The Media and the Mob

My Mirror column today:

Hansal Mehta's Aligarh is both a tragic bio-pic and a finely-wrought critique of our mediatised present.

Aligarh opens on a chilly February night in 2010, in an area called Medical Colony, somewhere in the university town for which the film is named. We can see little in the darkness, but what we hear is a jarring sound: cars honking, distant but persistent. It feels like a warning, a premonition of danger. 

What follows is indeed dangerous. A man is forcibly photographed in the privacy of his own house, and those images are used to humiliate, blackmail and illegally shunt him out of his job. This is what really happened to the unfortunate Dr. Shrinivas Ramachandra Siras, a Reader in Marathi at the linguistics department of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in 2010. 

A camera crew barged into Siras's house without his permission, and shot video footage of Siras and his male friend, using physical coercion to keep them in the frame. These media persons then called in three AMU faculty members, who were given access to the footage, which they used to charge Siras with "misconduct". Accusing him of having "indulged himself into immoral sexual activity and in contravention of basic moral ethics", AMU instituted a departmental enquiry against Siras. 

Even while the enquiry was pending, the self-appointed moral guardians of the university had pronounced their judgment: Siras was suspended, his electricity and water supply was cut off, and an order was issued giving him seven days to vacate his house. Meanwhile, the footage was leaked to local television channels, and it became difficult for Siras to even find an alternative house to rent. Initially persuaded that tendering an 'apology' would help carry on with his life, the 64-year-old professor eventually found himself having to fight for his job and his dignity in court. He won the case, but died mysteriously and tragically one day before his reinstatement. 

Hansal Mehta's film, at one level, is a straightforward, near-factual recreation of these events. But Apurva Asrani's script (based on an original idea by Ishani Banerjee) brings us much closer to Siras than the newspapers ever did - and it does so, ironically, by using the figure of a reporter. We see the professor almost entirely through the eyes of Deepu Sebastian (played by the excellent Rajkummar Rao). 

Modelled on a real-life reporter who came to have a rapport with the stigmatized professor, Deepu's character works as a bridge between Siras and us. It is Deepu's gradual shift, from seeing Siras as a 'story' to seeing him as a human being, that encourages the film's viewers—including those who may not be comfortable with homosexuality in the abstract—to make space for this person, in the particular. Deepu channels our better selves. 

Aligarh was completed several months ago, yet it speaks powerfully to the India being so cynically crafted in February 2016. What Aligarh defends is not just the right to privacy and freedom of sexuality; it is the freedom of the individual against the condemnation of the mob, and the role the media can play in mediating between the two. 

We live in times in which sections of the media have turned into megaphones for pre-existing political positions, giving up even the pretense of neutrality as they openly manufacture 'news'. These sections of the media speak less and less for the individual, more and more in the voice of the mob - a mob they are simultaneously helping to create. 

The tenor of television in India seems increasingly meant to whip up mass sentiment, rather than encourage a considered appraisal of differing viewpoints. This is not a media that questions its viewers; and even more rarely does it question itself. 

Aligarh offers an acute example of how the media's actions, no matter how damaging they might be to the individuals they drag towards televised mob justice, have come to be accepted as legitimate. When Deepu Sebastian (Rao) asks the AMU committee about the illegitimacy of filming a man's most private moments, the answer he gets is frightening. The issue here is not the camera, he is told -- only what is captured by it. 

In the ongoing cases of students being charged as antinationals, too, we are witness to the chilling process of a trial by media, in which the due process of law, or even the due process of newsgathering, counts for nothing. And if our media has long been unquestioningly parroting the police, we have now reached a stage where the police parrots the media. The self-legitimising circle of mendaciousness is complete. 

But Aligarh reminds us that Deepu, too, is the media. The journalist who resists his colleague's ham-handed intrusiveness, while being dogged in his pursuit of the truth; who asks permission of his interviewees and questions of his own profession; who is able to separate the grain of individual truth from the chaff of rabble-rousing hearsay—this is the media as it should be, the media we desperately need. 

Manoj Bajpayee's affecting portrait of Siras is a portrait of isolation, of the stifling 'morality' of those that would shut the doors of their institutions, their colonies and mohallas against anyone not like themselves. But difference is the lifeblood of democracy. We need our televisions to be windows to the outside - not a chamber of mirrors that closes us in upon ourselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 February 2016.

Haunted by Homelessness

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

When it comes to city housing, Hindi films have often painted a bleak picture, and CityLights is as dark as they come. But now even our fantasies only promise homes for the rich.

Hansal Mehta's CityLights returns us to what used to be a persistent theme of Bombay cinema: the search for a home in the city. An authorised adaptation of last year's British-Filipino film Metro Manila, CityLights brings its protagonists - Deepak (Rajkummar Rao), his wife Rakhi (Patralekha) and their daughter Mahi - from a Rajasthan village to big, bad Mumbai. (In what is one of the first signs of the hoariness of the plot, Deepak is escaping the clutches of a moneylender.) Within hours of arrival in the metropolis, they have been tricked out of their savings by the promise of a home. 

The enormity of that first betrayal is depicted in an early scene that is bleak, and powerful. Rakhi has already started cleaning the empty flat as her own when the construction workers return. There is an unspoken, brutal marshalling of class here: seeing a woman squatting on the floor with a jhadoo, the city workers assume she is a hired cleaning woman. Because of course no-one who looks like a bai can possibly be at home in this relatively comfortable space. Bai, tum ghar jao, they say to the baffled Rakhi, who continues to sweep at first. Then, as realization dawns on her (and them), she roots herself to the floor. It is a harrowing moment of cinema: the frail young woman clinging literally and metaphorically to the ground beneath her feet, as the men try their best to drag her out of the flat.

Rakhi is removed, of course, and when we next see the family, it has floated into that vast amorphous population of the urban homeless. They move from pavement to pavement for a few days, until a bar dancer helps arrange temporary shelter in a half-constructed multi-storeyed building. "When this flat is ready, it'll go for three crores!" declares the tout with that strange pride in something he will never own. Then he pockets a hundred rupees a night to let the family sleep on the bare floor, amid the exposed bricks and beams and dangerous open parapets.

The shadowy spaces of the half-constructed building are a favourite locale for Bombay cinema: most often as the site of action sequences, or a villain's den. CityLights is perhaps the first film to use the space as ironic shelter for the homeless, the city view spread out below less grandly picturesque than cruelly anonymous.

Watching CityLights reminded me of Gharonda (The Nest, 1977), about another young couple's ill-fated striving for a home. Though of course that unusual Gulzar screenplay -- directed by Bhimsain -- was about middle class office-goers: people who did not have ready cash, but could conceivably save up for it. And Gharonda's protagonists do try, working overtime at odd jobs. Sudeep (Amol Palekar) puts up film posters at night, Chhaya (Zarina Wahab) takes on a modelling assignment. But the Rs. 5000 down payment they need to book an LIG flat -- via a munshi known to Sudeep's roommate - is too large to generate so quickly. Sudeep's monthly salary is only 600. So they borrow money to pay the munshi, and in the lovely song 'Do Deewane Sheher Mein', fill the half-done building with their dreams of domestic bliss.

But a house in Bombay is no place for dreaming. It is a matter of life and death. The munshi disappears with the money; Sudeep's roommate commits suicide; Sudeep himself, broken by the turn of events, turns bitter and desperate. And as in CityLights nearly four decades later, acts of desperation only drag you further into the quagmire. Sudeep ends Gharonda as a ghost of his former self - walking away into the horizon, dwarfed by the tall buildings of Bombay.

Amol Palekar as Sudeep in Gharonda

Abandoned buildings were also the scene of a very different sort of film about homelessness and injustice, earlier this summer. All across Mumbai, according to the Amitabh-Bachchan-starrer Bhootnath Returns, are apartment buildings on whom work has stopped because they are haunted. They are haunted by the ghosts of those whose lives were lost in their construction - from engineers who fell to their deaths to displaced jhuggi dwellers. The good ghost Bhootnath (Bachchan) combines forces with a little boy from Dharavi (Partho) to get these hapless souls justice, so that they go peacefully into the next world and our ghostbusters can get paid by the building mafia.

Once upon a time, mainstream Bombay cinema sold a dream - the dream of the poor boy who would grow up to be Amitabh Bachchan, and buy the building for which his mother had once broken stones as a labourer. Sometimes that dream was a mass one, as in the marvellous scene in Coolie when Bachchan smashes the villain's chandelier as he says, to give every coolie's house a light like that one. The middle class film in the same period - even a film as sensitive as Gharonda - simply did not encompass the labouring classes in its imagination. The one time that manual labourers appear in Gharonda, they pause their work obligingly to turn into a gigglingly indulgent audience for the middle class couple's song of home ownership. (It is another matter that the song's desires remain unfulfilled).

In 2014, Bollywood has offered us two visions. On the one hand, the darkly cynical denouement of CityLights, in which we learn that there is no such thing as a free gift - or a free home. On the other, a feel-good tale in which Bachchan -- now a ghost of his former self -- gives corrupt officials lessons in citizenry. But to what end? So that the work of building houses for the rich can continue. For the rest, a home in the city is no longer even held out as fantasy.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Film Review: Shahid

Hansal Mehta’s biopic Shahid released last week, two and a half years after the still-unsolved death of the 33-year-old criminal defense lawyer who earned a reputation representing people accused in terror cases. It’s just about clinging on to the cinemas this week, despite having been released at the same time as Akshay Kumar’s Boss and losing its core audience in Mumbai to the Mumbai Film Festival which also kicked off last Friday. The fact that it’s still around for audiences to see is perhaps a fitting real life parallel to the story of a classic underdog. In a mere seven years of practice, Shahid Azmi secured 17 acquittals in matters that included the Ghatkopar bus bombing case of 2002, the Malegaon blast case of 2006, the Aurangabad arms haul case of 2006, the Mumbai train blasts of 2006, and most famously, the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008.

To those whom he saved from being sacrificed at the altar of an inept but bloodthirsty state, Azmi was certainly something of a hero. But Mehta’s film is scrupulously unheroic, choosing the messiness of real life over the clean arc of drama. Mehta’s directorial style echoes Azmi’s own commitment to a truth in which thoughtless actions produce victims, rather than villainy producing heroes. Azmi’s unglamorous courtroom victories repeatedly make the evidentiary triumph over the rhetorical. In the words of Rajkumar Yadav’s superbly convincing Shahid, “I’m as opposed as you are to terrorism, but that doesn’t mean that we can put innocent people in jail without any evidence.”


But perhaps what really made Azmi’s story compelling was his triumph over himself. Shahid’s impressiveness lay in the distance he had come from his own beginnings – and in never forgetting what that journey had been like. At the age of 14, deeply affected by the Bombay riots of 1992, he had briefly joined a militant training camp in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. At 16, Azmi was arrested under TADA, or the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act. Later, he was charged with conspiring against the state, specifically with plotting the assassinations of Farooq Abdullah and Bal Thackeray, and placed in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. He was acquitted of all charges in 2001, but by then he had spent over seven years in jail.

The film does not turn Azmi into a saint. His fallibility is shown in the depiction of his early years, including his time in jail with Omar Shaikh, who was serving time for the 1994 kidnappings of foreign tourists in Kashmir. But somehow, knowing that he could just as easily have been swayed by the sword as by the pen, gives Azmi’s eventual choice greater impact. It is clear that Azmi’s work was not simply a career for him. It was a vocation.

The poor Muslim men whose cases he took up mirrored his own experience. Mehta’s film makes the connections without underlining them too heavily. While Azmi had been arrested under TADA, which became defunct in 1998, his clients were frequently arrested under POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) or MCOCA (the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act) – all of these legislations allowed confessions in police custody (notoriously extracted through torture or deceit) to be made admissible in court.
Unlike regular criminal lawyers whose professional ethics require them to defend clients regardless of their guilt or innocence, the film suggests that Azmi worked on a personal ethic: he only took on clients he believed to be innocent. 


Mehta’s depiction of Azmi’s life derives much of its power from economy. Apurva Asrani’s editing (he also has partial writing credits) produces a narrative full of sharp cuts, where we must often fill in the blanks. In one of the best examples of this, we see Shahid propose marriage to his client Mariam, a divorcee with a child. She expresses utter shock, picks up her stuff and leave. In the next scene we see them together, very much a couple — leaving us to make up our own version of the interim period. Yet the film doesn’t feel choppy. The quality Mehta strives for — and achieves — is gritty documentary made up of snapshots, rather than orchestrated epic. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, we see a young Shahid run out of his house in Govandi. He emerges into the smoky dimly, tubelit street only to almost collide with the terrible figure of a man ablaze. It is a shocking moment and a cinematic one; the burning man sets the screen aflame. But instead of trying to chill us with the power of choreographed communal violence as so many films do (Earth, Kai Po Che to name two of many), it jolts us. Much like Shahid himself, we find ourselves very suddenly in a militant training camp. Again, the Kashmiri locale might have felt epic if Anuj Dhawan’s camera didn’t focus on the snow: it’s not pure white, but a dirty brown. 


Later, Mehta shears the judicial process of all the grandeur that Hindi films have traditionally accorded it. Even the recent Jolly LLB did not cut itself off completely from the dramatic confrontation of the big fish and the small fish, though it sought to undercut the court’s aura of justice with biting satire. What makes Shahid unique is its deliberate curtailment of both drama and humour. Instead we get a courtroom where life-and-death decisions are taken while lawyers squabble, cutting into each others’ dialogue to create inaudible moments. The police produce blatantly manufactured evidence; witnesses lie baldly, but seemingly without real malice. 


Shahid Azmi’s legal practice was devoted to defending people who he believed had been put into jail as scapegoats. The perpetrators of despicable acts of terror were still at large, “drinking in an AC room, plotting their next move”, while these ordinary people had been flung behind bars, as he says at one point, only because their names were not “Mathew, Donald, Suresh or More”. 


Names do have a strange power. The root of the word Shahid comes from Arabic and in Urdu, it has split into two pronunciations: 'shaahid' meaning ‘witness’ and ‘shaheed’ meaning ‘martyr’. Shahid Azmi was both.

This review was first published on Firstpost.