Mountain of light

There was once a little boy who always wanted to grow up and do what big boys do. The boy was shy and was afraid of talking too much about his dreams lest someone make fun of them. So he kept his dreams to himself, maybe write about them in a journal. He dreamt about what he would do when he grows older, how he would face the world and live his dream. It was all very clear to him then on how things would be when he became a big boy. He had a few friends but no one really understood him, he was a geek at best and didn’t really fit into any of his peer groups. All this made him feel that he was a misfit and he started to seek out other misfits.

 

One day he did grow up and become a big boy. However, the world around him was still very strange and suddenly he didn’t want to do the things that he had dreamt he would do as a child. All he saw around him were things that he couldn’t bring himself to associate with them. He saw values that he couldn’t imbibe, he saw dreams that he couldn’t share, he saw actions that he didn’t agree with and he saw those actions bearing results that he never imagined. He saw himself in a world where everyone played by a set of rules that were foreign to him. It is a game he doesn’t understand. Maybe he understands but then he can’t find any other reason for not playing this game, so not understanding will do for now. He couldn’t believe that he has co-existed with these people in the world for all these years, yet the more he co-exists with them the stranger they become, and they do stranger things. Then he noticed that his mind was starting to play games with him. He started to see things that no one else would see. He began to see a method in the madness and started to see sinister plots behind seemingly harmless things. He thought he was going mad, surely no one else was seeing what he was seeing. If they were then why would they go about their business like nothing else matters?

 

This was not how the little boy had imagined life would be when he grew up. So sometimes, he goes back to his old diaries and realizes how pointless it all is. All those dreaming of the big boy days seems so childish and life at that time would have been much better spent living the day rather than dreaming about the future. So the big boy with all his infinite wisdom now tells himself to learn from this experience. Except, now the past seems so much more wonderful. What is it with him that he can’t bring himself to live the present. It is either the future or the past. Why is it that he does not understand that all his answers are in the present, in the now? All he needs to do is to stop dreaming, open his eyes and look at them. Embrace the present, as the new age gurus would say.

 

The question is, does he want to do it?

How many times in the recent past have I seen a Hindi movie and said to myself, gosh our movies are looking increasingly like Hollywood. Where is the India that I know and dearly love, in all these movies? I don’t know who these characters are and where do they live and breathe? Where do they get their accents? Certainly not the school I went to! Their fantasies and aspirations seems so unreal and while I allow the moviemakers the license to be creative and imaginative, this is something else. I mean at the rate some of these directors are going I might start comparing them to animated movies. They are movies about relationships, families, love gained, lost, gained again, and then lost again. More like romantic fiction maybe.

 

So, when I see a movie like Omkara, which is set in rustic UP and refreshes my Bhojpuri like nothing else, it makes me very happy. Even though this is not the best movie I have ever seen and certainly not as good as Maqbool, I would still stand up and applaud the director. Atleast someone in big Bollywood is thinking beyond the foreign locales and trying to tap the vast breath of options that this country offers and actually does justice to all of it. The music, the characters, the story and all the supporting props come together to tell the story of three local strongmen – Omkara (Ajay Devgun), Langda Tyagi (Saif Ali Khan) and Keshu Firangi (Viviek Oberoi) who work under the umbrella of the local politician Bhaisaab (Naseeruddin Shah).

 

The movie promises a lot in the first 15 minutes with a brilliant action scene and then it sort of tapers off and is not as tight as I would have wanted it to be. I am not sure if there was any need of an item number, but I am willing to grant it for commercial reasons. Bipasha Basu in that role, even with her mouthing all the Bhojpuri sweet nothings, was not the best fit for the role. Konkona Sen was as always brilliant. I am now beginning to wonder if there is any director around who can test her abilities to the limit. She always seems to perform these roles effortlessly. She is slowly easing herself into the category of Naseeruddin who pulls off another great role.

 

All in all a good movie and great music. Even though the director is capable of much better, this is an admirable effort and deserves to be applauded.

There was this recent issue of Indian blogs being banned by the ISPs and the government for some ostensibly anti-national activities. Expectedly, there has been a lot of condemnation in the media and now as I understand the ban has now been lifted as quietly as it was imposed. This got me thinking on where do we stand as a nation on censorship.

 

As far as I know, our governments have practiced various forms of implicit and explicit censorship and there is no reason for them to stop doing so. Apart from the well-known cases, censorship affects us in our day-to-day interaction with the government also. Everyday in the newspaper I see so many examples of censorship. For example, the government will announce some big public project or other and in 99.99% of the cases, there is no mention of when the project is planned to be completed. There is all the information about the size of the project, the number of jobs it will create and its proclaimed benefits but nothing on when it will be completed. Therefore, when you do not give out completion dates then there is no way that you can calculate project time overruns etc. Yes, you could argue that this is not censorship in its true sense but to me it is the same mind bent which does censorship and which suppresses information. There is also the Right to Information Act, which after the current changes taking out file notings is a shadow of its formal self.

 

Personally, I think there is too much being made out of this blog-blocking episode. I am also a little upset that I am not on blogspot and so my blog was up and running through this entire “crisis”. Obviously, blogspirit is not cool enough. Maybe its time for me to move to blogspot and hope that my blog will get blocked too and I get quoted on national TV on how my fundamental rights have been snatched away from me. Maybe I can add that to my CV.