The story of two virals – Kolaveri Di and Aalu Anday

Here is a story of two virals.

Separated by a border, two very different videos went viral in the last two months of 2011. Both shared so much in common and were oh so different

Probably what goes viral depends on the current cultural temper of that country. What it considers as an echo of its voice, however subconscious or sublimal

One viral goes on to become a case study in IIMs and goes into the handbook of aspiring social media managers. Sung along by people who didn't care what the lyrics meant. Catapults the singer to national stardom, gains him a lunch with the prime minister….

The other one. One of the most courageous (some would say suicidal) acts in modern times taken in a stand for the freedom to speak the mind. Created and uploaded secretly on YouTube to avoid official censure and blackout. A song that openly mocked holy cows in a country where a state governor is assassinated by his bodyguard for speaking his views.

A song that ended with the words - “If you want a bullet in my head, like this video”.

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Do not go gentle into that good night…

Dylan Thomas knew what he was talking about when he penned his powerful paean about dying to that stage of our lives which forces us to come face to face with ourselves with terrible clarity – the stage when the curtains are coming down on us

Open Culture, that wonderful website of all that is interesting on the web, posted this article – The top 5 regrets of the dying

At someone at my stage of my life, at the launch-board of a ‘career’, so to say, what this says especially strikes a chord – especially when we become very much aware of the much philosophized word – choice.

The choices that we make everyday – that extra hour at work, the postponement of the vacation, that extra effort to drop in a hello, choice to let something make us happy or not, the laziness to do what we like in place of what we must. All of this shapes us who we become.

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Sedition of the good doctor

Binayak Sen was convicted today for ‘sedition’ by the ‘justice’ system of this country. People around the world are appalled that such a thing can happen in the largest ‘democracy’ in the world…

It would almost be abnormal today, in this seemingly ethically ambiguous world, to not feel a sense of hilarity when such heavy words are used with such seriousness. You feel like laughing out loud and then bang your head on the wall…Mr Assagne, you of course understand, dont you?

Dont you know, Mr Sen, that it is sedition to protest against what one considers injustice and it is sedition to care for the people who have been forgotten even by the democratic vote-seekers. It is also traitorous to speak up publicly. All this makes you an enemy of the state…dangerous anti-social…they called you a terrorist too, didnt they?

The justice of this country…they needed to make an example of you. Just like they are making an example of people who have stashed away millions nay billions from sports events or from telecom spectrum or even from onions. You see what I am getting at my good doctor?

There is a saying – Kill a man, you are a murderer. Kill millions, you become a general. Maybe you never heard of it…

If you had, you would not have been in a filthy jail for so many years…nah…you would have had merely a parlamentary committee set up against you (that too after many protests!!) and you would have been busy preparing bytes for our 24 hours news channel, between their reality show updates of course.

Maybe your mistake was in being upfront about it all. Maybe you believed in the balderbash about the essential goodness of it all – you know, humanity, justice, fairness…fraternity, equality and liberty and all that and you know how that one ended up!!!

No Mr Sen, its all your fault. They are right, spot on. People like you just keep cropping up and you just dont learn. You should have really taken up arms against the state or done something really traitorous. Then you would have had politicians lining up at your door so you can help them win elections. Like you were right now, you were of no use to anyone, dont you see that?

And what the world has no use for, it punishes. Ah well, justice meted out wont you say, my good doctor?

Mr Sen, you are already old news…Ah well, time to turn to the sports page…

 

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Ek revolutionary ki mauth…

I took some time to write about Kanu Sanyal, one of the fathers of what is arguably the only genuine revolutionary insurrection in post-independence India. I took some time to write about his death not only because it was a suicide but also because writing about the death of a revolutionary means bringing in his life as well…

Kanu Sanyal was found hanging in his house, at the same place that saw the break of the Spring Thunder in 1967. The end seemed almost poetic, but then you need a Neruda for to make poetry. All that the old warrior had was a few columns in newspapers, one of whom actually described it his death as the “death of a top Naxal leader”, as if he was still in the neo-Naxalite movement…

In the end, all he had become was a blurry myth and a sad present, repudiated by those who carry his legacy and casually ignored by those who once feared him…the fate of all great men who did not die in the blaze of glory and whom history passed by in search of fresher and more photogenic heroes…

His death came a few days before the Naxalites massacred 76 CRPF jawans in an ambush, the biggest attack by them to date. The government and the Naxals have declared open war, in which for now, the government seems to be on the backfoot.

So, at a time that the Naxalites have become, officially, the biggest threat that this country has ever faced (J&K terrorism pales by comparison), with them having a presence in a quarter of the country, with their tentacles reaching out into urban centres as well, you would expect the symbol of the Naxalite movement to be satisfied. At least, the last thing you would expect him to do is to go hang himself…

But then you got to ask yourself – was he a Naxalite anymore? Maybe in his last moments he would have muttered to himself paraphrasing Marx who once famously said “If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist”…maybe he was aware that no matter what he did, the media and the society would fail to spot the difference between what he believed in and what the Naxalites today believe in.

The Naxalism that arose from the simple need to fight for dignity slowly became a movement in which violence, not justice (which is an abstract term anyway) became the priority for maintaining momentum. It became a movement in which poor must remain poor in order for having a raison d'etre for the movement.

If an insurrection goes on for too long, it begins to look like what it intends to supplant. Maybe that's what Kanu Sanyal saw and realized.

When Naxals make pacts with dodgy politicians and when they start to blow up schools, when Naxals become the tipping factors in elections by way of fear, when they begin to claim glorious victory by killing CRPF men who have been pushed to be cannon fodder, maybe he realized that it was a war for its own means – a never ending war in which the people to be killed will be the ones whom he wanted to give a different life all those years ago…

Maybe the end came for him much before the noose tightened. Maybe at the end he had had enough of the power that flows out of the barrel of the gun…

Maybe its time to mourn him as we mourn those great visionaries who dreamt big and tried to live upto that dream, no matter how much the rug was pulled under them.

That takes courage…so does preparing a rope for yourself…

RIP Kanuda…

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India sold for 500,000…

I remember a childhood story that i remember affected me profoundly. The story was of the Koh-i-noor diamond and how we lost it to the Britishers. The Brits were the ‘bad guys’ who looted the best things that this country had to offer and how they obscenely display the Koh-i-noor, something that they stole from us.

It was a story told with much pain, a pain which I could articulate later as born out of impotent helplessness. At that time, I could just sense the injustice of it all. I could sense the wound. The pride of India, stolen and displayed openly by the thief. If only we were powerful and could force the Brits give it up, how wonderful that would be, i used to fantasize. I used to fantasize, Hollywood style (or rather Mossad style) of a crack team of commandoes who would steal back the diamond.

I guess i retained a bit of that boyhood fantasy till very late. If some part of it still lived somewhere inside, the following news pretty much would have killed it off…

Tipu Sultan’s sword sold off

The implicit belief of my boyhood fantasy was that no Indian, if given a chance would let a part of his history and legacy be sold off like a cheap trinket. By Indian, I mean us as a collective. The government of the people, as a custodian of the country’s pride…

In spite of having ‘grown up’ i.e. resigned myself to the ‘practical world’ of adulthood, a part of me that never let go of the boyhood fantasy has collapsed with dismay over the almost non-importance of the event for the public, let alone the mandarins in the parliament. It merited a single column in most newspapers. IPL’s cheerleaders get more space.

A part of our glorious history – that of resistance agaisnt the Britishers (Tipu was the last king to defeat the Britishers), a legacy of the perhaps the greatest threat against British rule (before 1857), a symbol of what we have learnt to be proud of (remember the serial ‘The sword of Tipu Sultan’?), is sold off to the highest bidder at an auction house in London and we do nothing!!! and worse, we are still happily doing nothing. And even worse, we have already moved on…

Tipu’s sword was taken (stolen by the ‘bad guys’ remember?) from his dead body when his capital was overrun in the Third Mysore war. The captured sword was taken a symbol of triumph to London and 150 years later, we get a chance to get it back to where it belongs. But we let it go into the private collection of somebody rich enough to display it among his/her other trinkets.

A government that sits back and watches millions of rupees being spent on as useful as their own statues (sometimes complete with handbags) is not able to spend a few million on getting back what is rightfully ours?

In 2000, Vijay Mallya bought another of Tipu’s sword amidst much fanfare, as if he was doing a service to the country by keeping it in his house. Why not make it public property? Why was it not demanded? (I would not be surprised if this is the same sword that Mallya bought, which it is, according to some reports)

Which is all a collective failure, a failure of our pride to galvanize us in demanding the restoration of dignity of our past. We just don't care enough. Perhaps we don't seem to feel that it is important enough. Our so called present ascent to a world superpower (superpower of outsourced work, mostly) gives us more pride, not a supposed colonized past.

The only question to be asked here – would China (with similar history and the supposed competition to our ascent) have sat back and let their legacy be sold off? Of Mao or of Sun-yat-Sen? How many of us would say yes to that, I wonder? Something to ponder on there…

I guess Tipu fought for the wrong country…

 

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Young green shoot up – why Delhi fares better

I had just come back from Mumbai and had various reasons to like and dislike the city.

However when I came back, while on the road in Delhi, I saw something that struck me as the symbolic basic difference between the two cities.

I saw new saplings having been planted on the divider (see picture), protected by a wire net. I realized what I had missed so much in Mumbai – trees and greenery. The only time I saw greenery was in Powai, the natural mangroves. But then, that too is fast disappearing under the weight of the ‘development agenda’. I did not see green on the streets or in the sprawling colonies – just miles of concrete and walls of jostling people. Delhi, on the other hand, has made an effort to make the city green. Almost every road has trees either in the divider or on the side.Colonies have trees planted on their perimeters.

I don't know why this is. Mumbaikars have an easy explanation – the pressure of living with millions of migrants coming in ; where is the space for poor trees? I don't have the figures but I don't think Delhi is far behind on the migrants radar. Yet, the city and the government has made an effort to green the city.

Probably the reason is the government. Delhi has a stable government which has been focussing on development for a long time and has been rewarded electorally for the same. Mumbai, on the other hand, is torn between ostentatiously corrupt and callous politicians and an ugly chauvinistic fascist ideology. That's why trees don't figure…

When I look at the green shoots, Delhi, for all its faults, gives me hope and for me tips the scales for choice of living here.

 

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End of an era – Viva Chetak

Ah well…all good things must come to an end, especially if you don't want to own the good thing anymore!!!

Bajaj will, from now on, manufacture only motorcycles, finally bowing to market tastes. With that decision, a product that signified India for decades will pass easily into history pages – the “Hamara Bajaj”, the Chetak.

The scooter that was the beast of burden for the common man carrying whole families on its seats, the acquisition of which (after sometimes years of waiting) truly became a neighbours envy – owner’s pride. The scooter which with its Italian inspired design ruled the Indian roads long before auto majors discovered the market in the country. A scooter which when your father let you drive was when you became a man of the world, a world suddenly free…

That's the nations nostalgia, a collective nostalgia as it were. Anyone above the age of 23 or so will have a special personal memory of the scooter that looks impossibly frail and might I say cute in front of the hulking bikes of today.

We also owned a Bajaj scooter, some 20 odd years ago. One of my earliest memories was the extreme thrill I felt of standing in the front, just behind the handles, my little hands on the dials, my hair buffeted by the wind against which my eyes squinted to see ahead, safe in the knowledge that my father was the captain and my mother the navigator. It was the most perfect Titanic moment (the hands outstretched moment that is – not the crash!!!) I ever had. I used to actually feel that I was flying without making any effort, tagged along by the Gods. Nothing I have done since has come close to that experience…

However I believe that it was time it gets consigned to our nostalgia. The Chetak was not made for the madly commercial world of today. It belonged to the world of movies like “Chashme Baddoor”. It belongs to a world when you actually loved what you owned because you literally bought it – EMI was not yet invented by financial whizkids, a world where cosmetics to make men fairer was not advertised on the TV, a world of sometimes impossibly grotesque fashion but also of rebellion. A world of limited but meaningful TV, not the infinite variety of trash today…

Ironically, It belonged to a world where streets were emptier and you could have done with more power in the engines, instead of in a world where you have all the powers in the world but no streets to drive them on!!!

Of course, scooters have been reinvented – the Activa for instance. But for us Indians, it will never be the same.

The song of Chetak remains humming on in our mind, if only as a dirge. An elegy, even, to a world vanished forever…

Viva Chetak!!!

 

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Some rapes are more equal than others…

A piece of news item came in Times of India on 2nd May 2009. Here…

It was about a woman who was gangraped in the wee hours of the previous night. It is uncomfortably similar to cases that have happened before in the city.

I waited for four days to see if any follow up article comes up in terms of any police developments that take place. Nothing yet and there is no reason to believe that there are going to be.

The reason unfortunately is not too far to see. The victim is after all a member of the ‘non-influential’ part of the citizenry as can be seen readily from the article and so we play the same game again.

As usual, the nation and the media wakes up only when a member of their own fall victim. Take any case past or from recent memory. MAMC case and more recently the Noida case. The Dhaula Kuan case is eerily similar to this case but since in that case the victim was a DU student, the police swung into action immediately as it did in every other case. Perhaps more pertinently, the cases evoked a host of responses in the media with everyone decrying the lamentable condition of women in the city. Our homes were concerned.

We were concerned. In this case we are not. The difference lies perhaps in the attitude that since the victim was a slum dweller, she was exposed to the risk anyway. Worse, the feeling probably is that – she is not one of us…so it doesnt matter. The english media wont find interested readers for the case, so why pursue…in any case, some news is always ready to dethrone other stories.

No matter what law we make stating the equality of victims in the face of similar crimes, the problem is that justice is also partial to public opinion. Lets not kid ourseleves - Jessica Lal case got a verdict due to public outcry and all the candle light vigils. Modern School is being persecuted for the same reason. Shanno is already lost, as is this unnamed girl – unfortunate victims in the real sense.

The most ironical aspect of the whole case I found was that even though its an election year, the opposition did not take this case as a stick to beat the government. I do not think the case would have been the same if it was one of those who read english newspapers. The politicians dont care either – even though the english newspaper reading population usually votes the least.

Its the attitude, silly….

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Rags to Riches strategy – sell your Oscar child

After  the storm – the debris…

Slumdog Millionaire was one such storm to hit the Indian storm…we will be picking its debris for some time to come…

An example of this is the sordid drama being played out with Child star Rubina’s father allegedly trying to sell her off…

Denials and counter-denials are going to be thrown back and forth for some time to come till the media attention drifts…but one thing is for sure…there does appear to be more than a kernel of truth in the sting operation by the ‘News of the World’…Rubina’s father taking her daughter to a sheikh and discussing her ‘future’ smacks of something rotten, especially with previous cases involving sheikhs in the country…

So, for a moment let us consider that Rubina’s father did try to sell her off…then, let us try to look at the situation…

That Rafiq Qureshi (Rubina’s father) should be condemned and should be prosecuted is beyond doubt. Selling your children off is an act that is heinous beyond words…

But then, it is easy to condemn a man like him from where we sit…its easy being armchair judges…let us try and put ourselves in his shoes for just sometime and try to think like him before condemning him as the devil…

It is human nature to extract the maximum benefit from an advantageous situation. There is nothing immoral per se from such an attitude…its a fact of how we have evolved…we are capitalists by nature, not socialists…

Look at the one other star from the stable of the successful film – Frieda Pinto. Almost overnight she has been transported from a struggling also-ran to becoming the face of many a brand to even getting a chance to work in a Woody Allen movie. She does not let go of any chance to promote herself, her abilities and her new found connections and nor does the media tire of telling us her changed glamorous lifestyle – even telling us which shoes she now prefers…

Why the difference, we may ask. Boyle and co might be opening up funds to take care of Rubina and her future but nothing has happened as of yet and it may not. Remember ‘Salaam Bombay’, ‘Little Buddha’? There too, promises were made and broken…there are no happy precedences.

Pinto and Rubina. The same film…possibly the same amount of effort (when comparing a child and a trained actor) and the after the flashlights, the future seems absolutely different. One has been put in the stratosphere and the other one given sympathetic glances and told to get on with her life…

Too bad, we may say…life isnt fair, In any  case, Rubina got more than her ‘peers’ will ever get…she should be happy with it. Which is exactly the point…who decides?

Rafiq is smart – in a devious way or otherwise. He does not want to depend on transient sympathy and dubious promises. He just wants to make hay while the spotlight still shines. He knows very well that Rubina’s face will not be chose as the selling point of any brand. He also knows that she does not have a career in films except for some sympathy roles for some time. He cannot be faulted for thinking like that; in fact the way this world works, he has full justification for reasoning like that. Where the problem arises is in the manner he wants to make the hay.

In any case, he will not be the first parent (and not the last for sure)to want to make money out of their child’s success. Some flog their children to death with work and some just siphon off the money. Rafiq just went one step further. He crossed the line so to say.

The fault lies more with the way we and the media treats people caught in the spotlight. As long as they satisfy our needs – glamour, sympathy, success, we raise them on a pedestal and adulate them. The minute something else catches our attention, we simply run off leaving the old heroes cold and feeling abandoned. And this kind of behaviour is increasing in frequency with our nano-second attention span.

It would lead to a host of psychological problems not only for the one directly in the spotlight (especially for someone like Rubina who would feel totally out of depth in this new world that she has been thrust in) but also those on the edges of the light’s arcs. Its not something that people who have not been in that situation can grasp easily.

Which is why it is easy to simplify and condemn.

So condemn Rafiq’s act by all means. He deserves all of it and more. But let us also try to see the other forces at play that are not so easily obvious and then perhaps the inhuman act will start to make some sense.

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