A review of Dil Se, dil se.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which
we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely
disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrifying.

from the 1st Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke.

I am a reckless reader, and the sudden poignance of certain lines, I credit to an innate taste. When I read of the angel pressing Rilke to his heart, I closed my eyes, because, I already knew without knowing that every angel was terrifying. Few days ago I felt an urge to see Dil Se. It was a favourite of mine while an early teen, the sort of age when a bookish fatso decides on a pious devotion towards anything with a 'serious topic'. I felt like falling in love with Meghna again. I have fallen in love with the film, and sincerely confess my prior indifference to it.

Lets just skip the parts where we praise the cinematography, and other cinematic values. Its all there, for sure, but this is the type of film that doesn't beat you on the head with its own virtuosity. The camera doesn't give us vertigo with disorienting angles, the editing does not turn every scene into a cliffhanger, the music is not cold and orchestral. The film doesn't try to be a classic. Every value is well and good, but not cunning.

Dimwits will not even begin to like this film, and half wits just might see that Amar 'represents' India, the centre of India, and Meghna 'symbolises' Mother's sorrowful, ephemeral fringe, or even, horizon. A truly sensitive viewer, or a brilliantly ignorant one, might just see that the film is very genuine, with no character ever degenerating into a symbol, and no symbol ever bloating into a character. There are some other themes, tropes, and stuff, like the lover's search, woman as beauty and sorrow, stuff. Don't bother about it, if you can appreciate the film only that way, then do.

This movie is special because Manisha Koirala. She doesn't speak much, so I won't either, just watch her and, if you have a girl friend, don't go out with her on the same day. You will be doing an injustice to at least one of them. Koirala loudest voice is when she has a seizure.

Shah Rukh Khan finally got to elevate his entire acting range in a character fit for his virtues, virtues that Meghna expresses her envy for in the film - vitality, energy, an almost epileptic joy. In Darr, he played a psychotic lover, in Yes Boss he plays a yuppie yes man, in Raju ban gaya gentleman he plays a straightforward everyman, and in Dil Se all of this soars into one excellent performance. He is quietest when she is envying him.

Meghna is a terrorist, Amar is an AIR man. He falls for her, and trailing her madly in the northern regions misty and snowy, falls in love too. He returns dejected, dolourous and agrees to a marriage to the new face Preity Zinta, fresh from her Liril ad, cute and Mallu. Meghna and her group comes to Delhi, certain vicissitudes in their planning causes her to ask Amar for help with a job in the AIR, further complications, all very well written, bring about a denouement between Laila and Majnu, and then there is a bit of rhetoric about the army and terrorism. They blow up and die, she is a suicide bomber.The greater embrace of the Angel. Except for that bit of rhetoric, everything in this film is very fine, very fine indeed.

The songs are better than songs, surely, they are poems within the 'search for love' in the film. First is the light flirtation in Chaiyya Chaiya; exhilarated Dil Se; aroused Satrangi Re,(there is no release, of course, one doesn't make love to Angels, and in any case, it would have been censored) and then Preity's Chaiyya Chaiyya, Jiya Jale. In fact, if Jiya Jale hadn't been so Mallu-sexy, we would have actually realised in one sitting itself that Preity is heart broken at the end.

A good book to read for a feel like Dil Se is Pamuk's The New Life. Or you could go and read the first Duino Elegy. There aren't many books or filims out there with such a dream as their theme.

The first and final frontier (USP essay written by Sandeep)

THE FIRST AND FINAL FRONTIER

Did man evolve essentially as a tool maker, or as a seer tormented by visions? I paraphrase Joseph Campbell (Masks of God – Primitive Mythology) to indicate something that has always fascinated me- machines (or any automata) and their effects on our lives.

Campbell’s insight implies almost every argument and thought that is contingent on any discussion about automata and man. Should we see ourselves as building contrivances that supposedly make life easier for us, or do we see ourselves as people receiving constant hints about a different world?

Machines as such permeate our life now. They are everywhere and are accused of reducing what is left of the seer that Campbell sees us as. The irony is that machines themselves are the finest evolved product of our dreams and visions, I need only mention the curious and mystic Nikola Tesla, visionary (in all senses of the dictionary definition – both mystic and a brilliant innovator and inventor). Tesla is said to have got the structure of the Alternating Current generator in a momentary vision.

Technology is often considered a Faustian exchange that man makes with reality, ultimately leading to some sort of apocalypse. Greater dependence on automata is seen as sapping his moral fibre, or I need only reiterate, destroying any remnant of spiritual or mystic sensitivity. Most processes nowadays are automated anyways, a manufacturing company’s prime achievement is to automate all its processes. This is supposed to leave plenty of time for man to explore his complexities, but this promise is seen as illusory, with the very automated processes requiring massive intellectual effort to control and manipulate. However, can we discard the idea that this very expense of the intellect is sharpening our mind and making it more receptive to understanding more profound concepts?

Such an abstract play of ideas does manifest itself in our greatest invention so far, the internet. It is a ‘thoughtscape’, a ‘mindspace’ , the product of a machine that mirrors, or can mirror the workings of our individual and collective minds. We can no longer think of Campbell’s tools as mechanical contrivances achieving physical goals, but as powerful, almost inspired creations that lead us to greater confusions and fascinations. It is easy to characterise the internet as a collective stream of consciousness, that we nurture, and which nurtures in return. It is an almost eerie sort of symbiosis, between one’s creation and oneself.

Cyberspace is so nascent that it is quixotic to attempt an analysis in this short note. However I can allude to several auteurs who have attempted to cast an outline on its myriad subtleties – the whole subgenre of cyberpunk fiction is indicative: like William Gibson’s Neuromancer (the foundational cyberpunk text), Isaac Asimov’s monumental Robot series, and the Matrix Trilogy appear to exhaust the theoretical and imaginative possibilities of technology, but this is clearly illusory. As of now, there are researches into biomimesis (the imitation, in materials engineering and other fields, of the features of living organisms). Also, one of the declared purposes of creating an artificial intelligence, is to study our own.

In the end, I merely allude to the aeroplane as an inspiring example of how automata satisfies a long lived, almost childish dream of ours: to fly. Such inventions always give us the fleeting impression that technology, is after all, a great thing. Only time can tell and man can decide, where he will soar or plunge to.

Katrathu Thamizh

With great regret, I submit that I don't know Tamil well enough to even review this movie with enough depth. I watched an interview given by Ram and the poor man doesn't speak English well, admitting it with irony. That sort of makes us even.
Its surely the best movie I have seen in many days, and it is particularly touching that I saw it on the day after I completed reading a brief biography of Guru Dutt, who could well be a cinematic alter ego to Prabhakar. I was also reminded of Pyaasa in the film, or at least, how the film radically fled from Pyaasa's poetry and melancholia to murder and ferocity.
Not that I wish to take anything away from the director's own vision, but there was something nagging at my mind all along, do I see this film as a realistic portrait of conditions, or as a semi mythical portrayal of a rebel, a Realistic film or a Romantic film? If its the latter, I have no problem watching it and enjoying a Quixotic ride allowing myself to cry "Ate!" and letting hell off its leash. But if its the former, I am pretty scared shitless.
Even as I write this blog I wonder at all my decisions so far, and my latest (yes. I have decided to go the Katrathu Tamizh way, fucking around in humanities.) It seems somewhat absurd. Here I am, moderately talented in English, with a thousand blogs to compete with me and with a thousand more with inferior thoughts but a more engaging (meaning vulgar) style, for the attentions of passing idiots. I mean, is this what I am going to offer agencies as a persuasion to hire me? Ah well, I have a nice way out...
But back to the film, though its difficult reviewing it, I couldn't study it too much, I was too busy drinking it in. Lets see. Cinematography superb, unforgettable, it has a sort of focus that is at once phantasmagoric and real. I remember this scene in the film where there he traipses down from the top floor of his dump of an apartment, the scrawls on the wall almost throb under the sole light. The thing to wonder is that even such photography has a powerful, mesmerising effect (curious how real life can be so tantalising).
Acting is....overwhelming. Again, the realism in it is fantastic. Some of the best examples are the superb performance by his tamil master, who speaks in a rolling patois of Malayalam and Tamil, Karunaas' crisp and believable comedy when kidnapped and ordered to record Prabhakar's (Jeeva) confession, and Jeeva himself, living the role with every sort of nuance and shade. It is too flat to say that he lives the role, he does more, he forces the role onto us, he represents a community, he lends flesh to an abstraction.
Katrathu Thamizh is a harrowing, Kafkaesque film. A post graduate in Tamizh goes on a rampage after a failed (or foiled) suicide attempt. Eventually, he returns back to his naivete, but is forced to commit suicide with his wife.
I am still reeeling under the effects of the film, so I will write a more detached review few days later....

Power and its tokens

Inevitable as authoritarianism is, re-invoking tedious truisms about its nature is not. My teens were spent in discussing politics from a couch and a coffee. We are rarely at the scene of revolution, and never its centre. We know back and forth, the theory and practice of almost every political credo (or at least, Wikipedia does.) So we shouldn’t think about it. But, yet, its vicarious effects are there every day of our lives, hard enough to miss, harder still to leave unprocessed. We place our chair between pro and con, of course, but still, the temptation to rethink them is upon us. So how do we deal with politics? I am tired of arguments and debates….

Before even man could write (and, perhaps, speak intelligibly) he chose a leader and carved a totem pole. Leadership is older than even flowing thought, that is, language. Perhaps this is why none of our efforts are enough to get a grip on it. But this doesn’t mean we stay numb and dumb (though we do).

Let us cast a glance at its prime perpetrators: politicians, aka rabble rousers, demagogues, chieftains…and the many epithets (many flatteries) they bestow on the ‘rabble’ gives them their freshness. Everything is new from the mouth of the Politician. There is a certain ignominy when the demagogue prostrates himself for the crowd, now vulgarly elevated….and then…suddenly, he is back on top. For a good modern example, The Last King of Scotland would suffice.

There is more to it. The apathetic, dispersed mass is captivated, hence captive, but how does the politician reinforce his ‘authoritah’? Scintillating examples from history: Asoka, seizing the reins of Magadha, bids the treasury to stamp coins with his profile. R.C Majumdar, historian, records this many centuries later. So ‘well stamped’ is Asoka’s power, that its glow does not abate for centuries. There are bulkier symbols that Asoka scattered, like Stupas and the uniqe Asoka pillars, but money is almost like a rash, his authority isnt reinforced, it breeds. It is an idea still utilised, if one sees into one’s wallet.

There are subtler examples in modern literature. ‘Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius’ , a short story by Borges, condenses the rise to power of a group of geniuses, who envision a whole new world called Uqbar, and slowly make it intrude onto the real world. In another story by Kafka, ‘The Great Wall of China’ authority is maintained by not only the building of symbols, but where the act of building itself is a symbol (the great wall is never completed, it is just a ruse to keep the mass scattered and disunited)

Not that literature forgets the flip-side. Authority is comatose. Kafka’s ‘Neptune’ has the great sea god so inundated with affairs of state that he is unable to take a swim. Italo Calvino’s ‘A king listens’ reduces the monarch to a motionless puppet moved by nothing in particular, trusting only his hearing (or his overhearing, as the tale progresses). A more moribund token is found in Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Brodie’s Report’- where a degenerate African tribe chooses its chieftain by certain stigmata on a child’s body, and promptly cuts away his limbs and puts out his eyes, so that he may concentrate on his duties, rather than the attractions of the world. Tedious connections to reality are readily available: Hitler’s insane behaviour as the World War progresses against his favour; a paranoiac Idi Amin regressing into wanton atrocity.

The ‘mob’ now churns out a new leader, or becomes the many headed leader. He challenges the sterile authority. In some fortunate examples, this is the first ruler himself, avoiding wearisome substitutions, like Asoka and other ‘enlightened’ ones. In most others, it does involve a dark interregnum bled by Civil war and violation from external aggressors. The mob behaves paradoxically at this point. In several cases there is a paradigm shift in world view: Gandhi’s non violence, Asoka’s missionary Buddhism, etc. There is a crescendo in the atrocities and the resistance.

Finally, the coin is changed, reissued. In modern times there is generally a disembodied ideal, like a thinker or a symbol (Benjamin Franklin on the dollar, the Asoka pillar in the Indian Rupee). This is an aphorism of democracy. However, democracy is hardly freedom….the totem pole still endures, there is just a many-headed monster on the top, destabilising it. A graceful Sufi epic casts its final scene in such a light- Mantiq Al Tayr (The parliament of the birds) by Farid ud-Din Attar. The poem, mainly spiritual in content and persuasion, sings of the search for The Simurgh, god of the Birds, by the race of birds. They seek enlightenment and authority through the Simurgh. As their pilgrimage continues, several birds drop out, citing various excuses, all symbolic, and (as it is a poem) sweet. Eventually, a mere thirty birds are left.

Reaching the height of Mountain Qaf, they wait while the Simurgh’s chamberlain promises a vision of the Great Simurgh. After several minutes, when no Simurgh is forthcoming, by looking at their reflection in the lake, they realise that they are the Simurgh(Simurgh also means Thirty Birds in Persian).

It is really quite absurd to try and narrate our way through any political era, there are too many details. Might it not be better to glide through them on symbols?