Chak De India

On field, we have the Indian cricket team back to its winning ways. And on screen, we have an Indian women's hockey team making waves. These are good times indeed. When two of my major passions, cricket and Bollywood, are in such fine form, what else can you say but Chak De India?

After the overseas one-day win against the powerful South Africans, India was rather impressive in notching up a Test series victory against England. And please let's not quible over the margin of victory or the inexperience in English bowling ranks. You can only play against the side that is fielded against you, and not those who would have made the squad if they were not recuperating from injuries.

We must learn to celebrate our successes, and not find reasons to dilute our achievements. I can't ever remember reading a post-mortem of an Australian victory in which it was said that the Australian success was any less because it was achieved against a side that was perhaps not as strong as the Australians.

In an ideal world, Indian armchair cricket analysts would prefer we prepare greentops at home, and then beat the visitors, who, on account of either lack of form or owing to injury, should not be missing anyone of their star players. Later on we should visit other countries who would prepare pitches to suit the home side, and again under those circumstances, Indians would win. And then, and only then, we would celebrate our victory.

It is simple. A win is a win, just as a loss is a loss. Just as the hammering we took in the 2003 World Cup finals doesn't become any less palatable if you concede that a young Zaheer Khan was feeling nervous in the biggest match of his life, similarly you can't take away the success of an Indian side which made it to the finals after notching up eight successive wins.

Ok, enough about cricket. Now on to hockey, our sadly neglected national game, that is now the flavour of the month in Bollywood, thanks to the eminently watchable Chak De India.

I am not a great fan of Shahrukh Khan, yet I must confess his performance in Chak De was very, very good -- almost as good as he was in Swades. Very restrained, not at all over the top, and very effective.

I watched the movie with my 73-year-old Dad and 3-year old son for company. It was a first of sorts -- three generations of Chakravartys at the movies. Dad thought it was a bit too long and my son liked it the most. On 15th August, when my mother was explaning to Ritwik the three colours of the Indian flag, he gave her a wide grin and said "Chak De India". Pop patriotism is clearly here to stay and explains, to a great extent, why the movie has caught the public imagination.

I am sure everyone in the YashRaj camp would heave a huge sigh of relief with the production house's first big hit of the year, and even as Shahrukh Khan's performance earns him rave reviews, I think not enough credit for the film's success is being given to its young director Shamit Amin. He impressed everyone earlier with Ab Tak Chhappan. And Chak De just confirms we have another young, very talented director in our midst.

And while we are in the Chak De spirit, I think it's high time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh just chucks out the Left. Congress may find itself short of majority in the Parliament if the nuclear deal issue came to a vote and may even lose power. But it is as good a time as any to call the Left bluff and seek the voters' mandate from a moral high ground. Methinks Congress would come back with a thumping majority and would not have do deal with the daily dose of Left blackmail.

For that to happen though Manmohan Singh would have to bite the bullet and go where no Congress leader has gone before. That is, give up on power that his party is only tenuously holding on to, and seek greater glory through the ballot box.

In 2004, still regarded by many as an "outsider", Sonia Gandhi took the smart decision of opting out of the prime ministerial race and immediately earned the nation's sympathy and approbation. The Indian prime minister, who enjoys serious goodwill as a man of integrity, can take a leaf out of that book, and call for fresh elections. I dare say he will find more supporters than he thinks he has.

For all his posturing, we all know Comrade Carat loathes elections almost as much as General Musharraf. The Left's expertise lies in post-poll manoeuvering and during elections the central leadership is overly dependent on Bengal to provide the numbers in the Parliament. This time the Bengal Left leadership, may not be as willing to toe the party line -- a difference of opinion that could cost the party at the hustings.

In any case, if we do have elections anytime soon, Messrs. Yechury and Karat can mull over the combine it would choose to support -- either the rightwing Hindutva forces led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the motley group which calls itself the Third Front, the only grouping which is perhaps even more opportunistic and politically irresponsible than the Left.

More I think of these mouthwatering combinations, more I see myself as a prospective Congress voter.

C'mmon Manmohan, Chuck De Left nu.

A Disturbing, Disconcerting Journey

Finally I am back from a rather long, gruelling, educating, and in the end, humbling shoot.

Three weeks of criscrossing India, three weeks of Delhi belly, three weeks of conning yourself to believe today is going to be less hot and humid than yesterday. Three weeks of asking myself there must be another, even easier, way of making a living. Three weeks of bonding between three people that will hopefully last a lifetime or at least another such shoot.

Three weeks of watching and chronicling, from rather close quarters, the inequities of Indian caste system, an evil that is so difficult to uproot simply because it is so widespread.

They were also three most memorable weeks of meeting some awesome people working in the most awful conditions. Paul, Arun, Wilson, Manjula, Satish, Indira, Durgam and many, many others. Meeting any one of them is a very special experience. Meeting all of them in a span of three weeks was rather overwhelming.

At the end of such an experience, it is difficult to measure -- or even choose -- what are you taking home with you. For me, and I suspect with my two friends as well, it will be a pair of eyes that belong to a seven-year-old boy we met in Patna.

A boy who has my father's name and reminded me of my son the moment I set my eyes upon him. A boy who was locked up in a dark, stinking toilet for a whole day by his own school teacher because he, son of a musahar (rat eater), had dared to use the school toilet!

His innocent, haunting, traumatised eyes have followed me the past few weeks. Until someone somewhere finds an answer to the unasked questions those eyes haven't yet quite articulated, I would be ashamed to use words like "great" or "modern" to describe a nation that still condemns, simply by virtue of their birth, 160 million of its citizens to a life of untouchability.

Beedih Jalai Le....

Bloggers' Bloc? Naahh....

Though i wish it was. Or something sexy like Blogger Fatigue.

Truth is, between playing Florence Nightingale at home, with half my family -- and critically, the maid -- down with viral fever, and trying to set up a complicated shoot about an even more complicated, but nonetheless, very interesting subject (changing face of Dalits in India), I am often finding myself sleep deprived, and worse alcohol deprived. The latter seriously messes me up. I mean the lack of it, just in case you get the wrong idea.

I meant to keep this short and sweet. But just before I go, will leave any unsuspecting visitors to this blog and the usual suspects with these cheerful scraps of info I have been working with.

Every four hours a crime is committed against a Dalit in this country. Of every four gangrape victims, three are Dalits. The school dropout rate among Dalits is as high as 70 per cent. And simply because they happen to be at the lowest rung of the social and economic ladder, even those crimes which specifically don't target Dalits, end up hurting them the most.

This is not something a Dalit with a raging Ambedkar complex dreamt up. These are government of India statistics. I have never felt great about, or given any importance to, me being a Brahmin. Right now, though, I feel downright ashamed that I was born one.

On that cheery note, my dearest private yet so puiblic diary, I am off and will see you when I see you.

What's so hot about Lutyens Delhi

From Comrade Somnath Chatterjee to the messiah of the Muslims, Mulayam Singh Yadav. From our videshi icon, Sonia Gandhi to his swadeshi bete noire LK Advani. From the technocrat Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the rustic Laloo Yadav.They all reside in this cosy comfort zone of colonial bungalows with lush green manicured lawns and servant quarters bigger than the average Delhi apartment. I am talking about that oasis of tranquility, surrounded on all sides by a city bursting at the seams, which answers to the name of Lutyens Delhi.

Nowhere in the world, from Comrade Carat's beloved communist China to the imperialist United States of America, from the impoverished nations of sub-Saharan Africa to the prosperous Western Europe, is there such an exclusive residential district for the country's politicians and bureaucrats. The upkeep and maintenance of which is paid for by you and me.

As Delhi grows vertically (simply because there is no empty space any more to expand horizontally), any building activity remains prohibited in Lutyen's Delhi. Ostensibly to maintain the aesthetic nature of that area.

Dearly departed Rajiv Gandhi, another man with exemplary asthetic taste, actually got a law passed that decreed the sanctity of the Lutyens bungalow zone must be maintained. The poor fellow was cut down in his prime. Methinks if he had been around longer, he would have surely built a multiplex on Shahjahan Road. So much more convenient for Rahul baba to get his Hollywood fix. Even Vajpayeeji could have seen his favourite Hindi movies there, without stepping out of his comfort, oops I mean bungalow zone.

Hey, but what about us? The Chakravartys and Chaddhas who spent a small fortune to buy flats and houses in different parts of a Delhi in the 1970s and 1980s, a Delhi that was until then unspoilt by the mindless building boom that has overtaken it since? What about maintaining the asthetic sense of the place I live in? What about my private slice of sunlight whose entry into my bedroom window has been blocked by the monstrosity that has come up next door, simply because I happened to live in a house that wasn't located in Lutyen's Delhi?

Have you ever heard a squeak from any member of the Indian Left, the self appointed champion of India's toiling masses, about this den of inequity? You would think an anti-imperialist party like the CPI(M) would have nothing to do with something as steeped in colonial history as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone. The left parties protest about the docking of USS Nimitz in Chennai, they cry hoarse about atrocities in Nicaragua, and they shed tears for the hungry in Sudan. But nary a word about the prime piece of real estate on which the India's ruling elite reside.

And, honestly, why pick on just the Left? The Manmohan Singh government makes all the right noises about ushering in a market economy and doing away with subsidies. Most members of that government live off water and electricity supplied at highly subsidized rates in Lutyen's Delhi. Most importantly, the supply of both is uninterrupted , 24 x 7. Phone lines are never down in this land of plenty.

Despite that subsidy, unrealised water and electricity bills from India's political elite run into crores of rupees. The dubious list of defaulters reads like the Who's Who of Indian politics. And such is the love for life in this beautiful part of India's capital city, that several occupants of these colonial mansions simply refuse to vacate the premises even when they have lost in the elections and thereby lost the right to live there.

And now as if free water, electricity and telephones were not enough, to ease the miserable life of our country's first citizens, the New Delhi Municipal Council has decided to subsidize internet connectivity in the area. An NDMC team is visiting Bangalore to meet up with Infosys honchos and discuss ways to make Lutyens Delhi a wifi zone. I checked with a friend in the Delhi government if entire Delhi could be converted into a wifi zone. He gave me a look which suggested he was deeply concerned about my mental well being.

Lutyens Delhi is not by the far the only or even the worst den of inequity. But it is more in-your-face than others, you pass by it, you read about its residents in newspapers and watch them on TV preach and pontificate us ad nauseum about the life we should lead, and then lead the life they lead. You drive through Lutyens Delhi, look at those bungalows and idly wonder: "Tumhara ghar mere ghar se zyada safed kyon hai?" To me it is a bit like what Bastille was to the average Frenchman during the times of Luis XVIth, a constant reminder of a life beyond his reach.

I invite the socialist, secular democratic rulers of India to step out of that cocoon of comfort and see how the lesser mortals live. May be live in a flat in Rajouri Garden or a house in Lajpat Nagar. Face electricity shortages in South Delhi and deal with water shortages in west and north Delhi and have a nodding acquaintance with the unfortunate neighbour whose son or daughter became the latest victim of Blueline rage.

Many many years ago, an Indian prince stepped out of his royal palace and witnessed firsthand the lives of the common people. The experience proved to be life altering for him. May be modern India's rulers need to borrow a leaf out of that book.

And who knows, come election time next time round, when they don their starched khadis, fold their hands and oh-so-humbly tell us how they are one of us, I just might buy that story without choking on my food!

A Nice Line, An Interesting Thought...

It isn't time that is passing by, it is you and me ...

Bollywood is Praying for a Bull Run

2006 would always have been a tough act to follow. A year when the box office sizzled with mega hits and a bunch of young, talented, new age film makers promised to take Bollywood where it had never gone before.

A year when Rakesh Roshan gave Indians their first superhero in Kkrishh and Karan Johar gave us his take on adultery in Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna. A year when Munnabhai met the Mahatma and Omkara met Othello, and Rahul Bose met a fully-clothed Malika Sherawat. A year that began with Rang De Basanti and ended with Dhoom 2. A year when the usually reclusive Aamir Khan had two releases, both superhits, and Farhan Akhtar let Shahrukh Khan mouth that memorable line : "Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin bhi hai."A year when Bollywood laughed all the way to the bank.

After a year like that, 2007 clearly had its task cut out. Yet there was an optimism in the air, after two happy years of box office business. But things haven't followed the script this year. As flops have piled up, hits have been few and far in between, with the notable exception of Guru, Namaste London, Shootout in Lokhandwala and Life in a Metro, and the sleeper hit, Bheja Fry.

The year started badly with Nikhil Advani's Salaam-e-Ishq bombing spectacularly at the box office. Then Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Eklavya won ciritcal acclaim, but was cold shouldered by the masses. And now Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, touted as YashRaj Films' showpiece of the year, has sunk without a trace. Shaad Ali who gave us Saathiya and Bunty Aur Babli, tried to be too cute with his new film, and ended up being acute.

Ram Gopal Verma's Nishabd floundered with Jia Khan looked sultry, but also terribly miscast as Amitabh Bachchan's love interest. Cheeni Kum came a couple of months later and proved the audience was ready top accept Big B wooing women half his age provided the movie was well directed. Tabu looked simply fabulous and acted even better.

Yet through this maze of hits and misses, few indicators have emerged that point the way towards the future of Indian showbiz. Spiderman 3 has been a whopping success across the country. Dubbed in Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and yes Bhojpuri, the friendly neigbourhood Spidey has done roaring business not just in the big metros but even in mofussil India. Shrek 3 is having a good run at the Indian box office too.

And the biggest moneyspinner of the year so far has been Shivaji, starring Rajnikant. In India alone the movie has so far done Rs. 95 crore worth business. The movie could well earn over Rs. 200 crores.

When you are in the business of selling dreams, optimism is often the only way forward. So after -- and despite -- a summer of discontent, Bollywood is looking towards a handful of movies slated for release during the second half of this year to shore up its bottomline.

Leading the biggies are Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya and Ashutosh Gowrikar's Jodhaa Akbar. Both are big budget extravaganzas in true Bollywood ishtyle.

Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh's son Ranbeer and Anil Kapoor's daughter, Sonam are being launched as romantic leads in Saawariya. Bhansali's lucky mascot, Salman Khan and Rani Mukherji also star in what is being touted as the year's biggest movie. The movie is scheduled for a Diwali release.

Hrithik Roshan and Aisharya Rai, who set the screen alight last year in Dhoom 2, come together in Gowariker's historical epic, Jodhaa Akbar. It remains to be seen if they can reproduce the same chemistry in a movie that Gowariker has described as a historical with a romantic angle.

Bollywood's biggest production house, Yash Raj films has three films slated for release this year -- Chak De India, starring the bankable Sharukh Khan, Aja Nach Le, the comeback vehicle of Madhuri Dixit and Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, starring Abhishek Bachchan, Rani Mukherji, Konkona Sen Sharma and Kunal Kapoor.

Chak De India, directed by Shamit Amin who impressed with Ab Tak Chhappan, is loosely based on the real life story of former Indian hockey goalkeeper Mir Ranjan Negi who let in seven goals as India went down to its arch rival Pakistan, 1-7 in the 1982 Asian Games. Negi never played for India again, but redeemed himself twenty years later as the coach of the Indian women's hockey team which went on to win the gold in the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games.

Laaga Chunari Mein Daag is director Pradeep Sarkar's second movie after his critically acclaimed debut, Parineeta. The film is a remake of a 70s Rajesh Khanna-Mumtaz starrer, Aina. Rani and Konkona play daughters of Jaya Bachchan and Anupam Kher. It is the story of two sisters who move from their small town home to big bad Mumbai.

Like Pradeep Sarkar, choreographer Farah Khan is coming with her second film as director, Om Shanti Om, which pairs the stunning Deepika Padukone, daughter of former Badminton ace Prakash Padukone opposite King Khan. The story revolves round a reincarnated Shahrukh Khan.

Then there is David Dhawan's Partner, starring Salman Khan and Govinda. Katrina Kaif and Lara Dutta (two gorgeous women and two very good reasons why I should watch this, first day, first show) provide the eye candy. Govinda is confident that his off-screen partnership with director and long time friend David Dhawan and his on screen chemistry with Salman Khan will ensure the move is a big hit.

But the movies I am most looking forward to are Taare Zammen Paar, Gandhi, My Father and Blue Umbrella.

The story of a dyslexic child, Taare Zameen Par marks the debut of Aamir Khan as a director. It is co-directed by Aamir and Amol Gupte who has written the film's story. After Lagaan, Taare... is Aamir's second home production. It is the reclusive actor's only release this year.

Actor Anil Kapoor is launching his production house with Gandhi, My Father, a film about Mahatma Gandhi's personal life, his relationship with his eldest son Harilal Gandhi, played by Akshaye Khanna. The buzz is Khanna has come up with a performance of a lifetime.

The movie, directed by Feroz Abbas Khan, veteran theatre director, is perhaps the first one to look closely into Mahatma Gandhi's personal life. I have been a great fan of the director ever since I watched his Tumhari Amrita, an unforgettable theatrical experience. It remains to be seen whether he proves as adept at handling films as he is with theatre.

Rounding off the list of my favourite films is Blue Umbrella. The movie has already done the festival circuit, winning critical acclaim for director Vishal Bhardawaj and is now slated for commercial release in the latter half of this year. Also known as Chatri Chor, the film is a heart-warming adaptation of a novella of the same name by Ruskin Bond. It stars old Bhardwaj favourite, Pankaj Kapur, in a lead role.

The fare for the next six months promises to be interesting, a potpourri of comedies, period dramas, remakes and typical Bollywood extravaganzas. Only a crystalball gazer could predict their fate at the box office. Lesser mortals like me will just faithfully queue up, Friday, first show.