The Greyland

Ain't looking back in anger

2011-12-17T02:41:00.000-08:00

I work through long periods of silence, when the noise outside looks like some silent farcical mime

I don’t work actually, but let my haphazard thoughts rummage through my mind

I waste the precious moments of my life – many, many years went by like this – in the trivial, trying to keep my bastardly egotism alive

I want to believe, but nothing comes my way; probably I’m not a believer

I had read and dreamt about the magic mountains when I was a child, sitting in the low plains and hoping to go there some day

What do you lose? What is there to lose? What is there to lose anyway?

The Paradox of Development

2010-11-24T03:32:00.000-08:00

Human poverty is more than income poverty; it is the denial of choices and opportunities for living a tolerable life – UNDP

West Bengal, a relatively poorer state in India, is also a hotbed for political conflicts, often resulting in violence and institutionalised suppression. Among the poorest and most suppressed people of West Bengal – or any part of India for that matter – are the adivasis, indigenous tribes living for centuries at the bottom of the Indian caste system pyramid. The adivasis are often (as and whenever required) shamelessly exploited by local politicians, government officials, and unscrupulous industrialists.

One such exploitative nexus, recently brought to public attention by NGOs and the alternative media (and now even highlighted by mainstream media), is about rampant operation of illegal stone crushers across the adivasi villages of Birbhum, in west Bengal. Villages like ‘Mohammed bazaar’ and ‘Patharchala’ would never have existed in anybody’s mental map – beyond contributing to the national census once in every ten years – but for their rocky terrain, a valuable source of stone and stone-chips used for construction activities.

Fuelled by the construction boom in the cities, stone prices – and the greed of the unscrupulous industrialists ready to make a quick buck – have gone through the roof. They see these adivasi villages as a potential goldmine. However, it is not easy to get license for operating stone crushers (crushers are used for making stone-chips from the rocks blasted from quarries). Firstly, adivasi land, as per law, cannot be sold to non-adivasis. Secondly, it is strictly not permitted to build stone crushers in the vicinity of villages, due to health and safety reasons. In reality however, such legal restrictions mean only one thing: uncontrolled opening up of illegal stone crushers, often in full knowledge – and in some cases, even tacit complicity – of the local politician and the government officials. Currently, only about one-fourth of the stone crushers operating in the region are licensed.

The results of such uncontrolled growth in stone crushing activities, as can be expected, have been tragic. The crushers have been largely been built on land taken away from the adivasis by force – hence depriving them of their livelihood. The stone dust from the crushers have not only destroyed the productivity of the land and contaminated the water bodies in the vicinity, but also polluted the air to an extent that it has resulted in sharp increase of diseases like tuberculosis and silicosis (source: Anandabazar Patrika, 16 October, 2010 issue). The blasting of rocks in the quarries by explosives have resulted in stones flying into the nearby villages (often the quarries being set up at less than 50 metre from the villages), injuring and killing people, making holes in the roofs and falling into their huts , and cracking the walls (due to vibration of the explosions).

The adivasis, most of whom are extremely poor, do not have the means to fight such institutionalised atrocities. With the loss of their agricultural land and supporting ecosystem, and no other means to earn their livelihood, most of them are now struggling for sheer survival. Earlier this year in April, when some of them tried to raise their voices (in villages like Chanda and Sagarbandh), they were suppressed by armed mercenaries hired by the owners of these crushers – resulting in burning of 42 houses and killing of 4 people.

Some of the NGOs (including one backed by the internationally reputed author Mahashweta Devi) are trying to organise and educate the adivasis against such exploitation. Recently, even the chief minister of the state, Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya, has acknowledged the problem and promised that no crushers will be allowed to be built within hundred metres of a locality. The situation at ground, however, has not changed much. While some of the crushers have stopped operation temporarily, most of them admit that there are many ways to bypass the law.

In a country where industrialists and second-generation politicians are increasingly seen as role models – and are expected to steer the country to the next level of development, such harsh realities – practiced regularly throughout the underbelly of rural India, but rarely highlighted – raises serious questions about India’s development paradigm, especially on issues of sustainability and inclusiveness. Even internationally, as India is trying to project an image of an emerging economic and political power, such violation of basic human dignity may prove counter-productive in the long run. Yet, it is only the tip of a corruption chain whose roots go very deep.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media in India is largely apathetic towards these critical issues. While people continue to be suppressed in villages and unabashed exploitation of nature and indigenous people continue, the national newspapers and television channels are getting filled up more and more with images of celebrities opening the next designer store.

- Siddhartha Banerjee

A prayer for Swapneel and his brothers – Part II

2010-10-02T05:34:00.000-07:00

Swapneel is growing up – day-by-day, hour-by-hour – like a bundle of pure energy. The earliest riser among us, his voice – full of strange melody and chaos – wakes us up every morning. His never-ending questions, his tremendous effort to climb the stairs or push my laptop bag around the room, his eyes and face always bursting with curiosity and enthusiasm, reminds me every day how our learning curve starts stagnating as we ‘grow up’. The incredible speed at which he is learning and picking up things everyday – from replicating complex sentences to doing acrobatic jings – leave me with awe and admiration.

As parents, we could only hope he continues to bloom in his own way and in his own pace, guided by nature and instincts, and not particularly moulded by our thoughts, norms, or ways of life. Though I’m not a believer in any way, yet, seeing him grow up day-by-day almost like a flower, I sometimes feel like bowing down before God –whosoever he or she may be – in gratitude; my mind filled with those beautiful words of Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Every child brings with him the message that God is not yet tired of man’.

Sometimes I also think about the world in which he is growing up: what kind of a world will it be? Though our generation were probably luckier than many previous ones (destroyed by war, poverty, conflicts of identity), there is absolutely no guarantee that we are moving towards a better world. Yet, no matter what awaits Swapneel and his generation, I believe they would have the strength and the conviction to shape it the way they want it to be.

Rediscovering Ritwik - A personal tribute

2010-06-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most talented and visionary directors to have come out of world cinema, is being slowly rediscovered by film lovers all over the world. Personally, his movies had always left me deeply moved - and here's my small tribute to the master:

http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2010/05/03/cinema.htm

The fact that this was published by the biggest National Daily in Bangladesh keeps my hopes alive that culture can overcome barriers which politics has created, that what is common in us is more powerful than divides us...

Halfway through the track

2010-05-12T04:18:00.000-07:00

I often think about many of my friends for whom life has been mostly a positive affirmation – fame, position, stature, natural ease, ambition, everything juxtaposing (as if by a stroke of luck) in just the right proportion. I see them making their way through life without the least bit of visible effort, basking – though a bit narcissistically – in their self-glory. I look at my own life in comparison – grumpily stuttering my way through all the wrong roads, often not knowing where to go, often wandering off in totally undesirable and solitary bylanes.

During many of these unproductive wanderings, I often remember those apocalyptical words of Thomas Mann, which, over the years, has continued to live with me and haunt me: ‘… for knowledge Phaedrus, has neither dignity nor rigour: it is all insight and understanding and tolerance, uncontrolled and formless; it sympathizes with the abyss, it is the abyss.’

As one of my friends has often put forward this question (rather rhetorically, and not without intending to produce a dramatic affect): ‘If we are like this, there has to be a purpose; why are we the way we are?’ I must admit that I don’t have a straight answer to this one. One of the negative effects, I guess, of too much introspection (and aimless wandering) is to see the elusive promise of redemption fall apart. As Camus puts it so matter-of-factly in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, the promise of a mythical paradisiacal homeland is not something many of us can fall back on.

Yet, for most of my friends who move through their lives effortlessly, shinning through their successes and always keen on ensuring all the right moves and gestures, there seems to be no such need for a redemptive promise or a mythical homeland. They belong to this world, to this time. This is their homeland. Their self-glory is sufficient a reason for them to exist and to exist happily. And no matter how much I sneer at the shallow foundations and self deceiving nature of their pride and self-glory, the fact remains that they savour and live their lives in a manner that I’d never be able to; though this doesn’t mean that people like us are essentially depressive by nature. It only highlights the fact that for most of them, life is to be lived: straight, healthy, and without the unessential complications; while for others like me, it continues to be a haunting, dazzling puzzle to be unravelled – one day at a time.

- Written on 11 May, 2010

Another Moment in Time

2010-03-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

The grey-haired man lingers on - with his guitar, his cigarettes, and his girlfriend. He doesn’t even bother to take position. Men and women let time pass in café chairs with their beer - or cerveza, as they like to call it here. The Carlos Franco murals look on indifferently from the walls. The slowness of the place, the sunshine, the absolute lack of hurry kind of gets into everyone.

After a while, the girlfriend takes the centrestage - kissing first the guitar and then the man. The old man sitting right across the table lights a cigar with a sigh, and continues to scribble in his notebook – God knows what. A sparrow comes from nowhere and sits on my glass of Mahou, the local beer which fortunately, doesn’t taste too bad. I look at the sparrow and feel - quite naively - that it’s an important moment. I try to think of something. Nothing comes to mind though.

After I take a few more sips, the guitar comes to life; the girlfriend turns out to be a dancer, giving one impromptu performance after another as the man strings on. The middle-aged man on my left, with a professional looking camera, now suddenly finds something to do. He starts to click on, making a futile attempt to capture the spontaneity of the girl as she turns round and round and round in a musical ecstasy.

My glass gets empty. I look around to ask for one more. An old lady with a drawing board comes to me and asks if I’d like to have my cartoon drawn. I smile apologetically at her, feeling, somewhat ironically, a bit cartoonish myself. I thought telling the man with the camera it’s no use mate. Instead, I look for the sparrow, now most certainly gone somewhere else.

- Documented in Plaza Mayor, Madrid (6 February, 2010)

Oh Calcutta!

2009-11-25T15:50:00.000-08:00

Gunter Grass, the German postwar writer, in the course of his three seperate visits, had spent a significant amount of time in Calcutta, a city with which - in his own words – he has a 'love-hate relationship’. During the few hot summer months (in mid-eighties) when he stayed in Baruipur, a distant suburb of the city, he and his wife Ute Grass used to commute every day to city by the crowded local train as ordinary citizens, something which more priviledged 'post liberalization' mortals of the city (like my erstwhile Calcutta colleagues) can’t even dream of. In fact, I used to be an object of much curiosity in office since for four years I (an overpaid Management consultant) travelled in local trains (an experience which I much enjoyed and had resulted for me in a few genuinely enduring friendship with co-commuters). While Calcutta (and the local media) rejoiced when Grass got the Nobel Prize, Grass’ own experience of the city and the attitude of her people was not so admirable. Here are just a few of his observations (though these may appear as ‘another westerner’s view of Calcutta’, I personally found much truth in it).

Grass on Calcutta and her people (several comments):

I was shocked and stupefied by the indifference of the privileged to the misery and poverty all around. I asked myself: it is their own country, their city and their people; yet how can they be so composed and leave almost everything to a few foreign charitable organizations…?

I visited the grand and palatial Victoria Memorial symbolic of British domination, and there I hoped too find a museum where India, Bengal and Calcutta would be portrayed as they exist after independence. Yet what did I discover? – A Victorian junk-room filled with colonial paintings, presents from Lady Curzon to Queen Victoria, war sketches depicting British victories… and many people, students, teachers, villagers, looking at this false, irrelevant foreign collection in that lumber-room.

It was an absurd experience for me to see how Gandhi’s birthday was celebrated, and that too by leading politicians who seemed to be determined to take India into the twenty-first century with principles (or lack of it) which stay in absolute opposition to what Gandhi willed.

Only a miniscule will live in ultramodern luxury, a new techno-feudal class, small, indifferent, and exploitative to its core. (How true!!)

How can you call a city the cultural centre of India (a term most Calcuttan loves to use)… when more than half of the city’s population is illiterate? Isn’t it shockingly ridiculous? I also wonder how after the disastrous flood which almost swept away Midnapore, you could begin your celebration with such fanfare: Durga puja, Kali puja, and so on… Music and light while nearby villages lay submerged in water? This swift and collective amnesia I find incomprehensible…

For those already preparing a defence in their mind, Grass (who had actively helped rebuilding his own country, literally from ashes) was not alone in his criticism. Almost a century back, in 1895, Rabindranath Tagore, whom all Bengalis (including I) hold dear, had this to say about the people of the city (the occasion was a memorial meeting for Vidyasagar who himself had endlessly scorned the ‘theoretical snobs’ of the city):

…day after day we begin but never finish; we make a show but do nothing concrete; we do not believe what we set out to do; what we believe we do not carry out; we can spin out words without end, but cannot make the smallest sacrifice; we feel pleased with ourselves by exhibiting our pride; but never think it necessary to be worthy; we depend on other for everything and yet rend the skies finding fault with them. We take pride in imitating others, we feel honoured to receive their favour, yet we try to throw dust in their eyes and call it politics; and the main object of our lives is to make clever speeches that fill us with intense self admiration. Vidyasagar had infinite contempt for this weak, mean, heartless, lazy, arrogant, argumentative race of men.

While it pains me tremendously (and hits my pride equally), the fact remains that in the last thirty years or so, we, as a city, has not been able to produce anything significant - in any discipline (with the possible exception of Sourav Ganguly in cricket). We still love to pat ourselves by talking (not without pride) about the sixties when Louis Bank used to play in the Trincas. Unfortunately, that’s where our pride – and knowledge of history - ends.

I sincerely apologise if I have not mentioned Sector V*...

* Sector V in Salt Lake is where most of the IT companies of the city are located

Death of a stranger

2009-11-09T14:15:00.001-08:00

Manik kaku, a dear uncle whom I have always loved deeply, succumbed today morning, after struggling with a coma-like situation for nearly two days in a government hospital where there were no doctors to see him because it was the ‘weekend’.

His struggle, in fact, stretches back much further – nearly three decades of fight with an extremely painful and ruinous drug-addiction, which was, nevertheless, his only true friend ever since he had stepped out of his teen. And even before that – the sensitive and vulnerable boy of seven losing his father and forced to come face-to-face with a strange world full of insecurity, alienation, and fear.

The word ‘Manik’ in Bengali means ‘jewel’. I don’t know to what extent he had been able to justify his name during his life (and what are the yardsticks), but Manik kaku was certainly one of the most talented, sensitive, compassionate, and honest human beings I have seen in my life. My father’s side is generally a talented lot; and yet, among my father's cousins, Manik kaku always stood tall – at over six feet, even physically. At seventeen, tall and extremely good-looking, he had an athletic physique and was already well versed in skills as diverse as judo and painting (he had a God-gifted talent in painting). Under the bright exterior however, maybe what always lurked was an id-like desire to return to the safety of a mythical childhood which he never had, and to his father whom he knew he would never get back.

Those were the eighties - hippies and drugs ruled the youth culture in Calcutta . And especially vulnerable were people like my Manik kaku, who were too honest, too innocent, and too sensitive for the world in which they found themselves. They wanted to hide, to run away from themselves, from the terrifying reality all around them. Was that the beginning of his ‘death-wish’? – I don’t know. My father, who undrstood human psychology far better than me, could have possibly answered.

Ever since Manik kaku got into drugs, he was mostly criticized (sometimes scorned) by relatives. Among the few exceptions were my parents, who were deeply attached to him ever since he was a child, and continued to treat him with love, empathy, and respect due for every human being, especially a man like him. He in turn, always loved my parents as few others did.

While many people tried to persuade him to come out of his addiction, not too many could really go into the depth of his soul and see the disfigured world as he saw it. Hence, their reasonings were not of much help. Time and again he himself struggled to come out of it; made genuine attempts, refrained for a while, and again plunged right into it like a helpless kid who didn’t knew how to face the world. During all these years there were numerous hospitalizations, accidents, broken bones (requiring insertion of steel plates in his hand and legs), asylums (some shockingly corrupt ones), gradual change in physical appearance, self-inflicted wounds… in fact, the God-gifted health and the God-like physique took a long time – decades - to be destroyed, slowly and meticulously, by injecting poisonous narcotics in his veins year after year – a helpless inhuman suicide which stretched painfully for so long. While he continued to scream for help and support during all these years, we could only see the cruel six-foot tall drug-addict who makes his widowed mother (my father’s aunt) - and all around him – suffer.

As his health gradually floundered and he had to stop working because of his deteriorating condition, money became more and more sparse. Today, when I called his mother, she told me that she had failed because she could not get her son admitted to a private nursing home, which was beyond her – but which could have saved her son’s life. As the meaning of her words gradually filtered through me, long after the conversation was over, the enormity and the absolute reality of her helplessness made me feel like screaming: against a society which condemned a sensitive and innocent child like Manik kaku to death, against the monstrous indifference and corruption of the medical profession in West Bengal where patients who cannot afford a nursing home has to invariably die (inspite of the taxes we continue to pay to maintain the government hospitals), against the dead Manik kaku who could not save himself from all these, and most of all against myself for not being able to do anything, for just standing and watching as a fellow human being died (are the doctors listening?). I wanted to scream and cry and do something about it – and all I could do is write this blog which doesn’t mean anything.

He lived all his life in pain and alienation, and died helplessly, almost unloved... like a complete stranger.

(November 9, 2009)

Art as self destruction

2009-10-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

Thomas Mann, in his novella ‘Death in Venice’, famously wrote: ‘Evil is a necessity. It is the food of genius’. Though the concept of ‘evil’ has changed a bit since Thomas’ time (both the writer and the saint), the idea remains as powerful. In Visconti’s film version, the protagonist, a musician of strict morality who believed in leading ‘a balanced life’ and art as ‘an abstraction’ (based on the composer Gustav Mahler) is mocked by his friend (alter ego) as having achieved the ‘perfect balance’ in his life. ‘Now the art and the artist has become one’, his friend jeers at him, ‘both hitting rock-bottom.’

Always drawn towards the conflict of the rational Apollonian mind vs. the self destructive Dionysian creativity (thanks to Nietzsche who I guess first pointed out the classical conflict), Mann’s lines set me thinking once again. I could immediately recall some famous examples of art (and artists) shining through the depths of darkness:

Dostoevsky’s guilt stricken womanising (he toured Europe with a girl half his age while his first wife was dying of tuberculosis), compulsive gambling (which ruined him again and again), and amidst all these (topped by his ever increasing epileptic seizures), managing to create some of the greatest masterpieces ever written

Mozart’s pompous, boastful and showy shallowness, his perverted jokes, lies, obsessive flirting, secretive gambling - and The Figaro, The Magic Flute, the Don Giovanni...

Einstein’s womanizing, his cruelty to his own children and complete apathy towards his wives and many mistresses

Goethe, ‘that venerable saint from Germany’ writing lustful poems (Marienbad Elegy – thanks to Google) about his sexual desire for an 18-year-old boy. This I guess was when he was in his sixties or seventies

Da Vinci’s relationship with younger boys whom he took as pupils and then went on to exploit

Oscar Wilde's love affair with blackmailers and male prostitutes, young choir-boys, crossdressers, and homosexual brothels of nineteenth century London contrasts beautifully to his immortal creations. In a recent visit to his grave in Paris, I found these words written: ‘Here lies the best man that ever lived’ – I couldn't have agreed more

Picasso’s passion for women was probably outmatched only by his passion for art

Our own Satyajit Ray no less; though unnecessarily portrayed as the ‘picture-perfect family man’ by the obsessive Bengali media - Ray's work, like all the above examples, I guess, could stand on it's own

The more I think about it, the more the distinctions get blurred into a complex psycho-causality which is way beyond the capability of my mediocre mind to decipher. Hesse had made an attempt in his novel ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’. Mann himself wrote the story after being drawn to young teenage Polish boy in a Venice hotel.

Picture: A Roman sculpture of Venus at the British Museum

October 28, 2009

An Autumn Sonata

2009-10-26T14:13:00.001-07:00

No words or pictures can truly describe the beauty and melancholy of an English autumn. One could only experience it unfolding day by day before one's own eyes; each day like a mosaic from a painting more beautiful than the one before, each day like the last cacophonic burst of a musical splendour before the approaching doom. The sharp chill in the air, the mythic temporal harmony rising from somewhere deep inside, the chirping of birds, the silent prayer to let time stop – that’s how the contemplation of autumn appears to me.

The change of season also reminds me, strangely enough, of another city thousands of miles south: a city which I had known and loved so intimately, which had been my homeland, and makes me feel at exile anywhere else in the world. Normally around this time of the year, winter slowly starts descending on the smog-filled rickety streets of that city, which had now been left behind by an entire generation. What had once been beautiful is now only a helpless haunting memory; like life itself, an endless elegiac yearning.

Ithaca, as always continues to remain elusive, hiding behind the perennial mist, forever beyond understanding…

October 26, 2009

The Last Scene of Act I

2009-10-06T03:56:00.000-07:00

With each passing day, the melancholy of the autumnal air is becoming thicker and thicker. Every morning, as I leave for my office, I tend to take the longer route through a nearby park; walking along the mounting piles of dead leaves which seem to cover the morning earth with almost a maternal love, like a thick shroud. Sometimes, in the afternoon, as I sit at a café with a cup of Americano (most often the cheapest option), I look at the distant trees lining the Broadway; the gentle rustle bringing-in the subtle but inevitable fragrance of decay. And I go back to watch the movies, read the books, and live through the weekdays and the weekends, sometimes taking pictures of the fallen leaves as I pass by, marking my days in the calendar. During the long evenings, I often fail to remember if it’s my first autumn, or have I died here before. I fail to remember many things as I sip my wine and think about the increase in heating bills with the approaching winter (all the while looking at the TV screen where the Bergman or the Truffaut DVD would continue guiltily). I think of all the people I had known in the past, people with whom I had once shared a passionate drink or an evening of naïve argument; who are now no more than strangers, living many milky-ways away. I think of the many imaginary lives I’ve lived, the many wishful thoughts of adolescence, the many self-ridiculed dreams of youth. I think of the years I’ve spent running – from place to place, from room to room, from books to books, from lives to lives, each time a disappointment, each time a bigger failure than the once before. And now as I once again sit at my café and sip my Americano gone cold, the movies and the books and the rooms seem to fade out. All I can see in front of me is the approaching autumn; the piles of fallen, abandoned leaves.

With my last fading strength, I wish I could ask like a child: what had life been like?

Reflection

2009-06-04T01:09:00.000-07:00

Scattered in the air,

... like dust

the evening streets watched from the balcony

with lukewarm tea and loneliness

'Tis the milieu', someone said

and those grasshoppers seen in the dream

the blue white and magenta

to you I return

to you alone

- Siddhartha (June 4, 2009)

Painting: Figure at a window by Salvador Dali, 1925

Donatello and his time

2009-05-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

This weekend, while watching a brilliantly crafted 4-hour documentary on the Medici family and their influence on the Renaissance, I felt as if a dream is unfolding before my eyes; a brick-by-brick recreation of some of the greatest artistic achievements of the human mind. Listing names would be futile; like trying to put a galaxy of stars inside a fruit basket. In that dazzling confluence of some of the most revered names in human history, I came across the name of Donatello.

Donatello (1386 – 1866) was one of the greatest sculptors of all time and one of the earliest pioneers of the great new artistic movement then sweeping through Florence, which later became the ‘Renaissance’. Rejected by many, in his life he was as much a non-conformist as one could get. He himself not only rejected most of the conventional art existent during his time (at the expense of facing public ridicule), but also developed a great notoriety for sometimes smashing his creations to pieces rather than handing them over to ‘unworthy patrons’ who would not understand.

His artistic conviction, however, was not limited to venting of angst. He also created some of the most path-breaking sculptures (like the bronze David, the first known free-standing nude since ancient period) of his time, breaking all existing conventions and fuelling great public debates, often facing mass hatred. He however, stood his ground. Alongwith Brunelleschi, he was instrumental in forever changing the face of Florentine and European art and architecture.

In our present age, where the concept of ‘selling’ and ‘getting acceptance’ lies at the source of every activity (including art), life and times of people like Donatello needs revisiting. It is artistic conviction like his (and not mere striving for popular acceptance) which lies at the source of all great creations and creative milieus of our history.

A Prayer for Swapneel and his brothers

2009-05-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

Swapneel, my son, is six-and-half month old. He sleeps with his hands stretched on both sides like wings, his face assuming an almost comical seriousness. He often smiles in his sleep; amused and self-contained in his world, a world where I’m sure (atleast hope) things are quite different from that of ours.

Yesterday, lying by his side, I was reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. The contradiction was kind of strange and disturbing; looking at my child as he slept, innocent like a flower, and at the same time reading about the insane horrors of our own heritage, of our own past.

And then, I came across these bizarre lines:

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you… you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand grenades, of your bayonets, of your riffle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these riffles and this uniform you could be my brother…”

I don’t know which way lies our future... how many more to come.

Lying there, book in my hand and my child by my side, I prayed… I prayed for Swapneel and all his brothers,wherever they are.

- Siddhartha (May 6, 2009)

Stranger

2009-05-05T00:16:00.000-07:00

The lane that leads to the sea

the picturesque lane lined with tropical trees,

tourists,

souvenir shops,

and a dozen evening bars playing jazz

I've traveled along the road

traveled towards the evening sky

hanging perplexed beyond the beach

where children played

beyond the sea

beyond reach

in a distant land

I've traveled

I've traveled

the sound of jazz and swinging doors

and nightfall

reminded me of many things

but I was no Lazarus

nor wanted to be

the beach now abandoned

except for the tireless rhythm of the waves

the hungry waves rising up

in the loneliness of the night

and I was no Lazarus

nor wanted to be

What ails Indian Cinema?

2009-04-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

A wrong title at a wrong time, given the mass orgasm Indians are having at the success of ‘Slumdog etc etc…’

The media is almost making us believe that we’ve arrived; the age of cosmetic cinema in the shinning multiplexes of a ‘shinning new India’. With reports of Bollywood movies grossing millions and receiving awards in the International space, it may appear indeed that Indian cinema is at an all-time high. A closer scrutiny, however, may reveal a different picture...

Firstly, the millions (so proudly reported by the Indian T.V channels) flow-in primarily because of the NRI population, rather than a true broad-based International audience. Organizing a Filmfare award in Dubai or Maldives in itself can hardly create a global audience. Secondly, the self congratulatory myth of Bollywood finally making it big internationally is largely created by a myopic and popularity-focused media taking recourse to selective highlighting. Films from countries like Japan, Iran, Korea, etc. (producing far lesser films in numbers) have a much bigger and broader international following. The Indian media is either ignorant of these, or chooses to keep its audience comfortably basking in a narrow, parochial self-glory.

Cinematic tradition, like any other art form, has a historical context and continuity. While sifting through my memory, trying to dig out what cinema had meant to me, I couldn’t resist repeating Bergman: “Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

Unfortunately for us, Bergman, like Ray, Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini, etc., is dead. While in many countries, a new generation of filmmakers, like Gus Van Sant (USA), Zhang Yimou (China), Wong Kar-wai (Hong-Kong), Majid Majidi, (Iran), Richard Linklater (USA), Tareque Masud (Bangladesh), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), etc. are trying to keep the experimenting tradition alive and to create their own cinematic language, in India, we’re a generation without memory, without history, without knowledge, basking in the transience of junk entertainment, a T.V promoted ‘make-believe’. Unfortunately, we still do not know the difference between acting and modeling. We are primarily concerned with copying, stealing, and organizing Filmfare awards, flushing everything with vulgar glamor and money.

One of the most deep-rooted causes of the problem is the tendency of the film-makers to be formulaic (dance, action, melodrama). Most of the film-makers in India are driven not by any artistic urge but by a vague, mythical notion of ‘what sells’, altogether bypassing the rigor and discipline of creation. As a result, there’s neither much experimentation with the art form, nor much variety in themes. This, precisely, is the problem with formula: it eventually replaces the imagination of the creator, creating a tendency towards short-cut and mass manufacturing; while in true art, there’s neither a short-cut, nor a chance to replicate or mass manufacture. Hemingway had once said: ‘For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning, where he tried again for something which is beyond attainment.’

Well… what’s true for literature is true for cinema as well.

Another troubling trait in the Indian film industry is a wholesale focus on packaging and promotion (though again in formulaic patterns), while neglecting the product itself. Unscrupulous self-promotion to grab attention in an over-crowded space, plagiarism, and manipulation is sadly replacing the art and the essence of film-making. While packaging and promotion may serve some purpose, but in itself cannot substitute for the product itself. Hence, irrespective of the self-congratulatory statements and uncouth media promotions, the fact remains that a large part of Bollywood and Indian cinema continues to cater only to junk entertainment.

The industry is much too cluttered with dynastic heredity and much too focused on instant fame and big money to have space left for the true artists, for creativity, or for experimentation. The sad aspect is that even if there are exceptions (like ‘Ocean of an Old Man’; a brilliant, evocative film by FTII graduate Rajesh Shera), even if there are encouraging initiatives like FulMarxx Shorts Fest, these hardly find their way through the manipulative nexus of the industry or the mainstream media.

Unless the industry finds ways of encouraging new voices and new experiments in syntax and themes, unless the media takes the responsibility of constructive criticism and highlight new artistic voices (a classical example is André Bazin’s Cahiers du cinema in the fifties and the sixties of France) , unless the audience becomes matured and open enough to appreciate and patronize (in some form) non-mainstream films (media again needs to play a big role here), Indian cinema will continue to be what it is: an ugly, grotesque, money-making machinery capitalizing on titillating a mass of junk-focused audience.

- Siddhartha
You can also read this essay at http://passionforcinema.com/what-ails-indian-cinema

Once again

2009-04-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

What is monsoon

if not memories

of narrow streets

watched through the window

the grey sky

the freedom

to go out

and wash away

- Siddhartha (April 14, 2009)

As I move on

2009-04-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

December 24, 2008 (a few days before I moved to Mumbai, leaving so much behind...)

As the strange beckoning of the unknown makes my soul restless once again, as wanderlust pulls me out of my moss-grown comfort and sends me packing, as my last days of stay within the comfort of 'a sleepy hometown' draws to an end, I look back once again through the multitudinous memories of the past few years. How had it been to remain firmly rooted for so long (rare indeed, considering the times in which we live)?

During the last five years, on an average, I'd spent about fifteen odd days every month travelling. The arrangement, on a whole served me well. While enjoying the stability of staying at home, the constant traveling kept my restless wanderlust at check, ensuring my 'rolling stone' status, with my mental window always open to the outside world. My travels had taken me through the laid-back beach town of Alibagh (the unforgettable monsoon) to the fast and happening KL, the lush green tea gardens of Assam and Dooars to the desert countries of the Middle-East, the small industrial towns like Rourkela to the nostalgic and surprisingly cosmopolitan Dhaka.

Now, as my five years of ‘staying at home’ is coming to a close, I have a feeling that the warmth and camaraderie of my colleagues and the wonderful memories associated with these travels (as my picture albums will vouch) will remain as my most significant professional 'takeaways'. As I retrospect through these bylanes of memories, my mind is getting filled with the endless tapestry of faces, landscapes, and anecdotes associated with these travels, reminding me once again of the inexhaustible possibilities and richness of the human life.

However, the pictures in my albums will only tell half the story. The pictures will ramble (like tell-tale) about everything that can be captured with a camera. Yet, there’ll still remain many an image which the camera could not capture, images which even reminiscences will not be able to recreate. These are pictures which make travel worthwhile. It's in search for these pictures that I'm packing my bags once again. Being brought up on tales of travel and adventure, I'm always weary of gathering moss. And as I'm once again leaving behind all comfort and getting ready to roll-on, I remember those inspiring (and challenging?) words of Dylan – 'How does it feel...?'

I wish I could tell.

Here. Now.

2009-04-06T00:32:00.000-07:00

The pale blue sky and the drifting birds!

perceived

through the grey haze of urban smog

the rickety bylanes

of memory and wanderlust

washed away

in the monsoon rain

like smoke-filled teardrops

yet refusing to fade away

coming

back every winter

like the passion in our ageing soul

or the bespectacled man

on the street

refusing to die

Yes…

we will

- Siddhartha Banerjee

Ritwik Ghatak, the lone voice

2009-04-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Ghatak’s films were an artist’s rebellious, painful, naked howl that cuts through the entire façade of so called decorative and bourgeois art; screaming with a brave and indifferent ‘I deny’.

Creativity, more than the art-form, is concerned with ideas and thoughts; the medium or the art-form doing as much as to ‘support’ the expression. The greatest of the artists (Kafka being a notable example) were almost always spontaneous, where the creative ideas/ inspirations have literally ‘exploded’ out, without any ‘dressing’. Great works of art (like Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’), are in many cases incomplete, yet bursting with inspiration and intensity.

Like Dostoevsky, Ritwik Ghatak too lived his thoughts and ideas in his personal life; suffering not only theoretically, but also physically, from acute alcoholism, alienation, isolation, etc. As Shahani (one of his prized pupil) had once explained, Ritwik Ghatak was “disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement.” A curious parallel can be drawn from the characters in his films: when they smoke (which is mostly ‘bidi’), they smoke with a tremendous intensity and hatred, in stark contrast to Ray’s characters (smoking cigarettes) who smoke elegantly, intellectually. This is not to speak anything against Ray’s work in any way. Ray is and will always remain one of the greatest directors that world cinema has ever produced.

Ghatak, like Joyce (or Ginsberg) in literature, had created his own style (like usage of sound alongwith deep-focus to create different layers of background) in order to express himself. His style was tailored to express ideas, problems, and issues deeply rooted in the epoch in which he lived; and yet, transcending beyond boundaries and epochs. Capturing Bengal in the 50s to 70s, his films revolved around themes of partition, alienation, existential struggle, always seen from an individual’s view-point, never impersonal. The artist’s spontaneity, pain and empathy were always visible.

Ghatak consciously held out against succumbing to the upper-middle class Bengali audience (often called the ‘intelligentsia’), who were far removed from ground-level problems like famine and partition. As a result, Ghatak could never reach upto their cozy, fashionable drawing rooms (like the bust of Goethe described in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf). His films spoke with a self-consuming intensity which never gave any comfort to the audience. Only those ready to face it with all its stark cruelty were welcome to his myriad world. This lack of ‘feel-good’ factor was a key reason for his limited appeal in India and the West (there were other reasons though, like planned sabotage by political establishments). He himself once said – “I do not believe in 'entertainment' as they say it or slogan mongering. Rather, I believe in thinking deeply of the universe, the world at large, the international situation, my country and finally my own people. I make films for them. I may be a failure. That is for the people to judge.”

As Ghatak is being rediscovered these days, as generations to come will wonder at his films, as his films will continue to speak across the boundaries which had systematically tried to finish him off, a dark question will again and again come to haunt us - ‘Are we too, not responsible?’

- Siddhartha Banerjee, http://passionforcinema.com/ritwik-ghatak-the-lone-voice/