A 100 storytellers

Just out of a screenwriting workshop. Cost me some time in getting to the place and the five days spent there.

One of the anomalies was that there were a 100 people in the audience, all aspiring writers (90 with some guests). I call this an anomaly because writing is an intensely human journey, and yet the crowd made it impossible for people to connect to each other at a person level. It remained a broadly indistinguishable crowd for me. The very number led to people stick to the cohorts they already knew, which would be the local film schools, or where they naturally belonged (for example, all local women beyond a certain age were seen sitting more or less together from Day 2).

Had it been 10-15 people, in five days we would have ended discovering a lot about each other. But, understandably, these workshops have to break even. And so, I guess it remained a solo journey for most of the people, journeys which were never shared. A girl tried once speaking, or rather spilling, about a man who called her randomly after his wife died and ended up becoming a chat-friend till he died, and immediately no one knew how to handle it, other than move forward to the other question.

Other than that, though the speaker was really knowledgeable and articulate, for me it was more or less a validation for what I already knew and a direction I already see for myself, to go deeper into the study of mythologies.

16 deleted scenes from Cocktail

Gangs of Wasseypur 2 Review: An underwhelming resolution

There is a moment in GOW2 where Faizal Khan huddles his family in a room as gunmen tear at the doors and he then disappears in the darkness of some stairs leading to the roof. From the cacophonous hailing of ten thousand bullets, the protagonist ascends to a silence where he immerses briefly in its deep watery pit as he dips his hands in a pool of water and splashes his face. He then makes his way through narrow corridors, terraces, peeping over the parapets calmly, jumping from one terrace to the other, limping, and landing in another jump with a pain that takes all his strength to stifle to a silence. It is a long scene of perfect silence and just when it was on the brink of becoming one of the most brilliant scenes I have seen in Hindi cinema, Anurag Kashyap inserts another of his gratuitous raucous songs and kills the moment.

I have appreciated Anurag Kashyap over the years for his courage and undeniable talent and even felt that he came close to greatness sometimes (especially Satya and Black Friday). But I believe he drags his iconoclastic loudness too far too many times. He creates deliciously implausible characters and sets the ground for the sizzling chemistry between them to burn the screen, but it seems that his intent is only an all-consuming conflagration and nothing else. Moments of quiet nuances, tinged with our human fumbling hankering to love and be loved, are rarely or too feebly realized. As a filmmaker, I believe, he sometimes displays too little an empathy for the audience. 
That is why I believe his DevD was a patch on the original, a poignancy reduced to attitude-struck posturings. The protagonist's connection with Paro was never allowed to grow on us but forced down the throats of the audience right from the very first scene with tu-tadaak language. Let it build. If it is there, the audience would see it. If it is not, not a thousand protestations, not the most intimate dialogues in ma-behen language would bring it together.

It’s the same reason why I rejected my once hero, Salman Rushdie: because I felt SR regularly fails to create, even within the constraints of magic fiction, believable relationships between his main characters (and the fact that he could never get his pen around his female characters.)

I believe this is so, I refer to AK specifically but a little to SR too, because

1.) either the auteur is too cynical or too afraid to confront the depth of his humaneness, and

2.) he definitely ultimately underestimates his audience.

When GOW came out, I read almost all the reviews published in respected national dailies. I felt that the majority of the critiques were not able to break the boundaries of convention the movie had; many times, the critic just did not have the intellectual heft to take on the movie, and sometimes, perhaps constrained by a limited exposure to the actual cowbelt heartland and the theth Hindi spoken in the movie, they did not get vital bits of the movie to be able to appraise it. Even Raja Sen made the unpardonable mistake of attributing the story of the son of a minor character killed by the nemesis and teeka-ed with his father’s blood to that of the protagonist, Sardar Khan. [Tigmanshu Dhulia's portly and effortlessly sinister Ramadhir Singh kills a fearsome foe and anoints his bereaved son with a drop of his dead father's blood. The son, vowing to keep his head shaved till he finishes Singh off, grows up to be Sardar Khan, played by Manoj Bajpai.]
While the reviews were disappointing, the comments were a revelation. I realized that there exists a vast intelligent audience, better equipped than the critics in understanding their cinema, momentarily formed into a collective against the thoughtless jaded reviews of a brilliant movie which had offered them a glimpse of what Hindi cinema can be beyond Bollywood.

How this very collective would feel cheated now by this conclusion. It is so because AK was talking over his audience and not to them. He was not perhaps even looking in their eyes.

Cinema or performing arts can be described in many ways, but I would still venture to say that any brilliant art invites the audience to complete the picture. It is not passive viewing. Hence, the auteur needs the audience to realize his work, besides the usual commercial reasons.

However, AK never seems interested in playing the game with the audience. Instead, he would rather keep surprising you (like RGV did so disastrously in Aag) but he does not. Instead, he makes you feel foolish ­ for making you hope that after years and years of inanities, a truly honest brave and intelligent movie has been made, for people like you, and you have been invited to come and realize it with the auteur. Instead, you are left standing with your pieces while the auteur works on his own jigsaw puzzle, ignoring you.

Let me state a fundamental. There is a reason why Veeru had to cry over Jai’s death before he goes after Gabbar. Losses have to be acknowledged, with overflowing sentiments perhaps, or a numb delayed reaction, any way, but the acknowledgment has to be honest. ­ Trust me, the audience will always pick out the fake from the genuine. Similarly, love can be silent and does not need to be underscored by Piyush Misra's lyrics all the time. The fundamental is that what makes us human has to be respected. Rocks and stones do not make their cinemas. We do, the humans. Cinema has to be human. If we anticipate a closure, it has to be given, unless the unresolved stub is deliberate and the questions it raises are important enough to deny the audience that catharsis. If they are not, it becomes an empty laugh not at the audience’s expense, but the auteur’s own creation.

GOW is not a spaghetti Western where men fire more bullets in a day than texts on their new mobile-phones and people die like leaves falling from a tree, and exciting as much concern, and life goes on without any human acknowledgment of the tragedy. It cannot be. The West of this genre, vastly imagined, was a brief anomalous transitory point in history as the Western front was pushed faster than the law and society could keep pace with it. GOW purports to be a story of a people who have lived over many, many generations and survived despite the lawlessness. Coppola realized this: that an organization which has silently survived over the centuries cannot be because the men like swinging their dicks around all the time. Killing indiscriminately does not make survival sense. No, something deeper, more human, more deeply embedded in our instincts is at play ­ our families. We kill in lawless societies to ensure the survival of our families.

Sardar Khan was an orphan, without a sibling, and was a careless father till his son was shot. He could afford the lighthearted thoughtless flamboyance with which he strutted over his enemies. However, Faizal Khan was a man betrayed by his friend, his father and brother murdered by enemies. You have to change the game. Because it has changed, despite yourself, and the audience knows it. Listen to this audience, see the direction it is looking at, anticipating; ­ no, you insist on keeping the same comical, raucous mood even as a dynasty these folks have seen build over generations, children grow into the men, fall now like a pack of cards; ­ brothers, sons, mother, wives murdered; the clan ultimately reduced to the same frugal fugitive trio where the tale of vendetta began.  Just shut the damn songs for a moment, they are all beginning to sound the same anyway, linger more on the pain, and let us mourn.

Perhaps AK’s greatest sin in GOW2, as a director he has failed Niwazuddin Siddiqui greatly. Niwaz's silent burning eyes communicate the pain more than anything else. But AK fails too many times to lift his cinema to his performance. Worse, his film-making gets in the way of this bravura performance. Faizal cannot be as joyously menacing as Sardar, his father. His childhood is too burdened with an unspoken secret. His menace is silent, brooding and fixated on his mother, the victim of his father and his own private sinner. He is an arrow, the string of whose bow has silently, silently been drawn so far back over the years that everyone had started to believe that the string had broken. The audience is waiting for that string to be released in silent respectful deference and finally the thumb and the forefinger holding back the nock release (There were whoops in the audience when Faizal swears revenge to his mother). 
You cannot clamor his moments with the same recycled Womaniyas as Sardar. The game has changed. You cannot take away his scenes of silent brooding and keep only the rushes from the trailer. You cannot give him a flickering moment of on screen-time as he closes the bazaar where his mother was gunned while giving minutes to fatuous exchanges as Ramadhir gives a litany of all the stars over the years for a minute when all he had to say was, ‘I do not watch cinema. Hence, my head is not on the clouds.’

I believe Godfather 2 was even better than the prequel precisely because it allowed us to see Michael and the younger Vito brood and weigh the consequences of his actions against the greater good of the family. Perhaps the only moment that Faizal gets for this, where he, like Michael, realises that he was sucked into this game of violence despite his will, is crowded out again by the irritatingly-facile and no-longer-original theme that defines his “deep” relationship with his wife (another tu-tadaak approach to compensate for a valid build-up.)  

Perhaps, it was a deliberate decision to not take the inspiration from the bellwether of organized-crime cinema, to avoid comparisons. But cinema is not an exercise of ego and about not getting caught looking over someone else’s notes. It is not about being original just for the sake of being original. The original idea has to have some meaning. Otherwise, it becomes a gimmick.

There is a reason why people could empathize with both Michael and Fredo because the story, actually ageless, still holds meaning for us and spoke to us directly and honestly. I sometimes got the feeling that AK was hell-bent on taking GOW to the direction of showing the meaninglessness and even comicality of violence, while it really acquired a meaning beyond the violence.

Niwaz does not have the imposing presence of his grandfather (Ahluwalia in the tallest, most explosively still presence on screen since Bachchan). He is a small, frail man who nevertheless brings an intensity, a smoldering stillness, not seen since the younger pock-marked days of Pankaj Kapoor. No actor could have done more justice to the immense complicatedness of Faizal Khan. But the auteur fails many times to give him the dignity and seriousness of an almost noble hero. Despite being almost the antithesis of his father, he has to port his consumptive rage to the same flippant score. Even as he rejects the pleas of a pregnant wife and walks out to brace his denouement, the tiresomely clever song that is disastrously made his signature tune blares in the background. His moments with himself, his relationships with his mother, siblings, are all snipped away as AK opens too many stubs that, unlike Salman Rushdie earlier bracketed with him, he cannot resolve. Let us take the case of Perpendicular, a brief interesting cameo in the form of Faizal’s 14 year old brother murdered by his rival. What purpose do this character and his death serve when there is hardly one intimate moment between Faizal or his mother with this brother/ son? Just one other villain raping Mithun’ sister. For that matter, what purpose did that pseudo-ideological reference to exploitation of workers by unions in the first installment mean? Why even broach something so, so heavy when you did not know where to take it from there?

If these various subplots are there to stick as close to the real story as possible, this is not the function of cinema. Documentaries do that. I will not say that cinema is only an illusion, but it still needs to have meaning in its structure. Unless the purpose is to convey the meaningless. If that was so, your actors were too intense, their humaneness too meaningful. You cannot ride two boats at one time.

Lastly, GOW becomes what I feared it might after watching the first installment. It discredits its characters with another kind of Bollywoodness that imagines (like in Udaan) that people in the cow-belt only think in terms of Amitabh, Salman, and Sanjay Dutt. Where was Mithun, where was Bhojpuri cinema, where was the bloody Muslimness of the characters, where was the straight from the Bihari-heartland songs stuff that was such a revelation to the broader audience? Why did you reduce so many dimensions to a single clichéd track? Why does every goddamn 90's blockbuster need to be trussed in the dialogues? Why do you shortchange not only your audience, but even your characters?  GOW sometimes seems to be on a raid, foraging Bihar for its lawlessness to showcase a different kind of macho-hood rather than making any meaningful statement about it.

Not that it does not try to, this is one of the bravest movie ever made in Hindi cinema, but it seems too busy with other distractions. GOW is flawed because it attempts too much, it is not a straight-as-an-arrow tale of a man without a past as Satya was, but a confused medley of too many brilliant isolated moments, too many brilliant isolated performances and too many interesting, potentially brilliant, but in the end unresolved subplots. Its message of the meaningless of revenge is almost lost against the Bombay skyline as the audience does not even see the eyes of the survivors.

If you only had listened to us, Anurag. Or just to the story. Sometimes you just have to play the game the way it shapes, even if it’s not quite what you anticipated. Cinema is about communicating to the audience, looking in their eyes. It is not self-indulgence.

You have denied us one of the greatest movies of Hindi cinema of all times. I will have to see it again and again and sigh at the lost possibilities.

Sikhs mistaken for Muslims

It is really regrettable that the Sikh community overseas is time and again targeted by low-IQ far-right terrorists. However, one plaintive argument  I listen to again and again after every such incident is to "educate" the white community at large and these potential killers in specific about who the Sikhs are and why they are NOT Muslims.
It doesn't matter.
Yes, these white bigoted retards and the larger community they spring from, sitting at the top of the advantages culled from a history of exploitation but conveniently ignorant of the larger earth and communities which produced them, need to be told that the world extends beyond their block. But not when they go and murder some innocent(s), be it Sikh or Muslim.
Then they need to be told that murdering innocents for alleged crimes by other members of their community is like any remaining Red Indian walking to a white man and shooting him in the head for the crimes of his ancestors. It is just not fair and is, by their own definition, terrorism. It does not matter if the identity of the innocent victim was wrongly interpreted by the killer or the bigot who stares at him in the bus. The crime of hatred would not have receded an inch if the victim really had been a Muslim.

Such pleas belittle the plight of the community and  reminds me of the scene in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer where the rioters board the bus looking for Muslims and the rest of the passengers instead of confronting them push the old Muslim couple towards them.

Why literary fiction matters: Excerpt from "Notes on a Scandal"

Thank god for literary fiction and its power to enunciate what cannot be enunciated.

The passage below is from the amazing Notes from a Scandal. I saw the movie last year and rarely have I seen two such brilliant actresses work together. Talented actresses, crowded out by dumb bimbos, are underserved by the film medium almost everywhere. But if the movie was stunningly good, the book is devastatingly so. Reminds me of “Remains of the day” where great character studies by stellar actors immensely complemented the book.

The plot is this: Sheba, a rather-artless happy-go-lucky upper-class lady in her mid 30s moves into Barbara’s school (where she’s been teaching History for decades) as a teacher for pottery. A little pixilated, she breezes in with rosy fantasies of transforming young lives with art but, unfortunately for her, the school is bristly proletarian and the kids, with no delusions about the futures awaiting them as the waiters and plumbers of the world, jeer at her naïve fumbling attempts. The only ray of hope seems to be Connelly, a fifteen year old, who affects to show an interest in her art after school and she ends up having an affair with him.

Both are the seducer and the seduced, but perhaps Sheba deserves more sympathy. The clammed frustration of a long happy but eventless marriage, lonely and out on a limb after her collapsed ambition, everything slowly balls up behind her as she teeters at the precipice of her only (seemingly) genuine relation in the school with Connelly, and there is a hint that Connelly with a canny, perhaps even unconscious, instinct plays on her vulnerabilities perfectly to seduce her.  

However, such complexities are unaddressable, unmentionable, in the public space. We demand one single certain truism (“In an ‘unnatural’ relationship between a major and a minor, the major is the transgressor and the minor the victim”) and not a tangled mess that threatens to upset this truism. Society, and the media which articulates its beliefs, function within boundaries that define their absolutes and no matter how stretched their absolutes, they are there. To question them a society essentially questions itself and the earth should shake below its feet before it would do so (like the revision of history in post-war Germany). And hence, these narratives and commonsensical ideas become so wholly pervasive that there exists no mainstream counterargument to them, even for argument’s sake.

This is where literary fiction quietly steps in to offer us a glimpse of an alternative perspective of people who live at the fringe of these morally absolute societies.  

Read the passage below and imagine it hissed by a Barbara played by Judi Dench.

On rereading

Sometimes
When I reread
I wonder
What I really soaked
On the first read.

The End of all this Dark bullshit

No one knows yet why Holmes got loose during the screening of Dark Knight. But suppose, suppose, he was really inspired by the anarchy of Joker? The whole “dark” message of the Batman trilogy. Wouldn’t that be a fitting tribute to whatever “grey-matter” claptrap this trilogy has inspired?

This whole bullshit about the age of grey-superheroes and their nemesis has gone too far.

I have a story. There’s this boy you know… his parents get killed in front of him… and he swears to take revenge and goes to this China kinda place which teaches judo-karate with all the Zen clichés to lend it some credibility above the macho violence… and this boy comes back and beats the shit out of everyone.

Make the boy grow up to be a Mithun and you’ve got one genre which is unapologetically an escapist fantasy. But take the same story to noir Hollywood, open some of the closures and have a brooding “dark” protagonist and you get something “meaningful”.

Bullshit. I imagined I could beat the shit out of everyone before I saw my first Superman and grew out of it. That’s my grouse with comic-books being taken too seriously for their "dark" matter. They are just comic-books with the most infantile fantasies at the root. And no matter how many layers you put over it, the core remains the same. Masked caped men with superhuman powers beating shit out of bad guys.

I have another story. How Chetan Bhagat became Chetan Bhagat and unleashed a war against all the things that he writes about in his columns and changed a nation. Or the story of how Shahid Kapoor got darker and darker, darken than Van Gogh, to discover the dark side of his art. You can get Scorcese or Nolan to make the movie on this premise, and they’ll make some really good shit, but at the heart of anything they make, beneath all those simmering layers, will always lie an idiotic absurd idea.

Few years ago we were told to believe that the Joker was the ultimate grey villain and were told to believe that it was possible for a non-entity to have infinite resources to buy out everything and everyone, planting enough secret bombs all over a city to bomb a country and all that bullshit and ­moreover to have plans ahead for unending trees of chances like “If I get caught and get thrown in a prison, I will have my unending supply of men throw in a human bomb, whose cell number I will already memorize, and then I will anger one of the guards enough to go after me and then I’ll overpower him and then go to the HQ holding him as a hostage while in the meantime I would have already taken hostages…”: ­ that kind of impossible scenario plannings. Interesting thrills if one doesn’t take it all too seriously.

The Joker was a revelation from Heath Ledger for his own transformation and not because of the Joker he played because for me the Joker was always a joker. A stretched fantasy who could have been played in any manner. He could have strutted like a wrinkled tart and giggled like a lactating shrew and the grey-matter-comic-freaks would have still called it a bold uber-modern phenomenal interpretation. For me, Ledger died for a stupid cause.

To those who call comic-books genre new mythology in making, they are not. Mythologies are not simply stories. They are embedded in history and are transcriptions of oral histories of a race, exaggerated, symbolical, conflating, but still, at the core, stories of travails and triumphs of our ancestors. For example, during the Soviet repression, myths like Alpamysh were preserved in oral traditions: ­ it was the defiance of human history to a 1984esque revisionism. Comic-book stories are borrowed caricatures of these mythologies and built piece-by-piece on the sentiments of the market ­ on what sells, what doesn’t. And that market is, partly, people who know the difference between fantasy and grey and still enjoy the fun for their wonderful plots and even more brilliant illustrations. The rest of the market is that underachieving escapist trash, overgrown kids who believe there is some truth in all this grey shit, dude, and still dream of superhuman powers to change the world. I will make a general statement: people who really make a change in the world -­ the Gandhis, the Mandelas, the Luthers, the murdered activists, the real heroes - ­ don’t care a shit about these nursery fantasies. The ones who absolutely believe in the dark side of this genre, those who secretly worship the Joker and go dressed in capes to the theatre in all seriousness (I don’t have anything against those fans who dress for kicks) are the first to rush out screaming like girls when the Joker-avatar gunman unleashes Operation-Chaos-and-Mayhem.

I am glad the Batman series is getting over. I really enjoyed the movies: all the sci-fi and butt-kicking, Caine’s wonderful Alfred, ho-hummed at the serious bits and felt Oldman was wasting his talents.

Hopefully, Nolan will turn to stories which deserve his enormous talents more.

The Batman series, even the Nolan ones, should be there in the list of the most spectacular cinema, surely, but never, never, any serious cinema. It might raise interesting questions but it doesn’t matter if at the heart lies a stupid idea or an escapist fantasy.

Rajesh Khanna - The man that never was

Rajesh Khanna was a mediocre talent who sold on his looks and mannerisms for some years of his life, before his face started resembling a pudgy strawberry-pie and his buns started tearing the seams. As an actor, his chosen career, he was briefly a superstar and always a ham. His epitaph had already been written forty years ago and might have looked better if he had passed at just the right time, like Monroe did.

Not that he was without tricks. His mannerisms, and that peaking bloom of youth, were used by the likes of Shakti Samant and Hrishikesh Mukherjee to shape some of 70’s cinema’s best magic moments. Classics which owe as much to their directorial and casting skills as much to RK’s brief but infectious jawaani zindabaad. Yes, the man had a trick up his sleeve but it was a single trick. A one-trick pony he remained. Avatars and Sautens were triumphs of cinema rather than the man since RK remained stuck in the same mannerisms.

Rajesh Khanna was not a superstar. He was a supernova. A brief explosion in the galaxy, outshining all other stars, but fated to oblivion once the gas was spent.

The tales of hysteria I heard, first-hand reports, were difficult to digest since the first movies I saw of the man were stuff like Maqsad, and not Anand or Aradhana. Hell, the man had already become a caricature of himself from “Aapki Kasam”. I would wonder if there was any girl who survived a suicide attempt the night he married Dimple, and went on to become a happy mother, career-woman, socially-active ­ What passed through her mind when she looked at the geriatric wigged man fist-fighting Jeetendra and trying to do an Aradhana in the eighties?

A million and one treacly tributes would pour today brimming with clichés. Superstar. India’s greatest romantic star. Pushpa. Anand. Mere sapnon ki raani. Haathi mere saathi. Anju Mahendru. All 70’s. Maybe Tina Munim and Avatar from the 80’s.

 Here, instead of what the man never was, the mask of a superstar his “fans” had reduced him to, even to himself, I would like to reflect on what the man remained once the mask crumbled.

Rajesh Khanna from interview here: “…when I started slipping, I hit the bottle. I mean, I am not a super human being. You are not Jesus Christ and I am not Mahatma Gandhi. I remember that once at three o’clock in the morning I was pretty high on spirits and suddenly it was too much for me to stomach because it was my first taste of failure. One after another, seven films had just flopped in a row. It was raining, pitch-dark and up there alone on my terrace, I lost control. I yelled out. Parvardigar, hum garibon ka itna sakt imtihan na le ki hum tere vajood ko inkar kar de,’ … It was because success hit me so much that I couldn’t take the failure.”

Ah, stardom. That encounter of a bit of talent, looks or mannerism (sometimes none of these, as in the case of Shahid Kapoor) and chance. The right person at the right place at the right time. Exploding over the powder-keg of media hype. Sometimes, the encounter happens before the media picks the scent. Sometimes, “they” just break the putty of old collapsed stars and slap it into another blinking shape. Backstreet Boys. Britney. Bieber. Vacuous non-entities with just enough aesthetical potential to make over and fill time-tested marketing concepts that would always rake in fresh celebrity-mania: boybands, angsty kohled rebel teens, boy toys, sex symbols, nation’s heartthrobs.

Sometimes, the talent sticks through the stardom because there is enough of it to survive on its own. What we call talent is essentially hard-work and if someone is willing enough to work that far enough without the limelight, chances are he would survive the brief blinding flashlights and the fervid screams beyond. Look at Beatlemania. They survived it, finding their own creative niches afterwards. At the end of the day, they were all talented musicians, who thought themselves as ones and kept working at it.

Where are those cutesy boy-bands? You don’t want to know. You don’t want to meet those guys in their 40s. Some would be bitter, very bitter and might even break your head in alcohol-doused rage. Others, hopefully, might have turned philosophical or spiritual and see their brief undeserved stardom in better perspective (as RK seemed to in the interview). Deluded others might have locked themselves in their castles and are still playing the stars to an audience of servants, or they might be in a rehab with shaved heads and suicide attempts, desperately demanding back our attentions. It is that tattered human bits that remain once the limelight has passed over that bothers me.

The stardom RK got was brief because that charm he had was brief. Charms usually are. In the end, it all comes down to brass tacks. He was an actor and he was a bad actor. But not all of us are the best at what we do. We can only aspire to excellence. Being good is not important to keep us working, aspiring to be better is. And that’s where we have to love what we do. Nobody, other than the utterly deluded Ed Woods, remained mediocre once he had put in hard work in what he did (assuming it was not a whale climbing a tree). Look at John Cusack who survived being a teen celebrity by working hard at being an actor. Greatness comes to few, but professional satisfaction percolates a few branches to all who try. Honest hard-work is life’s own reward.

Carlin was Carlin as he reinvented himself not once, but twice. 70’s and then 80’s. He did not end up as a has-been recycling the same “Indian Sergeant” or “Seven words” to a thin sympathetic audience. His standards of how good he was came from within him.

Unfortunately, there would be no Carlin for RK. RK was a bad actor and remained a bad actor. He was never into acting, just stardom. He never was interested in playing roles for what they were, only as the Rajesh Kha-nna would play them. He came for the fame and never thought beyond. Or perhaps, by the time he could, it was too late. And there was his grief and tragedy.

You cannot work towards superstardom. It happens. Things beyond your control. Kismet. Fate. Reclaiming superstardom is like waiting to be struck by a lightening a second time.

You can work towards excellence. That is within your control.

And stardom is not important in the first place, our humanness is. We are humans, first and last. It is better than being “next to God”. Stardom, the kind that RK experienced, is a most dehumanizing experience. Delinked from the quality of our work, like undeserved praise, it satirizes us. It traps us in an image we are either not or were. It takes away our now ­ if we never get over it.

My fans will always love me ­-

Bull shit. They never loved you in the first place. They never love anyone. They are briefly convinced they love someone, before the media machinery and chance picks the next thing for them to drool and scream over. Those that might still love you, those stalkers with no lives and those smitten girls who have aged with you and remained loyal, love a mask of you that belonged to another time. Give them the real deal, with all the human frailties and oddities, and they won’t recognize you. Your close ones love you -­ friends, family, those random associations life throws at you. They know you and they still love you. Most importantly, you can love yourself. (And I am not talking about the delusional ASN Norma Desmond sort.) You can love yourself when you like what you are. And you are what you do. The impact you make, not in scale but in meaning and intent. You can love yourself if you can, like those who love you, accept yourself for the human you are; ­ if, at the end of the day, you are a man you would like to shake hands with.

Fuck the fans. Forty years after your decline of fortunes began, you were left repeating your stock mannerisms to an audience of table-fans. I only hope that deep down you knew by then the bestial silliness of it all and were secretly laughing at it all. That’s a dignified way to go.

PS: This was a tough piece to write. The man is dead and his earlier movies have touched me greatly. But I believe that I pay far more respect and homage to the “man” here than all the unthinking tripe.

Artless and honest article - Should we really feel embarrassed of our parents?

Over the past few months, I have felt some honest emotional core missing from all the articles that I have read. There have been excellent articles to be sure – Suhel Seth’s roast, the expose on Kahani– and I do not even expect all articles to take me on an emotional hyperdrive. The famous letter to a Punju Boy is at best a rant, and not the best that has been written on the same theme, and its follow-up seems to be more a desperate bid to cash on an unexpected windfall as it rather incorrectly makes it a boys-vs.-single-girl crusade and works on a rather incurious logic that while bloggers are free to rant as viciously and stereotypically as they want, it being their blog, the commentators have to follow some norms defined by the very intemperate blogger.

Certain people on facebook have to end everything, everything, on a punchline. Seriously.

Then there are some favorite bloggers once who now have to have an armchair-side opinion on all themes they ever broached. So much so that when something happens, a cricketer retires, something else becomes topical, I can turn to their blogs in a couple of days and know there will be a post waiting for me there. Topical, vehement, but hollow.

In that respect, this article touched me with its honesty. It is what it is – what the author feels about, she has not been pushed to it by something that came in the news and is going to invite a lot of eyeballs if cashed on immediately, but something that touched her – simply. It is sentimental, because it is truly heartfelt and she does not have to cover with cleverness and punchlines.

A new low, yet again: Rahul Vatsa in CNN IBN

What's with CNN-IBN and their contempt for movies?
First, you have to bear the bloated mustachioed Masand offering his cliches for every movie, making you wonder at the ways of the world which pays this man to do what he does. Now this is the level of class II-level humour that you have to now read through by some Rahul Vatsa . It reads me like an idiot  sitting beside you and insisting on regaling you with his wit and you just wanting to shut him up to focus on the dirt under your fingernails. For me, this article definitely heralds a new low of such worthless unprintable inanities appearing in other-wise (still) respectable prints.


And what's with the utterly Zero-Percentilish language?