Blogs don’t usually come better than this: A simple desultory Philippic Written by an anonymous Indian bureaucrat with an aerodynamic hairstyle. Link through India Uncut.
Apr 082005
Apr 082005
Dairy Milk turned hundred this year. Apparently,
Throughout history chocolate has been associated with romance and sharing.
Hmm.
Before Playstations and iPods, chocolates were rewards. When I interviewed for my first grade – reciting Ding Dong Bell, (stopping at Tommy Stout) identifying colors counting pens and trying hard not to cry at the sight of the rude man who wore a gown – I got to choose a reward, and picked a Five Star and a Dairy Milk with no fruits or nuts, and even convinced my poor dad that I could eat them all by myself. I liked the Five Star better, maybe because I was a boy. Or just because unlike Dairy Milk it wasn’t partitioned into square blocks that somehow made it acceptable for people to ask for a piece or three. Screw that! So much for sharing.
Later in life, chocolates were romantic overtures. Especially Five Star, because all the ads had pretty girls and boys getting together over one. Love letters without chocolate didn’t mean much. The ones with chocolate didn’t mean much either, but they definitely tasted better. I gave Lavanya a bar of white chocolate from Lindt, once and got informed that it tasted like Horlicks. So much for romance.
Apr 052005
Jayakantan, winner of the Jnanpith award this year is one of the writers I’m proud to have read. And read again. And again now, thanks to the internets. And (cliché alert!) yes, the Jnanpith just went up a few notches in esteem.
His writing is minimalist: businesslike, brisk, and shorn of adornments. The content always takes precedence over presentation. Not for him the verbal flourishes of a Marquez or even Le Carre. Writing was but a medium to showcase his ideas – his brilliant, radical and often controversial ideas. He courted controversy, and reveled in shocking conventional sensitivities. He went on to write for a few films, and even directed a couple. Another medium.
A staunch Marxist, he was a fixture on Theekadhir, a red “newspaper” that my uncle used to buy – my first introduction to the man. Later, I read Sila Nerangalil Sila Manidhargal and walked around for a few days swelling with pride – that works like this existed in Tamil and that I had read it.
This article in the Indian Express is an evocative, incisive tribute by Jayathirth Rao. No one could’ve said it better. Link through India Uncut.
Jayakantan, however, is much more than the mere aggregation of his inherited traditions. He is, above all, an individual with a sense of the future, one who makes his or her own future, a future which is usually coloured with hints of an optimistic dawn about to happen. His masterstroke is to revisit the past and examine the possibility of different futures…
On another note, why is it that all the artists in my life bleed so red? Le Carre, Jayakanthan. And Illayaraaja who started off his career singing Communist propaganda songs. Sheer chance maybe. Or perhaps, God willed it thus.
Apr 052005
Bala’s singularly original Pithamagan was one of the better Tamil movies last year. It is about a young man brought up by an undertaker. He lives all his life in a cemetery, becoming an undertaker himself when his foster dad dies. He lives his life in isolation, with almost no contact with civilized society, ‘cept when burning their corpses. He is unfeeling and callous, his demeanour the same whether he is burying a child or watering a plant. His vocabulary is limited: all that he does is bray a weird song loudly when burning corpses. What happens when this “child of God” tries to enter civilized society in the company of an assortment of fringe characters?
Pithamagan is also an illustration of how one great artist can inspire another. Bala is a confessed Jayakanthan fan, and it is no surprise that the lead character in Pithamagan draws some inspiration from a Jayakanthan short story: ‘Nandavanathi Oru Aandi’ — which is about an undertaker living in isolation, considered “mad” by society because of his quirks, who is unfeeling and callous and happens to sing a song every time he buries a body. The similarities end there, but the source of the character is unmistakable.
Bala is quite possibly the best young director in India today. On second thoughts, I think I’ll get rid of the qualification and state simply: Bala is the best young film maker in India today. I say young, because he is only three movies old. All three of his movies are morose and inward-looking. Almost all the scenes fill you with a strange foreboding, even the funny ones. When I watched Mystic River, I was reminded of Nanda — not because the two movies were similar, but because they both made you feel the same way.
Bala is commercially successful without making what lesser directors refer to euphemistically as “compromises.” He dares to pick unconventional subjects and works hard on them. He chooses his actors after he has written the move — an unbelievably hard thing to do in Indian films. His films don’t preach — Bala understands that the role of art is to reflect life, not to change it. I hope he goes far.
PS : Bala wrote a wonderful series of autobiographical articles in Vikatan (paid registration required) that go some way in explaining what makes him tick: he writes candidly about being an academic failure and doing drugs; how his life changed after coming across works by people like Jayakanthan and Balu Mahendra among others. Here was a wastrel who used his love of art to rescue himself from obscurity. A filmmaker who reads. Another reason to hope he goes very far.
