A year on…

                  

‘We were playing a mindless game in The Office. It was the end of the day. I was juggling college with Office back then. Suddenly, my trainer got a call and his face hardened.

“There has been a bomb blast in Vile Parle.” He said before plunging into his phone again. Sometime later, his phone rang again. “There has been some shooting reported in The Taj Mahal Hotel. Some gangs decided to slug it out in the open it seems. The blast in Vile Parle was just a rumour, I guess.”

Then suddenly a girl from our team started throwing a fit. I thoroughly disliked her, let’s call her Ms.Loosepants for the time being. Apparently her brother was a member of the staff at The Taj Mahal hotel and for once, I did not find her to be attention grabbing. Everyone consoled her and said that it was just some gangsters slugging it out and not something serious. It had little effect on her. And soon news started trailing in that it was no gangwar at The Taj. Bombay was facing it’s first ever hostage situation. I still did not know what would the next 60 hrs have in store for me. I was just hoping to have a dekko at the news at home and resume reading Mohammad Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes.’ 

Soon, it was time to leave. It was only after I reached home that I realised the gravity of the situation. Of course, we were stopped thrice in the 20 minute drive from The Office to my house with Policemen pointing guns at us (That IS a scary experience!) and frisking everything, literally everything. I admit I was intimidated. I also did not fail to see the sheer number of makeshift bunkers that had come into place within two hours.

I had reached home at midnight. I remember watching the news until 5AM. I still remember the anguish that had set in when I saw the Taj on fire. I called Ms.Loosepants to check upon her brother. She said that her brother had called and had said he was fine and was hiding in the basement with some guests. I reassured her and asked her to go to sleep. I knew sleep would be hard to come by for the both of us. And to a lot of other people as well….

 

 

Yes. Bombay was under siege last year.. this hour of the day..

My brilliance.. in virulence..!

 Statutory Warning # 1: Reading this post may irritate some dunderheads. Who might later storm my house and beat me up..! I give two hoots..!! :D  

 

Statutory Warning # 2 : Please, don’t view my posts as Anti-Marathi, they are Pro- India.

                      *********************

 

            

 

 

What if our Chota Cub passes out of Bombay Scottish, sails through college, does exceedingly well at the incumbent CAT and actually gets a call from one of the IIMs?

And what if it turned out to be IIM - Lucknow?

 

Any ordinary Marathi Manoos would have been in a dilemma. But not Cub Sir.

He roars into the mike, “My Son conquered IIM Lucknow, but he would not study there. He won’t step into the state that has been Maharashtra’s undoing..!”

A thunderous applause follows.

 

                   

 

And all of a sudden, I pop out of nowhere and grab the mike from Cub Sir’s hands. (It’s MY blog, you see!)

 

I roar into the mike now.

 

“All hail the upholder of Maratha Pride! It is He who has shown us The Way. Like scattered sheep we were wandering aimlessly but now, we’ve found our Shepherd. Like Moses parted the Sea with his staff to make way for the Christians, Cub Sir would part the Indians to make way for the Marathis!

      My fellow Maharashtrians, let us all, at this solemn moment, pledge to not waver like Cub Sir. Let His wisdom give us the strength to emulate him.

             Let us all pledge to never desert Maharashtra. Even if our kids make it to the IITs and the IIMs, let them serve Maharashtra in Maharashtra, for we were fortunate enough to be born here. So, let our children live, rot and die here without ever stepping out of Maharashtra for they were equally fortunate to be born here. Let us kill them all by confining their bright, young minds within the walls of a city and the confines of a language. Let’s poison their thoughts while our leaders indulge themselves in a disgusting orgy of renaming schools and erecting token memorials! Let us rest on our laurels, slip into a trance and croak our throats out over our superiority over the rest of ‘them’! Croak – yes.. we’ll croak because we’re no better than the proverbial frog in the well..!”

 

I am finished. I return the mike to Cub Sir.

There is pin drop silence. One man gets up and yells an obscenity at me. Others follow suit.. soon they start throwing slippers at me.

 

Alas! Nobody likes to listen to the truth..

When Karan kowtowed…

                       

 

               Karan Johar is indeed a lucky chap that I am busy with my examinations. He is a great director and I love his movies because they so wonderfully espouse the Indian values and demonstrate to the world the greatness of the Indian culture. Though his last movie was a preposterous story about adultery and independent women, I liked it because both make good fiction. I was keen to watch his new movie, Wake Up Sid. But I won’t be watching it now.

Not because my friend said that it was a terrible movie, but because Karan Johar, with this movie, showed how ungrateful he could be to the city that gave him everything. Calling the city by it’s colonial name is sacrilege. The mere mention of the dreaded word, Bombay brings into mind hideous memories of our terribly secular, cosmopolitan, inclusive, spinster-like past. Bombay was a city riddled with problems. Slums, People, Women, Muslims, Madrasis, Stray Dogs etc. defiled the city. Our Beloved Leader had redeemed us and had solved our problems with one move. He renamed the city, and Bombay was gone! We were given a new city to live in. Since then, we have seen so many concrete steps (pun inserted by accident) being taken to prevent influx of poor people into the city. Barring the occasional bomb blast or the accidental flood, we have seen virtually no crime save a few rapes and some silly murders.

In fact, Mumbai is looking forward to a great future. We have just inaugurated the costliest bridge in all of Asia (by way of toll costs too) . We consume the least power in the country (As we don’t have it for the better part of the day!) Our airport (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport) is undergoing renovation, so is our railway station (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) and our museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vaastu Sanghralaya) is already a Grade I heritage structure. In some years, we will have a statue of Maharaj in the middle of the Arabian sea. It is rumoured to be taller than the Statue of Liberty itself. Contrary to popular perception, it is not a lavish indulgence on part of the Government, but it is a clever ploy to attract more tourists from the sea. (Accidental pun # 2)

Coming back to the main topic, that ungrateful Karan Johar will lose out on Rs.160 as I am not going to watching a movie which ‘hurt’ my sentiments. Besides, the entire movie does not feature a single Marathi actor and the dialogue writer was some South Indian half-wit who dared to refer to Mumbai as Bombay. Do we call his city Madras or Trivandrum?

Our Tiger Cub saved Karan Johar from our Beloved Leader’s wrath and Karan Johar rightfully paid obeisance to Mr. Cub and accepted his mistake. Cub Sir has dared people to use the tabooed word again and face dire consequences! Chota Cub Sir though, studies in Bombay Scottish. Cruel twist of fate.

Cub Sir’s secret obsession is to rename Bombay Times, the only problem is that they are too powerful for Cub Sir’s liking!!

Ismat Aapa Ke Naam…!!

I was looking forward to this day a lot. I had tickets for the Motley Theatre Fest’s play ‘Ismat Aapa Ke Naam’. It is the enactment of three short stories by the famed and controversial Urdu writer, Ismat Chugtai. Motley prefers to call it a story telling session, but it is an enactment actually. With no change to the original dialogues, minimal props and despite having only one actor for each story, it still didn’t come across as a story telling session. It was enacted by three masters, from the same family – Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak and Heeba Shah.

I saw the last two Motley plays at Prithvi (Bombay’s Mecca of theatre) and NCPA ( Mecca II, maybe!) respectively and I knew that a certain B.N. Vaidya Hall (What a dicey name!), however good it may be, would disappoint me. I was not wrong. It turned out to be King George school’s (Predictably renamed as Raje Shivaji School) auditorium. The crowd too, was the all too familiar assortment of the too affable, art loving, bourgeoisie intelligentsia. Everyone, with the exception of my friend and me, seemed to know each other. The only consolation was that there were more younger people. The last time, at NCPA, we were the only 20 something among a crowd of 100 people who had come to see ‘The Caine Mutiny Court Martial’. Everyone seemed to be on the wrong side of the 60s there.

The play (or should I say, the story telling session) began at 8.00 PM as scheduled. And right away, we were transported to middle class Muslim families in U.P.

The name of the first story was ‘Chui Mui’ and was portrayed by Heeba Shah. Her diction and narration was flawless, as she told us the story of a pregnant Bhabhi Jan from the eyes of a young girl. It hit me in the face, the contrast between the pampered rich Bhabhi Jan, and a poor woman.

I was still applauding for Heeba Shah when the second story began almost immediately (No props, you see!). It was the moment I was waiting for. It was ‘Mughal Bachha’, Ratna Pathak’s turn. My Friend and I, are unabashed admirers of Ratna Pathak, and were very keen to see her performing an Urdu rendition.She looks more stunning in real life than in TV. Her tone, her pitch and those expressions were picture perfect. To say that she played her part with panache, would only state the obvious. Or perhaps it is a huge understatement.

They had reserved the best for the last. Pop! Jumped in Naseeruddin Shah with a delightful comic caper. The name of the story was “Gharwali” and I don’t think lust was ever portrayed in such a funny manner and not once did it appear raunchy. From the feisty, carefree Lajjo to the bumbling, old bachelor Mirza, Naseer jumped in and out of characters with ease, as the audience watched, mesmerised. He had the audience guffawing one moment, and sit upright the very next moment. His mastery of the art shone through his performance which, was the cherry on the cake, literally!

In the end, I realised I was standing, clapping loudly like small kid who’s just seen the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat!

P.S.: Tomorrow is the grand finale of the Motley Fest as they perform their most famous, longest running play – Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot.’ I doubt if I’ll be able to sleep tonight..!! :D

Foyer Voyeur..!

“When the chips are down, these civilized men won’t hesitate to eat each other!”

This is a dialogue from the movie The Dark Knight. This is where The Joker tries to explain to The Batman about the futility of standing up for the civilized society. The Joker had the best dialogues in the movie but I felt this was a little too much. I rolled my eyes back then. Later, the more I thought about it, the more it became evident. Scratch the surface, our holier-than-thou façade starts to fade and we can see the real self. The Self that The Joker was alluding to. The one that would not hesitate to kill The Other at the drop of a hat. It is well concealed beneath the pleasantries and the etiquettes. The real us is always lurking near the surface though. It’s like a bunch of vampires trying hard to lead a life between a bevy of beautiful girls. This façade nauseates me. Underneath the masquerade, everybody is a voyeur and a savage.

It is not a very unknown part of us. Man recognized his Frankenstein long back, but we have now started to feed the voyeur within us. It is despicable. Collect some celebrities and put them in a room full of cameras for the world to see. We all sit glued to it, fascinated, watching the celebrity eat and drink like us. It makes us feel better when we see that they too, break wind like us. And if not celebrities, bring a middle aged Mom to the hot seat and put her through the most uncomfortable and sadistic of questions and make her answer them for the lure of money. The audience won’t even know the name of the 50 something Mom and, in all probability, would never bump into her, yet they are transfixed to the seat during the commercial break post which she will reveal her husband’s role in her son’s birth. People forget to eat, they wait with bated breath as the skeletons tumble out of her closet.

The other day, Amma was watching something on her Tamil channel. It was the interview of a man who lost his limbs while trying to cross railway tracks. He explained how the railway station has no foot-over-bridge for people to cross over and said, amidst tears, how his life had grinded to a full stop after the accident. That he was the sole breadwinner of a poor family and how his illiterate wife now struggles to make both ends meet. It was immediately followed by the story of a Kid who was blinded in the Slumdog Millionaire style. The next week they were to air the story of a Kid who was raped by her father. I was all ears, disgusted with myself for being the voyeur that I was.

The other day, I was at the bus stop, at 12.30 AM. It was the last bus of the day and we were an impatient crowd waiting for it. It arrived finally and all hell broke loose. People jumped upon the bus like a pack of wolves over a solitary lamb. Forget about queue etiquettes and chivalry, even children were not spared. Once inside the bus did people realise that it was an empty bus. People were now smiling sheepishly at each other from the comforts of their window seats.

It disgusts me. When I see people craning their neck from the window of a bus to get a better view of the drunkard who is beating his wife or when people rush too see an accident site and are almost disappointed when there are no casualties. Or when I see civilized women pull each other’s hair in public over matters as quotidian as a window seat in a bus and when the other men stand on their seats to get a better view of the fight.

These educated educated people define a voyeur as the ‘one who peeps into the ladies’ rooms.’ What about the people who peep into other’s lives? Aren’t they voyeurs as well?

Freedom of Expression, anyone?

                

 

  So, Jaswant Singh was expelled from the BJP. Well, the ‘Party with a difference’ did not seem to appreciate the fact that Jaswant’s book claimed that Nehru and Patel were also responsible for the Partition of India. Quite contrary to the dominant Indian historical narrative that Jinnah, the conspiratorial figure, in cahoots with the British brought about the Partition of India. In most historical accounts of the Freedom Struggle, he is shown as the obstinate villain who is coldly bent on partitioning India while Gandhi and Nehru as portrayed as the true leaders. In the rest, he is completely ignored.

                     The truth, however, is more complex. For the first two decades of his political career, Jinnah was a secular politician. He was a natty westerner with Victorian manners who showed himself as a true liberal who believed in education, rationality and democracy. In 1916, he was called as the ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’ by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He moved away from the Congress around 1925 after differences in strategies with Gandhi over the ways to attain freedom. It was only in the 1940s that Jinnah demanded a separate homeland for Muslims after all his attempts for a loose federation failed.

                What many are unaware of is the fact that it was not only religion that led to the division of India. Religion was merely a front, it was mostly politics. Or the lure of power, perhaps. We squabbled like cats over a piece of cake. Moreover, the British tactics of ‘Divide and Rule’ and of exploiting the communal divide in India was the perfect catalyst. All these are forgotten in order to lynch Jinnah. India was always the land of a thousand warring kings and as Indians, we always were the quarrelling lot, be it on basis of religion, caste, language or region. As Maulana Mohammad Ali rightly said to the British once, “We divide, and you rule.”

                          

                 I was never a great admirer of Jinnah nor is this post to be considered as my justification of the Partition. Jinnah, for all his secular nature, had a communal streak as well. His claim that the Muslim League was the only voice of the Muslims was plainly communal. While Pakistani historians blame the Congress for being too rigid to make compromises in a diverse democracy, Indian historians blame Jinnah and Liaquat Ali for sabotaging any chance of a unified India. Still, we need to do away with the myth that the British partitioned India and accept the fact that it was always the ‘We divide, you rule.’ syndrome.

         As for Jaswant Singh being booted out of the BJP for writing the book, it is the price he paid for telling the truth. What’s worse is that the Book was banned in Gujarat and soon other states will follow suit. Freedom of expression, anyone?

A Rakhi on the table...

As Indians, we have some festival or the other everyday. After all, we have 33 crore Gods to appease not to forget a Jesus and an Allah. There have been so many instances where someone walks upto to me and says that today is So-and-So festival.
And all I can manage is a bewildered, ‘Huh?’ And this expression does little to hide my ignorance.
Living in Bombay, or ‘The Great Ruined Metropolis’ as Salman Rushdie would say, has it’s own pitfalls. Festivals have lost their zing. Many have been reduced to mere holidays. Tomorrow is one of the most beautiful festivals – Raksha Bandhan!
On the day of Raksha Bandhan, the Sister ties a Rakhi (Holy thread)on the wrist of her brother. The Brother, in return, gives her a gift and vows to protect her. It is one of the few festivals in India that transcend the boundaries of religion because people of every religion seem to have siblings.
My memories of Raksha Bandhan will always be special. I remember, as a Kid, my sisters used to wait till I woke up and bathed fresh. They would then tie beautiful Rakhis and in return, I would give them 10 Rupees each. (Dad used to leave them on the table for me.) All day, I would strut around brandishing my Rakhis.
          
         What made me blog about Raksha Bandhan today was the fact that Mum had gone to my Sister’s place and She came back with a Rakhi which I am supposed to tie on my wrist tomorrow. By myself. My Sister lives in Bombay, which incidentally happens to be the city that I live in!  My other sister is settled abroad, She sent me a Rakhi by post once. I doubt if she would even message tomorrow. She wouldn’t even know that it is Raksha Bandhan tomorrow. We are bound by our personal commitments which has led the once inseparable siblings lead disjointed lives.
      As I write this, I see my Rakhi for tomorrow lying on the table in it’s plastic wrapping. Mum will tie the Rakhi.I am reminded of how my sisters used to hide the Rakhis so that I could not see what they looked like. I am reminded of all the fun and all the silly jokes we cracked at 1.00 in the morning. I wish life had a rewind button..! I so wish.. :(