South Asia Daily

Here is to Rishi Kapoor

Memories of my two encounters with Rishi Kapoor, one a two-hour-long interview with him at his Pali Hill residence and the other while escorting him to a special show by dear friend, writer and stand-up satirist Shireesh Kanekar, come flooding back to mind this morning.

Rishi Kapoor was the only star among those I have interviewed—and I have not interviewed many—who seemed genuinely interested in his interlocutor. Riding from Bandra to Ravindra Natya Mandir in Prabhadevi in his Standard Herald one evening in the mid 1980s, along with another dear friend of longstanding, fellow journalist and writer Amrita Shah, we chatted for about 35 minutes, of which about 20 were spent on him asking me about gathering news as a hard news journalist, something I have been. Incidentally, Rishi Kapoor was the chief guest at Shireesh’s show and I was his chaperon for the evening.

“I have always been fascinated by journalists, not of the film kind but your kind. Look at the kind of interactions you get to have everyday. Never a dull moment,” he said.

I pointed out that it was very unusual for an actor, that too a top star like him, to be not so self-centered.

That’s when he broke into his first invective of the evening. He had warned me during my earlier encounter with him for an interview along with Shireesh that he tends to cuss a lot, not to cuss but merely as a punctuation mark. “It’s just part of my language. Cussing just happens without my trying,” he said and laughed.

“Arey bencho….kya self-centered?” he said, “We are also human beings like you. At least I am curious about others.”

I am sure people would understand what “bencho…”is and Rishi Kapoor, like a true blue Punjabi that he was, always intoned it without really completing it the whole word. The d at the end just trailed away. At times it was just “ben…” “It is a terrible habit but it is part of my vocal reflexes,” he said. Those were his exact words.

During our interview with him a few months before that car ride, Shireesh and I had planned a bit of tease for him. We had decided that just as we sit down for the interview, we would pretend to be uneasy. Shireesh would look at him uncomfortably and I him, as if we wanted Rishi Kapoor to know something unpleasant but we did not know how to broach.

We did that for a few seconds with Shireesh saying, “Mayank, aap bol do.” I said, “Nahi, Shireesh aap. Main nahi keh paunga.” That back and forth went on for about 15 seconds. By now Rish Kapoor was on the edge of his sofa. I could see his lips silently curling into “bencho…”

That’s when Shireesh and I said in unison, “We don’t know how to tell you this but you are one extraordinary actor….”

And then, first a big sigh of relief on Rishi Kapoor’s face, followed by a guffaw and then, “Arey bencho…I thought you were going to say something very bad. Kya acting ki aap dono ne!”

Of the A-list stars of Hindi cinema of the last 50 years only a couple of more would be as spontaneous as Rishi Kapoor. Apart from him another name that comes to mind is that Govinda. Amitabh Bachchan once told me that, “I had to be on guard with Chintu (Rishi Kapoor) whenever we shot a film together. While I was a highly prepared actor Chintu would just come on the set and produce a perfect take without any apparent effort."

Incidentally, he did not like being called Chintu, a nickname that seemed to stick to him throughout his life. "Yaar, achhchha khasa naam hai mera, Rishi phir yeh kyun?" is what he would say. 

Here is to Rishi Kapoor, a bona fide Hindi movie superstar.

Irrfan Khan: An actor of well calibrated and edited silences

Irrfan Khan, January 7, 1967--April 29, 2020 (Image: His Twitter handle)

Perhaps unlike any other actor of his generation Irrfan Khan was an artist of erudite silences. Being unafraid of silences was his most formidable attribute. He was acutely aware but never even remotely self-conscious that he was working in a medium where people could see him, often more than hear him. He knew unlike any of his contemporaries with the possible exception of Nawazuddin Siddiqui that there was much more to be had by having as little as possible.

Irrfan Khan employed his entire body to represent a character and took his time. He was never in a hurry to make an impact. He intoned in a way that was essential and not acquired. He was never assertive but always assured. He was not there to exhibit but express.

In his passing at age 53 today, cinema everywhere has lost an artist of what I personally believe to be greatly untapped or underused talent. His death due to a rare cancerous tumor has removed from our midst a reflective mind who clearly had a much more exciting international career ahead.

In scene after scene, movie after movie and TV series after TV series if there was one defining characteristic of Khan’s career it was extraordinary ability to articulate silences. I suspect that he was perhaps the only actor of his generation who may not have needed any words to convey what he wanted to convey—a tilt of his face, a sideways glance of his eyes, a parting of his lips, an ever so slight annoyance or a hint of a smile they were all tools in his box that he used to chisel an outstanding career.

There are so many scenes from his career where Khan engaged in the slightest of movement to project the deepest of emotion. Be it in Mira Nair’s The Namesake, where he plays an unusually lugubrious Indian professor in New York, Ashoke, or Roohdar in Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider or Maqbool in again Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, or Sajan Fernandes in Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox or Pi Patel in Life of Pi or a police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire or Captain in A Mighty Heart, or Paan Singh Tomar in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, the list is long where Khan paced his portrayal in a way that only he could for a combination of factors, including perhaps his natural disposition as an understated man. If you are remembering him today, I suggest you watch any of these movies for him.

That notwithstanding he had a terrific comic timing as had he so brilliant dramatic peaks. Here was an actor so naturally calibrated and edited. I could be wrong but sometimes I wonder whether film editors had to do much at all when it came to Khan because he seemed to so tightly edited himself.

More often than not, Khan had the expression of a man on the verge of doing or saying something consequential but never really did it fully. That severe economy of his performances left his audience both wanting more and oddly satisfied.

Despite this view I believe that Khan's inordinate artistry was never quite used to the extent that it could be. It is from that point of view that I feel life played a cruel hand on him. Another two decades as a working actor and I am sure he would have gone down as one of the greatest actors of all time. Although his filmography is reasonably robust, I don’t think it does him enough justice. However, within what he was given even early on what an astonishing measure he gave of himself.

A few observations about Mindy Kaling's 'Never have I ever' on Netflix

The cast of Netflix series 'Never have I ever' (Don't feel like identifying them individually.)

As a father of a 17-year-old girl, not to mention also someone who watches and reads for a living, I began watching the new Netflix series ‘Never have I ever’ co-created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher. Part of the curiosity was because of the 15-year-old Indian American protagonist of the series, Devi, played by the first-time actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan on the cusp of experiencing sex.

Sex talk as it were was never any deal, big or small, in my family in the sense that the attitude has always been you indulge in it when you are ready. There was no sitting our two children down, the other now a 25-year-old son, to give them “The Talk”, you know “the birds and the bees” kind of non-sense. I remember asking both my children at the age I thought was appropriate for them this question, “Do you want us to talk about sex and sexuality?” Both said no on the grounds that they had already had a fair idea of what it is about. The rest was, of course, for them to discover for themselves.

So when I watch the angst and anxiety around it in Devi’s mind not only do I not relate but even my daughter does not. Cultural or religious conditioning has never been a feature of our lives. Both our children do not think from themselves with a limited spectrum of their ethnic background which as such things go is mixed. Father, namely me, is from India, mother, Kesumi, is from Sri lanka of Indonesian descent. Neither of us has ever, I mean ever, instructed our children Hayaa and Jashn along cultural and religious lines. The reason I am saying all this because watching a series like ‘Never have I ever’ is for me a very different vantage point compared to the ethnic sensibilities that Mindy Kaling chooses to address and has apparently grown within. The same goes for Jashn and Hayaa.

When I asked my daughter if she plans to watch it, she said, “Well, I don’t know.” There was none of that urgent curiosity about a show that is supposed to represent her both demographically and ethnically. In fact, she said this whole “representation thing” is something that she does not quite get. That is a consequence of the way we have raised them without ever breathing down their necks.

Coming briefly to the series which I have watched only the first two episodes of so far, I am discovering that 15-year-old girls, even Indian American, talk about being “railed” by hot boys. “Railed” in case you don’t know is to have sex. At 15, I knew of only rail gadi as in a train but then I was 15 nearly 45 years ago when parents, in my case my mother because father had died when I was nine, never gave us “The Talk.” One just started doing things, you know things that you do when you come of age. For instance, if a girl smiled at you, you thought you were pregnant. I exaggerate, of course, but you get the drift.  

As someone who could nearly be the Devi character’s grandfather it is naturally hard for me to identify with her problems and challenges. My daughter has a similar complaint about me when it comes to her angst. In my defense though I was never a teenager because I entirely skipped the teens. At 13, I was a poet who wrote:

दरवाज़ा देखता हूँ मैं के कोई अपना आये

दरवाज़े से डरता हूँ मैं के आ के वोह न जाये

I look at the gate in the hope that someone may show up

I am wary of the gate for they may leave through it

Or this haiku in Gujarati:

બંધ બારણે

ભલે પધાર્યા તેમ

તોરણ શોભે

‘Welcome’

Says the sign

On a door shut

I was a nerd alright with an abiding passion for physics even then. My point is I would not have got Devi, as in understood Devi, even at the age she is now.

From what I have seen so far of ‘Never have I ever’ I am not sure if I like it or not but my like or dislike is not going to be based on whether I identify or empathize or both with the fact that it is an Indian origin family in America. I am not so culturally sharpened. I am too quantum mechanical for that.

The reviews of the series have been rather positive. Devi, played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, along with the two other ethnic minority representations Fabiola, played by Lee Rodriguez and Eleanor, played by Ramona Young, seem to have the potential to capture that age demographic. It is just as well that I do not identify with the challenges and joys of their lives because it would be very odd if I did. Given the way I am, it would have been very odd even if I identified with teenage when I was a teenager. So there is that.

I am thrilled for Mindy Kaling’s success although I have never really been set on fire by her writing or humor. I would have liked to interview her but I have noticed that those Indian American artists who so loudly complain about and advocate for fair representation of non-white artists in Hollywood almost never respond to interview requests for a name like mine. I say this from a fairly consistent experience.

The other day I reached out to Poorna Jagannathan, a sharp performer in whatever she does and who is a key presence her as Devi's mother, in the specific context of the passing of the veteran Indian actor Ranjit Chowdhry who died recently. I did so because she tweeted something truly heartfelt prompting me to think that she might be inclined to do a short radio interview with me. As apprehended, she did not respond at all. I think one major problem with tweet-requesting celebrities for media interviews is that they see the number of your followers and immediately size you up either as essential or useless. I fall in the useless category with some 360 Twitter followers. Despite a nearly 40-year-long career as a hard news journalist reporting out of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and America, not to mention being an authorized biographer of the Dalai Lama and a writer-director of feature length documentary, almost no one responds to me these days. I digressed but good to get that rising bile out of my system.

I am not the kind who regards anything as of any lasting consequence. So I do not particularly care about what ‘Never have I ever’ and Kaling would do for the Indian America/South Asian American community at large using the platform of entertainment. In my scheme of things which is between things that are are either quantum mechanical or general relativistic, these little socio-cultural trends do not matter at all.

I will watch the series and move on.

The sheer violence of a bird eating an earthworm

For the past couple of days I have been closely watching birds in my backyard eating worms. I must say it is an act of great violence. In some sense everything about the universe is violent.

If you have not observed it, I suggest you spend a few minutes watching any bird picking apart an earthworm. Since the beak is their only tool birds look particularly vigorous. More often than not earthworms are half inside holes and half outside. That sets up the battle between the bird and the worm as the former tries to rip it out of the ground. I am sure there is some resistance from the worm.

Just before writing this brief post I saw a robin going at a worm with such ferocity at a worm that I almost intervened to scare it off. But then I reasoned that my breaking that circle of life one time is not going to make any difference at all. Just as the worm has the right to live, so does the robin. The only question whose right has primacy over whom. In this case it is not even a serious battle.

At one point I could see the tension in the fight though since the worm had become stretched straight between the robin’s beak and the the hole, a clear sign that the worm was really fighting. It finally snapped out of the ground and ended up coiled up around the robin’s beak. The robin flew away and was back a few minutes later.

What I marvel at is how robins or any other bird for that matter spot worms so well. I don’t know the answer to that. I am merely marveling at it.

Watching Mehboob Khan's 'Andaz' for the first time 70 years after it was made

Nargis, left, and Dilip Kumar in Mehboob Khan's 'Andaz', 1949

This morning on an impulse I began watching Mehboob Khan’s much celebrated 1949 movie ‘Andaz’. That would be a little over 70 years after it was released. I had never watched it before this morning. Perhaps it is a curse for the filmmaker but the pause button on YouTube and other platforms is such a boon for the viewer. I have paused to write this quick impression.

Some 22 minutes into the film, a few things struck me immediately. The first is how unselfconsciously modern Mehboob Khan’s sensibilities were. While one recognizes the urban affluence of Neena’s (Nargis’s) background because of her rich businessman father Badriprasad (Murad) and all the trimmings that come with it being among the elite of the era, one also notices the more technical aspects of the film such as Faredoon A. Irani’s unhurried but intelligent camerawork. It is way superior to anything that you see these days in most Hindi movies.

The camera steadily gazes at the lives of the urban elite almost immediately after India’s independence where the rich are still anglicized—Nargis goes horse-riding in breeches, Jodhpurs really, and boots and calls Murad “Daddy” while Dilip (Dilip Kumar) cuts a dapper figure in suits which are as modern as anything one sees now. Nargis’s mansion is modern contemporary and the living room, which seems like the size a decent-sized Mumbai apartment now, houses a grand piano which Dilip plays. I suspect it was actually Naushad who played in reality. He was the composer of the film, producing some brilliant music.

“Sahab, Mehboob Khan ne yeh farmaya tha ki film thodi modern kisam ki hai to mausiqi bhi kuchh is tarah se chahiye, (Mehboob Khan had said that the film is modern in its outlook. Hence the composition should reflect that,”) Naushad told me during an interview that my dear friend and fellow journalist Shireesh Kanekar and I did at the composer’s residence in Bandra in Bombay in 1986. To think that at that point I had not even watched the movie! I failed to ask Naushad if he did indeed play the piano because he was an accomplished piano player.

As a character Dilip has a swag and a push in his pursuit of Neena which too was quite ahead of its time 70 years ago. I suppose that was a function of the fact that Mehboob Khan was focusing on a particular stratum of the society then. There is a continuous flirtatious vibe--not just between Nargis and Dilip Kumar but also between him and Nargis's friend Sheela (Cuckoo)-- until the point I watched it before writing this little piece. I know from having read the synopsis on IMDB that that would change quite dramatically but I would not spoil it for you should you feel the same impulse to watch it for the first time. Let me just say that so far I am thoroughly engaged in everything Mehboob Khan has served. The performances, the music, the camera work, the editing, the locations and even the emotions, everything is quite polished.

Mehboob Khan is a giant of Hindi cinema with 26 credits as a director, including Mother India, Amar, Aan, Andaz and Anmol Ghadi. As it often happens I have a tangential connection with him which is so slight as to be not even a tangent. One of my mother’s uncles lived in Bilimora in Gujarat, where Khan was born. My mother’s uncle Meherban Mama told us with a sense of obvious pride when we visited him once. I think I was not even a teenager yet but that piece of information stuck and has come in handy this morning.

Living through absurd times

A decade or two from today when those who us who did not inject a disinfectant or drank it and lived to look back would remember this time as absurd beyond comprehension. For quite some time now, I have been avoiding making any political comment or observation simply because I am completely turned off by the level of discourse being so routinely debased by the grandees around the world, one of whom happens to be right here in Washington D.C.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument President Donald J Trump’s ludicrous explanation that he was merely being sarcastic in suggesting that a disinfectant could be injected in our bodies as a possible cure or antidote to the coronavirus infection. Even if that were the case, which most definitely it was not, to have the “leader of the free world” indulge in sarcasm over something so clearly dangerous and that too in front of a sizable number of utterly and even willfully gullible people who choose to believe everything that he says is profoundly embarrassing and worrisome.

Now on to the reality of it all. It was so obvious that he was not being even remotely sarcastic when he said these precise words: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me.”

Yes, these words were actually spoken in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic which has already claimed upward of 50,000 lives in America alone and close to 200,000 lives worldwide. Serious and highly respected professionals such as Dr Deborah Birx, the coronavirus task force response coordinator, sat there not saying a word to challenge one of the most bizarre claims made by someone who habitually makes bizarre claims and then spins them as jokes, sarcasm, humor depending on the kind of response he triggers. Have we now so completely ceded the space for a scientifically rational discourse to such lunacy that a highly respected medical professional would not feel outraged enough to walk out or, at the very least, correct it right there in the moment?

It is a measure of the absurdity of this theater that Lysol, a leading maker of such an disinfectant, had to say this. "As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)," a spokesperson for Reckitt Benckiser, the United Kingdom-based owner of Lysol, said in a statement to NBC News.

"As with all products, our disinfectant and hygiene products should only be used as intended and in line with usage guidelines. Please read the label and safety information," the statement said. It also said the company believes it has a "responsibility in providing consumers with access to accurate, up-to-date information as advised by leading public health experts."

Lysol, one of whose uses is cleaning toilet bowls, felt compelled to reject the US president’s claim. Think about it for a moment. The makers of a blue liquid that your squirt into your toilet bowl has to make that clarification. That is where we are now and that is where those of us still alive will look back on ten-20 years from now.

This morning when I went to clean my toilet, the bowl suggested solicitously, “You keep that. Your need is greater than mine. You will need me only if you are alive.”

मुश्ताक एडा aka Macbeth

Today happens to be William Shakespeare’s birth and death anniversaries both.  It seems he died on the same day as he was born. He was born April 23, 1564 and died April 23, 1616.

To mark the occasion, I have started adapt Macbeth as a play set among Mumbai’s wise guys known locally as bhailog. They use Mumbai’s street patois whose rhythm and style I have been greatly familiar with having reported on the underworld in my early days as a journalist there.

I had created a few random characters some years ago, main among them being Ganja Pistoolwalery or Pistool Ganja. Here is the opening scene from Macbeth Mumbai bhailog style.

This is just a teaser.

गांजा पिस्तूल – King Duncan

चंदू घासलेट – Malcolm

उस्मान तड़ीपार—Captain

शकील वडापाव—Macdonwald

मुश्ताक एडा – Macbeth

गांजा पिस्तूल

ये कोन है थकेला, दीखता तो ऐसा है जैसे डोंगरी में लफड़े की बातमी लायेला है.

चंदू घासलेट

नहीं भाई, इसी नेच मेरे को पकड़ने से बचाया. बोत फाइट किया इस ने. बोले तो दस, पन्द्र लुड़का डाला. चल बता तू ही भाई को की हुआ उधर डोंगरी में.

उस्मान तड़ीपार

भाई, पेहले तो किसी को मालूम नहीं पड़ा कोन जीतेगा कर के. सब साले एक दुसरे को चिपक रेले थे जैसे साले  सब गिर जायेंगे. वो शकील वडापाव बड़ा अकडेला था अपने दो चार लड़कों को कमाटी पूरा से लेके आया था. आज उसकी किस्मत ठीक थी. सब पे हस रेला था जैसे हम उस की रंडी हो. फिर भी किस्मत और शकील वडापाव मिला के भी अपने मुश्ताक एडे को रोक नहीं पाए. मुश्ताक ने,भाई, ऐसे काटा शकील वडापाव को साला आखा पेट से ले के जबड़े तक. साले के सर को दीवार पे ऐसे फटे कमीज़ के माफिक लटका डाला.

Animal kingdom creeping up on us

There are clear signs that non-human animal kingdom is creeping up on us. The first wave was impossibly cute inter-species fraternization as captured in a billion viral videos. Just one of a billion examples came this morning when I saw a video of a puppy throwing his paw around a cat (true story) on a sofa and both peering out of a home window. There is any number of such videos of monkeys caressing dogs (true story) or a python petting a deer (literary exaggeration) or some such animal doing some such things to another animal. You get my drift.

The second wave, which is far more sinister, is a virus 80 billionth of a meter in size, namely the coronavirus 2019, shutting a significant number of humans indoors. The consequence has been a free rein for a wide variety of wildlife to venture into cities and towns and their neighborhoods unlike ever before. Only this morning I saw a compilation of such photographs in The Guardian of mountain goats on the streets of Llandudno, Wales, a raccoon in a deserted Central Park in New York (although to be fair, they also come out normally), a jackal, normally shy, in Tel Aviv, a deer in Nara, Japan, Grey langurs in my hometown of Ahmedabad, which is no breaking news at all, and perhaps most weirdly a sea lion on a sidewalk of Mar del Plata harbour, south of Buenos Aires.

The point is the animal kingdom senses that we humans have been shut out. We are just a couple of steps away from being non-human animals taking over earthly affairs in the imagination. (Literary exaggeration.) I can almost visualize gorillas or an orangutans, which in Malay means a combination orang-person, hutan-forest or a person from forest or a wild person, giving news conferences from world capitals (If Bill Maher is to be believed, it is already happening in a sense vis-à-vis an orangutan. If you don’t catch the drift, too bad) and dogs barking their questions while cats continuing to look unnecessarily inscrutable.

It is not altogether inconceivable that recognizing that humanity may be in retreat animals feel emboldened and come out to take charge. As always, there is a Hindi movie song for that. Choon choon karti aai chidiya (The sparrow came chirping.) Watch the video on top. 

The universe is an illusion of a universe

Guess what this is. Answer in the post below.

I have always had trouble treating the universe as something real. It is perhaps nearly real in the immediate sense within the humanly graspable radius but in its incomprehensible grandness and elusive quantum-ness it ceases to be real in the way we conceive things.

While reading a piece about two black holes of substantially different sizes colliding and creating gravitational waves in Nature magazine even as thinking about the size of the coronavirus—80 billionth of a meter—it struck me that we are in a futile realm, either end of which is meaningless to grasp. And mind you an atom is way smaller than the virus, 10 raised to minus 10 meters, I think.

Everything in the universe is non-existent when you go extremely close or extremely far. Everything feels notional. For instance, when you go very tight on the pearl earring in Johannes Vermeer’s iconic masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring (See the image above) all that you see are two curved strokes which from a distance create the illusion of a pearl. The universe is an illusion of a universe.

When you are stuck with a perspective like this all your life, living a humdrum, mundane existence of bills becomes a harrowing task as it has always been for me. The other day I told a creditor precisely what I have written here and she put the phone down. I do do that from time to time when my reasonable explanations for any late payments do not work.

The two black holes of varying masses that collided and created gravitational waves are respectively 8 solar masses and 31 solar masses. Just so you know, 1 Solar Mass = 1.989x10³³ gram = 1.989x10³⁰ kg. As if we can really wrap our head around that number. 

My smug take on this, that and the other