Gandhi at his charkha sitting and spinning a yarn (a cottony one, that is) in a dawn full of pink (as a mark of respect to World AIDS Day).
‘Ah, Mr. Gandhi!’
‘Yes?’, Gandhi asks testily.
‘I had a dream last night!’
‘Not again, Jinnah!’, Gandhi leaves the charkha and moves away, ‘Not another of your dreams again! I don’t want to listen to them.’
‘But Gandhi ji, wait na! Please hear me out.’
Gandhi pauses, ‘Was it dry?’
‘Huh? You mean the morning bowel movements?’
‘No, the dream! And what the Vaishanavojan are dry bowel mov – no! don’t tell me!’
‘Yes! It was dry! As dry as – as dry as your loincloth!’
‘What the? Are you the one who’s picking them from the washing line and using them as towels? Are you? Don’t put that innocent PussinBoots look – if only you could see how horrible you look doing that. Do you know how it feels going to meet world leaders with a wet cloth shrink-wrapped around your loins? Nothing can be more embarrassing!’
‘Oh yes, there can be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You could have an erection. That’s why I always say these Savile Row trousers are the best.’
‘Paah, don’t have them anymore. The condition -- and the suits.’
‘You’ll have one after you hear this one.’
Gandhi squints hard at Jinnah, ‘I thought you told me it was a dry one.’
‘Oh it was, Mr. Gandhi. You figured in it after all.’
Gandhi moves towards Jinnah and stares hard at him, ‘I?’
‘Indeed.’
‘What the IshwarAllah was I doing in your mind?’
‘Search me. I imagined you in a Mughal costume – or perhaps it was your Bhanji (Gandhi: ‘My niece? But she was sleeping besides my mat all the time!’) – no some guy called Bhanji who looked like you – a more sculpted nose though – yeah, and the guy who was you was chasing a damsel in veil around marble pillars, and pining for her.’
Gandhi ji’s eyes milk over, ‘Ah, that must be Lady Truth then.’
‘Hmm, I never knew Truth was so well stacked.’
‘What else, Jinno? This is interesting.’
‘Then you catch hold of that damsel and get 14 kids out of her.’
‘14? Are you sure it was not 3?’
‘Nope, 14. I drafted a point every time one came out. Believe me, I had to pad up the list a lot for your sake.’
Gandhi frowns and paces about, ’14? Even if I add the Middle Way, as Ambedkar keeps pushing me to, I can only push it to 11… where can I get the other 3? What sort of message is this?’
To Jinnah: ‘what else did you see, Jinnah?’
Jinnah scrunches his eyes and tries to remember hard, 'While you were getting these 14 ways with that buxom honest woman, there was this man - behind one of the white pillars - singing - singing?'
Gandhi's eyes light, 'Vaishnav Jan?'
'Nope, something more like - 'Yeh kya ho raha hai, yeh kya ho raha hai... I think the guy was the father of this Truth babe or something like that.'
'Ah, He must be Conscience then, the father of Truth!'
'Conscience has a white goatee?', Jinnah pulls his trousers out a little and stares down his crotch, 'I think I also have a conscience then after all.'
Gandhi gives him a disgusted look, 'Forget that. What else did you see after that?'
Jinnah releases his trousers and it snaps back against his stomach, ‘Then I saw you nuzzling between the breasts of a Spanish girl.’
‘What?!’
‘Yeah, call her Lady Peace if you want, but she was some piece, man.’
‘You told me this was a clean dream.’
‘It was. The main bits were blocked out with a red tag offering me a free 3-days trial.’
***Have deleted the rest of the story as it gets nasty on a guy I admire – Gandhi.***
‘
It’s tough to dispute a movie which sticks to its promise so tenaciously.Luck is about luck and it will keep reminding you about that after every 15 seconds.
Sample this one exchange:
Sunjay Dutt (who, being Musa, is always accompanied by an Arabic sort of music whenever he makes an entry, which is all the time, or does something like whirl a pistol in his hands in silhouette): Maqsood ki taqdeer (luck) ko nazar lag gayi. Who kehte hain na: duniya saali jalti hai, jab taqdeer(luck) chalti hai. The only things sure about luck is that it will change. Luck saalaa ek hi cheez ki guarantee ke saath aataa hai – ki who saalaa kabhi bhi badal sakta hai. Kyun Major?
Mithun (Major): Na luck badalta hai, na insaan ki taqdeer (luck). Insaan ka waqt badalta hai, Musa!
Despite hailing from “Luck”now, I have never heard “Luck” so many times in my entire life as I did in these two hours.
Luck is about a Roadies type game where the girls do not fight and the contestants are, thankfully, allowed to die. It is impossible to review the movie by conventional measures – just like a triple rated adult movie would be. (Though I am reminded of a friend from college whose comment after one such movie was – “Story mein dam nahi tha.”) Acting, character development, and even thrills are all incidental. This movie is about luck – its different forms – and in how many corny manners it can be spoken of. It lifts its material from famous short stories, B-grade Hollywood flicks, and the cheesiest Bollywood fare.
In short, I enjoyed Luck. It’s like Ghaayal showing major yesterstars in a series of hospital beds, all ghaayal, exchanging dialogues about how they got there.
Sanjay – Major, meri yeh yalgaar thi ki main kabhi gaar-yal nahi hunga.
Mithun – Musa, insaan hosh mein tab aataa hai jab woh disco ki stage par ho aur Rajesh Khanna usse Gaa-yell kar raha ho.
Ravi Kissen (to Imraan) – Oye chikane, hee-hee-hee, tu banegaa meri paayal?
Imraan – Nahi. Tab tu karega mujhe peechhe se ghaayal.
Danny enters – Generator mein tel khatam ho raha hai. Tum sab logon ka life support chalaa jayega. Kisee ke paas ho–gaa aa-yal(oil)?
Yes. It’s something like that. If you think there is anything in Luck other than word-play around kismet, taqdeer and luck, do find it and let me know. Even the songs are about luck aazmaa-ing and choreographed with the actors cramped in giant letters of – take a guess – no – not that – what? Why the hell would.. anyway.. not that too – give up? LUCK.
Sanjay Dutt is the lucky man – which has nothing to do with the fact that he’s allegedly humped every moving thing of the feminine persuasion in Bollywood – who arranges lucky men to test their lucks against blank cartridges, non-functioning parachutes and sharks (Other than the Citifinancial ones most of them are trying to evade). He chooses Ram, via his hechman Danny – again this has nothing to do with his having exhausted with all the females and Imran with his luscious lips being the next best thing – for a game because he’s so lucky. So lucky that he was born in the house of Aamir Khan. In the movie though Imraan has one bad luck – his father – who dies after, as the policeman, tells doing what harshad did in 1992. this is the director’s way of showing that the story is as grounded in Indian reality as Sunju baba's helicopter landing in the middle of a Bombay Coffee Day; even Dhanbad is mentioned in passing. Ram’s mom is Rati Agnihotri and Ram does as many facial expressions as her prolific cousin, Atul Agnihotri, once did in Aatish, again with Sunju, and which has since inspired countless such no-brainers.
Mithun is an army major who never gets killed (Indian fauj's lucky mascot) though a rather incompetent one, always ending up getting his entire batallion massacred. Rupa Ganguly, who with every passing year reminds me more of Anju Mahendru, his wife refuses to die and he has to arrange some 20 lakhs for an operation, the details of which are never made clear to even Mithun. Mithun fishes out the calculator and makes the right choice of getting the money by risking his life – and luck. He figures that the cost of the kilometres of kafan needed to swaddle the erstwhile Draupadi would be much higher.
Ravi Kissen is a serial killer who is hanged for murdering some 11 girls but the knot of the rope of his noose slips – which again reminded me of the chain of a rickshaw in Lucknow which slipped at least a million times the day of my ICSE board making me an hour late. Unfortunately, I was never pardoned from that exam; but Ravi is because of a loophole in the law that no man can be hung twice (yes, it’s illegal to be twice hung – in case you were planning to get an extra implant). A distortion of “can’t be tried twice” but hey! This is Bollywood. And, to think of it, Indian law.
Now Ravi wants to loosen some other knots – those of the bikini of the debutant Shruti Hassan who passes muster (Her being Saar’s daughter – how can I say otherwise?!) and thankfully looks more like Sarika than Kamal. Otherwise it would have been really disturbing seeing Imraan woo her and Ravi try to rape her.
There is that Haryanvi girl from Chak De who does a good job in a role written as an afterthought. As part of her contract she has to speak about camel, since she rode camels (in a decent way) in Pakistan, every now and then and that’s understandable.
Then there are the extras, black white and yellow contestants, who never know they’re dead the moment they signed up for a luck-to-death game in a Hindi channel. I have heard that Tom Alter is livid he did not get an opportunity to recite some Urdu poems on taqdeer.
Did I miss anyone?
Yes, there was Mr Mukku Ambani doing a cameo (a cameo and not a camel – and no, Miss Haryana doesn’t ride him) as a South Indian don as the picture on the right shows. Nice try, Ambu! You thought you would escape unnoticed? Bad times, huh?
The one positive I got from the movie is that Danny and Mithun are signing up movies. Somebody please take these fine actors and give them the movie they deserve while they last.
Given that there was little to look in the movie other than the letter Luck (which, like Tyler, appeared in blinks throughout the movie), I still managed one astounding discoveries.
The Chosen. Nothing less.
For years I have despaired that Kishan Kumar never had a worth successor. Just like my grandmother hints at my marriage by asking me to show a pota before she ummm you know (It’s been a shock for me in the past couple of years in how many elderly relatives in my family have turned out to be salivating paedophiles), I know I can die peacefully now.
I had heard about Imran but this is the first time I am seeing him. Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me about his fantastic eyebrows? You can lose a wallet in them! Of course, the greatest of them still remains untouched as the snap below amply shows.
Sometimes I find an unexpected affinity in a blog and later realise htat the blogger is a decade younger to me.
Why?
Is it because after an age it doesn’t matter? Is life happening faster these days? Or is it just me who is still somewhat stunted in my imagination and realizations? Or was I too blind earlier? Or is it just talk whereas I come from the walk?
One of the blogs I silently followed has called it a day. The reason, the writer says, is that too many people who know the blogger in real life know about it and she’s too conscious to write about the truly personal stuff.
It is eerie as I face the same dilemma. Something happened to me a month ago, a knowledge, that laid to waste the best years of my life. It is impossible to paraphrase it without dragging some people here but I feel an innocence, a belief in goodness has been permanently washed away from me. It’s made me a colder, more mistrusting man than I was.
One epiphany, linked to my writing is, the idea that people who tell everything are basically honest and open is crap. This is not a rule but I feel people talk and talk because by doing so they feel they can control whatever happens. I am talking about the kind of talking where a person pushes you towards an opinion (there is a kind of talking where the person is just bursting with ideas and using you as a bouncing board and that is different).
‘You know, I saw Ram also there. Tch tch, poor fellow, he’s still heartbroken his wife was cheating on him’ sort. Where you're told that ram is the person to pity and his wife a villain.
I have always been disappointed in my habit of letting out more than what I should have. I always admired people who knew what to say and not what to. Now, I realise it partly arose from the compulsion to be honest. Telling someone, ‘I went to goa with a couple friend, the guy is my best friend. We had a great time.’ is a helluva lot different from ‘I went to goa with a couple friend, the guy is my best friend, but I was secretly screwing his wife nevertheless. We had a great time.’ and yet I have seen people who have been very close to me do exactly that. I pause here as the temptation to reveal the extent to which I have been misled is too much here.
There are two extremes in me – either I remain totally silent and wrapped in a cocoon if there is even one person in the crowd I do not trust; or I am obscene. Fortunately, I have found friends where I can be the latter and they’ll still call me back. Coming from a joint family, I have seen how unconsciously and innocently your darkest confidences can be the grist for the daily dose for gossip and intrigues.
I wish it hadn’t happened because I knew it had but I had trusted the person too much to heed my instinct. Now I know I am incapable of trusting that much. Whenever I will see a father wrap his paw around a girl I would believe that he has a hard on – unless proved otherwise.
I never respected Gandhi before I read his autobiography. I gasped when I read how he described that he was screwing his wife while his father was dying and sleeping nekked with nieces revelation. That is honesty. Giving the axes to his detractors forever and yet telling everything or nothing at all.
Honesty is a pact we keep with ourselves, and no one else.
I hope I can follow the path of Gandhi – or remain silent. But nothing between.
I don’t remember much of the fever which had gripped me for two months; I was told I was running a fever already when we came back. Measles followed mumps and a host of other things which were barely diagnosed. It was a tale I heard many times but do not remember; but I do remember a displacement once, an upheaval, and pounding panic: a paralyzing fear of loss and spaces, and the fever-maddened clamour for a familiar skin and smell to burrow in and shut my eyes and ears to the new world roaring with strange sounds and images. Perhaps, it belongs to this time; or perhaps it’s from bits of many nightmares – I have never slept easy. The parched ache for water in my throat is stilly vividly real though, much like the crumbling dust outside waiting for the delayed rains.
My fever broke the day the rains came. Ba sat at the edge of the bed feeding me something from a bowl when the outer door banged suddenly, startling us, and spilling the watery contents of the bowl on my shirt. In a single sweep, Ba rushed to gather the clothes in the washline, close the windows and the doors and unfastened the buttons of my shirt and wash and rinse it under the washbasin, and pull in a new shirt over my head. Outside, a howl arose and the windows and the door started to rattle on their fastened latches. I sniffed – my nose, reopened after days, alive to the fascinating world of smells which usually lies in the blind spot of our consciousness.
‘What’s that smell?’
‘It’s the earth. It’s calling the rains’, her eyes shown. Many years later, I would wake up from a cold again and smell her hair in the empty room, and remember this.
The pink doctor pressed against my neck and asked me if it hurt anymore. He then checked my eyes and tongue and then rose with a smile; I noticed that the cuffs of his trousers were wet. ‘Seems like he was waiting for the rains to get well’, he told papa, and they laughed. ‘He’ll grow up to be a poet.’ How wrong he was.
I was six when we came back to Lucknow, but it was not my first visit. A couple of years ago, when I was four, we had come for a month in the winters following grandfather’s death, but I have no memories of that time. Even of this homecoming, only a blur remains of its early day, wispy and fragmentary. A daze of hands wanting to lift me in their arms, an untiring gabbling stream, a relentless procession of doors opening and shutting, intimacies hurtling at me from every corner. The first day at the school – the forbiddingly massive iron gate, the brick paved courtyard of the assembly, the dank airless classroom, the dirty yellow tables and chairs, the smell of urine and even faeces everywhere, the mousy teacher who frightened the bunch of us to silence after she slapped a boy’s knuckles with a wooden scale, my partner who continued to wail, tears and running nose like two streams joining a mighty river, for many days before he mysteriously disappeared altogether. The rush of panic and tears when papa was not standing at the gate as he had promised he would, but before I could cry a hand touched my shoulder, and I turned and lifted my smiling eyes to his.
‘Why doesn’t he speak?’, Ma’am D’Souza, my teacher from second grade leans forward and asks Bua, as I look on. (I do not remember if she had already started living with us then or not, but I know that the task of attending the parents-teachers meeting was relegated to her by Badi Ma from the start.) Bua looks at me and pauses for words. ‘He’s still – adjusting.’ ‘But it’s been more than a year!’, the teacher leans forward and gesticulates exaggeratedly. It’s this vivid moment remembered inexplicably verbatim which gives me some anchor to say that it took me a long time to adjust. To Lucknow. To Windsor manor.
Windsor manor was built in the last years of the nineteenth century by an Englishman – how it came to us was never made clear; most probably, it exchanged hands with the Englishman and my grandfather’s father, or probably his father, sometimes in the thirties. The house had so utterly taken the shape of our family by the time we came that the fact of its origin was something we knew but had forgotten; to be reminded the day a couple from New Zealand tremulously knocked at the door carrying a daguerreotype: the photograph was taken from the back of the house of a low, sprawling turn-of-the-century bungalow, looking recently white-washed, with the granite courtyard dropping to an English garden in the front, complete with a saheb couple at a white round wrought-iron table and a liveried native waiting on them. I laughed when I read Preeti’s description of the couple’s complete bafflement as they walked across the portico with the mango leaves still hanging over the door from some earlier festival, the tint of the rangoli at the door steps, the fireplace invisible behind the huge potted plant, the life-size portraits of grandfather and Nehru gracing its either ends, the maze of inner rooms, picture of gods lining their walls, the kitchen courtyard where Ramdei and the others must have sat grinding the spices or separating the rice from the husks, the door, falling on its rusted hinges, which opened to the outer granite courtyard covered, I was sure, with quilts being sunned for the winter nights, and the sprawling English garden all but disappeared in the wild orchid of guava, mango, neem, papaya, pomegranate and lemon trees, and bushes and bushes of tulsi where the roses had bloomed a neat copper-brown. The contrast between the prim and starchy Raj sense of order and the commoving spicy spectacle of life could not have been bettered. Indeed, their bafflement, and I am sure, their eventual disappointment was so complete that they left the photograph with Preeti. Badi ma and chachi, with rictuses of confused politeness and yet infused with the sense of a moment, of being mapped in history, insisted that the couple wait for papa who would surely explain whatever it was; but they smiled politely and silently went away. Putting down the letter, amusement gave way to a mild surprise. Years later, long after the thick marble slabs had been laid over the rubble of the orchards and the bungalow, I would feel it again: when she would describe her own ancestral haveli – the side-entrance from the gali hidden behind the pillars, the inner courtyard, zenana, with the open pavilion and ornate arches – and I would suddenly and vividly remember the contrasting details of the Manor – the curving pot-holed driveway leading to the portico, the chandelier in the drawing room, the high ceilings, the mantelpiece in the drawing room, the closed mesh of rooms inside, the louvered windows in the older wing of the house, the sky lights, the pitched roof – and wonder why we ever forgot its Englishness. And then would I remember something Preeti wrote – about the way the couple took tentative sniffs at first in the drawing room, and when being escorted across the dining room and the inner rooms, they had briefly held a hand over their noses. They must have smelt the oil below.
The oils had been stored in the basement, I was told, for about a decade before grandfather inherited the house and the oil business went to other relatives; I imagined the basement had been built to preserve food against the summer heat. I only caught a glimpse of it when Mahadev once left the door, almost forgotten in a recess of the granary behind a heavy rusted padlock, open and Abahy and I had ventured inside. A curling flight of steps led to a mildewy cellar, wrapped in an oleaginous darkness, where I could just about make out a row of pillars extending to as far as eyes could see, an indecipherable jumble of stuff, a silhouette of an armchair on a trunk, before a sound behind us had sent us scurrying back, our hearts in our mouths.
The house had been bought to function as a sarai for the business pushing from the hills to the plains, the patriarch building a rudimentary base in the smaller outer wing of the house, while the rooms in the main wing served sometimes as trade floors but otherwise stored a horde of rope charpoys to accommodate the travellers from the village who came to sell the oil. It was only in the late forties that the family moved into the main wing, while the outer wing was restructured to house grandfather’s burgeoning library – bulging law digests standing like mute supplicants around the pit of a courthouse in rows and rows of shelves on three sides of the room. After his political career picked up, the rooms to the side of the portico and the drawing room, were converted to an extended office, where grandfather met the burgeoning stream of visitors; a small door on the side of one such room led to the inner sanctum of a wide airy verandah leading to badi ma’s puja, where some of the petitioners found in her more pragmatic and patient ear an alternative to grandfather’s strict Gandhian ones. But even after the decades of the settlement and the emptying of the oily pits of the house, the house still faintly smelled of the oil – like mildew it had eaten into the very thickness of its walls. Its faint tang had become the very breath of the house and we barely noticed it; in fact, I started noticing only when I came back in the summer months from the hostel, suddenly overwhelmed when it enveloped me at the portico – sniffing, probing and welcoming me back like many Argos at the doorstep.
Perhaps, the undefined sharpness of the tang added to the delirium of those early months, adding to the brimming fullness which so overwhelmed me. I longed for the desert, its brown silence, the assuring smallness of the flat where you could stand at the door and see the insides of all the three rooms, the tautness which enclosed and kept us together like the skin of a drop of water. Perhaps, it was the rains which brought me out of it. That first day, I suddenly realised that the sky was actually a brimming ocean, the water below – the rivers, the ponds, the puddles – chunks of it which had fallen down. I had seen water being dug out of wells in the desert village, surfacing in small puddles staining the sands with its wet darkness; here, it rained from the skies. Either we had come to a world below the arid world of the desert, a world where the water which so reluctantly surfaced in the upper world dropped so generously, like the crumbling plaster falling from the ceilings in the older rooms of the house. Or, the world had simply shifted.
And with this thought I opened my mind to this chaotic yet fantastic new world, the Manor the monolith around which it revolved.
It has been widely reported that London Dreams is Rock on revisited. Nothing like that. The movie is a straight lift from The Comparative Study of Class Struggle in Eastern India in the 1870s and the rise of the Balban Movement in Ghaznavi in 1110 by KA Rizvi – especially the bibliographic bits.
The plot stays static but three characters revolve around it. Ajay Devgun plays a young RSS scholar searching for the relics of a lost civilization which he claims created the zombie disco-dance a couple of hundred years before the rest of the world. His belief in his own claims is fortified when he find what he is sure is a yellowing parchment with – Hello! – English script that he is sure belongs to this greatest of civilizations. But at the ASI institute, the scholars throw him out with the lie that the parchment was just a torn scrap from the TOI which had been subjected to disgusting nocturnal emissions around a year ago. Ajay picks up himself from the street he’s thrown on and brushes the dust off his coat – a gang of IronMaiden wannabes headbanging to “Betty bought a bit of butter… bitter” in the background underlining his bitterness all the more. Ajay swears to never wash the right side of his body till he gets his revenge.
In the meantime, Salman Khan is Ajay Devgun’s chawl neighbour, unknown to each other, but known to Amitabh Bachchan who makes a cameo at the end as a camel smoking Camel. Salman is in love with a hole on the east wall of his room for five years now but can’t muster the courage to confess his love. He orders take home chai and vada-pav one evening, lights an agarbatti and proposes to the hole finally one day. The hole remains silent and Salman interprets the silence as acceptance. In the first such scene between a wall and a man, or any inanimate object and a man for that matter, they make love that night – picturised to Kanchan’s mata bhajans and a Parindaesque blueness. As Salman enters the hole, he hears a sob and realises with a shock that the hole had been a virgin all along. But the sob actually comes from Ajay, his neighbour at the other end of the wall, who’s come back to his room realising that the bastards didn’t even return him his treasure – the parchment.
The two heros get eviction orders; the chawl is to be brought down to pave way for a pavement. Salman panics and approaches his neighbour, an inconsolable Ajay, to help take down the portion of the east wall with the hole in it. The two delicately saw off the portion and start lugging it away when, with a cry of “Joy Mukherjee!”, Ajay discovers another portion of the parchment under Salman’s bed and lunges towards it, dropping his end of the wall. The hole cracks, and becomes a hol-aa, and as Salman stares shell-shocked at the widened rift – he realises that the hole had been sleeping around in his absence. Anger follows this discovery of treachery and he wheels towards the man he is sure is the man who destroyed his love’s intact and tight virginity, Ajay. In the meantime, Ajay has also realised that he has been tricked, the parchment is HT and not TOI, and he wheels to face his nemesis also. (This part of the movie is sponspored by a blining Wheel neon seen from the open window separating the estranged heros right now.) The two heroes face eachother, fire in their eyes, their breaths angry snorts, bending and digging in for the final charge – when suddenly the door flies open and a bare breasted Asin rushes in with a banshee-like cry and buries each of their faces in her ampleness. (This part of the movie is never fully explained except that she is the daughter of the owner of the building, Asit Sen.)
And these are the first five minutes of the movie.
