South Asia Daily

My city sucks but it is my city

Photo: Chandu Mhatre

The residents of Mumbai react with self-righteous indignation, smug derision, mocking rejection, faux detachment and/or whiny defensiveness every time a global survey of some kind gives their city a low ranking. There are also those who respond with mature resignation.

The latest finding to accord Mumbai a particularly low ranking comes from the Economic Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Global Liveability Survey. Mumbai stands 116th among 140 world cities which were ranked in five categories--political and social stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Melbourne of Australia has been ranked at the top for 2011 after it replaced Vancouver of Canada which was number 1 in 2010. To Mumbai’s credit it has jumped one full spot from its 117th ranking last year.

I have never understood why people have such strong emotional attachment to or commitment towards a city or a country or a piece of geological mass to feel personally slighted by such rankings. Mumbai does suck when you consider the benchmarks that EIU has used. Any city that can derive a sense of monumental accomplishment out of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link needs to get its head examined. But that is not the point. The point is that all cities have the right to refuse to see their obvious flaws and still regard themselves as the greatest cities on the face of the earth. We tend to underestimate the therapeutic value of living in denial. Denial is a nature’s way of fortifying oneself in the face of harrowing odds.

Speaking of denial, New York, which believes it is a divine gift to the human race, has been ranked 56th in the same survey, while London, which still deludes itself as the capital of the world, is ranked 53rd. Anyone who has had the pleasure of staring at the New York version of bandicoots strutting about in her subways might have a slightly different view of the metropolis. 

The important thing to remember is that liveability, while quantifiable is some ways, is a largely indefinable entity. If you can find people who consider Meerut or Kanpur liveable, then is this debate really worth having?

There is nothing peculiar about residents of Mumbai feeling particularly exercised when reminded of their city’s glaring flaws. Most humans tend to be protective of places they call home, no matter how terrible they are. The overriding argument seems to be: “My city sucks but it is my city.”

“Public samaan dekhti hai, dukan nahi.”

Excuse the preponderance of posts about subjects that the world dismisses as frivolous or trivial. Hopefully, this will be the last one for a while, although I do not promise anything. After all, I don’t charge to entertain you. I can just as easily speculate about the eventual fate of Schrödinger's cat.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and early 70s, the cheapest movie tickets used to be for a part of the theater we called the pit class. The pit class was the first two or three rows less than 15 feet away from the screen which cost anywhere between 50 paise to a buck and a half.

The pit class was where the rabble which whistled at even the mildest suggestion of lewdness or, alternatively, grand heroics on screen was herded together. It was not segregation imposed by bigotry but necessitated by penury.The stuck-up and well-to-do crowd in the balcony would be envious of the pit class crowd because the latter enjoyed the movies so much more. I watched quite a few films from the pit class.

While there was nothing constitutionally mandated about it, the regulars in the pit class like me knew that if you wanted to whistle it had to be done in a certain way. Unless you could whistle the way the illustration below shows and make it sound really shrill, you were made to feel like an outsider. I could shrill-whistle then and can do so even now.

The pit class shrill whistle

I have gone to some lengths here to talk a little bit about an upcoming Hindi movie called “The Dirty Picture”, a sort of biopic about Silk Smitha, the “sultry and sexy siren” of an actress of the 1980s. It is not for me to vouch for the authenticity of the film’s content. My interest is the trailer which has all the ingredients that would bring the pit class down, if it was released in the 1960s or 70s.

It has lines like, “Public samaan dekhti hai, Dukan nahi (The public cares about the goods and not the store)” or “Waise bhi jab sharafat ke kapde utarten hein to sabse zyada maza sharifon ko hi hata hai.  (In any case when decency is stripped, it is the decent who have most fun).” Both these lines are mouthed by a character played by Naseeruddin Shah in a wig which could well have been retrieved from the collection used by actor Jeetendra, the father and husband respectively of the movie’s producers, Ekta and Shobha Kapoor.

Then there is this gem from the luscious lips of Vidya Balan, who plays Silk: “Mujhe jo chahiye uska maza sirf raat ko hi aata hai (What I desire is best enjoyed only at night).”

However, the showstopper is this song: “Ooh lala ooh lala, Ooh lala ooh lala, Tu hai meri fantasy…Chhoo nana Chhoo nana, Chhoo nana Chhoo nana Ab mein jawan ho gayi. (Ooh lala ooh lala, Ooh lala ooh lala You are my fantasy (says the man), Don’t touch me Don’t touch me, Don’t touch me Don’t touch me I have blossomed now).”

The guiding philosophy of the movie’s writers seems not to leave anything to the imagination when everything can be spelled out in detail. What are words for after all?

A sullen murk of ashes and embers

Perhaps it is the reference to jute in Anita Desai’s latest “The Artist of Disappearance” that inspired the designer of the novel’s cover to use the backdrop of a gunny sack. The burlap gives the cover a tactile, textural feel that would compel someone like me to pick up the book. What adds to that rough hewn look is a slightly open box of purple-tipped matches produced in Kalugumalai in Tamil Nadu. That physical effect is completed with an almost fully consumed matchstick.

You can perhaps tell that I have not read Desai’s book which is now being hailed widely in the Western press as an example of her Chekhovian or Tolstoyan pedigree. Why else would I dwell on the book’s jacket? Until recently, I had never read anything that Anita Desai has written. For that matter, I have not yet read anything that her more celebrated daughter Kiran Desai has written. Hence I have to defer to the opinions of various Western critics who are describing Anita Desai in superlative terms.

“India’s finest writer in English,” declared The Independent of London. “Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy’s inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive,” says The Times.

At different times I have conceded my intellectual inadequacy to fully appreciate Indian writers who draw such unrestrained praise in the West. It is entirely a reflection on my limited capacity to understand great literature. Reading 30 odd pages of Desai’s collection of short stories merely reinforced my low opinion of my literary comprehension. I mostly don’t grasp the writing of this kind other than the inherent imagery in it.

Her first story begins with these lines: “We had driven for never-ending miles along what seemed to be more mudbank than a road between fields of virulent green – jute? rice? What was it that this benighted hinterland produced? I ought to have known, but my head was pounded into too much of a daze by the heat and the sun.”

“The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow.”

I am struck by the image of the sun setting into a “sullen murk of ashes and embers” because it is so cinematic. It is the same sensibility that draws me to the cover of the book. It is doubtful whether I would go much beyond the cover.

Of “Politics of Love”

Mallika Sherawat’s American accent is just about as authentic as the Anglicized Hindi accent that Raza Murad playing a cruel English colonial general, wearing a uniform mothballed at Maganlal Dresswallah for decades, might have in a deeply patriotic film directed by Dheeraj Kumar (not even Manoj Kumar).

I know, I know, even I felt tired writing that. Excuse some very obscure Indian pop cultural references but those of you who are not up to speed with such things will have to just lump this one.

Now that the politics of confrontation has subsided in India I have decided to move on to “Politics of Love.” It is a new Hollywood movie starring India’s very own Mallika Sherawat in what seems from the trailer to be a career defining role for her. What I mean is that if she had a career, it would be defined.

This romantic comedy’s plot summary says, “Politics makes strange bedfellows, but never stranger than when a sexy, savvy, African-American conservative Republican reluctantly falls for his Democratic counterpart: a beautiful Indian-American Obama campaign volunteer. Sparks fly, tempers flare, heads turn, and romance blossoms for his mismatched pair of lovers in the frantic and intoxicating days leading up to Election Day. Can the politics of love conquer all?”

It sounds like a movie which Freida Pinto might have smugly turned down because it does not have nearly the artistic possibilities that excite her. “Politics of Love” is by far the biggest Hollywood film that Sherawat has landed on her own strength.

Pictures :http://www.politicsoflovethemovie.com/

In one scene at a “frenzied” campaign office of Barack Obama, Sherawat is heard saying, “Okay, I need the number for the city hall, something something park (I could not figure out quite what) and inventory of campaign material.” The way she says it makes you wonder whether the movie’s producers had any budget for an accent coach for her. Her intonation is pitch perfect if she were auditioning for a position at a Walmart call center in Gurgaon dealing with irate Indian American callers.

What is admirable about Sherawat is that she is propelled almost entirely by gumption that is so typical of a certain type of young people of Delhi. (A lot of them were seen at the Anna Hazare fast.) Of course, her oomph does add to her overall appeal. It is equally admirable that she has stretched her thin acting talent as far as she has. Her main talent is self-belief. If you pay close attention to her career, you get the sinking feeling that she is actually mocking the whole system of stardom which she has sassed her way through.

I know it does not sound like that but I am actually praising Sherawat as far as it goes.

Speaking of “Politics of Love”, would someone please dim the reflected glory emanating out of Delhi?

“Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital”

One upcoming book that is intriguing me is British sociologist Catherine Hakim’s “Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital.” As the title of the book suggests it posits that there is something called “erotic capital” that exists so that it can be exploited.

"In sexualised, individualised modern societies," she writes, "erotic capital is becoming more important and more valorised, for men and women. However, women have a longer tradition of developing and exploiting it."

She also seems to argue that women have been discouraged from exploiting their erotic capital by the elite that cannot “monopolise” it.

Going by the reviews of the book in Britain and interviews with her, one gets the sense that she is stirring up the pot quite a bit. From full legalization of prostitution to a greater pursuit of surrogate pregnancies for profit, she appears to advocate things that may not make a lot of people happy. She would be happy to know that some women of Anand in Gujarat recognized the profit potential of surrogate pregnancy before Hakim’s advocacy.

Hakim’s views are bound to trouble, if not offend, many simply because she says people, particularly women, should exploit their erotic capital. The book’s US edition is being released next month at a time when America has become both extremely puritanical and wildly licentious at the same time, depending on which societal layer one is looking at—TMZ or the Tea Party.

Speaking of beauty generally, I must end this short post with the ever memorable take on it by the ever captivating Oscar Wilde. “Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.”

Being the Mayor Emeritus of Plainfolksville I can only imagine what it means to have any kind of beauty and then to exploit it.

P.S.: You must have noticed the arresting clipart with a lot of erotic capital which I have used to illustrate the post.

Torn between a diamond planet and diamond panties

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Illustration by Mayank Chhaya

On the day astronomers announced the discovery of a planet made up of diamond was also the day Victoria’s Secret model Selita Ebanks announced that her vagina was scratched by her diamond-encrusted panties. I am unable to decide which announcement has greater significance. I am torn between the diamond planet and the diamond panties.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, was quoted as saying by Reuters.

“I don’t know about wearing diamonds on your crotch. It’s like you’re walking and scraping. This is not cohesive to get a man. No man wants a scratchy vagina,” Ebanks was quoted as saying The Huffington Posts’s Naughty but Nice Rob. There is touching innocence about her assertion that no man wants “a scratchy vagina.” She should not be so pessimistic. There is a whole world outside the dazzle of her diamonds.

Selita Ebanks (Picture: www.selitaebanks.com)

The diamond planet has been found 4000 light years away from the earth, which at the 186,282 miles or 300,000 kilometers a second speed of light is a little farther* than the diamonds encrusted in Ebanks’ 4.5 million dollar panties. I have spent the entire last night thinking about the implications of these two announcements. I am afraid I have not reached with any definite conclusion.

Scientists think the planet is so dense that that its carbon has to be crystalline, or in other words, diamond. No matter where you stand on that planet, you are standing on diamond. Every backyard on this planet is a diamond mine.

I apprehend that once Victoria’s Secret finds out about the yet unnamed planet, it might outsource the manufacture of its new diamond line of intimate wear there. By the time they are through with the planet, astronomers may not have anything left to study. So I suggest they claim it before Victoria’s Secret does.

On the other hand, Victoria’s Secret needs to hurry because I am sure De Beers and Surat’s diamond merchants are already planning to send trade missions.

* For those of you who care one light year means about six trillion miles (5,865,696,000,000 to be precise). That makes the diamond planet 24 trillion light years from Ebanks’ panties.

How much damage is done annually to the American forests by the spruce budworm?

Katherine Hepburn (left), with Spencer Tracy (right) in the 1957 nerd romcom “Desk Set”

Last night, entirely on a whim I watched what turned out to be an eminently enjoyable 1957 nerd romcom “Desk Set”, starring the ever eminently watchable Katherine Hepburn and  Spencer Tracy. Until I found it accidently on hbogo.com I did not know such a film even existed. (Check out the trailer here: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2573009433/)

Even if I discount that serendipity accentuated some of my pleasure of watching the film, “Desk Set”, directed by Walter Lang, is a charming little nugget that does not get talked about much while discussing these two great artistes’ work together.

Tracy is a “methods engineer” (really a computer whiz, a PhD from the MIT) who has been contracted by a fictional television network Federal Broadcasting Company to computerize their reference department which is run with joyous efficiency by Hepburn. Hepburn’s all-knowing Bunny Watson was Google nearly five decades before Google was born and a million times more charming. She and her three female colleagues are a human search engine, fact checker and librarian, all rolled into four.

Tracy’s Richard Sumner is told by the network that he is being brought in to save them having to do a lot of menial work of physically searching references. The reality, of course, is more ruthless.

What struck me about the movie, apart from its smooth and witty passage,  was the fact that it was probably among the first nerd romcoms and also how it presaged the way our lives would depend so much on the computer and its ability to do functions like search.

Towards the end of the film, as Hepburn and her colleagues are fired after Tracy installs IBM’s “electronic brain” there is a scene where Tracy wants the computer’s ability to be tested. He wants a question asked of it. Hepburn volunteers.

“How much damage is done annually to the American forests by the spruce budworm?”, she asks  and answers:

“138,464,359  dollars and some cents.”

Tracy then checks her answer against the computer’s. It is 138,464,359 and 12 cents.

I fed the same question in Google search and got no specific answer except one which quoted from the movie. I was actually looking for how much damage is done annually to the American forests by the spruce budworm in 2011. I am sure the answer is there somewhere but it did not come up at once, although I am happy to report that there is indeed a spruce budworm which does seriously damage the American forests. If the spruce budworm had paid Google for keywords, it might have been on top of the list of answers.

An expedient absolutist

Associated Press photographer Saurabh Das’ excellent picture as published by The New York Times

The harder I try not to find quirks in the Anna Hazare saga in Delhi the less I succeed. This brilliant news shot by the AP’s Saurbh Das, for instance.

The first instant thought, without any reflection whatsoever, that came to my mind was, “I know he is now a saint but does he need so many physicians at once?” This is like a Broadway musical moment. My congratulations to Saurabh.

Another standout moment happened yesterday when Hazare got up on the stage to tell his supporters about his firm resolve not to call off his fast despite the physicians’ advice to get hospitalized. He said his “antar atma”  (conscience) told him, “Why are you scared of dying?” “If you say that you can die for the nation, then why are you scared?”

He then went on to exhort his supporters that if the authorities tried to forcibly take him away to a hospital, they should obstruct them. An aide whispered in his ear quite obviously reminding Hazare to remind the crowds to be “non-violent and peaceful” as they obstructed the authorities.

As is my wont, I immediately began to parse those words. Here is a man putting his own life on the line to create what is probably the single most authoritative legal and investigative institutional structure in India’s history which demands total compliance by millions of people serving in some official capacity or another. Yet, in the same breath he is urging his supporters to happily violate another law that expressly prohibits suicide in any form, including by fast unto death.

Under the current law the Indian authorities are required to intervene if they apprehend that the protestor on a fast unto death might actually die and forcibly hospitalize that person. Any form of suicide is an offence under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code and punishable with a simple prison term of up to one year and a fine.

I remember a 2006 case involving a 93-year-old Jain woman called Kaila Devi Hirawat who was on the Jain practice of Santhara which essentially means one starves oneself to death in a consciously considered decision. Kaila Devi’s action led to a major debate among legal experts, human rights activists and religious leaders.

So here is my question. Can one lead a political agitation using all the legitimate means of protest in favor creating a far reaching law enforcement institution with sweeping powers and simultaneously encourage others to violate a law that already exists on the statute books? If one is an absolutist, the way Hazare appears to be, when it comes to following the law of the land in letter and spirit, can one also be expedient as well?

Vanishing Bombay

Perreira House, Bandra, Mumbai, Built in 1902 (Pics: Chandu Mhatre)

For the past few years, photographer and friend Chandu Mhatre has been shooting throughout Mumbai images of a great metropolis in transition. Great cities are constantly making and remaking themselves. Bombay is no exception and not in the least because it was turned into Mumbai.

Having long been India’s industrial and financial heart, it was inevitable that the sheer physical effects of the country’s 20-year-old economic reform would also be more strikingly visible here.

As the old makes way for the new and radically alters Mumbai’s physical personality, Chandu has undertaken a project called “Vanishing Bombay” to document and record the metamorphosis of the metropolis unfolding in front of our eyes.

The project by its very nature requires popular participation in order to ensure the widest possible coverage of the city’s transforming contours. Chandu is inviting those who live in the city and feel a connection and those who live outside and still feel a connection to send information and audio-visual materials that chart the changes taking place in all walks of life, including buildings, monuments, art, music, culture, movies and people.

Chandu has also set up a website called www.vanishingbombay.com which is still a work in progress.

The eventual objective of the project is to create a sort of a people’s history of a city in transition.

‘Lao ya Jao” and “Quit India”

Actors Shreyas Talpade (left) with Celina Jaitley at a pro-Anna Hazare rally in Mumbai (Picture: www.ibnlive.com)

Content warning: Unless you have a shallow mind like mine, which leaps from idea to idea, some of the content here might offend you.

Watching some of the television images of the crowds at Anna Hazare’s fast in Delhi and a support rally in Mumbai, I keep getting this weird sense that the whole thing might abruptly morph into an IPL game with cheerleaders prancing around on the sidelines wearing boat caps and very little else.

The branding, quite like the IPL (Indian Premier League), is already happening. The white boat shaped Gandhi cap has become a chic emblem of this freshly baked nationalism. Incidentally, “Gandhi cap” is a bit of a misnomer since it was not necessarily invented by him and he did not wear it nearly as much as perhaps Jawaharlal Nehru did.

When actor Shreyas Talpade wears the boat cap with the top two buttons of his designer white shirt carefully undone and attends a pro-Hazare rally in Mumbai with Celina Jaitley by his side (also wearing the cap), you know that a genuine peaceful revolution is afoot. I see nothing particularly wrong with trendifying and eventually even merchandising a revolution. Why not market everything in life if you can find a buyer?

If the boat cap is the emblem of this revolution, then “Lao ya Jao” (Bring forth or Quit) is its war cry. It is appropriate that Hazare or someone close to him has coined a war cry that could be used in a large number of situations in India even after the revolution has accomplished its purpose of pushing its own version of a Lokpal bill (Ombudsman bill). For instance, you could be at a restaurant in Delhi or Mumbai or wherever and ordering the waiter, “Lao ya jao.”  You could also be home watching the revolution unfold on television and telling your servant to Lao (dinner) or Jao. Once you get past the crass pithiness of the term, it is quite effective. It reminds me of the elegant phrasing of a song from “Shootout at Lokhandwala Complex” where a bunch of Mumbai bhais sing “Ey Ganpat chal daru la.”

Gandhi had his “Quit India -- Bharat Chhodo” and Hazare has his “Lao ya Jao”. Lao ya Jao has a clear echo of “my way or high way” to it, which has generally been the approach people with messianic certitude have taken throughout history. I do not point this out as a value judgment but merely as an objective fact. Whether or not I agree with it is irrelevant here.

Speaking of the Quit India movement, it is perhaps fortuitous that Gandhi made his famous speech at the August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai on August 8, 1942.

It began thus: “Before you discuss the resolution, let me place before you one or two things, I want you to understand two things very clearly and to consider them from the same point of view from which I am placing them before you. I ask you to consider it from my point of view, because if you approve of it, you will be enjoined to carry out all I say. It will be a great responsibility.”

There is no ambiguity in Gandhi’s statement. “…you will be enjoined to carry out all I say” is how he puts it. It is either all he says or well…To Gandhi’s credit he did not say that his was the only way. He says further down in his speech, “I want you to know and feel that there is nothing but purest Ahimsa in all that I am saying and doing today. The draft resolution of the Working Committee is based on Ahimsa, the contemplated struggle similarly has its roots in Ahimsa. If, therefore, there is any among you who has lost faith in Ahimsa or is wearied of it, let him not vote for this resolution.”

At the start of this post, I said I do leap from idea to idea. I think I kept that promise. It has no particular theme to it other than a tone of mild mockery.