Gone Too Soon
Music connects to us at a deep, emotional level like no other art form does. You don’t read your favorite book hundreds of times. You don’t watch your favorite movie dozens of times. But through repreated listening, you do acquire a very initimate relationship with the music you liked. Music even gets to define the “epochs” and “eras” of your life, the glue that sticks your memories together. Notes that you accidentally hear at unlikely places wafting down the wind may rekindle memories of your first flame or a long last friend. Singers and musicians wield a power over our emotions that I believe no other kind of artist does.
I got hooked to Michael Jackson when I heard “Beat It” in late 80’s in my college dorm. It was “love at first hearing” and the affair endured.
Michael Jackson is to pop music what Spielberg is to cinema. He invented new sounds and innovated new dance maneuvers. He created new standards and defined new benchmarks. I felt inspired when I watched his videos. Sounds infradig, but they indeed were class acts: superb music and dance mated with superb cinematorgraphy. Through his all-round brilliance, Jackson made me aspire to excellence.
Over the years, my tastes in music changed, from pop to more gentler melody to even the classical, but love for MJ’s music remained. All of his songs sound as fresh to me today as when I first heard them. I never admitted to anyone that I was a great fan of his though, because I think there was a weird peer pressure at work: friends and collegaues who were more deeply into rock music would look down on my “pedestrian” taste, while those less attuned to Western pop would think I was putting on airs. But I remained a devoted fan. Which is why I feel, irrational though it may seem, as grief-stricken at his death as those chest-beating mourners on TV do.
The lyrics of his song “Gone Too Soon” (album: Dangerous) read:
Like a perfect flower, just beyond your reach,
Born to amuse, to inspire, to delight,
Here one day, gone one night,
Gone too soon, gone too soon
He sounds prescient!
Thank you for the music, Michael Jackson. Love you.
Kashmiriyat
Every summer, between one to two lakh pilgrims make an arduous trek to Amarnath shrine in Kashmir. Facilities en route are meagre. The Jammu & Kashmir government has created an organization to provide better amenities to Yatris. This organization is called the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board. The government has leased 100 acres of land to the board to build rest rooms. The structures have to be of a temporary nature. Simply put, these are ramshackle toilets meant to be used by travel-weary pilgrims so that they — especially the women — do not have to urinate or defecate in the open.
Hell has broken lose. Some Kashmiris see a deep-rooted conspiracy behind the construction of the toilets. The government’s larger gameplan, they allege, is to turn Kashmir into a Hindu-majority state. There have been protests, rallies, rage boys, police firings, deaths, the works.
This gotta be a first anywhere in the world. Opposition to the building of rest rooms. Heck, nobody is even asking that even exiled Pandits — let alone people from outside the valley — be resettled in these hutments. But a Hindu conspiracy nevertheless.
If this is Kashmiriyat, I shudder to think what religious harmony in Kashmir would be like.
Trivikram Makes a Point: “I am good in the Crap department too!”
Why is the film “Jalsa” named Jalsa? Nobody seems to know. Nobody seems even want to know. Interesting pointer to the fact that movie names have become irrelevant. If you make a film on the life of the cow and call the flick “Donkey”, nobody is going to get hypercritical. Anyways, I speculate that since ‘Jalsa’ means “merry”, the suggestion here might be that that the director and the producer are making merry with movie-goers’ money.
Jalsa is a ridiculous movie. Our superman hero renounces Naxalism, gives up a life of violence in the jungle, and turns to – farming, you’d think? No way! — a pub-hopping city-slicker lifestyle. Babes find him scalding hot. They are all over him, humming to a variant of Michael Jackson – Paul McCartney number: “he is mine .. no no no he is mine”. And so he falls in love with the daughter of a cop that he was — believe it or not — pals with during his Naxal avtar.
And then what is the rest of the story? I don’t quite remember. Believe me, I am not giving any spoilers away, because there’s not much to give away. There’s a suggestion of a plot, an outline of a story maybe, but no real story. There definitely is a villain, very villain-like. I can’t recall why he’s after the hero. I mean, he is not gay or anything like that, he’s after the hero basically to kill him. But why? I don’t know. So during the first half of the film you watch fights, songs, comedy scenes and during the second half of the film you watch fights, songs and comedy scenes. Then all of a sudden the movie ends. Well, actually, let me give the devil its due. The climax is a creative scene. There is a sword fight. I am not making this up. There really is a sword fight. The villain and the hero really fight with swords. If there was a keyboard or game control, I’d think I was playing “Prince of Persia” all over again.
The witty punch-lines are over-smart, Tanikella Bharani’s villainy is overdone. What is the heroine good for? Not even for “exposing”, to use oneof Trivikram’s favorite lines. As to Pavan Kalyan, I won’t say much about him. There are some film stars that you shouldn’t talk unflatteringly about. If you do, you’ll end up in a sword fight. The star’s fans are closing in on you and they have swords; you don’t even have a stick with you.
I’m beginning to wonder if Trivikram has already peaked, and is running out of ideas. Maybe he shouldn’t try too hard to impress.
Trivikram Again
I am amazed by the simplicity of Trivikram’s script. Over weekends I watched his other movies, and have decided that Malliswari (2004) is perhaps his best script. Fairy-tale storyline, very filmi, but then again, it’s Trivikram’s dialogue that gives the film its life and vitality. He is indisputably the best thing to happen to the screenplay department after Mullapudi Venkata Ramana and Jandhyala. Justly famous for the funny lines and comedy scenes, but excels equally well in all other aspects of drama. Even has a knack for making romantic scenes — which in most films make me cringe in embarrassment and compel me to reach for the FF button — sound really lovely, natural, and sometimes even touching.
He should stick to script writing instead of spreading himself thin in direction and other departments and thereby losing focus. I am yet to watch his latest venture ‘Jalsa’, but am not hearing many good things about it.
There was a time early in youth when I wrote short stories, plays, poetry and other such fun stuff, and longed to be a script-writer in the film industry. I perhaps went to school at the same time that Trivikram did. He comes from the same region as me, our homes separated by a distance of 25 miles. He, like me, seems to have had a middle class upbringing in a fairly traditional household. Enough reason to believe, therefore, that we must have shared the same cultural environment, that our thoughts and outlook were shaped by the same social and cultural influences and that our imagination was fired by the same stimuli. Just at the same time that I was writing scripts for the plays that I produced in school, with a ragtag bunch of classmates for actors, he also must have been honing his writing skills, directing his own plays, and dreaming of getting into the films when he grew up.
But then, in all likelihood, we differed in one aspect. He won the university gold medal for his MSc in Physics, and could easily have settled into a salaried comfort zone. Instead he chose to pursue his natural calling. I was content with my engineering education and a job. I could have been Trivikram, but didn’t make an attempt at all.
How sad, eh? For the world, I mean, for it missed out on a genius?
LIES in a Metro, mostly retro
Bits and pieces of “Life in a Metro” I watched on the telly got me so interested that I logged on to the net to watch all of the flick. Summary, in one word (or make that two): entertaining but disappointing.
“Life in a Metro” is a pretentious, dishonest movie. It pretends to tackle the bold theme of adultery in a real-world sort of way: up close and personal, warts and all, not your bollywoodish KANK masala. But it ends up serving the same old Bollywood fare. Sort of new wine in old bottle.
The film narrates four plots concurrently. The plots are not unrelated though. The connecting thread is that the dramatis personae know each other. There is the Shilpa Shetty track. There is the Dharmendra track. And then there are the Konkona Sen track and the Sharman Joshi story. The underlying theme for all of these tracks is love, romance, sex and relationships.
Women will like this movie, because most of the female characters in the flick are victims of the male characters. KK Menon, Shilpa Shetty’s husband, is a self-centered, manipulative, hypocritical and philandering husband. The suggestion is that having a bad husband is what makes Shetty amenable to contemplate having an extramarital affair. Kangana Raut, Menon’s “innocent” secretary, is so used by him cynically only for sexual pleasure that she attempts suicide. Konkona Sen Sharma is deceieved by a gay chap who needs a girlfriend to camouflage his sexual orientation. All in all, the men are all crooks and the women can’t help being their victims.
But male audiences will like the film too, though for different reasons. The female characters, though tempted by opportunities to stray, settle eventually for the sort of decisions that your average Indian male would approve. Shilpa Shetty doesn’t sleep with her illegitiamte lover after all. Konkona Sena Sharma comes dangerously close to having sex before marriage, but manages to keep her virginity intact until she actually ties the knot. And Dharmendra (re)eneters Nafisa Ali’s life only after her husband passes away, so adultery is eliminated by design in this sub-plot. Message: Indian men maybe dirty-minded, but inside of every Indian woman there’s a Sati Savitri struggling to get out. This message should reassure a lot of insecure husbands and lovers; ergo, men will love this movie.
So where’s the bold tackling of a difficult, taboo subject then? The film ends up playing to the gallery, while pretending to do just the opposite.
There are other flaws in the film as well. The Dharmendra track is candy floss romance. Adds nothing to the storyline. Several characters come across as unreal and pathetic. Shilpa Shetty appears revoltingly pathetic when she keeps crying so consumed by guilt at having come so close to crossing the relationship rubicon. For Chrissakes! Is that the educated (and at least quasi-liberal) upper-middle-class woman she’s supposed to portray! Do women have to be this stupid? And KK Menon is shown to be such a hypocritical dirtbag that when his wife spills the beans on her unconsummated affair, he gets all enraged forgetting his own infidelities. Do men have to be this ugly?
The most pathetic of them all is the role played by Sharman Joshi. It is not explained at all why he should in the first place love a certain co-worker, and keep loving her even as he gets to know that she’s having an affair with his own boss. Thirty-year-old Konkona is tormented with doubt when it comes to having pre-marital sex, and can’t stand men who ogle at her, but is suddenly struck with liberal enlightenment when it comes to accepting that homosexuality as a sexual preference is a (gay) person’s right. Very desi one moment, and very liberated gora woman the next.
The only saving grace is the role played by Irfan Khan. Somewhat consistent thoughout, and somewhat true to life. And funny as well. The final scene where he rides into the railway station on his baraat horse to claim his lover is truly comic, and verily the film’s highlight.
Otherwise, like I said at the beginning, pretentious and dishonest.
Trivikram Srinivas — A Talented Film-Maker
To my surprise, I found myself liking “Athadu”, a commercial Telugu flick that apparently was the biggest grosser at the box office in 2005.
I have low tolerance — indeed contempt — for commercial Telugu films, and so my liking of any of them should defy logic. But Athadu is not your run-of-the-mill commercial movie. It compels you to watch it throughout, and forces you to admit honestly that you’re enjoying it.
And that despite its several drawbacks. A weak plot and a crappy, predictable climax rely on the credulousness of the audiences. The song sequences spoil momentum and cause distraction. Some scenes just consume footage, not adding anything to the storyline. The leading actor is actually a poor actor, no matter that he is now poised to become the next big thing in Telugu film world after Chiranjeevi. So then what does the film have going for it? Two words: Trivikram Srinivas, the guy who directed the film and wrote the script for it.
Trivikram comes across as a very skilled script writer, and shows all the potential to go on to become a great director. His taut screenplay and penchant for being different from the rest of the film-making crowd make Athadu an absorbing and engrossing movie; the kind of movie that I wished, in my 20’s when I had dreamt of making movies, that I could make. (At the risk of sounding immodest, I should say that I was ahead of my time. 
) In my view, Athadu marks the beginning of a new genre of commercial films that are both formulaic and offbeat at the same time. Some context is needed to understand what I mean by this.
A commercial movie is a big budget production aimed at extracting a handsome return on investment. The stakes are high, so it has to appeal to a wide swathe of audiences. Back in the 80’s, when us college guys’ idea of hanging out was to go to the movies, the Telugu film audience was largely rustic. This environment allowed film-makers who were relatively mediocre in the talent department to become star directors of their time. Their movies were all indistinguishable from one another. The plot was invariably centered on “wronged hero extracts vengeance” theme. Lots of dhishum-dhishum for the adolescents. The regulation rape scene, the mandatory wet saree song, and the camera’s loving gaze on the heroine’s cleavage and navel for the males. “Siter sentiment”, “mother sentiment” and “wife sentiment” for the females. This fare was topped up by a third-rate script that mixed rhetorical flourish, maudlin melodrama and crude humour into stale khichdi. The hero had his “powerful” lines. The villain had his. The comedians said their double entendres. I was mostly bored to death watching these entirely predictable flicks.
The scene has changed now. Movie-goers have become a bit more sophisticated. The largest segment of audience, I believe, are no longer rural but semi-urban. Time is ripe for a new breed of film-makers to experiment with and redefine the big budget film. But in line with the new expectations, a new talent is needed, mediocrity won’t do. Trivikram fits the bill.
The first remarkable thing you notice about Athadu is that for a commercial film, it has exceedingly good script. The dialogue is mostly real and down to earth, but does not go the way of being pretentiously “realistic”, ie, the excessive use of swear words. There are a couple scenes though which are well begun but spoiled by melodramatic speech at the end: the scene where Mahesh Babu declares his love for his girl and the one where his (assumed) grandfather pardons him come to mind.
The second thing you notice about the film is the director’s insistence on tackling most every frame and scene differently than most other directors would have. The sneezing doctor enlivens the scene at the morgue. The blaring noise of the tractor enrages a Tanikella Bharani plotting an evil plan with his henchmen. The CBI chief is so driven to distraction by his quiz-show watching grand-daughter that he wants to foist a false case on the television channel and shut it down. The speech by the politician is a representative sample of speeches given by the smarter set of leaders; on how they manipulate voters in the guise of empowering them. The romance between the hero and heroine has an interesting twist. The role assigned to the heroine is a welcome break from the “cutie-pie doll with baby-like speech” routine that has infested Telugu films since early 90’s. The whodunit track (with Prakash Raju as CBI investigator) is not amateurish, is in fact refined for what you expect in aTelugu film. The comedy scenes are contrived and do not mesh with the narration, but the humour is wholesome, first class and is guaranteed to have you in splits. Even as the overall movement of the plot is fairly predictable, the individual scenes and their flow keep you riveted to the screen.
The biggest disappointment actually is Mahesh Babu. He has good screen presence and major good looks going for him, but his acting talent leaves much to be desired. He cannot emote or show a variety of expressions. A stony look dominates his face, and his eye keeps wandering for no reason. I believe that though he may go on to become a “super star” like his dad, the heights attained by NTR and Chiranjeevi are not for him. The latter gents, for all the crappy movies they acted in, had versatility. No matter what role he plays, Mahesh Babu appears melancholy.
Another gripe I have with the flick is the inconsistent value system it endorses. The hero is a supari killer shown killing on assignment. But we’re supposed to empathize with and pardon him because he is a good guy anyway and is willing to turn a new leaf in life. There is not even an attempt to justify his criminal past. At least the heroes of the yore killed because they were dishing out some vigilante justice to the baddies. The new hero needs no excuse to kill at all! Scoring at the box-office is important, but Trivikram, given the great future he has, needs to think about the kind of message he is leaving to the audience here.
And of course, the one detail that the new commercial film doesn’t deviate in from the old is that the hero continues to be a superman. He combats dozes of bad guys at the same time, flies in the air, fires with guns in both hands and doesn’t miss targets, can break stones with his fist, and can generally create the sort of mayhem that in the real world ought to take a whole battalion of the army to stage.
All in all, it’s really Trivikram’s screenplay and direction that make Athadu worth watching. I’m sure he has in him the ability to churn out more entertaining potboilers in the future. I predict that the best of them will flop at the theaters because it will be ahead of its time.
TO venkat@tirumala.net
(Archiving stuff written long ago and seems to be in danger of getting permanently lost. This musta been written in 2000, but definitely revised later.)
<>
This email popped up in my in-box recently, when I was in the middle of some workplace tension. Please read and see for yourself how inhuman some people can be. * * * >> From: <Spammerson Chainmailerson> >> To: sigsegv and 19 other victims >> Subject: Fw:Fw:Fw: Tirupathi Venkatachalapathy >> >> Hi, >> >> Trust in God with all your heart and Venkadachalapathi >> will light your way. This letter has been sent to you for >> good luck. This original copy came from Thirupathi. It's >> no joke. You will receive it in a few months. Please send >> 20 copies of this letter to people whom you think need good >> luck. Please do not send money. Do not keep this letter. >> It must leave you within 7 days. >> >> An officer has received 2 million dollars after sending it. >> Mr. Robert lost more than 21 lacks for not sending and breaking >> this chain letter. Please send 20 copies and see what happens >> in 4 days. >> >> This chain letter comes from Thirupathi; written by >> Lord Venkadachalapathi in Andhra Pradesh, South India. >> This is true even if you're not superstitious. >> Mr. James from Ipoh received this letter in 1987. >> He asked his secretary to type and send out 30 >> copies. He won a lottery for RM125,000.00. >> >> Mr. Lim received this letter but lost it. >> Therefor he lost his job. Later he wrote 20 copies and >> send them out. He received a better job with better pay. >> >> If you neglect this Venkadachalapathi chain letter your >> GOOD LUCK will go away. So make 20 copies and send them. >> You will see a miracle in your life. >> I am sending this on the behalf of my family and myself. >> I believe it is true and we'll get what we've been wishing >> >> THIRUPATHI VENKATACHALAPATHY * * * I had to respond to this nasty. There was no way out. So I responded immediately. Enclosed for your benefit is my reply also. Kindly read with patience, and let me know if you see any flaw in my logic. * * * From: sigsegv To: THIRUPATHI VENKATACHALAPATHY Cc: <Spammerson Chainmailerson> Subject: Re:Fw:Fw:Fw: Tirupathi Venkatachalapathy Dear Tirupathi Venkatachalapathy, Howdy! Long time, no see! May I call you Venkat? Thank you! Venkat, what have I done to warrant this threatening letter from you, routed via your earthling agent, Mr Spammerson Chainmailerson? Have I not been leading a righteous life? Have I not paid you my dues? Have I not earned your divine grace? What?? Did you ask me what I have I done to earn your grace? Did you? How can you! Well, then, Venkat, please recall. I visited you at Tirumala long long ago. I gave away all of my hair to you. I was a teenie- bopper then, and loved my hair. Mom forced me to donate my hair to you. (Don’t moms always do that, pledging their son’s hair away in cool sauveness without caring for the sentiments of the son?) I was blackmailed into giving my locks to you, as otherwise apparently you wouldn’t have intervened to save my ass in a hair- rising health situation. So I gave my hair to you and went home with a clean-shaven pate. And the next-door teenie-bopper cutie stopped looking at me ASAP! A budding romance came to an ignominous end, all because of *your* obsession with *my* hair! Does that count for nothing, Venkat? And then also, remember, did I not also put a cool grand in your hundi, so that you may pay off your debt to Kubera? I was pestering dad to put a cool grand in *my* hundi, so that I could go watch India-Australia world cup action in Madras. You snatch my money from me, and compound the cruelty by ending the match in a historical tie. Does my sacrifice count for nothing, Venkat? You know well that I haven’t wavered in the path of righteousness all my life. You know that I remain righteous as I speak. I am the very picture of moral and ethical conduct. The torch-bearer of values. The role model for the younger generation. You know all of this, don’t you? What’s that again? Why are you singgering at me? Oh, I see. You wanna know why I was looking up that gorgeous babe in Shopper’s Stop last week, right? Alrightie. I plead guilty to some indiscretion. But hey, Venkat, show some sense of proportion, OK? "Let him who did not sin cast the first stone", said your pal Jesus. You want to make big deal of the fact that us mortals even when happily married, tend sometimes to admire the beauty of other womnen. No probs. Make that point. Feel free to rub it in. But then how about you, Venkat? You did not stop at admiring the beauty of cowherdesses, did you? You went right ahead and got physical with as many as 16K of them! (And they say that you stopped at that number only beause there was a register overflow, he he he). If you could pull off that kind of stunt in righteous dwaparyug, Venkat, I shudder to think what atrocities you’ll commit in this sinful, anything-goes Kalyug. Moreover, you’re even a bigamist! Before poiting fingers at me you should know that I’m famously monogamous. (That fact is the talk of the town. At Jayanagar Shopping Complex the other day, I overhead one wide-eyed girl tell another: "See that guy!? He is sigsegv! And he is famously monogamous!" She appeared to fall at my feet any moment and start worshipping me right then and there.) So my point is, you can’t really use my so-called indiscretions to deny me your favours, Venkat, since you are guilty of far bigger indiscretions than mine. As we all know, I don’t harm any of your creations. I don’t eat meat.I have never ever hurt other livnig beings, whether they be big or small, ugly or beautiful, even test engineers or HR managers. Oh, yes, if you insist that I must be very accurate, yes, I admit to having snuffed out a life a while ago. But it belonged to a rowdy mosquito. The bugger was bugging me, and I wanted to sleep. Murder in self-defence is not a serious crime under Indian Penal Code also. Yes, I also admit to liking my bottle of Kingfisher Premium once in a while. But then again, don’t you devatas drink sura and party all the time? I heard that you get drunk and make passes at other devatas’ wives. Chee chee. I just drink my beer and settle down to read "Education and the Significance of Life", by Jiddu Krishnamurthy. Therefore, dear Venkat, show mercy on me. SAVE ME FROM YOUR WORSHIPPERS. Tell them to stop sending me these mails. Punish them. Install in them "the Fear Of God", Version 2. Cause their mail clients to core-dump indiscriminately. Bless them with a billion BSODs a day. Make sure they see a null pointer exception on every mouse click. I don’t care what you do, but please do something. And deliver me from this chain mail menace. Yours respectfully, sigsegv PS: Warm regards to Lakshmi, and to .. to.. heck, what’s the name of Consort Number Two?
