My introduction to Veturi began with the ETV programme ఝుమ్మంది నాదం years ago. I was so overwhelmed with his repertoire that whenever I heard an interesting song – సరళమైనవి, లోతైనవి, చిలిపివి, గమ్మత్తైనవి, అద్భుతమైన భూతులున్నవి  – whose writer I didn’t know, I attributed it to him. I still do and I might continue to for songs written long after his death. It might be because even though he may have not written those songs, it seemed that he could easily have written them with his other hand while attending another mind-numbing awards ceremony.

After his recent death, I listened to a number of his songs hoping to transcribe another of those. I finally settled with ఝుమ్మంది నాదం itself. The music director with the first sound of percussion sends a wave through the legs, and by the time it climbs up the body the lyricist with his first word sets the heart aflutter.

I don’t understand the lyrics completely, but that never hindered my pulse from rising and my mind from dancing beside Jaya Prada and Chandra Mohan. I don’t think the picturization could capture as jubilantly as the words did the resonance of the atmospheric phenomena with the emotions inside the mute protagonist’s heart. ఎల తేటి రొద probably means the sounds in a tender coconut; I don’t know what లెస in కలిత కవిత లెస and విరుపు in నీ మేని విరుపు exactly mean.

చిత్రం: కె విశ్వనాథ్ గారి సిరి సిరి మువ్వ (1977)
రాసినది: వేటూరి సుందరరామ మూర్తి
కూర్చినది: కె వి మహదెవన్
పాడినది: ఎస్ పి బాలసుబ్రహ్మణ్యం, పి సుశీల

ఝుమ్మంది నాదం సయ్యంది పాదం
తనువూగింది ఈ వేళ
చెలరేగింది ఒక రాసలీల

యెదలోని సొదలా ఎల తేటి రొదలా
కదిలేటి నదిలా కలల వరదలా
చలిత లలిత పద కలిత కవిత లెస
సరిగమ పలికించగా
స్వరమధురిమ లొలికించగా
సిరిసిరి మువ్వలు పులకించగా

నటరాజ ప్రేయసి నటనాల ఊర్వసి
నటియించు నీవని తెలిసి
ఆకాశమై పొంగె ఆవేశం
కైలాసమే వంగె నీకోసం

మెరుపుంది నాలో; అది నీ మేని విరుపు
ఉరుముంది నాలో; అది నీ మువ్వ పిలుపు
చినుకు చినుకులో చిందు లయలతో
కురిసింది తొలకరి జల్లు
విరిసింది అందాల హరివిల్లు
ఈ పొంగులే ఏడు రంగులుగా

chitram: ke viSwanAth gAri siri siri muvva (1977)
rAsinadi: vETUri sundararAma mUrti
kUrchinadi: ke vi mahadevan
pADinadi: es pi bAlasubrahmaNyam, pi suSIla

jhummandi nAdam sayyandi pAdam
tanuvUgindi I vELa
chelarEgindi oka rAsalIla

yedalOni sodalA ela tETi rodalA
kadilETi nadilA kalala varadalA
chalita lalita pada kalita kavita lesa
sarigama palikinchagA
svaramadhurima lolikinchagA
sirisiri muvvalu pulakinchagA

naTarAja prEyasi naTanAla Urvasi
naTiyinchu nIvani telisi
aakASamai ponge AvESam
kailAsamE vange nIkOsam

merupundi nAlO; adi nI mEni virupu
urumundi nAlO; adi nI muvva pilupu
chinuku chinukulO chindu layalatO
kurisindi tolakari jallu
virisindi andAla harivillu
I pongulE EDu rangulugA

While fretting over some stupid business since a fortnight, I grossly neglected significant issues of national importance. The current one apparently is made up of headlines with Modi and Tharoor’s names and a voluptuous model’s pin-ups. I am yet to catch up with that, but an acquaintance this afternoon summarized briefly the current concluding issue about apnI deSkI bETIkI shAdI.

As the acquaintance so subtly put it, “<long beep>, isko IndiasE nikAldenA hain”. People joined both sides and a lukewarm debate ensued, and even though I never benefited from her forehand strokes I took to her defence. I have offended some people during the debate, and as always it gave me immense pleasure.

Here is a biased MOM briefly describing a few points discussed:

1. She’s what she is because of India.
A. Is it? Because India apparently paid for her success and fortune, at least after she won the 2003 Wimbledon Championships Girl’s Doubles title? Keep it aside for a moment. Take yourself, a person who somehow found a decent job. Your company pays your salary, which is most of the money or fortune you make, which is the means of your (and maybe your family’s) prosperity. It also occasionally pays for your “career development”. Are you what you are because of your company, and even if you were does it give your company to dictate your choices? What she and “India” have is mostly a business relationship, which has so far been acceptable for both parties.

2. Couldn’t she find one deserving man from all of India?
A. People in love, people who get married, etc. don’t do an exhaustive search of the universal set. They come across a person, hopefully find that person interesting (depending on factors like money, looks, sensitivity, sense of humor, intelligence, cup sizes, penile lengths and other strengths), tell themselves and anybody who listens to them that they have found the person they have been looking for, and get together. It doesn’t mean that they have done an exhaustive search, which is unrealistic and something most people wouldn’t want to do. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the population is undeserving, and for that matter the word “deserving” here is meaningless on the grounds that it is undefinable or at least remains undefined. It also doesn’t mean that they have found the person they have been looking for, but I’m digressing.

3. It’s okay with anybody except a Pakistani.
A. Oh! you are the one to decide who all it is “okay” with for someone you haven’t met nor have any interest beyond her short skirts and navel rings? And imagine injecting that clause “except a Pakistani” into a villain’s dialogue in a movie of national integration. How have you felt then? It may be nothing more than a movie, and you are nothing more than an Indian Pakistani-hating stereotype. I read a definition this morning. One-shot case study, n.: The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is concluded that all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green.

4. It is not her individual preference because she’s a celebrity.
A. On the contrary, being a celebrity gives a person more strength to exercise individual preference, at the cost of some sacrifices. What is the use of gaining that power if one doesn’t exercise it? Celebrity or not, which hole a person lives in and which hole a person plugs his or her tools into is nobody’s business except the person’s and the hole’s owner’s. On the other hand, a celebrity running over pedestrians may be an individual preference but as it violates the pedestrians’ preference it is to be condemned, at least discouraged.

5. India needs a sports icon. What if she gets pressurised from his side to start playing for Pakistan?
A. a) I don’t understand the need for sports icons, and recommend you to read this counterpoint. b) See image below and also try the exercise by yourself. I’m glad that wiki is at least ranked 7th among the search suggestions, and I hope you see the point about the nature of people’s interest in that sports icon. I speculate that more Indians may have downloaded her wallpapers than have watched her Tennis matches.

6. If she were from Pakistan and he from India, the Pakistanis would have massacred both families.
A. I read a definition this morning, and I already mentioned it above. Also, somebody doing something irrational doesn’t mean that you should join them. Nevertheless, I understand the temptation.

7. India gives so many benefits to its citizens.
A. Pray tell, what exactly are those benefits? And how do they compare with other countries? There is nothing wrong for a person to move to a country which appears more beneficial. It is not very different from people shifting houses.

8. Tell me anything but my conscience just cannot accept it.
A. You will get over it. You may continue to live irrationally, but a lot of people including yours truly live that way, and die largely of natural causes.

9. What about the woman who got cheated and divorced?
A. One valid question, for the whole issue doesn’t seem to me of national importance but more of an alleged fraud. You tell me. I know nothing about the case. If she got cheated, it appears that it isn’t the celebrity in question but her husband who may have cheated her. If there has been a divorce, I am guessing there was some settlement. Whatever, I sincerely hope that the fat lady got justice.

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Cross-posted on I. Updated with information about modes of donation and contacts.

Akshar Bharati is an NGO with a beautiful aim: opening libraries for under-privileged children. Since its inception 3 years ago it has opened nearly 200 libraries across 6 states. That is a great achievement for an organization in which there is only one full-time activist and rest are all volunteers. As an awarness and fund raising campaign, it is organizing a musical night by Avdhoot Gupte on 18th April, 2010 at VIT College, Pune.

If you see the irony in a book-centric organization holding a music-centric event you should realize that we adults want very little to do with books ourselves though we want children to read more. Imagine a joyless event like a three-hour-long public book-reading session and you will agree that we are more likely to want to be paid in such a scenario, not the other way round.

As an occasional volunteer, it is imperative that I implore you to buy donation passes (worth 300, 500 and 1000 INR) or give donations or sign up as volunteers. Those are all inclusive ors. Interested folks can call me if you have my number, contact me (cinecynic AT gmail DOT com), or post a comment below. All donations come under Income Tax, 80G exemption and are eligible for programs like matching grants in several corporations.

Spread the word about spreading joy through reading.

UPDATE

Donations: The online payment gateway system is not yet on because Akshar Bharati is still waiting for the government approval. Donations of all amounts are accepted in the form of cheques (pay “Sewa International”). Library adoption costs: primary (10000 INR), secondary (12000 INR), complete library (22000 INR).

Office: Akshar Bharati, Sewa Sahayog, Flat #7, Shreya Apartment, Near Swanand Hospital, Deep Bungalow Chowk, Shivajinagar, Pune – 411016.

Contact: Kailas Narawade (+91-9604533919), info AT aksharbharati DOT org.

The only thing I knew about Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha is that it originally had a five-minute sex scene which the CBFC cut to half. The last Hindi movie that I watched in a theater was Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. I was mostly disappointed by it, mainly because I fail to understand the greatness of Devdas. What struck me about Dev D then and LSD now is the increasing sexual liberation that mainstream Bollywood is witnessing. It is nowhere close to accepting sex as an integral part of life (as in Europe), but it is acknowledging its presence in the society, in youth, and on the Internet.

LSD is not doing as well as I wish it. On its eighth day, a Saturday second show screened on the biggest screen of a multiplex here was only half-filled. I wonder whether it is the unknown cast or the reality atmosphere that is putting off the crowds. If it is the word of mouth about the “adultness”, it is a pity for it has nothing more shocking than is shown round the clock on various Indian news and reality TV shows.

The movie opens without titles, with a promise that the viewers will be treated to three raunchy movies for just one movie ticket (though popcorn doesn’t really fit here), and it takes us on an unabashed tour of sensationalism. The three “movies” tightly share their themes and are loosely interconnected in the way many well-known non-Indian movies are (e.g. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Paul Haggis’ Crash, Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic). I don’t intend to draw too much attention to this novelty, but it has been executed carefully here and I would like to see whether and how Indian Cinema milks it.

In the first movie, a young lad and a lass studying in a film institute fall in love while he directs a movie for his diploma certificate in which she plays the heroine. She is rich and he is street-smart, but together they are only fools for love. They reminded me of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (creepy Ricky Fitts with a camera in hand) and Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (director and ingénue). Why the scholarship-sponsored young director would make such a clichéd and terribly-acted movie is beyond me (he prays director Adityji), but its production gave Dibakar the opportunity to throw many stones at today’s state of Bollywood and more on reality TV. The entire movie is shown through a camera spitting out the timestamp, aspect ratio, battery charge, and lighting, and I was initially curious why Dibakar chose to include them. He may have been drawing our attention to the fact that the characters outside the young lad’s movie act as dramatically (reality ishtyle) as those inside it. It is a distraction. It could be my inexperience with watching reality TV. During the first married night of the protagonists, I found myself wondering whether the shot would be cut because the camera only had two minutes of charge left.

Voyeuristic hidden camera scandals are apparently all the rage in India, and Indians find the grainy videos more orgasmic than autoerotic asphyxiation. I am amused by the amount of research that must have gone into making the second movie, which revolves around an unemployed loser’s attempts to make a titillating video using the CCTV cameras in a supermarket. He desperately needs the money, and his conscience can turn around and on and off like the cameras that he controls (and sometimes doesn’t). After one beautiful caricature of a salesgirl calls his bluff, he digs his way towards another salesgirl with low self-esteem. He respects and likes her, gets attracted to her, tries to possess her, and she falls for him. The characters and their story are more developed than in the previous movie, but they mostly continue to act, especially talk, the way people do on reality TV, as if they are aware of the camera and the roles that it entails for them. Random thought: would a man jerk off on the night that he witnesses a gun shooting?

In the third movie, a cameraman who was once involved in prestigious sting operations, finds a candidate for a sex “sting of the century” which is all that his new employer wants from him (thanks to TRP ratings and a beautiful award on her table). The candidate was abandoned by the topmost album singer for a Russian (could have been an Ukrainian) who was quicker on her knees. The scorned woman wants revenge after surviving a suicide attempt (like the cameraman). The cameraman and the woman try to execute the sting operation, sketched by his boss and her assistant, and enhanced by them. As the movie progresses, the camera recedes, and while I welcomed it, it also distracted me too much just the way head-hopping and POV transitions within a paragraph distract readers. I am mostly ignorant about camera positions, but here I started feeling that it interfered with the story.

While the three movies seem to be centered around love, sex and betrayal respectively, each of them have all three elements as their central themes. The most enchanting aspect of LSD is the set of progressions from one movie to the next: the receding camera awareness, the increasing camera importance, the thickening plots, the deepening characters, the increasing casualness of sex, the decreasing crime, … I tip my hat to Dibakar Banerjee.

Image Source: Wikipedia

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I changed school thrice between kindergarten and tenth. The majority of my schooling happened through two public schools (which are actually private, not government). Later in college, whenever friends shared their pasts and compared their accomplishments I always spoke highly of the first school. Even today I am biased towards it.

The first school was a tiny remote one and didn’t have a real playground. It was very good. I owe my basics to it. The teachers taught the textbook lessons and didn’t spoonfeed. The examination papers weren’t filled with stuff at the end of each lesson and we were free to answer them in our own words. All students were encouraged to participate in various extra-curricular activities.

The second school was comparatively famous and had a large playground. It wasn’t as good though. The majority of the teachers went through the textbook page after page and spent lots of time in having the students answer the questions and exercises at the end of each lesson often through dictation or copying from the blackboard. Examination papers only carried questions from those stuff with a new concept of choice, and answering questions on our own (without using the dictated answers) was frowned upon, in some cases even penalized if not punished. The teachers seemed to confuse between encouraging and forcing, which on the upside introduced me to the rebel in me.

Even though the first school didn’t spoonfeed, of late I have come to realize that that was not enough for me. There was so much more that I could have benefited from, some of which I am fortunate enough to have picked up from other sources.

Literature. The language textbooks had stories by Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain, essays by Sri Sri and Stephen Leacock, and poems by William Blake and John Keats. We read those stories and essays and poems, and the teachers did their best to explain them to us. But we never analyzed them, never dissected their merits and de-merits, nor discussed their significance. Heck, I reached college without even knowing the broad categories called fiction and non-fiction.

Sciences. Seeing blue-green algae under the microscope, and seeing the teacher measure the weight of sucrose under a sensitive balance more or less completed my lab experience. There are so many science experiments mentioned in the textbooks which need no specialized equipment, that we didn’t try.

Social Studies. We never took a moment to digest the atrocities committed by man over the history of mankind, never debated the populist policies of political parties, nor even compared the traffic rules in the textbook with the traffic sense of our parents.

Moral science. It was a vague free period in primary classes, and wasn’t really a science. That may be the reason why it was dropped as students gained seniority.

Whenever I see a classroom of a public school (not private, but government) in a Hollywood movie, it is a scene of active discussion. When the teacher is especially good, they even attempt to apply what they’ve learnt to the world outside. Good for them. I can only imagine what goes inside an Indian government school. Of course, even the Americans are crying out loud for school reforms.

The schools don’t sign an affidavit nor give any guarantees, but we have some expectations from them. I think that schools should not just prepare students to be tomorrow’s citizens but make them conscious of the human nature, that they should not just instill values but inculcate independent thinking, that they should broaden the horizons of the young minds. Making children dream of becoming doctors and engineers is less important than making them curious.

Our schools, however, are mostly interested in completing the syllabus, ensuring that their students perform well in the exams, and maintaining a good reputation. To add to the woes, the Indian education is not helping with its apparent extraordinary emphasis on math and science. It may be ultimately paving way to more engineering graduates who can be “absorbed” by MNCs, but education is not about employment and much less about improving literacy rates.