Goodwill hunting

09/01/2014

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On tables placed eight feet long and two feet wide, four men efficiently stack up postcards in a dozen rows. Look closer and they are Indian Postal Orders, or money sent by post. The senders are Indian citizens from across the land. They have sent a rupee or two. Some have sent ten. But denomination is not the real value here. Faith is. This is how tens of thousands of people of little means are coming to the aid of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the newest and the most sensational kid on India’s political block. They are sending their hard-earned tenner because this cheeky 14-month-old party, born from an anti-corruption movement, has vowed to oust entrenched overlords of India’s decadent politics and replace them with greenhorns with no experience of bigstake electoral politics except of the last few months that sensationally won them power in Delhi.
And there’s no mistaking the frothy confidence of The Incorruptibles at the party’s cramped headquarters in a smoggy suburb known as Kaushambi in Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh just east of New Delhi. A festive air manifests at the three-storied building, which was meant to be a private residence and which sits at the end of a lane of similarly unfashionably built private residences. Twenty- something men briskly dip into cardboard cartons to sell, for Rs 5 apiece, white Gandhi caps with Main Hoon Aam Aadmi (I am the common man) printed on their sides.
For another fiver, you can have a metal badge with a picture of the party’s ‘convener’, Arvind Kejriwal, who sensationally led the mass movement for government accountability nearly two years ago that birthed the party and made him Delhi’s chief minister on 28 December. For Rs 40, you get a copy of Kejriwal’s book titled Swaraj (self-rule) that is the party’s bible. At an adjacent table, people crowd in for walk-in registration to become a primary member of the party. Three live TV trucks are parked around, one shedding copious smoke from a diesel generator. Community waste lies dumped in an empty housing plot behind the volunteer desks, but no one seems to mind.
For a party that is hot on the heels of India’s two biggest political parties — the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — and threatens to ruin this summer’s Lok Sabha election for them, the AAP headquarters is a study in contrast to the expansive British-built bungalows that house the national offices of the two parties just minutes’ drive away from Parliament. Unlike theirs, the entrance to the AAP headquarters or any of its floors is unguarded. And anyone generally does walk in, adding to the heady bustle.

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There isn’t a recognisable face, because nearly everyone in this army of volunteers is a rookie, the most experienced being less than three years old in public life since the anti-corruption movement broke out in April 2011. But a super-fast baptism by fire since the party decided a few months ago to fight the elections to the 70-seat Delhi Assembly has made everyone here seasoned, minus, of course, the slick and the glib of the professional politicians.
On the ground and the first floors, volunteers — most under 30 but a few salt-and- pepper types, too — zip about busily. A woman talks patiently with a visitor who fancies his chances as a candidate for the Lok Sabha. (She clearly doesn’t but is too polite to shoo him away.) An oldish man fires questions at someone at the other end of a mobile phone in Jammu: why hasn’t the committee yet been formed? How many people joined the last meeting? What about fund collection? And gave advice, too: be sure of who you bring in; we don’t compromise on integrity.
A coat of dust rests on three steel cabinets of uneven sizes lining a wall. A few awards are strewn atop them. One reads “Man of the Year Award to Anna Hazare and his team, 2011”. A bouquet of flowers in a bamboo basket sits atop another cabinet as it must have been brought in days ago, for the flowers have shrivelled inside their transparent paper wrapping.
The cabinets themselves are full of files, folders and books. The last include names such as Panchayat Raj Manual, Militants Citizens, Land Acquisition Act, The Tamil Nadu Panchayats Act, 1994, and Forgotten Warriors: Indian War of Independence 1941-48/Indian National Army. Hardly any appear to have been read lately. A recent entrant on a shelf though is a thin green book titled Delhi Assembly Rules.
Betraying no specific scheme, party posters, pamphlets, notices and calendars are pasted or strung on the walls. But a framed and garlanded picture stands out: a close-up of a grinning young woman with “shaheed (martyr) Santosh Koli, 1984-2013” written under it. A Dalit activist who was one of Kejriwal’s longtime associates, Koli died in July after a motorcycle on which she was riding pillion was hit by a car. Party leaders cried foul, because she had been named a candidate for a Delhi Assembly seat, but police never caught the car driver. (Not unlike the traditional parties, AAP instead fielded her brother from the seat; he won as one of the party’s 28 MLAs.) Perhaps the only indulgence in the room is a broom — the party’s by-now widely recognised election symbol — painted golden and then sprinkled with gold dust, pinned to the wall next to Koli’s picture.
On the ground floor, a sheet of white paper with donations printed on it is taped at the bottom of a huge board that says “Yeh desh ke liye tan man aur dhan nyochhavar karne ka avsar hai (this is an opportunity to dedicate your body, mind and money for the nation)”. Under the intense gaze of Kejriwal, who stares out from the board, a clutch of volunteers explains transparency rules to visitors enquiring about how to donate.
From the first-floor balcony, another youthful volunteer leans and bellows instructions on the time slots for television reporters to interview a party spokesperson that evening. A few men in khadi kurta-pyjama, the standard threads for old-style politicians, troll the building’s outer precincts and are clearly outsiders seeking perhaps a way to ease into the party.
Catapulted to a dream run with few parallels in Independent India’s political history, AAP is, however, aware it is racing against time vis-à-vis the elections to the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha due in another four months. Too much has happened for it and too quickly. As party ideologue, scholar-psephologist-turned-politician Yogendra Yadav, told TEHELKA that the party does not have the organisation and the people of the required calibre to mount the mammoth operation increasingly being expected of it as a serious national alternative to the Congress and the BJP.
The populist decisions of the Kejriwal government to provide 667 litres of water free daily to each household in Delhi, halve the electricity tariff, and get the Comptroller and Auditor General to fine comb through the accounts of the power distribution companies, have already pushed the traditional political parties on the back foot.
Plus the symbolic gestures, such as not accepting police protection normally due to a chief minister or ministers, and doing away with flashing beacons on their cars, have meant that AAP is setting the political agenda and not the BJP and the Congress. Disproportionate media attention has been more than welcome, as it has helped the party highlight the facts of its holier-than- thou attributes of transparent funding norms and inner-party democracy.
Indeed, although they don’t say it openly, the AAP leadership has privately begun to believe the party could well emerge as a strong contender for power at the Centre in case of a hung Parliament. Days before 2 October 2012, when Kejriwal announced that they would form a new party, a top associate of his had told this correspondent in a private conversation that a nationwide survey they had commissioned had suggested their party could win 100 Lok Sabha seats. If it seemed fanciful then, a few in the party’s top rung now believe the figure could be within grasp.
But there are many issues of concern. The party has a woefully inadequate number of recognisable faces at the top. Of strategists and those with experience of governance, there are fewer. Having arisen from a popular anti-government movement, the party is deliberately peopled, including at the highest levels, by many who were political nonentities until yesterday.
Indeed, three of the party’s ministers in Delhi — Law Minister Somnath Bharti, Transport Minister Saurabh Bhardwaj and Women and Child Welfare Minister Rakhi Birla — did not have prominent roles in the movement of 2011 led by Anna Hazare and Kejriwal that demanded that Parliament legislate into existence a public ombudsman — the Lokpal — to investigate and prosecute the mightiest public servants, including the prime minister, on charges of corruption. None of the three ministers is even a member of AAP’s national executive, its highest decision-making body.
Party leaders have also been concerned by a succession of events that have exposed its ministers as being wet behind the ears — all in under two weeks of coming to power. Birla was mocked when she filed a police case after a stray ball from a playground smashed her car’s windscreen. Health Minister SK Jain hastily backtracked after appearing callous in response to a question about a dead infant found in a hospital’s dump. (He had suggested that he was not answerable as a private hospital was involved.) And Law Minister Bharti was reported to have committed a faux pas by asking for a meeting with Delhi’s district judges, over whom he has no jurisdiction.
Following these hiccups, a quick word has gone out to the ministers to leave the talking to, apart from the spokespersons, Kejriwal and his closest associate, Urban Planning, PWD and Education Minister Manish Sisodia, a soft-spoken campaigner credited with running the massive India Against Corruption, the impromptu name given to the Hazare- and Kejriwal-led movement of 2011. Now that both Kejriwal and Sisodia are being sucked into the big task of implementing the party’s manifesto for Delhi, which would play a huge role in building the party’s attractiveness at the Lok Sabha election, the party is left with few others at the top to devote full-time to party work.
Only two other leaders are of Kejriwal’s stature and acumen in the party: Yadav and Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan. But Yadav has decided to devote himself entirely to defeating the Congress party in Haryana where it currently holds all 10 Lok Sabha seats, as well as in the Assembly election, which is due in October this year, to oust the Congress’ state government.
On a brief visit to the party headquarters this week, Yadav expressed his anguish in a closed-door meeting with a battery of party spokespersons, whom he is supposed to lead and mentor, that he would increasingly find it difficult to manage Haryana as well as the party’s communications.
Next in terms of gravitas are Gopal Rai, who has been associated with people’s movements, and Shazia Ilmi, a television news anchor turned anti-graft campaigner, both of whom unexpectedly lost last month’s Assembly election. Both were certain to become ministers had they won. But both are now at a loose end, trying to figure out their role and future action within the party.
If the top ranks are thin in Delhi, the party’s ranks may well be non-existent in the rest of the country. Despite photo-ops that have played up Gandhi cap-wearing party men and women in different cities, the party’s existence in most places is but a whisper.
In Maharashtra, for example, the designated leadership is more Mumbai-centric and has little on-ground engagement across India’s second most populous state of 11 crore people.
In Uttar Pradesh, the biggest battleground for some of India’s biggest parties — the Congress, the BJP, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party — the AAP leadership is forgettably uninspiring. The lack of cadres would mean it would need to depend only on its general goodwill to hope for substantial votes, especially in the rural areas.
To overcome this hazard in the short run, the party is actively considering inducting regular politicians, who may have been with other parties but who have a clean image. But politics being a cesspool, as Amitabh Bachchan famously described it nearly 30 years ago during his brief stint as a Lok Sabha MP, AAP is finding it extremely difficult to find politicians at that high a bar. The party has especially been meeting some Muslim leaders, including two former MPs and a sitting MP, but nothing has come of those discussions yet.
Meanwhile, impostors have become a threat: Bihar’s capital Patna has been abuzz that a mafia shooter was seen wearing the AAP cap and claiming that he has joined the party. That’s one Aam Aadmi the party could and should do without.
With inputs from Avalok Langer
ajit@tehelka.com

[Film Review] The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Ajachi Chakrabarti

03/01/2014

secret life of walter mitty — Rating – 2.5 / 5

Stephen Fry was once asked about the difference between American and British comedy. “In American comedy,” he said as part of an insightful reply that would soon go viral online, “the comic is above the idiots around him. In British comedy, the comedian is the one getting shit on by life.”
It might sound a little strange for me to bring up British comedy in a review of an American adaptation of a short story by the quintessentially American humorist James Thurber. But not for nothing is the only authentic cinematic adaptation of Thurber’s work, the 1959 Peter Sellers comedy The Battle of the Sexes. Unlike the slapstick 1947 Samuel Goldwyn adaptation of Walter Mitty — so different in tone from Thurber’s story that he dubbed the film “The Public Life of Danny Kaye” — that film, based on The Catbird Seat, captured perfectly the Thurberian male protagonist in all his glory: small and timid, hemmed in by the overbearing world around him (mostly represented by an overbearing woman), looking for some sort of escape, wishing for some sort of control over his life. It is a sensibility that is close to the heart of what makes British comedy; the victory of the protagonist, if at all he is allowed to taste victory, is invariably small, not the ticker-tape happy ending Hollywood lives for.
Walter Mitty, in Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker story, is a hen-pecked husband living a mundane life in rural Connecticut who escapes the banality of his existence by daydreaming about all sorts of exciting adventures. Thurber doesn’t afford him a happy ending; the story ends with a final vision of Mitty leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette, facing an imaginary firing squad. His only victory is gathering the courage to tell his wife to let him and his visions be. (“I’m going to take your temperature when I get you home,” his wife replies.)
In Ben Stiller’s adaptation though, Mitty gets to live the adventure he seeks, which does wonders for his eHarmony profile. He gets the girl he’s been pining for. He even gets to tell off the corporate drone who is taking apart Life magazine, while providing the magazine with an appropriate cover photo for the last issue that captures the “quintessence of Life”.
Stiller makes Mitty’s visions a personality tic, with little examination of why he has them, apart from a few references to how his dreams of seeing the world were crushed by having to support his family after his father’s death. Instead, the focus is on the ridicule he faces for zoning out in the middle of conversations. His primary antagonist, the aforementioned corporate drone (Scott), who refuses to take him seriously because of his tenuous grip on reality. “Ground control to Major Tom,” he taunts him during one of his reveries, setting up the film’s most uplifting moment, of Mitty running into a helicopter piloted by a very drunk Greenlander with David Bowie’s satirical song about Britain’s failed space programme, reimagined here as a call to go forth and live life to the hilt, blaring in the background.
This tendency of the film to fit its plot into the familiar Hollywood story of the triumph of the human spirit makes Walter Mitty seem trite. Stiller’s heavy directorial foot, the forced sensitivity he infuses into every scene and the overall lack of substance, makes it seem inauthentic and indulgent. But excellent writing and great understated performances make it eminently watchable, an engaging film that takes you on a journey you are all too willing to undertake. Just where that journey leads you, however, remains a mystery.

Going Bust

Ajachi Chakrabarti

20/12/2013

**Jackpot**
**Director:** Kaizad Gustad
**Starring:** Naseeruddin Shah, Sunny Leone, Sachiin J Joshi

Kaizad Gustad’s Jackpot has a very similar problem to The Desolation of Smaug — a waferthin storyline that needs extensive padding in order to become a full-length movie. Unlike Jackson, however, Gustad doesn’t have an entire mythology, not even a family tree or two, to pick side plots from. His response is to dress up what is a simple heist story into a noiry tale of deceit and deception, with Naseeruddin Shah gloriously hamming it up to fill the difference. The results are wearying to watch; what Gustad tries to present as a plot intricately tied up around itself, looks more like a crumpled piece of paper.
It’s been 15 years since Guy Ritchie forged a new sensibility for the heist movie, and there have been dozens of imitations in that time, both in Hollywood and Bollywood. The concept has been established, tinkered with, subverted even, so many times that its basic structure has now become formulaic. The scamsters in Jackpot spend a lot of time and energy grappling with the idea that no one trusts anyone else. But if they had, like Gustad must have, watched any of these films, say A Fish Called Wanda, this really shouldn’t have been that alien a concept. You’re scamming a guy for Rs 10 crore, guys. It’s entirely possible that someone would entertain thoughts of you doublecrossing them or vice versa. It’s not like these suspicions add drama, either, as they mostly take form as petulant accusations made, more often than not, while staring at Sunny Leone’s chest.
Gustad relies far too much on the well-worn device of the gradual reveal, telling the story mainly through flashbacks prefaced by the latest inane catchphrase to be uttered being displayed in full psychedelic glory. Warping the timeline can make any plot seem more exciting, but the endless iterations, each less believable than the last, of what is in essence a very basic plot makes it just seem more and more insipid. It’s very simple to guess who’s conning who — the film makes no pretence, laying its cards on the table in the opening scene itself — the only suspense is how. And while the ending might have worked for Agatha Christie in Murder on the Orient Express, here it looks and feels like a cop-out.
Sachin Joshi’s Francis is a con-artist (emphasis, he says again and again, on ‘artist’) with a plan. He wants to con the owner of an offshore gambling den in Panjim’s Mandovi river, the titular Jackpot casino. He gets the owner, known only as ‘Boss’ (a dreadlocked Shah) to let him rig a poker tournament at Jackpot so that a ringer wins, then have him swoop in and steal the money (thus getting the insurance company to pay up a matching amount). Once he does so, he finds an empty suitcase. The rest of the film plays on the suspense of who has the money, as well as establishing the long con that all this was obviously a part of. Like with most things Goan, there’s a land scam involved.
As Boss, Shah is given full license to be as overblown as he likes. However lacking in substance his role is, he seems to having fun. That, combined with Sunny Leone’s utter inability to deliver one convincing line of dialogue or Makarand Deshpande’s highly ridiculous Inspector Tukaram, he provides moments of campy humour that do salvage the film somewhat. Hey, if they’re not laughing with you, they might as well laugh at you. It’ll keep their attention away from how bad your film is.
ajachi@tehelka.com

Muddled Earth

Ajachi Chakrabarti

20/12/2013

The Hobbit: The Desolation of smaug Director: Peter Jackson Starring — **The Hobbit: The Desolation of smaug**
**Director**: Peter Jackson
**Starring:** Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch

Okay, someone needs to say this: 3D films are not for the bespectacled. Ever since I first watched Chhota Chetan ages ago, every such film has involved a comical struggle to keep two pairs of glasses perched on an unhelpfully slippery nose. (Is it really that hard to provide clip-ons?) It doesn’t help that the glasses at most Delhi cinemas are filthier than my already dirt-infested spectacles, which means the film ends up looking dark and blurred.

The thing is, the glasses aren’t really a distraction if the film is gripping enough. The worst pair of 3D glasses I’ve ever been handed was for Gravity, but after some furious manoeuvring in the first 15 minutes, I even forgot that I was wearing two pairs of glasses as Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece captured all my attention. Watching Peter Jackson’s second Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug, I was constantly shuffling the order of the two pairs with increasing frustration, until I finally dumped the infernal things and watched the last few minutes in blurred 2D.

That frustration, while triggered by the discomfort and accompanying headache, was helped in no small manner by the film’s tendency to ramble on and on. The relevant portion in Tolkien’s 300-page novel for children that Jackson has adapted in this film is really a tiny chunk of storytelling — having escaped from the goblin kingdom, our heroes make their way through elvin territory to reach Smaug’s mountain. It’s the Point-A-to-Point-B journey that forms the crux of most Tolkien stories, with really no overarching theme or backroom chicanery or anything that deserves a full film. The reasons for the quest have already been made abundantly clear in the first film, while the epic Battle of the Five Armies — goblins, wargs, dwarves, men and elves — will be seen in the third.

Jackson uses the rest of the 161-minute runtime for what The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr rightly calls “bad fan fiction”. He has reimagined what was a simple bildungsroman about the consequences of greed into a prequel to The Lord of the Rings by taking all sorts of liberties with plot and characters. Which is perfectly fine, if done well, but Jackson’s interventions do not, in any way, make the film more watchable. Neither does he give the audience any reason to care about the fate of Middle Earth.

As Bilbo Baggins (Freeman) and his company of dwarves prepare to battle spiders, elves, orcs (always the orcs) and dragon, Gandalf (McKellen) deserts them to embark on his own quest, which mostly consists of him looking at things and expressing surprise. His meandering, an attempt at investigating rumours of a Necromancer raising the Nazgûl and generally being menacing, eventually leads to the rise of Sauron (not a spoiler for anybody who’s read any Tolkien). There is nothing that he does, or can do, about it other than look on in horror and take up considerable screen time.

While the rise of Sauron ties in the events of The Hobbit with the tumults of Middle Earth in the later trilogy, it does nothing to add to the film itself. Sauron isn’t the primary antagonist in The Hobbit — though I suspect that will change in the third film — and bringing him into the mix only complicates matters needlessly. It takes focus away from Bilbo’s own journey of self-realisation to the extent that the hobbit is missing from screen for a fair chunk of the film. Also, like the parallel arc of Legolas’ origin story, it seems a forced insertion of extraneous characters to fill up time, with no satisfactory payoff in sight, at least for those who aren’t die-hard Tolkien fans missing their annual Middle-Earth fix.

Maggie’s Harm

Ajachi Chakrabarti

20/12/2013

Spitting image Baroness Thatcher at the unveiling of her portrait at the National Portraits Gallery — **Spitting image** Baroness Thatcher at the unveiling of her portrait at the National Portraits Gallery. Photo: AFP

Have you ever thought, right, but you don’t know, but you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fuckin’ life and all you have to look forward to is fuckin’ sickness and purgatory?”
Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked, through its violent, sociopathic protagonist Johnny, paints a bleak picture of post- Thatcher Britain. Unemployed — one of over 3.5 million in the country — and running away from a beating at the hands of a man whose wife he has raped, Johnny flees Manchester for London. He wanders the streets of the capital, latching on to people who offer him shelter from the cold, only to ridicule them with some of the sharpest dialogue written in cinema. He is a man convinced that society is on the verge of collapse, living with pre-apocalyptic abandon, scornful of those who still hope for better days.
The England around him provides little evidence to the contrary. It is a land of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease (it is heavily insinuated that Johnny is HIV-positive), the five Giant Evils that the Beveridge Report sought to eliminate through its vision of a cradle-to- grave welfare state that formed the basis of post-War British society. This consensus, which even her Conservative Party supported in large part, was directly challenged and eventually shattered by Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long premiership. Her economic policies arrested rampant inflation and (somewhat) rekindled growth, but trebled unemployment; her cuts to social security programmes meant the unemployed lived worse lives. Her refusal to compromise with labour unions and her policy of mine closures destroyed the country’s coal industry, inflicting untellable harm to the communities that depended on mining for sustenance, and to trade unionism at large. Her proposal to let individuals buy their council homes precipitated a housing crisis that would in turn contribute to the 2008 financial collapse. Despite the shopkeeper’s daughter’s challenge to the traditional class barriers of politics, her policies increased inequality in Britain, making it the most unequal large nation in Europe today. Social mobility, despite her exhortations for the poor to lift themselves by the bootstraps, actually decreased in the Thatcher years from the levels under Labour rule. The only sight of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land was the violence of the anti-Thatcher riots and the IRA’s bombing campaign.
More insidious than the economic impact of Thatcher’s policies was her championing of political individualism, the creation of the ‘Me Generation’. Johnny, and his yuppie mirror image Jeremy, are its products, devoid of empathy, giving voice to their, and society’s, darkest impulses. The film is populated by characters fending for themselves, jobless youths living on the street or security guards guarding empty buildings. They talk, but don’t listen, all preoccupied with the injustices in their own lives.
Jonathan Aitken’s biography of Margaret Thatcher doesn’t concern itself with the social costs of the Thatcher years. There is little critical examination of her policies; as a Conservative MP, Aitken is largely supportive of her economic reforms and rigid stance against the unions (“The power struggle against union militancy had to be fought and won”, he writes, expressing surprise that her actions did not win her popularity). The focus of the book is instead on the rough and tumble of British parliamentary politics, on Thatcher’s rise to power and eventual fall.
But despite its title, Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality is by no means a hagiography. “This is a portrait that attempts to combine both the applause and appraisal,” he writes, and the book presents a fascinating account of the life of the first woman prime minister of a Western democracy, warts and all. Even in a year where Thatcher has been almost deified after her death, Aitken does not make any efforts to paper over her personal failings. “She was much easier to admire from afar than to work with at close quarters,” he writes. “She could be personally kind to her staff but impersonally unpleasant towards those whose views or misfortunes lay outside her field of empathy. She was never an easy person.” He calls her quoting of St Francis’ apocryphal prayer — “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony” — on taking office an “ill-judged lurch into uncharacteristic hypocrisy”.

Margaret Thatcher Jonathan aitken Bloomsbury 764 pp; Rs 2275 — **Margaret Thatcher** Jonathan aitken Bloomsbury 764 pp; Rs 2275

Her ambition, nurtured by her father and helped by her insecurities about her background, defined her from an early age. At one point in Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady, an ageing Thatcher says that politics “used to be about doing something. Now it is about being someone.” But Margaret Roberts was always obsessed with becoming an MP. Aitken describes her in Oxford, disenchanted by the male chauvinism and social snobbery that she faced, but winning no friends through her constant attempts at recruiting whoever she met into the Conservative Party. Over-eager and socially awkward, lacking a common touch or a sense of humour, Thatcher’s ambition would leave her isolated throughout her career.
Despite her ambition, few considered Thatcher a likely future prime minister before the infamous winter of discontent in 1979, when James Callaghan’s Labour government failed to prevent the largest industrial action in half a century. It wasn’t just her gender; Aitken’s biography shows in great detail how she was a political lightweight until the precise moment when she was not. Although a powerful public speaker, she struggled in Parliament, being outmanoeuvred so easily by Harold Wilson and Callaghan while Leader of the Opposition that her party was already contemplating replacing her. Her rise to that post was the result of there being no credible alternative to Ted Heath, and helped by a Macchiavellian campaign for the leadership. Even her promotions in the party to the front bench, Aitken contends, were largely the result of her being the token woman.
For someone who changed the fundamental ideology of Britain, there was very little Britain knew about the ideas Thatcher stood for before her election. They knew much more about what she was against. She was never overtly involved in the ideological debates the Conservative party faced in the 1970s, though she did discreetly support the neoliberals led by Keith Joseph. Unlike the principles of the welfare state, arrived at after years of negotiations, protests and incremental advances, her policies were imposed on the nation through the “elective dictatorship” of her secure majority in Parliament. Those in her Cabinet who disagreed were replaced by those who didn’t, and the split in the Labour party meant she never had a credible Opposition to worry about. Any fears of losing an election were laid to rest after the spectacular victory in the Falkland Islands.
Instead of coherent ideas, what Britain got from Thatcher throughout her political career was a set of homilies, reducing the complexities of governance into highly simplistic rubrics. She shrewdly couched the most divisive of ideas in common sense — balancing the budget is like keeping household accounts; no mother would ever deny her child milk, so it is all right for the government to do so — which often conveniently ignored the realities of poverty. These shallow statements were accompanied by one of the most negative election campaigns in British history. It’s a model that is copied extensively today, both by the Tea Party in the US and Narendra Modi in India, successful as it feeds on, and adds to, the paranoia of the middle classes. This brand of disingenuous politics may be her most dangerous legacy of all.
ajachi@tehelka.com

The Liberating Gaze

Aradhna Wal

13/12/2013

[cycloneslider id=”liberating-gaze”]

When the camera came to the Indian subcontinent, sometime in the mid-19th century, its people took to it with great enthusiasm. And photographers, both the Europeans who carried this medium to the sub-continent and the people who picked it up, became a new breed of artists. As photo studios mushroomed across South Asia, they took the art of portraiture out of the courts and made it accessible to the masses. Portraits — of royalty, of tribals, of courtesans, of families — all become an insight into the history of a people and of the medium. This is evident in the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts’ grand new photography exhibition, at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, called Allegory and Illusion, with 101 images from across India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Burma. In 2013, when the word ‘selfie’ was declared as the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, this show becomes all the more important as it explores people’s historic fascination with portraits and the drive to leave an imprint of oneself on history.
For a show that combines photographs from what are now four different countries, one might ask whether this could lead to a cultural flattening of different people and their cultures. But for curators Rahaab Allana (of the Alkazi Foundation) and Beth Citron (of the Rubin Museum), it was their colonisation under the British rule that provided a link. One could not control how the art form would permeate across South Asia’s then fluid boundaries. In fact, as these photographs captured history, “we will find how differences can be quite subtle and exchanges far deeper and wider in range than imagined”, to quote Allana. These photographs come together as a disruption of the colonial narrative and a unidirectional gaze into the past, a point the curators make in their accompanying note.
“Disrupting the colonial narrative is something the natives were doing in unsuspecting ways,” says historian Veena Oldenburg. There is a toss-up here, of either seeing these images as Orientalist images of an exotic people or of seeing how “natives” assimilated the European, read Victorian, lifestyle into their realities, tinkering with the art form, appropriating the rigid formal pose that the Europeans brought with them.
What stands out is what the colonial subjects, as they were, made of photography, and what a viewer today makes of them frozen in these frames. Oldenburg gives the example of the representation of courtesans. Is a gorgeously decked-out woman, titled A Lucknow Courtesan, just an Orientalist image of a beautiful sex object? Or does the photographer’s intervention of seating her amidst signs of her own wealth give her agency and grandeur? For Oldenburg, such an image gave these women back their “dignity as purveyors of culture rather than as mere sex objects bought for pleasure”, instead of the status of prostitutes that the colonial government had relegated them to. The cultural significance of the word ‘courtesan’ becomes clear here.
In fact, the abundant presence of women in public stands out in this show. From the Lucknow courtesan, to the women from various parts of the subcontinent lying regally on couches, or showing off their fashionable presence, or posing in family portraits either in havelis or with images of Srinathji (an avatar of Krishna), it’s a stark contrast to the images of Victorian women covered in sheets, posing with their children.
There is a gradual comfort with the camera, as reflected in many of the photographs. People grew more used to the mechanical lens and shrugged off the initial rigidity and discomfort. As the expressions grew more varied, perhaps the subjects grew aware of how much photography is both an act of recording a moment and of performing. And so, the Bengali couple pose in their finest clothes and jewellery to impress upon the audience their wealthy status in A Bengali Couple; the young woman smiles knowingly at the camera (and at us) as she is photographed painting a woman in Lady Painting a Portrait. The form demanded by painted portraits, of the subject looking away from the viewer, falls behind. As people look directly at the camera, their self-awareness of who they were, and how they want us to see them, become the most arresting feature.
The show is on at The Rubin Museum, New York, till 10 February 2014

‘War is a madman’s attempt at stability’

Ajachi Chakrabarti

13/12/2013

In their words Adam Klein with contributors to the anthology. (From left) Klein, Ali Shah Hasanzada, Fazilhaq Hashimi, Khalid Ahmad Atif, Helay Rahim, Hoshang Sulaimanzada — **In their words** Adam Klein with contributors to the anthology. (From left) Klein, Ali Shah Hasanzada,
Fazilhaq Hashimi, Khalid Ahmad Atif, Helay Rahim, Hoshang Sulaimanzada

EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
This fascinating anthology came as a result of a creative writing workshop you held in Afghanistan. How was the experience, and what were some of the things you sought to address in this workshop?
I didn’t have things I necessarily wanted to address. I took writing workshops for over three years in Kabul. I didn’t intend on an anthology. If anything, I’m fairly skeptical of the packaging of Afghanistan as a bunch of white Toyota trucks and one-eyed Talibs terrorising the populace. On the other hand, there were the white trucks and the brutality of the Taliban regime, so it couldn’t be nixed. It wasn’t my place to write the stories, but to tell the writers what we (non-Afghans) hadn’t heard: how they loved, how they fantasised, what impact growing up in Iran or Pakistan may have had on them, or how they adapted to the strict edicts of the Taliban. The practicalities of writing — point of view, tense, areas where there could be greater detail, revision — these I worked on with writers individually, once I saw the shape of their stories and the originality in them. I read hundreds of stories and selected very few. I worked with pieces, and with writers I felt had distinct voices; or those who took risks or simply avoided the stereotypical. The experience of working with these writers humbled me. There are instances of great pain, of trauma. But there are simple stories, too, where poverty is depicted with great generosity, and loyalty transcends mourning.
Were you surprised at the quality of the stories that your students wrote?
Not the quality. There were many deficiencies in the first drafts that had to do with their writing in English, which was not their first language. I was surprised by the way English seemed to provide a space for risks that I think Dari, Pashto, Farsi or Urdu would have inhibited. It felt as though English permitted them to write without a reader in mind. This freed them to be critical of the Mujahedeen, to be more sympathetic to the Russians, even writing about Afghan Jews, Mickey Spillane novels, homosexual desire. These stories would probably have not been easy to write if they felt they were too accessible to people they knew. In the end, most did not choose anonymity. Only those in higher positions chose it.
How important is it for a culture coming to terms with its violent past to build a literature that addresses it? Does anything of that sort exist in Pashto or Dari?
I imagine it does exist in Pashto or Dari, but again, probably not in the short story form. Perhaps poetry. Eliza Griswold’s I Am The Beggar of The World provides amazing examples of the two-line poems known as landays that are memorised by Afghan women. Some of the landays are quite old, and some incorporate drones and American soldiers. I am not certain that literature helps a culture come to terms with a violent past, but I am sure it makes it impossible to simplify the past, or to collectivise it. Writing is essentially individual and comes from a spirit of independence; I would say that’s what makes it great — it speaks for itself. I’m thinking of books like A Woman in Berlin or Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization or Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. All of these books complicate the American narrative of World War II and have been deeply influential on my thinking about that war. They may not change the grand narrative, but for me, they make grand narratives seem suspect.

The Gifts of the State (Ed) Adam Klein Dzanc Books 175 pp; Rs 972 — **The Gifts of the State** (Ed) Adam Klein, Dzanc Books 175 pp; Rs 972

You write in your introduction how your students barely trust that “the past is the past and not the prelude”. How do Afghans under 30 see this present, uncertain moment?
Many Afghans have already lived as refugees and they’re not going anywhere. Many have already left. Many who are working for the US or UN and have the skills to work internationally are applying for visas. But the overwhelming sense I get is that Afghanistan will weather this transition, that there is hopefulness, and that the civic work has been ongoing. The post-war reconciliation feels very real to me, but then I’m an outsider. I think many Afghans would agree that the past decade has created a space for dialogue to begin. And this is impossible to sell people on: that the war, which is not a war in the traditional sense, but a war with “nation building” or “capacity building” at its heart, is in many ways a good thing. At the cost of so many lives and so much money, liberals and conservatives don’t want to hear about the effectiveness of creating space for talk and creative thinking. But I think it’s the only achievement that is guaranteed to last.
It is, of course, important to note that this isn’t a society coming out of war, but one where war has been a constant presence throughout its history. Are notions of war and peace more fluid in Afghanistan?
Well, it’s hard to say. I think when one experiences war, there’s no denying it. Afghans know very well what they’ve gone through. They’re highly sensitive to war, having seen it demolish their cities and separate its people. On the other hand, I think the rest of the world has had a troubling experience with the fluidity of war, how and when we use the term. I think it’s fair to say the United States is engaged in an undeclared war with Pakistan, which is why we call this our Af-Pak conflict, or at least we did. But this war, too, is difficult to simplify, since I believe the US does collaborate with Nawaz Sharif to use drones in the tribal areas. I also know that US aid is sent to Pakistan and not rebuffed. War is a madman’s method at stability, but in the name of stability, we have accommodated gross injustices globally. In some cases, that stability may be so precious it seems worth military intervention.
Your students wanted this anthology to be published everywhere except for Afghanistan itself. Are you hopeful that these discussions can take place within Afghan society anytime soon? What are the obstacles that prevent such dialogue?
The discussions are happening. Perhaps, people aren’t willing to disclose their names, put it in writing. They’re still pushing the limits of what can be said and attributed. But none of these stories came from my suggestions. The writers want to address the hypocrisy of religious purists, the economic inequalities in their country, the belief that Afghanistan is a place to go to “get your Jihad on” –whether we’re talking Osama bin Laden or an American or European war reporter. I’m not saying the three are the same. But perhaps they see Afghanistan as remote, victimised, abundantly cruel or abundantly pious. It is none of these things. Our greatest obstacle to knowing how to look at Afghanistan is the stories we’ve told ourselves about it. I hope the stories they write will chip away at that façade, and show us their humor, their tenderness, their inventiveness. It’s all there, along with their endurance.
ajachi@tehelka.com

‘A tragedy occurs and people become just statistics’

Ajachi Chakrabarti

13/12/2013

Geetu-Mohandas — Geetu Mohandas, 32, Filmmaker

EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
How important is international recognition of this sort to you as a filmmaker directing her first feature?
Firstly, for any independent filmmaker, it is very difficult to secure the finances for a film that you want to make. I made the rounds of knocking on doors of Bollywood production houses and clearly it didn’t work for me. When I decided to do it my way, collecting funds and co-producing with my husband, an Indian release was a very far fetched thing. For me, the biggest thing would be to show this film to an audience. We don’t make films to get awards, or for a festival run. The idea is to release it in theatres; that is our dream. So, when a film gets such recognition, invariably the opportunities of seeing a release increase. In that way, I am very excited. Sundance happened because people there liked it and that is great. Right now, I am more excited for my team. We can see a possibility of a release next year, which is the most exciting thing for me.
This is your first feature as a director after a fairly successful career as an actor. Was this a transition you always wanted to make?
It was a transition I wanted to make. I used to write all the time. I was an actor for over a decade, and I think somewhere down the line it was a very smooth transition because, apart from doing a lot of commercial films, I was part of some very interesting cinema that travelled to a lot of film festivals. In fact, the last film I acted in, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s The Four Women, went to a lot of festivals. So, the exposure has always been there. Directing was something that was planned, not something that just happened. It was something that I wanted to do and I worked towards it.
You said somewhere that the film is about “people becoming just statistical information”. How did this plot come about?
When I try to jog my memory thinking how it all happened, I know it took shape as a very simple story that I wanted to tell. And what happened is, when you group the story geographically to a particular setting, the socio-political scenario of that space becomes the undercurrent of the narrative. And that’s how I would like to see this film, because rather than telling a very superficial story, it is important to root it, to make the characters believable from that area and address their issues. The idea came to me a long time back, some six or seven years ago, and over the years so much has changed. Even I have changed, through so many drafts. So, if I try to think back on how it all started, I don’t even remember the reason for which this stream of thought began. But I know that somewhere down the line I was concerned with our attitude towards people who suffer calamities. A tragedy occurs and they become just statistics. There are so many nameless people in our country, and that’s how we remember them. It’s not an area which has not been covered before; it has been done many times. But in cinema, there are only so many situations that you can do this way or that way. I wanted to do something different. However, while narrating a film with such political undercurrents, I am also telling a very simple love story of two unlikely individuals who can’t stay together.
Casting Nawazuddin Siddiqui in one’s film seems to be a great way to get attention and accolades. What does he bring to the table as an actor and as a source of indie cred?
When we shot with him at the beginning of last year, he was definitely somebody who was out there, but his more popular films were just releasing. It wasn’t a difficult choice for me to cast him, because we worked the film in such a way that the actor would be released on street amongst very normal people. We shot in real time and real space, with real people. It was an action and reaction that happened. So for me to get the kind of result I wanted, it was important for me to have an intelligent actor, who is somebody I can, you know, let out on the streets. Nawazuddin, at that point, was not as popular as he is now, which worked in my favour. Over the last year, I have seen him grow. He happened to be at the right place at the right time, doing the right films, which happened to go to a lot of international forums and festivals. So, certainly, that has helped me and my film, especially when a movie like this hits a film festival and they see Nawazuddin as a part of the film, and say, “Oh, so if he’s doing it, the film has to be good!” Few actors have that kind of effect, and Nawazuddin is a household name outside India as well. But all this was not planned, it just happened. What he brings to the table is that he just brings the character to life. For a filmmaker, 50 percent of the work is casting, because no matter how much you plan ahead, it all depends on what the actor gives you on the set. And he is completely a director’s actor, he is extremely receptive. He listens to the director; wants to know more about the character. We had a lot of workshops before the film began because of a little child in our cast. But apart from that, most of the dialogues were written on the spot and were his own. I had a skeleton of the script, but I did not believe in writing dialogues and making actors say what I wanted them to say. I would tell them that this is the idea and I would just allow them to explore all the dynamics of the character.
You started your career as a five-year-old in Onnu Muthal Poojyam Vare, the same age as Manya Gupta in your film. How did your experience help you direct Manya?
I remember how people used to behave with me and talk to me with a lot of patience and with a lot of love. That is something I remembered. I am a very patient person because I have a one-year old. I had also worked with a four-year-old blind girl in my short film, which won a National Award in 2010. So, for me, it was not very difficult to work with Manya. I love being with children. I don’t tell them too many things, I don’t ask them to learn too many dialogues. I treat them as little adults. Whatever I would tell Nawaz or Geetanjali, I would tell Manya as well. But, of course, with a little more patience.

Panem Spring

Ajachi Chakrabarti

13/12/2013

Panem Spring The Hunger Games: Catc hing Fire Director Francis Lawrence Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hensworth — **The Hunger Games: Catching Fire**
**Director:** Francis Lawrence
**Starring:** Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hensworth

Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy rode the post-Potter young-adult fiction boom to become an international blockbuster, selling more copies on Amazon than any other series, even Harry Potter itself. A major reason for its success is Collins’ refusal to resort to the blackand- white moral spectrum that any other writer woul employ when writing about children facing down a cruel empire.
The relationship between the two protagonists, Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson), is a case in point. Forced into the televised Lord of the Flies-meets-Big Brother carnage of the Games, the two realised that the best way to survive was to be popular. They accomplished this by creating the fiction of being star-crossed lovers. It was a convenient act that got them sponsors — who send contestants vital gifts like medicine — and, in a dramatic climax to the first book and movie, allowed both of them to survive the arena, winning as a couple.
The second instalment of the series begins with the two having to confront the real-world consequences of this fiction. Pretending to be in love with Peeta helped Katniss survive, but now she must live the rest of her life. That involves convincing her actual boyfriend Gale (Hensworth) that it was just an act. But she must also contend with the wrath of President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who isn’t quite convinced by the Romeo and Juliet act and sees Katniss’ defiance of his authority for what it is. To prevent recriminations against her family, Katniss must keep up the pantomime as she and Peeta embark on a whistlestop victory tour through the 12 districts of Panem.
The tour immediately turns ugly; Snow isn’t the only one who recognised that the romance was an act. Unwittingly, and somewhat unwillingly, Katniss finds herself the catalyst for a popular revolt. Again, afraid of Snow’s wrath, Katniss and Peeta decide to double down and announce their engagement.
It doesn’t work. Fearing that the other victors will follow Katniss’ example, Snow institutes a special All-Stars edition of the Games with the express purpose of eliminating as many of them, especially Katniss, as possible.
It is once the Games begin that one realises the impact of changing directors after the first film. Gary Ross’ first instalment was roundly criticised for being too tame, for looking too much like a film that compromised its soul in the interests of commercial returns. Obviously, getting a U/A certificate for a film built on the premise of children killing other children would mean going easy on the violence, but Ross’ solution of dizzy, handheldcamera sequences looked especially fake. In this second film, most of the killing takes place off-screen, but Francis Lawrence introduces real danger into the arena. Unlike the first film, where the Games seemed just that, a game, this edition seems a battle. Not just to survive, but to survive with the integrity of one’s soul intact. Again, unlike the first film, where Snow and his cohorts seemed cartoon villains made to be thwarted, Sutherland and the new gamemaster Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman at his understated best) provide truly menacing performances.
As a second film in a trilogy, Catching Fire has a transitory feel to it that can seem plodding to some. But the film proves that the franchise is in very good hands.
ajachi@tehelka.com

[Film Review] R…Rajkumar

Ajachi Chakrabarti

13/12/2013

Rambo Rajkumar, born simply Rajkumar, was a master stuntman who worked in over 450 films in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi before dying of a cardiac arrest while on set. He was known for his realistic close combat style, modeled on Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, which got him his moniker. The ‘R…’ in R… Rajkumar originally stood for ‘Rambo’, but copyright issues forced director Prabhu Dheva to change it to ‘Romeo’. Therein lies all that is wrong with the film.
Years of experience have led us to not expect anything resembling real life in Bollywood’s love stories. Part of our ritual suspension of disbelief is the notion that the leading man will eventually get the girl, no matter how improbable the success of his methods. R… Rajkumar stretches that notion to breaking point in the first 10 minutes. It then goes on to rip to shreds what little credibility it has left. Here’s the thing, Prabhu. In 2013, a woman, any woman, who has a guy following her everywhere she goes and making kissing sounds or breaking into her room as she is changing, is not going to fall for him. She’s going to report him to the cops — or, in this case, her gangster uncle — for that ridiculous euphemism: eve-teasing.
What’s strange is that Sonakshi Sinha’s Chanda is established in the film as a fierce, independent 21st century woman, beating up other eve-teasers (who presumably aren’t chocolate-boyish enough) and purse-snatchers to the applause of the more demure women of the town. Sure, even the most ardent feminist has the agency to fall head over heels in love with her stalker if she so chooses, especially if he has saved her life during a B-moviesque opening sequence. But Chanda so quickly reconciles herself to the role of chattel that the film gives her, as a prize for the two males butting heads — a role that has Sonakshi Sinha written all over it in blazing letters — that all that fierceness seems just a ploy to make her likeable. Or, more likely, a failed attempt at making her seem different from the doormat Sinha plays in every other film.
The two billy goats are Shahid Kapoor’s Romeo Rajkumar and his opium-mafia boss Shivraj Gurjar (Sood). Romeo is a drifter who has walked into a Yojimbo– style gang war and insinuates himself as Gurjar’s right hand man after saving his life and opium in some admittedly cool spots. His badassery, however, deserts him whenever he encounters Chanda, who shows up at the most inopportune moments, and he must go stalk her, leaving his long-suffering partner, played by Mukul Dev, to pick up the slack. Chanda is the niece of Gurjar’s mortal enemy Manik Parmar (Vidyarthi), which means this happens very often.
Matters come to a head when Gurjar sees Chanda and decides he must have her. He negotiates a truce with Parmar with Chanda as tribute, which leads to the inevitable conflict. Said conflict soon turns utterly ridiculous as Chanda and Romeo repeatedly bait Gurjar, leading to some incredibly atrocious (and decidedly unoriginal) jokes. At one point, in a misguided attempt at learning English in order to woo Chanda, Gurjar croons, “I am your buuull, you are my shiiit/ Together, we are buuullshiiit.” Not only is it an insightful statement on gender relations in the film, it also serves as a moment of honest self-criticism that is rare in Bollywood today.
Many have called R… Rajkumar the worst film of 2013. That particular circle of hell in my mind is reserved for Grand Masti, but this one comes very close. Like Grand Masti, it is a pastiche of other utterly mediocre films, plumbing the depths of Bollywood’s regressiveness.