Kundalkar, Chattarji, Manto- 3 book reviews

I am archiving three recent reviews of books that I wrote for Time Out Mumbai.

Dirty Love
a collection of short stories by Sampurna Chattarji

Sampurna Chattarji inhales her city in like a deep toke off an unfiltered Charminar. Her exhalations, equally unfiltered, are the short stories in her new collection Dirty Love. While other authors, from Salman Rushdie to Jeet Thayil, may prefer to project their urban perceptions into myth, Chattarji positions herself in the city as it is today. There is neither the benefit of hindsight, nor any studied objectivity. This is Bombay, “das Ding an sich” – the object in itself, which makes Dirty Love a brave and compelling enterprise.

“It’s not where you come from that matters, but how long you intend to stay,” writes Chattarji in her story “How Far Away is Faraway?” Like smoke swirling through the lungs, she has internalised the city. Out of these vapours emerge places and addresses: Colaba Causeway, Café Mondegar, Goregaon, the Mahim Dargah, Bohri Mohalla, the Strand Book Fair. These are the fulcrums around which Chattarji peoples her stories, with protagonists like dosamakers, rat-killers, postmen, watchmen, gas-men, general lowlifes and every-women. These characters are reminiscent of the denizens of Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems. Only Chattarji uses a larger lens, a wide-angle that encapsulates the entire city in its gaze.

Mumbai today is all about people contemplating people, watching and being watched; everyone is an ongoing subject. Vinita, Kausar and Lara are “Three Women in a Restaurant”, strangers, literally and culturally, who spend their time sitting at their solitary tables, regarding one another with envy. In “Burn”, a stoic woman contemplates a howling body on fire from her upstairs window. Chattarji’s city is, after all, “built on a scream” (from the story “An Ancient Memory of Pillage”). Chattarji is a novelist, translator, author of children’s books, editor and poet, and her short stories are rooted on the bedrock of her poetic sensibility. Her stories are written montages, short takes and jump cuts, which interweave urban angst, nostalgia, popular culture and the city’s cultural histories. Her prose is intense, but with the staccato slant of poetic enjambment. This is best seen in the eponymous “Dirty Love” which is a prose poem and should be read aloud, the better to revel in its words while dealing with its explorations into less-than-salubrious odours and secretions. This story is the collection’s guilty pleasure, and perhaps the best one in the book.

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin India (11 March 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143068008
ISBN-13: 978-0143068006

Cobalt Blue
a novel by Sachin Kundalkar
translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto

Cobalt Blue is the still-life of a family. Or rather, like dried and cracked paint leaked out of a tube: full of potential but never used. The younger Joshi siblings, Tanay and Anuja, find their existence transformed by the appearance of a stranger who takes centre stage in their lives for a while and then mysteriously vanishes, leaving them both bereft. Both have fallen in love with this man, of their own age but without conventional moorings, a bohemian artist who had joined their household as a paying guest. Sachin Kundalkar’s 2006 novel (translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto) delves into the vacuum of individual heartbreak, exploring those unconnected spaces inside people who live together, but are ultimately alone.

Kundalkar tells his story in two parts. In the first, Tanay directly addresses the absent presence of this unnamed tenant, who embeds himself with innocuous politeness and deference in the household. The memory of the man who became his lover in no time at all, “surges back, hot and fresh”. When the man elopes with Anuja, Tanay (who doesn't see this coming) is left unmoored twice over.

In the second part, Anuja confronts her own demons, having returned after running away with this rather inscrutable artist, who takes her to Pondicherry, then abruptly abandons her. Back home, she confronts her loss and embarrassment by writing a diary, trying to find an explanation for what went wrong. She sees her family’s individual aspirations pull and tug at each other, catalysed by this outsider suddenly introduced into the mix. In this turbulence, Anuja finds a way to reassert herself and makes a beginning at a life determined by her own choosing.

Despite this, Anuja and Tanay’s accounts are uneven. Their paths rarely cross and this leaves one thwarted – particularly in comprehending their motivations to seek love, especially Tanay, who wonders, after numerous casual physical encounters, “How long could I play this game of bodies?” Anuja, even after living in the claustrophobia of a close family never realises the physical nature of her brother’s relationship with her lover.

Kundalkar fills his canvas with colour, detail and hue, painting the Joshi family, their neighbourhood (the girls’ hostel next door, various kakus and maushis) and the conventions (motorbikes, Irani restaurants, kelwans) of the city, unnamed but filled with landmarks that remind one of Pune. His prose is sparse, using repetition and restraint, a quality of contemporary Marathi writing. Jerry Pinto translates, using instinct and imperfection (as he describes in an afterword), a strategy that allows him to remain satisfyingly true to English-speaking Maharashtrian soundscapes. This makes Cobalt Blue, a welcome addition to published translations from the Marathi.

Hardcover:240 pages
Publisher: Penguin (March 18, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10 0670086843
ISBN-13 978-0670086849

Bombay Stories
by Saadat Hasan Manto
translated from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmed

Manto’s Bombay stories were mostly written in Pakistan, where he lived his last years. “It was almost twenty years ago that I used to frequent those restaurants”, he narrates in “Mammad Bhai”. Here, Manto himself occupies the same space as the eponymous Mammad. Ergo, both are real and fictitious, simultaneously. Most of the stories in this new anthology are situated in and around Byculla, its Irani joints, Pilahouse, Golpitha, Foras (not Faras) Road and Safed Galli. These ossified signifiers remain in Manto’s memory to become pegs on which his stories hang. But what stories they are!

Manto is always readable, his prose curt and direct, like Hemingway’s; but the specifics of these stories set in the Bombay of his past (and of ours) evokes enough nostalgia to stick in your side, like Mammad Bhai’s Rampuri. Even so, it is edifying to look back at a city, which is even now dematerialising, and of a time when the local strongman was still called “dada”, when one travelled by trams and tongas and played solitaire with real cards and called it patience.

In the spirit of Manto, this reviewer recommends reading Bombay Stories, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmed, back to front. Begin with the occasional writings in the Appendix to quickly get immersed into his milieu. The stories can come later. Manto spent less time around Filmistan and Bombay Talkies writing screenplays and dialogues, but more observing the shenanigans of Ashok Kumar and friends. Here, the quirky Manto describes why he does not see movies any more: “The cinema is delusion and those in the film industry get sucked into it too”. He also writes about the perception of “filmi” women, and makes a completely self-deprecating lecture at a Jogeshwari College on “Modern Literature”. If the publishers wished to sell many more copies, they could have called this book “Punters, Pimps and Prostitutes”. Was the Bombay of the 1940s populated entirely by this triumvirate of “lowlives” as Rushdie once described Manto’s subjects? Almost all these stories revolve around them. One does, however, look beyond this salacious potential, and empathise with his fellow denizens, dominated by havenots, trying only to get through the day. Stuck inside this unsettled city, women could be either housewives or whores, and men made a living in any manner possible. Unlike today, individual aspiration is dimmed in the miasma of the present, which is where Manto’s characters live.

And yet, in that, they are very real: a prostitute relentlessly examines her own sexuality in “Insult”; in “Ten Rupees”, the flibbertigibbet Sarita shocks with the unusual choices she makes; even Manto himself is an unwitting beneficiary in “Barren”, as postmodern a meta-tale as one can get. It is in this reality that Bombay emerges as a multicultural, immigrant city where, at the level of the gutter, all are accommodated equally. The translations suffer from some excess, such as the necessity to make “Achoot Kanya” into “Untouchable Girl”. Some folksy Americanisms like “Shit happens" throw you out of the stories. Quibbles aside, this book, based in a city constructed out of Manto’s fevered imagination, should be well received by its citizens today.

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Random House India (1 November 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 8184003056
ISBN-13: 978-8184003055

Time Out Mumbai- Inert Deco

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai,  Volume 9 Issue 21, June  7-20, 2013.

Inert Deco

It’s about time, I think, that we stopped referring to a particular type of building in Mumbai as ‘Art Deco’. This appellation only trivialises our city’s urban fabric and some of its most loved icons, and could, in fact be the cause of its ultimate ruination. We should, simply and correctly, refer to these structures and precincts as ‘Bombay’s architecture from the 30s and 40s’. Even the name- Art Deco, is anachronistic. It came into common parlance retrospectively, in the 1960s.

We tend to look at the buildings like the ones along the Oval Maidan or Marine Drive, especially at their external ornament, colour and fancy grille-work, and call this the Art Deco Style. It was hardly surprising when; very recently, a former member of the heritage committee and a senior architect made light of the Marine Drive buildings and their purported style by saying that even a coffin can be made in the Art Deco style. Such a view is superficial; it is as if Art Deco can be applied to any building, like an ointment. This implies that buildings occupied for several generations can be demolished and rebuilt, provided they are then overlaid with the selfsame external ornament, colour and fancy grille-work.

In an earlier column, I had talked about how some places in our city are well mannered. The best examples of urban etiquette in Mumbai come from the two decades leading to Indian independence. This was the time of reclamation (first the Backbay, then the Marine Drive) and the laying out of plotted precincts that led to a building boom. This resulted in a lot of architecture, not only at the Oval or the Marine Drive, but also at Mohammed Ali Road, Phirozeshah Mehta Road and the Dadar/ Matunga/ Five-Garden areas. This was a time when office buildings like the United Insurance or New India Assurance, cinema houses like the Regal, Eros and Metro, and the many new-fangled apartment blocks from Napean Sea Road to Chembur were designed as both foci and fabric. With bursts of streamlined concrete, they defined the optimism of metropolitan life, tempered with the ‘zara hatke, zara bachke’ nature of Bombay meri jaan. These harmonious ground plus three buildings lining our streets form our image of the city even today. To see them isolated of their context and re-imagined only as wallpaper is to do them a profound disservice.

What is Art Deco after all? The Oval Maidan buildings form Bombay’s most famous stretch. These twenty or so apartments (with Eros as full-stop) were all built in just three years, from 1935 to 1938. They are the most ornate, with motifs of chevrons, ziggurats and frozen fountains, painted in bright pastels. Other buildings from the 1940s are far less ‘jazzy’ but are relevant nevertheless as icons of that era. Many office buildings are formal stone piles, while cinema houses are specially designed with striking verticals and ocean-liner horizontals, punctuated with spaces for the marquee. These buildings are numerous and varied, but the one constant is not their style (whatever you want to call it) but their urban placement, the manner in which they line the streets and circles that connect the city like a neural network. In most cases these buildings abut the road directly with no setbacks or gated edges. They belong to everybody.

There was a time when several of these buildings were protected as heritage. Now, under new dispensations, individual rights completely overshadow collective responsibility, so any of these buildings may be demolished and rebuilt with all benefits accrued, should the occupants desire so. Who can stop a multi-storey building emerging out of the seventy year old harmonies of the Marine Drive? That would be depriving its inhabitants of the benefits of FSI, TDR, and other fungibles and, in any case, we can take a forty storey building and Art Decofy it, no?

That is the problem with labels and names; they tend to obscure context and relevance by offering mental shortcuts to take the place of critical thought. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. An Art Deco building is no longer inviolate. By extension, neither are any of the buildings from the 30s and 40s. Full page adverts front our newspapers every day, pushing new building proposals in the Spanish Hacienda style or the Swiss Chalet style, or the all purpose Classical style, so Art Deco is just another surface solution to assuage fears of wanton urban destruction. I would not be surprised to see proposals of skyscraper sized Art Deco coffins in tomorrow’s dailies. After all, the tallest building in the world for several decades- the Empire State Building was an Art Deco building too.

Now I am gone (a Ghazal by Ghalib)

Husn gamze ki kashaakash se chuta mere baad
by 
Mirza Ghalib

Husn gamze ki kashaakash se chuta mere baad
Baare aaraam se hain ahl-e-jafaa mere baad

Mansab-e-shaftagi ke koi qaabil na rahaa
Hui mazuli-e-andaaz-o-adaa mere baad

Shamma bujhti hai to usmein se dhuan uthtaa hai
Sholaa-e-ishq siyaah-posh hua mere baad

Khoon hai dil khaak mein ahwaal-e-butaan par yaani
Unke naakhoon hue mohtaaj-e-hinaa mere baad

Darkhur-e-arz nahin, jauhar-e-bedaad ko jaa
Nigaah-e-naaz hai surme se khafaa mere baad

Hai junoon ahl-e-junoon ke liye aaghosh-e-vidaa
Chhak hotaa hai girebaan se judaa mere baad

Kaun hotaa hai harif-e-mai-e-mard afghan-e-ishq
Hai muqarrar lab-e-saaqi mein salaa mere baad

Gham se martaa hoon ki itna nahin duniyaa mein koi
Ki kare taaziyat-e-mehr-o-wafaa mere baad

Aaaye hai beqasi-e-ishq pe rona Ghaalib
Kiske ghar jaayegaa sailaab-e-balaa mere baad



Now I am gone
translated by
Mustansir Dalvi 

Beauty is free, no more
obliged to coquetry,
now I am gone.
These architects of cruelty
lounge in repose, at long last
now I am gone.

No one remains worthy
of the title of lover, obsessed;
beguiling charm, refined poise
are both made derelict,
now I am gone.

Smoke slowly rises
as the flame is snuffed out,
even once-blazing love
is clothed in black
now I am gone.

The heart spills all its blood
in the dirt. Cold comfort then,
Beloved, whose anaemic nails
will find red henna no more
now I am gone.

Neither solace nor petition work
against oppressors bejeweled,
even the once-flirtatious glance
is upset with the kohl that adorns
now I am gone

Crazed love lies entrenched
in the lovers’ parting embrace
that unravels like fabric torn,
fraying at shoulder-sleeves
now I am gone.

Again, again, the beseeching cry
flies out from the saaqi’s lips:
is there a man bold enough
to down the brimming bowl of love?
Now I am gone.

My sorrows are the death of me,
but there is no one in this world
to mourn over my grave,
to grieve over love lost,
now I am gone.

The plight of helpless love,
moves me to tears, Ghalib;
whose home will be tormented
by the next wave of calamity,
now I am gone?


Translation and Transliteration © Mustansir Dalvi, 2013, All rights reserved.

Don't Stand So Close To Me

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

It's springtime in Bombay, should you care to notice.

The time when, in the midst of unbearable heat, flowers bloom all over our port city, trees are lush, the foliage at its thickest, and riotous color explodes all over. One tree in the Sir JJ School of Art Campus is currently misbehaving wonderfully, blossoming in all the wrong places and, in near surreal narratives of decoys and smells creating the most ridiculous fruit, perfectly spherical globes that would crack your nut open if it fell on you squarely from its traditional height of eighty feet. Hence the title.

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

Although regarded as a tree with medicinal qualities since  the times of the Ayurveda, there are not too many surviving examples of the Cannonball Tree (Couroupita Guianensis) in Bombay. There is one in the University campus at Fort, one in the Victoria Gardens (Jijamata Udyan) and yet another in the IIT Campus in Powai, and then there is this one- growing sturdily and quietly behind the canteen in the Sir JJ School of Art Campus. This is a good time to visit the campus, incidentally, gulmohur and bougainvillea are arrayed like Hindi fillum heroinis on the Cannes red carpet.

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

Unlike other trees, the Cannonball tree oozes flowers directly from its trunk, hanging out showers of globular buds just like crazed amaltas from gnarly stems. The buds break open into spectacular six petaled flowers, with its anemone like stamens, which instantly get busy attracting pollinators from all around them.

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

I did a bit of reading and discovered that these fairly large (cabbage sized)  flowers proffer no nectar, but attract bees and bats because of their vibrant display and unusual hood shaped arrangements of stamens (compared to nagas, hence the local names Naagchapha or Kailashpati) and an enticing aroma. The outer more attractive purplish and yellow stamens are sterile decoys and the inner less imposing ones are the real thing. Bees or bats fly into or between them and get coated with pollen. Thus does the selfish gene pass on.

Our campus is particularly suited to this arrangement as we have our share of  bats that occupy two trees. These flying foxes have been around since before the site became the School of Art. Their fore-mummies and daddies very likely oversaw young Rudyard making a mess in his aayah's lap, wailing for Uncle Terry. Today, sadly, they are slowly diminishing in number, thanks to the unfavorable environment that metropolitan life creates but they persist nevertheless and we are happy about this.This cannonball tree is but one example of their perennial usefulness.

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

The flowers turn into fruit, in the same bunched formations as the buds, slowly browning in the summer heat, and honing their spherical shapes until they are too heavy to sustain and fall with an almighty explosion on the ground, cracking open like dried coconuts and throwing their seeds all around. Although I have not experienced this, the fruit apparently give out the most godawful smell, which, de gustibus non est disputandum, attract some animals who eat their pulp and move away with the seeds to drop them serendipitously in other places for another tree to begin its eighty foot journey into space.

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

These fruit are the eponymous cannonballs, and you can see how perfectly shaped they are. You might want to take a step (or two) back. 

Unless, of course you have passed your genes on already.

Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013

The Semiotics of Indian Citizenship

This is a long-form essay first published in 'the Indian Quarterly', Vol.1, Issue 2, January-March 2013, with the title 'When Rules Acquire Flesh'. 

Illustration by MSMDNYC, courtesy Indian Quarterly

The Semiotics of Indian Citizenship

an essay by

Mustansir Dalvi

1.

In Mumbai, here are a few things you can do with relative impunity: travel ticket-less; wheedle your way out of a parking ticket; get a substantial discount on a piece of real estate by paying rokda; erect a pavilion in the middle of a busy road during festival time; squat on government land or burn an effigy, a book or a bus, should you be collectively outraged. In Mumbai, you can also land in jail for kissing a cheek.

These quotidian acts make for a substantial part of the city’s citizenship. You can see them for what they are, illegal. But that will neither lead to an understanding of why they take place, nor help imagine useful remedial or preventive defenses against them. 

Think instead, of practiced citizenship (legal and otherwise) as a language, an articulation of communication between the city’s inhabitants, and a development of conversations that, taken to a head leads to a discourse that runs parallel to the one created by the state through its legislation  Language is a speech-act, where meaning is possible only in a context. Language is, in a very real sense, a game you play, and games can only be coherently played when all the players know (and follow) the rules. Citizenship is a street-act, played out in an urban context that gives rise to both a discourse and a semiotic. 

Language, as it is used is defined and in turn defines its user. This bonded binary was first described by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916. For Saussure, language presents itself to the user as a series of rules, such as grammar, that form an essential sign-system that all its users know and accept. Saussure calls this system ‘langue’. However, it is practiced by each individual user as a series of everyday choices, where the spoken or written word is articulated, or made visible, either perfectly within the system of grammar, or deviated from (which works, as long as meaning is conveyed). Saussure calls this praxis ‘parole’. With such practice and deviation, language is constantly evolving and is at any given moment the sum of the parts that are langue and parole.

Meaning and coherence is the result of this pas de deux, where rules are tentative, but followed and the spoken words are the rules made flesh, equally tentative, emerging in a visible spectrum from ‘propah’, to colloquial, to slang, to nonsense, to entirely internal dialogues, which still retain a semblance of sense across speakers.

It is no great stretch of imagination to see that our street-acts also follow a kind of langue and parole. What each citizen does individually coalesces into collective custom over a period of time that like an Impressionist painting, metonymically expresses the wisdom of the whole. How we act is governed by how everybody acts. And yet, our actions change based on immediate stimuli, peer pressure, or, on occasion our own motivations. So, in Mumbai here is another thing I can do with relative impunity: cross a street when the light is red, if the traffic is relatively frugal. I do so, of course, because everyone else is doing it too.

2.

The idea that laws can be bent, abused or broken is a matter of transaction on Mumbai’s streets. Looked at from an objective distance one can, somewhat vaguely, discern the rules that define the transactions.  These rules are like langue, ‘multiform and heterogeneous’ to quote Saussure. The parole/acts, however, are diverse, random and arbitrary, but spontaneity is often followed by mimesis, leading to a kind of normalization of behavior that we recognize as ‘common law’. I have to do so, because everyone else is doing it too.

If pulled up by a traffic policeman for a possible breach, what should I do? This quotidian stimulus calls for my response. This response is particularly acute when there are two ways to do something: one within and one outside the law. Do I show him my driving license with, or without a fifty rupee note tucked inside it? If we accept as a given that no one consciously breaks the law unless there is the possibility of a reward, then we accept that specific incentives are in place for making a choice. Whether I actually do this or not is parole. An act, as Roland Barthes says, of selection and actualization. The confidence to do it depends on the discourse, the extended street-acts that recur. I know it has been done before. 

This known discourse is based on possibility, tolerance and acceptability and is practiced, mostly by imitation. It is nearly impossible to find the first offender for any breach of law. Through iteration then, to impunity. I put the currency note in my driving license; it gets looked at and is returned, sans note. I drive away. There is a tipping point beyond which such behavior becomes convention, and is integrated into the language of the street-act. At the pointy end of parole, any attempt to attribute ethical values or moral judgement is beside the point. What remains is the transaction conveyed, without words, acted out as a meme.

3.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins, in his seminal book ‘The Selfish Gene’ proposed the concept of the meme (an extrapolation of the ‘gene’) as an idea that is transmitted through a culture through words, speech, or actions, anything that can be imitated. These idea/memes take a life of their own in a society and persist through mimesis. Just like genetic evolution, these self-replicate to become ‘sticky’, like catch-phrases, or a tune that you cannot get out of your head. 

For good or ill, they remain as events in the life of a culture. The meme cannot be controlled or wished away; it can only be modified through mutation, or lost through disuse. A meme may be replaced by another meme, over a period of time. If certain normalized memes in our society breach the laws that our own society makes, then cracking down on individual offenders is most unlikely to stop that meme/act from taking place in the future. For this very reason, attributing causality to certain acts serves no purpose beyond merely showing that these acts do, in fact, take place.

Of course we know memes today as those quirky elements in the social networking universe that seem to keep capturing the eyeballs and multiplying in numbers and variations. With text, images and videos, meme-generators and phone applications, some objects, like cute kittens or laughing babies, on the internet, go ‘viral’. It is interesting how the language around memes uses phrases associated with disease.  Viruses spread. Memes are transmitted. Copycat behavior or even a general kind of imitation keeps the memes active and the infection in the population thrives. 

Aaron Lynch describes the spread and persistence of memes as a ‘Thought Contagion’. In his book ‘Thought Contagion: how belief spreads through society’, he describes the various ways that memes spread in a favorable environment: Some ideas remain as their consumers are loath to let them go. The user preserves the meme in the presence of other memes. Some memes are motivational, in that people adopt them out of a need for self-interest. Some memes are cognitive; they fall in smoothly with accepted belief patterns of their consumers in a society and thrive in their easy acceptability. On the other hand, some memes thrive by being adversarial, by being aggressive against other memes. Crossing railway tracks, for example, can be seen as cognitive behavior, preserved through repeated practice. Parole as seen in the practice of citizenry often takes one or the other of these meme paths, more out of convenience and custom rather than such options being well thought out.

In all these cases mimesis, usage and transmission make the memes flourish in a society favorable to their adoption. Taken together they coagulate into a rough and ready discourse, a system that is largely followed simply because it is largely followed. This coagulation or langue then is institutionalized socially, as (in Barthian terms) a collective contract that should be accepted in its entirety if one wishes to communicate. At this level, a single individual cannot bring change into the system.

4.

Unlike language, the semiotics of citizenship differs in one important aspect. Langue manifests itself in two forms, both separately institutionalized but one at a systemic level and one at the level of praxis. The langue described thus far is the second, formed by common-law agreement and repetitive usage. It is largely arbitrary and unmotivated, quite beyond the pale of cause and effect. The first langue is what society legislates as law, written down, for practice, defended and adjudicated over. The law applies to all, irrespective of individual desire, belief, value and motivation. There are written consequences for breaking the law, applicable theoretically to all who do so.

This law, an alternative manifestation of langue, is framed, codified and signed off in the legislatures of a country. While they seek to represent the values of its citizens as a whole, laws tend not to be reactionary, but equitable, even handed. As such, many deliberations go into its final framing, issues are examined from all sides, several times over, usage is simulated and worst-case scenarios analyzed. Framing the law is an intellectual and critical activity, serving its citizens well by deliberately looking beyond common sense. Law is frequently counter-intuitive, and thus prone to conflict with the other langue, the one of common-law agreement. 

Consider this: in the enrollment form for the Universal Identity Card (the Aadhar Card) issued by the Government of India to all its citizens, there are three boxes to be ticked under the category of gender: Male, Female and Transgender (in Hindi- ‘Anya’ or Other). This clear legitimation at the level of the State of the possibility of gender affiliation extending beyond the obvious binary is completely at variance with the way people with alternative gender choices are treated (or even recognized) in Indian society today. In an ideal culture, parole should coalesce into langue codified in law, but that is seldom the case. To use a Darwinian analogy, while the langue of the street develops through a process of evolution, trial and error, a survival of the most repeated meme; the langue presupposed by legislation is often a mutation, an intellectual exercise whose consequences appear at first glance to be far removed from the day to day.

So often at the level of the street-act, ‘the law is an ass’. Why can’t I cross the street when the light is red and there are no cars in sight? Why can’t I cross tracks when no train is present? Why can’t I pay for something in cash for a discount; I don’t keep the bill anyway? Why can’t I collectively express my religious fervor on a busy street during a festival day? Parole sees law as obdurate, as inconsiderate as a speed breaker is to a driver with one foot on the accelerator, who will (because he can) bypass this bump by taking his car over the pavement instead. Everyone does it, no? No one was harmed. So, parole subverts one langue with another, one that it makes collectively, and soon breaking the law does not seem such a big deal after all.

5.

In our country, there has been a growing distance between the codification of law and its actual implementation. In this vacuum, parole flourishes, and the law is bent, abused or broken in its use (as has been mentioned before, at a transactional level) rather than followed, as a civic partaking from a common troth. As the gulf widens, parallel discourses squat in their place. While the law is seldom actualized except in the most heinous of circumstances; at a quotidian level it is ‘used’ as a locally applied tincture, a semiotic, an exploration for possible gain, for the moment. There is an otherness while considering the ethical positions that brought the law into being. ‘The law may be so, but over here, this is what everybody does.’

The manner in which the law is followed, in part or in the breach, becomes normative, and soon takes a life of its own. Memes that emerge from motivational or cognitive imperatives become material. Common sense becomes operative in the common-law langue of the street: not rigid, not causal, loosely based on agreed upon values and beliefs, mediated by consequences of investment and return. This langue is powered by a shopkeeper’s logic that varies from day to day, depending on a perception of gain or loss, fueled by notions of acceptability and elasticity. Nothing personal, only bijness. In the end, all that remains is possibility.

6.

In the miasma of implementation, lies the shadow of occupation. 
Out of the 18 million or so citizens of Mumbai, more than half live in homes they have built for themselves, glossing over the city’s building bye laws and development control rules. From simple tarpaulin tents, often occupying land that belonged to the government, many of its inhabitants have, through slow accretion, now built ‘pucca’ homes in RCC with all the fittings of modern life, while still existing in a status of dubious legality. Some have lived in the same place for nearly half a century. This physical occupation, illegal though it is from the point of view of the state, is an example of the tolerance exhibited by the state itself in the form of deferred implementation of laws that prohibit such occupation. 

Illegality is allowed to happen for a variety of reasons that over time cease to matter. What only does is that the squatters are there, fait accompli. Parole has subsumed into langue, and every second person in the city you could shake hands with arguably lives in one or the other of these neighborhoods. More and more migrants, who come to the city plug into this system, learn to play the game of slum-dwelling. Soon, by becoming normative this results in a palimpsest of urban living that, although unrecognized by the authorities, cannot be wished away by mere legislation. Every major initiative by the state to eradicate slums in the city has flopped, in large part because they have got the discourse wrong. Calling the slums ‘difficult areas’, using a language that pontificates, harping on the dwellers of having a lack of hygiene, living in congestion or ‘stealing electricity’ simply treats them as unwanted without actually having a plan for them. Waving the red flag of illegality has simply ceased to have effect. In the meanwhile, these parts of the city live and flourish, following a langue of their own, evolved the hard way, over time.

Here, tolerance is a game played by all the stakeholders. Local officials allow the neighborhoods to continue, while they implement tentative rules that are acceptable to both. The occupiers are allowed to live, but under the constant threat of demolition, a threat that is seldom carried out, and both know it. Services and infrastructure make their way into these neighborhoods slowly, and very soon they take their place as alternative middle-class housing, with the structures they live in, while still illegal now command real estate values equivalent to the ‘legal’ parts of the city.

7.

In the miasma of implementation, lies the shadow of transaction. 
Laws are made; they are just not applied that way. The consequences of behavior in the breach are a series of negotiations over a rough ground of transactions that are smoothened through mutual agreement. The langue of the common people displays a level of acceptance that is much more elastic and variable than the law, that rigid old school master with a cane and a set of arcane pronouncements. Some things are frowned upon, completely unacceptable: thou shalt not kill, no doubt, nor rape, nor cause bodily harm. Thou shalt not burgle a home. Thou shalt certainly not be in breach of promise, but for all else there is cash. 

The parallel economy is widely acknowledged as one that substantially greases the wheels of the country’s economy. This economy runs outside the law, which insists that all transactions must be acknowledged to the state and taxes paid over services and value given. But what the state will not know, it will not miss, and nudge-nudge, wink-wink, things can be managed. The langue that is derived from the discourse of acceptability has, in our country, developed systems that are as rigid as the laws of the state. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that you could buy a piece of real-estate in Mumbai entirely through ‘cheque payment’. Hard, unaccountable currency is a large part of these transactions. The law is completely subverted by the norm. Now in practice for so many years this has become custom, accepted by all. To deny this is to encounter looks of astonishment, to be pitied as naive, as an amateur in a world whose rules you obviously have no idea of, Membership in a city based on a langue derived from praxis, exacts a price for your participation in it. We don’t need no steenking rule-book. Play this game, there is no other.

Even at the level of the state, where someone is authorized to permit an activity or a transaction, there exist a series of stages where interpersonal negotiations (settled in cash) make for quick or customized permissions. Such acts have now become convention, and monies have to be paid for permits even if everything is above board and nothing special is asked for. Such practices, loftily labelled corruption, are now so entrenched; even to describe them seems infantile. As mentioned before, an act practiced over and over, by a greater and greater number of people becomes essentially amoral, even though it is agreed to have broken the law. 

Where transactions acceptable between two entities outside of the gaze of the law are now conventionalized and follow their own specific langue acts, it is virtually impossible to eradicate such behavior by merely describing it in morally dubious terms. The corruption meme works strictly within preservational and cognitive ambits, having far too many participants and far too little useful outrage to actually transform it into anything else. Legislations against corrupt practices fail if they refuse to look at the practice as transactional and merely focus on booking the receiver of graft and denying the role or culpability of the giver. 

8.

In the miasma of implementation, lies the shadow of outrage. 
Where implementation of most laws are largely unmonitored, some laws can be fore-grounded, based on the perceived values of the wielder. A police inspector, scouring the watering holes of Mumbai to eradicate illicit activities, and arresting all the women in a restaurant or pub for perceived prostitution, is taking a high moral ground no different from a mob burning a bus in self-righteous moral outrage. A beat cop, booking a couple for a relatively benign display of affection in  a public space is implementing a law to suit his purpose and thus abuses it as a matter of personal choice. This is an act of parole as a reflection of a common-law langue, rooted in a vague moral conservatism, born out a milieu where the alienation of the other is a necessary aspect of the validation of the self. The law becomes subservient to the individual, and is interpreted arbitrarily to serve the individual’s purpose.

Let us take this possibility to its natural limit: imagine then, legislation made purely on the basis of the street-act. If langue is formed out of the collective discourse of a million acts of parole, then parole is the way langue is practiced. If common-law rules become the law, they will inevitably reflect a reactionary and conservative mindset, limited by peer pressure, not wanting to step across a line. The acceptability of the opinions of the lowest common denominator will rearrange the limits for the majority to remain within. In a sense this is the langue of the mob made law. 

In a public realm that is becoming rapidly de-intellectualized, this can only lead to a limiting of diversity, of free expression, of an acceptance of personal values, beliefs and choices of action. In this ‘with-us-or-against-us’ environment, petty slights will be enacted on the street in the form of expressions of outrage. Even today, even with our laws in place there is a hypersensitivity about treating the violent, public expression of outrage (especially religious) for what they are, as acts of criminality and vandalism. Imagine then, a common-law legislated to legitimize such behavior. 

In the recent past Mumbai has seen enough examples of such collective ‘rage’. This anger was essentially fueled by an astute use of adversarial memes that placed one set of people in a discourse of victim-hood  essentially in opposition to the rest. This manifested itself into public violence that disrupted the city and cost lives.  When the state acts to prevent such outbreaks in the future, an over compensation is inevitable, and an excessive zeal to keep the peace will result in the proscription of all free expression in the form of the arts, books, media, dress, and even individual presence in public spaces.

9.

If the discourse of state does not actively engage its citizens, the citizens will create their own through practice and experience. One discourse will rapidly be replaced by another discourse if the former recedes from public imagination. Such a langue will have no reasons for being other than that they exist at any given moment. Largely un-premeditated, it will flourish in its use and iteration, and only vaguely reflect the collective opinion of its practitioners. It will, however, have a hold on its adherents, who will follow the langue in their acts of parole simply because that is the way things are done. After all the reasons have been subsumed in the actions, the actions themselves will remain, carried out mechanically. For those who are charged with making good laws for their citizens, this situation will allow no accommodation. They are, after all, playing a different game. 

Unless engagement is actively sought and cultivated, laws, however well intentioned are doomed to sterility. Sensitivity to the semiotics of citizenship is the necessary first step in the development of a functioning, critical and inclusive nation state.

Thank you, Madhu Jain and Jonathan Foreman.

Dil ko khush rakhne ko, Ghalib, yeh khayaal achcha hai (translated by Mustansir Dalvi)

a Ghazal by 
Ghalib

Husn-e-maah garche ba-hangaam-e-kamaal achchaa hai
Us-se mera maah-e-kursheed jamaal achcha hai

Bosa dete nahin aur dil pe hai har lehzaa nigaah
Jee mein kehte hain ki muft haath aaye to maal achcha hai

Aur bazaar se le aaye agar toot gayaa
Saagar-e-Jam se mera jaam-e-sifaal achcha hai

Betalab dein to mazaa usme sivaa milta hai
Woh gadaa jis mein na ho khu-e-sawaal achcha hai

Unke dekhe se jo aati hai munh par raunaq
Woh samajhte hain ki beemaar ka haal achcha hai

Dekhiye paate hain ushshaaq buton se kya faiz
Ek Barheman ne kahaa hai yeh saal achcha hai

Hamsukhan teshe ne Farhad ko Shireen se kiya
Jis tarah kaa bhi kisi mein ho kamaal achcha hai

Qatraa dariyaa mein jo mil jaayen to dariyaa ho jaaye
Kaam achcha hai jo jiska ma’aal achcha hai

Khizr Sultaan ko rakhkhe khaaliq-e-akbar sar sabz
Shah ke baag mein yeh tazaa nihaal achcha hai

Hum ko maaloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat, lekin
Dil ko khush rakhne ko Ghaalib yeh khayaal achcha hai



This thought’s not bad. Not bad at all.
translated by
Mustansir Dalvi

It’s all very fine, from time to time,
to bask in the beauty of a blossoming moon,
but my beloved’s face, like day for night
is brilliance no less, and dazzles eternally.

You won’t kiss me, but always keep
my heart captive in your cold eyes,
and then surmise: if it’s free after all,
that’s not bad. Not bad at all.

Should it perchance shatter, you could
buy one from the bazaar another day.
Better than Jamshed’s bejewelled goblet,
is it not? This, my ignoble cup of clay.

Nothing gives greater pleasure
than to receive without having to ask.
Even a panhandler's presence is preferable
if silently, he goes about his task.

Each time I get a glimpse of her
a slow radiance rises on my face.
She sees me glowing thus, and thinks:
why, this invalid's all better again!

Let’s see what gains lovers accrue
prostrating before such wanton icons.
Well, here’s a Brahmin who has decreed:
this year'll be a good one.

It took a workman’s shovel to bring
Shirin and Farhad to speak of love.
Do not look down upon this.
Every humble skill has its worth.

Each drop that falls into the sea
is subsumed to make the sea itself.
Every endeavour is praiseworthy
if it succeeds in its conclusion.

O Great Creator, let Sultan Khizr
flourish and thrive. This fresh sapling
in the garden of the emperor
may bring good fortune to us all.

I know the truth about paradise, but
you will agree Ghalib, if this fable
provides cold comfort, then
the thought’s not bad. Not bad at all.


Translation and Transliteration © Mustansir Dalvi, 2013, All rights reserved.

Ten Hindi Movies Only I have Seen

Ten Hindi Movies Only I have Seen

Since I should not be left behind in the list-making that everyone is indulging in to celebrate 100 years of Indian Cinema, here is my list of 10 Hindi movies that only I have seen (or so I believe). Who else would want to see them- some of the most weird, most peripheral and some of the most dire (what-the-fuck-were-they-thinking variety of) Hindi movies ever made and released?
Says something about me, I suppose.

1
Aman (1967)
Dir. Mohan Kumar, with Rajendra Kumar, Saira Banu, Balraj Sahani, and 
Bertrand Russell (as himself, died 1970, no connection)

The movie begins with a dedication to Jawaharlal Nehru (framed photo with rose), and this title slide appears anon:

“Lord Bertrand Russell, 

courtesy Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation 

in Emkay Productions’ 

‘Aman’”.

Here is a brief plot summary from Wikipedia: 
Dr. Gautamdas (Rajinder Kumar) attains his qualifications in London, England, and with the blessings of Lord Bertrand Russell (himself) decides to re-locate to Japan, which has been devastated by the explosion of atom bombs on two of its cities - Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I saw this on Bombay Doordarshan, and it was notable for two guest appearances:
1. Laaard Bertrand Russell, whom ‘Jubilee Kumar’ Rajindr Kmar meets and gushes: "Iyyum Haanered! Iyyum incraeged!"
2. Two half naked acrobats doing the most incredible splits (not at the same time as the above)

2
Birbal My Brother (1973) 
Dir. Raja Thakur, with Sachin, Lilian, William Soloman and Poonam Vaidya

I saw this one on Bombay Doordarshan, too.
This was an ‘English’ movie about a tour guide in Agra ferrying an English mem around. The movie would slip into Hindi at will, and return with locals speaking to locals in English. I remember that Sachin ends up being killed by dakus, and one incredibly risqué scene (to my childhood eyes) involving a lady in a string choli and ghagra and a packet of itching powder.

In an additional bit of trivia, Bhimsen  Joshi sang a juglabandi  of Raag Malkauns in this film along with Pandit Jasraj.



3
Jeevan Sangram (1974)
Dir. Rajbans Khanna, with Shashi Kapoor, Padma Khanna, Jalal Agha, Iftekhar, Radha Saluja and Om Shivpuri
Screenplay and dialogues by Gulzar and Qamar Jalalbaadi

For a longish time, almost nothing was available about this movie on the web, but this was probably the one of the best action movies made in India before ‘Sholay’ (1975) rewrote the textbooks. 

The story involves the radicalization of one of the disembarked passengers of the famous 'Komagata Maru' steamship in 1914 (Shashi Kapoor), and his exploits as a revolutionary. Some amazing stunt work, as I recall, especially the taking down of a train carrying armament (reminiscent of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, later also attempted rather poorly in ‘Rang De Basanti’) and a climatic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid type shoot out.

I would like to see this once again, and now I have my chance.
Here is Jeevan Sangram on You Tube.

(From Wikipedia)
The Komagata Maru incident involved a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, that sailed from Punjab, India to Hong Kong,Shanghai, China; Yokohama, Japan; and then to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914, carrying 376 passengers from Punjab, India. Of them 20 were admitted to Canada, but 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, all British subjects were not allowed to land in Canada, and the ship was forced to return to India.The Komagata Maru arrived in Calcutta and was stopped by a British gunboat, and the passengers were placed under guard. The government of the British Raj saw the men on the Komagata Maru not only as self-confessed lawbreakers, but also as dangerous political agitators. When the ship docked at Budge Budge, the police went to arrest Baba Gurdit Singh and the 20 or so other men that they saw as leaders. He resisted arrest, a friend of his assaulted a policeman and a general riot ensued. Shots were fired and 19 of the passengers were killed. Some escaped, but the remainder were arrested and imprisoned or sent to their villages and kept under village arrest for the duration of the First World War.This incident became known as the Budge Budge Riot. 


4
Chala Murari Hero Ban ne (1977)
Dir. Asrani, with Asrani, Bindya Goswami and Simi Garewal
and special appearances by 
Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Premnath, Amitabh Bachchan, A.K. Hangal, Keshto Mukherjee, Jagdeep, Ashok Kumar, Paintal, David, Sunil Dutt and Kishore Kumar

Asrani directed this movie about a village bumpkin rising in the Bombay film industry to become a major star. Around this same time another similar film was being bandied about on Vividh Bharati called ‘Naya Bakra’ (Baaaaa!) but I am not sure that ever saw the light of day.

Lots of Asrani’s friends made cameos in this film. This was a total ‘B’ movie that I saw in Bombay’s (now) only surviving ‘B’ theater Edward, where the balcony had the cheaper seats, wooden benches that you had to run to catch.

Why did I see this? Probably this was the age when we saw anything with Amitabh Bachchan in it, however fleeting his presence, a trait we would soon learn to regret.


5
Be-Sharam (1978)
Dir. Deven Verma, with Amitabh Bachchan, Sharmila Tagore, Amjad Khan, A. K. Hangal, Iftekhar, Nirupa Roy and Deven Verma

Every comedian in Hindi films has probably directed one movie, lost everything and retired with tail-between-legs. Here is another one. One of the direst. Even as we watched this, we were appalled at the kind of things Bachchan was in. Typically, a movie without a story, probably put together as the shooting went on. Not helped at all by Deven Varma in triple role- of a comedic sidekick and his mummy and his daddy; and a scene with Sharmila Tagore in black-face.


6
Devata (1978)
Dir. S. Ramanathan, Sanjeev Kumar, Shabana Azmi, Danny Denzongpa and Sarika
Music by Rahul Dev Burman

Alas, I remember this well.

A kind of channeling of ‘Les Misérables’ set in a Katlick community, where in the first half a 40-year-old Sanjeev Kumar (as a 21-year-old Jean Valjean) in a half-chaddi spends time romancing Shabana Azmi, with the over-the-top song: ‘Chand chura ke laya hoon, chal baithe Churrrch ke peeche’.

The second half is all about Danny Denzongpa (as Javert) trying to expose the identity of Sanjeev Kumar, now returned from the dead with a French beard and a three-piece suit.
And this final dialogue: 

Mere andar ke jaanwar ko mat jagaao Inspecktuuuuurr!" 


7
Jurmana (1979)
Dir. Hrishikesh Mukherjee with Amitabh Bachchan, Raakhee and Vinod Mehra

Terrible, this movie, whose central regressive conceit is a bet between Vinod Mehra and Amitabh Bachchan to get Rakhee inside Amitabh's bedroom. What was Mukherjee thinking?

This movie opens with a completely gratuitous fight sequence in a pub whose only reason seems to be to get the Bachchan fan to buy a ticket.  Incidentally, the shooting of this very scene would make a reappearance in HM’s epical ‘Golmaal’ made the same year, where Amol Palekar is taken by Deven Varma to meet Mr. Bachchan.


8
Morchha (1980)
Dir. Raveekant Nagaich, with Ravi Behl, Aruna Irani, Suresh Oberoi, Jagdeep, Shakti Kapoor,
Music by Bappi Lahiri, Lyrics by Ramesh Pant and Faruk Kaisar

Silly enough story of a prepubescent snotfaced kid who turns to karate after his family members are raped/murdered (by rote). Had one song in which Jagdeep rhymes karate with ‘parathe’. I went to see this perhaps taken in by the director’s previous film ‘Suraksha’, the camp James Bondish caper with Mithun Chakravorty as Gunmaster G9, but this was a disappointment.

Except for one thing:
The awesome tribute song by Bappi Lahiri ‘Let’s Dance for the great guy Bruce Lee’ (click on link), sung by Bappi and Annete Pinto, full of ‘Hoo! Hah!’ kung fu-style, and bubbling electro sounds like an upset stomach.


9
Spandan (1982)
Dir. Biplab Roy Chowdhury, written by Biplab Roy Chowdhury (story) and Vijay Tendulkar (screenplay), with Amol Palekar, Utpal Dutt, Anita Kanwar

This was a relentlessly morbid ‘art’ film that book-ended the phase of 1970s indie films and the rise of the VHS cassette, which is how I came to see this film. Nothing of this shows a trace on the webs, not even an image.

Spandan (pulse) is about a good for nothing type who resorts to smuggling aborted foetuses to medical colleges. Towards the end he tries to make his pregnant wife believe that she has a tumor instead of a baby, to harvest this foetus too.

I have done many things in the cause of art, as you can see.


10
Star (1982)
Produced by Biddu, Dir. Vinod Pande, with Kumar Gaurav, Rati Agnihotri, Raj Kiran
Music by Biddu, songs sung by Nazia Hassan and Zoeb Hassan

This, of course was, for Nazia Hassan (and Biddu, seen in cameo below), the only other paradigm apart from A R Rahman more than a decade later to seriously challenge the entrenched Hindi film music stronghold. ‘A Star is Born’ garden-variety film, which should have run on its music alone, but after the high of ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ and the album length ‘Disco Deewaane’, Biddu could not sustain an entire movie of platitudes and songs that went ‘Ooie Ooie’ and ‘Boom Boom’ (which is the only thing from this movie that has survived, thanks to the remix).

This tanked so badly that it would be 26 years before a similar attempt was made with ‘Rock On!!’

Time Out Mumbai- Hindi Picchers

This piece appeared in a slightly edited version in my 'After Words' column in Time Out Mumbai,  Volume 9 Issue 18, April 26-May 9 2013.

Hindi Picchers

Indian Cinema is a 100 years old. I have been around for approximately half that time. I can measure my life out in matinee shows (do they even call it that anymore?). My back-story begins, so I am told, with my sleeping through most of ‘Shikar’ (1968). My mum would wake me whenever the tiger made an appearance and I would make loud growling sounds, irritating all the other Dharmendra fans. I was four.

In the same year, I was given a choice of seeing either ‘Brahmachari’ (chakke pe chakka) or ‘Raja aur Runk’. I chose the latter as I already knew Mark Twain’s ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, read out to me from Classics Illustrated comics. I still haven’t seen ‘Brahmachari’, except for the song where Mumtaz in a cut-off saffron sari shakes a jelly belly.

In the late 60s, movies came to us through advertising rather than actual movie going. As a schoolboy, my eyes were stabbed by the flash of psychedelic hand-painted billboards of ‘Hare Krishna Hare Ram’ (1971) and ‘Bobby’ (1973). One poster I can never forget is of ‘Bhoot Bangala’ (1965) with its skeletons doing the twist and Tanuja screaming on the Radio Cinema; a rerun, in a rundown theatre. Radio would make its way to dusty death in 1974, to be replaced by the pyro-happy Manish Market, home of ‘do number ka maal’.

I readily believed in ghosts for several years after, an obsession fuelled weekly by very cinematic radio plays called ‘Adbhut Kahaniyaan’ on Vividh Bharati. Radio is where we got our primary movie education. New movies would be presented in 15 minute ‘radio-programs’. The phrase ‘kitne aadmi the?’ was on everyone’s lips much before ‘Sholay’ opened on 15th August 1975, thanks mainly to the radio, our very own social media. Television was something we knew of only by reading American Gold Key Comics.

Television (1972) brought with it the back catalogue of films (from the 40s to the most recent) which we assiduously imbibed every Sunday evening at a convenient neighbour’s house, and learnt songs by heart every Thursday with ‘Chhayageet’ and antakshari. Hindi films (and advertising) also educated us in Urdu. Even as a child I knew some impressive words- ‘Aalingan’, ‘Ulfat’, ‘Jwar Bhata’, ‘Salaakhen’, ‘Saawan Bhadon’.

It is lesser known, but world cinema was regularly telecast on Bombay Doordarshan in the 1970’s. I vividly remember every ‘bloody’ scene from Chabrol’s ‘Le Boucher’ (1970) telecast in B/W when I was 8 or 9. Even after television, radio-programs for films would survive well into the 1980s, when the Asian Games, colour TV and Delhi Doordarshan killed all civilised programming that once came out of Bombay’s Worli studios. The memes of popular cinema continued as songs, thanks to Radio Ceylon and toothpaste. Ameen Sayani would host the weekly ‘Binaca Geet Mala’ right until 1988.

Seeing movies was something we took for granted in our fledgling years. All movies ran at the same time- 3.30, 6.30 and 9.30 pm, while children’s films had matinee shows at 10.30am. I saw 3 movies a day several times, especially in college, hopping from theatre to theatre all located near Bombay VT.

Even the prices were mostly the same: cheap seats were the Lower and Upper Stalls, the Balcony was costlier and the Dress Circle the costliest. A carryover from the days of drama, many of Bombay’s cinemas were converted playhouses, which meant that sometimes you had to hope that you wouldn’t get a seat with a column in front of you.

Movies were like comfort food. They would begin with advertisements, the Indian News Review, a Films Division Documentary, the trailers (forthcoming attractions) and a cartoon, all before the main (feature) film started. We missed none of these pleasures.

Hindi picchers were to die for. I waited 2 days straight in line for a ticket of ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ (1977) and went back home disappointed after reading ‘House-full’ in every seating slot just above the booking window. I had to content myself with radio-programs for several weeks before I finally witnessed the awesomeness of Manmohan Desai’s magnum opus (but I knew all the dialogues before that). Do movies ever go ‘House-full’ anymore?

Seeing a movie ‘First Day First Show’ was a matter of peer pressure. We could not believe how one bunch of kids in school always managed to do that. They would gleefully commit the unforgivable sin of telling you the story and ruin everything. We hated them.

The only movie I managed to see in all its First Day First Show glory was Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ (1982) at the Regal. We got lucky, buying tickets from the ‘panch ka pachhees-wallahs’ at no extra cost because on an unusual police presence. Of course, this hardly a story we could tell the next day to those smug so-and-so’s and return the favour.