MINUET

“Your pressure’s fine,” the doctor says,
unwrapping the velcro. A ritual for a fever,
and I’m done. “How’s the sugar?” he grins –
an old joke, knowing I don’t much give a
damn one way or other. “Paying for my sins
Doc,” I smile back, “you know my ways!”

We go through this vaudeville, he and I,
each time some nuisance knocks me flat.
He writes his stuff, I do mine, both assured
in our certitudes, both aware of what we’re at.
It’s been long enough for us to be inured.
Well… at least it’s a harmless enough lie.

***

Munnabhai MBBS (MMBBS) and Rang de Basanti (RDB) – Flawed Beyond Recompense

Both are, in a manner of speaking, super-duper hits. Both are targeted at the Indian youth and makes pretenses to be different cinema. Both have captured the imagination of the Indian youth who swear by the originality of both movies, not realizing that both movies are flawed beyond recompense, at least, to me, a minority of one.

RANG DE BASANTI (RDB)
RDB was shown on Independence Day, probably to incite patriotic feeling in citizens. Patriotism? Is killing your own father – as one of the protagonists does, although, the subject is a corrupt politician – patriotism? The message here is that murder is good and that would include parricide. Are we back in the dark ages? Amir Khan in a scene from the film is clearly shown giving money to a policeman to stay off a fight that his friends had started. The message here is that bribery is also very good and worth emulating.

In another scene which I found very objectionable, the character played by Amir Khan is shown standing on a high wall bending backwards and drinking beer, a hit song sequence, I guess. Drinking while bending backwards down into a precipitous pond is a juvenile and dangerous exercise for a youth, of that everyone is aware. But the movie is absolutely insouciant about the wrong images it is sending to the youth. Firstly, the impression created is that drinking is good, and drinking and doing risky things are even better.

What sort of message does this convey to the youth? I will summarize: Parricide is good, bribery is good, drinking and doing foolish stunts is good. How can such a movie not even be panned by critics who rave about its great qualities and even confer awards on it? How can a censor board – which has been constituted for this purpose – not object, at least, where the politician is shown as being bad and killed by his own son?

There are many more flaws in this supposedly youth cult film which I am not mentioning here. One of them is lewd remarks made to a white girl which she cannot understand. It is clear that there is sexual harassment involved. The movie left a bad taste in my mouth. Are our youth so cynical as to applaud all these bad qualities in themselves? The stereotype here is youth of the north somewhere around the Punjab. Do they behave so grossly, if so, what can the nation expect from these citizens? Peace or violence?

This is over the top, way too exaggerated, and made with a view to appeal to the baser instincts of viewers. Is it an ironic reflection of the state we are in that this movie is a huge hit?

MUNNABHAI MBBS (MMBBS)
Here's another flawed film that is a super box-office hit. Here the protagonists are Central Indians, most notably Bambaiya, and talk the language of the Bombay hoodlums. The character played by Sanjay Dutt is admitted to a medical degree college to train as a doctor. There is a shortage of bodies to be dissected and the hoodlum phones his sidekick to bring him a body from somewhere. The sidekick played by Harshad Warsi clobbers and kidnaps an oriental-looking man and brings him to the dissecting table.

Okay, okay, what went wrong here? Raju Hirani, in an interview said the film portrays some of the problems that MBBS students face during their training. Yes, there is a shortage of bodies in medical colleges, but, can it be solved by clobbering a foreign-looking oriental and bringing him to the laboratory in a sack? Again, what message are you sending across Raju Hirani?

Munnabhai doesn't know a single letter in the proverbial three "r's", even to spell or sign his own name and forces a doctor to impersonate him in the medical college entrance examination. And, surprise, surprise, he is admitted. He is doing all this to take revenge for some slight against his family's honor. Message: cheating in exams is good for your family honor.

The irony doesn't end there. Munnabhai becomes a doctor in the end. That means cheating, lying, impersonating, threatening teachers; all are accepted behavior in Indian medical colleges. Believe me when I say freaky messages are being conveyed here, messages full of bitterness, insubordination, deprivation, and the use of violence.

Would the people of India trust the medical fraternity after seeing such gross exaggerations of their profession? Why didn't they speak out? Is that again an indication of some malaise at the root of the medical system that extracts millions of rupees from students seeking admission into medical colleges?

And this film too is a box office hit. It raked in enough cash to encourage the director to make a sequel with the same theme. The sequel goes a bit further and hints that hoodlums should be treated on the level of national figures – with pictures of them printed on currency notes. What an insult to the nation's leadership! I can only say, what guts and gumption these directors exhibit to the public, and that when it comes to exaggerations Indian films recognize no boundaries.

As they say, "Whither, Indian Cinema?"
Tags: RANG DE BASANTI, Amir Khan, sexual harassment, MUNNABHAI MBBS, Raju Hirani, Indian films, Bollywood

An ode to Qana

Further than proximate fires
and natal storms
We bury innumerable open hands
into the pollen smell of
unconciousness.

Into the womb of this cold earth.
Hands that no longer seek warmth.
Shut in.

The invisible shadow of missiles lurk
Hungry. Arrogant, cascading on thickets
and thorns.
And a hush falls on yellow eyes,
quiet bodies.

Leaves wilt into shadows of green.
No winds resurrect them. Neither water.
The Sun does not sing in them
the galvanic rhythm of seasons.


The black hands of death break
into secret sounds
of a simoom.
And our mouth lies caged in
hypnotic threads
In our ashen breast
whispered into untamed disregard
to
life,
to the earth and the sky.

Loneliness

I pause midway in the in the whirl,
Of deadlines, things undone,
And averaged the sadness and joys -
There remains only loneliness,
Of which I see no cure,
No bitter palliatives, no anodyne.

We remain in life’s journey,
Like loners sitting depressed,
On solitary park benches, or,
Staring at people from balconies,
Loneliness gnawing at our minds,
As hungry ants at a grain of food.

Often in life’s vicious lanes,
In lonesome moments,
It’s our failures we ponder,
Not the joys and victories; both,
We have given and earned;
Not others’ courage, but faults.

When in each passing lonely moment,
I count the millions of seconds,
I was alive to witness this world, and,
Mimetic thoughts that pass into eternity,
My loneliness vanishes, I shout,
“I live; I am alive this lonely moment.”
(c) John, August 2006
Tags: Loneliness, poetry

ENIGMA

No one really got the measure of you,
Not all your biographers, who erred
On one side or the other. And the film –
Predictably, one would think – deferred
To the image, meant to overwhelm
With landscape and legend. And the few

Slightly wiser lapped it up like the rest.
After all, the public pieces were there
In splendid scope, and true more or less.
And since a hero was intended, only fair
The treatment, even the slight excess.
The director certainly knew best.

But there was more to you than fancy
Dress, or driving flags and crescents
To some private Acre of your own –
That was a sort of crusade in essence
Anyway, whose seeds were sown
In Oxford probably, or your infancy

Cutting teeth on castles. Still, that came
To nought, save as happy windfall
For venal masters; in the event,
A foregone outcome you couldn’t stall.
Yet there was more to disillusionment
Than that drama in a three-hour frame,

Beyond the lens’s circumscription
Or the boards of books: what romance
Was it that so irrevocably soured –
Caught in that brief backward glance
But inadequately – what powered
Your effacement into almost fiction?

***

Nocturne

Let me speak in grasshopper hazes
if you want to be green
Let me fade in the chime of fireflies
if you need to feed on fleeting darkness.
And tell you all there is to know about
arriving storms and earthquakes.

Burn like the soft fiery moon
if you shall lose your way among shadows.
A desertwind if you forget
the tongue of water.
and tell you stories about absent tides.

A raindrop falling quietly
into the kohl lined sea.
A sliver of moisture
wrapped in your silence
forever between petals
and you can sail me to some obscure sound
stringed to the lashes of summer breeze
every night.

Fire

Ignite then
slowly inside
deep.
Without the song of smoke
or crackle of splinters.
Like an obscure
splash of water
in the womb of aged rivers
born from butterfly-oars
sailing through nameless fogs.
Before

Kohl snows,
dreamful,
dark.
from ashes
burnt.
Awake wide,
magic brimming,
windswept.

Carried through maritime
sand dunes
Aflight on
desert’s wings.
As the monotone dusk sits licking
blisters,
hollowed
out
to memory.

Of storms and related things

Each day winds blow,
cocoa dark
from north to south
east to west
and wherever they go
unwithheld.
They bring the
youth of flowers
to some
and fable of death
and wars
to strangers.
Aged winds from hushed wildflowers
frenzied and burnt.
Long lived.
Some from the sea, moist,
tranquil.


Each day a night grows,
naked
unkempt and wistful
on the tender mesh of swansong laziness.
feeding on the echoing madness
that is left behind.
The moon only rises to mold it.


Each day we falter
to speak
of hopeless causes
and long lost reasons
but the world still spins
through some cannibal spell
that makes not a pause.

And each a day distance grows
From the fallen leaf
to the absent ear.
And we do not hear
the sepulchral skies
that the tree sings.

Each day a fire dies,
behind the wooden heart of logs
and barks
ashes to ashes.
Flesh, blood and bone,
And another ignited.

Bombay

Bombay

In your bosom I wake up with fear,
In your sky there’s only unending tears,
You always roar, but within,
Hangs silence like a shroud of death.

You are rocked, periodically, by bombs,
Yet, people go about their business,
As if nothing happened, all’s well,
Are they too dazed to protest?

In your hungry, convoluted entrails,
Lies paupers and millionaires,
Separated only by the whimsy,
Of your very partial caress.

On your skyline of sooty chimneys,
Decaying concrete, bristling antennas,
Are the sad stories of fortunes,
Made and lost, just as lost loves.

City of gold, they say, which never sleeps,
Will you stay awake, tonight,
Wipe away our cascading tears,
And give our tired bodies some sleep?

So you're dead...?

- In memory of Syd Barret

last night came a message from a friend:
'Syd Barret died'.
yeah, so? i am dead too, fending off masked people,
tracked documents,
words, words, words, too many words
...and yet, what is this feeling, this lack of feeling?

Another death.
The end of hope
for another song, poetry, image
strung on your Fender, end of a life
that was dead anyway,
except now there's something permanent
about it, 6 feet under
...no more music, no more words.

Shine now under red mud
or beneath blue skies, wherever you longed to be
paint under a willow tree
all the words you thought you lost in your haze
in colors that will enhance the black ties
your divided band wears for you
today, shine on you diamond,
in the darkness of our memories of you.