Isolated incidents

My Mirror column (3rd May 2020):

Placebo takes a personal deep dive into one of India's premier medical colleges and comes up with a disturbing, affecting vision of where we’re headed.

In 2011, a young filmmaker made a visit to his younger brother Sahil, who was studying to be a doctor at India’s premier medical college, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. It was the time of the annual college festival, Pulse, and as happens during ‘fest’ season, enthusiasms and emotions were running high. Before the night was over, Sahil had been admitted to hospital, with his right arm so badly damaged that he would not be able to return to the hostel for three months. The twist, though, is what made the tale possible: Abhay, the filmmaker brother, didn’t go home with Sahil. He decided to stay on his brother’s hostel instead, gradually inserting himself in – and his handycam is – into life on the AIIMS campus. And so began the dark, dark cinematic ride that is Placebo.

Free to stream on YouTube, Placebo is a strange and vivid film, combining special effects, hand-drawn black and white animation, found footage and still photographs with Abhay Kumar's footage. The 96 minutes that we finally see on screen apparently draws on 800 hours of footage, and the filmmaker edited 80 different versions before finalising this one. That process sounds terrifying. The film is a little less so – but not by much.

Placebo is a film about many aspects of the Indian present seen through a sharply angled lens: education, privilege, individualism, community, institutional failure and our failures as a society. Kumar starts by pointing to the competition that these students have dealt with to reach these peeling hostel buildings. According to a statistic cited in the film, MIT has an admittance rate of 9 per cent, and Harvard (the university, I'm assuming, not the medical school) has one of 7 per cent. The rate for AIIMS’s is 0.1 per cent.

Kumar’s voiceover repeatedly emphasises the 'brightness' of these students, and they mirror his framing, telling stories that reveal their sense of achievement in having, as we say in North Indian slang, “cracked” the medical entrance. But watching these nerdy young men talk about girls or play music or collapse in laughter after a doobie or a round of bhang pakoras consumed appropriately on Mahashivratri, what one is struck by is precisely how ordinary their desires are. They seem like any other 23-year-olds, with the same fears and desires and anxieties as young men everywhere – just bearing a heavier weight of academic/professional expectation, without the emotional or therapeutic support structure needed to deal with the pressure. Those who break, the film shows, are not helped to mend themselves. The cracks are papered over, and the fragments swept under a carpet.

All that the Indian educational system seems to have given these young men is the heady sensation of entering an elite. The path from AIIMS could take them on to a well-paying career as a doctor, or a powerful position in the Indian civil services, or to more specialised medical research in India, but more desirably in the USA. There is ambition aplenty – but even among the four or five students that Placebo keeps in fairly tight focus, there is no sense of a vocation.

There's Sethi, a fair North Indian chikna hero type who says his greatest desire is to “look good naked” – “like the guy in American Beauty”. He categorises the species called girls into different colours: “There are orange girls, there are green girls”, and the one who got away, “she was so white”. Sethi wants to be confident enough to ask out girls in America. Getting to America is his second ambition after getting to AIIMS.

There's the tall, bespectacled, pudgy-faced Saumya Chopra, who begins his AIIMS life terrified of ragging but becomes the senior who's suspended for two months in 2008 after a Supreme Court judgement makes the authorities crack down on ragging incidents. There's a tangent here that the film doesn't follow, about how our educational culture is so toxic and so isolating that ragging was the only way to forge intergenerational connections.

There's K, the most meditative of the lot, whose self-reflection does not in fact help him deal with his inner demons. “The respect I have for the word doctor is far more than the respect I have for me as a doctor,” K tells Abhay.

Ostensibly at the other end of that spectrum is someone like Saumya, who's only answer to why he wants to be a doctor is “My parents want me to be a doctor.” “What do you want?” asks the filmmaker. “Whatever my parents want,” comes Saumya's reply. “Our life is a debt to our parents... You can't pay it back ever but one must try at least.”

Saumya's words reminded me of another young Indian captured on camera in a documentary: a Durga Vahini leader-in-the-making called Prachi Trivedi, in Nisha Pahuja's superb 2014 film The World Before Her, who says she would do whatever her father wanted, because she was eternally grateful to him for not having aborted her as a female foetus.

This idea that our earthly existence is essentially beholden to our parents feels chilling to me, and will do to many who see human beings as free-standing individuals. Yet the flip side of that individuation is also a chilling aspect of Placebo, and particularly resonant in these solitary, socially distanced times. As K says to the filmmaker: “Even though we have been talking for so many months, you and me, we're isolated, that is a fact.”

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but perhaps also a self-fulfilling one.

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

It is a bleak vision of humanity, but also a self-fulfilling

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/isolated-incidents/articleshow/75513645.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 May 2020. You can watch the film for free, here.

Picture This: Different Tyrannies

Nisha Pahuja's new documentary tracks young women through two Indias: a beauty pageant and a Hindutva camp. (This month's BLInk column.)

Durga Vahini camp leader Prachi Trivedi addresses a group of girls

Nisha Pahuja’s documentary The World Before Her, slotted for a 25 April release by PVR, will now hit cinemas only in June. The delay is a pity, because the film helps lay out the choices before Indian women, in ways that no party has articulated, but that form our everyday political matrix. Some would say, correctly, that Pahuja maps two extremes, and that most women stand somewhere in the middle. But TWBH presents the poles through real, believable, often conflicted characters, making their worlds come alive.

On one side is Prachi Trivedi, 24, a sturdy Durga Vahini activist whom we first see twirling a baton. Prachi’s opening voiceover is both a warning and a plea: “Egyptians, Romans, they are history now. It’s going to happen with us. So we are trying to save ourselves... Our country is becoming modern. But our past is our roots. We cannot forget our roots.” The other side is represented by Ruhi Singh, 19, a Jaipur girl with her heart set on the Miss India crown. “A lot of people think that if you let women get modern and educated, you’ll lose your culture...” says Ruhi. “But I don’t agree. As much as I love and respect my culture ... I want freedom.”

The Durga Vahini (DV) is the women’s youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Pahuja says she is the first filmmaker to be allowed into a DV camp. We watch as Malaben Rawal, DV’s national president, ties Aishwarya Rai, Miss World, skimpy clothes and Lux sabun into a scathing narrative about Westernisation and videshi corporations. We see young girls pushed to their physical limits by the camp’s shaaririk module; we see them go from giggly to exhilarated by learning to fire a gun; we watch them shout slogans in defense of the Hindu rashtra, against imaginary Muslim and Christian enemies. Earlier, Prachi’s father Hemant Trivedi literally demonises these communities, inserting them into a tweaked Hindu iconography: “Muslims with their beard and caps even look like rakshasas, don’t they? And Christians, they come with their hands folded, like Pootana (a demoness). But like Pootana, the milk they offer is poisoned.”

Meanwhile, at the Miss India pageant preparations, another kind of remaking is in full swing. A female trainer teaches young women to catwalk: “Chin parallel, elbows front, back straight. It hurts? It looks fab.” A cosmetic physician blandly urges a chin extension surgery because the “three parts of the face” need to be “equal”. The men are even more brazen about the fact that they’re making and packaging a product. One Bombay Times photo-op has the aspirants line up in uniform: tight blue jeans and a thin white t-shirt, which a man rips and re-ties to reveal maximum bosom. Another time, they parade with faces veiled so that the pageant director can rate their legs without distraction.

Miss India contestants wait around before a practice swimsuit round 

At first, Prachi seems to speak for the old world, where women have no agency, and Ruhi for the new, where we are ostensibly free. But it quickly becomes clear that both these worlds are responses to modernity. The battle, as always, is being fought on the bodies of women — and our freedom is as elusive on either side.

Each side feels like a factory, where women are sought to be shaped into pre-given forms — forms of use to militant religious nationalism, or forms that might enter themselves smoothly into the capitalist commodity machine. But Pahuja’s painstaking interviews reveal that the factories do not only spit out the well-oiled clones they might want. Ankita Shorey wins third place in the Miss India pageant, but she knows that “achieving her dreams” comes at the cost of objectification. Prachi remains terrifyingly loyal to the Hindutva vision — even as she recognises that the ideology she wishes to make a career of declares that women should not have careers.

The rhetoric throws up constant contradictions. Amid all the enforced thrusting-out of butts and boobs, it isn’t too persuasive to hear ex-Miss India Pooja Malhotra insist that the pageant isn’t only about “external beauty”. The DV atmosphere is one of near-machismo: when a girl fumbles over a gun, the teacher jeers: “Are you planning to chop onions all your life?” Yet marriage is a woman’s only future: one DV leader mocks male-female equality even as she proclaims that girls must be married by 18, because by 25 they would be “too mature to control”.

Pahuja’s talent for juxtaposition gives the film great texture. The DV girls giggling over their saffron sashes as being Miss-India-like; the uniformity of the beauty pageant eerily echoing DV’s drills; both Ruhi and Prachi calling themselves ‘products’ that must fulfil their parents’ expectations.

The film’s juxtapositions reach their acme with female foeticide — and it is also here that any equivalence between the film’s two worlds must be abandoned. We learn that Pooja Malhotra’s mother walked out of her marriage to keep her baby daughter alive. Soon after, Prachi tells us that she cannot really be angry with her father for curtailing her ambitions, because after all, he let her live. Malhotra’s love of her mother is stronger for knowing the battles she fought, but she does not carry around the burden of perpetual gratitude. But if Prachi’s world were to be our future, all women would be forever beholden to men — for their very lives. Crushed under such a weight, what other battles could we possibly hope to fight?

Published in BLInk, Hindu Business Line's Saturday paper.