Raj B Shetty tells stories. That is what he does and he says it really well. Cinema is his medium for now. And he sure lights up the screen with his tales.
I saw his first Ondu Motteya Kathe sometime in 2017/18 and that small story was told so nicely. Yes, it had that small film feel but it was engaging and he told an everyday story that we most often don’t tell.
He made for the most unlikely of heroes. If Nasser and Om were considered unlikely in their time, Raj was working with a big handicap. He was a reluctant actor too. That movie inspired remakes. The Malayalam one called Da Dadya was nice too.
You should find out why he is an unlikely hero for yourself – in an industry dominated by typical good-looking men. After a few months of holding on to that movie and even trying to get my urban friends to watch that flick by passing on my torrent downloads on thumb drives, slowly time and other movies dimmed that experience from memory. And as I wasn’t following the Kannada movie scene much because even my general opinion was that the quality of movies was not very good here… I of course had discovered Rakshit Shetty earlier and liked his films and kept up with them.
And for unknown reasons, I missed GGVV. It had created quite a ripple but I was taking dips in other lakes perhaps and completely missed the buzz. Raj BS acted in a few movies that didn’t do too well. He was stereotyped and we thought that was just that one hit, and he had gone off the deep edge, down the Mangalore sea.
Raj BS came back to my sights when the promotion of Toby was on. There was great prerelease hype about that… and all of it was based on GGVV. And when I saw it, I knew why. And it blew me away. I loved this rugged gangster flick set in a small town.
The bromance that turns insecurity and hunger for power can sour and curdle and bring great harm. I was immersed in his storytelling and found myself immersed in the scenes ever so bloody and violent. It was all evident in me that was behind the thin veil of my urban pretence. The cowardice, the hurt you feel when a loved one is harmed, and your need to avenge that, were all just parts of me playing out on screen.
When the movie ended I realised that the visuals on screen were outside of me. And I lived most of them in those couple of hours.
To think it could be Godfather or even just a Tarantino blood bath was an othering RB Shetty didn’t allow.
Also, the mythology played out in the characters was a deep attachment to the land we come from. And the blood that spilt reddened the ugly floor under my feet. There was the creator, the protector and the destroyer… did the actors just play out these characters strictly in those attributes?
Raj was Shiva and Rishab was Hari. But don’t we mesh the trinity all into one? Yes, we do and the holy ghost danced a wicked thandav.
There are no greater truths than stories. And when a story descends inside of you, attempting to touch the soul or whatever it is, that is deeper and invisible and still you… It awakens you. The cold sweat that drenched me, drained me, and then refreshed me.
Wonder if another filmmaker could tell a story of his on-screen like he did? We will know when we see Toby.
This movie is set in the pandemic period of 2020. Which is only now starting to fade out of the lives of those that survived made for a very engaging watch. The movie completely is in black and white. The cast is in fantastic form. The movie is a slice of Indian life in a small town – on the border between two Indian states. Anubhav Sinha narrates a very tight engaging tale. And his actors are only willing to help tell the tale as best possible. The aftermath of the lockdown happened when the world saw the surge of the virus. It was as unbelievable to our generation. It was the horror fantasy of some old testament tales – of dire biblical propositions. I even now remember the fear we were living in, though the second wave was more grim. The reaper was on his merciless thandav. The second wave had the grim reaper tossing about heads in absolute glee. Every family knew or saw the death of someone they knewIndiathe government. The first wave in India was a play of the ineptness of the government, which was so used to letting its people die. We had seen state-sponsored (or look away) to allow massacres. Then demonetization – drove the population into distress. These were precursors to this ‘natural’ disaster in the lifetime of our ‘supreme leader’.
Our ugly side and every more crass selfishness poured out in dollops. It spilled into the streets and let our loved ones die so we could live.
This movie set at the start of the pandemic in India. After the supreme leader announced a lockdown. And with no time or arrangements made for its citizens. Good lord! There were hoards of people stranded in cities. The migrant workers were the most affected of the lot. They had no place to stay and the land they came from was very far away. They started their walk that was 100s km away. To walk for days without food and water. This was tragic! and the apathy of the moneyed/city dwellers was thick and fast too.
Rajkumar plays a cop from a lower caste who is in charge of a check post. Oh yes, Sinha weaves in the perennial problem of the caste issue that plagues us with a fine thin thread.
As much as we want to believe that caste does not play a role in present-day India, that is fartherest from the truth. Every state/national election plays out caste equations. And even the urbanites get involved with the hate narratives. Communities and people belonging to other religions blamed for all that ails them. In the city we ignore this issue when we can. And cover ourselves with shinny material, false smiles and glibed forked tongues. But, there has been so many communal voilences unleashed on us in the last few years. It is not new, but in the years before we were a society trying to remedy this. Today we give vent to our primative hate self and have enough justifications. Unconfounded fear as shield to cover. Our children take on blood letting of the other as solution to their imagained problem. All moral bearing that make us humane, sacrificed at the alter of self interest and a nationalism of exclusion.
At no point in the narrative did it snag or bore me. There is also a nice little love story between the Tikas caste cop and the high-caste doctor. Bhumi is to die for. She is so good. She has taken her acting career to a high ground. She is comfortable with her body and at ease with what her character demands. And with every movie here performance a few notches higher. I did compare her ease of acting with Kate Winslet. But that may just be the small sample size i am operating with. And impatience in wanting to give Bhumi what is her due. Rajkumar is good in his role too. The point he freezes over when a high-caste migrant beats him with his caste stick … must have hurt and it showed. Pankaj Kapur and Ashutosh Rana were very good in their roles.
Telling is not a pandemic problem story but weaving these other stories. These stories continue even after we have forgotten the pandemic lessons. This makes the few hours spent in the dark watching the moving pictures in black and white so rewarding. There is something about melancholy that is uplifting. I am reminded of the days of the parallel cinema which said such dark sad tales they would wrench your heart out… but after we were done viewing the film it lived in us for years to come and was an enabler. Like the sweet aftertaste of the bitter Amla. And not one that made you stumble.
Bheed is a good crowd coming together to free themselves and help set us to seek our freedom. The stains of Sinha’s cry in an interview a couple of weeks after the movie was released in the theatres rang on in my ears. There were few people in the theatres to watch this movie but the critics seem to have loved it, he said.
Wishing Sinha continues to make cinema that moves him and awakens sensitivity in him. He did sound a bit distraught in that interview with Rangan Bhardwaj.
This is the season of Lent. I got thinking about this time of year and how it was in my early years. Well, I got down to recalling from memory and filling the faded memory parts by talking to Amma and her sister.
But the thought of documenting the food habits of the Lenten season in a post here came to me from the conversations I had with a friend who was working on ideas for her food blog.
So here I am drawing from memories of the 70s,80s and 90s. It was Amma who gave us this taste of tradition in the practice of the faith. Amma, at the age of 19 had moved to Bangalore after her marriage. She brought along with her the value system and much of the customs. Practices from the small municipality she grew up in – Urakam in Thrissur District in Kerala.
And reminiscing about this period in the Christian calendar, the topic of discussions and conversations this time of year is the giving up of excesses. This would mean going off eating meat for us young folks. And dad tackled the bigger issues of cigarettes and such. There was still a lot of free will in our faith practices; very unlike the Roza of the Muslim community. No, such thing as going hungry from sunrise to sunset for 40 days. We shared the 40 days concept with that community though. Oh yes, but the food is still an important part of our abstinence and austere days. The days that count down to the betrayal, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Amma kept to the practices of the community she came from for this season in our household. We recalled the momentous days in the life of Jesus over supper on those days. Lenten days were not holidays. The food customs were thus commemorations marked for the evenings.
The season of lent starts on a Wednesday – this year it was the 22nd of February 2023.
Ash Wednesday.
We would go to the church service that evening. The Catholics have early morning mass. And a ritual of crosses drawn with Ash on their foreheads. We are less on ritual, but the church I belong to did bring that in as a ritual and stayed with it for a few years. Those were the years when one pastor believed she was the only one hearing the whispers from the Lord. And the sheep were driven to some slaughterhouse or grazing land – don’t know which. This ritual was introduced in an attempt to update (retrofit) us to the Old Testament (the fear concept of it) to have the laity not think and the priest would play – God! And the many readings and sermons from the good book on the wrath of god to underline that. And the chosen few went about being materially rewarded when the sheep awaited the afterlife. Back to the ritual – some old palm leaves were burnt and the ash was given to the members of the congregation like prasadam, in small putlams.
a choir getting ready for a Television program recording in the lenten season
Let me move on to the foods that defined the special days in the season. I had to check on some of the steps with my Aunt who still follows these practices. Amma meanwhile has been out of the kitchen for a few years now and her memory was fading. When I tried pressing on with Amma, she asked me to speak with her sister. My Aunt told me that the first of them in the Lenten Calendar is ‘Indairy Wednesday’. That is the 25th day from the Sunday that precedes Ash Wednesday. And this marks the midpoint of the journey to the Cross. On this day the unleavened bread is made – Indairy.
Indairy:
is made from a mix of
rice flour,
a very small portion of urud dhal
These are mixed with water to the consistency of the idly mix. Poured out into flat containers that would fit into a steaming vessel. Like it is done in the making of vatteappam or idly. And left to steam cook. A few minutes on the stove and the Indairy is ready.
Wait for it to cool.
Sliced into small pizza-like triangles the unleavened appam is ready to eat.
Most often served after the evening family prayer.
Kozhikota Saturday
The next one on the calendar is Kozhikota Saturday.
This is the Saturday before Palm Sunday. This is a minor celebration.
Kozhikota is a Kerala version of the kadabu. It is a dumpling made from rice or wheat flour with a filling of grated coconut and jaggery
This signifies the stones hurled at Jesus. And the sweet jaggery filling signifies love.
And with a Sunday of waving palms, we enter the high drama Holy week. When Christ after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem enters the Temple and whips those folks that had made ‘his father’s house’ a den of thieves/ a marketplace. And then gives in to His father’s Will. His friend betrays him. Another friend who was his rock denies him. And he will witness seats of power wash their hands off and give him over to be crucified.
And just before the blood starts to flow comes the serene Maundy Thursday.
And in the pot for that day is Pesaha.
Pesaha is a very basic porridge made of rice flour and a few species. Cardamom and a couple of crushed cashews and a few raisins. A little sugar or jaggery. Remember austerity is at its peaking point and the dishes are also thus.
Pesaha signifies the wine part of the supper. We are going full in with the symbolism and have risen way above the literal. And it is often eaten with unleavened bread – Indairy. Yes, so Indairy comes on twice in the season. On this day, Indairy is the bread (unleavened) and Pesaha is the dip – the blood spilt for the remission of our wrongs.
Women worshipers at the grotto
And after the solemness of Maundy Thursday we wake up to Good Friday. The day the cross takes centre stage.
And most folks fast on that day and the food is further austere. It’s gruel with bitter gourd thoran or a chutney.
Easter of course is the feast. Everything that went off comes right back.
Explaining a few words:
*Potlam – a small piece of paper folded to hold a lil somethings like pills and power, just about anything in small quantity *Thoran – a vegetable dish to go with the main course. *The pics are just there to dot the text landscape
Wesley, that quaint lil church in the Cantonment area, Bangalore
Set in a small locality named Saudi in Cochin. This is a bittersweet tale told at an everyday ordinary pace. But, it smacked me harder than a Rawalpindi Express delivery to the head.
Binu Pappu and Devi Verma
It starts off ordinarily: a man throws his garbage into the next compound. It was immediately identifiable with the everyday middle-class neighbourhood I come from. A grouchy neighbour sweeps the fallen leaves from the front of her house and leaves it in front of our gate. I do lose my head about it some days. And am most often escorted indoors quite like Umma is here by her daughter-in-law. From that everyday mundane scene, the story leads us on.
The movie initially seems like the slow pace of an old lady’s unhurried steps but breaks into sweeping overwhelming emotions. And yet on screen, the pace is always as unhurried as Umma’s walk. Devi Varma as Ayisha Rawther is brilliant, you do want not to miss any part of her slow gait. In the first few minutes, she is fighting back against the injustice done to her. But after the cops take her in for her ‘violent act’ of slapping a boy. Oh yes, his stubborn shaky milk tooth falls off and there is blood on the roof. The vile neighbour calls in the cops to spite her and turns the story around on its head. And Umma now has to shoulder the Court’s apathetic slow pace. The wheels of ‘justice’ grind slower than Umma’s walk. The case goes on for decades.
The supporting cast is all so real riveting me to this sad tale – the stoic Umma and the few sensitive folks around. My eyes wouldn’t even blink on the narrative. And before I knew it I was so involved that I found myself crying. Oh yes, crying for a world that has very few of these kind (of) folks. I knew some but they were from a world that has passed us by. Folks that made the world a warmer place even through poverty and hardships.
Lukman Avaran who was impressive in Thallumala is in good form here too. but the man who is not at the centre of this tale and yet the fulcrum was Binu Pappu as Britto the friend of Umma’s son. Sathar, Umma’s son played by Sujith Shanker, lived that nice soft sensitive auto driver, wrinkled shirt en-all. This harsh world that makes him bring hardship upon his mother destroys him. How I empathised with him. But Sathar, rather than wallow in my pity disappears from the scene – from the screen and this slice of the world that has no humanity left.
Poster
This humanity (or lack of it) I speak of is not playing out on the screen. It was the one that had burst out of the screens and enveloped and mirrored my world. My mother’s difficult days played out. My brother’s plight with a wife who displays extreme behaviour and verbal abuse. His responsibility to the mother who gave him all her money and herself tearing his apart. The tragedy on screen mixed with my real, as heady a mix as whiskey and beer. And the inhumane employers I worked for spilt into the screen and then out. Sat on my shoulders and watched me cry and laughed aloud. And yet in all the pain Saudi Vellaka still set me free even as tears flowed down my cheeks.
I even narrated the film to my friend one evening, in brief. In a world that moves too fast in my restless gait and the short time we have for each other these days. She called to tell me how much it made her mull. She said that that night, parts of the story kept coming back to her in a loop. It is a tale told beautifully. The realness of how the court and police system bring such misery to the poor and middle class. And underlined further when the credits roll at the end with the staggering stats of people affected by the court system, of cases that drag on for decades. ( a tribute to 47 million pending cases in Indian courts.) In Saudi Vellaka the 7-year-old is 27 by the time he is summoned to court. The many witnesses who signed the FIR were dead or invalid. Oh, there is a girl who was 7 at the time of the incident and named as a witness in the FIR. She is now a young woman not so happily married. Vincy Aloshious in that 5 minute screen time is such a roar. Can’t recommend the movie enough.
that magical visual experience. This movie is magic. The movie is based on a short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ by AS Byatt. The movie adds rich lovely texture to Byatt’s already lovely word weaves.
The cast is divine: Tilda Swinton as Prof. Alithea Binnie lives her role. Idris is a Djinn she can’t let go, nor can you. George Miller is deft with a narrative that spans aeons. From the times of Solomon and Sheeba and Suliman the magnificent, it jumps into the 19th century with the young wife of a Turkish Merchant. This story of love. What is longing if not for love? Alithea brings Djinn’s long life into the present.
The love that sets her free… and keeps him free. Banished into the bottle by Solomon he lives on the deep ocean floor for centuries. He does live and love in bliss granting wishes and being thus free. What is life but the pursuit of love and the aches of longing? Alithea’s pains with the present world is so forgotten in the embrace of the Djinn and when the pollution and airwaves bring him close to death… she sets him free. love does not start at a moment and end as the material world makes us believe. This tale of longing released me from that limited entrapment. Releases us to eternal life, the waters that we will make us thirst no more. How beautiful it was to wallow in these beautiful thoughts for a while. Walking on air every time you thought of them. How whole and complete their union, and how fragrant mine in that reflection.
A bottle will not keep a good perfume down. It fills our mundane into the magic of life.
The surrender to love buoys the soul and the songs flow out of you. It wakes up the lovely heavenly beings to sing along in harmony with you. Three thousand years of longing is a beautiful symphony.
This one was a 25-notebook sprint. There was enough time to deliver them – about 6/7 months. But I kept dithering, waiting for inspiration. I did get on with it after the initial hitch.
My mind slowed with the clutter and the challenges at work. Mind games and dealing with employees rudely had become the way of management in that world. Diagnosed mental illness and exclusive Shrinks list for the top management, justifications! Too late for the many lives that passed through those portals. My only hope is that these very bad experiences made those who hurt better for it, going forward. Like the cliche: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I hope they don’t add to the number of the bitter, self-serving lot because of this hurt. But these are bad lessons to make for a better life. Oh yes, there is that constant questioning of the values I let go of to keep the home fire burning. Sad, pathetic excuse. More on all that in a piece I intend to write about in another post.
the answer sheets I received.
I got started on Bookbinding a couple of years ago. I have been working with books for the longest time. And even was delusional that I knew everything there was to know about it. That feeling came from being around books all the time. I worked in the biggest library in the city, and a bookstore in my early years of employment. And most all my jobs after had me dealing with paper and production. I fixed old books that had fallen apart for friends. Also fixed Dad’s books that had fallen apart. Oh, I loved the smell and feel of paper.
the double sheet stitched, ready to be bound
It was sometime around 2010-12 that I got a stack of books from amazon.com way before amazon showed up in India. From coupons, I got at work. And good colleagues who brought the heavy stack for me from Europe.
But I only got to read those books many years later. I started off with upcycling and that is what I still do with making books. This activity took my mind off the toxicity that I spoke about earlier.
This Project:
the first book – covered with a collage paste sheet and ribbon for a closure
This 25 notebooks-plus project is not one set of books but more out of the papers that Jiju gave me for this project. There will be smaller note-pads and more notebooks. I landed an ample supply of examination answer sheets. Jiju gave me these to make notebooks. He plans on presenting these books to the children he is working with, at the end of this academic year. He had collected these sheets of paper over many many years.
25 books of about 15×15 cms:
Out of the four paged sheets, I bound 25 notebooks.
Cover:
I decided on collages as covers keeping the school leaving the year of the kids in focus. And writing as a daily practice. A collage of current affairs and words that would evoke good thoughts was the first book cover.
As I will go along further on the project the covers will find themes and other aesthetic visuals.
The pages are serial-stitched and bound. I’ve used a thinner board (about 230 gsm) than the usual hardcover for these 80 pages notebooks.
Have used a piece of an old zipper as head-bands for the first time. And ribbon for bookmarks.
Part II of converting these papers into books:
The secondary part of the project will be smaller books about 3 inches in height and 5 inches wide.
The Single sheets will be longer thicker books – about 300 pages.
So there’s a lot to do. Looking forward to finishing up these papers. These old sheets breathed new life to consume themselves. These pages would spring purposeful again, which sat idle on a shelf now for a few decades.
And here are the lot that I hurriedly took pics of before I handed them over. – https://tiny.cc/dll8vz
I stopped by today at the tree Mark* had painted in ‘his gospel, and saw it anew this time. But that was also in the light of what Bishop Spong spoke this day to me. Spong was talking about Nathaniel, and how Jesus tells him, ‘I saw you at the fig tree”. And he goes on to explain that under the fig tree is where the Rabbi taught his class. Oh and from that John’s gospel, the Tree on Mark’s gospel road was lit. The very tree that Jesus cursed and it withered soon enough.
The fig tree was my little church and then I quaked in fright at what the light shone on. My first instinct, oh yes, that animal one, was to blame the building and the clergy. Oh yes, that they will have to bear anyway – Pinkie Brown and those that go up and down on the hierarchy of this CSI “empire”.
So in that light, the Church was the fig tree and not bearing fruit. And thus God would remove it by its very foundations. Sigh! There is a feeling of divine unfathomable energy force that one feels when at some locations. For example a Cathedral, an ancient temple, an old mosque, Gurudwara, a cave, or the calm of the high hills. I herein only speak of the places I have felt that warm swell of energy, and the breathing in which made life worth the living in all its suffering. And thus trudge on along the path made for you. And find the strength to live that wasteful love in abundance.
That phenomenon is the energy points on the earth. The folks who came before us, the wise among them, had the gift of knowledge and wisdom to decipher this. And they pitched the foundations for Shrines in those energy centre fields. It does seem difficult to understand that in today’s India and our literalness pursuit. How a caste or a chosen few now go about desecrating the places of yore claiming it theirs. They claim that their very own ancestors came upon that place way before this existing structure and wisdom practices. And claim it, violently. Kings and conquerors of yore might have done that too… but to do those horrid acts of violence in these times of tech and progress. And only to find that there is nothing left for them! Ah! so be it. But, it will not be there for anybody else either.
That theory about the earth’s energy Centres also says that the energy in these places on earth can deplete too. Abuse and greed can deplete it faster. See it in stark ways: the greedy and Vain deplete the finite resources of the earth. Causing immense suffering to a vast number to give unto that few more and more, more than they could do right with. And then soon that disappears; the sinkhole of hate does it faster still.
And if JC was to swing by that Lil church near the park. From some distance would find it laden with fruit with that fresh paint and a tall bell tower. And on coming closer would whisper the same words he did to the fig tree a few centuries ago.
How long would he have gone before he came back this way and his disciples found it withered? You ask. This question will also have no easy answers in the finite and literal.
And as Martin Luther King said: even if the world was to end tomorrow, go out and plant that apple tree. And in that hopefulness, one could keep working at keeping the water in the Well. Water for all and thereby in plenty for us too – JC did say rather simply: love the other as you do yourself. Or as Stephen Still sang, love the one you are with.
JC would then stop by to drink a cup of coffee with the Samaritan woman. And even leave us with good wishes and invoking the presence of his father upon us. Oh, what great joy that.
*
12 The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. 13 Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. 14 Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it. – Mark 11:12-14
Below are thoughts about those grounds that anchored us and gave us life in its abundance (freedom to live, laugh and know Him in all our deeds and ways)
Preface
Voice was the Wesley Church Magazine, a project that started in 1992, and the last issue was released in December 1997.
It is May 2022 as I write these few lines. I write these lines to put into context the collection I plan to bind together all the issues of Voice. Many many years have passed, just like the blinking of His eyes. Lots did happen to the Church in these years that went by. Some folks who contributed to the Magazine have since moved on, some from the earth itself and some to distant places on earth. A few of us continue to be part of this community.
I decided to put together all of the copies of Voice in one place, rather than have them in those tiny booklets that are fast disintegrating just as the memory of the history and traditions that made us warm folks. You may see a little of that in the pages of Voice. You will also see that the struggles were rough and the young did write terse editorials.These copies are also falling apart and the print is not the best. So now that we are doing that, it will be a book form, and a book needs a foreword. We included a postface too. Just to tie them together. .
Times changed, and the country changed too. In 1991 the new economic policy for India was introduced in and in about 10 years we saw a shiny India, an India that moved from a socialist democratic to capitalist democracy, and this did change the way we were as individuals and as a church too. Church went from an institution that worked at caring and loving as part of the ideology we believed in and as per the only commandment we were given – love your neighbour as yourself. And seamlessly that ideology began to fade and we started to move towards love thyself(period).
Can you give us a concrete example?
Ah OK: The Wesley Home which looked after destitute women, the only outreach program of the church, started to serve itself – old uncles and aunts were admitted to the Home to await their deaths. People have voiced their entitlement to be part of it whenever the need arose. Oh how far we have come from the only congregation workshop that was held (there is a special Voice issue of the workshop). At this workshop, we listed old-age homes not existing – as in longing for a time wherein we looked after our old ourselves and did not commit them to an institution’s care. We did this in a session of brainstorming to visualise the world as a better place than we found it.
Here’s a tweet from Pope Francis (11th May 2022) – A long life – so the Bible teaches – is a blessing. The #ElderlyAndGrandparents are signs of the goodness of God who bestows life in abundance. Blessed is the house where an older person lives! Blessed is the family that honours its grandparents! #BlessingOfTime
One more?
OK: Now we spend time and money on the building and care not for the folks. So, if you go back to the time when the church building was being ‘restored’ (ah no, they corrected that word after they found out what the word meant, to renovation). Ah right! A Hundred and twenty-year-old Church should be washed of its history and presented as an eighteen-year-old awaiting a suitor. And we did that quite well. We had reached a time where we hired people to serve us for every community activity. The PC even contemplated bringing in event management firms to run the harvest festival – our thanksgiving!
OK enough!
the back cover
A brief history of Voice
The beginning: in 1992 when we were young and the rosy glasses were foggy and shaky on the bridge of our noses is when we dreamed up this magazine for the Church. And we, the young folks decided to run it. Oh yes, we were aware that was a serious responsibility, and there was a certain discipline required of us -content good and also having to release the Magazine at regular intervals.
Looking back, 1992 was not the best of years, it had been only a couple of years since this peaceful church has seen a conflict that shook it at its very foundation. Ah, and by that, I don’t mean the building. The people had been disturbed, well I won’t go into who shook the bottle.ii and maybe I don’t even know, but shaking the bottle did happen. And a church that was a haven to many of us, a place we ran to when life’s jolt came along, was being washed of its succour.
Some folks left the church, and distrust grew. Brothers against brothers-in-law and so forth. This fracture hasn’t fully healed to this day, even though many folks from that time have passed on. Their blood and spirit still linger on talking to us in whispers even amidst the urban din, if we only cared to listen. Our fault was also that we didn’t try to address or fix this issue. We just carried on and the others’ troubles were just their own. They went off to faraway places to heal but the collective festered on and we did some small-time band-aid jobs and in a few years the self-serving folks came on to take it into their own pockets – into their hands we committed ourselves.
We worked on this idea of the Magazine for a while, just a couple of us; we drafted a plan and then we took it to a few other folks and thus encouraged by their inputs and enthusiasm we launched the Voice. In the initial issues none of the editors who started the Voice wrote for it, it was for the folks we called the family to be engaged on topics that mattered and could work together in His house. The first issue was a serious struggle. We managed just enough money to be able to print it. We even had a logo, and the name for the Magazine came from the cries of John in the wilderness. Billy who was the resident artist worked on the logo. Those were the days before digital prints and we didn’t even have enough money to make a block for the logo for the offset printing. And for the logo for the Masthead for the first issue a friend who screen-printed helped out.
The editors’ main job then was to fundraise for the next issues and put together a few articles. We had more donors after the first issue and we did a full offset print of the next issue and managed three issues after. And then we went off the air. Difficult to keep it alive, it was. The Voice was documenting the calendar of events and reprinted articles from other church magazines and some written by friends outside the church, Wesley didn’t respond with contributions to the content of the magazine in that year.
the spine
And though there was talk about the magazine it couldn’t get off the ground until a year later in 1994, we did change the outlook some too. More involvement from the young people who then put it together. Computers had started to become part of our lives. With the advent of IT, came computers and printers, and that reduced the production cost. Oh yes, and drastically at that, and that got the editors to work at getting content from the pool they were in. Just asking folks and letting them know got us perhaps 1 or 2 pairs of ears but the net had to spread to find more participative fish. And this happened in Rev. VasanthKumar’s time. The Rev was a proactive administrator and found time for the Church despite his ambition and involvement in the diocese. He left the fertile spaces for use by members and there was involvement and contribution from a larger pool. Rev. VasanthKumar was at Wesley for about three years, he was elected the Bishop of the KCD when he was at Wesley, and moved on to the big Chair.
And when the last issue of Voice was released Rev. Ravikumar Daniel was our presbyter. He was a mild person and meant well, but the older folks pushed him hard and the young folks got impatient with the uncouth ways of the older folks.
The editorial team had agreed all along that we would be accountable to the PC/Presbyter in charge and therefore to the church. Every issue got an OK from the priest. The PC started to yield their ‘power’ and made the Youth beg for that very little. That money a tokenism was what made the pact of accountability real.
We had devised ways to make the copies available at a very low production cost. One digital printout was then laid out with illustrations (sometimes it was drawn directly onto that master copy) and then that was used to make photocopies and we then glued the Eight pages together to make the magazine. The most cost-effective way one could think of. And when the PC started to push and make things difficult for the young legs that carried the ideas of the old and even added to the ideas with the endless energy they possessed. The legs slowly started to walk another way. And when the last issue came out, it was without the money from the church and it went ‘underground’. And that also meant that the young didn’t think it wise to engage in the activities of the family that we called Church.
Come by to Wesley now to see where that road has led. Of course, when all the memory of that time has faded the new folks will work on making the wheel again.
Didn’t we evolve to this state of civility that love could lift us to? We have reduced it to the very opposite, and now proclaim that the institution should uphold this? Really? Hate instead of love? Look at our practices that exclude rather than include. And the attempt of those big men with small minds going at the people who try to live and do things together. All those who have ears let them hear… or eyes, then see.
Postface
Now that I am putting these issues of Voice all together I did reminisce of those times and decided to put in a few lines to bring my thoughts up-to-date about this place we call Wesley and consider family. Yes, that public place which we used to gather in at times of joy and sorrow, and thus could our joys abound and our sorrows bear.
We now mostly just come in small numbers on Sundays, and when we are the chosen few to a feast that some folks throw on these grounds.
The ingredients that make for our very being; like music, writing, thinking, and fellowship need to be fed by collective energy, and not by two or three self-appointed corporate heads. These activities and acts of love are essential to our practice of the faith, as oxygen is for life. We do the reverse in our places of fellowship and worship. We build new toilets and set up basketball courts in our belief that it will bring the kind of people we would like and get along with. No no, that doesn’t work, the remnants of that failed experiment still hang on our grounds like art installations that represent no thought, quite like that permanent one – the bell tower.
The core of a church’s being is Jesus Christ and the spirit that holds us under this umbrella of many many colours and splendour. And the abundance of grace sets us aglow with the knowledge of that unending warmth. We substitute that abundance of the infinite invisible with our understanding – crass, very limited, material, finite and self-interests.
a glimpse of an inside page
Ah! Did you read the above lines as you don’t need money for the upkeep of a fine building/institution? Please then read again or just know that’s not what I am saying. People not participating and drifting away to find peace in walks in the park because the waters that we bathe and drink from are now a pool filled with filthy plastic and dollops of hateiii. The froth of hate that fills the place is the new ‘beautiful’. So we are at a stage now where the faces may change but the bad precedence continues; whataboutery takes wings in this devil’s playground. So, this is the new road and the old road cannot be found even if that were to be sought, the memory has no way to recall it objectively.
In the years after Voice went silent, Wesley went along some wide easy roads. There were significant money activities, in the same vein as the small elevated unnecessary park on our little grounds. We even called that park a sic park(sung to the tune of Jurrasic park – Voice Issue – August 1994). And today, years later it’s still in the way.
We got a towering Bell
Almost 130 years into the existence of the Church, the brilliant minds that managed money and activities related to it, came up with this masterstroke of an idea to get a bell and a tower to house it. And it came to be. One man contributed to the whole, and now it peels at arbitrary hours and times to announce nothing. A church bell primarily was a call to prayer. Is the purpose the same? In this day and age when no one depends on that sound to heed the call and when no member of the Church is close enough to hear it ring? It is perhaps a perch for the pigeons, kites and ravens, dedicated in flowery fonts on exquisite marble in pursuit of immortality?
We piled gravel on the roof of the old building weakening the whole structure, and after years of it being discovered, it still stays there and continues to sag the old beams that hold up the roof. Bulldozers’ snores on Renovation road lull us to deep sleep.
Ah, the church also got renovated and thus managed to wash away a lot of its history too. Did I mention tradition and history before? Well, we don’t care for things like that. So when you dress up a 130-year-old as an 18-year-old virgin the sight can be ghastly, even to those uninitiated to the art/science of aesthetics. And some folks in frock trying to show you the ways of the world.
At the time of the renovations(did I make it sound like the reformations?) that work on the building brought more destruction than the building of His temple. The people were divided and all the platforms that were enshrined in the constitution to keep the flock together were all destroyed and a few folks decided on all expenditure and engineering of the destruction. This top-down corporate bullying saw His kingdom here on earth being built by a few for a few. Kings and Queens reigned and their children abused the sanctity or an understanding of it passed on gently down the ages. Their parents even told the priest to let their children do whatever they wanted on those grounds and as the office of the priest was so totally compromised the children did what they pleased and in spite of that great freedom, we saw the children leave the place. Did I not mention the 2021 harvest festival which had no youth presence?
Hymnbooks
So now on to the hymn books. When the few who now abused the soft grounds of love with their lust for the material and glory the years of trudging along the road of evolution were abandoned and they, the wise few, went on to invent the wheel again. The hymn books we used were over 100 years old in the making and had many editions before the edition in use at our Church at that time A process with the opportunity to undo its previous print runs mistakes and omissions, as does happen with printing and as it does with the evolution of life too. Did not even Einstein stand tall because he stood on the shoulders of those who came before him? The church now had new hymn books badly bound and the meat of it – the hymns, were error-ridden and many favourites omitted.
This happened during the 5-year tenure of Rev. F. Deenadayalan.
We got more employees too: we hire them for cheap and teach them charity. One example(there are many of course): Wesley hired a nightwatchman at half the salary. The poor man went to sleep every night tired from another job that paid him to keep body and soul together, one night the coil he lit to keep the fierce mosquitoes away, burnt a part of the old wooden church door. And then we just got rid of him. Sigh!
We still got a Sexton who is asking for larger living quarters and our charity allows us to give away what is not ours to give. Our great love for our Old gets us to tuck them away at the old age home meant for the have-nots. The sexton now has no work responsibilities but he has a big house, poor pay and is bonded to the folks who speak loud and abuse poor lives.
And as always some people said the same things: the next pastor will bring the change. Oh NO! How wrong that hope is.
The Choir
The choir in the early 90s was a group of all ages and mostly young people. In the mid-90s saw the demography changed to senior citizens. This was meant to be a temporary arrangement but that wasn’t to be. And the problem that stared us in the face and we did nothing about punched us in the solar plexus in the time of the pandemic. That story is a long one and it does tell us of what we have become, but that is for another day.
There was another singing group that came to be from the throes of the traditions of Wesley – The Bridge. The Bridge was/is a singing group. Their participation was a good indication of the involvement of the congregation. When their numbers swelled it meant the songbirds had found fruits to come to. So, if you measured the last couple of decades by the Bridge sighting you will see that their absence also meant the birds just flapped about in the park and picked some spiritual birdfeed off the lake bed and other school grounds.iv
The Mizo fellowship
Now a forgotten race. They once used our church to worship in their language on Sunday evenings. They also were part of our worship when invited for occasions and at Christmas programs, their singing would tug our soul strings to hum along in divine harmony. But in the pursuit of keeping public property private, we asked them to leave as we needed it for our use. Really?! Yes, we started an evening service just to show them that as a reason, and that service stopped within a few weeks with the attendance being down to 1 and 2. That wasn’t even worth the effort of donning on his white Robes, a priest once opined. There was another fake news planted, that they would register their Church to this address and that would mean our ouster. The larger parent body was in ‘Kathrey’v. And all this in our small space way before the Majoritarian movement raised its ugly hood in India. So, it is no stretch to say that we deserve the leaders we got, Nationally too, i mean! Glocal!
One can’t hold placards that say ‘not my PC member’ or ‘not my PM’. No no, can’t absolve ourselves of that responsibility. And this would be a nice time for a song. Here goes: Nina Simone’s: O sinner man, where will you run to?’vi
The genre – P &W
This is what the Catholics called the Charismatic. The inclusion of these folks in the regular worship was done to counter the new-age church movement that took away the flock to a new way of worship, which involved loud singing and a lot of clapping and even speaking in tongues. This emotionally charged kind of movement that started with the Pentecostal churches had found resonance and meaning for a large number of people than just the cult-like movements of the 70s that fizzled after Youth for Christ and such like cults were destroyed from within. The new movement had corporate management styled personalities who preached the prosperity religion. And the traditional churches despite their academic colleges that produced their priests were found wanting. This exodus had to be arrested and therefore the traditional churches lazily decided to deviate from its path and make a patch of the same in their churches too.
And out of this came the “praise and worship” teams that led the congregation in singing choruses that were popular in those new-age plush places. This is the antithesis of the contemplative mode that the CSI was pursuing with its flock, to be informed and be strengthened in the faith by questioning and reflecting. This practice also faded out in many of the CSI churches, the informed congregation found this schizophrenic and moved to better the service that they came to be part of and live in love. And also to love the other as oneself.
the first page
But a Church without its history or tradition is a new age gathering. With deafening praise-singing and emotional outpouring which gives one a temporal feeling of upliftment, this feeling of the dopamine high refuses to kick in soon enough and the high decibels didn’t really make for increased dosage. The above effort by the New Age is an attempt at dislodging the brain in the worship of your Maker. Nay, not trance like, nor like King David did with his dance before the Ark of the Covenant on its way to the temple.
Birthday Celebrations
Rev. Ravinder started the special prayers with a difference, for those celebrating their birthdays that week. We always did offer prayers of thanksgiving for the folks celebrating their special days, but now they were called to the altar and the priest blessed them, the choir sang the happy birthday song and then the plate for the offering was passed around. Benign and not an issue most said. But unthinking actions do change us and not necessarily for the better. This was a practice to get people to feel important and so special that they loosened their purse strings and offered more to the ‘Lord’. It also was the manifesting of the self. Self before all else, and the Church which helped rid you of the evils of the ego now catered to building that very ego. Gods built in his image.
When Rev. Ravinder was the presbyter in charge, the language handicap was manifest, and his was a political posting at Wesley. He was at Wesley because he was part of the winning party and the requirement of the church was not considered. But, to give the man his due, he was open to ideas and the basics of tending to the flock was a skill he had acquired over the years of being a priest. The first 2 years of his tenure saw the congregation’s participation in wholesome ways. I also remember a conversation with him wherein he wondered what he could bring to a newly renovated church. And he readily agreed that the suggested route would be a good one to take: now that there is no work to be done on the building, his legacy could be building the church (the people i.e.). But a politician in him woke up in the 3rd year of his tenure and when he fixed some members in the PC, not illegally, but with tactics and manipulation, he decided to make good his next few years at Wesley and work on his ambitions. That oft-heard cliche for emphasis – For that very sin fell the angels from heaven.
And then began his troubles and the church started to lose its relevance with more folks in the congregation. Two years of work were replaced with no work in that area. He didn’t gain much, his legacy is now that of any priest in these times – irrelevant to the everyday situation of the flock. The church was back on a downward spiral. The analogy of an alcoholic slipping back to his ism would help us understand our present – an alcoholic when he gets back to his drink doesn’t start gradually again but at the extreme level he had reached before his giving up.
And then Wesley had 3 years or so of Rev. Rodrigues. No arrest to the downward, it just got worse. When Rodrigues was Presbyter in charge, the bishop came calling to sort out a problem that had even his office windows clanging – A domestic issue with a couple of members on the PC. Ugly and pathetic those incidents were.
Then came the pandemic and new Rev. Dennis – two for the salary of one, we overheard someone say on the church grounds. And yes, it was visible too. But that has shown no sign of the congregation being more dynamic or growing in number. The conversations with her about making the church a place for people to gather and be involved with the Church’s mission was so banal. She said those who want to be involved should be here on the ground. Oh boy, how timely that interjection from her was. The pandemic protocols kept people away from the church. And Wesley did nothing for its suffering flock nor for that outside who were very severely affected. ‘We will pray!’ you heard on WhatsApp and we moved in the opposite direction of what Mother Teresa of Calcutta warned us about: “Prayer without action is no prayer at all.”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the Church had lost its way. The leadership of the Clergy? Like Gandhi is supposed to have said about American civilization, “I think it would be a good idea.” Most of them are embroiled in scandals involving material acquisitions and very cheap public behaviour reported in the mainstream press. The incumbent Bishop even wanted to fist it out with an office-bearer. Oh yes, in public. And there are other more seedy and atrocious behaviours by the white-robed shepherds in the public domain. The young therefore don’t have much need to be in Church.
Personal saviours we might all have but the corporate worship that would bring us to live in a fellowship of his knowledge and bear each other’s burden is a distant dream. It gets overbearing doing it for oneself and also that no wo/man is an island.
The leaders of the church are all just devoted to the brick and mortar(real estate) and the 2 and 3 gathered that would bring Him into our midst is not our concern.
Ah, you want hope?
Yes, there is always that, aren’t we the people of the Book? And that promises us hope, so there is, but it won’t be the old roads even as much as in our looking back, it would seem like the better way. And yes, a new Jerusalem will establish itself.
I will stop here and leave it to others to write their history as they saw it or affected them.
Will Voice serve any purpose if it did exist now?
Oh yes, it might do a lot for making us better humans if we tried and the ink on paper would mix with our blood and help us see God in the other and a Messiah inside us – Tatvamasi (“That you are”).
Friends from Church do discuss the possibility of Voice making a comeback, so many years after it went kaput. It would still be such a glue and be able to address some of the problems and create a platform for people of all ages to work together. It would probably only need a few in getting it out as issues but it will definitely touch a lot more lives and it will bring purpose to our Church life and aid in being a Christian outside of it too.
From the experience of working on the Voice I can tell you, it taught of us skills that empower us in our professional life and continue even to this day. And if it were in the hands of the young it gives them purpose and it even opens their eyes to the community. But, that task is herculean considering the Youth are absent in these grounds. And to identifying a few to take over tasks is not the same as getting them to invest their time and ideas in the pursuit of an outcome. It works best when the space makes it possible for them to dream and if the grounds are fertile for them to work on the dream here. Just handing them an idea that worked years ago for you is not the way forward. That’s all i can see in this hazy crystal ball. Will need more hands-on deck to see more clearly.
An aside: when F. Deenadayalan was the priest she called me to a one-on-one meeting and asked me to bring out the Voice again. All support was promised. I declined, as really it was not mine to give/run it belonged to a collective, and that too the Youth, which I wasn’t anymore. Even though there are 40 and 50 year old calling themselves mentors and guides and path-makers, goldsmiths, whatever… and trying to give direction to the Youth. Ah, nice. And now the whole lot (Youth) left the constituency. So there are kings and no subjects. Abject poverty this.
Well, we sure hope that there will be more hands in the struggles. Cause Jesus didn’t say that you will have no troubles, he said he will be with us through those darkest times. Amen!
“I can’t remember what all Frank had fighting in the jar that day, but I can remember other bug fights we staged later on: one stag beetle against a hundred red ants, one centipede against three spiders, red ants against black ants. They won’t fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that’s what Frank was doing, shaking, shaking the jar.”
iii Check all the hate mail that just one person has put out in the public domain. Even when the Pastor decides it’s filthy and not good for others’ consumption and doesn’t share it. He will send it to folks because he has the database, he collected them you see, as part of the church’s drive to update records.
iv The New Age churches functioned out of large spaces like these and oh yes, they filled up those places.
v https://bit.ly/3MgNnwF ( a slogan which is used by the Hindutva forces to divide the country into community lines and violently at that too. Make the minorities second class citizens. This is the link to the article by Ramachandra Guha.
We saw this one a couple of weeks ago. Not something that appealed to me at all. The concept of that time thing got me thrown to Tenet. Oh, no you don’t have to be clever or have watched movies to know this. They throw Nolan and other references at your face. And the Venkat Prabhu experience is not much of it for me. The over the top is not always the desired experience. I have to change this diet as it doesn’t agree with me or take it in very small doses. Was looking forward to a new ‘little superstar’ appearance. Simbu looked better after having shed a lot of weight. The actors make a lot of references to that too, and so do they explain all the references they were making. There is the SJ Suryah ref on his own self – overacting that is. Suryah was the best part of the movie. his over-the-top works nicely. But all of the rest of this ‘political flick’ in the light of all the time-bending or looping it back and forth was all wasted on me. I longed to be done with it. The girls have very little to do. Kalyani and Anjena Kirti have just to show up at a few places in the script that seems to be writing itself as the camera rolls.
In the light of the controversies that abound with a minority community, this should have been something else we thought… Simbu plays a Muslim, well he does make some observations. But in all that forced humour that was infused most of that was lost in the slapstick…
So this experience I will leave out of the resume. of course, if we qualified it with some long small prints this could be justifiable. Well, that’s it for now… we hope to get to have some more to say soon.
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them. George Eliot
There is so much I could say about Eddie if only I knew my way around with words. But, emboldened by the many prayers Eddie said for us in the the everyday tongue that he spoke with Him in; I will converse of Eddie into the void he left us.
The news of Eddie leaving this earthy abode saddened me. I felt abandoned for a while; I would not hear his voice on the telephone or see him at his house or church or our house. The morning I heard the news of his passing, Eddie’s thoughts came to me in the words of a well-known hymn:Bold I approach the eternal throne, And claim the crown, through Christ my own. He was always ready to meet his Maker. He spoke gently and confidently of that moment many times in our hours together. I was left thinking he would be happy with a line of a song that went:toss me to the winds of time when I die (sweet honey in the rock).
I will dwell a while on the time we were in the same singing group at Church. He, Jenny and his children were part of the same group – The Bridge. Jenny and Eddie were able allies in our pursuit of worship in song together, in many voices. Laughter came easily to them, even when they walked in the darkness of the Valley. Our church life was alive in large part because we could live on this group (The Bridge)the inclusiveness the Good Book taught us, even as the larger body of the Church seemed to pull itself in the opposite direction of profit and material and exclusivity. The Bridge was a group of folks of all ages, and Eddie was in large part its voice and action in the pursuit of its purpose of inclusion and truth that set us free, secured in the warm embrace of love. He spent hours looking for songs the group could sing, and even played them out on his piano for us folks who could only sing by ear and didn’t read music. Even this he did was such niceness, not once insisting on the song he laboured over to be picked by the group. He joked of those episodes to echoes of great laughter.
I leaned on Eddie as we worked to keep The Bridge above the ever raging waters outside. I would like to believe we, The Bridge, had such strength in the togetherness liberally sprinkled with deep laughter and a sense of joy. Eddie was sensitive to the cause and to us folks who worked on it. He has called me many times because he sensed that I was weighed down, offering solace as we separated the wheat from the chaff and made right the discordant strains and set our lives back on songs. Many a time when the ill winds threatened to blow songbirds away from the house of the lord, Eddie encouraged us on with lessons from history, literature, jokes and the Good Book.
He helped lighten the heavy air and shone more light on the straight and narrow, he wore his responsibility lightly but with utmost diligence. He would be at every practice well ahead of time. He made doing things together and being together look as easy and essential as the air we breathed.
India’s economic policy change in 1991 had put us all in the pursuit of happiness in the material. The Church was not spared that pursuit, Churches were classified on their income and new class divisions thrived – new urban caste stagger had begun. Amidst this scenario, Eddie with his very being taught us to hold things lightly.
Eddie offered his services wherever he saw the need. He didn’t need special mention, attention or even thanks in return. He was a team man whose joy was in the happiness of the rest. He once volunteered to work at the Church office and quit when they wanted to pay him. Little did we, the church, understand his faith and knowledge and his abiding belief in the abundance Jesus promised those who came to him.
Oh god, how much we will miss him in the post-pandemic world, even as I am confident of hearing his voice ever so often along the paths of what remains of my life’s journey. I still hear him in the pages of books I read, in the songs that play, the orchids that bloom…
He loved the written word. Oh, the many hours we spent trying to find the real meaning of words, the words the great masters like Dante and Dickens used to weave life. I delighted in his joy of the written word it often lit our darkened paths and but spring in our steps. When old words found a new light, they shone as in perfectly cut diamonds. Yes, like the word that was in the beginning, and it then became flesh…
The loss of Eddie’s presence amongst us will be felt for a long while to come. But the dust he returned to is a part of the earth that calls my name gently and stills the storms in the deep darkness of the nights.
So long Eddie! One of these days and it won’t be long, We’ll rejoin you in a song, and join that circle at the throne
– 9 July 2021
**Eddie left us on 19th April this year, 2021. These are a few random thoughts on a man who I had the privilege to be in close proximity in public spaces and deeply in private spaces for a few years. Oh yes, Friends makes all roads of this life tenable.
A friend called to talk about the shows and movies we were watching in the lockdown and he said, this small film, Sethum Ayiram Pon whispered something that stayed with him a while even in the midst of the din of Money Heist and Jyothika’s Ponmagal Vanthal and Penguin.
Yes, talking of movies that were released directly to the digital platforms because the theatres have been closed for the longest time now, since march 2020 and we are in the middle of June now, all the theatres we pass by still has the movie posters from the movie that played and also starting to look very sad and morose. Reflecting the gloom that hang overhead our cities (mostly, though the clouds are spreading into the
hinterlands too). Therefore the new releases had to find digital platforms.
Sethum Ayiram Pon has a fresh cast and a debut director in Anand Ravichandran. It was an engaging film. It brought about the city-Village contrast and divide. Had Nivedhithaa Sathish’s puffing on cigarettes to accentuate that attitudinal divide, and she kind of smoked it like it was forced on her, even when there was no one else in the frame. Except for that little awkwardness with the smokes, she played her part well. She frowned most of the time and when there was a brief love interest she did smile and then she cried hard too.
The film was also looking at the other opposites like life and death. And for us city folks who have death removed furtherest from our social milieu; like moving the graveyards as far away from habitations or building tall walls around it. The rural however, embraces this inevitable. And like Srilekha Rajendran who plays the grand mother explains this inevitable to her grandchild (Nivedhithaa).. And for us so used to getting everything over the counter and have forgotten the subtle, Ravichandran has to make Srilekha Rajendran live and die her lessons. And that death does not announce itself all the time: a dark comedy plays around an extramarital affair, when death couldn’t wait until he got back home after the nefarious. Ravichandran deals with death more lightly than Lijo Jose’s Malayalam movie Ee.Ma.Yau, not really anywhere in this genre, though, categorized under dark-humor. It came to mind when i saw dead bodies and rain here. Ee.Ma.Yau is a fine film too, and Lijo a super craftsman.
Sethum Ayiram Pon a nice lil film in this darkness of the lockdown. To reflect on death shot in a light before the present the shiver inducing icy cold of the ICU pallidness of the Covid deaths. Would be lovely to see what Ravichandran would showcase next, his sensibility sure has the warmth of that new normal that we talk about and do nothing to step into.
To get back to writing on movies (or writing itself) i picked, Shylock with Mammootty and Big Brother with Mohanlal.
AT the outset let me tell you these movies are waste of the digital space they occupy. You really wonder why these stars would do something like this at this stage of their career, which after this long a stay in this field perhaps already their way of life. And they cannot be donning greasepaint for the money alone. And after they having done such wonderful work even very recently this was such a let down. And if they were doing it to help some newcomer or friend, then this half hearted stuff wouldn’t have helped at all. Mammootty’s recent Unda was really good and Peranbu almost got him the national award, or atleast it had his fan rial up Rahul Rawail of the jury. And Mummotty magnanimously appoligised even though he had nothing to do with the behavior of the trolls. The national award itseems went to Gujarat, that’s were all the action goes, Trump included.
Back to Shylock, it doesnt’ cut any meat, even them thighs of the sexy vamps can’t tip the scales. It’s made by new comer, who probably adored the 80s Malayalam film scene, and set out to live in it in this decade, well, it doesn’t work. I thought the cast was interesting, Meena after a relatively large gap, and RajKiran to ham it up in his typical old school ways. This fan-directed (Ajai Vasudev) film and his adoration of his hero is uninspiring, and the storytelling unimaginative… ofcourse mummootty manages to stand tall amidst this abysmal ruin. There is all the elements from that time that made a film successful used here, the villain is gruesome, the hero can triumph over every odd, and the loving heroine an ideal Indian woman, and then item number (remember the days of the vamps). Well, it’s not merely enough that you have the ingredients for the dish, you should also know how to put it together to make that biriyani. It might not suffice to put all the ingredients into a cooker, light the stove wait for 2 steams and serve hot, and that would make for a killer dish. Na, that doesn’t work. It’s like Ajai just slid back further from this debut flick RajadhiRaja. Surprising how he gets these stars to act in his films.
Mummotty still seems to be having fun in his outing, Mohanlal seems to have otherthings in his mind. His swift moves and fights made me think of ‘the irishman’ and how even cgi can’t get the old actors, that fine bunch like DeNiro, Pesci to move fast when they are playing their younger selves. The Irishman seemed like a daylong movie cause it had to keep to a pace of these actors in slow mo, and the director seemed unable to help this out cinematically.
And now to the Mohanlal flick, this is worse than the above said movie. And it’s not like I want to trash these guys, I am a fan of these folks too. I try not see all their films as soon as I can, and these bad movies does make one sad, and wallow further in the darkness of this Covid ridden times. And I also like the masala movie genre, where the hero is larger than life, but then it should be done right. The benchmark for the Malasa in the last decade I believe is Daabang. There have been others in the regional – the Rajini films… well he seems to be having a rough time keeping that image too. But the Malayalam also has had it’s share, Saji Khailas had got that formula ticking for sometime, wonder where he is at. Narasimham was one with Mohanlal which kept you completely engaged, with mass dialogues and action sequences. But the young generation trying to reinvent the superstar, as is the case here, just ends up being a bad xerox copy from another time and it is smudged and illegible and therefore a waste of time. Well, Siddique the director of this caper is not a newbie and has made many hits, this one really fell on it’s face. It’s also the lack of energy of the lead actor, and when the whole movie revolves around him the center not holding is an issue. The script is weak too and the 80s kind of cut and lack of detail to the scenes takes away your attention. Bringing in Arbaaz Khan which seemed like a good casting decision quite like Shylock’s casting I spoke about earlier also is lame.
It would suffice to say that these two movies does nothing to help the mood in these dark times. Sure hope the coming films will be better.
The Music Teacher is a nice little film on Netflix. I have already spoken about the boundaries that Netflix is pushing, the probabilities it has made possible, and they continue on. So, more tharif of the Netflix platform another time. Will just say this, Netflix really can replace everything that the cable television provides us in India which now is at an exorbitant cost, and at a much better content quality too. Netflix does not have a NEWS-circus output yet. But that really is no loss, except for that one channel NDTV. Ok, now back to the little something I wanted to say about this little film. It also has been a while since I said anything about movies or anything else here. The big dance of democracy has been on and also it’s not been really good times with the church, which has begun to reflect the tripe and stink that the top offices of the country broadcast and spit out. The recent one from the country’s top office was this: ‘Hamara pas kya hai baay?!’ that is how the former Chai man and now watchman talks to another head of state, and he asked if those nuclear buttons we have are for Diwali. Beautiful rhetoric from that high office from a man who they call an orator. Cursing and spewing venom is hardly an oratory skill. But that then really has been what has been going on in the Church too, the high office of the priest has sent out letters which talk ill of the office bearers on the PC and the two offices – secretary and treasurer has written replies which are not worth the camera light of your cell phones and therefore haven’t even found enough readers. And in such hate do we live in an institution that is built on the foundation of love. So we are really a microcosm of the nation we have come to be. Ok, back to the movie now.. 🙂 seriously.. All things come to those that wait. 🙂 This has Manav Kaul in the lead and has an ensemble of beautiful women to make up the cast, the lovely Shimla hills, and the lush green. The slow burn movie is a delight though, the camera lingering on the hills and reflecting melancholy on the actors, is still such beautiful light. Sarthak Dasgupta tale of love and loss and sprinkling of the human agony is a result of many years of carrying this tale within him and kept alive in the vials of tears that people he knew who lived this tale. Manav helms this bitter laced sweet film sensitively and with gentle assurance. It is a relationship drama with spoons full of lovely landscape intertwined with romance and the lilting movie songs of yore. The songs fill the green surroundings and my heart buoyed with pouring out of rich romance in the familiarity of these songs, the resonating hills with the sound of Phir Wahi Raat, sung this time by Papon. Well, when you give into the warmth of the sentiments of the loveliness of the longing for another is as much about life as it is of the pain of loss and the ache of loneliness. But then what would life be if it weren’t for these moments that added depth, meaning and to the purpose of one’s sojourn on this earth. Songs are the music of the souls stirring to find harmony and herein even as you feel the cry in the wallowing of Manav’s self pity (some have called his sadness that). This cruel world has cruel words for the inwardness of another’s life. Yes, it can sometimes be that the others around has been dealt harsh blows because of the wallowing in one’s own grief. Well, there is a: A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance… and a time to every purpose under the heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:4and 1)
Yes, there is loss, andthere is waiting. Beni Madhab (Manav Kaul) is in love with his music student Jyotsna Ray (Amrita Bagchi) and so is she with him. He however pushes her to pursue the high potential of her skill, moving his feeling for her to the far recesses of his being, as a good teacher would. She does not want the great heights, she longs for his companionship and love in the knowledge of the now, rather than the glory in the glitzy world that beacons. He puts wind into her wings to help her soar into the ever glorious heights that call out to her. Her wings are soon strong and she does fly away from him and into great success.
But the heart does weigh on him, and he does want to see her again. He is shooed of from the house by her parents, he manages to leave word asking her to meet him by the bridge that evening. Ok, hang at the bridge a while, while I introduce you to another beautiful woman.
Divya Dutta!, is oh so lovely and giving as only perhaps a woman so beautiful could be. She drenches herself in the songs that Beni sings into the hills. She opens her heart and her body to the warmth of the insides of Beni’s soul, that very wrenching ache that adds myriad colors and light to the rains in the cold hills. Rimjhim Gire Saawan is celebratory in the joyous rain and the warmth of the intertwining of warmth, sadness, joy, sex and melting into each other rendered by Papon and Shreya Ghoshal. The other songs in the movie are fine original melodies that keep you invested in the narrative. Sambhaal Rakhiyaan is especially beautiful sung by Jubin Nautiyal with a cry in his voice still held firm with the aliveness of hope, there is also a version of this song by Neeti Mohan. : Rabba mere jeene ki, waja hai/ Woh nasha hai, mera dil tarse/ Baarishein bhi beet gayi bin barse/ Aise na saza de yaar ve
A big slice of me did leave with Divya Dutta in her suitcase as she left the Hills. Beni, after some soul searching and the constant batter around bout Janoi’s coming thinks that he still longs for the love of Jyotsna. And he reveals that to Geeta (Divya Dutta), they have begun to know each other in words, their past and their present and opening up to the other in mutterings of their inner most voices. These articulations are weaved into the bed-sheets, hope and hopelessness that envelop them and warmth to their smiles and lives.
Now back to the Bridge where waits Beni. Jonai/Jyotsna does not turn up that evening. And now it’s time for Jyotsna to perform in Shimla. The movie starts with the buzz of her coming to perform here after 8 years. Beni doesn’t want to talk about it at all, even when everyone throws that at his face. But now he rushes of to see her at the auditorium and he does talk to her after the show. She does confess that she came by just to see him all else was incidental. He however bids her good bye and goes back home. He tells his concerned mother (Nina Gupta) that he has few students to teach and he has no ambition of going away to Mumbai to make it big, something that Beni keeps telling himself he must do.
But now, he wants nothing more than the waiting which fuels his existence. He will wait at the spot he asked for her to come. He has grown accustomed to the waiting. And that’s what he tell Janoi.
I write this as I listen them lilting music in a loop here:
I also do believe that Art that speaks to you has a streak of melancholy.
At last, I got to see the Mani Rathnam movie. Some critics called it the comeback for Mani. Well, he did come back, but not quite.
I was excited in the prospect of seeing these interesting actors on the big screen together: Arvind Swami, Silambarasan, Jyothika, Aditi Rao Hydari, Prakash Raj, Jayasudha, Thiagarajan and Mansoor Ali Khan;to see Prakash Raj play an aged Don in a Mani Rathnam film would be interesting, we thought, Mani and Prakash have been around a long time and have collaborated a few times. Very early in Prakash’s career he played Karunanidhi in one of Mani’s killer script flick – Iruvar along side Mohanlal’s MGR, that was 1997. And then to see all those others added to the ensemble..
Well, I must say I was disappointed, will have to wait a while longer to see that expected spectacular Mani film, this is not that. Even Shiva Kumar the south Indian movie critic (The Hindu) had said nice things about the film, and he is reliable and has an insight that I kind of go with. He said it was lifted from a Korean film, but the writers of the film are Mani and Shiv Ananth, and they probably put it down to coincidence.
Arvind Swamy is having a really good second innings and he is good playing the brooding urban thug (ala Sunny from Godfather). Joyothika as his wife is in excellent form. Her journey back from the break has been a slow, calm, quitely jogging in and then bursting into a long sustaibable sprint, into a crescendo that breaks glass. The career break and raising kids seem to have found a whopper shot to her chi.
Vijay Sethupathi, his career graph would make Apple (the I people) blush. He play the thread that weaves these violent family into a gore fest of departures in a single-file quite well. Oh yes, like Robert Duval did with his lawyer turn in that reference for all Gangster films – Godfather, but then again, not quite that.
Simbu is his confident cocky self, and good for it too, and also therefore the last to be thrown off the cliff.
Mani had cracked the casting list, he had brought about a coup of sort. Arun Vijay is having a good run too, he has been slowly notching up good performances in movies that don’t make big release noise but has been a very bankable actor- yes, a minor star. He plays the other brother, he is content playing second fiddle to Simbu and Arvind, just very happy to be in a Mani film.
Jayasudha has more screen time than Prakash Raj who plays her husband and the fulcrum where the rest of them spin on, in this very slickly shot film of ‘brother will kill brother’. It just didn’t seem at all worth it to blow up everything and kill all of them just for Vijay Sethupathi to walk alone towards the camera in the end credits.
The locales and the camera work that captures them are spectacular and engaging .
Mani just didn’t get the emotions and visuals to combust and catch fire, it’s not like he did anything wrong. It just that the soul was not sitting into it’s comfortable nook inside of a well toned body. It’s not a John Wu dance of choreographed fights and blood spurts. This is as if Mani borrowed the blood dripped pen of Quarntino and let the on his Aleypayudey waves wash these bloody swords and hoping he would have a Dalapathi. Alas not, but all is not lost, he is close and the next one might be it, I hope he doesn’t feel too discouraged. Am sure he has read enough good press to wash away the few not so nice and the box office must have been satisfactory, not meeting the expectations of the producer, am sure. Am hoping however that Mani will want to make the next one soon and he is still rearing to go.
So I have so many nice things to say of the film but am still disappointed? Oh yes, Mani’s last few small films were with star-sons!,
He launched Gautham Karthik, son of actor Karthik, and Thulasi Nair, daughter of Radha, in the lead roles, with Arjun Sarja and Arvind Swamy in supporting roles. This was also misplaced expectations, and the movie crashed against the waves, and even the talk of Arvind Swamy’s comeback didn’t do much for him. Arvind is Mani’s paper tiger, well, it’s another story that Arvind did come to his own a couple of movies later, and yes he is at a stage walking tall, his Mojo purring.
OK Kanmani did delve into the new ways we (Urban India) have began to behave, he explored rather gently a live-in relationship, with promising young actors (Dulquer Salmaan and Nithya Menen) and a really good turn by danseuse Leela Samson.
And then there was Kaatru Veliyidai with Karthi and Aditi Rao Hydari which really didn’t get the wind into it’s sails.
And then came this all stars flick, not many directors left who can command that kind of respect from the stars and a meaningful multi-starrer is great fun: think Magnificent Seven, Sholay, Thin Red Line…
Oh, and the music is by AR Rahman, melodious and catchy, too sweet to splash on oh so much of gore.
Boy! Can we have ever thank Netflix enough?! This platform makes some really cool things happen and so much good in just these few months, it’s so beautiful and I have already taken it all for granted.
The coming together of people here has the casualness of having bumped into someone you think you have known deeply all along, but didn’t know how and it happens as if it were meant to, like along the roadside on the way home.
This is no great film, might even feel like you have seen it before, but it has such buoyancy you could drift in these clouds a while.
Shefali Shah and Neeraj Kabi act out beautifully, as if they were meant to be just that, together. This story of 2 older folks in love in busy Mumbai is a sumptuous offering, no, not the rich Indian sweet but the subtlety of the aftertaste of the amla without the bitter or sourness of the first bite and still wholesome. And yes, it’s also about food, Shefali playing Tara runs a small restaurant in Bandra and Amar (Neeraj) gets his meal from there.
It has the niceness and refined ghee sprinkling of Ritesh Batra’s lunch box. This is not the same lunch though; the lunchbox might have been borrowed from him however. Kanwal Sethi’s camera gazes over Shefali quite the way Batra did with Nimrat Kaur. Oh, you fall in love with your love once again, and all those lovely memories of the times of intimacy bring life to the weary bones and to the senses dulled by the city pollution and noise, yes once again. Once again is the nectar for the urban soul.
And then there is the background score. I hadn’t noticed background scores in my viewing movies a while now, I am many times trying to rush through a movie to catch another one. OH, this is how we do it in the city, we rush through a lot of moments trying to catch another one. We will say over chai, also rushed, that we have been there without quite having been there. We might recall a couple of moments for a couple of days. Well, this movie is that rose you have to stop and smell. It’s slow waltz, ever engaging, and Tavlin Singh finds the right taal for the nicely shot visuals.
Shefali makes you melt in nostalgia, the lovely lingering memories that once put spring in your strides now adds a gentle surge of life into the aching weak heart. Life is worth living again. Neeraj too, who seems to be drenched in melancholy. You don’t much like happy endings, Tara tell him when talking about his movies. He replies; but you sure can make me.
The dialogue play is very measured, subtle, gentle and straight forward. I could in the silences of the movie hear voices from my life-track: she whispered, keep it simple. It is not simple as I understood then, of my friend telling me but simple as she would have liked it, I felt now.
Shefali’s moist eyes make you feel aches you suppressed and then her longing look in her doe-eyes heals your wounds.
the song, but it was morphed in the trailer of the serial that played on Sony some years ago and was a constant soundtrack to our rusks and tea, and phone conversations. When you could ask, Aur? It could be ‘aur tum’ on a good day.
Oh, it’s not a mature love story, as we are so used to saying about stories of older folks in love. This is a story of 2 people drawn to each other in this vast sea of humanity. This beautifully painted out film, the bokeh shots en all. Beautiful skies, the sizzling food, the market places, the traffic, the long easy roads in the late hours and the gentle camaraderie. Mumbai a character woven into Once Again.
Tara once tells him over the phone, I can’t even seem to fight with you, you must teach me that. But you know that beautifully drawn relationship will also have its share of hurt, and that inevitable does come to be here too. And at those times her beautiful moist eyes fills up the screen with shattering, bitter hurt.
The movie is most times verse and sometimes short prose read amidst long pauses. A simple verse in the twilight of Mumbai’s quite groove over looking cacophonous concrete structures is the most elaborate expression of his desire and vision of her.
how did you think Tara would be, she asks of Amar:
the same Tara
the same bangles on the hands
the same hair
the same fluttering sari
the glow on the face
and the moist eyes
that’s how I imagined you.
Amar whispers without a hint of overplay with short pauses for thought, even as he picked up these everyday words. And the camera loving panned and would linger on Shefali and let her eyes sparkle and light up and reflect his warmth and the sincerity of those words.
Did her eyes not slay you thus those many years ago.
You would live your romances in the many beautiful pauses of Once Again. It’s that fine smelling rose which will refuse to let you hurry. Good food, leisure, art and love should not be hurried and this good art, not at all.
Of course there are flaws, there are times it seems a little contrived, but Shefali Shah and Neeraj Kabi have brought their very best to this game, and it dims the little niggles and the bumps you feel on this otherwise smooth safar. And Tavlin Singh smoothes down your restless nerves: the music never stops and you realize you can play your romance into that soundtrack in the many deep breathes of pauses in Shefali Shah and Neeraj Kabi tale.
I heard my friend saying from another distant year about the inability to fight but the fights did come all the same. But here with Tavlin’s soundtrack you are assured we will soon come to better roads from the bumpy rides.
And when the sea beckons and she heeds the call, Amar is not far behind. Ah, and the ride into the sunset was the refrain of many a cinemas that drove your dreams in the midst of those inevitable nightmares that be the life we are handed.
The supporting cast is top class too. This small movie is a welcome cup of chai, you could easily miss in the big bowl of the many gorgeous Netflix offerings. And Shefali’s many pastel colored cotton saris (dipped in vegetable dyes) continue to flutter on, and the smell of coriander on her hands.
A Mohanlal starer, which delivers about 3/4th of what it promises with a premise that’s not everyday with the tools and means of everydayness.
There are times in ones life when one comes to sit at a pivotal perch to view a life lived thus far, which then force feeds you to throw some clarity into what is left of it. It most often happens to us in the darkness of our suffering, there is no time for all of this when one is having a decent life. Your life flashes before you in clear cinematic visions and at the inevitable dawn, struggling and gasping at breath, drenched in the terrifying sweat, you are given a new light and a promise of life anew. We have sometimes read these signs wrong at such perceived epiphanies and walked lanes leading up blind dark allies. At best being the self and material gains further into focus in a already self oppressed world. These moments, in our haste to foster a lasting change with no new real inputs and in a tunnel vision has brought separation from the a community with a seeming endless hunger for a cold blooded hunt of material gain. Well, Neerali is not one such, here your world is taken apart in slices and leaves you hanging from a cliff. And if that is not drastic enough, the cell phone is out of currency and the battery out of charge.
Mohanlal is Sunny George: a gemologist married to Nadia Moidu living an ordinary urban life of flings and minor deceits. It’s his life played out from the high precarious perch hanging by a thread. This situation then distills his life into a clear prism view of life ahead. It is eked out at the razor edge continually thinning even as the mind conjures up new life from the loose hanging threads of your past, your god, and the unbiased, unrelenting nature – kind, compassionate and fierce.
Sonny’s lessons are, yours too, if you haven’t encountered your dark night of the soul, there are few lessons which will stand you in good stead when the inevitable dark cloudy day comes. Sunny has it all packed in a day but it’s an intense day, these dark days can sometimes seem like slow burn going into endless days.
So, the premise is set, Sunny gets into it almost as casually as any other day, this being just that little more special, what with the expecting of twins that day and his wife, Nadia Moidu in hospital for the delivery. Oh right, for some of us who are warmed into nostalgia of the first pairing of these two on screen Nokketha Doorathu Kannum Nattu (1984), where have all them years gone? Well, the memory is all there is, no magic from that time though, they do try to pull some strings to take you there, just in case you are one of those who missed that time in Mohanlal’s cinema life. But Nadia has nothing to do, except be a nagging wife for a very small screen time, and 90 % of that screen time is spent on the phone from her hospital bed. Her role seems patched in without paying too much heed to the parent cloth or the thread for the patch.
Parvatii Nair is a natural in the role of the woman who has a relationship with Sunny, the nuances of heartbreak and separation and feeling of betrayal, the modern girl who longs for what is considered bliss of the family without quite walking that path. Many a women today attempt that and spend many hours of their life complaining of the lack of the bliss they think they are missing. Writing paeans to the darkness of loneliness and the great weight they carry being thus single.
This journey which Sunny starts out with Veerappan takes only one survivor. Suraj Venjaramood again, oh boy, he is in most every movie these days. He is a fine actor too. From comedy, to character actor, to even the main protagonist he is playing all of them with equal elan. This definitely not his best but you can’t fault this one either. And having an actor like Suraj Venjaramood in your film, gives you the freedom to take that character into any realm that you choose to or add a few more layers as the movie progresses. And though it clutters up the storytelling somewhat, there is an interesting and emotional back story packed into the already heavily packed truck Suraj drives. Noted filmmaker and jury chairman Saeed Mirza, while announcing Suraj’s award in a press meet, said: “Suraj excels in comedy but in this film Suraj has brilliantly played a reticent character. I would not have been able to sleep had his name not been in the list of awardees.”
OK back to the movie now:WE are now left hanging on the cliff with Sunny with his dead phones and just the flickering headlights all other life and light soon shuts out. Sunny even manages to shut out the blaring sermon from the far away small town in the valley. The survival games intensifies with small reprieves in his past flashing by. The monkey and the snake in the shadows adds to the drama and in the stillness of the dreary dark, a miracle of life plays out to take him out of this into walk on into purpose in this life. Not ever visible, nor will ever be, the purpose IE. The years on this earth has shown you that. The hours you lived are all that are sure. You journey to reach a destination and your tomorrow‘s dawn are not yours to know, this movie acknowledges that absolute emphatically, set in a modern day which lives life as if we were the one in the center of it all and we set the world on a roll.
Dileesh Pothen breezes in with a good turn here in a hoodlum’s avatar, he is at a period in his life where he can do no wrong, finding enough time to do interesting small roles between directing really good movies himself. And then there is Nasser in a brief role, setting his superb acting chops on the bonnet of the precariously placed truck, in perfect balance.
Having said all this, this debut movie of Ajoy Varma falls short. Mohanlal was a good pick to play this ordinary Sunny having no room to bare his Pulimurgan super-humanness. But, even Mohanlal seems hurried to play out his role, which is rather sad, it’s a beautifully etched character which could have done with the immense resource he does posses. It seemed stagy in many parts and affected the narrative. But, then I am nit picking. Oh, well, he plays these everyday characters with such overarching triumph, his vast filmography would confirm that. This I felt fell short of those high standards. He does look more fit and slimmer than hisouting.
A good Sunday afternoon viewing though is Neerali, I could reflect my life with Sunny’s playing out on the screen. Sunny living out his theology seemed to have way much more substance than the sermon which I chose to walk out of to find the strains of His voice in the bustle of the joggers path in Coles park.
First Reformed is the Church at Snowbridge, New York, and this is the quaint world of Rev. Toller. This film; dark and liberating, freeing and strangling at the same time, flows quite like how life could be, living with knowledge of your impending mortality, and your gurus only lighting the paths you want to see. Living in the solace of the present be it somewhat intoxicated or numbed with the pain – physical sometimes and psychosomatic at other times. All of it real, terrifying, grim in Toller’s world at first reformed.
This film directed by Paul Schrader has Ethan Hawke as Reverend Ernst Toller, Amanda Seyfried as Mary Mansana and Cedric the Entertainer as Pastor Jeffers.
This film deals with a few months in the life of Rev. Toller, and his introspection which pours into his journal, his spiritual conflict, his love for his maker and the agony of waiting on the lord for his wisdom to pour forth.
Rev. Toller has this very small congregation, a reality of our urban times, but Toller is a dedicated priest, and intent on walking the path he has been called to. Very unlike the priest we encounter in our 21 century urban. The white robed who has advice for the worldly and absolutely nothing for that endless kingdom that would be the only reason to hold all of us in a church. The clergy and few who participate in the activity of the church are all doing it for the material which is now further limited now by the diminished flock and the rampant financial corruption justified by the endless need of our city life, and therefore keeping the flock from the premises helps and justifies the cause and further feeds their lathery, lack of vision and even need for it. Here I talk of the traditional churches, quite like the one Toller is in charge. The modern ways of highly paid priests have led to them to function as CEOs or even CFOs who live out their lives being the mirrors of the very world they preach you must not be of. (And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. – Romans 12:2)
The museum? Pastor Jeffers inquires about the Church, which Rev Toller opines as, they call it the souvenir shop.
This movie does walk the razor edge along the real and that great spiritual unknown. It is even in its bleakness a film of great hope. Hope! You say? How? Where? The camera, after looking inwards for the first 15 minutes or so into the life of Toller and his journal and his steady whiskey intake, looks up into the deep longing eyes of Mary. It’s coming, you hear a whisper, even as you have wallowed in Toller’s quite desperation, self-loathing and even destruction perhaps.
Mary, pregnant and with a man who has been scarred by his activism: the helplessness of making a difference for the better in a world being pushed to destruction by our every act.
Michael asks Toller, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?”
“Who can know the mind of God?” Toller retorts, almost as quickly.
Michael’s deep desperation and depression invades the already immune deficient mind of Toller.
“I know that nothing can change and I know there is no hope.” – Thomas Merton wrote this, Toller scribbles in his journal.
His journal continues to be lucid, even as things begin to fall apart.
Toller reflects
Despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses one’s certitude
Some are called for their gregariousness some are called for their suffering Others are called for their loneliness They are called by God because through the vessel of communication they can reach out and hold beating hearts in their hands They are called because of their all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of all things that can only be filled by the presence of Our Savior.
And his pen continues to illuminate our lives in the dark:
Discernment intersects with Christian life at every moment. Discernment Listening and waiting for God’s wish what action must be taken My petty ailments have made me bad-tempered. I fight the urge not to write down the thoughts which come to my mind. The desire to pray itself is a type of prayer. How often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion My hands shake as I write these lines And then all of it is even clearer when he affirms: Self-pity! That’s what he calls his act of keeping a journal.
Yes, in the deep humility and knowing of ourselves is our redemption. I have always believed that writing was therapeutic, which is what gives me the courage to work away at the clattering keys with the knowledge of my limitation, even as much as my laziness and the wallowing in self-pity takes away from my healing.
Toller like father Damien is afflicted by the disease he is out to help heal. And Michael departs in a messy pool of blood.
And when you see a Priest like Toller unafraid for the other and there for people so vulnerable, somewhere inside of you a grain of faith seems to sprout with hope in practicing a corporate-faith. The white robed men who walk amidst us, they are not the ones you go to even with your tiny questions in your spiritual quest. And to even expect to find counsel in troubled times at their feet is to hope for gold in the mines of KGF: long has the gold been gone, even as the gold diggers donned white robes. Ethan Hawke excludes the Christian hope. So, even if being a priest is just a job, as opposed to a calling, Toller is employee of the year.
And here’s a bit from a group meeting Toller goes to:
How easily they talk about prayer, those who never really have prayed.
That’s what he means. Christianity is for losers?
Jake, Jake! I just get tired of turning the other cheek.
Jesus didn’t turn the other cheek.
Why stand for anything?
Take prayer out of the schools.
Give money to people too lazy to work for it.
And whatever you do, don’t offend the Muslims.
And this verse came alive in the reading too: Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.” Yes there is strength in the words of the good book.
Does the physical affliction take his mind away from god? Or like the bishop says, he is spending too much time in the Garden in an obvious reference to JC in Gethsemane. And then Pastor Jeffers continues on wanting to help deal with Ethan Hawkes’ mind by now full blown in the throes of turmoil:
Pastor Jeffers : Who’s that priest that you like so much?
Toller: Thomas Merton?
Pastor Jeffers : Thomas Merton. He didn’t live in the real world either!
Toller: Yes, he did! He would…
Pastor Jeffers : No. He was a monk who lived in a monastery in Kentucky and wrote books!
Well, somebody has to do something!’ Hawke counters. It’s the Earth that hangs in the balance.
Yes, it does. The movie does the whole walk; will Toller have to self-destruct too? Schrader keeps you walking the dark streets and you hope and pray that Toller lights up that path, even as much as Toller himself hopes and believes in his salvation, as bleak and thin as it seems through the melting snow and the burning whiskey and sell out of the church to corporations that destroy the earth. Michael’s desperation cuts into the very flesh of Toller even as he wraps himself in barbed wire for the metaphysical that turns flesh and blood.
There is an attempt at bringing a transcendental levitation in the midst of this engaging gloom and that is at once lessons from the hours Schrader spent at the foot of the great masters which allows the cinematic depiction of the invisibility of faith and the presence of the unknown. That scene that leaps at you stays on with you, even as you try to shake it off, blink it away, shout into the void to make it go away, but it stays on answering some questions sometimes, and throwing many more questions at other times. It is totally magical that might seem like it is patched in, but it’s a work of magical theological transcendence.
And it sunrise after the rain that Schrader leaves you with after the strains of are you washed in the blood of the lamb has chilled your body and raised goose pimples, is the presence Mary – Amanda Seyfried, fragile with a vulnerability so disarming, her eyes filled with serene delicate strength to light the deepest darkness.
First Reformed washed me afresh with promise of faith and hope. A feeling the quait church I have been going to has promised and delivered in my youth now lays forlorn and poor even as we rich folk battle over positions of power (responsibility and servitude were the old verbs) in this ruin. We have had white robed ministers selling out the remains of the English empire for souls won in the stink of the cesspool stirred to find this world’s gold.
A Tovino starrer. Yes, Tovino is a rather exciting new talent, in a already rich harvest of young crop of Malayalam actors. His movies have done very well in the last couple of years and the future looks bright. His Oru Mexican Aparatha was outstanding, and then I went back and watched Godha, in which he marries a female wrestler (Oh! no, he is in no mess because of that – (https://youtu.be/SDOg-juiEcI ). In an earlier film, Guppy, he was a standout performance too. And he doesn’t disappoint in this Abu Ashiuq film. Oh, yes, it seems liberally influenced by the foreign films Abu has been watching, Korean some say. The pace deliberately slow sets up the tragi-love story very well.
Tovino playing a small time criminal with a love for the good things in life, smitten by the love for a girl which seems on and off from her side.
The modern day relationships which can be intense one moment and then back on ice the next, is where Tovino’s Mathew finds himself. Aishwarya Lekshmi as Appu plays his love interest, and she is struggling to make a career in showbiz. Aishwarya is back from Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela after a brief interval, with a character with dollops of gray, a big change after that weepy, sugary Nivin Pauly starrer, and she plays true. Yes, it is a generation where sometimes relationships have to be discarded, rather easily too, to get on with ‘making it’ in the cut-throat professional world. All very reminiscent of what we have become in our urban utopian existence.
So, when Mayaanadhi was voted the best Malayalam film of the year on some prominent lists, it had to be for how well it resonates with the urban folks and how well Abu has been able to bring out this our new reality on screen.
The darkness and deceit of our times played out rather casually with sizzling chemistry between Aishwarya and Tovino, it moves this tense thriller into lanes as familiar as your back streets, that slowly meanders into dark alleys that torment your night sleep.
This film might not be a path breaker but it is taking us along paths we are on, which we are completely unaware of it happening to ourselves, but very aware of it when it plays out in the perilous lives of people around us.
This film does that, with the easy style of Tovino and the disturbed and relucatant and persusive at the same time Appu.
Appu’s new dreamy film being shot brings to end the film even as her best friend has to leave, which then gives her this opportunity and Mathew has found his end even inspite of us egging him on from the galleries, for him to somehow better the cops again, like he did effectively in the beginning of this film – under water in the bath tub. But no, this time the bullet ends him, the waters can’t save him, also he does not want to, and even in the life being ebbed and Appu’s betrayal doesn’t make his love for love her any less.
Ah! The strange bedfellows and the beds we make to lie on.
Here’s a beautiful film set in the time of the WWII and it is gentle and enlivening. Oh, yes, i must confess, i have stayed away from what i considered English mushiness and sweetness, in Jane Eyre, Bronte and the likes, instead dipping into the realism of Dickens and Shakespeare, be it ever so rare. But this movie swept me off my cynicism and lack of wit into the lyricism of the language English.
The wisdom and poetry that flowed from the pen of Charles lamb forms the back drop of the narrative, and how sweet the miracle of the bonding over books and the lives it sets on fire.
Lilly James is beautiful and affectionate, here lingering smile so moving and enticing . Making the beautiful country side even more so. Her love for letters and the bond the words that free her from the drabness of a life in the pursuit of comfort would have been. She is ever so endearing, i am cross with myself for not getting at Downton abbey yet. And to think if it was made a couple of years earlier Kate Winslet would have played this role of author Juliet Ashton. Lilly makes for the most gorgeous, effervescent Ashton – warm, bookish and adorable. Oh, yes, I loved her as secretary to Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour.
There is no war to witness, but the sorrow of what war does, is the backdrop and the strains of melancholy etches the buoyance and the miracle of life itself in the deft strokes of Mike Newell, the very man who directed a big favorite of mine, where i discovered Mr. Bean was not just that cartoon, and thereby discovering the many priest acts of Mr. Atkinson (this is only one reason, I have many more reasons to love that flick) – the film 4 weddings and a funeral.
I am a sucker for anything set in the book world, but this film does not need any such prerequisite, it’s warm and welcoming, as the idyllic afternoons in the company of books and its warmth and the feeling of that heaven on earth. Oh so wonderful! Making me think that this most definitely has to be a part of my heaven in the afterlife, should I make heaven.
I happened upon this Netflicks film, almost as accidently as Elizabeth (Jessica Brown Findlay ) came up with the name. Making up the name of the bookclub to the occupying Germany army general when stopped on their way home late at night, in this quait town of Guernsey. Yes, more than a mouthful of a name, with generous helping from drunken interjection by Tom Courtenay as Eben Ramsey and his pie. A friend mentioned this film as something she was watching on a lazy Sunday afternoon and cause she was now a netflicks druggie, mainlineing on its sumptuous offering at the cost of country and church and the waste of time of meeting friends. It was then given more gravity when a Chef friend, Irfan shared his recipe of Potato Peel Pie on whatsapp, which then I liberally shared with my friends on the same platform.
And am grateful. Had me longing for the rolling greens somewhere in Brighton, something i don’t even think i will ever see again. And the movie did add sunshine in these days of devastating floods in Kerala and now Karnataka too.
And here are a few lines from the film which though being quote from another time is relevant to the 1940s as it is to us today in 2018 India or most other part of the world.
Jane Austen knew whereof she spoke, and she spoke most elegantly. Malice is what holds a society together.”- That, and a reliable postal service. “At bottom…propriety… is concern for other people. When that goes out the window, the gates of hell are surely opened.
To Charles Lamb, then.”Contented with little, – yet wishing for more.” – Ah. Bravo. “The beasts are very wise. Their mouths are clean of lies. But man with goad and whip, breaks up their fellowship. When he has ploughed his land, he says, ‘they understand.’ But the beasts install together, Freed from the yoke and tether. Say as the torn flanks smoke, – nay…- “Nay…it was the whip that spoke.”
And when Katherine Parkinson as Isola Pribby utters this line, which wrenches your heart out: terrible to lose a friend when you dont have many.
A film that had me long for the small town we once were and lost, and how suddenly one day we found ourselves in the world of concrete building and having become an urban zombie. The freshness of this small town film about a Nigerian football player who plays the football league in small town Malapuram in Kerala, is like fresh rain that brings new hope.
Oh! Gawd! Love is the only hope. Undivided pursuit of Material possession and self-interest can get us a good-looking empty shell. The fullness of life is in living it unfettered. Slim chances of it in the new urban we build with thick walls, on lake beds and fields of paddy and veggies. And driving the other we don’t want to understand or see as lesser life furthest away from us or to suicide. Aren’t we the very ones who cursed the English oppressors for destroying everything they did not understand? It is said many wise men and records of wisdom and remedies that gave life were destroyed even to it’s very source.
Samuel Abiola Robinson is the Sudani from Nigeria, and Soubin Shahir plays his first lead role as Majid. It’s a beautiful fresh flick. Oh yes, this film attempts what lil Richard said about his music: “My music is the healing music. It makes the blind see, the lame walk, and the deaf hear”.
Oh the Sudani, is like the racial jibe north Indians have for the south Indians – Madrasi! But this like good cholesterol (as opposed to bad cholesterol) is vastly different from a racial slur, well, I believe there is a difference, and if we don’t see it, we will be condemned to live life in morose gloom.
Samuel is a good sport and plays the part really well. And that controversy after the film’s success about payment and racism allegedly claimed by Samuel, seemed right too. It was a small film and this too seemed part of the script playing out, outside of the screen. It’s a small film with a large heart and good production values. And glad too that the racial issue was sorted out amicably. And that further shortening and affectionate Sudu calling, was still nice and not cute or mean.
Soubin who seemed type cast as a comedian with the fast-funny retort, comes fully alive here. Well, he did a wicked turn in Parva, another fine film by a debutant director, Soubin Sahir himself.
There are many characters here with brief roles playing out very well deeply etched parts. This film set in the football crazy village is all heart. A film that keeps you engaged every minute of its running time. Majid (Soubin) finds it almost impossible to find a bride because he has no steady job or big money. But, he lives his life out in its rough shod unfairness and pain, with grace, a smile and a sense of humor which packs the spine of Majid and the film to stand tall. The football league is really well captured and Zakariya Mohammed, the first time director has done a fantastic job of the film based on the love of football and its passion in the small town he grew up in. it’s such a beautiful little gem, from a man who was in love with home videos from the time he was growing up. He does a super upgrading of a genre that had a very small ardent, loyal audience – a niche which had a large base in small towns.
And you must see the 2 old ladies (Savithri Sreedharan as Jameela (Mother) , Sarasa Balussery as Beeyumma) serve up the good wishes and superb acting chops. In these retired stage veterans Zakariya unearthed such precious lives. Such warm unconditional and maternal love, I haven’t felt such truth or moved by it playing onscreen, in a long, long time. The film was a real treat that threw much light and laughter into some really dark days that I had to walk along. The film becomes beautifully global. There is the lure of easy money and recognition and then it having to fall face down on the ground. The big story of this unusual bonding which makes the newspaper front page brings govt officials to Majeed’s doorstep, and they make life further miserable. There is the tense part where the passport goes missing and how vital its recovery is, and the film tying up the ends nicely with Samuel leaving for home and Majeed bringing home his step father home on the way back from the Airport. You find yourself cheering them to find the way even though there has been a breach of legality herein. The poverty and hard times and hurt of losing and the yearning and longing are universal strains across continents or any geographical divides or skin color. The everydayness of these extraordinary acts played out on screen moved in me to feel my soul.
These crop of young film makers in Kerala are narrating lives which we only seem to be aware of in its going away.
A very successful film at the box-office too. Here’s waiting for Zakariaya’s next.
A satirical flick, that works even at the first level of its narrative. A bus company named democracy takes us on this ride through the land of nasals, the liberals, the law keepers, hardliners…
Well, the lament that we are being tormented and we are from the outside, will have to stop as the infiltration of the aggressor in totally complete and resides in our intimate corners of our homes and much of our pores which embedded these in dormancy for centuries seems to have found its way out into fresh sunshine. The fantastic climate of capitalism and its numbing materialism has imaginatively fueled our intolerant and ‘might is right’, ‘rich is safe’, ‘money above all else’ present. Aabhaasam in many ways shows you that the aggressor outside has come to be in our very homes. The fight now is not just the cleansing our doorway and throwing it into the next house. that has got us to be the very mess we fight. Now we must clean our insides and not just change the PM in the next election. He might have shown us how to turn your 2 ass checks in the face of great crime on the other, and to staunchly keep your back turned on the anguish and complaint of the weak and down troden. He might even have even shown you how to wave one’s might on whoever you chose and jeer and mock your brother. And in all that we have lost the India we were, and we stepped right out of the path of evolvement into aping material highhandedness, in this age of great technological advancement. A crying shame indeed, the road to heaven led us right easy into hell’s mouth.
Even death is dealt out by ever willing lynchers, albeit that it might later be accounted under the causality-head of a ‘political stroke’ in this age of global warming.
Aabhaasam is a light, even sometimes chuckling flick about our present hard times, ably told by earnest good performances from the cast.
Rima Kallingal: good in the role of a liberal, occasionally smoking modern girl, and boy! Does she get it for being so from the lot who thinks that such girls are loose and available, and then then cannot handle it if she shuns your cheap advances.
Suraj Venjaramoodu is that ever reliable actor, he has moved so far from his days of being a mimicry artist. He seems to be in every Friday’s movie release and still delivers time after time in such varied roles. He seems to have the consistency of a Jaggady.
Indrans has moved to a character artist’s slot with utmost ease.
Alancier the new Thilikan? Well, maybe he does not have the intensity that late veteran would bring to the screen, but Alancier has been hogging the screen with his presence.
Anil Nedumangad is always an underutilized actor and that seems to be his wont, well, maybe we need someone to play that ordinary every-day-next door man with his share of kinks and tics, and competently at that. Anil delivers a fine low growling performance. Not at all saying that he doesn’t deliver on the complicated characters… he did amazing well in Samarpanam.
Nassar intercepts the journey in Tamilnadu and adds a dollop of his unique flavor.
And Jubith Namradath is promising in his first outing as director, he is the writer too, it will be interesting to see where he goes from here.
A nice ride, yes, some of them have to run to make it or take another bus, like sometimes bus journeys in India can be.
I was fresh out of a journey on the bus from kodikanal to Bangalore and had to spend more than 2 hours on the road outside the bus watching traffic and taking in the chill air in the wee wee hours of the day, like that’s how it normally is, kinda mode. So, relating was the first thing we did.
And the story weaves all our maladies and the struggles in this journey on the Democracy Travels from Bangalore to Kerala.
This is a biopic of Sanjay Dutt by his good friend Hirani. I saw it a couple of weeks after the hype and reviews that raved about it and some that trashed it, and then some articles which looked at the film objectively and hearing very favorable reviews from friends mothers’ who came out loving Sanjay all over again. Yes, it was about this Dutt that Shoba De, many many years ago said: he appeals to the mother in a woman. Oh Yes, it is the story of a poor rich boy who couldn’t help the wrongs he fell into, or sleeping with the many women he did. And Mr. Hirani starts out to redeem the man he has come to love, and even succeeds. And yes, a couple of years ago a lesser artist redeemed Azhar from match fixing on celluloid. And herein we have a very talented actor play Dutt. Shiv Kumar, the film critic in ‘The Hindu’ said ‘played by an actor far more talented than Sanjay’.
This one has Ranbir playing the title role, he does mimic Sanjay Dutt some, but Ranbir is a serious and far superior actor than the one he plays on screen. It’s a well-produced and a nicely crafted emotional ride and a sure-fire box-office hit. Well, is this Hirani’s attempt to resurrect his friend’s career? Well, we will know soon enough from the Sanju Baba movies that will release soon, and then which might set up Hirani and Sanju Baba to get back together for the Munna Bhai franchise which got completely sidelined with Sanjay Dutt having to go back to jail.
The only part that rankles or gets a little tiring and stretched are the parts where Sanjay is not responsible for all the damning deeds and habits he gets involved in. It is the outside! Like the sorrow of losing his mother that gets him back on drugs again, his desire to protect his family gets him to stock up on illegal guns. But then it might be what Hirani himself believes and therefore sets out a canvas so wide and brilliant to save this man-child.
Hirani’s craft is well honed, this one is way better in production value than his previous big hit film, PK. Hirani loves to tell sweet tales that warms up the humane in us and he has been largely successfully. Oh right, there are times you believe not at all in the simplistic solutions to complex life issues, like uttering: ‘all is well’ but then his hold over his craft gets us to believe in it atleast for the hours we spend with his creation in the dark. And that is in itself cinematic triumph.
Ranbir’s journey towards superstar status seems like a rather meandering road, the man most suited for that top position from the current lot plying their trade, but the movies that will crown him continue to be in the distance. But, then again he might be another kind of superstar, one that is completely different from the ShahRukh and Amitab or even Rajesh Khanna who ruled hearts and box-office before AB. But there is no denying that Ranbir is bound for great stuff and the pundits and we the mass will continue to watch his journey, as we did from the much promised debut Sawariya – a pretty, sweet fairytale dud, that the Mughal Leela Bhansali launched; Ranbir and Sonam in. Sonam is here too, playing his early love interest: no not Tina Munim but few of the early girls he had flings with all rolled into this one character. Tina M is conspicuously absent in the narrative. Maybe they figured that the Reliance dudes might take offence, and then who wants to tangle with the powers that be in the happy universe of Hirani, and therefore left the sleeping dog lie.
Good performances from rest of the cast too: Paresh Raval as Sunil Dutt is a super dad, Vicky Kaushal is good friend Kamlesh ; this boy Kaushal has been delivering one super performance after another. It was only yesterday he was in Masaan, that quite, small but wonderful flick… he blended in intensity with quite ease on the river banks in the unhurried funeral pyre smoke and then slow smoked the silver screen, and in his next, matched evil intensity for evil intensity with Nawazuddin in Raghav 2.0. And now this hard worker is in many places, and in very interesting roles too. Was also nice to see Manisha Koirala as Nargis; Manisha a cancer survivor herself playing one who fought the big C bravely. Also coming back to the big screen was Dia Mirza, this beautiful girl is more off screen these days than on it. Oh she is as lovely as before and no major histrionics required of her playing Sanju’s wife.
That’s another big Hirani bonus; he gets his actors to shine in the knowledge of their limitations. A case in point is Karishma Tanna as Pinky, this TV actor in a brief role in briefs (well, nighty) is bang on. And then there is Anushka Sharma playing the writer who pens his bio pic.
Sanjay is that familiar overtly physical friend we had in school and one who never grew up. Bully! you say? No no, tough guy with a heart of gold. Oh, you said that before. Oh yes, and that act of him going for the balls is very different from the US cops or gangsters you have seen on the silver screens before, a macho tactic to extract information. But, this is as Indian as it comes. This act of going for the balls or feigning it sometimes is a very guy thing, that a bully took great pride in when in school, and years later even after the bully tag might have faded, continues to do go for the balls, in jest he will assure you, if you are offended, to raise laughter with his friends he so loves … or even to break the ice when he meets a young boy, to prepare him for the world would be his explanation here. Oh, yes, you will have to accept him with that physical humor as he is really a ‘nice guy’. But it’s cheap! you say. Ah! Yes, but he has a heart of gold, you justify soon enough.
Hirani also gets tears rolling down your cheeks very easily. Yes, Hirani does have that old world charm which he ingest in us so easily. He makes the world a place we could still find much to be happy in and smile in spite of the odds and easy urban hopelessness.
Simplistic!!! You may say. But, he has mastered this art. And the large celluloid canvas we immerse ourselves in for few hours in the dark hall, will help gloss over the fight with one’s girlfriend. And even for few hours after make one forget nagging big miseries and even light up your eyes from the listlessness of having lost a job.
If you are looking for those simple Hirani solution for life like “jadoo ki jabi’, ‘Aaall is well’ he gives us 3 songs as lessons to live life by. Majrooh Sultanpuri’s ‘Rukjana nahi tu kabhi haarke’, Anand Bakshi ‘s ‘Duniya me rehnahai to kaam kar pyare’ and R D Burman ‘s ‘Kuch to log kahenge’. Well, I suppose he would like you to listen to other songs by these 3 guys, cause Sunil Dutt does call them Gurus!
So, if you grew up in the times of Sanjay Dutt’s trials, films and tribulation, Sanju is a nice nostalgic ride. Hirani probably the best to paint celluloid nostalgia, almost a trademark that would be his legacy. Quite like Leela Bhansali now taking upon himself to rewrite our history on screen in such fantastic grandeur.
And as Sanjay is still out there very alive and making movies, it’s a happily ever after too, so go out and wallow in this happy world a while. Cause tomorrow we have to deal with the reality of ‘Sacred Games’. Oh boy! And that Netflicks original i can’t wait to see.
And chasing up on Ms. Chastain, we happened again on Ms. Sloane, yes, I had seen this earlier but it didn’t talk to me so much as it did today. The gun-kills in America hadn’t had quite the impact yet on our lives in the subcontinent. Oh, yes, I do still rememberseeing ‘Bowling for Columbine’ at a docufest, it was shattering and very disturbing. And even the funny momentwhen Michael Moorecalled out to Moses (Chartonheston) to take away the gun laws and Mosesjust turned and walked into the sunset unheeding, could only bring a sigh. Moore is a documaker I like, as much as I doAnandPatwardhan. I believed these guys were very good storytellers and their camera of realism would move around and back in to make the real come alive just when you thought the camera was looking away and awaken us in our nightmares: as opposed to numb us and perhaps only sympathize. They were activist film makers. They continue to work at that thankless job, even getting some stick ever so often. But now back to Ms. Sloane.
This is 2016 flick must have been timely but we like most often refused to recognize the prophets in our own land. And come 2018 we had the worst tragedy with guns that involved children.
Ok ok, back to the film, Sloane is a lobbyist, mean and deadly deal breaker and go-getter! From the right side she takes up a job on the other side to lobby and bring about the senators to vote for a law that would do away with guns. What chance of her winning? When the firm she worked for has been hired by the gun lobby? And Michael Stuhlbarg is no less mean former colleague.
In the midst of the engrossing drama of a career woman who would stop at nothing to get to the goal, there is the nagging questionof; do the means justify the end? Well, there are no easy answers to those Qs in these days wherein every problem seems to have a solution that can be bought. Well, not all of it can be bought! andalso no man or woman is made to only serve themselves. And this truth we continue to want to erase from memory and run up the same path over and over again, getting up from the slush we buried our heads in, time after time. But, the world will continue on this path, because the means do most often justify the end. The means is the end maybe true, but that is for another day. Today, Sloane will draw amazing figures in gray.
Do we become the game we play? Ofcourse! We do! We will fall in the pits those roads have pre-dug, but we will venture on all the same, thinking we will not be the ones to be hit by the pitfalls of those before us. Well, this gripping drama, does dare to take on a question that America somehow won’t answer in spite of many lives that are laid down for it, and many young at that. Well and, How many seas should a white dove sail?
Ms. Sloane beats the means to try and get to the end, she works the gray into super shades of strength, and her vulnerability causes the fragile around her to find strength take wings and then have their wings fail in mid-flight.All of this is still griping and not the perceived predictable.
The lobbyists work the tale to an almost staggering epic victory. But, well as much as we would want to be taken to victory on screen atleast (you plead), but no! even as the screen turns dark in it’s end, the light seems to flicker on with hope. But, those ache dins are not yet, but there is hope. And yes, ‘almost’!!!
Chastian does a wonderful job of finding steel from her real to live this on reel and vice versa too, perhaps.
We sure hope that the flickering hope will not shatter having come this close and would find that last mile surge to make that the world a better place: one small place at a time, atleast.
Mark is a Strong presence on the side of non-violence.GuguMbatha-Raw as the fragile beautiful former victim conquers, stumbles and finds strength again. Sloane gives her wings but she then walks on confidently having discarded those, from the strength she gained from the fire pits that Sloane walks her through, with the courage of Daniel. Ah, yes, she does, like we all must, to find our strength within after we have walked with a savior a while.
Not endorsing the academy awards, and this time with all the noise about the women’s issues and racist issues it was not going to be much about the cinema. One awards night trying to make all things right might not be the way to be fair and black and women, and then celebrate cinema as top priority. Well, in these days of instant solutions, it’s getting weirder with every passing day. For now, am just talking briefly about the films I saw from what is now, a list.
The Shape of Water
A very involving film made by an adult with the heart of the child (his 7-8 year old self perhaps). Or like JC said, you have to be like little children (to see the wonder). And Guillermo del Toro goes right back to a childhood and looked at the world with a modern filter, and in visiting his favorite tale, the beauty and the beast’, the grownup he could work wonders with that immortal tale. And he placed that fantasy in the cold war era and shone it right into today and beyond. Love does make the world go around.
The visual delights and very good performances from the actors took the movie to a deserving Best Picture prize. The Beauty here is furiously so even though she now is mute, and the Beast is powerful artistry. When you get fantasy to walk alongside on the solid ground you tread, itgets strong wings. Diving deep into the waters, this tale of love; triumphs, lifts and soars.
Darkest Hour is a History lesson of the English triumph in the Great War, and works at making the victory lastingly sweet. Gary at the Oscars looked not at all like the English bulldog . And that Gary has not been living in his native England for the longest time, only adds to the objectivity that brings soul and drive into the life of Churchill. Oh, what if it’s manufactured history a little bit, all tales of valor are in the telling. And how much joy it is in the oral telling and how the myth adds to the legend and comes to life in us and gives wings to our dreams, lifts our today into rejoicing and hope, andshine light into the foreseen darkness. The Darkest Hour is Gary’s complete grasp of his art.
Phantom Thread is such a fine weave, with a very rich finish. It’s riveting revelation of a Man’s relationship with his art and women. The gives and takes of the relationship: like Alma Elson says in the film: “Reynolds has made my dreams come true and I have given him what he desires most in return, every piece of me.” Oh right, it cuts deep and into nice precise slices and is laid out as beautifully as the clothes Reynolds sculpts out on screen. Is this really Daniel Day’s last appearance? Boy! Does a knowing (or decision) of that kind add more edge and bite to the craft? Daniel Day does a fine elegant walk with his Reynolds: a very careful man, even seaming to attempt and succeed in placing a soul into the dresses he caresses out. And in the physical act of getting to that impossible he stitches memories (a part of himself, a piece of his life) into the fine folds. ON screen the sense of being fully conscious being played out does not allow us the viewer any less. Does love include the anger in the other? How do you read into acts that seem and have been clearly articulated to mean ‘be thou gone’! HOW? Oh, yes, Reynolds is a difficult man to live with. But Reynolds and the people on screen playing their roles set in London’s couture world of the 1950s are beautiful people. Clothes also do make this man.
A Spielbergquickie and I bleddy liked it. I have very little to say about Spielberg films otherwise. (In Bangalore, India), The only thing I seem to remember clearly of Schindler’s Listwas being stopped by the cops on the way back home, for not donning a helmet when riding my 50cc moped, the cops further angered that there was a girl riding with me. So Spielberg is all romance for me! J I waited months before I could catch Raiders, it ran for near a year, at Plaza, a theatre that played that film, has in these years grown up and become a metro station. So, yes, Spielberg and I have been around a whileJ. This tale set in the time of the President’s Men: a movie so thoroughly enjoyable, who would have thought a tale of journalists meeting in parking lotswould make for good cinema. It did and The Postis as engaging. It’s also a lovely little tale of a woman in finding herself and the courage to live fully, dignified and in a world of men – boardroom men at that. Meryl does just fine, her smile endearing and gracefully, striding confidently in the world muddied byWeinstein. Meryl will do so in the new world of bold women. It’s nice to find a strong role played out with grace: her gentle eyes that convey the boundaries and the full freedom of being civilized evolved creatures. Tom Hanks is perfect foil in playing a nice man yielding the whip and power kindly, contradictory as that does sound – an editor feared and respected. He plays it with dignity attributed to the real life Ben Bradlee. The fine art of writing in the newspaper about the powerful people at whose table you have dined played out so well and plainly. Oh you long for the days when television had anchors who read out news memorizing many lines so as to gaze into your eyes through the camera. Today’s newsroomsare like the cockfights that have been banned for being cruel. The sport every night at 9 on Indiannewschannels have led to shouting over and beating up the other for entertainment and power, shutting out the other, shaming the other. This kind of cacophony is also reflected in the ugliness of our public spaces and lives. The Postcould help bring some relevance to the values mentioned in textbooks of journalism, which the students thought was like learning calculus when training to be a bricklayer.
Mathew Rhys playsThis side after his That side in The American. And in that brief role add much heft to this quickie. And Bob Odenkirk brings urgent energy even in underplaying his physical acting.
Another fine performances film, theOscar for best actress, supporting actor and a just miss for Harelson who was absolutely brilliant. Even the gap in his front teeth oozed the complexity of the character battling morale and mortality.It’s a grim story of an unsolved murder, mother’s anguish. Three billboards is very unlike Frances McDormand’s last Oscar outing – Fargo. She is not at all like that seeming vulnerable pregnant cop woman walking carefully on Ice, she is more up and personal in this. Sam Rockwell does a turn as a racist who finds direction towards redemption, after Harelson having left and the cop station has been set on fire. The fire has cleansing effects. And Frances McDormand celebrated the Oscar in typical style and drama. And adding further to the drama was someonewho stole the Statue and then the authorities got it back for her, all on the same day. So, yes, much excitement over that and she got all the women to stand up and celebrate womanhood and even asked the grand lady and fellow nominee for the same award, Streep to ‘please stand up and then the rest of them will do too’, she said. Cool! No prudes here. JOnward to a better world! Yeah, yeah #metoo!
A Denzel Washington flick, as Denzel has been doing lately, here to hegoes out and defines a unspoken hero, outspokenly. It’s a fine moral tale for the times and ColinFirth does well to show respect to a man who has no ambition. Roman’s life is a gory end, for a man in pursuit of a just world. It just wasn’t cut well at the table and also didn’t work out a very important tale to be very engaging on screen. It does take a while to get interested in this tale of a backroom crusader. And Washington does not disappoint, he puts his stamp on a black lawyer way differently than did Marshall. Marshall fought for justice but a few decades before the system decayed again and now Esq, (a title of dignity, slightly above gentleman, below knight, he does explain), has to fight to clean it again. Well, an ideal state is not a stagnant clear water pond, it’s a dynamic, so no fight is the last fight in an evolving landscape. Ofcourse Washington plays Roman with the sure-footedness of a knight. He goes about the role, with an excellent sound track playing on his iPodthroughout the length of the film, the music only stops with the gunshot. His activism from a time gonebydoes not fit in with the aggression of capitalism. Roman falls, like one man against a system will.
A movie about card games, how can that be interesting? Is that a sport? But Jessica Chastain just rocks this party. She skates on at deadly pace even along very precarious bends, deftly. Molly does break her spine, and that only adds more steel. And then Kevin Costner comes along to play daddy, who finds her every time she snaps her wings to add strength for flight again. Jessica is a very good Molly! And there is another ice skating movie which I haven’t seen yet, the cute Margo Robbie playing a toughie (I, Tonya). Jessica is so good that I am now looking to watch movies which have her in them.
Best adapted screenplay – Molly’s Game (nominated)
Marshall
Chadwick Bosemanis having a fine year. At the time of the Academy awards, he has had great success at the boxofficewith Black Panther, a first of a kind super hero who is Black. We are not counting Hancock. Though am sure that connection has been made and the market will work to see if Hancock and some bull can be flogged now that the viewers have bought into black panther, even if the only thing similar is skin deep. But Marshall is good watch, the struggle of the first lawyer who fought on the side of the underdog, and in the days when everything seemed loaded against you. There’s dignity and triumph andBoseman is a solid defender. An important piece of history that can add to the other lovely films like – Selma, The butler etc… America, at this time in history might be fighting to keep the arts from the shallow politics of petty boardroom that Sri. Trump brings to the big fat white house. But, all said, Hollywood still has rooms that are working on important stories being told well. Unlike? Unlike Bollywood which this year got Padmavati, a tale told grandly and not much else. It will probably be remembered for showcasing what a intolerant country we have become. A case of history having to repeat itself because we have forgotten our history. The burning and arson in this time of evolved materialism and technology went right back to the time of wicked Khilji. So, that’s how we seem to play out reel and real.
Back to Marshall, it has fine performances by Kate Hudson and Josh Gad too. This is enabling history lesson.
Best song : nominated : Stand Up for Something, Marshall
Along with I, Tonya we do plan to see: Coco – nice little Mexicantilt with even the big prize (Best Picture) going to another from the other side of Trump’s wall. And then Call Me By Your Name, for the peach and also see another James Ivory treatment, so many years after Merchant having passed on. The Disaster Artist which probably didn’t get much volume probably because Mr. Franco seems to have embittered a woman.
The girls are beautiful and so are the locales and both these are shot beautifully. It’s sensuous! and Dulquer is a rock star! That is about sums the movie up succinctly. Guns N’ Roses – Paradise City, would have sounded right when the credits rolled. [Symbol]
There are 4 stories in here and Bejoy goes off on some Shiva path, for depth? Well, can’t tell really why, all it does is add an illustration to the title page of every each story
Dhansika, Arthi Venkatesh, Sruthi Hariharan, Neha Sharma are absolutely gorgeous and the camera is calm, firm and is often gentle and even emits warm glow, not for a moment does it seem voyeuristic. And then Ann Augustine who walks in and out of the ‘world of trilok’, with the camera looking on longingly for
The tales: World of Shekhar World of Trilok World of Siva World of Rudra
a wee bit more, we plead. Haven’t seen Ann Augustine in a long, long time. There is something to Bejoy’s camera when it gazes at women: Juhi Babbar was ravishing in that short film where no words were spoken, a movie Bejoy made over a decade ago with Mohanlal – Reflection. Have you seen Aditi Rao Hydari in Wazir? Exactly!, that’s the point!
There are strong performances in the film. Dulquer Salmaan gets to play 4 very different characters in the 4 stories. The stammer in the first story was over done so was that story, and it really seemed like Bejoy had gotten it all wrong. But the other 3 tales are far better woven.
They are all tales or a very strong male, no no, the women are not just lookers-on, but it’s just that I felt the Solo was a Dulquer portfolio folder.
Bijoy was a director, I found interesting from the very first flick of his I saw, Shaitan. Oh! my o my, I thought it had huge promise and delivered too; it did seem to have a small flick feel with all the new comers, but what a lovely flick that was. There was no better remix of the old favorite: KhoyaKhoya Chand, that song of longing was fit with a beautiful eerie. So there was great promise from very early on, and he only somewhat delivered on them, somehow making one feel that he was holding back on that flourish which would have made it fantastic, or maybe he was just that touch impatient or restless to wait and find and let that magic work. I felt that with David, Wazir and then again with Solo. It’s like we felt about Ranbirmised but didn’t deliver, and still no denying that in there is a treasure trove in there, and those stones were waiting to catch the light to reflect but does quite reach deep enough for that to happen. These disappointments at the box-office could also be that process of the diamond being cut. There is such throbbing energy of promise that is just short of that one deft cut.
So, we will wait until the next offering and sure hope Bejoy finds the right team that will light up cinema halls and make for film history. Ofcourse it’s coming.
Ah! It’s been said, that books pick you! Yes, they do and so do movies in this age of downloads and streaming. And All Saints was so timely; one’s belief finds thirst quenching sparking water. Timely for me in my microcosm, am sure it talks in deeper and urgent tones to others too.
So, to the movie:
Michael’s (John Corbett) first assignment as newly ordained Parish priest, is a small job: clean up the church and its premise and ready it for the market. He sets out to do so earnestly. Ah! Right, cleanup has been reduced to this these days, not quite what Christ did with the rope around his waist, whipping the merchants out of His father’s house alone. Today the merchants own it fully. In our small church by the park, the voluntary position of the treasurer is usually with the guys who love money – they will treat it with care, like handing over the keys to the thief and he is thus reformed. Well, that theory is as whopped as all those solutions that grow back hair or pills that will rid you of envy and jealousy.
No big deal, there are only a few people who come in on Sunday mornings. I have heard this being said of the church I go to as well: it’s a church of just senior citizens and a handful of them. We should ask them to move to a church close by and do something else with the large plot that houses the church. The small difference being that in our case there is so much devious activity in an already demonic thought fueled atmosphere, thankfully not so with All Saints.
And Michael works at being a good priest, works out a couple of nice sermons and talk to the few old who still continue to hang in there on Sundays, before they are sent off to a larger parish. close by. Yes, you sigh, sitting here in a new urbane India, it seems the initial scenes of the movie is where we (our church) would be at in less than 5 years from now, if we continue down on the road we are on. The west has, we assume again, easily let go off its churches for more creative purposes. We see our future played out in another land’s history, and with the prayers of waiting on the messiah to come as our only hope in our rather stubborn apathy. Our solutions are all outside. Like a visiting priest who told me the other day, the solutions to the trouble the South Indian churches finds itself will come from the laity. I almost choked on my smile. This small congregation of ours believed our solution was the next Clergy in flowing shining white robes. So there goes that!! So, we continue looking into the dark clouds that offer no rain.
Like empty hopes filled to the brim with superhero movies, I waited for a bishop/messiah to step in and give this tale which was also turning melancholy with the misty-eyed -camera looking sadly on at the small congregation. No! Messiah is not coming! But Yes! God is at work though.
And into this gloom several refugees come in, misery does love company! They’re members of the Karen people group, farmers from Burma who’ve been transplanted to the little town of Smyrna, Tenn. They don’t speak much English but they are Anglicans. And its right fit for Anglicans in this episcopal Church.
And about this time God starts to talk to Michael. One rainy night and he reads the signs and His voice in the thunder. The roads will smoothen out with god on your side, the angels will plough you land! We think, and we will sit through like we do at sermons that are soothing, like common candy, sweet only for as long as it lasts and soon forgotten. Michael now just has to say and the red sea would part! Well, if our Christian/life journey were to be thus, would not Christ have turned those stones to bread? Michael all inspired and with the light bursting out of him meets the bishop and tells him, that he will make a Church of All Saints, the property should not go on the market. Ah! The red sea lays still to the gesturing of his rod!
Yes, the story, true story, is more the real gospel, quite unlike the tele-evengalical spiel that ends with your cheque books and their promise of comfort and lots of money pouring straight out of our leaky roof and into our bank balance. This movie does not attempt to proselytize, just tell a transforming tale is all. The story is well told, and no, it’s not just a ‘Christian’ story, it’s a story of transformation, of love, and the reassurance that in humanity is our hope.
Oh yes, the movie is based on a true story and adapted for the screen wonderfully. Many of the church goers that are shown in the movie are from the actual congregation and the real-life Karen refugees from Burma too. It was filmed at the actual All Saints’ Church where the events took place, located outside of Nashville. It is definite impetus for sagging faith, most definitely for guys living in urban milieus; going with the generalization that all cities are just the clone of a big city we aspired to be and become, Became!
And importantly God’s voice was not in the thunder; the voice is so finely intertwined in the lives of all who have now become part of the community and from there comes salvation. The strength: to withstand the lashing of the storm, to bear a loved one leaving, the disappointments. There are thanksgivings and joy of providence of grace, there is all of it and the light that makes life come alive with meaning, God with you.
And meanwhile in a small town in Bangalore, in our little church amidst the apathy there rests this hope that the present priest will go and then will come a new shepherd and a sheep whose fleece will from years of apathy suddenly start to sparkle and crackle. God does work in mysterious ways, but it still would need us to put our hands and voices into what he called us to. We presently have left the church to come to when you absolutely nothing else to do, we come looking for some fun amidst weltering flowers expecting them to all perk up for us. Ah! Well, it’s beautiful to find momentary solace and a stirring in our hearts from the goings-on on the silver screen. Hopefully, and until such time as we heed that voice inside so dulled with material possession and consumeristic delight. And the hollow eyes and emptiness inside we continue to beg the outside to fill.
So going back to the story, it lives in you; am writing about this movie, month after I have seen it. It continues to be the flickering little light in my finding love and warmth in my brotherhood – at the moment cold awaiting the messiah from a pool that’s already quite deplete. Yes, as bad as the water table of our city, 2nd in line in the list of cities to run out of water after Cape Town. And Cape Town already has been hit. And like empty court verdicts that we think are cures, we await the man in white cloth to wake up the living-dead. While we continue to sing the lord inside to sleep, with songs of new cars for bad roads, and one more house in the country (good investment boss!!! She said! – to the Janis Joplin tune) But ofcourse there’s hope: there were only 25 members when Michael Spurlock took over as pastor and a mortgage it couldn’t afford. We have a few more than that at our Services.
All Saints reiterates the truth (that humans are gregarious) that we are meant to live together and we are made humans to be thus, there are no answers in cutting and running away and hiding behind material fortress. Nay! NO!
A good nice cinema: not preachy and the message not taking anything away from the script. A very enjoyable uplifting tale! could easily fit into list of : ‘movies at lent’.
Elijah at Horeb: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. – 1 Kings 19:12
the link to the reel / real: http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/all-saints/
William Fichtner slow walk and working from home pace, is the pace of the movie’s narrative. It creeps upon you slowly and hits you on the head, bleddy hard too. I felt myself at various times restlessly wanting for the pace to pick up. Urging Mike (William Fichtner) to move faster – to his doom and even sometimes to safety. But no, and NO is right!
Mike with his easy routine and a wife who is intensely into her career and a son who is away is easily drawn into the distraction that moves next door. Beauty of the youth and as often as is its wont the recklessness of that phase of life which adds to the glow and zip, well, that somehow doesn’t sit well with you when you are older. WE know this but we continue to walk that path, so confident what was true to a million others will most definitely not be yours, and so does Mike, that damned slow pace doesn’t still help him get over that feeling of love/concern and that god-knows-what- is -this -thing that makes one feel this way. It does takes you down streets that has been your reluctant prayer to keep out of: keep me away from temptation. Oh how often we give into the other dictum: the best way to deal with temptation is to give into it. Oh, at various times it does even seems god sent, into your barren land an oasis for the many years of perseverance and boredom you braved. Oh, yes, deserving you say. Oh right, entitled!
Jenna (Jessica McNamee) is bang on as the forbidden fruit in the neighbor’s garden. Lovely, comely and also helpless, intelligent and sensitive, ‘perfect!’ as Mike’s friend Brain reassures him. You will find yourself tell Mike to walk away: hey Mike, ok you got to sip that much of the water now leave. And then even when circumstances turn right on its head to lead you away from the path to the house of the rising sun, cause the sun shine is always better on your neighbor’s grass. You can’t keep away, cause it’s as sweet as the leaf that Mike and Jenna shares. How am i to let a helpless girl fend for herself?
Mike’s darkness or his shade of gray leads him back on the road again and again. A familiar road actually as unique as it does feel to Mike at that time. But you already know from the encouragement Brian heaps on the hapless Mike that it is familiar road for the urban modern man. The easy way does most times lead you along the Chinese-Interesting- times* .
And when Mike finds enough spring in his steps it’s again to that garden wall, the wall that was to keep you away from that fruit of knowledge you so thirst for. This one fruit you have been asked to keep away from. the rest vast expanse all yours, but that tree blinds you to all the other realities that shine sparkle and live and with overreaching open arms beckons you to its throbbing with life, which has been denied only you, oh yes, you are convinced of that.
Well, it’s a nice little fable told well, and the pace of its telling only right. Oh, when Mike is left holding the tomato as the credits roll on, it could well be the very apple Adam looked hard and long at before he moved east of Eden to pick up the plough.
*(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times)
Wow! It was Friday, even before we could say ‘Thank God’, and He had given us a little more to cheer, it was Shivarathri, and the movie release – Rangoon. Thank you god! We said. A lil too soon we thought, thinking back a little afternoon that day.
I salivated at the thought of the treat from Wednesday (the next Wednesday was Ash) on. Even decided to do the piety of lent for a couple of days – practice run for the coming feast. Rangoon is a Vishal Bhardwaj film, and it had Shahid (with whom he has never really failed, not just that but even gave Shahid new life) and then gorgeous Kangana. Vishal had gotten back to form with Haider after a bit of a slip with Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, but then with MKBKM would have been difficult to get Imran to be Amir, and even the confidence of blowing the breath of life into Shahid didn’t help then. Cut to the present, Imran seems to have retired and must be in the same state of bliss as Abishek the Bachan! So, move on we will.
And come Friday we rushed about all the chores of the morning and got to the theater for the first show (yes, first day first show). Ah! Shiva’s slumber and the producer having to talk with the Censor board guys seemed to have effected the guys in Mumbai. The censor board is the joker in the pack that brings more tears than laughter. Our censor board is the most hardworking team on earth. Their sharp scissors can’t seem to have enough. They chopped off the kiss from the Bond flick Spectre and with it all of Monica Bellucci, making it a total waste of a cinema outing. We will save the stuff they did Under My Burkha for later. Moving on, after an hour’s wait the movie began. All the better for the lovely feast we thought, licking jowls in anticipation, thoughts that voiced itself in that hall, the 10 of us in the stall (the 11.30 morning show and it eventually got us to Rangoon at 12.30) were fairly well acquainted by now. And because of this instant camaraderie we also found out that in this digital age the movies are streamed at the theaters, show after every show, and that these guys had some issue with the film certificate.
OK, movie now. It was really nice to see Kangana on screen, it was nice every time she was on. Oh, Shahid was solid too, that boy has been working very hard, the debacle that was Mausam, an indulgent one which his father mounted for his son, did disturb his inner blocks. And he continues his good from from Udta Punjab. Saif’s struggle continues, he looks good, he gets to wear crisp tux en-all, the creases in place period wardrobe. Yes, he does carry it off and well, sometimes it just becomes that, and them clothes does not maketh the man. Earnest, oh he was! Also there was Richard McCabe, he had a lot of screen time, if he was out to get us to loathe him, he did a good job of that. He was just over the top, and his Urdu and Hindi mostly made you cringe. So it was nice to see him shot down after that fearless Nadia train rescue, very short lived that was, he came back and how! Kangana’s fearless Nadia would have made Mary Evans proud (yes another Aussie reference) and a lot many others too. She is fragile, strong and she soars, and she lifts your heart. Will the melancholy that only seems to add further to her sparkle consume her too soon? Her screen presence is almost Brandonesque.
The sets and the bridge to Rangoon, the scenic Arunachal Pradesh were just very small drops that promised a downpour this summer. So like one swallow and a few little water drops does not a summer thirst quench, Rangoon too does very little. Rather disappointing horse at the Race from the Vishal stable. So, in some ways it was like the debacle that was Rajni’s Baba(2002_film) . Well, scale it down a bit, and the impact in this small world would have the same feeling of hurt. Rangoon did however get me to dig out a copy of another war flick (Aussie reference again) about the girls who went on to entertain the troops – The Sapphires. And that lovely sound track.
Rangoon OST was bloody good too.
OK, now for the script. Yes, it had lots packed into it. Vishal was through, so when he made Saif’s Billimoria walk the tight rope and then take off his hand at the wrist very early in the movie, he was setting up a finale that would take the whole lovely bridge down and with it your heart and let you wallow in your tears of loss and love, and also love of our country, that heady concoction was flat beer – neither foster nor our own kingfisher. But there is that wooden feeling, quite like billimoria’s mechanical hand, or a hangover from cheap bad liquor.
Shahid does get you to leave your cushioned seat and stand up, with his rendition of the national anthem and his Bhagat Singh stance. Supreme court ruling of which stanza to stand for and when you could snore through, be hanged. Our patriotism being defined by lathi and gun yielding unruly, lacking any culture could do with this selfless lesson no? OK no! But then that is the farther-est we are from today. We understand en-mass chest thumping to lies and self love. Well, that is not the reason why the film didn’t do well at the box office. Rangoon does test your patience quite some in the first half and then the second half gets muddled up with too many of the subplots having to knit. Vishal does lose it every now and then, and sometimes when he thinks he has got it, he has lost you. Was it the big budget and scale that made him lose it? Was he infected with the same virus that got Anurag Kashyap when he was in Bombay ?
And for that triangle that Shadid, Saif and Kangana play, is but just a Tinny percussion discord. Can a girl love two men? Can two men live with the love of one girl? Well, NO answers, maybe they were not even the questions that were asked. But if you ended up asking, then you have Billimoria left alone to walk the tight rope with a tattered flag and a battered hand. Love is a just a thin veiled backdrop, but it still gets the lot of them to perform very brave acts like with grenades and bullets in the brain .
The old world trying to speak to the shallowness of the new world will let your art down. Like after all that tough kissing in the movie, the big question Kangana got asked many-times over was, ‘who is a better kisser, Shahid or Saif?’ hmm m…
Oh yes, Kangana does take a big part of you when she leaves saying, my soul left with the Soldier and of-course ‘Bloody Hell!’ nice touch with that as the famous last words, but the cgiafter a big let down. All puns and spoilers intended.
Dedh was a cuss word in the streets of the small suburbs of Bangalore we grew up in, of the 70s and 80s. And this half measure does need some cursing, much more than the One and half I haven’t quite uttered.
Vishal is an artist who in 2013 has decided to feed us Rotis that are only half cooked. True that even these are better than the Rowdys and Chennai trains that go nowhere. Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola disappointed, so does Ishqiya 11/2.
I accept, we went in with the memory of the sweet taste of gaalis and Vidya from Ishqiya, and came out wanting to go back to the old. This 11/2 and not half the fun.
The parts we liked:
The guys are quite good. Naseer and Arshad are good together. Their timing delightful, though Arshad moves like he probably chewed one bhang more than he should have.
The English subs – a very cool idea. If it wasn’t for that, a lot of the Urdu shayaris would have been wasted on us aam jantha.
Vijay Raaz is in good form, he has a lot of screen time and he makes good.
Huma promises but has no support from the script. She is the bodyguard to this petite aging Begum and she plays it straight.
Didn’t much care for:
Madhuri Dixit, there has been much made of her come back. She is all dainty en all.. but she’s quite like a mannequin that was given some lines to speak. Oh, yes, she looks very well preserved and there is even a whole song as the credits run for her to showcase Birju Maharaj’s deft moves, but it held back none, not at the theater I was at anyway. A person from the newspaper a couple of days later wrote that she was more enthused by Madhuri in the 1 minute trailer of ‘Gulab Gang’ more than this movie that she went to see. We sometimes make too much of a comeback: sometimes we expect great brilliance to come after a fading away. If you remember Pukar in 2000 it was more Namrata than Madhuri. And when the barefooted Hussain couldn’t quite get her to ride them horses around that time. Devdas was like: ‘ok, now we are tired, am going home’, and Chandramuki handed the bucket to Paro and left with Nene.
And Madhuri did come back 5 years later, and they (mostly reality shows on TV) crowned her dance queen with the ravishing smile.. and in the last 5-6 years she has been trying to freeze that to her image. Oh yes, that’s it, she does look a bit stiff.. And about that trailer, which pits these 80s girls on the big-screen for the first time, we think they might have waited too long.
There are some cool lines and Naseeruddin does the shayari well and the con man even better. And that time when an old Hakim (yes about 100 years older than Naseeruddin) holds his trembling hands and then just when Khalujaan (Naseer) thinks the Hakim might have gone to the other world in the course of listening to his pulse, the hakim wakes up from deep seance and delivers his cure: the mohabaat (seven course) will do it!
And Masha Allah! Mohabaat does heal! kicks and lives again.
Oh right, and Babaan (Arshaad) does gets a few stages into Mohabaat and get into Huma’s skirt too.
And these being the 7 stages: Dilkashi (attraction), Uns (attachment), Mohabbat (love), Akidat (trust), Ibadat (worship), Junoon (madness)
and the last stage is Maut (death).
This team that worked on this flick are such heavies : gulzar, rahat fateh ali khan, vishal… and they even get Honey Singh to mouth Gulzar’s lyrics with the banal ‘horn ok please’… no, it is not crass as dinka chika… remember Vishal made Dhan Te Nan (kameney) sound classy, and gulzar got Bipasha Basu to light a Beedi… So, these guys when they pick up dirt, it does breathe life. But the energy and the hooks abandon them here. No – Dil To Bachcha Hai. No – Ibn-e-batuta … Kya Hoga soars some height but doesn’t quite get there.
Oh ok, it is a good outing at the theaters I accept, but it is difficult to settle for anything but the finest Biryani from these folks.
On a barmy morning in January, our democratically elected leader turning into a high priest, confirmed fears and shaky hope crumbled to a silence. The hush was louder than the shrieking of children over the loud exploding bombs, drawing their last cry and breath. Despite this, it is still our only home, and I can’t imagine any other way.
Well, it is Ramrajya or Achedin for the majority, the ruling party claims. If the majority are in bliss then what state are the 3% and 13% in? Can that small percentage suffer and pay for the majority to be in the throes of that blissful state? A physical impossibility. Thinking in materialistic terms that would leave us in that perennial burning fire – right here, right now. No waiting to die for purgatory.
I have heard folks say, “We are sending our children away to another country,” I nod as if to agree. Hate is more on display than kindness. Isn’t kindness the expression of otherwise formless thought – love? So to cut the preamble and come to where we are at and why we can’t blame anything external for what ails us. By We herein I am sticking to that place we call community which has none of the characteristics that would justify it being called family and such like terms of endearment that rings more false than the big useless bell.
But, somehow that talk is not a walk, not even a crawl. Institutions that have helped us live together in our diversity are destroyed. They are being made uniform and levelled to a new low. JCB en all. India, which once strived to be beautiful and tolerant is now in the throes of hate and violence. 500-year-old beauties were razed, and our church of over 130 years old was renovated and not restored – Bathroom tiles for the old stones and ugly cement cover the grounds that could have allowed rainwater to rejuvenate the groundwater. Let’s get to the point. We must acknowledge that we can’t blame external factors for our predicament. This scenario or how we came to it.
Let me trace back to this one microcosm that gave rise to this fine monster we created to rule over us. I am tracing back to one that I was/am part of. A benign Dic is what the 8-year-old minds in 50-year-old bodies have been asking for the longest time. And the wish has come to be. And now their 18-year-old daughters live in fear. This is what we got from our lazy understanding of democracy. Vote. The people we elected would then tell us what to do. They could destroy your right to decent living, faith, speech, and laughter. But we will talk about that in closed rooms. We will say it’s still the best, so we must obey the lame gods we created. Avatar we can call him, just in case god is a little bigger than that and His name can’t be used on a vain person. But then we have been working towards this dystopia with the intent of utopia. That lazy road of good intentions led to hell.
In practice, the Church (the microcosm) has had low democratic involvement. Having seen it for over 3 decades. And have seen this snake’s head rise and am aware of it too. Spoke about it and countered it when could. Most folks felt it was cute and harmless but now it is a full-grown one with a poisonous disgusting head.
I didn’t start to write this to complain but to see more clearly where our actions have taken us. And also that the outside didn’t happen by itself. I still remember when many in the ‘community’ cheered when the government’s people came and started to audit the church accounts. They bloody deserve it, they said. Not even knowing that they were encouraging destruction on the very grounds. The place where they came to find peace and nod off in blissful sleep. No no, that is not sarcasm or a nod to the sleep-inducing sermons. That is for another chapter.
And when those in positions got more and more corrupt finding very cool ways of leaving no money trails. The goodies flowed into the houses of those who were working for their betterment here on earth. Can’t wait for those mansions in heaven that the white-robed empty sermons promised the sheep, quoting the scriptures literally. We had to replace JC with a superior god. A god that answered when you called in clear lucid voices. He sent you money whenever you asked or gave your children seats in schools and various such things.
But this god was partial and gave only to his ‘own’ people. All the institutions built to serve ‘everyone’, not only Christians, were serving themselves. Baal was here and the coffers overflowing into pockets were the main aim. Yeweh was deaf and mute and didn’t even have form. A scholar said He is the very air you breathe. They laughed and danced around their Bullish gains. And now when the majority gets into that kind of behavior. cry? How sad!!
Look at the way this movement is turning out in this country. Does it not have the same flavour of the corrupt organised religion used to add gain to those who were yielding power? Power? Yes! The positions of servitude and voluntary service is just that. That most have left the fold is still no concern of theirs. As long as there is gravy for their lot the rest can stay out. Close the gate! And lock it. Come see us. You will see the spikes and the locked gates. That is us keeping the Lord safe.
Today a religion which was not organized has been organized for the purposes of power. But, then that is the nature of that act. When the church that preached an inclusive religion had to be divided to allow only your own. And you closed the gates and put up spikes on the wall..
And then those in high chairs used social media to call those they did not like – names. It even got as serious, as immature people who sat on those tall chairs (I wish they didn’t do anything at all). A man even died because of the stress an unthinking person caused him from vitriolic outpourings on social media. Well. May his soul rest in peace and may the grace of the lord and hours at the shrink bring that peace all around.
We have to pray. Like Cohen famously said: “When you see the world and you see the laws of brute necessity which govern it, you realize that the only way that you can reconcile this vale of suffering … to sanity is to glue your soul to prayer.”
That’s why the rich, who thought they were safe, now want safety in numbers. But they don’t know how to approach the god who promised to walk with them through the turmoil and pain.
We so easily chased people who didn’t agree with us and celebrated when our own stumbled. The robed guards themselves behave thus. The congregation chooses 12 to lord over them. It is not different from democracy as a state. The population understands casting their vote as being in a democracy, and the voice of God through them. Well, do they really? I think not! But what that being the only exercise of the citizen makes the elected not one of you but an avatar of the gods… and now we are worse off than when the kings rode roughshod.
At the church, there is no doctrine or ideology but the management of money. The oldest trick is construction work. That act continues to be the handmaiden of the corrupt. Not saying all work is corrupt but most are in most churches. And the purple-clad ones too look the other way. So before we look for change in places where we have no say or role. look at the places you are involved in – home, office, church. And try and be part of that change you want to see. But, we play the victim as the aggressor does. When my PM cries about being a victim, I am moved to believe that he learnt that skill from these organized places of religion!?
The Robed one does not even bother with the people of his congregation. And the congregation members don’t bother about their own. They outsourced the job of ‘kindness’ to the steel-cold office of the clergy. We are busy; we don’t have time, not even for our mothers or fathers. What do you think of the sick in the congregation? And so we go on: blaming the other for all that befalls the collective and self.
The people who held positions destroyed all platforms. These platforms involved the congregation in decision-making. They also destroyed platforms for celebrations, sorrow, and joy. We said nothing. We said they were doing their job. The task of more than 200 people being a community is now in the hands of 12 people. They were chosen from a demography of people who had nothing else to do. You are being unkind to them, I hear you say. NO! Who else can spend over 8 hours a day in a voluntary position?
Would you mind if those few who only know leisure set up a workshop for idleness? What change and life would that bring about? The one thing that this group, the sole inheritors of his kingdom does is: keep the rest of us away from here. They only understand the concept of fewer people meaning more material for them.
Good Lord, now pathetic is that? This is, in reality, a public place. And does not belong to anyone. And if this abuse carries on, the grace we undervalue will be lifted, and we will lose these grounds, the face of our little community.
The robed and their ilk think the community is in the empty WhatsApp walls. That WhatsApp does nothing; it only adds to your unhappiness. We are also a place of friends and family, and we keep telling our own to keep away from Church politics. You vacated those places to serve only the corporate gods and amass great wealth. You threw some of that earnings in the direction of the church. It got your child a platform to be applauded Well, that is a good thing you say. Maybe you see it that way.
However, the child finds herself in a diminishing returns system that relegates this place to the priority – least. Also, the abuse of wealth and position destroys it further for others and will do the same to you. Ah! I listed the most benign of the great dangers.
There is no room anymore for the poor here. The rich take over everything. We have a bell tower built for only one reason – so a wealthy man can have his father’s name inscribed on it. He paid for it, so why not? Yes, why not? And nobody else had to contribute!!
An aside:A few years after he did that, his children called the priest a bastard and other names to his face. Well, those who have eyes see… and those ears hear… cause what is coming is bigger than anything you thought would be, and it will take it all away from us. Those that abused may be the first to lose out. But be aware that you will not have this place of solace too. Before you say, they deserved it. But, yes, you may not lose something you didn’t invest in. We only know that kind of transaction today.
I didn’t start of to be hopeless about our existence but to shine life to the dimming hope and attempt to rekindle it. The change will come if we change. Cause the public consciousness/attitude has to change at our level. We wait for change to come from above – Messiah, the next priest, the next PM… but NO!. I have seen it only getting worse with every passing generation of the priest in this congregation I belong to.
People still wait for the next super priest to come by and we will be that house on the hill. Those who waited have gone into ripe old age and some even went on to the other side of the veil, but that messiah hasn’t yet come. We were ashamed of the Messiah within and let it die a million deaths. And now, we nor our children have any solace in this place but have to run to find peace and help elsewhere. The walls that the self-proclaimed guardians build will have no souls to house – the spirits having flown.
The church office bearers continue to hoodwink the congregation and themselves blinded by their power struggle. The priest doesn’t even care that the house of love is now a cauldron of ugly insects who hate. Some of us express it very freely on Facebook. But most of us just look through each other at very close quarters. Yes, they will know we are Christians by our love.
We were one of the few churches that didn’t even get out to do anything, even towards its own, during those 2 terrifying years when the pandemic raged. The Sikh community were exemplary – they walked our talk in confident strides. Giving more and more and more and didn’t tire. We waited for the winds to change and fought over ‘not enough pieces in this biryani’.
Do look at it: we are no church for young people and we will not be a country for them either.
I remember a conversation with the priest about our careless and cold ways as a congregation. She did things on a war footing after that.S/he said those who want the church will come here. And s/he went on to keep the main gates locked. That board with the stupid sign – ‘ALL ARE WELCOME’ hanging there waiting to peal off and fly to where there would be meaning.
Meanwhile, the office bearers fight over what new block to build and toilet seats to change in a place fast losing its flock. .and for now where only the rich are welcome to come to play. The prayers are for favours that can be bought.
You said hope?yes, if the few of us can find strength in each other and be forgiving (over and over and over again) of the community and work to enrich the core – the love of god and the love of fellow men. We can find it. We have no other way but this.
The present system where the rich operate behind doors to close doors on those they do not like has already driven us into an unsustainable way of being. It is also in their interest, until the grace we believe in heal us all. Yes, it is where we could all live together or perish!
That is all the hope?YES!
I still believe that place is open if some of us continue to go there. That is getting to be a big ask on any given Sunday. The very people who found relevance in the company of the people who walked the values of the idea of the lessons from the cross and crossroads want us out. So, the struggle is real. But I am also hopeful that the struggle itself is the way to light and life.
This small pocket can then be the light that can be the strength to that larger demography which we call my country. Where hope is not a useless dread but strength. Where our head is held high, and narrow walls will crumble down and into a heaven of freedom we will rise.
Here is a quick response to a friend who actively advocates such stringent measures to an institution of love. When most of us there walked into that public space it was welcoming. And now we close the gates to the public after we are in.
Summary:
Setting up a screening committee to accept new members into your church is against the very foundation of the church and how it creates power structures that are to dominate over the others. Church is not a place where material benefits are distributed to those who bow down to those who have usurped positions of servitude and made it positions of power to mistreat the very ones who elected them to a position they volunteered to do. Church welcomes everyone, not a place for your rich friends alone. our god is that of the weak and humble. We are called to be the light on the hill by our actions of compassion, service and kindness not authoritarian. and a place where you throw ‘charity’ crumbs and expect those not privileged to grovel at the feet of those who sit in places of responsibility and work most actively at keeping most of the congregation away because they are not of their economic status or you don’t like their faces. The priest, as I see it is now a corporate head, and ‘Maam’ fits better than how the robed ones were addressed previously.
The establishment of a screening committee to accept new members into a church goes against the fundamental principles of the Christian faith. The Bible teaches that the church is a body of believers who are equal in the eyes of God and that everyone is welcome regardless of their background or social status. Setting up a committee to scrutinize potential members creates a power structure that can lead to discrimination and marginalization of certain groups.
The church is not a place where material benefits are distributed to those who bow down to those who have usurped positions of servitude and made them positions of power to mistreat the very ones who elected them to a position they volunteered to do. Rather, it is a community of believers who come together to worship God, support one another, and serve those in need. The focus should be on spreading the message of God’s love and redemption, not on creating barriers to entry for those who may not fit a certain mold.
Furthermore, the idea of a screening committee implies that some individuals are more worthy than others to be part of the church. This contradicts the biblical teaching that all people are created in the image of God and are therefore equally deserving of respect, dignity, and love. It also undermines the concept of grace, which is central to Christian theology. Grace is the unmerited favour of God, freely given to all who believe in Him, regardless of their background or past mistakes. By establishing a screening process, the church is essentially saying that some people are not worthy of God’s grace unless they meet certain criteria set by humans.
Moreover, the creation of a screening committee can lead to an authoritarian atmosphere within the church. Those who are deemed “worthy” of membership may feel a sense of superiority over those who are not allowed to join, leading to division, cliques, and exclusivity. This goes against the biblical model of the church as a body where all members are equal and have different gifts and roles to play. Instead of fostering unity and cooperation, a screening committee can create an environment of competition and elitism.
Additionally, the notion of a screening process suggests that the church is a place where “charity” crumbs are thrown to those who are less fortunate. This perpetuates the idea that the wealthy and influential are the ones who truly matter, while the poor and vulnerable are merely recipients of handouts. However, the Bible teaches that true religion involves caring for widows and orphans in distress and advocating for justice and equality (James 1:27). The church should be a place where everyone is treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their financial situation.
Finally, the fact that the priest is now referred to as “Maam” highlights the problematic nature of a hierarchical system within the church. Instead of being a servant leader who models humility and selflessness, the priest has become a corporate head who wields power and authority. This reinforces the idea that the church is an institution that exists to maintain its own interests rather than a community of believers who exist to serve God and others.
In conclusion, setting up a screening committee to accept new members into a church goes against the foundational principles of the Christian faith. It creates power structures that can lead to discrimination, marginalization, and exclusivity, and reinforces harmful stereotypes about wealth, status, and worthiness. Instead, the church should strive to be a place where everyone is welcome, valued, and treated with dignity and respect. As followers of Jesus, we are called to be the light on the hill by our actions of compassion, service, and kindness, not authoritarianism.
The above is also an experiment at using an AI tool. The ideas expressed are still all mine… AI made the anguish of the rough and overwhelming feeling a fast food offering.
Baa baaaa.. sang the lamb, in rhythm as he jumped over David’s hunched-over back. He was on his harp strumming a melody. The strains of the tune enveloped the flock of sheep in a protective fence. He sang lines he came to him early that morning – a song of praise!
He looked up into the skies, the sun was setting, and he had been out many days in this pasture. In the next couple of days, he planned on being home. He got up from the cool spot under the tree and tucked his Harp into his bag. He called out a few sheep by name and began their walk back to his father Jesse’s house.
The house was calm when he got there. He found his father at his desk, lost in thought. David inquired his father about his brothers. Jesse said they were in King Saul’s army, and have been away close to 40 days now. Jesse asked David to take some food over to his brothers the next day. The following morning, David got to the battlefield and located his brothers.
He asked them about the happenings there. They told him about the standoff with the Palestinian army. Every day a giant of a man would come out from the Palestinian side and challenge the Israeli army. Even before he got more details, the man came out to challenge them. As he had been doing for the last 40 days. Goliath was his name. The Israeli army trembled with fear. Goliath thundered: Come out and fight me! David looked at the man in shining Armour and gleaming sword, he looked as tall as the hill he had stepped out of. He was over 9 ft. tall. This giant of a man had a voice that boomed and bounced off the hills. David looked at him from his perch, his mind going back to a story Ruth, his grandmother had told him many years ago.
His mind wandered to that time. He was sitting outside looking out into the starry night with his grandmother. Ruth was recounting a tale from a book she found in the forest. She found this book many years ago when she was a young girl. She was on the way back from the temple, her eyes gleamed even that night, as she recalled that day. High above the trees, she saw a strange sight. A muscular man-like creature with a long tail was moving at great speed. Her friends and she ran to find a clearing to get a better look but he soon disappeared among the trees.
Ruth noticed something fall from the trees. She picked it up. In her hand, she held a bundle of exquisitely embroidered, golden leaves parchments. Written in a script she couldn’t decipher. David remembered the tale of her very treasured book as vividly as the tales she told from that book. Time passed by, and Ruth was now married to Boaz. One day Boaz brought along a man who had travelled the world selling spices and gold. Ruth noticed the book he made his notes in had a script she recognized but couldn’t read. She went into her room and from her little box which went with her on all her journeys – Moab or Bethlehem. She was right, the script on the parchment resembled the one in that Man’s notes. She showed Boaz the book who then showed it to Varun the Merchant who was visiting.
On seeing the book he held it with great care and touched it to his forehead and read some leaves to himself.
Varun came by a few times after that and taught them the script which he called Sanskrit. He even left a Sanskrit to Syriac phonetic script so Ruth would read on. And in the days that followed she lived the exile and celebration and the dangers of the great war from that book.
David was back in the present. And before his eyes Goliath morphed into Raavan, that fearsome king from the great war. David felt the tug of his purpose. He told those around him that he would fight Goliath. His brothers shooed him and asked him to go on home. But, David was in no mood to relent. One of the soldiers took him to King Saul.
Saul dismissed him at first but when David persisted he let him go out to face Goliath. He even gave him his Armour to wear and his sword. David walked on to the place of battle. He found he couldn’t walk wearing that Armour. So he removed it and laid the sword down. Saying a prayer under his breath as he set out on his task. He walked into the clearing that reverberated with the bellowing voice of the giant. David shivered involuntarily at the sight.
Goliath looked more fierce than when he saw him from a distance. He took a deep breath and spoke out loud, the quiver in this voice visible in the words he spoke: “You… you… taunt us with sword and spear… I have come to you in the name of my God, by this strength I… I challenge you”. Taken aback for a moment by the diminutive size of the young boy he opened his eyes wide to take in the scene. He threw his head back and laughed aloud. The hills around shook, and a few soldiers perched on rocks fell off their seats. The trees fell back a few paces and took root again. Goliath’s mirth ended abruptly as it had begun.
He stretched to his full height and started towards David. David meanwhile had steadied himself. The quivering ground below him filled him with unlikely courage. His feet were now firmly on the ground, and his veins throbbed but his mind was clear and calm. He reached into the pouch at his waist and pulled out three pebbles. He rolled them around his fingers and picked one which felt perfect and put the other 2 back into the pouch. Goliath was making giant strides towards him. David with his left hand pulled out the sling from his belt and swung it in the air. The collective gasp from the Israeli army behind him was louder than Goliath’s sneer. David was calm. He placed the pebble that the water over years had smoothed. He placed it in the sling. Goliath was now about 200 yards from him and fast eating up the ground between them.
David swirled the sling above his head. It was a whirl, his hand seemed to move as a wind gale, and the speed of his arm was like a swishing cloth.
The hills and the trees danced through the screen that David’s frantic arm motion created. Eliab, David’s elder brother closed his eyes tight to clear his vision. There was a great silence and in a moment a thud that shook the earth as if struck by a quake. Goliath lay sprawled on the ground. It had happened so suddenly that the mind had to play it back to the eyes again.
David gauged the distance of Goliath’s run. And when he had the measure right he tugged and unleashed the pebble from the sling. His lips moved constantly in a whispered prayer. The pebble travelled at the speed of a falling star and hit Goliath bang in the middle of his forehead. It knocked him down. The stone entered his skull and took his life breath away. The Palestinians were now running away from the battlefield. The Israelis chased after them and killed many of them that day. The war was won.
Later that day, Saul rode with David in a victory procession all over Israel. The rejoicing and celebration continued for days.
postscript:
This was something i wrote about 10 years ago. it was an attempt to retell the story and bring in a mix of mix of cultures into the story telling... oh yes. it did end up as a short piece. And in these times of rewritting histories by the new victors they attempt is to delete and lie... but this is just a story not retelling history. well... that needn't be said... but the obvious in these times are fairy tales.
A Tovino starrer. Yes, Tovino is a rather exciting new talent, in a already rich harvest of young crop of Malayalam actors. His movies have done very well in the last couple of years and the future looks bright. His 
k, that works even at the first level of its narrative. A bus company named democracy takes us on this ride through the land of nasals, the liberals, the law keepers, hardliners…
ic of Sanjay Dutt by his good friend Hirani. I saw it a couple of weeks after the hype and reviews that raved about it and some that trashed it, and then some articles which looked at the film objectively and hearing very favorable reviews from friends mothers’ who came out loving Sanjay all over again. Yes, it was about this Dutt that Shoba De, many many years ago said: he appeals to the mother in a woman. Oh Yes, it is the story of a poor rich boy who couldn’t help the wrongs he fell into, or sleeping with the many women he did. And Mr. Hirani starts out to redeem the man he has come to love, and even succeeds. And yes, a couple of years ago a lesser artist redeemed Azhar from match fixing on celluloid. And herein we have a very talented actor play Dutt. Shiv Kumar, the film critic in ‘The Hindu’ said ‘played by an actor far more talented than Sanjay’.
listlessness of having lost a job.
And chasing up on Ms. Chastain, we happened again on Ms. Sloane, yes, I had seen this earlier but it didn’t talk to me so much as it did today. The gun-kills in America hadn’t had quite the impact yet on our lives in the subcontinent. Oh, yes, I do still rememberseeing ‘Bowling for Columbine’ at a docufest, it was shattering and very disturbing. And even the funny momentwhen 
whispers,rants and murmers 