Desicritics Author: PH

Farewell, Faraz

PH — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:57:26 EDT

Ahmed Faraz succumbed to kidney failure on August 25th in Islamabad. My first Urdu book ever was his "Be Aawaaz Galii KuuchoN meN" (In Voiceless Lanes and Quarters). But that's just one of those trivia you think of and smile wistfully when you learn of the passing of a writer you've admired.

Faraz was admired by many. Along with Faiz and Parveen Shakir (whom he graciously referred to as the most read poet after Faiz in Pakistan), he formed the holy trinity of Urdu poetry in Pakistan. Much like a Hindu god, he had many titles bestowed on him - progressive, communist, traitor, rebel, non-conformist and what not. Both India and Pakistan heaped their highest literary awards on him. But labels never do justice to an artist. So we may call him a Pakistani but he has said,

ab kis ke geet sunaate ho, woh mulk ke jo taqsiim huwaa

What nation do you sing of now, the one that broke?

With Akhtar Shirani, he penned the most eloquent paean to the country he left behind, "O des se aane waale bataa" (Tell me, o visitor from my country).

Despite the Persian slant in its diction, Faraz's poetry had an earthy, colloquial quality about it. He could be scathing when, for instance, speaking of the hypocrisy of the religious. Here he notes how after the pious return from Mecca, they're back to their deceiving ways.

bazm-e-hareefaaN phir sajtii hai

kizb-o-riyaa kii daf bajtii hai

the wily craftsmen meet again

and drums of falsehood beat again

And here's an unflinching introspection:

merii bastii se pare bhii mere dushman hoNge
par yahaaN kab koii aGhyaar kaa lashkar utraa
aashnaa haath hii aksar merii jaanib lapke
mere siine meN meraa apnaa hi Khanjar utraa

I may have foes outside, indeed

But no army besieged us from without

Familiar hands sought to kill me

My own blade tears my breast, no doubt

Of course these laments against the hypocrisy of the pious and self destructive politics are particularly relevant to Pakistan, but good poetry is never prisoner to its context.

Faraz often displayed a deft satirical genius. In a single sher, perhaps my personal favorite, he could pull the rug from under all civilization:

raftah raftah yeh hii zindaaN meN badal jaate haiN

phir kisii shah'r kii buniyaad na Daalii jaaye

eventually, they become prisons

Lets never build cities again

His 'Kaneez' is the only Urdu poem I know which speaks of the sexual abuse of servant-women by the feudal gentry. And, in keeping with the golden rule of speaking for the oppressed, the poem comes from the victim's point of view; the narrator, the kaneez, is pleading to a drunken master at her doorstep to leave.

Faraaz wasn't content with lament and demanded that we act.

shikwah-e-zulmat-eshab se to kahiiN behtar thaa

apne hisseh kii koii sham'a jalaate jaate

Rather than complain of the night's darkness

Wish you'd've lit your share of lamps

The beloved in his poems was often the country he lost to the Partition - famously in ranjish hii sahiih - but he could be playful and optimistic about this troubled romance of nations.

awwal awwal kii dostii hai abhii

ik Ghazal hai k ho rahii hai abhii

Its a new and budding romance.

A Ghazal being formed, per chance

Note the clever use of "Ghazal" in its traditional sense, as a conversation between lovers.

It's a cliche, but it’s true: the passing of Faraz is the passing of an era. Here's a poet who has seen his country go from Jinnah to Musharraf via Zia, and on every occasion spoken against the injustice and questioned the prevailing absurdity of the day. He will be missed, no doubt, but the huge body of work he leaves behind is fertile ground for more of his ilk.

dil giraftah hii sahiih, bazm sajaa lii jaaye

yaad-e-jaanaaN se koii shaam na Khalii jaaye

Meet and sing, O poets! sad though the heart may be

No evening should pass without her memory

***

Here is a link to a poem Muhasara in Urdu

Movie Review: The Blue Umbrella - Rustic Bond

PH — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 02:45:36 EDT

The Blue Umbrella opens with a telling sequence: when you’ve taken in the snowflakes and the pine trees synonymous with a Himachal winter, you squint to notice a little girl with an umbrella, camouflaged in the scenery. And it’s a telling sequence because in presenting little Biniya (Shreya Sharma) as completely one with the region she belongs to, Vishal Bharadwaj is simply mirroring Ruskin Bond’s idyllic vision of a pahaaRii people seeped into their surroundings.

An interesting dualism emerges from Bharadwaj’s work so far. The films he’s made with child protagonists (Makdee, The Blue Umbrella) are infused with the innocence that adult nostalgia projects onto childhood, and his adult films (Maqbool, Omkara) are unmistakably dark. In this film, the nutty Nandkishore Khatri (Pankaj Kapur) embodies this conflict between childhood and growing up. His coveting the blue umbrella – Biniya’s little piece of heaven with clouds sprinkled on its canopy – is after all an adult's longing for a lost childhood.

Having spent a calculating life in pursuit of profit, Nandu sees his possessing the umbrella as his one shot at redemption – priceless precisely because it offers no real advantage, like “watching a sunset”. And this is what gives the plot its bite: Having grown up, we too have robbed childhood of its gay innocence and coated our worldly concerns on it. We too have, as it were, stolen and painted the umbrella red.

The film is a visual delight - the use of the blue and yellow tinted night scenes, a toy scarecrow, a woman sieving wheat, a Ferris wheel in a tizzy, and the picturesque Himachal hamlet with its motley characters - all make the quotidian seem quaint.

Mark the swooshing shot of the umbrella’s descent, as if it were an angel seeking Biniya out. Bharadwaj’s background score and the gifted Gulzar’s lyrics add an adorable touch to the proceedings. There’s a lot to laugh about: the idiomatic dialogue; Nandu swaying his head religiously to a bhajan set to the tune of “You are my Sonia” from Kabhie Khushii Kabhii Gham; or a Beatrix Kiddo-esque montage of Biniya wielding the umbrella followed by a remark emphasizing what “khilbil” (mayhem) she caused!

The only false note is the morphing of Ravana’s heads into Nandu’s; the cut from Nandu’s speech to the Ravana-burning shot is enough to convey Nandu’s villany; spelling it out robs it of its subtlety.

Pankaj Kapur deserves a hundred hat-tips for his comical, childlike, neurotic and vulnerable rendition of Nandu. Here is an actor for all seasons: quirky carrot-loving detective (Karamchand), tormented cop (Raakh), tragic scientist (Ek Doctor Kii Maut), harassed teacher (Zabaan Sambhaalke) and Marlon Maqbool Brando. Clearly, the man is no Phateechar when it comes to acting.

In some ways, Vishal Bharadwaj is the most Indian of mainstream Hindi filmmakers. He seeks out the rugged, rustic, forgotten-by-Bollywood India – a decadent Urdu speaking Mumbai mafia, a political fiefdom in the cow-belt heartland, and a tiny Himachal hamlet. And he’s at home in this ‘other’ India; he isn’t the voyeuristic urban outsider (think Swades). Instead, he revels in becoming and making us become one with them. That is what makes his cinema refreshing and real.

Book Review:The Varieties of Scientific Experience

PH — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:34:37 EDT

As soon as I finished reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience – A Personal View of the Search for God, an anthology of Carl Sagan’s 1985 Gifford lectures in Natural Theology, I wanted to grab every person on this ‘pale blue dot’ planet by the shoulders, and ask him/her to read it. Sagan was a man who, per Ann Duryan, the book’s editor, “spoke extemporaneously in nearly perfect paragraphs”. Here’s a typical passage.

‘By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night…every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion. Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of worship. And Einstein said, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” So if Carlyle and Einstein agree on something, it has a modest possibility of even being right.’

This is about as poetic as Kabir, Meera and Bulle Shah will ever get.

Sagan’s tone in these lectures is benign and almost avuncular; only the patently prissy would accuse him of disrespect. His gifts as a science writer are many. He has a keen eye for the beauty in every facet of human inquiry-literature, art, science of course, and even religion. He has the sort of wit that pokes to tickle, not to hurt. For instance, when pointing out the obviously anthropocentric view of the afterlife, he recites Rupert Brooke’s Heaven. And here’s a snippet from a post-lecture Q&A session.

Q: What is your opinion on the nature of the origins of intelligent life in the universe?
A: I’m for it!

The book is rich in poetry (that of rhyme as well as reason), artists’ depictions of astronomical phenomena, and of course those breathtakingly wondrous NASA photographs. Sagan dazzles us even when citing numbers - a couple of hundred thousand million suns in the Milky Way, ten to hundred times as many galaxies in the universe, and an equation attempting to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

Above all, his clear yet sophisticated ethics give these talks a halo of nobility. For instance, he rejects miracles not because they’re absurd but because, following Democritus and Hume, the likelihood of nature changing its course is much smaller than that of a person lying. Or consider his nuanced take on the preserve-destroy conflict innate in civilizations.

‘ [It is] a conflict within the human heart…between the bureaucratic, hierarchical, aggressive parts of our nature, which in a neurophysiological sense we share with our reptilian ancestors, and the other parts of our nature, the generalized capacity for love, for compassion, for identification with others, who may superficially not look or talk or dress exactly like us, the ability to figure the world out that is focused and concentrated in our cerebral cortex.’

Note the “superficial” and “exactly”, implying that the similarities among different peoples far outweigh the differences; and the references to “reptilian ancestors” and “cerebral cortex”, as evidence of his commitment to a purely natural theology.

Speaking in 1985, the heyday of Reagan and the Star Wars, Sagan constantly returns to the nuclear threat and warns us that we have (still true, I gather) nuclear weapons capable of destroying our species many times over. And this is a scientist’s warning, so he duly backs it up with some morbid math on how many warheads it’d take to get to doomsday. Here he is championing the ethical legacy of such heavyweights as Spinoza, Einstein and Russell - not just in their espousal of laws of nature as the only plausible god, but also in their compassion and pacifism.

By itself, atheism is a negative and that very fact weakens its sales pitch. It’s no co-incidence that the word consists of a negating prefix followed by two harsh syllables; it is supposed to signify a rejection of something. What we want is something we can embrace, something positive. Sagan offers a recipe for that. Take what is best in religion: the deep questions it seeks to answer, the compassion it seeks to advocate, and the poetry it touches upon. Add what is best in science: the persistent chipping away at the wall of ignorance; the humility and awe of knowing that we live on a planet of a sun in the ‘boondocks’ of a galaxy (to use Sagan’s imaginative expression) that is itself a miniscule part of the universe. Cook this mixture in Sagan’s funny, lucid and lyrical prose, and what you get is a literary feast of a book.

An Idiot's Guide to Political Galaxy

PH — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:15:07 EST

An uncle once teased me that at some point in time, the word 'idiot' used to refer to one who does not vote. I'm going to be thirty and have never voted. I did try once. On a typically sweaty Mumbai morning, I diligently queued up at a municipal school to get my voter's ID. As luck would have it, I was fourth from the counter when they shut shop. Since then, laziness and a strong dislike of queues have prevented me from exercising adult franchise.

The recent US primaries and the nomination of prime ministerial candidates in India have made me feel terribly left out. In true spirit of active citizenry, therefore, I decided to voice my opinions. Idiots are people too, and a minority at that, so I wanted to speak on their behalf.

Since politics is about rationalization of one’s preconceived biases, here are my cop-outs for being an idiot.

Sensitivity:

The simpleton narrator in Pu La Deshpande’s Asa Mee Asaamee confesses to being equally convinced by opposing ideologies. This is often true of me. I find myself agreeing with both the Left and the Right on many fundamental issues.

Take capitalism, for instance. It is both ruthlessly opportunistic and (hence?) extremely effective. People fall on the political spectrum depending on which of these two aspects they emphasize. Arundhati Roy’s rhetoric sometimes moves me as much as that of [fill in your favorite libertarian blogger here]. I don’t disagree with either, the respectable word for which position is ‘centrist’, I guess. But ‘centrist’ suggests an equanimity that I am far from. Instead, this confusion disturbs me no end and makes it nearly impossible for me to take sides. It’s a bit like being the dyslexic agnostic insomniac (with due politically correct respect to all of the above) who stays up all night worrying if there is a dog. Besides, one good book is worth a lot more than all political ideologies combined.

Individualism:

Behaviorists must attribute this one to me being the only child. Having no siblings left me with a lot of time that I spent looking out of the window daydreaming. As a result, I am not too big on the communal thing. I have never understood why I must choose or form a clan to belong to, and then defend its every action to death; it is tiresome and evidently dishonest, and yet most political discourse revolves around justifying one’s own group and condemning the other.

It’s not that I don’t have group loyalty; I fire up my communal passion for the Indian cricket team (and the advantage there is that the more we love our team, the more we criticize it), but no political party has seemed that important to me.

I prefer voters who have immediate, self-centered reasons to choose their candidates - like a friend who voted for his local BJP MLA because the guy kept roads in his neighborhood free of potholes. Now there’s a concrete reason. To me, such voters seem less self-deceptive and far more sensible than ideologues.

I read somewhere that more Americans voted for American Idol than for their President. Is it any surprise they did? I mean, if the satisfaction of one’s opinion being counted for something (and that is what most of us are after in democracies) can be had for a musical contest, why vote for a cacophonous one whose outcome will inevitably leave you feeling more powerless?

The only idealistic voter whose convictions I understood (and frankly envied) was another friend who always voted for the Humanist Party in Mumbai- a front floated by working middle class people without big money or campaign. His sagely response to the mockery of my BJP/Congress loyalist friends was, “I know they’ll never win.” This irony made him a tragic hero in my eyes.

Skepticism:

This is perhaps the biggest reason I have never sworn allegiance to any side and it may have something to do with the fact that the first novel I remember reading is Orwell’s Animal Farm. For one thing, I’m not too fond of words with capitalized beginnings-President, Prime Minister, God, names of countries and states, corporate titles, Party, Communism and Capitalism - they seem to beg uncritical reverence.

Another thing that makes me uneasy is people flaunting their pride in some or another purely accidental fact. Are you proud to be [fill in identity of choice]? Well, that’s a moot question if there ever was one. Pride in oneself is best earned. Of course, one can’t discount her birth in a certain place and station in life. In my case, however, that makes me humble, not proud, for I know that I owe much of what I have to where, when and to whom I was born.

Perhaps a better question is if I like being [identity of choice here]. Mostly, yes. In any case, this whole pride thing is just posturing and chest thumping of the sort that our cousins in the animal kingdom indulge in; it’s a pity they don’t have language to give it a righteous spin.

Another capitalized word is ‘I’, and I’m too skeptical to take myself so seriously as to passionately advocate anything. Bert Russell comes to the rescue, “I would never die for any cause. What if I am wrong?” These days, however, bookstores and blogs are packed with everything from passionate pleas for one’s own ideology to brazen browbeating of another, and most of them speak in an in your face, doctrinal tone. Skepticism and the humility it brings are no longer in vogue.

These, then, are an idiot’s justifications of his politics: I don’t vote not because I’m uninterested, but because I can’t bring myself to: it’s just not in my constitution.

The human drama in politics fascinates me as much as the next guy, but to my film and fiction fed mind, real politics seems too much like loud theater to suspend my disbelief. To quote Woody Allen, “Life doesn’t imitate art; it imitates bad television.”

Who knows? Someday, this idiot might just wisen up, get off his high horse and get used to voting for the lesser of two evils. My constitution, after all, is open to change. It isn’t spelt with a capital ‘C’.

Movie Review: Juno

PH — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 00:47:00 EST

It isn't easy to make an intelligent, sensitive, uplifting and witty film on teenage pregnancy-especially in America, where the issue is a political hot button. With Juno, however, writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman manage to do just that.

So well written and humanely depicted are the characters that you're forced to suspend judgment on the issue; indeed, the movie makes the word "issue" sound heavy-handed, and sixteen year old Juno MacGuff's (Ellen Page, please give her an Oscar now) pregnancy seems like an innocent, youthful indiscretion. Juno is portrayed as an endearing, middle-American, precocious teenager in complete control of her life. This humanizes her and deftly overturns the stereotype that "pregnant sixteen year old" conjures (sister Spears, for instance). Sure, she has all the characteristics of her age - sarcasm, the hearts for the adorably awkward Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera, understated and outstanding), and a passion for rock- but she is gracefully intelligent.

The film's feel is neither saccharine nor preachy, and the musical score adds the right flavors. In lesser hands, humor might've made the goings on wacky, even distasteful- after all, there really is nothing funny about a pregnant sixteen year old. But Cody and Reitman put humor to its best use: as an antidote Juno and her father (J.K. Simmons, brilliant and cute), like most of us, use to cope with their lives. When Juno tells her dad she's pregnant, his disappointment is real but not over-the-top. "I thought you were a girl who knew when to say 'when'", is all he tells Juno - there is no verbose condemnation, no antics, but a heartfelt remark that is all the more effective in its laconism. "I was hoping she'd been expelled for drug use" he quips to Juno's stepmom in the same wry, deadpan tone that his daughter seems to have inherited.

Juno decides to give her child to a rich, suburban couple- Marc (Jason Bateman, doing justice to an important and difficult character) and Vanessa Loring(Jennifer Garner, transitioning beautifully from a Stepford wife to a nurturing mother). The dialogue at their first meeting is top-notch funny and wonderfully pits the folksy MacGuffs against the yuppie Lorings. The fleeting attraction between Marc and Juno is handled with restrained sensitivity; it proves to be a coming-of-age experience for Juno but not, alas, for Marc, which gives us an interesting and tender twist at the end.

Here is an adult film about adolescent mistakes that asks us to understand rather than judge. Deservedly, the queue for tickets to the show after mine ran around the block; after all, not often does a topical movie make you chuckle, choke and chew on its subject.

Movie Review: Love in the Time of Cholera

PH — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:03:40 EST

The wife and I were in the windy city on Thanksgiving Day. After croissants and a jasmine tea by the river, we agreed to complete a romantic morning by watching a romantic matinee. I hadn't seen/read any previews on Love In The Time of Cholera, knowing only that it was about longing in love or some such. That's romantic, we figured, and it's based on a book by the Great Garcia who brilliantly allegorized the futility and tragedy of our species in his 'One Hundred Years...', so we can't go wrong, re. Alas, go wrong we did.

Florentino Ariza, the boy, is smitten by Fermina, the village belle, and half a century of sex with over six hundred women doesn’t make a man of him so that he still ‘loves’ and pines for Fermina. I know, it’s supposed to be Profound - a man looking for True Love, the Holy Grail that’s spiritual and loftier than all the physical relationships he has (the number of which would make Genghis Khan look like a monk). I know that his diary of sexual conquests isn’t a high school kid’s scorebook of chicks he laid; it’s a chronicle of his journey towards True Love. And when he paints, in turpentine, the letters “This is mine” along with an arrow pointing downward (to you know where) on the belly of a woman, leading to her husband discovering it and slashing her throat, it’s supposed to convey how possessiveness in love destroys (and how turpentine is hard to get off human skin).

Oh, and by the way, all this happens in the time of cholera. Don’t ask me why.
Women undress like it’s an episode of Senoritas Gone Wild, and Florentino (Garcia?) seems to have a brazenly narcissistic “the chicks dig me” air about him. Fermina is the only character you sympathize with; she refers to Florentino as “empty”, which is true of the plot as much as the protagonist; she reconciles with real life with a dignity and charm bordering on poignancy. Our hero, on the other hand, writes business letters in rhyme because “all I can write is love” and such juvenile, lofty gobbledygook. The only redeeming moments are the unpretentiously real ones, like Fermina’s wedding night.

This is my problem with magic realism run amok: metaphors tend to lose their purpose as means to illuminating truth and become ends in themselves. Characters become, to quote Amitava Kumar, “walking-talking metaphors”. The narrative space is crowded by metaphors - often contrived, tenuous, and downright absurd – and meaning struggles to find a place in it.

So, unless you're a horny heterosexual male, a connoisseur of stretched metaphors, or interested in the chemical bonding of turpentine and the epidermis, avoid this one.

Book Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

PH — Thu, 4 Oct 2007 00:09:16 EDT

When Changez, the narrator-protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, returns to New York just after September 11, 2001 from a business assignment, he is stripped to his boxers by airport immigration authorities. There is a disarmingly clever little detail that Hamid works into this incident:

...I had, rather embarrassingly, chosen to wear a pink pair patterned with teddy bears, but their revelation had no impact on the severe expressions of my inspectors

Changez has bared himself to be the childlike, adorably dorky personality he is, but no one seems to recognize that. In post 9/11 America, he feels as though his external appearance defines him.The Reluctant Fundamentalist is largely a book about such prejudices. In a café in Lahore, Changez narrates his past to an American. There is constant tension between the two, obviously mirroring the uneasy love-hate relationship between the two nations. The book is a quasi-monologue; the American remains anonymous and peeks out of the pages only when Changez either repeats his casual questions (“Oh, you ask Why”? and suchlike), or reads his mind (“I see that you are alarmed”). This allows the story to come from Changez’s-and therefore Pakistan’s-perspective, it makes us-the readers-the intended anonymous audience, and heightens the sense of mystery surrounding the American.

The most powerful thing about the book is, not surprisingly, the love story. With some extraordinarily sensitive prose, Erica, Changez’s love, emerges as a brilliant personification of her country (whose name contains hers). Having lost Chris, her first and longtime love, Erica is only beginning to find life in Changez, when 9/11 happens. This pushes her into a depression-a heartbreaking vortex of longing for the dead Chris.

Hamid seems to warn us that this quest for a better future in an imagined past is not only Erica and Changez’s tragedy, but that of all fundamentalism. True to the novelist’s craft, he doesn’t directly condemn this backward looking ideology, but instead brings out the self-destructive tragedy of this outlook.

During their courtship, Erica responds to Changez sexually only when he pretends to be Chris. This is a poignant comment on the obliteration of identity that ‘fitting-in’ demands.Religion, apart from a few oblique references, is conspicuously absent from the narrative. Hamid is more interested in the psychology of a fundamentalist. Changez’s inspirations are not in Islam; his angst is fuelled by his sense of wounded pride (he cannot bear the fact that even Manila has a swankier skyline than Lahore), his awareness of acute economic disparity, and his alienation-induced identity crisis-issues that all of us grapple with in this “World Is Flat” age.

The novel is the perfect medium to give these issues an identifiably human voice, and Hamid’s rich prose adds to the beauty of this endeavor. (A quibble: too many words are italicized for emphasis, often unnecessarily, sometimes jarringly.) The ending, too, is a slick comment on the perpetual mutual suspicion between the two cultures.

Stanley Kramer, Rama Sethu and The Inheritors of Wind

PH — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:27:25 EDT

A few weeks ago, I happened to watch two powerful Stanley Kramer courtroom dramas: Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg (they now join my all time favorite in this genre - Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men). What drove me to write about these films are the Ram-Sethu issue and the subsequent spate of arguments on Desicritics.

Inherit the Wind is based on the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where the legality of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution of humans was questioned by Biblical fundamentalists. Both the film and the real trial were star-studded affairs (the irascible H L Mencken reported on the real trial).

To be fair, much of the credit for the film’s grand fireworks goes to writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, on whose play the film is based. But lets give Stanley Kramer credit for those haunting close ups of the fundamentalist prosecutor-statesman Matthew Brady (Fredric March) on stage, shot from below, towering him in our eyes for the messianic sway he holds on the masses. It’s as though the camera were searching his face and inquiring, in an attempt to understand the ‘other’.

Equally memorable are the tense respect-disagree dynamic between Brady and the agnostic defense lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) captured on a quiet Tennessee night, the sweat oozing out of the film as a literal and metaphorical reminder of the heat in that state, and the theme song, “Gimme that ol’ time religion”, used to contrast the two forms of religion-the cacophonous public version sung by the village crowd versus the dulcet private version accompanying the last shot of Drummond.

Judgment At Nuremberg is a much more complex film. It is set in post-World War II Nuremberg, where judges were tried for the “justice” they meted out in the Third Reich. As Hans Rolfe, the German defense lawyer, Maximillian Schell deservedly won the Oscar for his powerhouse portrayal of German indignation. Here, too, it is he and the Hitler-hating German judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) whose close-ups and monologues seek to understand the ‘other’.

During the trial, Rolfe points out how Churchill and American businesses flirted with Hitler before the war, and asks, “Are they not to be blamed?” And as Stanley Kramer’s alter ego, Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy, who else?) concedes when sentencing the judges, “There is some truth in this”. Haywood doesn’t condone Ernst Janning; in fact, he denies Janning redemption by pointing out that the latter had lost moral ground the very first time he sentenced an innocent man to a concentration camp. But what is remarkable about Haywood is that this doesn’t blind him to the finer side of Ernst Janning.

Stanley Kramer’s strength lies in this very quality: He takes an almost egalitarian view of human flaws, and yet maintains an empathetic, noble worldview. His moral compass is a sensitive one; its needle surveys the entire moral dial, but always settles at the right position. He is tolerant of contradiction, but not of dishonesty. (Mani Ratnam’s “Is he a thug or a genius?”, “I think both” in Guru is the Indian example I can recall). His morality is not the hasty judgment of the preacher; it is the calm, dispassionate analysis of the philosopher. His camera is always zooming in on the ‘other’, always inquiring. And his only fierce commitment is to the relentless pursuit of truth-that often unpalatable, usually messy and almost always imperfect ideal.

This commitment is what makes the best in science and art score over judgmental doctrine. With its blind, algorithmic opportunism, science mainly ends up being a dispassionate description of how the universe is, not a passionate prescription of how it ought to be. And the best writing is always peopled with gray characters, it always appeals to empathy rather than moralistic judgment, it is always more feely than preachy. The Ramayana is such writing; reading it literally diminishes it. Those who do so have inherited nothing but wind.

Freedom: To Be And Just To Be

PH — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:03:24 EDT

It’s impossible not to feel anything when independent India turns sixty. Given our conjoined-twins-like history, India’s freedom reminds me of two Pakistanis; specifically, it reminds me of two Urdu short stories by writers who, post-Partition, became Pakistanis.

No-land’s man Manto’s Toba Tek Singh is arguably the more famous one. The story is about the dangers of asserting demarcations - what Richard Dawkins calls the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. Freedom lies in freeing our minds from such arbitrary categorical boundaries.

But it is the other story-Ghulam Abbas’s Anandi that really gets to the heart of the freedom issue. The struggle between arbiters and freethinkers is a perpetual one, still being played out in India and everywhere else. As Faiz observed (with typical melancholy),

na apnii rasm nayii hai, na unkii riit nayii

na apnii haar nayii hai, na unkii jiit nayii

My prosaic translation:

Ours are the same old ways, as are theirs too

Our defeats and their wins, none of these are new

But Anandi ends on a note of irony, not melancholy. Years after a new, vibrant city has sprung up around the banished red-light district, its own council is ready to banish them again. No society can flourish without mirth, and there is mirth in the freedom to think. That is the freedom that Taslima Nasreen, Fehmida Riyaaz, and countless others have sought from the Indian state:

You’re sixty, O Great RefereeRetire, and let us be.

Movie Review: Pan's Labyrinth - A Tale of Two Worlds

PH — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 00:03:07 EDT

All of us have seen movies and read books that we love despite our disagreements with them: Guillermo Del Toro’s exquisitely shot Pan’s Labyrinth is such a film for me. Actually, it isn’t as much of a disagreement as a childish demand on my part that such a beautiful movie would conform entirely to my worldview (I don’t buy that “objective” review stuff. I review movies because I’m passionate about them. I’d rather be fiercely subjective, as long as I’m completely honest).

The plot is ingenuous and quite extraordinary: Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother join her stepfather (Sergi Lopez), a Captain in Franco’s army. Ofelia is a die hard fairy-tale buff and lives in her own universe, hobnobbing with fauns and fairies. Like Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), the guerilla mole in the Captain’s labyrinth, Ofelia too is fighting for a better world; only her fight takes place in that world of fauns and fairies. She is, we are told, a princess who must undergo some tribulations to unite with the king and queen in the underworld-the faun’s labyrinth. Ofelia and the Captain are cleverly introduced: she extends her left hand for a handshake, he corrects her. What a way to pit the creative mind against convention! You can’t help but cheer the doctor who mocks the Captain, “Obeying for the sake of obeying is for men like you”. Ofelia’s assignments parallel those of Mercedes. Mercedes, too, holds the key to a better world, and has to destroy the greedy monster at the root of Spain, so her country can flower.

Del Toro’s execution is remarkable; for the most part, he leaves room for viewers like me who don’t want to read the obvious religious subtext. But walking the tightrope between the real and the imaginary is never easy. And the couple of occasions (the priest’s affirmation of God when Ofelia’s mother dies, or Ofelia eating the forbidden fruit and being denied paradise) when he trips stand out-like one color smudging into another across a fine boundary. (This is almost a mirror image of Vishal Bharadwaj’s Makdee, where the reality smudged onto the imagination.)

It is to Del Toro’s credit that I could still see Ofelia not as Jesus (or Uncle Tom), sacrificing herself for the world, but as a little girl who possessed that rare gift: the power to imagine. In that light, Ofelia looks like Azar Nafisi, desperately clutching her fiction to make sense of reality, and Pan’s Labyrinth becomes a wonderful paean to human imagination, the escape it offers from reality (Ofelia warning her unborn half-brother that it’s bad out here), and the possibilities it creates to improve reality.