Ratheesh KrishnaVadhyar's Journal
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Ratheesh KrishnaVadhyar" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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08:31 pm
[Link] | My grandmother passed away last Saturday.
The last time I met her was just three weeks back, during my vacation at Kerala. She was a bit unwell that time, because a few days earlier she had missed a step in the veranda of the house while trying to pick up something, which resulted in swollen feet and ankles. But she was still very much active with all daily chorus, and in spite of her advanced age, the kitchen was mostly run by her until a week before her death.
On October 21st, I was at my grandmother's home, and it was the day of remembrance of my grandfather, who had passed away in 1992. The purohit came home, and after some rituals in the morning, cooked rice was placed on a banana leaf at a corner of the compound, and all of us waited for the crows to come and eat. It took a few minutes for the first crow to come down with a lot of suspicion towards this unexpected feast, and he tried to grab as much as possible in his mouth and then ran away. In the process, he scattered the rice all over. Soon, more crows started arriving, and eventually the mynahs came, who then ruled the scene and finished the leftover food. My grandmother was sitting on a chair in the veranda and observing all this, and she looked very satisfied. I looked at her face and tried to guess what she might be thinking - Is she thinking of my grandfather?
Soon after, lunch was served which included rice and a few curries. Vaishnav, my uncle's four year old son, was very reluctant to eat rice, and he wanted some snacks from nearby shop instead. After a lot of persuasion, he agreed to eat, but he wouldn't sit on floor like others, but wanted a wooden palaka to sit. My grandfather's old photograph was installed on a wall in the living room, and my grandmother told Vaishnav: "See that - He is looking at you now. Eat now!", and then he started eating.
She was at my home on all of 24th and 25th, helping my mother to make chapathis, and so on. After attending the family function at my home, she left on 25th evening, and her eyes were filled with tears when she left.
Her life was mostly spent inside the kitchen. At the back of my mind, I think I always had this belief that I was her favorite grandson (because I was her first), and I remember going to the kitchen and demanding various things from her during my childhood, and coming back with a handful of potato chips or something. This habit never changed. After I moved to Bangalore, I nearly always visited her during my Kerala trips, and she used to become very upset and complain to my mother if I didn't. Whenever I went to her home, I could always see her doing something in the kitchen. She would be happy to see me, point me to a tin containing some snacks, and then start making coffee. She would then make inquiries about my Bangalore life, smiling and nodding her head showing some sort of agreement. She always had a good sense of humor, though it has been deteriorating in last couple of years.
It brings pain in my heart to think that she will no longer be there at her home anymore. The house will cease to be my "grandmother's home". For four year old Vaishnav, memories of his life are probably just starting to get written; And for him, his grandmother would be yet another photograph hanging from a nail on the wall, and silently observing him grow up.
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07:26 pm
[Link] | Trying to Read Dharmaraja again..
We had an abridged version of CV Raman Pilla's classic novel Dharmaraja (1913) prescribed as a text book in our tenth standard. Filled with adventure and mystery, this historical romance had taken me to a different world, and I had thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The only experience comparable to that was reading translations of Kalki's novels, especially Ponniyin Selvan, many years later. One of my favorite pastimes during tenth standard was to imagine a Malayalam film being made based on Dharmaraja and see which all actors would fit into various characters. I remember the first actor I "confirmed" was Madhu, to play the role of ageing Ananthapadmanabhan Valiya Padathalavan :)
Twenty years after reading the abridged version, this week I started reading the complete version of the novel. This version, published by DC books, has introductions by Ayyappa Panikker and K Raghavan Pilla, and an informative and detailed study and commentary by P Venugopalan. Reading the novel hasn't been a very entertaining experience so far, though, and reminded me of my attempt to read CV's Ramaraja Bahadur sometime back. It took me an hour to read the first ten pages of the novel, which have a total of more than a hundred footnotes, explaining the meanings of various usages of languages of that period, hints regarding political history, references to Kathakali, and special dialects in dialogues. I have to go back and forth to the footnote section now and then, and I need to consciously crack the thick shell of its language to make clear meanings out of the sentences in the chapter; That process hinders a more direct appreciation of the story and characters. I should perhaps consider myself fit to read the abridged version alone!
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09:04 pm
[Link] | The Best of Youth
Italian masterpiece The Best of Youth, directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, tells the story of the Carati family and their friends, as they go through nearly four decades, starting from 1965. Through the story of the family members, we also come to know of bits and pieces of modern Italian history and its social and cultural implications. The theme has all the necessary ingredients for making a typical soap mega-serial; But its sensitive portrayals of characters and incidents, wonderful performances, and a brilliant background score take the film to a different level, and make it a memorable and moving viewing experience.
The movie is six hours long, divided into two parts. This gives enough time for us to get to know the characters very well, and empathize with them as they go through various situations in life. We see them ageing - It is not shown through a bit of very superficial makeup or wigs; We could even observe the gradual diminishing of the strength of light in their eyes. Portrayals of the effects of passage of time always have an inherent ability to move our minds, and the director has made use of that effectively. There are ambiguities and unanswered questions - For example, it is not clear why Matteo enforced on himself a rather solitary existence, in spite of having loving parents and siblings. But these kind of points make the film look real, as real life itself is full of such paradoxes and contradictions.
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04:43 pm
[Link] | Aniyara Sangeetham
It seems an ox's urination can often turn out to be a lengthy process, and if he is pulling a cart along with him, you can track the marks of urine on the road for as long as a kilometer! The Malayalam phrase "kaala-moothram", which is used to describe anything that keeps on dragging on and on, is based on this observation. In that sense, all of the mega-serials coming in Malayalam television channels are excellent examples of kaala-moothrams.
Like what was commented in an episode of Akkarakkazhchakal, Malayalam television serials don't give a charming picture of social and family lives in Kerala. Among the characters of these serials, every husband would have at least two wives, and every wife too would have at least two husbands and the equations can become quite complex as the moothram progresses. I happen to watch Manasaputhri, a serial coming on Asianet, during my visits to Kerala. This serial tells the story of two girls, Sophie and Glory, who grew up in an orphanage. Glory comes to know that Sophie's parents are rich, and she disguises as Sophie and approaches her father, and gets his property registered in her name. Meanwhile, the real Sophie also gets the picture, but she doesn't want to reveal the reality to her father because he is a "heart patient" (these kinds of twists are necessary for the smooth flow of moothram). Also, both the father and mother of Sophie have married multiple times during this interval, to add more characters and meat to the story. This was the situation when I watched an episode of the serial around two years back. Then I watched another episode an year back, and there was not much progress in the main story. I watched the 600th (or 700th) episode a few weeks back when I was in Kerala, and the moothram was still going strong.
One common aspect of these serials is that the characters would not say the word "I". They would always refer to themselves in third person, including their surnames and other prefixes. For example, instead of saying that "I am happy", they would say "Asha Varghese Menon ippol santhushtayaanu". This is not to show that the characters have grown beyond the low level tendencies of "I-ness", but it is just to help the viewers to keep a handle of the characters, as the same character and actor might be seen in numerous other serials that are being shown, and there is a chance of getting confused.
I was thinking about these serials while reading Aniyara Sangeetham, Malayalam translation of Nepothyo Nayika, Bengali novel written by Ashapurna Devi, published by DC books. It is not that the novel was bad; In fact I felt that the characterizations were quite good. But when I read it today, what I thought first was that it would make an ideal story for a mega-serial. Somnath and Jayanthi have a baby girl. Somnath's friend Chinmay's wife dies, and he wants to travel to distant places to recover from his grief. He requests Somnath to take care of his own baby girl, and leaves India. Chinmay is rich, and he sends a good amount of money to Somnath every month, for taking care of his daughter's expenses. A few months later, Chinmay's daughter dies in an accident. Somnath decides not to reveal this to his friend, and instead present his own daughter as Chinmay's. The novel focuses entirely on this thread. Malayalam translation is done by K Radhakrishnan.
* * *
I watched Hindi film Kaminey recently, and I fail to understand why this film was praised so much by critics. I agree that there are a few nicely paced sequences and a bunch of new-faces who added a touch of freshness to the movie. Also, it is always a pleasure to watch Priyanka Chopra smile. But thematically, there was nothing in the film that has not been handled earlier by Ram Gopal Varma in his various underworld films. The climax was just a typical masala, that failed to reach even the standards of Varma's films.
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08:56 pm
[Link] | Nadodigal
Nadodigal, Tamil film directed by Samuthirakani, is one of the films that attempt to glorify "Friendship" in a pretty vocal way. The film tells the story of a group of jobless youngsters living in a Tamil village. Karunan (Sasikumar) is their leader. One day Karunan's friend Saravanan lands in the village, looking very depressed. He has fallen in love with his classmate, but her father, who is a big businessman, would not allow them to get married. Karunan readily agrees to help Saravanan, and Karunan's friends too at once jump into it (as for them, friendship is above everything else). After a long car journey and an item song, the friends kidnap Saravanan's girlfriend, arrange for their wedding at a temple, and then send them off to a remote resort. During the process, the friends are all severely injured. Worst was yet to come, as the goondas sent by the girl's father could soon find out the whereabouts of Karunan and friends, and their family. After all this, the friends are shocked to realize that all they had suffered was for nothing, as Saravanan and his wife are planning for a divorce.
All over Nadodigal, we could see a conscious attempt to replicate the atmosphere of the successful film Subramaniyapuram. The fact that two of the main characters in the film are played by the actors (Sasikumar and Ganja Karuppu) who were members of the gang in Subramaniyapuram makes this resemblance strong. In fact, these characters appear like coming straight out of Subramaniyapuram. Widespread usage of ultra-wide angles to capture even interior scenes, quick-paced narration involving many long sequences - all are reminiscent of Subramaniyapuram. Samuthirakani has made one of his heroines a bit "cinematically talkative" (nevertheless, it was good to watch the cute actress, Ananya), added the customary dappan koothu song, and also a touch of humor to the entire first half of the movie, which was interesting to watch. Sasikumar (and others too) has given a performance that is most suitable for his character, and I liked the way the director narrated some of the dramatic incidents in the movie with just a song in the background. The structural integrity of Subramaniyapuram is nowhere to be seen in Nadodigal, and in the second half, the film degrades quickly, and when the dramatic scenes in the climax are once again shown with a song in the background, it all looked like a joke to me. Overall, Nadodigal is a film that can be watched once, though it is heavily overshadowed by Subramaniyapuram, which was a much superior work compared to this.
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01:40 pm
[Link] | Djmoeh
Djomeh, Iranian director Hassan Yektapanah's debut film, tells the story of an Afghan refugee's life in Iran. Just like any true works of art, the social aspects of the regional conflicts go to the background, and it is the universally relevant human emotions that are portrayed in this film, and watching it was an experience similar to reading a good short story, and it also reminded me of Majid Majidi's Baran though the latter had a totally different tone of narration.
Djomeh, the young Afghan, lives in a hilly region of Iran, and works with a milkman. His job is to look after cows, and also to accompany his Iranian 'boss' Mahmud when he drives to a local town to buy milk from the townspeople. He has fallen in love with the girl managing the grocery shop in the town, and makes several trips to the shop just to meet her. She never reciprocates his love; In fact she hardly ever looks at his face, and he is also much restrained in his expressions, because of social restrictions of the place and times. He shares his thoughts with Mahmud, and requests him to act as his "godfather" and ask the girl's parents for marrying her to him. Mahmud tells Djomeh that his dream would never materialize as he belongs to a different region, but eventually he agrees to help. There are no unexpected or dramatic developments in the climax, and towards the end, we listen the only background music in the entire film.
There is a kind of gentle warmth in the portrayals of the characters and the village life, that adds a sort of "feel-good" factor in the film, which is never forceful but comes out naturally. The conversations between the innocent (and sometimes childish) Djomeh and Mahmud, who looks and talks like a veteran, the images of the dusty little town (which looks like a kind of big ant-hill, with small mud-huts perching on various places on a short hill and its valley), recurring images of Djomeh's frequent trips on a bicycle to the grocery shop, the children of the town playing with reflections of sunlight on a broken mirror, a cat yawning or a group of dogs chasing the cyclist for food - the director has added a charming touch in every scene.
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09:46 pm
[Link] | A Scientific Experiment
"Can you go to the ration shop and buy kerosene?"
My mother asked me on a Saturday morning, as I was just sitting in my room, fully concentrating on making the next edition of my kai ezhuthu masika, one of my favorite activities those days. Obviously, I didn't like to have any interruption, so I refused to go. Whenever my mother asked me to do some work which was not of my interest, I always refused first; But on her second request I would agree. So, this time also I was mentally prepared to go, and closed my magazine and paint box, and looked towards her, waiting for her to ask me a second time.
There was a second reason for my not liking to go to the ration shop. The shop was located next to National High School, where I studied. I didn't like myself being noticed by someone from school, carrying a black plastic can dripping with kerosene. It was a Saturday, a holiday for school. But still, the presence of the school next to ration shop made me feel a bit uncomfortable. My father was not around, and it was the last date for buying kerosene for the month, my mother said. So, I reluctantly got ready and started towards the ration shop, carefully hiding the kerosene can inside one of the nylon bags which my father used during his grocery store visits.
During the early 1980s, there were three different kinds of stoves my mother used for cooking. One was the traditional one where wood was burned to make fire. The second was arakka podi stove, which was a foot tall iron cylinder with a small hole near its base. Arakka podi, wood powder bought from timber sawmills, was filled in the cylinder and then a small piece of wood would be lighted on one end and inserted through this hole. Vessels would be placed on a triangular metal frame placed on top of the stove. The arakka podi would burn very slowly, resulting in almost no fire but a lot of smoke, and the food in the vessel would get cooked in the process. The third was a Nutan kerosene stove, and I associated the word "Nutan" with kerosene during my childhood, until I learned that there was an actress named Nutan.
Out of these, arakka podi stove was the first one to retire. Wood powder was not very easy to get, and cooking in this stove was time-consuming and a bit inconvenient, so the old stove was moved to a corner of the "store room" where it was allowed to rust for sometime, after which it was taken away by some guy buying old metals and stuff. After this, cooking was done on the traditional aduppu, or on the kerosene stove until we migrated to LPG much later in 1996 or so. Kerosene was more economical than wood, but we could get kerosene only from the ration shop, and that too just a few liters a month, as per the "permit" issued to us, which was printed on a thick rose-colored paper that smelt of kerosene. The few liters that we got lasted for a week only, but something was better than nothing, and we never missed to buy our quota of kerosene every month.
During those days, the ration shop and Jose's shop were the two places where most of our grocery shopping was done. From the ration shop, which of course was much cheaper, we got rice, sugar, oil and kerosene. All other things we bought from Jose's shop, which was located on the road leading from Irinjalakuda bus stand to Koodalmanikyam temple. Even though it was called as "Jose's shop", I don't remember if the person sitting in the shop was Jose himself or somebody else, but let me call him as Jose. He always wore a white shirt and white mundu, and sat in front of a table placed on a corner with a rather miserly expression. Even if we buy things for 1000 rupees and 5 paise, he would show his hand after paying the thousand rupees, waiting for the remaining five paise, my father used to comment.
Of course, things were much cheaper those days, and if I remember correctly, our monthly shopping which used to happen on the first or second day of every month, used to cost us not more than two hundred rupees. Before the shopping, my mother would prepare the list of things that have to be bought, which were more or less the same every month. Rava - 1Kg, parippu - 1Kg, Lifebuoy soap - 2, 501 soap - 1.. so on will go the list. Once the list is made, my father and I would walk to the shop, which was around half a kilometer from our house.
Groceries were kept in jute bags inside the shop and on racks on the walls. Oil was kept in a few big tins. In between all these things, under a dim electric light, two people stood and attended the customers. Customers have to stand outside and then call out the items they want, and the attenders would measure and pack the things. Finally, Jose would make the bill. One attender was a bald headed man who always wore a lunkee and a banyan (I don't remember his name), who usually took up our charge. He had a habit of keeping on asking "pinne.." (next). The conversation will go on like this:
"Hmm. Now tell me", he would ask.
"Gothambu - 1Kg", my father would say.
"Pinne? ", he would ask as he starts measuring gothambu.
"Rava - 1Kg"
"Pinne? "
"Parippu - 1Kg"
"Pinne? "
"Payar - ara"
"Pinne? "
"Mulaku - 100"
"What is after Gothambu?", he might have finished packing gothambu by then.
All items were packed in newspaper sheets. He will take a sheet from a paper stack, quickly make a cone out of that, and then pour the things into it using a coconut shell or something. Then he would measure it on the balance, and then tie it using charadu (jute-thread) pulled from a thick coil that was hung from the roof. While all this happened, I would stand near my father, observing the inside of the shop, or looking at the wooden planks that were kept on one side of the shop - These were used as a sort of "shutter" for the shop at the end of the day, and I always wondered how they specially arranged and connected these planks to form a strong shutter.
It usually took an hour for our shopping process, after which we would walk back, my father carrying the things in two heavy bags in his hands and me following him carrying a lighter one, or perhaps the coconut oil can. Back at home, it would take another hour for my father and mother to unpack all things, and then to transfer all things into various tins and containers in the kitchen and store room. Meanwhile, I would collect the newspaper sheets and jute threads from the packets. Paper I would keep in a pile, which my father would later take up and add to our own old-newspaper stack. I was more interested in the jute threads, which I would tie together to form a longer thread, and then attach to a coil that I personally maintained, tied around a small stick.
Once in a while, we also earned money from Jose - by selling old newspapers. I accompanied my father for this process also. He would take a small stack of a few newspapers, tie them to make a small bundle for me to carry, and the rest he would divide into two bigger bundles for himself. At Jose's shop, the bald-headed man would do a careful examination of the paper sheets, to filter out damaged ones which he would keep aside. I used to have a weakness towards any sort of color photographs published in newspapers (this was a rarity those days), which I would secretly cut from the newspaper, and then paste on my "picture album", which was basically an old edition of Manorajyam magazine. These missing pictures would appear as holes in the paper, and the guy at Jose's shop never failed to catch them and reject those sheets, making me feel a little worried imagining about my father's reaction.
Jose paid a rupee or something for a kilogram of paper, and rounded down the payment as much as possible. If it comes to 11 rupees, he would pay only ten rupees. So, we often used to combine our newspaper sale with our monthly shopping, to get the full payment adjusted towards our bill. Once, we even walked all the way to Irinjalakuda market, around two kilometers away, as we heard that a guy there was paying more than a rupee per kilogram of newspaper.
The location of the ration shop kept on changing. For some time, it was in a building close to Jose's shop (I remember waiting in a long queue there for buying the special palm oil distributed for some occasion). Then it changed to another building near my father's workplace. Later we heard that Jose himself got the contract for ration shop as well; And during that particular period, the shop was located next to National High School.
I managed to quickly visit the ration shop and return back home unnoticed by anyone known to me. But when I reached home, I was shocked to notice one thing: I had kept the ration card and permit on the nylon bag which I had used for "covering" the kerosene can. During my brisk walk back home, some amount of kerosene had spilled out, and both the card and the permit had taken a neat bath in the blueish black liquid. I felt like some acid burning inside my stomach, a similar sensation I used to have when I heard the "last bell" ring during school examinations when I was still in the middle of answering the last question on History question paper (which typically was to write an "essay").
After considering all aspects of the issue, I quickly decided not to reveal this incident to my mother immediately. She was washing clothes, and was near the alakku kallu behind our house. I placed the kerosene can in the store room, and took the ration card to my room, wondering what to do next. My mind was blank for some time, and then later, all of a sudden, it clicked - I congratulated myself for this most scientific idea, and promptly started preparations for implementing it to solve my problem.
This particular idea was based on the very basics of Science, learned from lower primary classes. "Kharam, dravakam, vathakam...", I told to myself - these are essentially the three forms of matter - solid, liquid and gas. By applying heat, matter would gradually move from one form to the other, in sequence. Kerosene is a dravakam, a liquid, and ration card is a solid. If we heat up the ration card that is drenched in kerosene, gradually the kerosene alone will get converted to gas and then go away. What will happen if the ration card gets converted to dravakam? I wondered. Well, there was a slight risk involved like in any scientific experiment, but I thought that it was a pretty straight-forward and clever idea. Since I used to get good marks in Science those days, I believed that at some point of time I would anyways end up becoming a scientist.
The next question was to how to heat up the card. The easiest way was to keep it under sun for some time. But that was not very scientific, and also there was a risk of my mother finishing her washing before the ration card is rectified. Then I noticed the electric table lamp I had on my table, and remembered the nice warmth I used to feel while reading my books sitting in front of that lamp. I quickly wrapped the ration card around the electric bulb, and then switched on the lamp, and then proudly stood there watching the card getting healed.
It was good that I stood there close to my apparatus. This helped me to quickly remove the ration card the moment it started to smell a little of smoke. It was indeed not a very encouraging sight, and I could hear the last examination bell ringing again. There were some squirrels and sparrows making loud noise outside, as usual, and this music was interrupted only by the "tukk.. tukk" noise of wet clothes getting banged on the alakku kallu - my mother washing clothes. Overall it was all a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere, but everything was going to break soon. I tried to imagine what would happen in another five minutes, once my mother comes to know about my scientific achievement. I wished I could rewind Time by a few minutes.
"Ration card is the most important document in our life", my mother told me after her initial reaction about the experiment. "And the first page of the ration card is the most important one, where our names are written. Now look at this - Can you make out anything from this now? Its black everywhere!". I had already completed a couple of rounds of cries, and her comments made me see the whole thing from a different angle. I visualized us getting wiped off from all government records. What would happen now? More than all this, in the back of my mind loomed the terror of my father's upcoming reaction when he hears about this. If it was any other scenario, I could have coaxed my mother "not to tell father", but in this particular case, it was not possible at all. The ration card had become just too hot to hide, and its pages were crying out aloud.
My father came home in the evening, and I anticipated lightning and thunderstorms any moment. Surprisingly, nothing happened and eventually I slept a troubled night. In the morning I woke up, went to the backside of the house and started brushing my teeth. My father was doing some work in the parambu, and he didn't talk anything to me. It appeared that he was yet to hear the news. But for how long? I felt that I was standing in front of the most major crisis in my life.
But my mother had already told everything to my father. Later on the day, when I timidly went towards her to make inquiries, she told me that my father had already declared my punishment as well - I was supposed to buy things from ration shop next time. I had a sigh of relief, though I was worried thinking if the guy in the shop would accept the card or not. Indeed, he looked at the first page of the card during my visit, and then looked at me and asked: "Where am I to find the name and number here?". I stood with an awkward expression and then helped him to decode bits and pieces of letters from the dark pages of the ration card.
* * *
When I narrated this incident to my wife, she commented that if at all I ever write a book, the most appropriate name for it would be, "Ratheeshinte Mandatharangal". She also used that occasion to restate her strong suspicions about my claims of completing an engineering degree.
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06:12 pm
[Link] | Paleri Manikyam
"This is not a detective novel", says the back-cover of TP Rajeevan's novel, Paleri Manikyam - Oru Pathirakkolapathakathinte Katha. True, the novel is much more than detective fiction; but it can also be enjoyed as one maintaining suspense till its last few pages (though the climax is not something startling or 'expectedly unexpected' like in a Shaji Kailas movie!). Narrated in first person by an investigator, the story is mainly centered around a murder committed half a century back, in a village called Paleri in Kerala. Manikyam, 20 years old, was found dead a few days after her marriage. Her close relatives suspected it to be a murder, and investigations were carried out. A few people were suspected, arrested and questioned, but the prosecution couldn't prove anything against anyone and finally the case was closed. After fifty years, the private investigator (who is not named in the novel), whose ancestors lived in Paleri, tries to find out what might have happened to Manikyam.
The theme of a private investigator getting interested in a 50 year old mystery has freshness in it, but it is something that I would call as a bit of a "foreign theme" for a Malayalam work. The first chapter of the novel, in which a Kerala police officer shows his personal notes commenting on this old case (which he studied as a hobby!) was largely unconvincing, and the strange geometrical representations in the notes and their explanations looked very pretentious. So, I didn't start reading the book with a great impression. However, my opinion quickly changed as I read the subsequent chapters in which the novelist recreates the atmosphere and lifestyle of a Kerala village of the past with great skills. While the investigator interviews different people in the village, trying to recreate the incidents of the past, parts of social and political history of the village is also unveiled. And its not just the history; We read in detail how vattu charayam was prepared during those days, how a barber shop functioned, what kind of services the mid-wives of those era provided and how, the operations of the local manthravaadi.. and the list continues. The narrative is made more genuine through appropriate usage of phrases and similes with a touch of the old times, that are abundant in the book.
There are a few people in their seventies and eighties who live in Paleri and have something to say about the Manikyam case, though some of them are initially reluctant to speak, even after this long period. There are reports given by the witnesses in the case diary as well. As the stories unfold through the case diary and the interviews, we see each character giving a different account, conflicting and contradicting with others, or just showing a different facet of the happenings. This reminds of the technique Kurosawa used in his masterpiece, Rashomon. But in Rashomon, there were only a handful of characters, and the study of the characters and the psychological reasoning behind the differences in their accounts was thorough. Such refinement is absent in Paleri Manikyam, simply because there are too many stories here. There are too many characters, or the novel is too short to accommodate these many of them. There are around twenty important characters, and other than that I think there would be at least some fifty characters in this 300 page long novel. Most of them are underdeveloped and just remain as names (At a few places, the names of the characters appeared to be incorrect, so it looks like the author himself was confused by these many characters). However, the numerous accounts of the story are related to many of these characters in some way or the other. So, obviously, unlike the four stories representing deep character study in Rashomon, the stories in Paleri Manikyam many a time appear as just typical false testimonies. Perhaps the author's intention was mainly to bring out a collective experience, rather than on specific character studies. In that he has succeeded, and overall, he has brought "Paleri" to life as SK Pottekkatt did for Athiranippadam (if not as much as OV Vijayan did for Khasak at a philosophical level).
Even though it is far from perfection, Paleri Manikyam is a remarkable Malayalam work of recent times. I am looking forward to watch director Renjith's upcoming film adaptation of the novel, and am curious to see whether (and how) he would capture the essence of the novel in a two hour movie, or he would just make it as a mere suspense film.
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02:33 pm
[Link] | Padachonte Thirakkathakal
Padachonte Thirakkathakal is a book on Sreenivasan published by Olive. It's an interesting book for spending a couple of hours.
The first section of the book has six articles written by Sreenivasan, all of them related to Cinema and are filled with the author's trademark satirical observations (It seems these were published earlier in Sreenivasan - Oru Pusthakam, another book on Sreenivasan). The second section is a short autobiography by Sreenivasan, and the third section has two interviews with Sreenivasan. The fourth is a feature narrating the process of writing a screenplay for a Sathyan Anthikkad-Sreenivasan film (this feature was written in 1999; I think the script discussed in this feature was never filmed).
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02:58 pm
[Link] | Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja
While waiting in the queue in front of Prabhat theater for buying tickets for Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja, one of the most eagerly awaited movies of Malayalam of recent times, I was observing the wonderful posters of the film pasted all over there. With their peculiar color toning and details of texture, these beautifully designed postures remind of Ravi Varma paintings. The eighteenth century prince Pazhassi Raja, who was a contemporary of Tipu Sultan, led one of the earliest organized resistance movements against the British Empire in India, though not many people might have heard about him outside Kerala, I believe.
Leading a period film like Pazhassi Raja, on a vast canvas with numerous stars and supporting cast and technicians, might have been an extremely strenuous task; I suppose Pazhassi Raja might have required much more project management skills from director Hariharan than any other Malayalam movie made before. And he has to be appreciated for the end product. Frames of Pazhassi Raja are a beauty to watch. There is a scene in the film where we see the interior walls of a palace with beautiful murals painted on it (I guess they were made specially for the movie), and the sunlight reflecting from a small pond creating interesting patterns on the walls. The British have come to capture Pazhassi Raja from his palace, and we know the scene is not going to be a very peaceful one; but it is the beauty of the visuals that attracted my attention even in scenes like this. Hariharan, along with his art director and photographer, has taken great pains to make this visual splendor consistent throughout the movie. Another area to worth mention is the appearance and performances of all the lead actors. It was amazing to see Mammootty, who might be in his mid fifties, playing the main role and looking just like the warrior prince of our imagination, as if coming straight out of a painting in almost every scene.
If Pazhassi Raja just remains as a visual extravaganza, I think the responsibility for it has to be shared between the two veterans behind the film - MT and Ilayaraja. I think there are multiple ways a historical film can be made - You can show the happenings of the period from the perspective of fictitious characters, which would give much more liberty and flexibility to the makers to portray the events in its multiple dimensions. Visconti's Leopard is an example for this. Another method, followed by movies like Gandhi is to follow the events as they are, bordering on documentary but bringing life to the narrative via careful dramatization of the happenings. Look at the picturization of Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha in Richard Attenborough's film - It shows Gandhi walking briskly holding his stick, chatting with people on the way and marching towards Dandi. The number of his followers keeps growing as he approaches the sea. Then, a panoramic shot shows multiple streams of satyagrahis merging with the one lead by Gandhi, and the accompanying background music reaches a crescendo. I remember the excitement and adrenalin rush I had while watching this scene even the fourth or fifth time, and there were many such moments in Gandhi. There are none of such innovative scenes in MT Vasudevan Nair's script for Pazhassi Raja. He follows a traditional way of story-telling - We see the king going to see the queen, we see a song showing the queen waiting for king's arrival, we see the spies trying to capture the king and then his show of valor, after which we are shown how the king is polite towards a British couple captured by his men; then see a Muslim song and a Muslim chieftain's declaration of loyalty towards the king, then we see one of the king's right hand men getting betrayed and caught, and the king going for a solo revenge performance.. All these incidents are shown through a series of clichéd scene patterns. Far from being inspiring and memorable, this mediocre script is not even capable of capturing the attention of the audience throughout the lengthy 3+ hours the movie spans to.
Another disappointment was Ilayaraja's background music. I remember AR Rehman's wonderful score for Shyam Benegal's Bose - The Forgotten Hero, which had greatly helped to underline the patriotic spirit in the movie. I hoped for an equally powerful score for Pazhassi Raja, and I personally wished for one using traditional Kerala instruments. However, Ilayaraja's "original background score" consists of bits and pieces of western music, some of them vaguely reminding of Hollywood films. But then, the Malayalee audience is always too emotionally involved with films that the so called 'fans' were providing live additional background music for many scenes in the film, so perhaps the effect of Ilayaraja's score was considerably diluted :)
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07:00 pm
[Link] | Theyyam Performance
The Thapasya Kala Samithi at Irinjalakuda organized a Theyyam performance near Koodalmanikyam temple yesterday evening, as part of Deepavali celebrations. Even though yesterday's performance was an edited version (I think) customized just to showcase the art form, it was a unique and memorable experience for me, as I hadn't watched a Theyyam before, except for bits and pieces in movies like Kaliyattam and Pulijanmam. I actually didn't understand much about yesterday's show, except that it was called Veerabhadran - Panchuruli Theyyam, but I enjoyed the rustic charm of the art form, which with its usage of raw natural substances for its costumes, and emphasize on show of physical strength and flexibility, has some sort of a "pre-historic" look and feel.
The Veerabhadran-Panchuruli Theyyam started at 6:30PM, at a small ground in front of the temple. For nearly an hour, the first Theyyam, who wore a shield in the shape of a false tummy and chest, painted in shining red, went around people, dancing and trying to befriend with a few little kids. After this performance, for an hour, we could see the dressing up of next Theyyam and see how a young man gets transformed to a scary form within an hour. The artist with just minimal facial make up came in and stood at a corner of the ground. They initially installed a wooden wheel shaped apparatus around him, and then fixed tender palm-leaves on it. After that, around 12 torches (sticks with clothes tied on one side, dipped in oil) were fixed around the wheel, and the headgear and masks were put on after that. A 3-meter tall veena-shaped board made of clothes and palm-leaves was then fixed to this wheel.
Electric lights were all switched off, and the torches attached to the Theyyam were lit. Then the performance started, and for around half an hour, he danced, roaring occasionally (which was sometimes responded by a mild scream from the temple elephant who was tied in the adjacent compound), and then twirling around swiftly, when the light from the torches attached to his body made a circle around him. Towards the climax of the performance, he scattered the burning embers from a small fire (which was prepared when the show had started) around him using bare feet!
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11:06 am
[Link] | Two Angels
Two Angels, debut film by Mamad Haghighat, tells the story of Ali, a boy who wants to learn to play the musical instrument called Ney, which looks like a flute. His father is a pious and orthodox person, who believes that Music is sin. Ali knows that his father would never allow him to go for music lessons, so he secretly goes for the classes at Tehran, supported by his mother. But eventually, his father comes to know of it, and he reacts violently.
While the film is interesting to watch, it constantly keeps on giving implicit hints towards its ideological standpoint, and I felt that this diluted the artistic value of the film a little bit. The boy who played as Ali was not convincing either; Neither his facial expressions nor his body language gave the impression that he was truly passionate about Music. Instead, it all looked a bit pretentious. I could never empathize with this character.
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08:56 am
[Link] | The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Slovakian film The Shop on Main Street is one of the best films on Holocaust I have ever seen. Without explicitly showing any stark scenes associated with Holocaust, the film shows us the tragedy of the events in a most intense way. I watched Vittorio De Sica's film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971) yesterday, and it is also a film that falls into the class of the Slovakian masterpiece. This film is based on an Italian novel of the same name written by Giorgio Bassani.
Finzi-Continis are rich, aristocratic Jews living in Ferrara, Italy, and they have a vast estate with tall walls surrounding the entire area. Inside the walls, it's a totally different world, covered with beautiful forests, lawns, playgrounds and a huge mansion in the middle of all this. Mussolini was in the process of giving orders to gradually take away the rights of Jews one by one; But inside their garden, the Finzi-Continis felt that they were well-protected by their wealth. The film shows the love affair between Giorgio, a middle-class young Jew, and Micole of the Finzi-Continis. Even though Giorgio is intensely in love with Micole from his schooldays itself, and Micole also seems to like him initially, things slowly take a turn when they grow up (though the film never clearly explains the reason for Micole's coldness towards Giorgio). The persecution of Jews initiated by the Fascist Government adds one more layer to Giorgio's tragedy, and the Finzi-Continis are also not well-protected inside their gardens as they thought.
De Sica's narration is poetic even when handling the most disturbing scenes in the film. The passing image of a pet dog, the cry of an owl breaking the silence of night - all are most effectively used to convey the deep emotional states of characters. And the climax scenes and the haunting background music accompanying them, are just pure poetry in Cinema, and they are some of the most touching moments in films I have seen so far. Many things are left unsaid as far as the plot is concerned, but in fact they don't matter at all.
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09:09 pm
[Link] | Aakash Vani
When I was in Kerala a few weeks back, I noticed this skeleton of our old Philips radio set, lying abandoned on top of our terrace, along with many other miscellaneous "unwanted things". It was a sight that filled my heart with pain. During my childhood, this radio used to be the only source of "media entertainment" for us at home, and it was also the most "advanced electronic equipment" we had at home till 1991.
The radio was with us from the time my memories start. I suppose it might be older than me for sure. Initially, it used to have a leather casing, and I remember the look of sophistication it used to have, sitting inside that casing. It was powered by four 3 volt Eveready batteries. I remember sitting with my father and observing him open the backside of the radio and replace the batteries, once in two months or so. When he opened the sliding plastic sheet covering the battery compartment, I could get a glimpse of the complex circuitry sitting in the darkness further behind the battery compartment, and it indeed used to look like a mystery. I used to like the "tik" sound it used to make while inserting the batteries, and then while closing the battery compartment.
The radio used to be placed in a most prominent place in our living room (In fact, we had only one room and a kitchen at our home those days, so it was literally a "living room"). It always was treated with respect. Our days used to start with a radio program and end with another for many years. Whenever my school examinations came into the horizon, I would start becoming anxious and ask my mother to wake me up at 6AM everyday so that I could study for an hour in the morning. She would be punctual, and get up at 5:45 itself, and then switch on the radio. I could hear the Samskrit program they used to broadcast early in the morning, accompanied by the beautiful rendition of "Keyoora na vibhooshayanthi purusham..", though it didn't use to look so beautiful to me those days as I tried to postpone my wakeup process and ask my mother: "Amma.. just a five minutes more..". And after five minutes, I could hear the smell of kattan kappi which my mother would be making, and then I would reluctantly get up and go for brushing.
There are many programs which come to my mind when I think of radio. The "Vidyarthikalkku Vendi" program on weekdays at 7:10AM or something, was supposed to be for school students, so it was always played at our home, though we often found the music classes in it more amusing, in which they taught "Ooadi vilayadu pappa.." and a few strange songs from various Indian languages. Kandathum Kettathum and Palarum Palathum were five minutes programs similar to today's Munshi of Asianet, but they were weekly programs. We almost never missed these short social/political satirical comedy programs. Sundays were always special, as we had Nataka Ganangal in which we heard those evergreen songs like "sharkkara panthalil then mazha choriyum", "ambili ammava thamara kumbililendondu", "madhurikkum ormakale", "pampukalkku malamundu", "balikuteerangale...", "maarivillin" and many more, again and again, and again. At 12:30 or something, we had Kauthuka Vaarthakal, and in the afternoon there was some English music, which my father used to play. The film songs program on Sunday 1PM was special too, as they played new songs on Sundays. Later in the evening, they played Konkani Ganangal, and we used to try hard to make out the meanings of those songs.
Two or three times in a week, they broadcast "Natakam". "If you finish your studies quickly, we can hear natakam!", my mother would say, and we would promptly assemble to hear the radio-customized drama recording in the evenings. Once in an year, there used to be a weekly event called "Radio Natakolsavam" (not sure if it is still there), when they broadcast recordings of perhaps more superior quality dramas. All of these natakams lasted only one episode. The serialization of natakams, if I remember correctly, started with the drama version of C Radhakrishnan's Munpe Parakkunna Pakshikal and CV Raman Pillai's Marthanda Varma. Since we were familiar with their stories, we watched both of these with special interest, and I felt that the theme music of both these natakams were pretty fresh that time.
Exploring the Radio
One day, my father bought home a strange instrument, which he called as "eliminator". So, with this device, we no longer had to regularly feed the radio with batteries; The eliminator was connected to AC power point at one end and the other end to small hole on the radio, and it magically worked!
During this time frame, I also started playing around with our radio. I was given various tips by Satheesh, my cousin, who used to visit our home and stay with us during school vacations. So, I realized that there is this thing called "short wave" on the radio, and we can "tune" to various channels other than Malayalam. I liked the strange sounds we heard while doing this "tuning" from one end to the other. That time, it almost looked like voices from a remote planet, and the thought that we were able to connect to distant and unknown places and hear these voices, using this little box, sitting inside our "least-scientific" house, was fascinating.
Television Arrives
During 1980-84, we lived in a rented house owned by KVK Warrier, a freedom fighter. There used to be a naalu kettu house (which has now been demolished) of a relative of the Warrier nearby, and that is where I saw this magical instrument called Television for the first time. I think we were invited for some function at their home, though I don't recollect what it was. I remember eating the yellow Malayalee dish called kaalan for the first time there (my mother has never made kaalan at home), and after the sadya, they played a Malayalam film cassette. My mother, sister (only a couple of years old then) and me watched the film sitting on the shining black floor along with several other people, while my father preferred to skip the function. I liked the sadya, the naalu kettu that smelt of cows, and the movie. Even now, when I taste kaalan anywhere, I try to compare it with that day's kaalan, even though that taste of the distant memory has become more of a matter of imagination.
Even though television was around from 1980 itself, they were luxury items which only a handful of people at Irinjalakuda used to have. I think we didn't get television signals at our place, and people used TV mainly for playing movies from a VCR. Actually, I didn't know the difference between TV and VCR those days, and used to think that they are one and the same. The Malayalam television channel at Thiruvananthapuram was inaugurated in 1985, but I think it was sometime only in 1987 that we used to start getting useful signals. This coincided with the beginning of telecast of Ramanand Sagar's serialization of Ramayana, which led a revolution in Indian media and consumer electronics sector. Perhaps this revolutionary aspect of this crude and melodramatic picturization of our epic was not appreciated that time, and people would never have thought that poor old radio sets were going to be dumped soon, well, at most of the homes.
Ramayana had its actors wearing glittering ornaments and strongly colored costumes. The vaanaras had poorly made tails, which clearly looked like some sort of rubber tube wrapped in pieces of cloth, more or less of the same quality of the makeup that is used in drama competitions in school youth festivals. Though Arun Govil's Rama was decent enough, Ravana looked like a typical comic Bollywood villain, and Sita a talkative Bollywood heroine. War scenes were pathetic, and showed two arrows slowly moving against each other in air and confronting with each other. One arrow would make the other vanish, after which the owner of the vanished arrow would express shock (but nothing would happen to him, and they would continue fighting). But in spite of lack of style, Ramayana was literally worshiped by all. People bought television sets just to watch the serial - black and white sets, most of the time, and color, if they could afford - and those who didn't have the device at home, paraded to neighbors to watch the serial on Sunday mornings. People were anxious not to miss any episode of the serial, and when they had to attend a family function or something on Sundays at distant places, they would make sure that they identify houses in the nearby locality where television sets are available, where they could go and have the darshan in the morning.
Television at Kalady
We couldn't afford a television set that time, and continued to remain loyal to our little radio for a few more years. We couldn't watch the initial episodes of Ramayana, as none of our neighbors had television sets. My valyachchan at Kalady had already bought a Binatone TV set, and a color one at that. We used to visit Kalady during our school holidays, and our next visit was eagerly awaited, as we knew would be watching Ramayana this time.
At Kalady, it was indeed a celebration. The TV set was installed in a big room on the first floor, and some 20-30 people from nearby area were packed in this room to watch Ramayana. After Ramayana, there were various children's programs like Ek Do Theen Char, etc., and in the evenings we watched a few more programs for children, like Vikram Our Vethal, Dada Dadee Ki Kahani and Spiderman. On Sunday afternoon, they played award winning regional language movies, and Adoor's Mukhamukham was shown during our visit. I don't recollect much of the film, except that it showed a person sleeping most of the time, and that the audience slowly left the room one by one. I sincerely watched the movie till the end, because I thought that watching an award-winning movie would make me look important (I haven't watched Mukhamukham after that day - Perhaps I should watch it again sometime). There were no advertisements in between the movies - They had a 10 minute slot just before the movie when all the advertisements were shown, after which the movie was shown without interruptions (unless there was some news program in between).
The television set at Kalady was kept running throughout the day. I remember the instrumental music they used to play before evening news, and images of India's map panning on the screen, the beautiful songs of national integration like "Mile sur mera tumhara", and even the way they started a day's telecast, with the images of the Doordarshan logo slowly spiraling out and expanding to fill the screen.
Television at Home
Soon after Ramayana, they started BR Chopra's serialization of Mahabharata. This was a far superior work in terms of production quality, presentation, dialogues and performances, but when compared with the Amar Chitra Katha version of the epic which also was published at the same time, I liked the comics more. We got a chance to watch Mahabharata from the day it started, since Nanma Chechi, our neighbor, had returned from Dubai for good, and she bought a television set at home. On Sunday mornings, we marched to Nanma Chechi's home for watching Mahabharata. By then, Thiruvananthapuram Doordarshan had started showing Malayalam movies on Saturdays; we never missed these also.
Mahabharata ran for around two years. After that, it was Chandraprakash Dwivedi's Chanakya that took up the prime time on Sundays. Chanakya was very different from any other serial that was shown before. There were no kings wearing heavy costumes and ornaments covering their entire body, that made high noise when they walked; There were no gold-plated palaces either. Instead, there was liberal usage of clay and simple natural materials, and the attention paid to details in art direction to make the scenes look more real was remarkable. The director himself played Chanakya's role. He disappointed me initially, as I was again comparing with an Amar Chitra Katha comic book in which Chanakya was drawn as a tall man with a very aggressive look, and Chandraprakash Dwivedi's portrayal was totally different from this. But I started liking him later, and I still feel that Chanakya was one of the finest television programs aired in India. When Chanakya started, my father made the "historic decision" after a lot of deliberation, to buy a television set at home. The Nelco Blue Diamond 22 inch television was seated on a table in our living room (by then our house also had expanded to have a few more rooms other than the "living room").
Watching programs sitting in the comfort of our own home was a pleasurable experience. On the first day, we watched almost all programs, including a program on krishi, and we were mesmerized by the shining colors of brinjals and tomatoes on the screen. We also started watching all of the Malayalam and Hindi television serials, and I think those serials were far better than the "mega" serials of today. Parudeesayilekkulla Patha, Mikhayelinte Santhathikal, Reporter, Flying Sikh Milkha Singh, Malgudi Days and Thehkeekat were a few serials which we liked a lot that time, and Shyamaprasad's tele-film Uyirthezhunnelpu was also greatly appreciated. But none of them equaled the experience of watching Pather Panchali for the first time, which was telecast in 1992, when the great director was on his deathbed.
While all this happened, our radio set was slowly going to the background. It used to share the "living room" with television for some time, but then it was moved to another room. My father played it once in a while a little apologetically during daytime; And before going to sleep, he played the Carnatic music programs all days. But the natakams and Palarum Palathum programs were gradually forgotten.
One day, while doing some errands, the radio set fell down from my hand. No external damage was seen, but it refused to work after that, as if announcing a feeble protest. I dared to open the back side of the radio set using a screw driver, and the interiors which used to look so mysterious during my childhood, were left all open under sunlight. The circuitry was covered with dust and cobwebs, and I felt pity for the aging device. A cable appeared to be disconnected from the place where it was supposed to be attached; Even though I had no clue what that cable was for, I tried connecting it, and the radio started working again! My grandmother, who was observing my engineering practice, praised me, and I felt a little proud of myself.
Television and Cinema
I think there was not too much importance given to Cinema in Doordarshan those days, except for the telecast of films themselves, and weekly film music programs like Chithrahaar and Chithrageetham, and interviews with film personalities once in a while. But this was to change soon. They started Superhit Muquabala a new weekly Hindi film music program, and soon there were many more programs that were entirely based on films. Films were slowly taking over the television media. During this time, my father got transfered to the KSEB office at Kozhikode. He came home only once in a week, on Saturday evenings, and then returned to work on Monday mornings. When he came home after a tiring bus journey on Saturdays 9PM, he would always see me sitting in front of the TV and watching Ek Se Badkar Ek, a program based on latest Hindi film songs. I am sure he never used to like that sight. "Don't you have anything to study?", he would ask.
I think Aakash Vani tried to follow Doordarshan in this aspect that time, and started broadcasting "Shabda Rekha", audio tracks of movies edited to fit into a 1-hour slot. But who was going to hear an audio track, when another movie can be seen with its colorful visuals on the television at the same time?
Enter Satellite Channels
After completing my graduation in 1996, I had minimal interaction with television for four years. Initially, I was staying at a rented house in Bangalore, where I didn't have television, and then doing my higher studies where I never found time to watch television very often. This was the time when the Satellite Channel revolution started in India. Soon after my return to Bangalore in 2001, I bought a television. By this time, numerous Malayalam Satellite Channels also had come up, and Indian Media had changed its face completely. There would be no looking back now.
I was thinking about all these things today, since I am television-less now, after a long time. My television set stopped working three weeks back, and I am yet to repair it. Though not having the constant background noise from television was something which I took a week to adjust with, now I am finding it very peaceful at home.
I think Satellite Channels have affected our mindset in various ways. People would sit holding a remote controller in front of the television, start with channel zero and then keep on incrementing the channels, giving 2-3 seconds per channel. When it reaches channel 99, it goes back to zero, and then they would repeat the cycle. In effect, they don't watch any program at all. I too have done this many times, but no other thing irritates me more than the sight of seeing someone else doing this in front of me. I think the psychology behind this channel-surfing is linked with our attachment to life and its pleasures. We know that time is limited, so we want to select and enjoy the best; But the selection process itself takes up the complete time! May be I am becoming a bit philosophical today, thanks to my television set who wants to retire..
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07:46 pm
[Link] | Half-Moon
Bahman Ghobadi's film Half-Moon is about a famous musician living in Iran, who wants to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan and give a concert, probably his last one. Mamo, now an old man, gets a permit to enter Iraq after trying for a long time. His journey is by a bizarre looking bus with wooden seats. Along with him there are a set of musicians whom he refers as his sons (a few of them looking as old as him). Some of them carry laptops and access Internet as the bus passes through barren and hilly landscapes of Iran!!. To make things more interesting, the bus is driven by an enthusiastic fan of Mamo, who is also very business-minded and has a handy cam installed on the vehicle to videograph this legendary journey, which he hopes to sell to CNN or BBC. He is a cock-fight organizer by profession, and his pet bird sits near him in the bus, observing all things.
Mamo is having a recurring vision of a girl dragging a coffin uphill over snow, and it seems a soothsayer had even advised against this journey, as he thinks that something bad will happen to Mamo. But Mamo is insistent. On the way, they stop at a settlement, which has all its houses located on a valley, and makes a great sight from distance. This is the place where hundreds of female singers exiled from Iraq are living. Mamo has a disciple named Hesho in this village, whom he wants to take along with him to Kurdistan. Hesho doesn't have a travel permit, and she thinks that she would put Mamo also into trouble, and is reluctant to come; But Mamo says without her there would be no concert. Rest of the film shows Mamo's eventful journey to Iraq.
While I enjoyed watching Half-Moon and felt that it made a dreamlike experience with its unusual characters and great visuals, I am not sure if I understood it fully. There were many instances where I felt that the director was trying to say something, but I couldn t make out what it is. For example, in the climax scene we see Mamo entering a coffin, and then suddenly we see a quick cut to the scene in which Hesho lies down hiding inside a wooden box sort of thing in the bus. Is the director trying to make a comment on the lack of freedom of women? I don't know. Similarly, I could not understand the real significance of the girl named Half-Moon appearing near the climax (played by the actress Golshifteh Farahani - I have seen her in another Iranian movie called Santoori - How beautiful she is!). Is she representing the old man's death itself? I am not sure..
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01:45 pm
[Link] | Accent Helps!
K(arnataka)SRTC online reservation website (ksrtc.in) is something which managers in software industry would call as having a lot of "scope for improvement".
Once you login for ticket reservation, you would want to give your source and destination and see if there are tickets available for a particular date in any of the KSRTC buses. But this is not at all a straight-forward thing in the website. First of all, you need to understand that there are more than a dozen different types of buses (like Rajahamsa, Rajahamsa Executive, Mayura Deluxe, and so on), and there are different timezones in which a bus can depart (like 16:00-18:00, 18:00-20:00 and so on). When you give your source and destination, you will be led to a detailed query page, where you have to select "more specific" source and destination once again from two drop-boxes (For example, if you entered TRICHUR as destination, your drop box would contain an entry called "TRICHUR BUS STAND" which you will have to select), and also try various combinations of the above parameters to find out if there is a ticket available in that particular combination. This is indeed a time-consuming process. But you get a break once in a while, as the system very often goes under "maintenance" (may be they are in the process of adding more granular timezones - like 16:00-16:15, 16:15-16:25 for example, so that user gets a more complete investigation experience during the booking process).
I happened to make an online reservation recently, using a credit card for payment. Two times, the transactions failed due to connectivity issues, but the third time it succeeded, and I could see my ticket in the booking history. But in the credit card statement, the money was deducted three times! The only customer service contact information available in their website was an email address, which didn't respond to my complaint for many days. I checked their Right of Information documents published in the website to see how I could escalate the problem, but I could only see a PDF file giving an organization chart written in Kannada (with names alone, and no contact numbers, unless the numbers themselves are written in Kannada).
I somehow managed to find a few KSRTC telephone numbers from Internet and called them, but most of them just cut the phone stating that they don't address e-tickets, and kept on redirecting me to other people. I was about to give up, but then I thought of giving a last try and play some gimmick. I called one of those numbers again, and this time I spoke with a fake foreign accent. And this time, the person didn't cut the phone! He transfered to an accounts department, they noted down my transaction number, and told that they will refund the amount in a week.
P.S. As I finished writing this, I also got an email from them stating that the refund will be issued to my bank in three days. Hope this works, and I wont have to use my mimicry skills once again :)
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07:40 pm
[Link] | Unity in Diversity
Near my home, there are six or seven small Hindu temples, a big church, and two large mosques. These all have some sort of a permanent structure. In addition to these, makeshift places for worship pop once in a few months here and there, made for special local festivals lasting for a few days. These temples are essentially small sheds made using wooden poles and tarpaulin, usually on many of the narrow inner roads in the area (blocking the traffic, of course). A small table, covered with a plastic sheet with flowery design, would be placed in the middle of the shed, and the idol would be kept on this table, decorated using plastic flowers, balloons and a few inexpensive glittering things. The key part of the whole thing is an array of loudspeakers, that would be installed around the shed. Irrespective of the category of the idol, on all days during these special festivals, starting from early morning, they would play Kannada and Tamil film songs of all genre and time period. These group of speakers would ensure that people living within at least 200 meters radius are paying proper attention to the festivals, feeling religious, and are hopefully enlightened. The music would stop only by midnight, so there is maximum coverage.
I have often tried to figure out what is the significance of these festivals. They are not celebrated on any of the "important" occasions known to me, but on arbitrary days. Most of the times, other than the film songs and this decorated structure with two or three people standing around it, there is nothing much to the festivals. But there have been occasions when these festivals were held on a grander scale, with live music shows conducted on stages made in the middle of the road, etc. Once they even installed closed circuit televisions at various places (along with loud speakers) in a wider area so that more people can enjoy the programs sitting in their homes or doorsteps.
Note that these are only Hindu or Christian festivals. Muslims don't believe in idol worship, and there are no such festivals from their side. So, they get to use the loudspeakers only for their daily prayers.
One interesting thing with these festival films songs is that, at the end of a festival, I would start liking the songs of some new movie. This time, it was Aadhavan, a new Tamil movie. I was not impressed with the songs when I watched its promos on television, and felt that other than Nayanthara, there is no particular reason for me to watch its videos. But in a recent local festival that ended yesterday, they played the songs from this movie more than a dozen times, and since I was mostly at home during the festival, I ended up liking these songs.
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09:55 pm
[Link] | Mrityunjay
This weekend, I read the Malayalam translation of Assamese novel Mrityunjay written by Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya, published by DC Books as part of their "Great Indian Literature" series. This Jnanpeet award winning novel tells the story of a turbulent period in Assam, surrounding the Quit India Movement. It was the last phase of India's Freedom Struggle, but people were more confused than ever. Some freedom fighters continue to follow Gandhi's recommendation of non-violence, while a few have more revolutionary ideas. The rulers are trying to suppress all forms of voices against them, while some of police officers are worried thinking what will happen to them if India attains freedom. Common people spent their days in desperation and hope.
Bulk of this novel narrates the plan and execution of a mission of a group of revolutionaries, to derail a military train while it passes through the forests. While reading this, I could visualize it as a thriller movie, set in the beautiful but tough terrain on the banks of Brahmaputra and its tributaries - It was after quite a long time that I was reading such an engaging Malayalam book (though a translation), and I enjoyed reading it. In some sense, this part reminded me of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's famous nineteenth century work, Anandmath. Both of these novels have romanticized freedom struggle, though in Mrityunjay this aspect is very limited; The characters are not mere ideological symbols here, but they are well-developed, and are real people with flesh and blood. The dilemma in the minds of the revolutionaries when they take the path of violence is nicely portrayed, and so is the developing comradery between them in spite of differences in opinion.
Translation by P Madhavan Pillai (Malayalees should thank him and Ravi Varma for bringing so many renowned works from other Indian languages to us) is decent in most of the parts, but at some places I felt that he was being a little careless, and a bit of editorial touch would have helped.
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06:19 pm
[Link] | It rains almost every day now. Since 2001, I don't think Bangalore has had such a lengthy rainy season like this year. May be the quantity of rain is not that great, but I think it has rained almost every alternate day starting from this June.
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09:02 pm
[Link] | Elephas Maximus
Elephas Maximus - A Portrait of the Indian Elephant, written by Stephen Alter, is neither a purely academic study of the majestic species, nor a collection of anecdotes relating to close association with elephants, as I expected. It is a mix of both. Cherishing his childhood memories of observing elephants in Indian forests, Stephen Alter spent an year studying the myths, legends and traditions associated with elephants in India, and the presence of elephants in India's art and culture, and exploring the state of elephants in India in the wild, and briefly, in captivity. This book is a result of these explorations. The author's "encounters" with wild elephants are mostly through guided trips in India's National Parks as a tourist. There are no dramatic narratives of adventures or scientific disclosures, and results of extensive study (which indeed have to be appreciated) are not presented dryly. Its simplicity and an overall travelogue-like nature makes this book a delightful read.
There are ten essays in this book. Four are on the experiences at National Parks (Corbett, Nagarhole, Rajaji and Kaziranga), while three explore the association of elephants with India's art, literature and warfare. There is a lengthy essay that talks about the origin and distribution of elephants, and another on elephants in captivity at Mudumalai and Guruvayoor, and one on the festival of the elephant-god - Ganapathi - at Mumbai. The essays are not restricted to these topics, but there are overlaps - for example, while in Assam, the author gives a beautiful narration of his trip to a monastery in an island in Brahmaputra, to see a copy of Hastividyarnava, an ancient manuscript on elephants.
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