Losing the plot.

The last time I met Avantika, Ashu’s younger daughter, was when she came here last November-December to attend a big fat Punjabi wedding in her mother’s family. It was then that, in my time-tested arrogance, I had the temerity to recommend to her Padosan as a comedy worth watching. She had already seen it. “I didn’t like it, Dada,” she said matter-of-factly. It suddenly dawned on me there and then that this business of the older generation’s experience benefitting the younger generation is a non-starter. Avantika is a Digital Native from New Jersey. I’m at best a Ludditesque, reluctant, late-adopting Digital Immigrant ill at ease in the fast changing world. http://tinyurl.com/43fygl. In other words, my experience is of no use, value or consequence to her. For her, it’s maybe cool to pay Rs 320/- to see 3 Idiots in a multiplex and an extra Rs 50/- for a tub of pop corn. For me, it’s idiotic, nay criminal. Get the drift?

The Gift.

Pop culture has an entire mystical edifice built around 'giving’. The Biblical-sounding admonition, “’Tis better to give than receive” sums it up. Christmas is the season of giving. It’s the Christmas spirit, see? http://digbig.com/5bawdt. Santa Claus is also a part of it, I guess. What’s his role in the whole season-of-giving rigmarole? Frankly, he’s the guy who sits in a mall to act as a conduit of children’s wish lists. The marketing suits hire him. So, he owes them one. Things got murkier when ol’ O.Henry from good ol’ Greensboro hopped on the giving wagon with his The Gift of the Magi. http://digbig.com/5bawdw. This short story ranks with the best in the genre. O.Henry − William Sidney Porter in real life − was the son of Algernon Sidney, a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter. His great-uncle, Jonathan Worth, was governor of North Carolina from 1865 to 1868. Dogged by bad luck, he was incarcerated between 1897 and 1901 for alleged embezzlement of bank funds. In1910, O.Henry died of diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver in New York. Five years earlier, he wrote The Gift of the Magi in the bar of Pete’s Tavern, extant even now, in the Gramercy area of Manhattan. http://digbig.com/5bawed. Giving is a sign of love was his message. But a sign to whom? In Della and Jim’s case, there was no need to prove their love for each other. In buying the gifts they could scarcely afford they were merely conforming to a pop-culture ‘tradition’ fuelled chiefly by commerce. Were the Magi’s "gifts of gold and of frankincense and of myrrh" to the new-born in the manger a wise and thoughtful choice? Frankincense and myrrh were probably for the baby’s body rub. What about gold, though? Was it a tribute to the perceived royalty and divinity of Jesus perhaps? P.S.: This morning, purely by accident, I happened to watch on the MGM Channel a 1988 movie called Masquerade. http://digbig.com/5bawfj. It’s about Olivia, a recently orphaned heiress swept off her feet by a dashing yacht racing skipper (Tim). To start with, his courtship is a part of a conspiracy to wed and kill her and share her wealth with his co-conspirators. But as their relationship grows, he begins to love her in right earnest so much so that, after marriage, he voluntarily gets his name removed from her will without her knowledge. He wants nothing from her, in short. He even sacrifices his life to save hers. How about that? (I know. I know. It's only a movie.)

Babes in the woods? Tiger lurking!

If what Jamie Jungers says http://digbig.com/5batwk is not an experiment with truth http://digbig.com/5batwm, Tiger has walked willy-nilly into the Mahatma league. He is now on par with MK Gandhi no less. (AN AUTOBIGRAPHY OR The story of my experiments with truth, Chapter 8: My Father’s Death and My Double Shame, p.16). How come nobody noticed it?

Amar Akbar Anthony, anyone?

Recently, one morning, I was listening on my iPod to Mohamed Rafi singing the qawali ‘Pardah Hai Pardah’ from Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony. It suddenly occurred to me what an ass I had been not to have made friends with Desai when I had the chance. I used to bump into him in the late fifties in our mutual friend’s (Vinay’s) den in the Bhagini Samaj building virtually next door to 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde. We somehow never hit it off. By all accounts, he was a gem of a guy whereas I used to be, in those days, an opinionated oaf who took himself too seriously. I remember thinking of him as a wastrel because he had quit college and was doing nothing. He used to borrow comics books from Vinay because he did not have money to pay the circulating library fees by his own admission. Then he disappeared from the scene. Vinay told me that he was probably assisting his brother in film production. In 1960, MD directed the Raj Kapoor and Nutan starrer Chhalia. It had hit songs and did quite well at the box office. His magnum opus unarguably was Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). I enjoyed it when I saw it in Apsara Talkies in spite of the innumerable cinematic clichés he peppered it with. For instance, in the opening scene under the credits, blood from the three long-separated sons of different religions flowed into the veins of the mother (Mother India?). Then, in the unabashedly exploitative ‘Shirdiwale Sai Baba’ sequence, the son’s prayer triggered a miraculous recovery of the mother from the jaws of death. There was nevertheless an infectious joie de vivre he managed to inject in the movie that made it a fabulous fun flick. The story, by the way, was credited to Desai’s wife who was from the Khetwadi Main Road neighbourhood. Even after MD’s success, the couple continued to live in the same neighbourhood. What was incredible in the Manmohan Desai saga was the ending totally out of synch with his persona. He jumped to his death from the terrace of his building abutting the Bhagini Samaj building. Inexplicable!

Alternative History: freedom or transfer of power?

Come to think of it, the Congress Party at the outset was almost a non-starter. It debuted, on 28 December 1885, somewhat anemically under the baton of Allan Octavian Hume, Esq., formerly of the Indian Civil Service, a decorated veteran of the 1857 rebellion and coincidentally also a noted ornithologist, with the aim of keeping a watch over native civil unrest and collaborating with the British Imperialist administration. The idea was perhaps to act as a facilitator for the Indian accommodation to the powers that happened to be.

I just finished reading Freedom Struggle Betrayed: India 1885- 1947 (originally entitled Indian National Congress: How Indian? How National?). Described by its publisher as a search for answers to basic political and economic questions, it tells a story about how India won freedom and what role the Indian National Congress played, quite different from what we read in school history and other popular narratives. The thrust of the argument here is that what we learned about what happened is a huge and horrendous lie.

The Indian National Congress was always a collaborator or comprador of the British Raj right from the beginning with a program of lukewarm petition politics. It was so when Dadabhai Nowroji, Gokhale, Sir Phirozeshah Mehta and like-minded moderates − closely linked with the Indian businessmen, financiers and landed gentry − were running it in the early days. It remained so even when Mahatma Gandhi took over the reins of the Party and steered it right till 1947. The book cites evidence, chapter and verse, from various published sources to make a case for the betrayal of the freedom struggle by the Congress Party at every step of the way. It points a finger at Gandhi as the principal villain. Among his many trespasses cited in the narrative are the famous Champaran campaign, his intervention in the Ahmedabad textile strike and the Kheda episode. In all these instances, Gandhi persuaded the victims of injustice − the working class and the peasantry − to settle for less than what they had fought for. The beneficiaries of his intervention were the exploiters who got away with having to pay less than the rightful penalty. Similarly, in other instances where Gandhi claimed to be agitating against the British Raj, he would stop the movement when it had gained momentum but before it had really started to hurt the Raj. The famous example was the Chauri Chaura incidence. All these are seen by the authors of the book as an abject continuation of petition politics at the cost especially of the downtrodden masses, i.e., the working class and the peasantry. Gandhi is also accused of manipulating the Congress Party to suit his will and whims. There is a long list of transgressions in the book to his debit. The book is sharply critical of Nehru as well for his socialist “pretensions” and his claim that he was a champion of the rural masses. But once again the blame is shifted to the puppet master or Svengali aka as the Mahatma for manipulating Nehru on many policy issues favouring the other side. The trouble with Nehru was that he was a fairly decent writer with probably a writer’s ability to deceive himself and others.

My own take on reading the alternative history of the Indian freedom movement and thinking about it in the light of what little I’ve managed to learn on my own about Gandhi is that there could be quite a bit of truth in what it says. Reading Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates is a big eye opener. One of the grossest instances of his interference in the lives of his associates is how he punished an adopted daughter Jeki for her sexual transgression involving his own son Manilal. http://digbig.com/4yaae and http://digbig.com/4yaaf. In one of my earlier posts http://digbig.com/5basgm, I had written, inter alia, as follows: “This [Girja Kumar’s] narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering.” He could have lived up to the image the report in question accords him, in short.

Did India wake up to freedom at midnight on 15 August 1947? http://digbig.com/5basma Or, was there simply a transfer of power from the British Imperialists to their equally ruthless Indian compradors?

Take your pick or toss a coin.

Conspiracy by omission.

As a rule, I distrust and shun conspiracy theories. Today, I’m going to spin one. It has been bothering me for a long time. The more I try to shoo it away, the more it refuses to vamoose. It concerns the last months of Gandhi’s life. He had become something of an embarrassment and a liability to the powers that happened to be then and there as well as to his colleagues. His mahayajna – his by then notorious Brahmacharya experiments, to be precise − had infuriated his close associates including Sardar Patel who had accused him of committing adharma – of being guilty of moral and spiritual decadence, in other words. Long time colleagues like Kishorelal Mashruwala and Narhari Parekh and even Devdas Gandhi joined in the protest. Thakkar Bappa, a top associate of Gandhi, journeyed to Noakhali in December 1946 to dissuade him from continuing his mahayajna. Gandhi felt completely isolated. “For after all I am not God, “he wrote to Birla. “I can commit mistakes; … this may prove to be my biggest at the fag-end of my life. … all my well-wishers can open my eyes if they oppose me. If they do not … I shall go from hence even as I am … Whatever I am doing here is a part of my yajna.” He was totally transparent. “… when I take M[anu] in my lap, do I do so as a pure-hearted father or as a father who has strayed from the path of virtue? What I am doing is nothing new to me: in thought I have done it for the last fifty years; in action, in varying degrees, over quite a number of years.” In February 1947, he spoke of publishing the findings of his research but nothing came out of it. His honesty and courage to follow his convictions did not cut ice with his followers. The old man had to be punished with at least a slap on his wrist if nothing worse. Meanwhile his intervention on behalf of the Indian Muslims and his recommendation to the Government of India to pay Pakistan her share of the pre-partition finances (Rs 55 crore) had raised the hackles of the Hindu fundamentalists in and out of the Congress Party. Several attempts had already been made on Gandhi’s life. B G Kher, the then Chief Minister of the Bombay Presidency and a close confidant of the Central Home Minister Sardar Patel, had been apprised of the plot by Dr J C Jain after he had got an inkling of it from Madanlal Pahwa, one of Godse’s fellow conspirators. Balukaka Kanitkar, a well-respected Congressman from Pune, learned of the plot from G V Ketkar – a former editor of Kesari. He wrote a registered letter to inform Kher. The intelligence was passed on to the authorities in Delhi and yet the security was not beefed up. http://digbig.com/5baqge. The Godse Brothers, Apte, Madanlal and their colleagues were just some of the conspirators apparently. There were more who collaborated by omission. Culpable negligence, anyone?

Misguided?

In the typically self-deprecating, understated RKN style, Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Narayanswamy once described how his renowned novel The Guide written in his room at The Carlton during his 1956 Berkley (California) sojourn on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship was reduced to a distorted caricature by Bollywood’s preference for the “canned” instead of the genuine and the sanitized instead of the raw. For instance, he wrote how, after condescending to take his guided tour of authentic ready-made locations peopled with authentic ready-made crowds at the time of a fair to replicate Malgudi, the director and the lead star preferred specially erected, exorbitantly expensive sets in Jaipur and a cast of thousands of junior artistes called “extras” in those days before political correctness came to our shores. They also soft-pedaled on the adultery angle. The eponymously titled essay where Narayan wrote about how his The Guide metamorphosed into Vijay Anand’s Guide happens to be in a collection of his non-fiction I own that is right now out of my reach. A friend who borrowed it quite a while back has not returned it so far. Be that as it may, I quite enjoyed Navketan’s Vijay Anand-directed Guide (1965) particularly for Sachin Dev Burman’s music. I read The Guide much, much later. In retrospect, what had transpired, I guess, was that Vijay Anand could not break away from the then prevalent norms and style of film making – contrary to RK Narayan’s expectations. Had the director lived up to the author’s standards, maybe an art movie would have been born instead of the box office bonanza that Guide turned out to be.

Obsessed with Bom Bahia?

“The trouble with poetry is that it doesn’t call a spade a spade. Anthropomorphic language tends to confuse every issue. For instance, if you call a piece of real estate motherland or fatherland, you’re bound to confound the confusion by believing yourself in the role of her/his gallant son/daughter and transferring a host of human attributes and emotions to her/him.” http://digbig.com/5bamsx. This applies to a city, as well. No matter what anyone says, in the final analysis, it is no more than a swath of real estate. Like the city named Mumbai, the erstwhile Bombay, believed by some to be the Anglicization of the Portuguese name ‘Bom Bahia’ (= good bay or good harbour), when it changed hands from Portugal to Great Britain as a part of Catharine de Braganza’s trousseau when she married Charles II in 1662. The Portuguese first visited the good bay in 1509 and grabbed it from Bahadur Shah of Gujrat in 1530. Citing documents dated from 1525, a leading Portuguese etymological authority, José Pedro Machado, traced the origin of the name to the Marathi term ‘Mumba Devi’, the city deity. From it came the name Mombaim later modified to Bombaim and probably further to Bom Bahia, he argued. Be that as it may, when the British got their hands on Bombay, it was an archipelago of seven islands: Colaba. Little Colaba, Bombay, Mazgaon, Parel, Worli and Mahim from South to North. After Shivaji’s plunder of Surat in 1664, the East India Company shifted its operation to Bombay in 1668 paying an annual lease rent of £10 sterling to the Royal Family – an arrangement confirmed by William III in 1669. A securely fortified area for the British officials’ work and living spaces – known as ‘Fort’ even today – was built on the largest island, Bombay, with only three gates (Apollo Gate to the South, Bazaar Gate to the North and Church Gate to the West) as the sole access to it. Within the Fort, there were offices, shops, commercial establishments, warehouses and churches. The locals, among them quite a few Pathare Prabhu Sokajis http://digbig.com/5bamtc, used to enter the Fort in the morning and quit it in the evening using the North or the West Gates. A step in 1860 to consolidate the seven islands was the building of the Colaba Causeway (now Shahid Bhagatsingh Marg) from Sassoon Dock at the South end to Museum at the North. Around 1782, Lord William Hornby, Governor of Bombay, started the Hornby Vellard project as a first step to connect all the islands north of the Bombay island. Ramji Shivaji Parbhu, a Pathare Prabhu contractor, got the contract. The idea behind it was to construct a bund that would prevent sea water from flooding the areas neighbouring the Worli Creek at high tide. According to one legend, during the construction, the sea wall kept collapsing till a Laxmi idol was recovered from the sea and was consecrated in the specially built Mahalaxmi Temple close to Haji Ali. The second stage of the reclamation was to fill in the shallows between the islands of Parel, Worli, Bombay, Mazagaon and Mahim with a bund to stop sea water intruding into the nearby areas. The Governor went ahead with the project in spite of the Company Directors saying No to his proposal and was reportedly sacked for his insubordination.

Irony of ironies.

Cliché of clichés! What to do? Jawaharlal Nehru wrote on p.333 of his An Autobiography (London, 1953) that he was “attracted to the idea of losing the house [the ancestral Anand Bhavan in Allahabad]. I felt that would bring me nearer to the peasants who were being dispossessed…”. This was the state of his mind after his father Motilal’s death on 6 February 1931. Jawaharlal had been active in the cause of the peasantry since 1920. He had walked with them under the scorching sun, listened patiently to their tales of exploitation and dispossession and even managed to lessen their misery to some extent owing to the moral pressure exerted on the Goverment and the landlords by the agrarian movement of which he had become a part. In fact, his first glimpse of the UP peasantry had, according to his own admission (ibid., page 52), filled him “with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easy-going and comfortable life and our own petty politics of the city which ignored the vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, and sorrow at degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.” Nonetheless, after independence, the same Jawaharlal thought nothing of dispossessing the Indian peasantry for building his temples of modern India (mega dams and mammoth public sector undertakings). He did nothing to stop the ruthless and venal Indian State from appropriating all the national resources with impunity and in the process dispossessing the already impoverished masses. http://digbig.com/5bamam.

Worse than yesterday and today.

I’m no futurologist. Neither am I a born pessimist. What I’m about to write is based on observation. I could be totally off the mark when I say that life will get worse and worse – never better hereafter. Ever after. That is going to happen because mankind has been profligate all along. What’s more, we refuse to learn from our mistakes. In Mumbai, for example, water will become scarcer and scarcer as high-rises keep rising all over the landscape and people callously insist on taking long showers, soaking in tubs and using high-end washing machines that waste water. Soon, power cuts may become pandemic even in South Bombay – oops, Mumbai. The recent Congress Party’s call for austerity should have been contextualized properly. They should have placed it squarely in the framework of the coming drought of resources which is likely to last for a long, long time in the absence of a miracle like a technological breakthrough or a major geological find. In the interim, we have to make the best we can of what is available. Greed (sorry, Mr Gordon Gekko http://digbig.com/5bakah) is no more good. It’s time we cease and desist outdoing the Americans in greed, profligacy and venality and learn to husband our scarce resources and share them with the less fortunate among us. This is not a sermon, mind you. It’s merely an opinion and a reminder.

Cat’s whiskers.

If you’re one of those who think “intellectuals” are cat’s whiskers, better stay away from Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals (Harper & Row, New York, 1988). My friend, Manohar Mason of Pentagon Communications is probably the most logical people I’ve met so far. Don’t believe me? Just read this: http://digbig.com/5bahag. He is also a huge fan of Bertrand Russell. Whenever we meet and end up talking about (Ahem!) intellectual and philosophical stuff, good ol’ Bertie pops in the conversation. If memory serves, Manohar told me more than once that he had read Bertie’s autobiography and spoke of it in glowing terms. I wonder if he would go into a Fahrenheit 451 mode were he to read Chapter 8 of Johnson’s tome. Johnson runs through the gamut of this brainy specie right from Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, Sartre, Wilson, Gollancz and Hellman – with a quick worm’s-eye view of fellow sinners like Connolly, Mailer, Tynan, Fassbinder and Baldwin. His main grouse is that these worthies do not practice personally what they preach publicly. They have clay feet, in other words, as well as being guilty of all the major sins not excluding greed, lust, envy, pride, mendacity and venality. He pitches at us shovelfuls of dirt on each and every one of them in an entertaining and highly readable romp. I rather enjoyed it but then I have always been a sucker for historical gossip. For example: http://digbig.com/5bahba and http://digbig.com/5bahbb. At times, though, Johnson sounds a wee bit waspish, condescending and holier-than-thou. To me, it’s a simple matter of so what. But for most of the time and most of the people, to err is human; to forgive, out of the question.

Second thoughts.

The other day, while watching Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, it occurred to me that the only victim of partition I witnessed at first hand was a hapless hack Victoria driver being butchered in the 13th Khetwadi Lane facing my 233 Khetwadi Main Road terrace. http://digbig.com/5bafde. Why the “cracking” of India as Bapsi Sidhwa called it could not be achieved without bloodshed and strife and monumental human tragedy is something that has always puzzled me.

Looking around for clues, I’m dumbstruck by the unconscionable haste with which partition was announced and carried out. On 4 June 1947, quite out of the blue, Lord Mountbatten announced at a press conference http://digbig.com/5bafnh that the British would quit the sub-continent by 15 August of the same year, i.e., in less than 3 months − instead of the earlier set deadline of June 1948 for the transfer of power. Eleven months earlier, on Jinnah-decreed Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, policemen in Bengal were allowed to go on a holiday by Governor Fredric Burrows with Lord Wavell’s tacit assent. The Calcutta massacre went on without police or military intervention for three days. http://digbig.com/5bafng. It is as if the British Raj had washed its hands of the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown and wanted to get the hell out of India at the earliest without involving itself further in the emerging mess.

Had Churchill been the British PM instead of Attlee, the holocaust might have been avoided or at least postponed for a while given that he would never have agreed to the colony’s independence readily. That would have been a blessing in disguise as it might have given the Indian leaders time to think up a cogent and workable plan of action for an orderly partition and the massive migration involved when the moment arrived.

Gaslight.

When I was growing up at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5baehr gaslights used to light up the streets of South Bombay. A runner with a long pole in his hand would trot from street lamp to street lamp and fire them up one by one. The darkness of the dusk would then gradually yield to the white-yellow glow of the street lamps. I’m talking of the 1940s and maybe even the early 50s, mind you. As dusk approached, the Vanita Vishram Garden behind our house would be filled with twittering birds joyously heralding for almost a quarter of an hour the approach of darkness and time for repose. Some evenings, I used to take my bicycle http://digbig.com/5baenb to the Garden and ride a few leisurely laps around its periphery listening to the soothing chatter of the birds. Those were also the days when tramcars – double as well as single deckers – used to ply on the streets of Bombay from dawn to midnight. http://digbig.com/5baena. The other noteworthy feature of South Bombay life that is no more was the daily washing of the streets at dawn by bullock carts fitted with sprinklers. In those days, by the way, the minimum fare for the yellow top taxicabs was 6 annas (= 38 paise approximately). Those were the days, boys and girls, believe you me.

Come again?

It caught my eye one Saturday morning near Crawford Market where I had gone shopping with Ujwal. Called Bokoma, it has a stylish plastic handle out of which sprout a dozen curved springy wire “fingers” of varying lengths ending in tear-drop finials −a kinky kitchen tool or claw look-alike. It must have something to do with acupressure, I thought. It seemed to me that it would make a cool art deco doodad/thingamabob/gizmo http://digbig.com/5baekg were it to be stuck in a bottle. The boy hawker was asking Rs.80/- for it. I haggled him down to Rs.30/-. Its smart-looking tapering carton printed in German with the unbelievably exorbitant price of €19. 50 (= Rs.1355/-) marked on it and the underscored legend “Das Original” in red intrigued me. My first reaction was someone was pulling a fast one. Maybe, it was a locally made product passing off as an imported one. This impression was further reinforced when I heard that Bo was being hawked for Rs.20/- near Sicca Nagar, close to where I live. Then I stumbled on to this:http://digbig.com/5baekh and this: http://digbig.com/5baekk. Pay Rs.100/- or Rs.125/- for Bo plus shipping charges. Hold your excitement in check for seven days till you get delivery. Instead, why not zimply come to me and I will take you to where you can lay our hands on it instantaneously at a mere fraction of what the shopping site is selling it for. By the way, they http://digbig.com/5baekj are claiming Bo can do you a lot of good: “Originally developed by the to obtain a complete body relaxation, today it still serves that purpose and is a strong and positive source of new energy to you.” P.S.: Times Shopping mentions Pick N Sell as the seller of Bokoma and the only Pick N Sell that I found was a wholesale super market in Bangalore:http://digbig.com/5baekm. I couldn’t trace the Bokoma seller at Rediff Shopping (e-bizwizard). Bokoma’s cousins are congregated here: http://digbig.com/5baekn. Bokoma is also a place situated at 0° 22' 19" South, 17° 8' 23" East in Congo Republic (Africa). http://digbig.com/5baeks. What’s more, Semi Document: Bokoma Kegasu is a Japanese romance-porno movie. http://digbig.com/5badws.

The lament of the lover boy in Rangoon, circa 1949.

I saw Patanga (= moth) in my early teens at the Imperial Talkies http://digbig.com/5baehq. It was within easy walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road.http://digbig.com/5baehr. I had nary an inkling then what an NRI or an expat was. The terms were not in vogue at that time. It was maybe 30 years too early. The rollicking joke in the movie was around the prediction made at the time of the hero’s birth. The astrologer said that he would be surrounded by droves of cars. (“Iss ke aagey pichey motor gaadi daudegi.") Everyone and his aunt took it to mean he would be a rich man and said: “Bahut khoob!” In the very next shot we saw him in the uniform of a traffic cop directing traffic at a busy junction. Later in the movie, he tried to break into moviedom. That’s when he and his co-star performed the song concerning an Indian expat in Burma. In those days, a lot many Indians used to go to Burma to work in the timber − mainly teakwood – trade. (Remember The Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation? http://digbig.com/5bbtcl) It was a well-paying job. Anyway, the movie song sequence within the movie had the lovelorn young man calling from Rangoon his wife in Dehra Dun. An overseas phone call was a big thing then, costing virtually a bomb by the then prevailing standards. Even sending a telegram was not very common. It was considered the harbinger of bad news. History http://digbig.com/5baehd tells us that the Indo-Burma Radio Telephone link was established between Madras and Rangoon in 1936 – the year I was born. In 1949, the Own Your Telephone plan was introduced. Also, the surcharge on trunk telephone calls was raised from 40 to 60% by the Honourable Finance Minister, Shri RK Shanmukham Shetty, in the 1948-49 Central Government Budget. http://digbig.com/5baehf. By the way, the Japanese occupied Burma in March 1942 and China invaded Tibet in 1949. All this is now in the dustbin of history, of course. Coming back to the song it had a prose preamble wherein the caller identified the originating town as Rangoon for the benefit of the Dehra Dun trunk operator and asked to talk to his wife. After that, the proud wife took over to tell us the story of her husband having gone to Rangoon, boasting that he had made the trunk call just to tell her that he missed her terribly. The husband admitted he had made a big blunder by not taking her with him to Burma. He then went into a detailed description of how he was suffering in a mock serious, even somewhat naughty vein. The lyrics in Hindustani can be read here: http://digbig.com/5baehs. The lyric writer was Rajinder Kishan whose greatest claim to fame was the all-time single biggest jackpot pool of Rs.48 lakh he won at the Mahalaxmi Race Course in 1971. http://digbig.com/5baewf.

Incredible India II.

At the end of the last post, I wrote: “The saga of incredible India goes on…”. It did. The visit to the VP Road Police Station yesterday was a big surprise and revelation. PC Nalwade was the very antithesis of his colleague who had paid me a visit on Tuesday: smiling, polite, soft-spoken, knowledgeable. His colleague, a woman PC, matched his demeanour perfectly. The questions were respectfully put, the answers smilingly recorded. They explained that my passport reached me prior to the police enquiry probably because of my age. Getting it police-checked was optional, the risk being I could be prevented from flying if they noticed on the computer screen that I had not been police-checked. Fair enough. If only all of Mumbai Police behaved like these two …

Incredible India.

Will wonders never cease in incredible India? On 5 August, i.e., last Wednesday in case you are not in a Gregorian mode, I searched the India Passport website http://digbig.com/5badws and was duly informed that my passport was ready and was expected to be sent to me by 04-09-2009 subject to all documents being in order. On the afternoon of 5 August, i.e., of the same Wednesday in case you are still not in the Gregorian mode, a Speed Post person dropped in at home when I was out on work and left an intimation for me to pick it up from the Kalbadevi Post Office the next day between 10.30 am and 2.00 pm. Which I eventually did as directed! Incredible India had one more surprise in store for me. Yesterday, i.e., on 10 August, in the afternoon while I was once again away on work, a policeman dropped in to do the police check – a pre-condition to the issue of a passport. He was told I was out and the passport had been already received. I wonder if there are more wonders to come in incredible India.

Update: No sooner had I finished and poasted the above than one more wonder came my way from incredible India. It was in the shape of Police Constable Hanurkar from VP Road Police Station. After comparing my mug with the picture on the form in his hand as well as the one on my new passport, he invited me to present myself on Thursday morning at the said Police Station to meet a certain Mr Nalwade with two copies of all documents submitted with my passport application and three copies of my photograph. When I protested that the passport was already in my hand, he said “they” had to “complete” my file – whatever that means. He also broadly hinted that he had had to make two trips to my residence on my account. The saga of incredible India goes on…

Sepia tone.

In the 1967-released Bonnie and Clyde, when Clyde meets his brother, the film is still in full colour. But when Bonnie overpowered by nostalgia and missing her mom terribly finally takes the gang to meet her family, Arthur Penn shoots the entire Parker family reunion in sepia tone. Why?

If only I could've emulated Penn I would have done that very thing to this press note I found in my old papers. It’s about The Last Gandhi Movie website’s performance between 09-09-1998 and 30-06-1999. It’s also about a gambit that failed owing (in retrospect) to the lack of timely follow-up and inability to provide sustained support mainly because of inexperience and over-optimism. I thought I would reproduce it here for nostalgic reasons:

32181 hits in 295 days* is ‘jolly good show’ for a niche Gandhi novel website.

Mumbai, 20 July:- He wrote a novel, ‘The Last Gandhi Movie’, cross-p0llinatin Gandhi’s life with Hollywood lore. Then, instead of chasing literary agents and querying publishers, he opted for the internet route, to take the pulse of fiction readers. Last September, as soon as the site was up, he sent out ‘visit this book site’ e-appeals to some of the readers who had posted book reviews at Amazon.com, in addition to ‘listing’ his site with search engines and directories.

Interest is where you find it.

The Internet is a great leveler. Ask nicely and you shall be given. ‘The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire’ at www.addgandhi.com is a living proof of it. Here, you get to read sample chapters of the novel and e-mail them to friends. You can also meet the cast of characters – a bevy of unusual suspects, get to know the chronology of events, and play an interactive role-switch game. A fair proportion of the people who visited the site came from search engines like Alta Vista. They asked to be taken there out of interest or curiosity is what it means. The highest point in the hits curve coincided with the time span when the e-mailing was done. The next high point came when the posting to search engines and directories was intensified. No banner advertising, just e-mailing and site listing!

What they have been saying about addgandhi.com.

Here’s an assortment of comments from the site visitors. “Who is publishing The Last [Gandhi] Movie? When and where will it published? Who is your target audience? Your site is graphically very exciting.” (neeta@eartheweb.com, 05-11-98) “… if you are the maker then you have it in you. The very essence of looking at things differently, think separately and mere fun of speculating ‘What ifs’ and ‘What if nots’. I really do like your style and appreciate your work.” (anirvan.sen@tipeur.ge.com, 12-11-98) “I checked out your site and it’s interesting. I’m not really into role-playing games or Gandhi, but I enjoyed it just the same. I’ll visit again…” (infringer13@ hotmail.com, 24.10.98) “I very much look forward to your forthcoming novel. Please keep me apprised of its publication schedule.” (hharwood@sps.edu, 23.10.98) “Hi, I really liked your site. I heard about it from a friend… Very interesting, will it be published?” (sing2@fas.harvard.edu, 23.10.98) “I was pleasantly surprised at your site. I do intend to read your novel some time … where can I find it in bio-degradable format?” (s_bandyopadhyay@mgmt.pudue.edu, 20.10.98) “… your site is lovely, informative, and with attitude.” (india2.0@hindustantimes.com, 14.09.98) “Brilliant site by the way, haven’t laughed so much for a long time and that was only after visiting it for a short time … can’t wait to get back and see what else is there.” (010544.255@compuserve.com, 15.09.98)

No bells, no whistles.

In keeping with the essential simplicity of Gandhi, the site is devoid of gimmickry. The only concession to the ‘movie’ of the book title is a preamble with a smiling Gandhi on a ‘screen’ pop-up. The tone and the writing are upbeat and literate like the novel it showcases. The site has RSACi’s seal of approval for content, has a link to Amazon.com via a books and music section and a Recommend-it link as well. Deepak Mankar who wrote the novel created the content. DBS Internet Services Private Limited designed and host the site.
[*From 09-09-98 to 30-06-99]

To date The Last Gandhi Movie remains unpublished. You can find the scattered remnants of The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire at http://digbig.com/5badqn, though.

Don’t get me wrong.

There is one amusing ad making the rounds of the idiot box just now. Its subtext is completely out of kilter with its own original intent. In trying to persuade the Indian metrosexual to take to a fairness cream, it unintentionally pokes fun at two desi demigods: cricket and people born with safed chamdi, preferably from abroad.

In it, the pretty girl busses the metrosexual businessman because he has apparently used the product with positive results. In the process, she pointedly ignores a star Indian cricketer as well as two white skinned colleagues of his.

Kya yaar, Doni?

Evangelist.

All those who crib and gripe about Hindi movies neglect to mention their one monumental achievement.

Almost single-handedly, they did what the national government couldn’t.

They made Hindi acceptable all over India so much so that even its most vociferous opponents eventually joined the band wagon.

If that isn’t something, tell me what is.

Now the Hindi movies made for the Indian Diaspora as well as the domestic multiplexes are probably doing for Hinglish what its mom never thought it being capable of.

Becoming global.

Kya yaar, Doni?