Son of Sardaar
DIRECTOR
ASHWNI DHIR
STARRING
Ajay Devgn, Sonakshi Sinha, Sanjay Dutt, Juhi Chawla
By Ajachi Chakrabarti
Whenever there is a family feud storyline, be sure that a guy and girl from the two families will fall in love. Even the Flintstones’ intergenerational family feud with the Hatrock family ended when Pebbles befriended the Hatrock baby and almost drowned, but for Fred’s heroic rescue. In Bollywood regurgitations of the trope, a tearful reconciliation followed by the wedding of the star-crossed lovers if it’s a comedy, or their melodramatic deaths if a tragedy, is inevitable.
Ashwni Dhir’s Son of Sardaar is the comic variation of that idea, along with a premise borrowed from Bollywood’s latest mine of story ideas, SS Rajamouli. Extending the idea of atithi devo bhava, Rajamouli’sMaryada Ramanna and this film base most of their humour on the fact that a good host (cartoon villain Sanjay Dutt, here) cannot kill a guest in his house. Devgn channelises a trans-Vindhyan hero that has him dispatching murderous crowds with Rajnikanthesque ease, if not panache, hours after he holds forth on the topic of love and marriage like a flat Shah Rukh Khan.
Unfortunately, this film takes the worst of both worlds and throws them together in the forlorn hope that the star power of Messrs Devgn, Dutt and Salman Khan (in an equally star-crossed cameo) pulls it through.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
‘Dark matter and dark energy are the two most outstanding questions facing physicists today’
Photo: Arun Sehrawat
WHEN THE 20th century dawned, the electron had just been discovered. We knew that the electron went around the atom, but no one knew what was inside it. Then Ernest Rutherford discovered that there is a nucleus in the centre, then Niels Bohr came up with his theory of atomic structure, then there was the quantum revolution. We have made tremendous progress in the past 100 years.
Towards the end of the 20th century, cosmology, which had never been considered a science at all, was accepted as one. This is because for most of the century, we had only one fact: that the galaxies are moving away. Nothing was known about where the universe came from. It is really the theorem of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking that gave a scientific basis for the thinking that maybe there was a beginning.
This very great progress itself, which made cosmology a science, has led us to the unknown. We ask, what is dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of the universe? We know it is there, because it exerts gravity, but we have not been able to detect it. And we know little about it. The acceleration of the universe tells us that the energy, which is causing this cosmic repulsion, cannot be the energy of matter. For one, there isn’t enough matter: the energy per unit volume is four times as much as what would be generated if all the matter was converted into energy. That leaves us with only vacuum. We used to think about vacuum as only empty space. But now, we find that this empty space has energy and pressure associated with it. But what is this energy? We don’t know. These — dark matter and dark energy — are the two most outstanding questions facing physicists today.
Interestingly, the most outstanding questions for physics at the turn of the 20th century came from the microscopic world of atoms and nuclei, whereas these questions now concern the infinite universe. And what is known about them is that dark matter and energy exist because of what happened when the universe was 10-45 seconds old and 10-33 cm in diameter. By contrast, an atom is an enormous 10-8 cm in size. What is extraordinary, in my mind, is that what is happening to the universe at a scale of billions of light years today, seems to have been decided by the laws of microscopic physics when the universe was 10-45 seconds old. For Rutherford and Bohr and the other great physicists of the early 20th century, this notion would have shocked them. But I suspect they may have enjoyed the beauty of it.
As Told To Ajachi Chakrabarti
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
The great leveller
Marcus du Sautoy would have you look beyond the numbers and find that mathematics is as much about literature and history. By Ajachi Chakrabarti
Photo: Rohit Chawla
IN 1637, lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat famously wrote in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica: “It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” He was right; it was too narrow. Three hundred and fifty seven years later, when Cambridge professor Andrew Wiles finally proved what became known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, earning him a knighthood and many other honours, the proof was more than a 100 pages long, and incorporated a number of new branches of mathematics created after Fermat’s death; branches that, to a large extent, had been created by generations of mathematicians trying to prove the infernal theorem.
Marcus du Sautoy does something similar when asked to autograph one of his popular books on mathematics. Especially when asked to sign one for a school student, he often prefaces his signature with “2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23… Find the pattern,” presumably in the hope that some kid somewhere will someday do just that and find a truly marvellous function to predict prime numbers, solving one of the great mysteries of mathematics and rendering all computer security systems, which rely precisely on the lack of such a pattern, redundant.
Du Sautoy, who succeeded Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, works primarily for students and adults to appreciate the beauty of maths and be inspired to explore the complexity of the subject. “I don’t do my maths because it’s useful,” he says. “Ultimately, it may be useful, but I do it because there’s something extraordinarily beautiful about the subject.” He’s done this by writing books, hosting television and radio shows, and talking to all who listen — and there are quite a few who do — about the power of mathematics. But the real problem, he feels, lies in the way maths is taught in school.
“The one thing that is really lacking in maths curriculum the world over,” he says, “is telling the big stories of maths. We concentrate very much on the technical side of mathematics, but we give students very little insight into what it allows you to access. I think in any other subject in school, such as learning a musical instrument, you’ve got to do a lot of technical things like scales and arpeggios. That’s boring, but necessary, because it gives you the facility to play fantastic music. The thing that a music teacher will do is play for the students the wonderful music they’re aspiring to play. The kid will be inspired to want to achieve a level that allows him to play, compose and create his own music. Then they put in the hard grafting, because you can’t get away without hard work.”
In Goa, du Sautoy was often stopped by people who had heard him speak and wanted him to know that they wished they had a maths teacher like him in school. The difference between university and school maths education, he says, is that in university, you are preaching to the converted — students who love the subject enough to choose to study it — whereas in school, you get a much greater diversity, and the disenfranchisement of the student often means that teachers are talking to them at the wrong level.
“There are many different ways in which people access information,” he says. “You need to use a multiplicity of tools in order to bring each of your students into your ideas. Some people really love technology, so understanding that primes are the key to Internet cryptography or that eigenvalues and matrices are used to run Google, that’ll bring them in. Other people respond to more artistic things, such as music, art or architecture. So showing them the maths in those will be their way in. Some people like history, and the history of mathematics will draw them in. And some people like maths for its own sake. So there can’t be one way to teach maths, and different things work for different people.”
Du Sautoy says he is planning to approach the British government to introduce a course on the literature of mathematics. “I’m trying to talk to the British government and say to them, ‘Why don’t we be the first country to say that yes, we need our kids to know about sines, cosines and logarithms, but why don’t they learn about how Fibonacci numbers are present in nature or the power of prime numbers?’”
Telling the big stories is not useful merely to inspire students, he says. “I understood my subject in a much deeper way by going through the lives of people like (Bernhard) Riemann,” he says, “and understanding things like how he created the Riemann zeta function. It was a bit of a tangential journey. He was interested in a new analytical function he could put complex numbers into, and it somehow unlocked the secret of the primes. I think you learn strategies by understanding how the people in history arrived at solutions.”
He calls it a tragedy when told that most Indian students memorise proofs for examinations, saying that you are missing the whole point if you are learning the proof. “The power of mathematics is that you need no memory,” he says, “because once you actually understand the ideas, you can always reconstruct them. One needs to really wean people off the idea of memorising for exams. This can be done through exams that cannot be answered by pure reproduction of proofs, where you have to understand the proof to answer the question because there’s a slight perturbation. I think it’s really essential that the education somehow celebrates the power of proof as a tool for relieving you of memory.”
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
‘By changing the environment, you can improve people’s lives’
Photo: Sarang Sena
WHEN I think about the one idea that inspires me and my work, I’d rather not talk about epidemics, because I think that’s easy. The tools that are required to identify infectious agents that cause outbreaks are becoming less expensive and more rapid, and the real challenge is trying to understand the roots of disease that are laid down in infancy, or even before, and how as a result of exposure during life, you change the way genes are expressed.
We thought when we began sequencing the human genome that the answers to why people are the way they are would be resolved. But the more we have delved into this, the more we have learnt that the most important bit is not the coding sequence, but the way the genes are modified over the course of life. It results in cancer, modifications in height and intelligence, longevity of life, obesity, all kinds of things. And we have learnt that the types of exposure that you see in early life can have an enormous impact.
Now, the exciting thing about this, from the vantage points of democracy, productivity and evolution, is that by changing the environment, you can improve people’s lives. We have learnt from patterns of disease in mice that how you feed an animal when it is pregnant determines whether its offsprings will be obese or not. Similarly, if you consider intellectual aptitude and social intelligence, if you get exposed early to a social environment that is rich, you can improve people’s lives in the longer term. This means that you can take someone who comes from a poor background and give them a better life by adjusting their early environment.
The last thing I find exciting is the notion that you can think about social behaviours like infectious diseases. When I think about infection, I actually mean the concept of transmissibility. If you have a positive or negative relationship with someone, that influences their behaviour, which, in turn, influences somebody else. There is some truth to the notion of karma. Children who grow up in areas where there is a lot of violence, for example, will influence others to be violent. Instead, if you can intercede and contain that violence, that would have a huge impact on the spread of violence. You can immunise people against violence.
As told to Ajachi Chakrabarti
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
“We need to ensure a vibrant future instead of glorifying a dead past”
National Award winning director Onir, 43, has taken up the cause of independent filmmakers by launching an online petition along with a number of celebrated actors and directors, asking the government to set up centres for exhibiting independent films. In an interview with Ajachi Chakrabarti, he explains why it is necessary for the government to rescue independent cinema.
What prompted you to start this petition, and what do you hope to achieve?
A lot of us independent filmmakers have been discussing this issue for a while now. We agreed that the problems we faced were not related to the actual making of the films, but with distribution. It is extremely difficult for us to get space to display our work to audiences. In Europe, for instance, television channels regularly show independent films, because cinema is seen as art. The government is spending Rs 600 crore to restore old films to mark 100 years of Indian cinema, but where are these films going to be seen? We need to work to ensure a vibrant future instead of glorifying a dead past.
We have historically had support from the NFDC in making films, but what is the point if we only get to show our films in international festivals? Now, I’m not saying that an audience will be created overnight. It needs to be nurtured. But there is talk of our films crossing over internationally, but if one can’t see a Rituparno Ghosh film in Mumbai, it means we are not crossing over among ourselves. Encouraging independent cinema is important for the government, as it will bring down walls between different regions.
Have you had any feedback from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on the petition?
We haven’t had any direct feedback, and when some journalists contacted officials in the ministry, they said they had not heard of the issue. We are hoping to get a chance to meet with them and initiate a dialogue on how to protect Indian independent cinema.
You have asked multiplexes to have one dedicated screen for independent and regional films, but a case can be made that the audience has voted with its wallets for mainstream films. Why should for-profit multiplexes not cash in on this by giving the public more of what it wants?
Multiplexes were given hefty tax breaks by the government in order to promote independent cinema alongside mainstream films. Therefore, we have the right to demand that they work to do that. However, this is not a permanent solution, as the government needs to create dedicated spaces for independent films. Multiplexes have been given tax breaks for ten years and we are asking them to do this for two to three years only. It’s the same with kids and classical music today. Children do not appreciate classical music because a love for the music has not been nurtured in them. It does not mean that classical music is inherently inferior. The moment you start exposing people to good films, you will start building an audience. When we were growing up, we could watch bothSholay and Aakrosh on television, which is why I have a taste for both types of films today.
A lot of your petition castigates Doordarshan (DD) for not showcasing independent cinema today. However, in an era where DD has nowhere close to the popularity it had 25 years ago, isn’t going after it rather irrelevant?
Nothing is irrelevant. Today, satellite channels are a lot like multiplexes in a sense that they also focus only on mainstream films in order to maximise revenue. However, as a government organisation, DD has the duty to provide a platform for art. And even if you say that DD is irrelevant because it is crap, it can still penetrate untouched areas and take our films to virgin audiences. We are trying to take our films to smaller towns, as our films still get released in the big cities; and even if DD can show our films in the afternoon slots, it would make a difference. However, they are only interested in blockbusters. I had to fight for six months before DD agreed to show I Am, which had won two National Awards. Even then, they only paid Rs 5 lakh. There was no question of negotiations.
You have asked the government to invest in spaces to screen independent films. But the spaces you talk of are small, 100 seat theatres. Why hasn’t the industry started these on its own? Why wait for the government?
Who would start these spaces? The big studios that have the money, just like the multiplexes, have no interest in promoting independent cinema. It is essential that the government work for these, because it serves the national interest. The government generates a large amount of money from entertainment taxes, and it should use these revenues to promote cinema as an art form.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
The coming out party
By Ajachi Chakrabarti
DIRECTOR
Karan Johar
STARRING
Sidharth Malhotra, Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Rishi Kapoor
PERHAPS I should apologise to Dharma Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment for allowing outside events prejudice this review of their Parent’s Day-cum-Debutante Ball that is Student of the Year. Maybe I would have thought more favourably of the film — unlikely, but possible — if I hadn’t seen it hours after Yash Chopra’s death. Karan Johar, like so many other cogs in the Bollywood machine, has never shied from borrowing tropes from the man who wrote the very formula the industry strives to emulate. However much he tries to hide it in the stratospheric heights of an über-elite Dehradun school, Johar falls back on the tired narrative devices of song-and-dance sequences in exotic locales, where romance is expressed only through Urdu poetry, and the world revolves around the lovebirds’ daily drama.
Unlike Chopra, Johar does not understand the power of empathy in the Bollywood formula. Chopra would construct very Indian social barriers that audiences identified with, however contrived they were. Johar’s protagonists are Delhi-brattified characters straight out of The OC, surrounded by a bunch of stereotypes masquerading as a supporting cast. Rishi Kapoor is hamstrung by playing a closet homosexual whose raison d’être is to get a cheap laugh. He spins it by playing a Mr Weatherbee instead of a Dean Pelton. It makes him likeable, but doesn’t add depth.
Likeability is the only thing the actors strive for in this most commercial of films. What little negative traits seep in are caused by, and blamed on, an illogical Triwizard tournament decided on the basis of a triathlon where male and female students compete in the same race. The events serve to eliminate all who threaten our two sculpted alpha males, There is the cheesiest of reconciliations by the dean’s deathbed.
Likeability is something the film should have strived for itself. It is very difficult to watch it without a negative attitude with your overpriced popcorn. The blatant nepotism does it no favours. Neither does the spectacle of the protagonists infesting your TV for weeks before to shill for soaps and ecommerce websites. I’d love to say that the new generation’s youthful energy helped, but like India’s political dynasties, the young simply bring more of the old. Just with fewer wrinkles.
‘Going to jail 14 times has sharpened my skills’
WHO Tenzin Tsundue is a poet, writer and Tibetan activist based in Dharamshala. The author of three books, he has written for various global publications and won the first Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction (2001).
You’ve been arrested, beaten, starved, thrown out of Dharamshala. What keeps you going?
We’re fighting China, the biggest colonial power in the post-colonial era. It runs the largest slave labour force of about 900 million Chinese with investments from the West. The Tibetan faith and practice of non-violence pushes our idealism further into impossibility. But without a seemingly impossible dream, what is life about anyway? These experiences, like going to jail 14 times, sharpen my skills and they enrich my life.
Is the movement to free Tibet turning violent?
If you call self-immolation — one of the most non-violent acts, carried out with a calm serene mind — “violent”, what word are you left with for organised terrorism? Our people have given their lives to speak to the conscience of the Chinese. They have not hurt anyone else. Till date, 57 Tibetans have set themselves on fire. The freedom movement is growing stronger, even confrontational, but must remain non-violent.
What is more effective, your daredevil stunts or your activism through your writings?
When I climbed the Mumbai hotel scaffolding in 2002, it caught the attention of a consumerist world hooked on cosmetic beauty. But culturally empowering activities using various arts help sustain the movement. Although Tibet today is battered by the military, the police and multiple waves of consumerist market economy, artists and intellectuals are leading the movement from the grassroots. While jailed Tibetan singers and poets are loved and idolised, the military dictators and puppet babus are feared and despised.
How effective is poetry against the economic and military might of China?
The first man who inspired the voice of India’s freedom was not a politician or an activist, but a poet — Sri Aurobindo Ghosh. At the time, India’s condition under British occupation was similar to that of Tibet under Chinese occupation today. Art inspires people to free themselves and reach for beauty and glory. Then, they can neither be threatened by fear nor bought by greed.
Aradhna Wal is a Sub Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
The City of the Apes
MUMBAI-BASED scriptwriter Rajesh Devraj, creator of Channel [V]’s Quick Gun Murugun, is about to release his first graphic novel. The collaboration between him and illustrator Meren Imchen, Sudershan (Chimpanzee) is set in Mumbai where anthropomorphised animals and humans work in the film business together. It charts the rise, fall and heartbreak of the titular chimp and Bollywood superstar Sudershan. Harking back to the days of Bollywood’s animal heroes, this is a darkly funny tale of celluloid dreams and the absurdity of humans who will dance like monkeys to other people’s tunes.
‘Like films, science uses known facts to create a new world’
Q&A Bedabrata Pain, Filmmaker
AFTER 18 YEARS as a NASA scientist Bedabrata Pain (48) makes his directorial debut with Chittagong, a film about the 1930 Uprising where young men and women, led by schoolteacher Surya Sen, took on the British Empire. Pain talks to Aradhna Wal about recreating history and reaching for the arts via science.
EDITED EXCERPTS
How did Chittagong come about?
As a Bengali growing up in Bengal, I was so familiar with the Chittagong Uprising, I didn’t think a movie could be made of it. I’d read books on it — Suresh Dey’s first hand account of the Uprising’s Battle of Jalalabad. Talking to a Delhi University student in 2006, I realised people from outside the state didn’t know the story. As I started voicing the idea, someone told me about Subodh ‘Jhunku’ Roy, one of the participants in the struggle. I rushed to the hospital he was admitted to and met him two weeks before he died. I decided to tell this fascinating story from a boy’s perspective. Manoj Bajpai (as Surya Sen) and Nawazuddin Siddiqui have meaty roles. But the frail 14-year-old that Jhunku had been, the youngest boy to pick up a gun, is the mainstay of the film.
Why cinema after working with NASA for 18 years?
My mother tells me that I was a great storyteller as a child. I’m a very visual person. Even as a scientist, when I made pitches to sponsors I’d keep seeing what I was saying in my mind’s eye. That’s what cinema is. Seeing and saying come together. My life has been the 3 Idiots story. I was good in studies, told to go to IIT, topped my department and got an Ivy League scholarship. During my PhD, my friends and I invented the active pixel sensor and that set my life for the next 15 years. You get addicted to the work, as one would get addicted to cocaine. One day, my colleagues told me to plan for life as a chief scientist, and I had a vision of myself as doddering 60-year-old at NASA. That scared me. If I wanted to do something different with my life I’d have to do it now. Much as I love science, performance arts have an excitement that science doesn’t.
How has the transition been?
What’s tough is that I’ve gone from being the top person in my field, to scraping the bottom of the barrel. But, luckily for me, in the past five years independent films have been given unprecedented space.
As a scientist, what do you bring to film-making?
Structure. I went through 36 drafts of the screenplay, tracking each character to make sure their arcs aligned. Science is also about creativity, which many people forget. It’s about using known facts to create a new world with its own logic and rules. Force will be mass into acceleration, but you can go beyond that to come up with the theory of relativity. That’s how, using history, I’ve brought a film into existence. Every night, as everyone else slept, I would close my eyes and think of what I wanted to see.
How did you fund the film as a newcomer?
When I came up with the script in 2008, people loved it. Prasoon (Joshi) took it to Reliance who wanted to make the film. But, at the end of the year recession hit and I got caught. We were supposed to start shooting on 15 December 2008, but I was told that it had been put on hold. Then Ashutosh Gowarikar announced his film on the same subject(Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey) and I knew that I wasn’t going to get any money. Early 2009, I got the money from my patents and put every cent into this film. I am the producer director and writer of this film. It’s my baby.
What about the reports that Amitabh Bachchan stalled your film to push Gowarikar’s?
Amitabh Bachchan came and blessed my film. I’ve grown up watching him and Jaya Bachchan on the screen. It was a dream come true. What more can I say?
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
Winning Words
Fresh from another award, writer Dilip D’Souza talks to Aradhna Wal
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
DILIP D’SOUZA does not call himself a journalist. He finds that an insult to other people in the field who have worked hard to get where they are. Nor does he label himself a leftist, rightist, centralist. “I’m just a writer. And a man with opinions,” he says.
The 52-year-old Mumbai-based writer recently won the ‘Newsweek and The Daily Beast-Open Hands Prize for Commentary in South Asia’. His award entails a month-long residency at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in New York. Nominated by his editor from HarperCollins India, he won the award for three pieces — ‘Mr Tendulkar’s Neighbourhood’ and ‘Get to the Top’ forThe Caravan, and ‘A Few Good Doctors’ on rural healthcare in Chhattisgarh, for Fountain Ink magazine.
A graduate of BITS Pilani, D’Souza refers to his days as a software engineer in the States as his “previous life”. Twenty years ago he discovered his passion for writing and came back to India. Since then he has been on the hunt for stories in different parts of the country, from living next door to Sachin, to Muslim neighbourhoods in Mumbai, to denotified tribes. He is, however, keeping his next project under wraps.
He attributes living and travelling abroad to opening his eyes to India. “Growing up you get conditioned to poverty and to filth. After I came back, the first thing I asked myself was, why don’t we keep our streets clean. You get rid of preconceived notions. People in the States grow up with the same family values, if you want to call them that, as we do. And, despite what many undergraduate fresh-off-the-boat students expect, women are not simply going to fall in bed with you.” His book Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America was his attempt to look at the country without prejudice. “I held up a mirror to America, which reflected both me and my country. Writing is a way of educating myself.”
Label shy, D’Souza laughingly recounts the Wikipedia war over his political loyalties. Different users changed his description from Communist to left liberal and, post-award, to “far-left, Western left liberal” and “follower of Che Guevara”. “Call me what makes you happy,” he says, “I am just trying to keep an open mind.”
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Teheslka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
