Suppressed, oppressed and depressed

I am not sure where this is supposed to go, I think here would be fine. Sabbah shared this: Veena Malik’s rapping of the mufti sahab. It could use a little more autotune, but it’s fine this was as well. Watch:

I never quite liked her in the bigg boss household. All that showboating and drama and antics used to grate on my nerves, but I loved the way she speaks. I love the way all Pakistanis speak. The choice of words and the respect they show towards others by their way of speaking Urdu is quite enviable. Hindi doesn’t quite sound as sweet, because of influx of all the foreign words, perhaps.

While I am not well aware of the entire media circus around Ms. Malik, I have seen the interview, and I have newfound respect for her. The host (who’s supposed to be the moderator) and the cleric gang up on her and use some really foul words towards her (some of which I thankfully don’t understand), but the way she gives it back to them, you can’t help but admire her guts. What she says during the interview is right. She’s from the entertainment industry and entitled to look good and dress the way she wants, and she was representing herself and not the country. She’s certainly not a mascot for national pride. It’s quite hilarious how they drag it all to do-kaumi nazariya and zameer ka bojh and Sania Mirza and completely random topics. And then the cleric says that he’s not even seen the show.  Huh?

Like it’s been oft-repeated,  there are other things happening in Pakistan (and the rest of the world), which are far more important which have been swept under the rug, and no one cares two hoots. It’s rather tragic how the media rules our lives and eats into our mindspace — it’s almost like they own it. An average person gets baited very easily. And so, if an issue is played 5 times on tv, it really does look like an important issue, and for us it becomes a part of being aware of “current affairs”.  Oh wait, that’s what happens in Peepli Live.  Sometimes makes me wonder if censorship is a good thing.

One could argue that with twitter and social media, all this is changing. It is, but for now that space is only for opinion mongering, not for real news. It has the tendency to ignore real news till it is already famous. No?

The King’s Speech

Managed to watch ‘The King’s speech’ — an award season favourite — starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter.

It tells the story of a young Prince Albert, Duke of York, who suffers from a speech impediment (stuttering) which severely affects his confidence, all the way until he becomes King George VI. Bertie has been bullied and ill-treated through his childhood, and has gone through as much stuff as his blue blood will allow him to. But he doesn’t have to worry, since he’s always played a second fiddle to his more charismatic elder brother, the heir apparent, and this rids him of any responsibility of delivering Christmas messages to the masses. And then there is a messed up attempt at a speech. Enter, charismatic speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who harasses him into admitting the reason behind his lack of confidence and hence, his stammer. Meanwhile, Father dies, and Big Brother subsequently abdicates because of his love for a twice-divorced woman, and this whole situation makes Prince Albert’s head quite uneasy, even before he wears the crown. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

If we peel the layers of ‘your majesty’ and ‘your royal highness’ off, it is a classic underdog story, where the underprivileged meets his suave teacher who turns his life around. Needless to say, it’s a tearjerker, especially when it hits the crescendo of the final monologue.

Colin Firth is this tentative, shuffly person and hence, as outstanding as he needs to be. I’ve always had this thing about Helena Bonham Carter eating up screen space wherever she went. Here she seems extremely subdued compared to screen-eater Geoffrey Rush, who overpowers everyone else even by just being in the corner.

That explains it!

Conversations with two very interesting people, led me to conclude this:

The endless discussions on  the Slumdog *issue* seem to resemble rediff messageboards, except some of the opinions expressed are by wordsmiths.

And in comment space, noone can sue you.

Kkaba D

The Kkaba D idea has quite a few takers, it already has rave reviews. Unfortunately, Kollywood got to it first. The K Konnection, you reckon? Check the rediff review, and read the original idea (which was a collaborative effort):

The riveting screenplay is supposedly based on a true story.

and

Our heroes number seven, the principal of them being K Marimuthu (Vishnu), a gangly, scruffy lad who loses his father at a young age, and is put to work as a goat-herd to the village’s landlord.

and

Movie does manage to have its own special flavour, as our boys slowly go from being under-dogs to a force to contend with.

So: True story – check. Romance – check. Country bumpkin – check. Trouble with coach – check. Underdog story – check. Oh lord, I swear I didn’t plagiarize.

Now what? Have a high budget remake with Saif Khan in the lead – first he’ll be sent packing his abs, while we count. No, abs have already reached the max ab limit. Think of the next body part Bollywood will obsess over. I bet on the butt.

Maybe I should find a job as a scriptwriter.
Kollywood calling?

Two Songs

This blog was about earworms, how did one forget that? So two folksy Hindi songs worth mention:

#1: Genda Phool from Dilli 6. I absolutely love, love, love the lyrics. Such a beautiful metaphor:  the Sasural a marigold flower. It looks fine and bright, but doesn’t smell that great.  Marigold is such an inconsequential flower, and yet so important. How better to describe the bittersweet experience?

Prasoon Joshi, you rock. After seeing you at the JLF, slight love type thing happened, since I haven’t seen anyone write Hindi poetry for a while. [Aside - I didn't know that Dooba Dooba and Man ke Manjeere was written by Mr. Joshi as well. Did you?]

#2: The quirky Emosanal Attyachar, the brassband version. What is there not to like about it? While Bony Chakravarty as Patna ke Presley makes “tregedy” sound yum, there is this part where he goes “Bol bol why did you ditch me?’, and pronounces “why”  the way only a proud Bengali can. O-high. I have spent a quite a few idle hours trying to figure out why I can’t round my w’s that way. Bol Bol ohigh did you ditch me, whore? Cracks me up every single time.

Blabber, wince, repeat.

Just a couple of days back, we were having this talk about a Kabaddi movie: Kkaba D*, which goes by the tag line: the underdog story. And the teaser-trailers-promos which would say: Hold your breath, in 2009.
It started as a joke about the fact that since we had Shahrukh for Hockey, Aamir for Cricket and John Abraham for Football,  who would be the best to promote Kabaddi? It eventually became a full blown attempt at thinking of the plot of a Kabaddi movie .
Kabaddi is a sport for which we have actually won a medal at the Asian games, so it automatically implies it’s based on real life incidents. Add to it  a romance with the daughter of coach of a team, and  the lead actor getting asthma right before the match at climax — against Pakistan, obviously —- so he can’t hold his breath. Another arc in the story, another member of the team, would be a country bumpkin whose Dad thinks he’s useless because he doesn’t know how to milk the cow. Throw in some national integration. Add Himessbhai doing the rock+pop+dandiya version of the title song, which has only one word, “Kabaddi”, repeated, breathlessly. One just needs to decide which actor gets to play the lead. Suggestions welcome.

Now think about whether such a movie will ever hit theaters? Okay, cut out the exaggeration a little bit, and you will see it’s totally possible. In Bollywood, yes. Ludicrous as it may seem, time and again bollywood is not just repeating itself, it’s busy making spoofs of it’s own movies, only with bigger budgets and bigger names. Nothing has changed, or evolved.

Mainstream escapist cinema. It’s wrong to call ourselves the ones who perfected it, that we are the only protectors of good-beats-evil kind of fantasies. Ironman and Dark Knight are fantasies too, aren’t they? But people playing the part are not bigger than the characters, and hence the stories themselves. Because elsewhere, there are Kung Fu movies or war movies or romcom movies. We have Shahrukh movies and Akshay movies. The stories are irrelevant. Because frankly, Bollywood movies don’t tell stories, Bollywood movies create stars. The star is the opiate of the masses. The script is optional. Hence Bollywood movies, most often than not, aren’t are  wonderfully memorable, Bollywood movies are blockbusters.

Of course, that was before the recent spate of masala masquerading as meaningful. In my opinion, a movie doesn’t become memorable or get noticed because the lead character is blind, dyslexic, amnesiac or an asthmatic, because it brings to light his suffering because of poverty, or because it tells us about how colourful India is — it’s when there is a story which is being told, and being told well. Reality or fantasy, unique or repetitive, thrilling or predictable – everyone remembers a story told well. And in Bollywood, we don’t really care about that.

Agreed this is our style of escapism, to consume the same thing over and over again at the end of a tiring day, much like comfort-food, but then we shouldn’t whine about it not being recognized as high-cuisine. This masala is suited for our and only our palette, it’s okay, it’s fine.

So Mr. Bachchan, I am a great fan of yours. I worship your movies. But the true problem is not the fact that the critics/awards  ignore us, the fault lies in the fact that we hardly have anything new to offer,  and more importantly with the fact that when an esteemed critic like Roger Ebert has a chance to watch mainstream escapist cinema –something which Bollywood has supposedly perfected –we give him Chandni Chowk to China.
–

*Credit to @manuscrypts

Also thanks to a thousand people on twitter.

Karzzzz.

a.k.a. Karva Chauth and Kaarzzzz [Some spoilers, do you really care?]

I dragged the reluctant other half to watch Karzzz. A good half hour later, the usually stoic man leaned closer and said out loud (noone cared to whisper in the theater today) “I need to discuss this with <his best friend>. In 1999, we watched Haseena Maan jayegi, and I thought that was the worst movie ever”.

I then realized, today he managed to get himself a slave for life, namely, me. I owe him a big one for agreeing to watch this.

Having said that, it was completely worth it – worth the laughs, worth the comments in the theater, worth this whistles and catcalls. Since everyone knew what to expect. Almost all my predictions were right.

When Hindi movie directors want to attempt to remake an old classic, the only step they take is to replace every single gadget/plot device with something which is technologically advanced. So the notebook becomes a CD, and instead of tapping on a glass, Sir Judah goes beep-beep-beep-beep on the touchpad of his robotic/prosthetic arm, the tea estate becomes a vineyard, so on and so forth. That automatically makes the movie a reinterpretation and it indicates that we, the people are keeping up with the times. It’s a pathetic solution to fill up gaps left by lack of imagination (which they obviously lack, else why would they be attempting remakes). Strangely, all the arcane elements of the plot (Ma Kali ka mandir) and more importantly, the characters never get an upgrade. The only character that ever changes, ever so slightly, is the “vamp”, who is portrayed as being more sexually forward since now the movies allow the women to be so.

Himesss, as Monty, is not bad, he is okay as an actor. There’s something very convincing and unpretentious about the way he deals with his lack of star appeal. Urmila would have to be born again to have half the class of Simi.

Rest of the movie is ridiculous, inconsequential and hence, at the expense of sounding repetitive, completely worth the money and popcorn.

And yet, when Danny Dengzongpa and his sidekicks, Shaakal and Mogambo repeat all those dialogues from yesteryears, and that sinister melody plays, we remember the good old times that Hindi cinema has seen.

Kya umar thi, kya sama tha, kya zamana tha.

Tom’s Diner

A colleague was going “do-do-doo-doo, doo-dodo–doo” during a meeting, and soon it was the two of us, humming, punctuating silences. Do-do-doo-do, doo-dodo-doo, Do-do-doo-do, doo-dodo-doo.

Uncomplicated melody, simple lyrics – this song grows on you, and then lands up playing at the back of your head all day and you dont even notice it. .

Apart from the fact that it would will easily making it to many a earworms list, Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner is famous for few other reasons. This a capella, folksy number was used by Karlheinz Brandenburg (at what is now the Fraunhofer Society) to develop the audio compression scheme known as MP3, earning Vega the informal title of “The mother of MP3″. Vega describes her feelings on being called the Mother, the history behind the song, and how she put out an album called “Tom’s Album” collecting 11 remixed versions of the same song. in this wonderful post on her blog on NY times.

In another post, she refuses to be embarrassed by Luka and Tom’s Diner, and says about being a two-hit wonder:

As for being a two-hit wonder — well, I think it’s better than being a one-hit wonder, thank you very much.

Though I missed the concert in Esplanade Theater here, I had the chance to watch her live at Rock in Rio at Madrid this year, and she was fantastic. Will upload a couple of pics here later.

All the good ones are taken.

This aside on my previous post on Thirteen senses, the thoughts of all you iReaders and Cynic got me thinking.

Before the days of search-at-your-fingertips, for music lovers, Music was hard to discover, and so was trivia. Fans dwelled on every piece of information they gathered about the band. Including how the band names came by.

Almost all famous bands had a story to tell about their names. Maybe, we know those stories only because some music fanatic told it to us. Some of them had significance, some of them were really pulled out of a hat. Think The Beatles, think Pink Floyd, think Jethro Tull. Simple sticky names, and fun stories. My favourite bit of band name trivia is how the name of Frank Zappa’s band, The Mothers of Invention came about. They were originally called The Mother*uckers, but their record label refused to publish them under that name, and so, by necessity, they were the mothers of Invention. (I am not sure how true it is, and am too tired to look it up)

Now, loads of bands which get created every minute get an audience through last.fm and youtube. I wonder where all these people find names? Are all the good ones taken? And how do they manage to create a name which will stick in people’s minds when the attention span is so less. Though you would agree that the music does play a role in the stickiness of a name. I would have perhaps never thought twice about a band called “Thirteen Senses”. The name doesn’t quite stick. Maybe, if had found the music fantastic, I would have remembered it. Which is when I notice how some of the names that come up on my last.fm channel ( Radio Like Belle and Sebastian) list are bordering on outrageous.

Funky names: An aim: Cute Is What We Aim For , a plan: Saturday Looks Good to Me, a location: I’m From Barcelona, and a vibe: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Some others are: Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, and The Apples in Stereo.

Almost like they have all been pulled out of a Band name generator.

Anyway, let see what the band name generator churns out for our Darling Cynic. While “A cynic in wonderland” makes a perfect band name, I am quite tempted to ask her to start a band called Cynic Bicep of the Primal Goggles.