part. Why did the vampire bite Pia?”

Wedged between a huge executive desk and a wide sideboard blurred by god paraphernalia, Ekta says, “I used to be a human being. Now I am folklore.” At 35, she combines her infamous bluntness with a kittenish voice. A few years ago, she took to wearing a gemstone that she says helped with her temper. Before you can start wondering if any male producer in Bollywood ever worried about his temper, she adds with a grin, “It helped only 40 percent though.”

Ekta is the face of the production house she runs with her mother Shobhaa Kapoor. She’s been at it for 17 years now. But since 2008, there’s been a new regime of streamlined budgets at Balaji under Puneet Kinra, the group CEO. Ekta herself has welcomed the iron shoes Kinra wears to prevent Balaji from floating off in a swirl of zardozi. Just as importantly, there is now more senior management to ease Ekta’s burden, if she so wishes — which is still a matter of debate inside Balaji — of signing off on every last detail on every last show.

The old habits are interesting to watch. The entire seven-storey building is galvanised from the ground up when Shobhaa Kapoor’s car is spotted down the street. Whiteboards listing the week’s tasks also list ‘Jeetuji’s trip to Hyderabad’. Ekta’s movie star father Jeetendra is promoting the group’s next film Ragini MMS. When writers talk of Balaji investing in their writers, of Balaji refusing to change scripts to please the channel suits, they gesture unconsciously in the direction of Ekta’s office. “You will know when she is here,” the intern says wanly.

THIS IS the room where underconfident writers come to die. Kapoor’s meetings are often protracted and chatty. Working with her requires you to recognise when she shifts gear, and then business is suddenly concluded in a concentrated 10 minutes because she knows what she wants. Ekta’s nose for what viewers will like is formidable. Smriti Irani, star of Balaji’s flagship Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, remembers the 25- year-old Ekta Kapoor insisting on casting her in the face of much opposition, saying, “This is my Tulsi.” And later agreeing with Irani that she should cry as she wanted — face-distorting, ugly tears — not the glycerine prettiness the director wanted.

Her intuition is partly shaman. It is partly an endless interest in details. Althea Kaushal, writer of Balaji’s hit vampire teen show Pyaar Kii Ye Ek Kahani, says, “The thing about Ekta is this. You throw her a plotline and she gives you inputs. A month later if you haven’t incorporated her inputs, she’ll spot it right away. She’ll remember exactly what she told you in spite of having meetings all day long. That’s scary!” This is the same Ekta who jokes about how she was once an undereducated couch potato. She’s somehow turned the two traits of a TV addict — a fragmented attention span and obsessiveness — into a creative dynamo.

When media critics first caught sight of the young woman making those shows that appalled them, they must have paled more. Her orange-tikka’d religiosity was going to take the country back into the Dark Ages, they warned. Ekta has always been unapologetic and amused by this nervousness. A nervousness her parents share. “They are religious, not spiritual,” says Ekta. “They do pujas and all but they worry about me. They keep saying, you are so young. Why do you go to temples?” She adds, “Astrologers keep trying to meet me, they think I’ll fall for anything. I’m not stupid, I think through things. [But] in the astrology world, I am Mallika Sherawat.”

Ekta talks with delicious, sensual enjoyment about alternately seeking passion and calm on her pilgrimages, saying things like: “Tirupati Balaji and I have a bond. When I go to suprabhatam, I get sucked in by his aura. I love him.” Or “Kamakhya is wonderful.” Or “Ajmer Sharif is very calming. Soothing. I prefer the Sufi saints to the Hindu ones.” She speaks with the same thick relish about everything. Of her favourite goddess Kali, she says, “She rides a wild boar because it’s the wildest animal. She feels a little remorse only when she has her foot on a man’s head.” She adds with a smirk, “So she is feminine too.”

Her parents may not get this desire for spiritual uppers and downers but they are, by all reports, workaholics like her. Milan Luthria, director of Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, admires Ekta for being the rare producer who’ll pitch in when the director is alone and beleaguered. He talks fondly of Ekta and her parents for being able to do long hours, endless trips and casual stopovers in small towns. All three combine enormous drive with a gift for being relaxed. “They are happy. It’s rare,” he says.

Which perhaps explains why Ekta never tries to present a picture of Happy Families to the public. She and her mother have raucous fights at work, knowing that when they get home the fight will have to be (and can be) dealt with. Some years ago, she moved out but ended up moving back home in a few months, saying she was too dependent on her mother to run her own household. Ekta says candidly that she and her actor brother Tusshar Kapoor give each other a wide berth to keep their relationship stable.

ONCE, 35 of the top 50 shows on air were Balaji Telefilms creations. Then in 2008, everything went pearshaped. Star Plus, the network that had bought all her shows, decided to take Ekta’s iconic Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi off air. An outraged Ekta sued the channel unsuccessfully and the show’s eight-year glory run — 1,800 episodes — ended in a hiccup.

Ekta had adored the idea of producing a Mahabharat that focussed on Draupadi’s dealings with the Pandavas as modern relationships. Her Mahabharat on 9X had perfect bodies and a colloquial idiom, but some audiences mumbled it was too realistic and not BR Chopra, others complained it wasn’t realistic and not HBO. It failed, along with the channel.

Meanwhile, audiences were spurning saas-bahu shows for the charms of reality TV and shows about rural girlhood. Balaji was reduced to having just four shows on air in 2008. The new flock of shows like Balika Vadhu that came then frankly surprised Ekta, who says about them, “Forget getting into them, I didn’t get them. Child marriage and women beating their daughters-in-law. I’d never seen anything like it.” Balaji announced a net loss of Rs 14 crore for the quarter ended March 2009. It was as if the evil vamp had wormed her way into the heart of the family and thrown Ekta out.

The channels who didn’t anticipate this new wave condemned them as regressive, but Ekta is humbler and says, “I felt it was a gap in my experience that this rural reality was not something I knew anything about.” And suddenly it clicks. However anachronistic, those zardozi family dramas were, in the end, urban. They were about urban joint families that Ekta had watched as a stealthy outsider. They were as urban as the young people for whom Balaji is making movies today.

And as TV will teach you, you can’t keep a good woman down. Balaji is now more professionally run — and profitable again. Today, it has four shows on air — all youth-centred with an individualistic ethos. Pavitra Rishta is the top show in the country, while Pyaar Kii Ye Ek Kahani has the highest ratings on Star One. The TV business is chugging along, but Ekta says she’s more energised now by her films division.

Above the heads of the restless intern and the earnest writers, Balaji’s films division is a place of efficient people with thin, gentle smiles and hair in thin, gentle spikes. Balaji Motion Pictures produces stylish mainstream aspirants like Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and Shor in the City. More interestingly, the films division’s ALT brand is gathering attention for edgy films like Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, this week’s Ragini MMS (a horror date film) and soon Dirty Picture (a biopic about Silk Smitha).

This is not the wild swing in taste that Ekta watchers claim it to be. It is, in fact, consistent with her focus on urban storytelling. Ekta has added up two facts since 2008: 1) Young urban viewers do less and less appointment TV viewing and prefer to download shows or set aside weekends for movies. 2) There is urban life outside Mumbai. She recounts her happy surprise at attending cool house parties in Chandigarh and meeting articulate young people in Guwahati.

PhD theses and newspaper columns keep condemning TV shows as regressive and anti-women. They don’t get the radical appeal to viewers in their making women protagonists central, even if in slo-mo. Ekta has made no secret that the men on her shows are merely eye candy. In a 2007 episode of Koffee With Karan, she fake-leered her way through a description of casting cherubic Hiten Tejwani and the suave Ram Kapoor for different age groups of her women viewers. “Indian women are not worrying about ‘Why’d you say that to me at dinner?’” she told Johar. “They’re worrying about their in-laws.” The critical contempt hasn’t been towards Ekta’s shows, it’s been towards the minutiae of women’s domestic lives.

She laughs at silly allegations that her films are all about sex. “Today, no one needs to go to the movies to watch sex. You can download any amount of porn for free. Movies need to talk about young people’s lives in the language they use. About relationships. Money. Sex.”

The culture has changed in the 17 years Ekta has been at work. We are equally at ease with mata ki chowkis and dirty weekends. She observes with pleasure how, increasingly, Indians are now more comfortable in their skin. In the end, this is what is most attractive about Ekta — her desire to live in multiple worlds and let others do the same.

Porn At The End Of the Rainbow

2011-05-03T23:21:00.001+05:30

THE MOMENT in which your innocent sex tape turns into porn is the moment when English news channels talk with long faces about privacy and the Hindi channels, with less long faces, use variations of the phrase ‘zaleel harkat’. Until that moment, the sex tape1 was something you made one bored afternoon or slightly drunken night. You did it ‘me, by myself’, with your significant other, for your significant other or with a horde of fellow revellers all laughing hysterically because what could be funnier than pretending you are sexy. (Though you know you are. Of course, you are).

Once earnest editorials are written about lives ruined in premier institutions, the party is, alas, over. The disingenuous questions always posed at this moment are: Why make sex tapes? Why do ‘these girls’ agree to be taped? The answer to both is ‘because they can’. You can apply pop psychology labels of voyeurism or exhibitionism but they don’t tell you anything new. Human beings are always tinglingly alive to new tweaks on old pleasures. The phone camera is this decade’s sex tweak and the making of the sex tape is merely a new addition to the human repertoire. You could even call it position No 34. 2 (Aside: sometimes the phone camera as sex toy is not just a metaphor. Once people were embarrassingly hospitalised with root vegetables where they ought not to be in, you now hear of freak accidents involving cell phones in places they ought not to be in.)

And once you understand that, you figure why ‘these girls’ agree to be taped. Allow the possibility that the sexually curious young woman might (surprise, surprise) initiate the creation of a sex tape, throw herself into it enthusiastically and even watch it uproariously. Hence the cult around the beautiful woman in Mysore Mallige (a wildly popular sex tape that emerged from Karnataka in 2003) or the genuine admiration for the Noida MBA student in the 2009 MMS who gamely stripped and danced for her lover.

The Internet is awash with ‘Indian homemades’. (Of course, the altruistic nature of the Internet is such that someone somewhere created a website with a ‘rainbow’ device. Pick a spot on the rainbow and find porn shot in that exact tint. Happy surfing.) Two genres of Indian homemades are considered blue-chip. 1) Fake/real sex tapes of Bollywood or political celebrities. 2) The ‘leaked’ tape from an educational institution. IIT, JNU, Noida B-School — these labels are instant narratives for viewers to hang their fantasies on..

Few of the thousands of Indian sex tapes ever make it to the news but many make for interesting viewing. Somewhere on Youporn or Redtube or any number of other porn sites is a video labelled ‘Delhi University Girls’ — a group of five raucous girls, sprawled on the floor of what looks like a hostel room, whose hysterical giggles is the soundtrack to their irritating essays in porn stardom. Apart from howling at each other to ‘dikhao, dikhao’, each takes coy turns to tug down her neckline and flash her cleavage at the camera. And that is as far as it goes. But the video is pregnant with the potential of how much further they could go, visibly marked as they are by their knowledge of how ‘girls gone wild’ behave in front of camera. It’s the kind of stuff that’d make Naomi Wolf’s hair stand on end.

American anti-porn activists such as Wolf and Andrea Dworkin have argued that young women and men in the West are doomed to play porn stars in their private lives. After the arrival of the Internet, Wolf argues, porn has become the wallpaper of our lives, teaching us our expectations of what sex looks, feels and smells like. Certainly, if you have watched the 2004 Delhi Public School (DPS) student’s MMS, you would believe that apocalypse is now. The schoolgirl in the MMS is persuaded by her boyfriend to ignore the phone he is holding over her head. Because, don’t worry, he is not recording her, you hear him say. He is only watching porn on his cellphone. This is a schoolgirl who thinks it is all right for her boyfriend to be watching porn on his cellphone while she is giving him a blow job. (Of course, being ignored in favour of porn is a legitimate sexual thrill too for someone somewhere. But it is too depressing to attribute such jaded palates to children).

Cut to February 2011 when emerged the JNU couple who made a tape of themselves getting into the mood for some action by watching some porn. JNU’s chief proctor complained in an interview to TEHELKA, “Both of them start having sex after watching a porn clip themselves. The room has been given to them for studying and research and not for such things. There is a lot of healthy entertainment available on campus. Even then if they did such a thing, then it is objectionable.” Does healthy entertainment mean table tennis or Iranian cinema? Because then, Mr Proctor sir, sorry. Mohsin Makhmalbaf just does not cut it for a hormonal couple. For those bred on the image, sex is spectacle. Anti-porn activists have argued that the psychological damage lies in women imagining that their sexual persona lies only in being spectacle — and not in their eager muscle, nerve and imagination. Unfortunately, that attempt at reconfiguring of our sexual imaginations has been undertaken by mainstream pop culture — movies and advertising — just as ably as porn. So it is not so lurid to imagine that some of the people who make sex tapes are secretly hoping for leaks — because look at how good I look from this angle, how could I possibly keep this wealth to myself?

MANY FANS of homemade sex tapes like them for their grit, awkwardness and surprises — bored as they are by the slick finish and paint-by-numbers predictability of the multi-billion dollar porn industry. (So, of course, the porn industry now has legions of films faking the homemade sex tape aesthetic). As you plunge and drown in the sea of breasts, buttocks and body hair of Indian homemades, you are likely to find a surprisingly charming exponent of sex tape. This is roughly how it goes. A young woman, sometimes plain, sometimes spectacularly pretty, looking with mild, unstudied amusement or curiosity at the camera. Without coyness or giggling, she undresses a bit. Perhaps a hook or two of her sari blouse.

The mumbling voice behind the camera tries to coax her to go further. Sometimes she follows the suggestions. Sometimes she ignores them. The camera sometimes gives up and decides to zoom in on her lips, her eyes, her jawline. In another era, the awestruck lover might have been mucking about with a paintbrush instead. What is also evident in this variety of sex tape is the subject’s faith in her own desirability and trust in the person playing with the camera. Presumably until the video went online. But that is just an assumption. Yon unschooled maiden (whom we could eagerly fetishise) too might this very moment be discovering the joys of being a spectacle, as her sex tape joins billions of others online.

Here is the only way of preventing your sex tape from leaking: don’t make one. If you must make one (which you must), prepare for two possibilities. You may never view it more than once because what felt good is not necessarily going to look good (as clever little James Franco confessed in January about a sex tape he made when he was 19, sending search engines into a frenzy). The second possibility (and this we guarantee) is that someone else is going to view them. Over and over again. And perhaps rate them and leave badly spelt comments below. Prepare to grin and bear it.

Many of the women in ‘Indian homemades’ — the ones from Noida, DPS or JNU — are victims only in that the universe conspires to shame them for their minor sexual adventure when the tape leaks. Urban myths abound how they paid the price — they must have surely paid the price, we say almost hopefully. Once we acknowledge that we crave to see and be seen, perhaps then the sting embedded under our skin will dissolve.

1 We are using the phrase ‘sex tape’ rather than MMS even though no one uses VHS anymore because it sounds friendlier than any three-letter acronym.
2 As homage to Rule 34 of the Internet, a meme which states that "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions."

Vamps and margins talk back

2011-04-30T01:17:00.001+05:30

WHEN BRITISH journalist Sarah Harris made a documentary on dev-dasis and sex workers in India, who could have guessed the twist in the tale? She hung out with members of Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP), a 5,000-strong collective of men, women and transgender sex workers in Sangli, Maharashtra. Duly a film was made and Harris christened it Prostitutes of God. The film is packed with foreign-filmmaker-in-India clichés — ‘fat Hindu gods with blue skin bikinis’ and an alarming disrespect for those who welcomed her into their homes. Harris also ‘outs’ a young woman’s HIV positive status. When the collective watched the film in 2010, they were outraged at the many betrayals.

Normally, this is where the story would have ended, except VAMP decided to fight back. The collective made a short, pithy video riposte and uploaded it on YouTube — it is a remarkable document. Speaking directly to the camera, several members of the collective in Sangli confront Harris, wherever she is, on her racism, manipulation of the facts and plain ignorance. “Did we come to your house and insult your god? Did you tell that girl you are going to tell everyone she has HIV and that she is spreading AIDS?”

The video’s first impact is forcing Harris to excise the outing of the HIV positive woman from her film. There has been no apology from the filmmakers but as of now, nearly 10,000 people have watched VAMP’s response — Sangli Talkies’ first hit.

This film was one of a handful of spunky exemplars of the global south staking digital turf that emerged at Count Me In! — a recent feminist conference in Kathmandu, Nepal. Delhi-based human rights organisation CREA brought together marginalised women — sex workers, disabled, single, young, lesbian and HIV-positive women, and trans people from South Asia — to discuss violence against women.

The usual criticisms of too much, too little can easily be levelled at a conference of this scale (nearly 400 participants) but as non-profit conference- hoppers will tell you, look for the energy offstage — in the (o, overused phrase) margins. At Count Me In!, the margins swarmed with the attitude of Sri Lankan photography of drag kings, Indian activists loudly speculating over international phone lines on how Section 377 will fare in the Supreme Court this week, and a beautiful, disabled dancer. The piquancy lay more in the Pakistani contingent covering their faces and wincing when the cross-dressing television host Begum Nawazish Ali made yet another lame phallic architecture joke. The promise of a different world lay more in the confidence of the members of the Blue Diamond Society (BDS), an organisation working for the rights of the third gender in Nepal. Two days before the conference, BDS had finally persuaded the government to issue citizenship certificate to a person of third gender for the first time. The promise lies in imagining a conference a few years from now, when Sangli Talkies would have their own hits, not rebuttals.

Authenticity can be such a pain

2011-04-30T00:55:00.002+05:30

IN THE author’s note, Aamer Hussein says, “My novel is the story of some of the paths I might have taken.” The book does bear the dull, deadening smell of authenticity — as if written in a rush of memory.

Like the Urdu and Persian poetry the protagonist, Mehran, is addicted to, this is a novel that constantly examines separation — from home, family, lovers and friends. As a child in Karachi, he watches his family in constant Brownian movement, vibrating with a desire for adventure and romance. As an adult in London, Mehran is tethered somewhat by a lack of money. He can only study hard and wait for what romance will find him — in the shape of the older and elusive woman Riccarda, the affectionate classmate Marco and the difficult lover Marvi.

Mehran is unceasingly gentle, his three friends less so but all are attuned to language and poetry. The trio are the only ones who understand Mehran’s need for an Urdu at once contemporary and rooted in a great tradition. The novel is interspersed with short and long poems — translated often by Hussein himself. The bulk of the book grows out of Mehran’s days studying Urdu and Persian in a fictionalised SOAS and his preoccupations about translation, orientalism and alienation.

Hussein’s prose is simple, quiet and elegant — adjectives this reviewer is beginning to despise, but the alternative might’ve been the heavy-handed allegory the novel begins and ends with or more elaboration of the rain/cloud/desert metaphor. There’s too much musing of the meaning of Karachi/London/Indore/ Delhi, as Mehran wanders elegantly.

Sentences such as “I spent my life longing for the place I’m not in, but when I go back I never fit” or “He has begun to feel, after the Indian trips, that he doesn’t belong anywhere; he is no longer in thrall of the places of his past’’ should be banned. As the novel says, quoting Shauq, “Chup raho kyun abas bhi rote ho/muft kahe ko jaan khote ho”. One wishes the characters would give their cerebral cocoon and Hafiz a skip and go to a karaoke bar or tend to goats.

The Jat Mutation

2011-04-16T23:36:00.001+05:30

In the late 1990s, when kitsch was still cool and Channel V was the best friend everyone had been waiting for, Udham Singh arrived on his haunches. Props: a buffalo, a lathi and a dangerous, deadpan sense of humour. Udham was a Borat before his time, both playing out the stereotypes of a Haryanvi Jat and puncturing the hot air balloons of English speaking urbanites. Manish Makhija, the radio jockey and music composer who played and scripted Udham Singhn, lives in Mumbai. The show might be long gone but his Jatphilia still thrives. Occasionaly he chats up young Jats in Mumbai nightclubs where, far from home, they're thrilled at the chance to to slip back into the lingo and rough hewn accents that their parents paid so much to erase out of them.

The jats occupy their own niche in the mosaic of stereotypes in the Indian consciousness, and the stereotype can turn out to be startlingly alive: a marshal race, patriarchal, brawny, artless, proud, phlegmatic, blunt, impetuous, fight-ready. In shorthand, somewhat similar to Punjabis -- but gruffer. “They say things straight,” says Makhija. “I've always thought that the Jat reputation for aggression comes from a frustration that other people are unwilling to listen to the truth.” And when the Jats threaten to disrupt the minding-our-own-business lives of urban Indians with demands of wanting to be classified as OBCs, the rest of the country is left puzzled. What is their problem? Where's all that pride now? Just where do they get off?

Over a thousand kilometers away from Mumbai, across UP and Haryana great masses of Jats would agree with Makhija. The summer has just begun and their battle is being conducted in fits and starts. Under the banner of All India Jat Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti (AIJASS), thousands of Jats spent 20 days in March squatting on 14 train tracks in UP and Haryana. Their demand vexed the country, and yet to them it seemed simple, natural, logical. Jats are already considered OBC (at the state level) in half a dozen states, including UP and Delhi. In Rajasthan they already have OBC status in both state and Central level (barring two districts). Make the same happen for Jats everywhere.

Or else? Or else watch Delhi grind to a halt, its roads blocked off without access to essential supplies, oil, even water.

This virile threat is not, despite newspaper columnists' confusion, a sudden development. It's been a long time coming, and now it's reached siren levels.

Last month, after a year of hectic procrastination and delay tactics, Delhi finally panicked in slow motion. Trains cancelled! Are these Jats going to be like the violent Gujjars? They want reservation in state and central goverment jobs! But aren't they embarrassed in demanding to become OBCs?

On March 26, the energy is still high in Kafurpur village, near Amroha in UP, though after a Supreme Court order to resume essential supplies, the movement has stopped blocking the tracks and moved its agitation to a tented college ground across the street. The police presence is relaxed and friendly. UP Chief Minister Mayawati has no bone to pick with the movement, despite the acrimonious relationship between Jats and Dalits. AIJASS president Yashpal Malik left at midnight to attend a hasty meeting called by Haryana CM BS Hooda. A week earlier, a meeting with Home Minister P Chidambaram had gotten nowhere. Over the last five years, Malik has led massive and determinedly peaceful demonstrations, each time calling it off when the government promised to look into it. Last year saw the AIJASS issue a series of escalating threats – including cutting off Delhi's water supply at Muradnagar for a while in June, threats to disrupt the CWG and blocking dozens of roads to Delhi in September (which involved the one burst of violence so far in the agitation, when an SP allegedly shot a jat demonstrator in Hisar which led to a riot) – but the politicians proved better at brinkmanship, providing falsetto assurances every time that went nowhere. Last Novemeber at another demonstration in Jantar Mantar, the jats pronounced that they were done with their grovelling – they'd now meet the powers-that-be on their homeground, not in Delhi. They resolved their March 2011 agitation at that meeting, and when still nothing had happened by this Spring, blocked the trains tracks last month which finally got the nation's attention.

For now, the agitation has been suspended for six months till September after assurances from both the Centre and CM Hooda that they will seriously consider the demands. In the interim, the jats plan to organise 'chetna yatras' (warning rallies) to ensure that the fever of discontent stays high in the heartland.

The people gathered at Kafurpur are not in the least disheartened. They have been fobbed off so far, they are not going to be fobbed off forever. They're convinced they have the power – and the will – to turn Delhi into a starving island.

In a strange way, it is the electric world of the island of Delhi that is the prize. In village after village, Jat families are announcing that they are done. We are done with farming. What can you earn with working on 10 bighas of land? We are done with farmers' credit cards and bank loans. We are done with being patriotic sons of the soil, with doing the nation's heavy lifting, with serving as soldiers and lowly police constables. Do you know how many Jats died in Kargil? We want our children to go to technical colleges and live as they do in the cities. We want technology. The cry is uniform from the men, from the women, from young people and older people – we've been left behind in this slantedly globalised world and we now know our brawn will get us nothing. We want our pens to have power.

Entering Jat colonies in Kandhera village outside the dusty UP town of Baraut, there isn't the miasma of dissatisfaction that blanketed the agitations in Amroha. Instead, there is the silence of houses surrounded by fields, rooms where the sun is always carefully kept out, the comfort of shadows. The eyes surveying visitors are confident and rather incurious. Conversations are direct and salty. This is the virile, somewhat insular face of the Jat stereotype. The average Jat will trace his history back a few centuries, to one or another battle fought bravely. Or tell you how Jats descended from Shiva's dreadlocks – his matted 'jattas'. A recent medical study of what is known as the 'Jat mutation' shows distinct genetic links between Jats and the Roma gypsies. But Jats are not a carefully gazetted caste with a cultivated caste myth. Even the current AIJASS movement is based on an ethnic identity beyond the caste system, inclusive of Jat Sikhs and Jat Muslims.

Which makes the claiming of OBC status a very pragmatic decision, without stigma, without embarrassment. Peetam Singh, a retired bank manager in JP Nagar district in UP is one of hundreds in the movement who will tell you, “We were never oppressed before. But we are now, aren't we? What can you earn on 15 bighas? How can you send your children to good schools.” What enrages the Jats is that every other community they consider their equal got the OBC status. “The Gujjars, the Kashyaps, Yadavs, Kurmis....” Singh goes on listing what decades ago sociologist MN Srinivas handily and vaguely called dominant castes – land, political power, pride in their geneology and claims to having steered history.

Every village has a host of unmarried men. Unmarriageable since they’re farmers. Farming is uncool, say the young boys and girls

Big towns and cities are only a few hours away but they might as well be light years. Older Jats complain that their youngsters want and buy, like everyone else, cellphones, jeans, cars. But they have no way of paying the bills. Abhisehk Tomar, 31, the not-so-young-looking youth leader of the AIJASS in UP runs a spare parts shop in Baraut. “Of course, people turn to crime,” he says. “Robbery, murder, it's all getting very common among young Jats.” He also expresses pious despair that young people are turning to alcohol. Others are less sanctimonious, such as his 24-year-old friend Sanjeev Chowdhary, who actually works in the liquor store across Abhishek's shop.

22-year-old Vikas Tomar shuttles between Rohini, a Delhi suburb and his village two hours away. Quiet, podgy and easygoing, he has a raw stitched wound on his arm, which he keeps picking at. He was injured in Amroha while squatting on the railway tracks and is reticent to explain how. When prodded about crime and young people, he smiles and shrugs. Sure. Yes, some of his friends have turned to crime. Hours later, feeling more comfortable and apropos of nothing, he shyly brags about 'helping' someone in Delhi evict a tenant. How he and a gang of jat boys arrived quietly. Gagged the tenant. Took his mobile. Put him in a sack. Beat him up a bit. Changed the locks. Shifted the house items to a tempo and drove them all away to the tenant's village. Neighbours heard nothing. Vikas smiles.

Every village has households of unmarried men. Unmarriagable since they're farmers. Jat pradhan Sukhram Pal says contemptously that he would rather marry his daughter to a sweeper than a farmer. His pals around the charpoy guffaw. Many UP jats distance themselves from the infamous misogyny of Haryana's khaps. “We have love marriages,” explains Naresh Singh, a UP jat pradhan. “We will stay united. We need to tell those [Harayana jats] to be a little more normal.”

Yogendra Yadav, senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, recently wrote a newspaper column in disgust at what he called the 'familiar script' of the Jat crisis. India is going to experience this crisis over and over again with different communities. Yadav’s solution is an evidence-based approach through an Equal Opportunities Commission (proposed by an expert committee and promised in the 2009 Congress manifesto) that will actually examine socio-economic data for competing claims for reservation. Yadav also railed briefly about the national media treating these caste groups ‘as if they are alien tribes from Africa.’ Yadav’s solution is an excellent one, one that may rescue governments from the quicksand they are in.

On the other hand, the Jat ‘script’ is proof to some scholars that the caste system is not a framework that explains reality – that the Jat or any other caste is always a moving target. Or to put it simply, why is the caste framework unable to allow us to identify who a Jat is. Vivek Dhareshwar, Bengaluru-based scholar has long mocked the caste system as a way of understanding Indian reality – calling it the theoretical framework of the colonial explorers who were meeting ‘alien tribes’. He says, “It is a framework trying to hold disparate ideas and failing. What does the term ‘caste’ picks up? Jat, Jain a muslim, trade, craft. All the idea of caste can be is a counter of the state and groups of people will try to see if they can fit themselves into the counter. It isn’t a theoretical framework.” Certainly, there is something absurd about the Jats claiming OBC status because the Gujjars in Rajasthan got it and the Gujjars in turn wanting to become declared Scheduled Tribe out of fear that the Jats will eat into the OBC pie.

The jats are not fighting for their identity or culture, they are not fighting historical grievances, they are not fighting social ostracisation. In typical fashion, they're upfront in stating that this is all about economics, about seeing themselves left behind, about the fear of a perpetual lag. Farming is uncool, say both the young boys and girls. It's also unviable, chorus their elders. The community wants modernity, and for this it is resorting to a traditional solution – caste reservation. It wants technology, and for this it dreams of that archaic thing – a government job.

The jats are clear: in a world of not too many options, this is one way of getting a head start. "Even our gods in temples are now made in China – and China is a godless country!” says one elderly gentleman who won't identify himself. “But it's invested in technology, in teaching young people – we also want that.”

Back at the college grounds, dozens of young girls sit in the sun and discuss how they don't want to stay home after school. They want work, they'd love to work in an MNC but how do you get into good companies without having gone to a good college? And who has the money to pay for a good college anyway? The older women ask angrily, do you know how far they have to commute to go to a bad college? Mithlesh, a housewife in her 30s, almost screams, “Don't we have dreams?” Those sitting around her are first startled, then guffaw at her cinematic explosion. The ambition and despair might be expressed in borrowed pop culture lingo, but the desire to rise in the global food chain is very real.

In Kandhera, Sachin Tomar is 22 but seems younger. The first year B Com student sits in the living room of a sprawling house. Sachin is an lanky, mild giant who wants to be a teacher but is probably going to end up as a delhi police constable, like his elder brother. That elder brother, praised as the scholar in the family, gave the Crime Branch exam but missed the cut-off by 2 percent. His father grimly points out that he'd have made it if there was reservation for Jats.

Contrast this with Rinku Chowdhary, 23, son of a sugar mill owner near Amroha. Dressed in a blazing pink muscle tshirt and always on his cellphone, Rinku is in a long sulk about not getting into a job he wanted in Dehra Dun even after finishing his MBA. He has a sense of frustrated entitlement but the discontent is palpable even in him.

Historian Irfan Habib once quoted Huein Tsang's 7th century account of encountering what Habib speculates were the Jats, where Tsang says these people “have no masters” and mentions their “unfeeling temper” and “hasty disposition”. AIJASS president Yashpal Malik says something startling that shows how the jats are vying to break out of that ageless mould, and his words might also bridge the gap between Sachin and Rinku. “We have the raw products, we wear jeans and tshirt and have cellphones and cement houses now. But real prosperity will come with tehzeeb. We have to teach ourselves that, it will come with better thinking.”

Today, Rinku and Sachin and Vikas and Abhishek and other Jat youth are always on message, dully trilling what they've been taught through the movement. But between their elders' lines the young jats of India are hoping to strike their own designs, as they slowly come into focus. Between his glamourous pouts Rinku has visions of a greater Jat future. We will have schools. We will have engineering colleges. Medical colleges. “I want to make Jat a brand,” he smiles. “like Nike and Reebok."

Murder on the Wannabe Express

2011-04-16T01:36:00.000+05:30

The Plot
Billionaire Kabir Malhotra (Anupam Kher) summons a drug dealer, a Thai prime ministerial candidate, a British journalist and a Bollywood star to his Greek island for mysterious reasons. He knows something about each of them. High jinks ensue.

+ 10 for creating bollywood’s first malayali protagonist neil menon (Abhishek Bachchan). This following Bollywood’s first Ladakhi protagonist (Phunsukh Wangdu of 3 Idiots) is a big thrill for our multiculti heart. He is bored, neurotic, feels huzun in Istanbul and reads Murakami, making him utterly convincing. A tired minus three for revealing he is only pretending to be a Malayali because by then we have given up.

- 5 for line after line of farhan akhtar’s translated-from-english dialogue. (Our favourite: Latin zubaan mein ek kahavat hain. Cui bono.) Minus two for those that seem to have been written by Abhishek Bachchan — a mysterious Chelsea football segue.

+ 6 for the shameless aspirations of the script. Agatha Christie meets Ludlum wannabe meets CSI meets us howling in laughter. Of course, the billionaire must say, “I’ll see them in the library” to his secretary as if it is Downton Abbey and discuss wine as if it is the Travel and Living Channel.

- 10 for creating an op ramsay (Boman Irani), a politician so useless he is unable to tell a reporter where his funds come from. He also dies because of a single sting operation. We miss omnipotent, shark-loving grand villains like Shakal from Shaan.

+ 5 to Kangana and Shahana for playing policewoman and journalist/lost daughter in ways that don’t embarrass anyone in a thriller with holes in the plot so big you could put a few Greek islands in them for safekeeping.

+ 5 to the pretty face of Sarah Jane Dias We feel bad pointing out that an exotic dancer without a posterior is no exotic dancer. However, she was nice to look at during her Monte Carlo sweater ad style romance with Abhishek Bachchan.

+ 5 for the most awesome updating of Indian technology optimism. Witness the British investigators conducting surveillance across countries in a way God would envy.

- 10 for the Kabir Malhotra has a twin number. Oy, mastermind, why didn’t you just bump off your rich brother? Why toy with our tiny minds? And most mysteriously, Kabir Malhotraji, whatever were you planning with your assembled menagerie on the island? What was the Game?

A big comic con

2011-04-09T01:53:00.002+05:30

+ 10 FOR CREATING A NEW DRINKING
game. Is this movie Inception meets Shutter Island meets The Baby-Sitters Club? Or is it The Baby-Sitters Club meetsShowgirls? Or is it Baz Luhrmann’s Matrix meets Afro Samurai? So many lovely ways to lose consciousness while watching this movie and you will want to.

- 10 FOR THE MOST ANNOYING,
metaphor-heavy, cringe-making voiceover ever. Luckily, it pops up only in the beginning and the end. So plus five to Zack for that decision.

+ 6 FOR THE BORDELLO
loving imagination of the unreliable narrator Babydoll. Combined with the unreliable narration of writers Steve Shibuya and Zack Snyder, all you end up with is head-scratching.

+ 5 FOR THE ROTATING RED BED IN
the bordello because what is a bordello without girlish camaraderie, golden-hearted whores and a rotating red bed?

+ 3 FOR MAKING JON HAMM THE
doctor who lobotomises mad girls. As Tina Fey says of his 30Rock character: so handsome!

- 10 FOR CREATING THE MOST
dull quests for the girls, making you miss action sequences ofSuper Mario Bros or was it Prince of Persia? Perhaps Pac-Man.

+ 10 TO CINEMATOGRAPHER LARRY
Fong for creating the rich, burnished look, that is the only reason for you to keep watching. (This despite the presence of five pretty girls in short skirts and sexy Carla Gugino as Dr Gorski, the Madam of the brothel.) Thanks to Fong, every scene looks like a page out of a comic book you want to buy.

- 10 FOR KILLING THE
gallant Rocket (Jena Malone). Of course, the moment we saw her kind eyes and determined little chin, we knew she was going to be offed but still. Also, why didn’t Snyder have any suicide girls in the troop instead of this all-American girl band?

+ 5 FOR DISCOVERING EMILY BROWNING,
who plays blank-faced Babydoll. Fourteen-year-old boys everywhere will always love the violent hottie and thus the order of the world is maintained. The rest of us geriatrics think the surprise element of the wee little girl vigilante began with Buffy and ended with Kick-Ass.

- 6 FOR NEVER EXPLAINING TO US,
even in the end, why Babydoll (Emily Browning) is Super-Babydoll. We like, we love back stories for ass-kickers, even if you could only squash them in a single panel in the end because of the vaulting ambitions of your narrative.