Namak Haraami

Namak Haraam – the traitor, the betrayer. One who has been disloyal to the pre-agreed norm. Not conforming to the rules of the game. (Something that would irk heteronormativity?)

In the ambit of retrospective queering, this film stands apart from every other popular Bombay cinema from the 70s.

The pair, Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna, has no other love interest. Their passion is relieved from the shocks and disbeliefs commonly connected with the exhibition of homosexuality in India, shrewdly camouflaged within the dominant social foliage of fraternal camaraderie. Concocting a congruency with the normative tropes with manly bar brawls and references of high-speed car driving, they were successful in avoiding derisive name callings and other social ridicules.

And being an industrialist’s son, and his beloved 'chamcha' definitely shields away a lot of the social mistreatments. Yes, a lot of it had to be carefully ciphered. 

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But what could not be concealed, revealed it all. 

The restrained expression of jealousy and possessiveness on the knowledge of a potential love interest of the partner, the rage felt against the father after coming to know of the conspiracy hatched against Khanna, and the jerking apathy bordering on impassiveness after the swift death scene of Rajesh Khanna actually portrayed the intense eros shared between the two characters.

Maybe the words used to define that then were not approximated with the present rhetoric of homosexuality, but the ethos was sincerely queer.

They laughed at the fact on how Amitabh’s father had set a beautiful maid upon him in order to win him over (to the other side?).

The iconic frame of Amitabh –Simi, looking away from each other, should be recalled when Amitabh appreciates Simi’s sensitivity. Not just for being a sympathizer of the poor and the hungry, but for understanding the relationship between him and Rajesh.

Wasn’t the slight hint of a love affair between Rajesh-Rekha (underwhelming to the core when compared with the contemporary cinematic representation of courtship. And keeping the economics of the industry in mind, why/how would you not pair Amitabh-Rekha when the producers has paid for both!) a decoy, a part of the incognito that Rajesh was playing?

The movie dwells on sabotage. 

Would it be too outlandish to assume that queer paradigmatically sabotaged the diegesis, overtly bearing allegiance to the demands of contemporary Bombay cinema?

From tit to tat!!

Walter Benjamin once stated that the quality that provides a charismatic aura to any artwork or art form is it’s ‘unreproducability.’ Therefore, any adaptation must undergo semiotic changes, when a text is translated from one form to another. Whenever a literary text is morphed into a cinematic text, there is a shift in code structures to make the text congruent in the new medium. The domain of audio visual medium has the opportunity of regulating the space for imaginative approximation or appropriation which helps in consolidating the illusion. Illusion being the pivotal point on which the basis of the narrative rests. Thus, the dynamics of literary texts and their cinematic adaptations largely depend on the relationship of literary and cinematic semiology.

The adaptation begins only after literary texts are read by the film makers, thus, is dependent on the nature of reception of the reader. Therefore, what we get is the reflection of the reception of the film maker himself. In the process, the discursive space of the original text gets manipulated in some way or the other, resulting to what one may call as the distortion of subjectivity. Apu and Durga running in the fields and catching a glimpse of the train may have been Satyajit Ray’s successful attempt to incite nostalgia of the banal yet pristine childhood excitements in the popular Bengali psyche, but in BibhutibhushanBandyopadhyay’s literary version, the female, namely, Durga, never gets the opportunity to see the train in her lifetime. The ‘train’ was the totem of Modernity entering the rural scenario, and Durga not being able to see it insinuated at the deprivation of the females in the semi feudal rural social structure. Thus, by capturing Durga and the train in a single frame, a significant discursive political paradigm of gets blocked. Features like fidelity to plot and character sketching gets fundamentally more complex. That perhaps may explain the change in character of ‘Devdas’ in its innumerable cinematic adaptations. Thus, it is clear why Sanjay leela Bhansali’s Devdas is different from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, both being characteristically different from Sarat C. Chattopadhyay’s  ‘Debdash.’

Influence and reception play important roles in the matrix of intertextuality in literature and cinema as they do in the ambit of culture. The transition from ‘vaudevilles’ to a rigid art form called for a lot of additions and subtractions. While building a language for cinema, people like D.W. Griffith (read Hollywood or the institutional mode of representation) borrowed the structure of the narrative mode of the classic realist novel from literature, which limited the definition of cinema to an art form which caters to the innate human propensity and tendency of storytelling. The codification suggested by the above system has turned into the most popular narrative style all over the world; the triumph of Realism (which is a progeny of the capitalist social structure). People took more interest in the on screen struggle of the individual against the repressive social order, and their march to success against all odds. The illusion becomes so strong and effective that people forget that actually a story is being told to them, assuming themselves to be omniscient spectators, oblivious to the presence an invisible narrator. The verisimilitude with reality becomes the ‘Real’, slowly drugging the people to a point of political docility. This is the way the art forms are turned into institutional modes of repression. Beacons of human sensitivity become the batons that slander. The process being subtle and suave, just like anybody skin care lotion catch line may say, ‘it works within you even when you are not aware.’ Ladies and gentlemen, that’s hegemony for you!!

For the crow's cause and caws

Interesting how the crow becomes the recurring theme for narratives in the subcontinent. This has been happening for a quiet a long time.

Crow, the rational bird, has inspired writers and thinkers for a long time.  Why crow? Is it a democratic choice? Is it because of its ubiquity? Omnipresence?

Crow is like that silent buddy in your friend’s gang with whom you do not necessarily talk to everyday, but his or her absence explains the awkward lackluster of the day’s hangout.

(There was an article I had stumbled upon a few days ago, which claimed that Indian crows are gradually taking over the eastern African coastal line, pushing the native birds towards the interiors.)

Suskumar Ray, (whose numerous literary offspring were as prodigious as his earthly progeny – Satyajit Ray) was perhaps the first (nonetheless still the best) non sense writers I have come across. He showed us that nonsense literature is absolutely no nonsense stuff. Much later, when academic hermeneutics helped us decipher the convoluted postulates of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Alice in wonderland, we instinctively went back to the apparently infantile nonsense verses of Sukumar Ray, just to realize that there is indeed more to heaven and earth… (And it gets more interesting after denouncing the existence of heaven altogether)

Sukumar’s story ‘Ha-ja-ba-ra-la’ had a character called the ‘kageshwar kuchkuche.’ (kageshwar comes from ‘kak’ – the crow, and kuchkuche is the onomatopoeia associated with the blackness of the crow)

Kageshwar was the accountant, wearing the stereotypical round rimmed clerk specs, and as the accountant is expected to, he carried a pen, a notebook and an ever confused countenance of continuous calculation. The reader, quite ‘normally’, gets bewildered at his calculating techniques. Just like kageshwar was bewildered to know that the ‘normal’ way of counting one’s age is adding up years! How can it be so? Age cannot only increase! After a point of time, age is bound to follow a reverse order… and then it should rise again after the age decreases for a few years.

After much contemplation, one might conclude that Kageshwar’s calculations were not merely ‘wrong,’ actually, at some subversive level, it was critiquing the whole concept of ‘mathematics’ which human being staunchly, and quite irrationally, cling on to… And being a rational scientific person himself, Sukumar did not practice the heresy of blindly defying ‘all that is western,’ which is the contemporary RSS-Boko Haram talisman.  Kegeshwar’s logic encompassed the whole dynamics of age, human behavior, tantrums, psychology, giddiness, life and of course – numbers. The humor here provided a contemplative space to distinguish between ‘Science,’ its ramifications, its influence, and more importantly, its reception.

The old talking crow, Dandabayosh, was one of the key figures who helped bring about an alternatively armed revolution by the deprived masses in the streets of Kolkata in radical writer Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel ‘Kangal Malshat.’ Dandabayosh the crow was this ancient observer, who was the witness to the passing of various milieus, regimes and ideologies. He shared a special camaraderie with the ghost of the late queen Victoria. He can smirk away high brow neo liberal intellectuals and their theories by retorting – “I keep your Nietzsches in my pocket like so many nickels and dimes”

Can we not say that Kakkassery Bhattathiri could muster the bravado of never bothering about any rules of untouchability, and nonchalantly denounce the ways of the symbolic order because he could identify crows from one another at the age of 5?

Can we not say that the crows left Abdul after realizing that he was tying himself up with the alluring banalities of family life, the samsara?  

That is the power of the crow. Crow, the passerine alter ego of the common man – the aam aadmi. The aam admi party conveniently owned the symbol of the broom… And guess what, in Bengal, the crow is also known as the jhadu-dar bird.

Epitaph of one of those slain Bangladeshi bloggers

"I am done with writing on war crimes, fundamentalism and politics. In either case, they
do not serve any purpose other than venting out personal angst. But even that
purportedly hurts feelings, disrupts ‘peace’, and impedes ‘development.’ Therefore, I
have to write about something that does not offend anyone.
Okay, let’s write about flora and fauna. Our country has lesser trees than required. Trees
are being cut down daily for a variety of reasons. Last year, that communal group had cut
down a lot of trees under the guise of some obscure religious movement. Their
love for deserts probably makes them hate trees. And if they build the power plant in
Rampal, it will endanger the ecology of the Sunderbans…
… Hey, what am I doing! Nope, this can’t be written. Peace will be disturbed,
development would falter. Will have to write about something else…
…Well, can write about education. Education is the backbone of a nation. As the literacy
rate improves every year, education pays a price! Question papers leak abundantly.
Achieving the pass mark is being promoted and appreciated with no proper
evaluation of intellect.
…No, it would not be right to write on this either. The literacy rate increases by leaps and
bounds. Writing something like this in such a scenario would offend the education
system…
…Rather write a travelogue. I had been to Sitakund a few years ago. From there, one
can see the hillocks of the craggy Chittagong district. It is the habitat of a significant
portion of the nation’s aborigines. Anyway, they are terribly upset about the aggression
and encroachment of the army and outside settlers. On top of that, a huge portion of its
land mass was submerged during the installation of the Kaptai hydro power plant…
…Oh, these would surely brand me as a separatist infidel! Let the aborigines be. I will
choose something safer…    
…Films it shall be then. Our cinema is in shambles. A handful were trying to progress.
The most prominent among them was Tareque Masud. Sadly, we could not keep him
alive. A certain class of our nation was not too fond of him. His films accommodated issues like
religious orthodoxy, militancy. Though his film ‘Matir Moyna’ was awarded in the
Cannes festival, the contemporary BNP-Jamat coalition government did not agree to
release the film in the country citing religious sensitivity. Later…
…Impossible! How many heads do I carry on my shoulder that I dare to talk about
religious fanaticism? Instead…
…Love, yes love and romance are the safest bets. Most undergo this episode, at least
once in their lives. And there are guys who ‘love’ one after the other; they promise
marriage, get intimate, and leave the beloved once they have made love. There are many
who upload the videos of the intimate moments of love making on the internet. And
usually, it’s the fairer sex who gets blamed and victimized. And these are the very men
who specifically hunt for virgins to marry; ‘chaste’ virgins to carry their family names.
But those girls rarely get the opportunity to return to normal…
…Nope, women rights, women empowerment, have to keep mum on these issues. It
would ruin the society, lead to utter decadence. Let society be by itself, I…
…Lets write about me. I was born in a middle class family. All the idiosyncratic
characteristics of the middle class - opportunism, indecisiveness, selfishness, I can be
convicted of all these. But it’s better than not belonging to a lower class or a proletariat
family. The farmers don’t get the fair price for their produce, and the workers do not earn
fair wages. The workers of the leading garment industry cannot even guarantee
themselves natural deaths. Collapsing buildings and fires often kill them, on an
industrial scale. Then comes those farcical rescue missions, ludicrous enquiry
commissions, fake promises of compensations, concealing the culprits in the name of
justice, et al…
…Damn, it is actually not possible for me to write. How joyously the nation is
developing. And look at the cynical me! This is the rhetoric of those conspirators, who
want to destroy the national industrial sector, disregard the blooming development in
agriculture. Instead of the reality…
…Better to get into fiction. Once upon a time, there lived a king. The ‘once upon’ is now
far bygone. The last sovereign ‘Nawab’ was defeated and killed mercilessly by the
treachery of Mir Zafar. Though incidentally, Mir Zafar had to pay for his actions, but
criminals of war, a thousand times more dangerous than Mir Zafar, have peacefully lived
in this country for many years. They have tasted the sweet syrup of power. Although they
have been presently brought to trial, but the sloth tribunal, the uncertainty of verdict,
allegations of entente with the government, the Shahbag movement…
…Crazy! Writing on these would falter the pace of the war crime judgment. The anti
independence Rajakars would flaunt the rules!
So what am I left to write with! Can someone tell me which kind of writing would
appease the government, political parties, fundamentalists, public, and the pro/anti
freedom groups? Is there anyone to advice?

Hello…"

The exciting Exide exodus

Exide now sells life insurance

Cells – should last long (Really long)

Don’t bother brother

What you fuel

Long lasting Trucks, trimmers, DVD players

Long lasting xenophobia, misogyny, superstitions

Got to last long

Exide, with its perennial lifespan

Awaited insurance FDI

To enlighten us of our juicy salvation

How much juice you got in you?

The non menstrual manly commodities

Double alkaline men

To last long, really long

 

Developed decadence - Only lovers left alive

For some reason, I had the notion that Jim Jarmush was non American. However, the trope of 'for some reason' is loaded with a conscious conniving sense of escapism, Precisely the avenue Jarmush likes to tread in, trade in.
The locale of the movie bore a resemblance with the numerous eastern European spaces depicted in various aesthetic platforms. These typically signified the economic downfall of the region, inevitably insinuating at the futility or rather the non viability of the Soviet government, translating the idea of socialism as obsolete, and in the process, perpetuating the politically incorrect portrayal of history. (These works of art are usually celebrated by people, who use these to legitimize their claims on the ways of the world, denigrating the insignificant voice of the 80 percent of the world population.)
Thanks to the well established motif of the dilapidated red regime aftermaths, the film's canvassing of present day post recession Detroit helped me connect the dots between the Russian and the American distress. Social fibers have always been torn apart due to economic breakdowns. It transcends petty religious, political, partisan blame games and chest poundings. It is universal. Historical.
Only Lovers Left Alive dwells on the universality of the human race. The oeuvre of Literature providing the basis of its narrative. Timelessness is ruggedly palpable in this movie.
If Jesus was a lonely sailor who sank beneath his wisdom, then Adam and Eve were perhaps smarter than him. Adam chose the sensible path of languor, mocking the much celebrated and over hyped construct of industrious dexterity. Eve chose to live in Africa, who unlike Adam, had forsaken the idea that there is still good 'blood' left in the first world America... and so did Christopher Marlowe!
Oh, before I forget and divert into other silly impertinent banters- this is a 'vampire' movie which also has zombies in it. Doctors in the movies often get their names mixed up. Faust becomes Calligari who can be called Strangelove as well! Names are but noise and smoke obscuring the heavenly light. Just that, there is no 'heaven' per-se in the movie, not even remotely. Marlowe dies of food poisoning, or blood poisoning. Blood, which of course is the food of the vampires. No horror here. While in a developed and civilized society it is getting harder to gain access to unadulterated blood by the quintessential kill-drink-dump vampire exercise, the cause of Marlowe's death was the contaminated blood he procured from the city Hospital of an underdeveloped third world nation.
The movie does not waste aesthetic energy over magnifying the stark contrast between the simultaneous development and decadence of humanity. That is the agreed understanding one starts the movie with. Instead, the director is more interested in the dialectics of being, of existence...
Adam and Eve talk about radiant stars emitting the sound of a gong in the vacuum of outer space, of Einstein theories, of how the mainstream hullabaloo of the 'culture industry' can be offset by sheer intellectual brilliance, how Shakespeare was a bloody Marlowe rip off, and how the Marloewes are always non nonchalant at the market driven definition of Shakespearean success.
They are driven by blood. They are the vampires. The rest are all exasperating zombies!        

Subramanian Mirzaswamy Men

When do you might guess there is still hope left?

The comments for the YouTube upload of a Ghalib-Gulzaar-Jagjit Singh video is full with those quintessential fundamentalist display pictures whom (which?) you usually tend to ignore, or in sporadic intervals, dare to challenge (quite vehemently) under the godly atheistic  cyber sense of security.

But, you indeed understand that they are , with a commanding disposition, appreciating Ghalib.

People are still ‘Reading’!

And in one flickering moment, let each of them realize (be it in sporadic intervals) that it is not ok to synonymies the profanely sacred idea of the word ‘secular’ with ‘sickular’, a pun that humiliates sense of humor, a flash visual of ‘comedy nights with Kapil’ promo dreadfully slithers through each brain cell for a second.

It is an allegory which insults intelligence the Michael Corleone way.

And one day, probably they shall learn how trivial it was to assert identity, and while at it, they were moronically infantilizing the self, the swaym, the sans-exotic Vedic Swami, humiliating the Ghalib which they now muse.

Swamyji, you are an intelligent man. But I guess there is still hope left.

The faded faceless saffron people still listen to Ghalib.