“Rehaan”, says my wife.

Fifty-sixty-something aunty has an animated expression on her face — wonder concealing  surprise, and the effort needed for that is not concealed — probably because no effort is made to conceal the effort.

“Isn’t that a muslim name?”, she asks, quite sure that we don’t look muslim.

“Yes. He’s Rehaan Phansalkar”, my wife adds.

I look away, trying to keep disgust about the line of inquiry off my face.

“It’s a persian name”, quips my wife.

Fifty-sixty-something aunty manufactures a smile at that escape route, as we get out at our floor.

The next day, she is back at it, “Rehaan Khan”, she chides him/me/both. Or perhaps no one really, Just jesting. Showcasing her sense-of-humor. However sick. And I keep looking away to hide the disgust.

But then I start thinking. Why am I offended? When we picked up that name, we knew someone like that was going to say/do something like that. It’s the most benign form of bigotry even. And being offended about such a line of inquiry is actually giving it a validity it does not deserve. So next time I see her, I manufacture a smile.

+++

Same place, different time, different individual. Actually, we don’t really call the watchmen and the other helpers in the society — like that person who picks up the trash in the morning — individuals. They’re just people. They’re just the jobs, even. Watchman. Cleaner. Maid. Driver.

But anyways, this elderly guy who collects trash in the morning, and dumps it into the compost pits, and collects the compost at times, is an individual. I’ve seen him trying to clear up a road space for vehicles in Ganpati celebrations time, near where he lives — a basti through which a road that I have to take to visit my parent passes — trying to control rowdy/boisterous members from his basti, already high, I believe, on spirits other than the religious passions sparked by Ganapati visarjan occasion. When the road is partially cleared up, I pass him, thanking him silently for helping out, and saving probably half an hour of noisy celebration and traffic jam on a narrow road. I applaud him later in person, the day after for helping out so many people. Probably because of that interaction, for me, he is an individual. Not just a job.

But again, I digress. I asked him about the compost that’s generated from the pits and whether I can get some, and he brings me a polythene bag filled with compost a couple of days later.

“Just don’t use it in the Tulsi pot”, he requests.

“Why, does it harm the Tulsi plant in some way”, I ask instinctively, as that’s the only thing that I can think of.

“No. This compost is made from all sort of unclean things, no. Meat pieces and what not”, he says.

I smile. Not a condescending, I know better than that smile, but rather a “I know what you mean” smile. And I know, even the radical atheist (to borrow a category created by the great late Douglas Adams) like me, will think for a second, before adding that compost to a Tulsi pot — even if it’s only to remember the innocent faith that made the elderly individual to tell me, an almost total stranger, something like that.

+++

Same place, or thereabout, different people.

We’re walking around the complex, taking my kid to the Ganapati temple in the complex, when another couple turns up with a boy, almost same age as my kid. We smile at them. The boy, in just the half minute or so he had to notice, notices that my kid was wearing a dark pink T-shirt.

“He’s wearing pink”, he says animatedly to his parents.

Me and my wife laugh.

His mother scolds him, “They heard you”, as they drive away on their scooter.

Yes. The only thing (probably) that they found objectionable in the sentiment (what else do you call it? reflex?) was that it was uttered loud enough for us to hear.

Pink is for girls.

Sissies.

+++

And then, different place — or same actually, depending on how broadly you define ‘place’.

I switch on the TV and I find the great Farhan Akhtar sporing a thick mustache, later also adorned by the lovely (well, I’m not just cynical, you know) Preity Zinta. The MARD pledge. Is the irony of girls sporting a mustache, as a symbol for real maleness, the one that’s supposed to save girls from being molested/raped/groped, is it intentional? Wouldn’t it be better for men to sport bangles, say, claiming solidarity with the victims of a typical male thing. Wouldn’t it be better to challenge the whole stereotypes of bangles as sign of weakness, mustaches a sign of strength (mooch katwana and all that melodrama), or machismo (whatever the f it is). To reinforce, even if unintentionally, a much problematic stereotype, could very well be counterproductive. But then are celebrity social drives ever really supposed to be productive? Beyond counting eyeballs, that is.

+++

Bangles are for sissies.

Mustaches are for the real men.

Men don’t cry.

Good girls don’t wear skimpy clothes and its corollary.

Men love sports and cars.

+++

New religions are formed each day.

Sometimes they’re imported from more prosperous lands — like the great USA in the boys Vs. pink case — and hence come pre-approved. They get to bypass the usual slow organic decay that is necessary for other ones, produced locally, need to take root (which incidentally has just one o more than rot).

But organic, or GM, or hybrid, or whatever, they all seem to thrive in this land called India which is a fertile land for bigotry. Mohammedans are this, parsis are that, south-indians are what not, xyz is abc. Pink is sissy. Make him wear bangles. Blacken his face to shame him.

In all these fifty thousand shades of bigotry and stereotypes, there are a few innocent ones, like in the case of the elderly individual. But when one looks at the spectrum, how does one feel hope that the picture will be painted in better shades anytime soon?

For the picture looks pretty grim with all the shades of religions — godly or not, major or minor, deep or trivial.

this lifetime
and aiming
for eternity
hoping
it would be enough
for this lifetime

maybe they do
especially
words like those
living through
identity crisis

words like those
used to being
thrown at random,
attached to
the unwanted,
always,
start feeling
unwanted

and in their acceptance
is their death
from ignominy
to anonymity
some words
are trapped
in search
of their own meanings

like people

Closure?

So yes, we’ve moved on from Kasab’s hanging, to routine things, and routine world of ours. The world with routine issues: like rapes (some high-profile due to unprecedented brutality that it came along with, but others quite routine, by state and non-state actors alike, even friends, family members, including husbands, and fathers); road accidents due to apathy; deaths from malnutrition, or lack of accessible health-care, deaths due to negligence and lack of safety procedures, or callous disregard for them; deaths due to illicit liquor; deaths due to people being crammed up into trucks like animals (as if that’s somehow acceptable way to transport animals) that meet routine accidents because they’re so overloaded that it’s a miracle that the accidents do not happen every single time; deaths due to beating in custody, or false encounters; deaths in the name of religion/caste (riots are just one aspect of it, but people get killed, women raped, for entering places of worship); the endless vengeance killings like those in Bihar, honor killings (that disgusting oxymoron, that’s everyday reality for youths belonging to certain regions/castes — where one of the greatest human emotion, love, becomes a social sin, to be punished brutally, by implicit, and sometimes explicit, condoning by society — consisting of elders one is told are the well of wisdom).

Yes, the list is well know. And it’s not exhaustive. And enlisting those things doesn’t lesson the evil of terrorism. But here is the point: why do we not get riled up (the way we do about terrorism, that is) about this horrific, everyday, reality around us, that kills countless more Indians, innocent victims most of them, just like terrorism? Why does an aggression by the external enemy make even some of the most sane voices among us turn into hate-mongers? Why is Indians killing Indians so much more ‘acceptable’ (going by the lack of outrage) than is, say, a Pakistani killing Indians?

But that’s not even the point of this rant, contrary to my last “but here is the point”. Bear with me, while I get to that.

It’s a good thing, though, that post Kasab-hanging, beyond the euphoria (sweets being

The euphoria of execution

distributed, people dancing on the streets — assuming that did happen), the conspiracies (that Kasab died of Dengue, for instance), and the ridiculous (the, now legendary, biryani), there are some dispassionate arguments being offered about capital punishment, and retribution, that make it possible to start a reasoned, dispassionate (to the extent that there can be dispassionate discussion over subject like this) discussion. Harini Calamur’s piece: Time for Retribution is one of those, that really got me started on this. Like I said, as dispassionate as you would see on this subject …

Okay, so this is a little dated write-up (I started it a week or so after Kasab was hanged), so that window of opportunity has already closed, thanks to shrill voices in favor of capital punishment taking over public discourse for the time being (contradicting my earlier claim that we don’t get riled up against some of the things on the list, I know), given the gruesome rape and assault in Delhi. But if anything, it’s more relevant now, more necessary even, to have that discussion. For the underlying issue is same.

The question is simply this: do we want to become a ‘retributive’ society, where revenge, even an organized, legal, revenge through a state machinery, is the primary collective obsession (and I’m not even talking about an exploitative media becoming a central stage for it all, for even without it, it worries me)? Or do we want to make it our priority to become as a society, what we cannot easily become as individuals: restorative, healing, believing in redemption, forgiving, even (when appropriate)?

Of course, movies, and even literature, can be overly romantic, but sometimes, there are gems in these products of popular culture. So even when the thoughts themselves are uttered by a cynical politician in a Hollywood movie, they are worth mulling over:

CHARLIE ROSE:  But you’re against the death penalty?

GOV. MORRIS: Yes.  Because of what it says about us as a society.

CHARLIE ROSE: Suppose Governor it was your wife…

GOV. MORRIS:  And she was murdered, what would I  do.

CHARLIE ROSE: It gets more complicated when it’s personal.

GOV. MORRIS: Sure…well if I could get to him I’d find a way to kill him.

CHARLIE ROSE: So you, you Governor would impose the death penalty.

GOV. MORRIS: No, I would commit a crime for which I would happily go to jail.

CHARLIE ROSE: Then why not let society do that?

GOV. MORRIS: Because society has to be better than the individual.  If I were to do that I would be wrong.

(from The Ides of March, when Gov. Morris, played by George Cloony – yes, the same charming George Cloony, if that is going to make you go back and watch the clip again on youtube or something — is being interviewed for television audiences before a Democraic primary).

Because, the society has to be better than the individual.

Because it’s easier for a person to fail, for rage can fail most of us, almost every single time.

Today, I see rage worn by society as a badge of honor. If you’re not enraged, there is something monstrous about you.

A distant memory of something I watched on the television comes to me, not the words, but the essence. In a remote African (?) village, the story goes, when someone commits a crime, the village gathers for justice. And what do they do? Every single person who has known the perpetrator of crime/misdeed stands up and talks about one (or at least one) good thing the perpetrator has done in the past. By end of the proceeding, most of the time, the perpetrator is in tears, and there are almost no repeat crimes.

Yes romantic, I know.

But contrast this with our justice system: we send pretty much normal people, pushed into crime by circumstances (many if not most of the times) to prisons and make hardened criminals out of them.

Punishment as a deterrent. We’re told. Deterrence works. Look: there is no nuclear war.

Practical, maybe. I’m even ready to put my money on it. Although, the delays in our justice system has meant deterrence has long lost its efficacy in our justice system. So what do we do? Instead of fixing the (possibly only — in the long term) pragmatic solution we contemplate the opposite of romantic.

Retribution. Institutionalized revenge. So that you don’t have to avenge personally. But your thirst for revenge is satiated by a nameless, faceless, institution. The government.

Life for murder, castration for rape, hand for blasphemy (of course the last does not, thank God   for small mercies, have mass support). Only, then will it deter, the argument comes back, rationalizing the need for revenge, with a cold logical front to make it sound dispassionate.

But switch on the TV. Open a newspaper. Read blog-posts, tweets, FB status messages, comments on social web, online media, TV debates, and you’ll know. It’s not about deterrence anymore. It’s not about safety. It’s not about improving the society. It’s about that one raw human emotion.

Revenge. Retribution as a form of revenge. Revenge without guilt, without risk. Revenge with legal and societal sanction.

While discussing Kasab’s death sentence, I was faced with a curious paradox: I, the radical atheist, the scientific materialist, was arguing against a colleague, a staunch believer in God (an active ISKCON member), that redemption has to a possibility for everyone, yes, even Kasab. Even if it does not hold true, it’s a good fiction (like the Valmiki case) to entertain when we contemplate what our society should aspire to be.

Reformative or retributive.

The choice is ours to make. The consequences are ours to face.

now
enrolled domestics
bourgeois workaholics
we shake our collective heads
at the kulturkampf
disdainfully
as if
been there done it
we’ve moved on

and we have

we have pulled down
the coffee mugs from the altar
the ex-believers
have employed the goddess
for the banal task
of keeping us awake

and yet
we sleepwalk

Featured Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitzcelt/399136360/lightbox/ (Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0))

PS: At least three words in the poem are AWAD words over past two weeks. No points for guessing which.

Nothing royal about it, just regular butter. It won’t embarrass you!

Introduction: Seven at One Blow or As Luck Would Have It

World is full of tailors. Even in ancient times, people used to wear clothes, and that means, there were people who would sew them for people. But how many tailors end up with a beautiful princess? When our valiant tailor killed seven flies in one blow of a cloth, and proclaimed that with a belt, omitting any mention of flies, his life changed.  The king heard about this valiant tailor and gave him an assignment which he completed masterfully, and another, and our tailor was the man chosen to marry king’s daughter: a beautiful princes.

When you heard this story in your childhood, I’m sure you thought of the tailor as a brave guy who took up the challenges that the life presented him and climbed high in life through intelligence, presence of mind, and courage.

But what if I told you that these things, although necessary, were not sufficient?

Lets look at the story again. First, our man was a tailor. This  means that he had bunch of clothes lying around in his shop at arm’s length. Secondly, he was a bachelor and so did not have a wife clean up the shop for him, so there were lots of flies in his shop. Then comes the crucial part: the tailor was bad at his job, so he had not a lot of work to do, and hence he took up the classical pass-time of killing flies. For five-six years, he had been killing flies, three, four, even five hours a day. I’ll let you do that math. That’s a staggering 10,000+ hours of practice in killing flies. There is a well-known rule that says that if you practice anything for 10,000 hours or more, you become a master in that task.

So our tailor, was already the master of killing flies, when he was presented with an opportunity: tens of flies sitting on a piece of cake. He had a cloth handy, owing to his profession. The result was seven dead flies in one stroke.

But that is not all! Our tailor then decided to embroider this fact on a belt so that everyone will know his feat. But being a bad tailor, he consumed the space on belt so fast that he could not fit in the word flies, and hence he proclaimed, instead: “seven in one blow”.

People started talking about this ‘feat’, and this presented our tailor with a huge advantage, and he got commissioned by the king to tame the wild boar. Think again. The world is full of tailors. But how many tailors actually get commissioned to tame a wild boar? I’m not denying that our tailor was brave, intelligent, and quick-thinking. He was all that. But what differentiated him from others who were as brave, intelligent, or quick-thinking, are those three things: a weapon to kill flies handy, not much work leading to 10,000 hours of practice in killing flies, and shoddy work that meant he could not put all the words on the belt that he wanted.

These three things made him a world-famous ‘valiant tailor’

Epilogue: Cinderella Story

Everyone knows Cinderella as the ultimate rags-to-riches story. In fact, the tale of Cinderella is the quintessential fairy-tale — a young girl living in hostile family environment is blessed by the fairy-godmother for a night, and prince charming is mesmerized by her beauty, falling for her, to the extent that he sends his convoy to search for her in town, with the lost shoe. The story of Cinderella is the story of what pure beauty could achieve.

But think again. Was it only Cinderella’s beauty that got her the break, that is so coveted by millions of women? To answer that, let’s look at the story again.

The most important detail is this: Cinderella was a step-child, living with two step-sisters and a step-mother, all hostile to her. Admittedly, this prevented her from being taken to the royal ball with her step sisters. But far from being a disadvantage, this actually proved an advantage. How? In three ways. One: she was left behind at home. Think about it, if she were at ball, would the fairy-godmother have blessed her? Two, she made a late entry into a hall, thus making heads turn at her entry, with even the prince noticing her: if she had accompanied her sisters and mother, would she have got a similar attention? Three: since she had never really been used to latest fashions, she didn’t know how to run in the shoes fairy-godmother had given her, thus leaving behind one shoe for the prince to trace her.

These three combined changed Cinderella’s life dramatically, not her beauty, or any other quality. If Cinderella had entered the ball with similar clothes as her sisters, she would most likely not have been noticed by the prince. Because she was forced to stay home, she was helped by the fairy-godmother, and she ended up being the best dressed person at the ball, who entered late, thus getting a double-advantage. And because she did not know how to run in fancy shoes, she ended up leaving a trace for the prince to find her. Remember, that in this sequence, she did not have to be the ‘most beautiful’ women at the party. The prince was smitten due to combination of beauty, timing, and make-over.

What examination of these age-old tales tell us are two things. One: inherent qualities, like intelligent, beauty, wit, presence-of-mind, are not what makes people successful. Rather it’s seemingly inconsequential things like how many hours a day you’re wasting killing flies, or how badly your step-mother treats you, or how incompetent you’re at embroidering, or running with fancy shoes, that do. Two: if you read stories the way you want to read them, you could just about take any story to read, and it wouldn’t make an ounce of difference. You’ll be an outlier.

he shook his head
looked at me, as if
I were hopeless …
for that, he said,
you’ll have to
start living
first

Set in Rajasthan, this is another Kashyap masterpiece, although it (understandable – as even though it released just after Dev D, it predates all his released movies, in terms of production, and is raw) lacks the finesse of some of his later work. But that’s more than made up by the sheer display of brilliance.

1. Music: Haunting music. Taken outside the movie it probably cannot stand like Dev D or Black Friday music, but in the context of movie, it works wonders. Especially haunting is “O Ri Duniya”. And the way it is used is typical Kashyap brilliance on that front.

2. Performances: Kay Kay delivers as he’s probably expected to. But Deepak Dobriyal (Bollywood is a graveyard of such immensely talented actors, with zero personality), Piyush Mishra (who also happens to be responsible for all that music, also plays a blinder of sorts, only this ain’t cricket), Abhimanyu Singh (what a bearing!), all stun you. Mahie Gill, Aditya Srivastava, and Pankaj Jha also leave a mark. To think that all these cameos were stuck in the stupid Indian sensor jail for years!

3. The treatment: Raw, and brilliant. Excellent pace, and yet engaging. Only No Smoking among his other films was more difficult a movie to make. But Kashyap’s brilliance is stamped all over this film — albeit, as I already said, lacking fineness.

4. Story: Offbeat and powerful, dark, and stark. This is noir movie without the customary dark scenes, replaced with liberal use of colors — as the name suggest.

All in all, it surely belongs to the best of his films. As with No Smoking, which could not lift the weight of expectations that came after Black Friday, Gulaal suffered due to tactical mistake of releasing it after Dev D. Both Black Friday and Dev D are mainstream Bollywood movies. Okay, not Black Friday per se, but even that is very consumable, and people tend to like what they can ‘easily digest’. And when they get it, they expect it every time.

Bollywood mainstream is moving into ‘cannot fail because it’s too big’ zone, and so it’s left to these smaller/medium budget projects to experiment and take cinematic experience to hitherto unexplored areas, at the risk of failing. Sadly, the risk is all too real, because frankly, Indian movie watching public want refined carbohydrates.Everything else is a #fail.

“rago me daudate phirne ke hum nahi kayal”

Oh well we are.