Film Review - Dasvidaniya

The Joker Returns

TRISHA GUPTA

FILM » DASVIDANIYA
DIRECTOR » SHASHANT SHAH
STARRING » VINAY PATHAK, RANVIR SHOREY, RAJAT KAPOOR, NEHA DHUPIA

WITH DASVIDANIYA, THE Russian word for goodbye (or ‘till we meet again’) makes its second appearance in Hindi cinema — this time in a starring role. Still remembered for its significant bit role in Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker, the use of the word in Shashant Shah’s film nudges the viewer gently towards a host of associations — the Indo-Russian connection as cemented by Hindi films, the clown who makes people laugh while himself desperately unhappy.

Vinay Pathak’s Amar Kaul, a 37-year-old accounts manager with a ridiculous katori-haircut, who lives with his senile, TV-obsessed mother (the wonderful Sarita Joshi), has never had a love life, and mutely suffers the daily indignities inflicted by his gross and gluttonous boss (Saurabh Shukla), is already a version of the sad joker. When it turns out that his ulcer is actually an advanced stomach cancer, the film threatens to keel over into full-blown weepie territory. But quietly well-executed performances and a charmingly straightforward script keep the film in a suitably low key.

Amar (whose very name provides the possibility of pathos) does have a moment of revelation, but he doesn’t become a new person overnight. He just replaces his dreary things-to-do list with a ‘things-to-do (before I die)’ list, substituting ‘repair geyser’ with ‘learn guitar’. His plodding but determined pursuit of these everyman desires — buying a shiny red car, travelling abroad, telling his childhood crush he loves her — make up the rest of the film. There’s nothing earthshattering or unpredictable about these episodes, but moving moments abound. Noteworthy are a dumb charades sequence with Neha Dhupia (again drawing on the joker/mime association) and the car-buying episode (Purbi Joshi’s lovely as the salesperson). And, instead of Raj Kapoor’s teary romance with a Russian ballerina, we get a short-but-sweet encounter between Indian tourist and Russian hooker, ironically — but perfectly — set to “Pal bhar ke liye koi hamein pyar kar le”.

Perhaps the cinematic references are overdone a little, what with Pathak asking his guitar teacher to teach him the title song from Kal Ho Na Ho, and his estranged brother (Gaurav Gera) being introduced with a parody of the Mere paas Maa hai dialogue. The conversations-with-self routine grates, with our endearingly boring protagonist sharing screen space with a winking, backslapping, long-haired version of himself. But to stress these things is to deny an honest film its due.

Published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 47, Dated Nov 29, 2008

Palatial Patiala: Hotel Review

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To see the article with accompanying photographs, click here.

The maharajas of Patiala, it seems, had rather a lot of money on their hands, and were given to the construction of opulent buildings. Patiala, therefore, has a lot of palaces. The oldest of these is the Qila Mubarak, a stunning 18th-century fort-palace that forms the core of the old city. Then there are the Moti Bagh palaces, Old and New, built respectively by Narender Singh (reigned 1845-62) and Yadavindra Singh, who acceded to the throne in 1938 only to join newly independent India in 1948. The Baradari Palace, latest addition to the Neemrana group’s chain of heritage hotels, is perhaps the least flamboyant of Patiala’s regal residences. A colonnaded colonial building constructed in 1876 as a new home for the then-ruler Rajinder Singh, it’s centred round a Mughal-style baradari—a pavilion with 12 arches which gives its name to the surrounding garden and to the neighbourhood.

We’ve been told there’ll be no trouble getting there if we just ask for Rajinder Kothi—it’s world-famous in Patiala. But we run through three rickshaw-walas and a couple of auto guys before we find someone who knows what we’re talking about. And then, too, it’s mention of the adjacent Baradari Garden (once royal repository of rare trees, now haunt of walkers, microphone-aided yoga classes and sellers of wheatgerm juice) that gets us to the hotel. After a tasty dinner of aloo-gobhi, paneer and chicken curry in the awe-inspiring darbar hall, I abandon late-night exploration plans in favour of the also awe-inspiring comforts of my suite: No. 15, otherwise known as Maharaja Bhupinder Singh.

The next day, talking to H.S. Gill, the mild-mannered engineer who worked on the building’s restoration, I realise why no one recognises the name Rajinder Kothi in present-day Patiala. The royals moved out soon after Independence, after which the palace has been home to the Shahi Mehmandari (the state guesthouse), Punjabi University, and from 1972 to 2006, the Punjab State Archives.

Years as a government office must have taken their toll, so it seems incredible when Mr Gill tells me that the Baradari’s wooden staircases, with their graceful banisters, and the prettily-carved wooden terrace railings, are all original. “It took a long time to scrape off all the layers of paint,” he smiles. Certainly not original, though, are the over-bright prints of Punjabi village scenes and maharajas, masquerading as paintings throughout the hotel. There’s also a slight problem with the restoration of the darbar hall, which now serves as the dining room. Most of the ceiling’s central portion, which had been eaten away, has been painted over in a stark white. Which is fine, except that the painter’s brushstrokes seem to have ranged indiscriminately across portions of the bejewelled red and blue borders. But this slapdash artwork is somewhat compensated for by the period furniture and the carefully chosen fabrics—from bedside rugs to table linen—characteristic of Neemrana properties. The rooms are luxurious without being cluttered, their relative emptiness allowing the eye to absorb details like the wood louvred ceilings and the arched doors with their old brass latches.

Wandering around the building, I discover that its original front entrance is now the back. A gloriously sunlit pillared patio, laid out as an informal dining area, looks out over the Baradari Garden, which itself has long been parcelled off for the benefit of the Patiala public. Having duly admired several gorgeously plumed pheasants in the garden’s aviary portion, I wander about the town’s grander palaces all afternoon. In the darbar hall of the Qila Mubarak, under an enormous gilt-edged mirror, I come upon a decrepit marble-topped table almost exactly like the one on which my toast was laid out that morning.

Back at the Baradari, I’m told that the room I’m staying in is part of the section that formed Maharaja Rajinder’s private quarters. As I lounge on one of the lovely terraces on a thoughtfully provided Bombay Fornicator, dawdling over my second cup of tea, I’m pretty sure I’m channelling something of his spirit.

Trisha Gupta

THE INFORMATION
LOCATION Near Baradari Garden, Patiala, Punjab
ACCOMMODATION 6 rooms, 11 suites
TARIFF Rs 3,000 (rooms), Rs 5,000 (suites)
CONTACT 011-46661666, www.neemranahotels.com

Published in Outlook Traveller magazine Nov 2008

Book Review: Dreams for the Dying

Sketch Of A Murder
CK Meena’s jigsaw-like novel turns the reader into a participant.

Dreams for the Dying is a disquieting read — and not because it’s a murder mystery. It’s not the sort of book whose world you sink into, grateful for the respite from your own. There is a world — and a deftly imagined one — but CK Meena revels in providing teasing glimpses of it; it’s a provocative sketch that forces you to imagine the rest, rather than the careful portrait you linger over.

There is a locale, middle-class Chennai, but no elaborate urban geography — just an apartment building where the murder takes place, and the bare bones of a neighbourhood: the daily clamorous din of a popular local restaurant, and the comings and goings of maids, watchmen and residents. The focus is on interior space: the insides of rooms and minds. The central character, Uma, with her deliberate vagueness, is difficult to pull off, especially when the only aid is a diary that mystifies more than it explains, but Meena knows her characters. She has a flair for the unexpected detail that brings a minor character to life: like telling you that the neighbour, Mr U Nathan, is a “stylishly clipped” version of Ulugunathan, or having him imagine a bahala bhath (“Good for those with BP also”) when he passes a waiter on the stairs.

Segments of lives past and present are scattered carefully amid the minutiae of a murder investigation. But this isn’t an ordinary murder mystery. The narrative isn’t chronological, and there are several characters whose role in the “story” is tangential — they exist solely for the reader’s benefit. The book has many of the “types” that populate crime fiction universes, but it subverts some and generously expands others. There is a police team, the methodical Mageshwaran and his head constable Ponnusami, but they are neither hard-boiled heroes nor the buffoons Indian popular cinema loves so much. Instead, we get two ordinary South Indian men into whose interaction is woven every possible police station dynamic: age, class, ribald humour, competitive masculinity.

Meena’s language is comfortingly at home with Indianisms: “When Manja was in third standard…” sounds perfectly right. Her frequently overdone analogies are harder to digest, and she isn’t very good at handling strong emotion — “jealousy towards one woman and rage towards another tore him in two”. But this isn’t a book you should look to for felicitous turns of phrase — it’s an intriguing jigsaw puzzle that’s fun to put together.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 46, Dated Nov 22, 2008

Column: Raat ka Reporter

The third instalment of a column for Time Out Delhi, about books set in Delhi.

Signs of the Times

Nirmal Verma’s novel Raat ka Reporter, set in Delhi during the Emergency, was published in 1989. Unimaginable as it may seem, that Delhi was a city where it was easy to be completely alone. Not just on the ridge beyond Jhandewalan, where Verma’s protagonist Rishi goes running every morning, but in the midst of the city. The very emptiness of the city’s streets gives Verma his perfect milieu: he couldn’t have found a better metaphorical locale for Rishi’s slow descent into paranoia than New Delhi’s deathly calm.

An atmosphere of menace is established almost before anything happens: Rishi is watching a young girl rolling a tyre down the road when she suddenly disappears from view. “This sort of thing happened often in some parts of New Delhi. Something could be seen for a moment, a clerk riding a bicycle, a slow-creaking cart, an odd crippled beggar, but before the eye could register it, it would vanish, swallowed by some dark lane, and the street would be desolate and lifeless as always, as if it were impossible for an event or an accident to take place there.”

In this portrait of a vast, silent city, there are occasional glimpses of peace, of normalcy. As long as Rishi is running, the world seems to pass by in a yellow haze, punctuated only by the sound of distant bullock carts or the bells of Birla Mandir: as Verma so pithily puts it, “Nothing can go wrong with the life of a man who can go for a run in the morning”. But it’s clear that the running is an escape into routine, from an outside world whose certainties are beginning to crumble under the burden of suspicions and half-truths. The Gole Dakkhana church signboard, on which a new Biblical quotation appears every day, seems to Rishi an augury. The interrupted ring of the telephone, the kites hovering in circles over Urdu Bazar, “like dark rumours” – everything is a sign. The city is transformed into a series of hidden inscriptions, a text whose meaning he must decode in order to survive.

The uncanny thing about this cityscape is how much of it is still with us – the nightly thhak-thhak of the watchman’s stick, the sudden nip in the autumnal air, the sharp, acrid smell of burning leaves – these are as familiar to us from last week as they were to a Delhi resident of the 1970s. There are new signs, too, if we wish to read them – the eerie neon glow of hoardings at night, the gleaming outlines of BRT bus lanes, the blast of air-conditioned air when the automatic mall doors open. What we seem to have lost, in fact, is our capacity for disbelief – and with it, any ability to perceive the city that lies pulsing beneath this thick coat of signs.

Rishi lived in strange times: even as he sank deeper into a morass of unnamable fears, he became more convinced that every report written “is a proof, not of their truth, but of your lie”. But our time is stranger still. We believe everything we read, or pretend to. The fear has become part of our skin, we wear it as armour, proudly.

Raat Ka Reporter, by Nirmal Verma, Rajkamal Prakashan, Rs 125
Translated as Dark Dispatches, by Alok Bhalla, HarperCollins,Rs 70

Back of the Book, Time Out Delhi, Vol 2 Issue 17, Nov 14-27, 2008

Roadside Romeo Review

FILM » ROADSIDE ROMEO
DIRECTOR » JUGAL HANSRAJ
STARRING » SAIF ALI KHAN, KAREENA KAPOOR, JAVED JAFFREY, SANJAY MISHRA

Footpath-Breaking?

TRISHA GUPTA

A TILED ROOFTOP on a moonlit night. Our hero, enchanted by the unknown voice wafting down to the street below, climbs up to find out more — and falls instantly in love with the pretty girl who’s singing. He takes her in his arms, matching his steps to hers, and when the dance is over, leans forward expectantly for a kiss. At which point she turns away, mid-pout, flutters her eyelashes and says, “Main vaisi ladki nahi hoon.”

Would you be disappointed to find out, at this point, that our hero is a dog called Romeo and his love interest a ‘girl dog’ called Laila? You shouldn’t be. Because this is a Yash Raj film, and there is not the slightest difference between dogs and human beings — or rather, Bollywood beings. Every self-respecting dog here struts on two legs, and the super-curvaceous Yash Raj bitches could give most item girls a run for their money. Romeo’s coolth is really all Saif, while the coy Laila is the worst of Kareena poured into canine form.

Even if one grants that successful animation films, especially Walt Disney productions, have traditionally anthropomorphised the non-human species they depict, Roadside Romeo isn’t a patch on recent achievements like the superb futuristic Wall-E (2008) or such doggie classics as Lady and the Tramp (1955), even in the animals-aswindow- into-human-world department. It’s probably a comment on our times that Romeo’s plot inverts that of Lady and the Tramp, where Lady, a spoiled, upper-crust dog who runs away when her owners have a baby, is saved by a Butch, a tough dog who shows her the possibilities of a free life without constraining leashes. In Jugal Hansraj’s world, the pampered upper-class dog has nothing to learn from the street dogs. It’s the poor, unsophisticated goons who need lessons in grooming from Romeo. Even Anna Charlie, the don of the dog world (voiced with gusto by Javed Jaffrey), can’t win Laila’s heart — not because she has a problem with what he does, but because he’s fat and bespectacled. In fact, the film turns on the premise that girls only fall for guys who look ‘cool’. For a film that a lot of parents are likely to take their children to, that’s a bit of a pity.

But the locales are generally well-realised (despite a suspiciously New York-like skyline), there’s some funny dialogue for Anna’s sidekick Chhainu (voice: Sanjay Mishra) and some smileable references to Ek Duje Ke Liye and DDLJ. With those, we shall have to be content.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 44, Dated Nov 08, 2008

Film Review: Hello

Grim Greeter

The Take
FILM » HELLO
DIRECTOR » ATUL AGNIHOTRI
STARRING » SALMAN KHAN, AMRITA ARORA, SHARMAN JOSHI, GUL PANAG, ISHA KOPPIKAR


MY ENTHUSIASM for India’s first call-centre rom-com was quite high until I learnt Salman Khan was in it. In my book, Salman Khan stopped being cute a long time ago. Pretty much after Maine Pyaar Kiya. Since then, the tears have gotten faker, the one-liners lamer. The Prem persona has become a sad parody of itself. So it seemed like a good thing that Hello opened with Khan descending godlike to earth in a helicopter. As he strode onto stage, purposefully bare-chested as always, to sing, “Bang-bang zamana bole boom-boom-boom,” I thought, great — it can only get better from here, right?

Wrong. Chetan Bhagat’s lines are lamer than anything Khan’s scriptwriters ever wrote. Often, he’s too lazy to even translate: “Great news aur grating news mein farak hota hai.” And, in predictable book-to-movie fashion, people keep verbalising stuff we should see: Amrita Arora’s shrewish mother-in-law is described four times, but the one time we see her, she’s wasted.

Any efforts by the actors to redeem their cardboard characters are doomed by their supremely unconvincing locale. A dimly-lit hall with six desks does not a call-centre make. While an office empty of people does enable our protagonists to have loud private conversations mid-corridor, there’s no getting away from the bad-sitcom-movingweirdly- into-haunted-house feel — appropriate for a film where the supernatural is represented by a squeaky-voiced red devil (Sharman Joshi’s Bad Me) and the most disappointing God in cinematic history.

A potentially non-judgmental take on a generation of independent young women is diluted. The career-minded Isha (Isha Koppikar) gets her comeuppance, while Gul Panag’s Priyanka, radically shown having consensual sex with her boyfriend (Joshi), is derided as starting a “nari mukti andolan” when she urges a mistreated bahu (Arora) to confront her in-laws. When she proposes to Joshi on bended knee, calling herself a “cold insensitive b***h”, he responds, “Self-assessment achhi hai.” Then there are the anti-goraisms. The formula is 35=10: a 35-year-old American is mentally the same as a 10-year-old Indian. (The formula’s truth is proved by showing us Americans who’ve screwed the top off an oven to fit a large dish) It’s hard to laugh at this sort of racist patriotism-lite, but Hello’s final answer to First World supremacy is so ludicrous that I promise you’ll be rolling in the aisles.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 42, Dated Oct 25, 2008