Very good article on understanding Thackrey-Bachchan conflict in a socilological context

Link

A city has always been a site for competing metaphors. Novelists and journalists in their writings have captured this drama. Gunter Grass and Dominic Lapierre did it for Calcutta, one pronouncing it a crematorium of death and the other labelling it a ‘City of Joy.’ In a similar manner, Mumbai too has become a pretext for competing claims and narratives. Only this time, the text is not a novel by Suketu Mehta or Salman Rushdie, it is a populist drama enacted in the open, with the media as storytellers. The impetus is Raj Thackeray’s attack on Amitabh Bachchan. In this essay, one is not interested in them as individuals. One is encountering them as persona, ritual enactments of competing visions of the city.
The first model embodies an idea of the homogenous city, where like reproduces like, as in a dull utopia. To the homogeneity, one adds a territoriality where the city surrounds itself with a cordon sanitaire. It seeks a ghettoisation of the populace, ensuring that nothing new, nothing different can enter. It is a populist ritual of pollution control where the stranger as the migrant, the refugee, or the poor is banned. It is a sanitisation of the rhetoric of nativism, security and populism. It is dystopian vision presented as a guarantee of safety as dullness.
Raj Thackeray is an embodiment of this domain. The only difference between his uncle and him is that Bal Thackeray appears to believe in it while Raj sees it as a legacy, a political real estate he must expand and exploit. This is more instrumental, more desperate, more cynical, more fascist. In Bollywood terms, it is a script for a B-grade movie with C-grade stars. The political trailer would be more worthwhile than the movie itself, moving between the redundancy of boredom and violence.
Counterposing this at the popular, populist, folk and mass media levels is the vision of Amitabh Bachchan. I am not interested in Bachchan and his personal forays into politics. I am interested in the Bachchan of folklore, the man and his sense of the city. The image of Bachchan evokes the alternative politics of the city as plural, diverse, violent, mobile, hardheaded, hardhearted, sentimental and creative.
Mumbai inspires and invites the migrant and the stranger but no one will deny it is a hard city. But as Bachchan and others show repeatedly, it is not the hardness of granite or of the heart, it is a demand for toughness, for survival, an initiation rite that demands that you survive the city. It is not the hardness of closure, denial, and refusal. It is a generous city which thinks dogs in the manger are not genuinely city-bred.
Raj Thackeray presents the vision of the nukkad strongman in a designer kurta offering safety in return for a policing contract. It is a Hobbesian world which offers city life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish’ if one does not accept their vision. It is a ghettoised imagination. The sadness is that the Shiv Sena has the same traumatic emptiness of McCarthyism. Put it on television, expose it on media as a documentary, and it seems hollow. No bit actor is less convincing that Raj Thackeray. In fact, some of his followers carry on as if they could enact his part better.
Bollywood shows that this is a notion of the city in corsets. Bollywood needs the genetics of difference. In fact, in many ways its original, the Bombay Talkies, embodied Hindu-Muslim unity before and after Partition. Bollywood is a salute to every outsider, migrant, stranger who seeks to come home to the city. It is a parallel vision that the Shiv Sena finds threatening and which it tries to control.
Happily myths don’t succumb as easily to the petty politician. Shiv Sena is in Mumbai but is hardly representative of it. Bollywood is in Mumbai but celebrates both the city and India. It is local, national, global and cosmopolitan. The battle at the level of myth is uneven even if the Sena digs hard into local legend and folklore.
Thackeray and Bachchan have become inadvertently competing models of the city. The first is ghettoised, farcical, threatening, and the second is generous, thoughtful, realistic and yet celebratory about the possibilities of the city. Thackeray threatens democracy through populism; the other expands democracy as script and drama even if it is a bumbling one.
One must be grateful it is an open drama being consumed by millions across the country. This binary model of the city raises a futuristic either/or. It raises the question of how a society responds to scarcity or relative deprivation. It is not the poor who create this idiot politics but a middle class seeing its part of the cake shrink. Thackeray’s is a politics of jealousy, envy playing to the politics of scarcity. It plays the idea of the sons of the soil to show it has no sense of the soil called the city. It is the idiom of security battling the metaphors of sustainability.
Democracy is a world of hard choices, even cruel ones. It also allows bit players a chance at the big time. The beauty is democracy does not eliminate either set of players. It puts them in a public arena asking the spectator to make choices. Democracy realises a city of spectators is also a city of critics and actors. Mumbai has set the melodrama and is asking India to decide. Raj Thackeray or Amitabh Bachchan as ‘Bombay meri jaan’?

A very good blog on atheism

Without Gods was an intereactive blog where the author bounced ideas about a book on the history of atheism. The most arresting feature of the blog is its comments. I have already quoted from one of the comments in an earlier post. Many a times, the comments are much more enlightening than the post itself.

Sample the link posted where the author asks whether leaving theism is a moment wrought with pain or liberation.

The comments highlight different aspects of the phenomenon. the very first, in fact, questions the premise if it's a single moment.

But the gem is this one -

It doesn't "have" to hurt. It often will, though, because like most such life transitions, it won't be complete -- ie, bits of the old theistic thinking will still be lurking, and thus you'll experience conflict between the opposing worldviews.
Think of Camus' meditation on whether a thinking person should just commit suicide in the face of a meaningless universe. That question is predicated on a couple of conditions: 1)that meaning is, in fact, necessary; and 2)meaning must come from a source external to yourself. That second condition is the classic theistic position, and I think that when people suffer pain from their de-conversion, it's because that idea is still lingering in their heads. Those kinds of underlying believes/assumptions about reality can be devishly hard to overcome.

A review tidily rearranged

I happened to go over the site or Above Average, a debut I felt with some promise, an started reading the reviews.

One of the lines said - 'These are authentic characters with authentic dialogue ...' I followed the link and this is actually how it completed.

'These are authentic characters with authentic dialogue, but what of it? "Have you heard Gravy Train? ... They are fundoo, man," but the conversations are so inconclusive you feel like crying out "fiction, fiction," much like a man craving water in a desert. '

Talk about quoting out of context!

How things look from a perch

I found this article in one of the blog posts following the Bangalore riots following Dr. Rajkumar's death:

When Bangalore Burnt! by Garima Gupta
Bangalore burnt with the police buses set on fire. Bangalore broke with every stone pelted on innumerable glass front buildings. Bangalore ached with every unruly push of the crowd. Bangalore mourned when five people lost their lives in senseless violence. Bangalore cried, when the film icon Rajkumar’s family found it difficult to perform his final rites with the dignity and grace every human being deserves in death.
Some say it was overwhelming grief that made the fans go mad. Some now say, that it was a politically sponsored and planned event. To me, as a Bangalorean, it makes no difference. It shocks me no less, that men can become beasts, together, for the slightest of reasons, be it grief or greed, be it language or religion.
When we shifted base from USA to India, Bangalore was the only city we were willing to relocate to. It was ideal. In many ways, it still is. Perched on 7th floor of a luxury apartment, knowing only enough local language to say ,”Kannada Gotilla” (I don’t know Kannada), having access to enough superstores and malls to never need to explore the city’s old Chickpet market, In a ever-pleasant climate and ever growing choice of companies to work for, life couldn’t be better for an average IT family. But when the other side of the coin turns over, and looks in your face with all its brutality and rawness, it’s difficult to turn the face away.
I ventured out today in the city after being in virtual house arrest for two days. The area near Kanteerva stadium, the center of all ‘action’, was full of devastation. Destroyed Cars , Shattered Glasses, overturned police posts and burnt Petrol Pumps. It brought me much closer to the ugly reality than the live TV images did.
Why did the mob do this? What have they achieved? Will they be ever brought to the book? Who is safe today? The questions that came to the mind were aplenty.
I am looking for larger answers. How can we create a better society where frustrations of the lesser lot gets a proper outlet and where the better lot is more involved. A society with opportunities for all. How can we end violence, corruption, inequality. How can we win over the obvious drawbacks of democracy?
I get no answers. There is no easy “Rang de Basanti” out there perhaps.
April 16, 2006

The authoress emphasises her definition of Bangalore - a luxury apartment isolaetd from he city's language and reality. in fact, she very aptly describes it as 'perched'.

Suddenly, she is looking for answers.

Answers ready-to-cook,within reach and over-simplistic like the RDB ones she rues for.

Unfortunately, I am also not far from here.

Chandler

Like a good whiskey, every now and then, I pamper myself with a Chandler. I have already gone through the Big Sleep over four times and into my third reading of The Long Goodbye.

No one wrote similes like him. No one.

Sample these from the Long Goodbye -

'XXX', she said in a voice like the stuff they use to line summer clouds with.

He looked at me like i was a cigarette stub, or an empty chair. just something in his line of vision, without any interest to him.

His hair was as smooth as a bird's breast.

Nobody, [...], looked at me as if my face meant as much as the hands of a clock.

The commericals would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

Not one of them could hit hard enough to wake up his grandmother from a light doze.

She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

All these picked randomly from the first forty pages I have savored. Like a chilled beer in the summer heat.

One that I gleaned from the net: The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.

Read Chandler.

Catch them before they go

Mah mush!

Mah religion

I have embraced a religion. It's called Guturguturism.
According to my religion, this is the list of activities that offend it -
1. The name of God in either the masculine or feminism gender. My God is a eunuch.
2. The portrayal of any god or goddess in the man-invented shackles of clothes. This means that I will be raiding all Hussain exhibitions that depict the goddesses in saris.
3. The evocation of any prayer without the acknowledgment that besides being all-powerful and all-knowing, God is also all-sexy.
4. I am against the killing of plants and can have them only by means of the flesh of other beasts. Hence, I expect all restaurants to abide by my tastes. That means, McD, which already doesn't serve cheeseburger and hamburger in India, would be picketed to drop the buns and the plant-grown seasoning too. Only the chicken patties would remain.
5. We believe that the most offensive part of a woman's body is her eyes. If we let women see the fuck we're making of everything, they will ultimately put two and two together, and upset the delicate unequal balance we have foisted on them. Hence, all women are expected to wear the antiburkha where their eyes would be covered by the black cloth and the rest of the body with guaze.
6. We regard all books by Harold Robbins to be the very words of our God; describing his narcotics-driven fantasies.
7. Our sons will have everything, but their foreskins, removed.
8. Our gods might not have invented the first airplane (as seen patently in the udankhatola) or nuclear missiles (sudarshan chakras). But we claim that he did invent the dildo and the middle finger. That, and the expression - Fuckin' A!'
9. Our Gods cannot be depicted in either idols, cartoons or portraits. However, carvings on turds are permitted.
10. Our first God appeared in the form of Bruce Lee. But he died before we could crucify him. We are waiting for the second coming that will happen three weeks after the Apocalypse. According to the epic, the God appears in the fom of a ram on heat and buggers all the other Gods doing the judgement right in the very courtroom. Then he bellows and tells the gathering - 'Go home you good-for-nothing c***suckers! Whaddya think this is - a f***ing exhibition?!?'


Any room for my religion?

Who are these people?

snap coursey - Indian Express.

Who are these people?

What do they do?

How do they find the time to collect and protest over the misgivings of a small still-to-make-it-big idol like Sreesanth?

In fact, any other guy - be it a Bachhan?

Don't they have a life?

Don't they have financial responsibilities?

Don't they know that their protest actually means nothing to the guy?

Why are they not looking grief-stricken in the snap (in fact, one of the guys has a gentle smile playing on his lips?

If they're Sreesanth's fans, why are they holding Bajji's snaps?

Can I hire them to protest against my own pay hike?

Does it work? If so, how?

I am sorry. I am not from the South and hero-worship still puzzles me.

Sadhus alight

Conversations

'There was this lady in ITT. Not exactly beautiful but very... very humpable. Really great ass. Matlab samajh raha hai na...’

Yup, I am.

‘ Uska, na, divorce ho chukaa tha. And she had a six year old son then. She was a single mom’, he takes a deep drag and passes the joint to me, ‘Woh office mein ek bande ko thokte huye pakdee gayi!'

I take a drag and watch the fumes hang like a cloud in the still, hot air, ‘You mean make out.’

‘Nahi. Thokte huye!’

It’s still probably just make out.

‘Someone from the office?’, I ask.

'Nahi, I don’t think so.'

‘So did they turn her out or anything?’

‘Of course, bhai. What do you think?!?’

I think that it’s not exactly an ‘of course’ case.

‘So was she financially liquid at that time?’

‘Huh??’

‘I mean you said she had a kid...’

‘Arre, mere ko kya pata, bhai!’

‘Ok’

We finish the joint between us, looking out at the eighth-floor power-cut darkness beyond the balcony.

V sort of moans, ‘Yaar, if she was looking out, she could have asked me!’

‘Hmm? Yeaa...’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Nothing. Damn hot. Let's roll another one.'

'Hmm.'

V lights a flame under the hash while I sit waiting in the darkness staring at the red-white blip of an airplane climbing the sky.

Be a good son, kid. That’s the least you can do.