In the name of a cause

Second part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Almost unconsciously, Delhi Crime puts its finger on the disconnect between the police and the public. (The second of a two-part column)

The worst written character in Delhi Crime is not one of the rapists. Richie Mehta's fictional depiction of the December 16, 2012 gang-rape gives the six men a rationale. Jai Singh, the driver of the bus as well as of the crime, gets to speak of his own motivations, however misguided. He had become 'unstable' after his wife died, unable to bear the sight of happy couples. 

As for the five younger men (including his own brother), they saw him as their leader, whose uncontrollable temper they knew not to get in the way of. Mehta and his co-scriptwriters resist the temptation to vilify them, instead giving us a remarkably sympathetic sense of their milieu – their poverty, the instability of their working lives, their attachment to their mothers and to family honour, so much so that they would rather be arrested quietly than face a public shaming. 

A long monologue by the series' bespectacled philosopher-cop, Sudhir Kumar (Gopal Dutt Tiwari, superb), offers a decent pop-psychological explanation for their actions: socio-economic deprivation set against a growing consumer culture, deep-rooted patriarchal assumptions about women running amok in a swiftly changing urban environment, in the absence of either sex education or gender equality.

But Delhi Crime affords no such explanation to the protestors. It doesn't help that the character who represents an entire city in tumult is the daughter of the DCP in charge of the case: a protected, spoilt, clueless teenager with the irritatingly alliterative name of Chandni Chaturvedi. Yashaswini Dayama is a good actor (she plays the funky teenage neighbour in both Phobia and Made in Heaven) but she cannot save this character, made up of so many stereotypes as to be downright unsympathetic. 

Chandni hates Delhi. She has grown up in it, but doesn't feel of it. She spends all her time glued to various screens. She is so alienated from her surroundings that her mother Vartika (the show's DCP protagonist) has requested two weeks' time in which to show her “the good side of Delhi” so that she stops clamouring to go off to firang lands for college.

To make Chandni stand in for the thousands of people who came out on to the streets that fateful December, to march and shout and weep and stand in solidarity with Jyoti Singh and with each other, is to not only support an establishmentarian politics that reads public criticism as a rejection of the city/country, but also to be utterly clueless about what the Nirbhaya protests meant. This cluelessness lies, unfortunately, at the very foundation of Delhi Crime. 

The show's dismissive, cynical attitude to protest emerges first in the way that Vartika eyerolls at a knot of students beginning to assemble outside Vasant Vihar Police Station. “Yeh lo, in students ko extracurricular activity mil gayi. They'll sit, soak in the sunshine, in the name of a cause. If they're lucky, they'll get on to TV. Aur is sab mein hamari lag jayegi,” says Shefali Shah's character to her subordinate Bhupender. “Yeh log itni jaldi signboards kaise banwa lete hain?” Bhupender responds on cue. Then the two of them chortle, as if they've made the funniest joke in the world. But really, if this is how disconnected the police are from the public they serve, then the joke is on them.

In another giveaway moment, an unnamed young policewoman working to deal with the gathering crowds at India Gate says to her colleague Neeti (Rasika Dugal), “Ek case ke liye itna sab? Ho kya gaya hai yaar?” The scene ties the quiet gravity of Neeti's response to an accident of circumstance: Neeti just happens to be in personal contact with the survivor. If she hadn't had that chance, the series suggests, she might well have been as baffled as the other young policewoman, untouched by the fervour that had taken hold of thousands of people her age, and her gender.

In turning the Nirbhaya case into a police procedural, the  makers of Delhi Crime have somehow missed the incredible power of that moment in our national life. The heightened public response that the show seems only to comprehend as a measure of the heinousness of the rape, the baffling crowd that must be dispersed as it gets 'dangerously' close to the PMO on a day when there are preparations to receive the Russian president at Hyderabad House, was not about “just one case”. True, there was something extraordinary about the violence, but there have been equally terrible rapes before and since (a point the show makes, again in bafflement).

But there was much more about the case that made it the symbolic epicentre of a vast spontaneous uprising, the spark that set a tinderbox city on fire: the young lower middle class physiotherapy student from a Hindi-speaking family who'd gone out to watch an English film, in one of the city's recently built malls, with a boy who may or may not have been her boyfriend. 

Each of those who protested that bleak, cold December drew from the not-yet-dead Jyoti Singh courage to wage our collective ongoing battles. We congregated in the streets to demand the equal rights to life and love and freedom that our cities will not award us without a fight. If we soaked in any sunshine, it was of our own making.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 April 2019.

(Read the first part of this column here.)

A blinkered vision

First part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Delhi Crime's retelling of the 'Nirbhaya' investigation is gripping. But it sees things so completely through police eyes that it can sometimes feel deliberately blind.

For me, the most revealing moment in Delhi Crime arrived a day or so into the Netflix series’ recreation of how the Delhi Police apprehended the six men later charged in the December 16, 2012 rape case. In director Richie Mehta’s screen version, a man called Banke Lal arrives at the Vasant Vihar police station to tell the cops that at about 8.30 pm on December 16, a little before the rape took place, he had boarded a similar white bus from Munirka Bus Stand, been attacked and robbed of his phone and wallet by the six men on board, and thrown out of the bus near the IIT overpass.

“Had I landed on my head, I’d be dead,” says Banke Lal.

“Why didn’t you report it that night?” asks Vartika Chaturvedi, the senior cop in charge of the case, played by Shefali Shah.

“Who would I have complained to? I was asking everyone for help, no one listened,” Banke Lal replies. “I managed to borrow a phone from a passing auto driver and called my brother, who told me to come home. I figured, what would the cops do? It was only when I saw the news that I realised that this had to be the same gang.”

The sequence ends with Chaturvedi thanking Banke Lal for coming to them and asking for another case to be filed against the same suspects. She then goes out of the room, leans against a wall as her right-hand man Bhupender (Rajesh Tailang) wonders if there might be other victims to be found.

“If he had made a complaint that same night, maybe we could have prevented this,” responds Chaturvedi.

“We don't know that,” says Bhupender. “Ismein hamari kya galti hai?”

“Try saying that to Deepika,” says Chaturvedi, half swallowing her words.

As I watched the sequence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we live in a country in which a citizen who has just been robbed, beaten up and thrown off a bus can respond to his predicament with “What could the police have done in this?” It seemed to me to offer an involuntary glimpse of something the show appears to take entirely for granted: that we as a citizenry have so little faith in our police force that we don’t go to them for help, even when we’re victims of an act of targeted violence and robbery, bang in the middle of the country’s capital.

Then, as I sat down to write this column, reliving my own memories of December 2012, as all Indian women who watch it will do, I remembered that there had indeed been such an incident. A man had been robbed on the night of the gang rape, by the very same men, aboard the very same bus.

It didn't take much looking up online to find reports. What I found in them was distressing. The Times of India reported on December 23, 2012, that three constables from the Hauz Khas police station had been suspended for their failure of duty when approached on December 16 by one Ramadhar Singh, who had been picked up “from RK Puram Sector 4 by the six gang rape accused, and robbed and dumped near IIT”.

The report continued: “The three cops were on patrol duty around 8.15pm when they were approached by Ramadhar. He had told them that he was robbed and that he had lost his mobile and, hence, cannot call 100. The cops, however, told them they were from the Hauz Khas police station and he needs to go to Vasant Vihar to register a case. They neither sent out a wireless message to track the bus nor had they informed Vasant Vihar cops about the incident,” said a source.”

I describe this incident in such detail not to make the point that the heinous gangrape that would end up making Delhi the notorious site of frenzied international attention was preventable. That may be true, or it may not. The “what if” that it becomes on the show is easily voiced — and almost as easily dismissed. Richie Mehta’s version is so insistent on showing Delhi Police in good light that he simply erases the inconvenient truth that the victim of the robbery did in fact try to report it and was turned away by cops. It then absolves the police of even the glimmer of responsibility by making his female cop protagonist have a moment of guilt, that can, however, be painted as emotional, even irrational — since in Mehta’s version the onus is on the citizen who didn’t come to the police earlier.

In many ways, this is transparently the position the show takes: it makes the police the put-upon heroes, under-appreciated figures whose valiant efforts to fight crime while being enormously understaffed and under-budgeted are not appreciated by a thankless citizenry. All we ever see are good cops being treated badly. The DCP who hasn’t gone home for three nights is taunted by a judge as being someone who spends her time at parties and has probably never been to a crime scene. Children in a posh South Delhi school regurgitate their parents’ assumptions about the cops being corrupt. In a less monied class, too, Bhupender tells Vartika that he hides his job from any prospective in-laws he’s meeting because “no one wants either a dosti or dushmani with the police”.

Vartika chastises Bhupender for not seeing that a family that doesn’t respect his job will not “protect his daughter”. But the larger issue, the fact of why a city of 20 million people has a relationship with its police force that is one of “Best if we never have to deal with them” rather than “They will help us get justice”, is never really discussed. When we get unwitting glimpses of the reasons why — such as when some constables on duty taunt and torture the not-yet-convicted suspected rapists, driving three of them to attempt suicide — it is not treated as an abuse of power, but simply as something strategically unfortunate that happens.

But surely if the police in Delhi and in the rest of India are assumed by the man on the street — and even more so, by the woman on the street — to be not just professionally incompetent, but a power-seeking, corrupt and potentially malign class of people that is best avoided, there must be some reason why. Surely the answer cannot be the one Mehta provides by ventriloquising the ex-police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who is a consultant on Delhi Crime: that it’s every other constituency who’s wrong — the politicians, the media, the judiciary, ordinary people, students — and the police who are right.

(To be continued next week)

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Film review: Once Again

Old School Romance

My review of Kanwal Sethi's film Once Again, now streaming on Netflix:

A few minutes into Once Again, we see the middle-aged female protagonist Tara Shetty (Shefali Shah) patting her face carefully with her hands. The deliberateness of her gestures suggest a nightly ritual: she seems to be putting something on, perhaps an invisible layer of cream? Almost immediately after, there is a mirroring, when we see the film's middle-aged male protagonist in the midst of his own cleansing ritual. But Amar Kumar (Neeraj Kabi) is a famous film star called Amar Kumar, and his smoky black eye make-up is being gently dabbed away by someone else. The addition of an invisible layer versus the removal of a visible one; the woman's actions hoping to stave off the inevitability of age, while the man has just shot for an erotic dance sequence with a bevy of much younger women: of such contrasting details is Kanwal Sethi's film made.

Creating characters who share your sensibility is the oldest trick in the fiction writer's book, and writer-director Sethi unapologetically takes this route, making both Tara and Amar agents of the film's unhurried tactility. It makes perfect sense that Tara's cooking, all slow marination and hand-ground masala, should appeal to Amar, the sort of man whose first gift to her is a fragrant, creamy- white gajra.

The premise -- of a connection fostered through the daily delivery of a freshly-cooked meal -- is bound to invite comparisons with The Lunchbox (2013). Stylistically, too, both films are redolent with old-school romance: the anonymous pleasures of Mumbai's streets, and nostalgia for handwritten notes and landline appointments. Unlike the plotted safety of Ritesh Batra's film though, Tara and Amar do meet, and meet several times, letting the charmed flame of their phone banter flicker into unscripted disappointment. “What are you thinking?” Amar asks Tara after one tense moment. “Just that it's all so easy on the phone,” says Tara.

Women have long cooked to express love. The film recognizes both the intimacy of the act, and the unequal gendered labour of it. Tara's response when Amar introduces her as someone who cooks for him is not that different from Sridevi in English Vinglish when her husband declares “My wife, she was born to make laddoos”. But Sethi's glancing, atmospheric style doesn't delve too deep, sometimes leaving us with more suggestion than substance. 

The protagonists' relationships with their respective grown-up children – Rasika Dugal, Bidita Bag and Priyanshu Painyuli – never feel fully fleshed out, coming off like distractions from our main focus. This is particularly so because Shah and Kabi are both fine actors, and Shah's trademark intensity makes her chemistry with Kabi a live, smouldering thing. We could really do with more of her.

An edited version of this review was published in India Today magazine, 15 Sep 2018.

Backing and advancing

My Mirror column:

Has the mature woman with a marriage in her past finally become a legitimate recipient of romance in Hindi cinema?

Irrfan Khan and Parvathy in a still from Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017)

Tara (Shefali Shah) runs her own small Mangalorean restaurant, drives herself around Mumbai, and has been a single mother to her two children since her husband’s death twenty years ago. But when this highly capable, independent woman gets home at the end of the day and her grown-up daughter asks her if the restaurant landline is working, Tara feigns ignorance, brushing the question off quickly. The phone relationship she has struck up with the almost-divorced actor Amar (Neeraj Kabi) is, for some reason, a guilty secret.


The idea that their desires are illegitimate is buried so deep inside most Indian women’s heads that even to acknowledge them can feel like taboo. To want companionship, romance, intimacy — and yes, sex — is perfectly natural, but still fraught with the possibility of social censure, especially for a woman past a certain age. So Kanwal Sethi’s atmospheric film Once Again, released last week on Netflix, gives us in Tara a rare Indian heroine: a woman who has walked the slow path towards recognising her needs.

And yet how little it takes to propel her back into guilt. Caught on camera by a paparazzi photographer while out walking with Amar, Tara finds herself to be the target of childish anger from her adult son as well as humiliating barbs from his prospective mother-in-law. Once Again eschews melodrama for piercing looks and pregnant pauses, but Tara’s samdhan manages to get in her critically frosty line: “In our family, we place our children’s desires far ahead of our own.”



Watching even the self-possessed Tara crumble under the pressure, I thought of another recent film in which a woman finds it hard to tell a judgemental world that she’s dating again. Released in 2017, Tanuja Chandra’s romantic comedy Qarib Qarib Singlle starred the well-known Malayali actress Parvathy as Jaya Shashidharan, a 35-year-old woman who’s been alone for so long that she’s forgotten she has the right to move on.


Unlike Tara and Amar in Once Again, whose relationship is conducted through lovely old-school means such as as landline conversations, handwritten notes and home-made meals, Jaya meets her suitor Yogi (Irrfan Khan) via a dating website. As a match for the tastefully turned out, punctual Jaya, Yogi seems an eccentric and unlikely choice at first: a self-published shayar with a fondness for mangoes, banter and running — invariably running late. But Chandra’s idea of romance is all about entertaining unlikely possibilities: before we know it, Jaya has joined Yogi on a tripartite journey to visit his three ex-girlfriends, and romance is afoot.


Despite many dissimilarities between the two films, it struck me that both the female protagonists are widows, not divorcees. And the films imply —sometimes humorously, sometimes with pain — that neither woman has been in any sort of intimate relationship since their husbands died. These social double standards are acknowledged by the way the characters are written, too: Irrfan has no compunctions chattering on about his exes to Jaya, from the sweet, quasi-familial terrace romance of his childhood to the sultrier adult one (with Neha Dhupia) — but he is rendered speechless when Jaya digs up an adolescent boyfriend of her own.


The figure of the still-youthful, attractive widow has a history in Hindi cinema — though much less of a history than proportionate reality would demand. Off the top of my head, I can think of Nutan as the translucently lovely widow Mahjubi in the 1973 Saudagar, whom a duplicitous Amitabh Bachchan marries for her talent in making the best palm gur, and Padmini Kolhapure as the exploited young creature whom Rishi Kapoor takes it upon himself to save in Raj Kapoor’s 1982 social melodrama Prem Rog (interestingly, Kamna Chandra — who is Tanuja Chandra’s mother — has partial writing credits for both Prem Rog and Qarib Qarib Singlle).


A much more radical portrayal of a widow who has desires was, of course, last year’s Lipstick Under My Burkha. Ratna Pathak Shah brought both comic flair and a tragic edge to the 55-year-old Usha Parmar, whom the world knows only as the stentorian Buaji, but who yearns to be recognised as someone altogether more tender. Usha’s secret life involves not just reading steamy Hindi romance novels and learning to swim, but also falling for her buff and youthful swimming instructor. Her secret phone conversations with him, unlike those between Shefali Shah and Neeraj Kabi, are unabashedly sexual. And yet when the veneer of anonymity is shattered and Usha suffers public humiliation, it is hard not to think of all those dozens of Hindi films we grew up on, in which the illusions of romance cultivated by the spinsterish figure of Lalita Pawar would turn out to be nothing but illusions.


It will be a while yet before Buaji swims free.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 Sep 2018.

The Heart of the Matter

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Rich people do think about money, suggests Dil Dhadakne Do. And sometimes, it seems, they even have feelings.

Through the looking glass: Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah in a scene from Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

For that category of Zoya Akhtar fans who have been waiting for a return to the understated charisma of Luck By Chance, the arrival of Dil Dhadakne Do tells us what we've been refusing to believe: Woh director na milegi dobara. DDD, which plays out almost entirely on an ocean cruise, has much more in common with Akhtar's second offering, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Other than replacing sun-kissed Spain with Turkey, Akhtar has substituted ZNMD's male friendship with a focus on family bonding. 

The family, needless to say, is fantastically rich. The Mehras -- salt-
and-pepper-haired Kamal (Anil Kapoor) and trying-to-lose-weight Neelam (Shefali Shah), both rather fine -- are celebrating thirty years of marriage by inviting close friends and family on an all-expenses-paid luxury cruise. The fact that it's a marriage both parties have pretty much checked out of doesn't seem to matter much to anyone, least of all the gossipy ladies who seem to hang out with Neelam only so they can make catty remarks behind her back. Even the Mehra progeny -- Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra, both effective in their respective roles as hangdog and tightly-coiled siblings -- seem not to particularly care that the anniversary is just an excuse for their parents to conduct a lavish display of wealth. 

There's nothing wrong with the premise. In fact, Akhtar makes things interesting by telling us that Kamal Mehra's plastic-container-manufacturing firm is making losses. It makes the expensiveness of the cruise a kind of Jalsaghar-style last dance, before the Mehras are forced to publicly acknowledge impending bankruptcy. It also increases the level of fakeness with which we're now dealing. Plus I enjoyed the idea that someone who thinks nothing of inviting three dozen people on a two-week-cruise can simultaneously keep zealous tabs on how much champagne is being drunk.

One of the unexpected things about DDD as a rich-people film is that the rich people in it aren't oblivious to questions of money. Kamal Mehra's self-made businessman (nouveau riche if you're being snooty) is full of resentment at the people living off the wealth he thinks has been produced by his talent and hard work, and the scenes in which this comes to the surface -- with his wife and son respectively -- are some of the film's most brutally honest. I wasn't quite as convinced by the idea of Ayesha's being self-made because she sold her jewellery to start a business: there's a bizarre obliviousness here about khandaani capital as what helps create capitalists. 

But the film's take on these business families is so ridiculously monochromatic that one has the sneaking suspicion that this is the Bombay person's unreconstructed view of the Delhi rich.Whereas in both of Akhtar's previous films, one felt she wasn't harsh enough with her characters, here it seems that she doesn't like them at all. The men's golf-playing camaraderie involves snarkily pulling each other down on business deals, while the lunching wives do the same on personal matters. Ranveer and Priyanka's likeable characters are saddled with familial expectations whose unreasonable burdens Akhtar is clearly sympathetic to, being the inheritor of a weighty family legacy herself. But Akhtar's account of the Delhi elite stops at the lowest level of caricature: uncles who mispronounce English words, and aunties who have nothing better to do than matchmake their daughters, or those of others. And oh God, is it possible that a business scion distressed about selling his private plane would have a mother trying to comfort him with a Nirula's Hot Chocolate Fudge? The whole of the parental generation is shown as so dull, manipulative and narrow-minded that it's not at all clear how their children are managing not to be like them. 

These are the distant, controlling rich parents we've met in many a Hindi film (think of Shenaz Treasurywala's parents in Delhi Belly, or Imran Khan's in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu), and I applaud Akhtar's desire to scale up them into full-fledged characters. Anil Kapoor is brilliant in comic mode - wait for the moment when he hides behind a tree, or the smug grin with which he sits up from a hospital bed. The tragically under-used Shefali Shah is better in the bitter moments, but even she has some exceptional scenes of black humour: "Acting kyon kar rahe ho?" she says to her suddenly romantic husband, deadpan. "Koi nahi dekh raha."

Such constant transitions from humour to high drama are not easy, and the actors do a fine job, even if the film doesn't always pull it off as a whole. Even Rahul Bose, cruelly miscast as Ayesha's preachy illiberal bore of a husband, manages some decent physical comedy on the tennis court. It's clear that Akhtar is aiming for something that sits between our love of melodrama and a sharply funny undercutting of it. The signature scene that exemplifies this is probably the one where a character threatens to cut her wrist -- with a butter knife. The deliberately dramatised climax, too, is of this ilk.

But when you've spent a whole film showing people as hypocritical control-freaks who're only concerned with what 'society' thinks of them, it's hard to believe in their last-minute changes of heart. No matter what the film's most ridiculous device -- the family dog Pluto, pontificating on human foibles in the voice of Aamir Khan -- tells us, it's hard to believe these unpleasant people have a dil that dhadkos after all. We can but try.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 June 2015.