Leap of taste – ‘Balika Vadhu’ and the death of intelligence

This piece was published many moons ago in Mid-Day. I’m posting the updated, unabridged version because almost 2 years on, we are still watching this nonsense. I just sat through two episodes of this bilge (after they have taken a 5 year ‘leap’) and still find it retarded. And the ‘messages’ at the end of the show now are so asinine, so stupid they can give you an aneurism.

And because I just read this in today’s Sunday Mid-Day. Do yourselves a favour and go online to read this piece on the death of any form of intelligence in this country.

P.S Forgot to add – Colors (and I presume Endemol too) want her on Bigg Boss. No, this is not a joke. We are.

'With the lights out, it's less dangerous...here we are now, entertain us...'

‘Oh, she’s so cuuuuute! Ekdum choti si dulhan…’

All the people I’ve talked to about ‘Balika Vadhu’ say this. In some form or the other. She’s cuuuute, they’re cuuuute as a couple, and everything else is forgiven. (And as fairness creams – not their ads but their sales in India – have shown us, beauty is all that really matters.)

‘Balika Vadhu’ being the topic of conversation for almost everyone is fine – what concerns me is how we’ve somehow overlooked the entire fact of how, at least at the inception of the show, we were trying to (were we?) talk about how this practice was bad and a social anathema and should be stopped. And now it’s just a cool show to watch. So there was a resistant teacher who spoke against this initiall – but she got knocked out of the show after a few episodes. Now the show has become this great soap where everything looks grand and pretty and there are nice clothes and exotic havelis and the usual: family, saas-bahu, traditional functions.

The fact that an underage kid got married to another in the show – and are still is married – AND IT’S ILLEGAL – has stopped to matter. And not just that – we’re (probably) the only country in the world where a child-marriage show can top the charts and the lead kid actors be Couple of the Year on some magazine cover!!  Because she is so cuuuuuute! They are so cuuuuuute!

And you see, suddenly how from the issue, we have quietly shifted to the image, and we’re talking aesthetics instead of ethics. Classic showbiz hyperbole thrown when there is no reason in what is being done and shown. Don’t blame the messenger they say, we’re just a medium. But unfortunately, the medium is the message nowadays.

There was a huge concern about the lives of the ‘Slumdog’ kids being spoilt forever once the stardust stops to fall. Well, that is nothing compared to what the kids who are playing the lead roles in ‘Balika Vadhu’ will go through. A ‘Slumdog’ kid might still be back to mucking in the slums, too young to understand how life has shut its doors on him or her again, but for a middle-class, educated kid, becoming a poster-child for something as ridiculous as child-marriage and not realising it’s portent is far more harrowing than I can imagine. Now that girl IS the country’s Balika Vadhu (she does ads, TV appearances and live events in her ‘dulhan’ dress) and seems to be quite cool with it. That’s her identity… and we should be OK with that why?

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/03/03pfearfactor.phtml

This is one of the most hilarious SNL Commercial Parodies ever : FEAR FACTOR JUNIOR! If you can find the video, watch it. We’re not far from being there, trust me.

I’m from Rajasthan, I’ve been in school with kids who got married when they were 7-8 and got sent off to villages as soon as they finished class 12 (marriage as kids, ‘gona’ after education, the only saving grace). Some of them were brilliant students, like the didi across the road who used to wake up at 5 to study and is now the mother of someone who is 7 years old and probably will never know how educated his ghoonghat covered mother is. And there are so many others, now trapped in the sand swirls of some god-forsaken part of the desert, tending goats and camels. Child marriage is nothing even half as pleasant as the show portrays, the problems not one millionth as simple to solve. Sure, we have to make it palatable for an audience to make them listen, but do we have to make it this delicious? And as it is, I don’t think anyone is being told to listen anymore. Just enjoy…

I’ve even seen a reaction to the show: now at least someone understands our age old customs and traditions.

!

The people who need to realise the ill-effects of this practice have no access to TVs or even education. And the rest who have access are covering themselves in glory by finding this all cute and fascinating and are missing the point (if there is any, other than the Television Rating Point-TRPs- for the show). So where are we? Nowhere. Which was always the intent, I think. To make an entertaining show, nothing else. What it ends up showcasing and auto-suggesting, not our problem.

The best way to celebrate Children's Day - by promoting child weddings. Lets end the innocence once and for all.

Every culture is becoming strict, a standard fight and flight response to ‘modernism’ – the classic ‘going back to a simpler time’. And it’s happening all over the world. Religion and tradition has become extremely stringent, exclusive and obtrusive. And, as is with every event in the history of humankind, the ones to feel this shift the most – and first – are the women. So next time you scoff at the Swat valley lashings of girls while surfing channels during a break in ‘Balika Vadhu’, try and not feel too good about yourself. Because both are demeaning and endangering women to the same degree, but in different ways. One is overt, and the other is covert, something we in India have a tradition of doing. The craziest, ugliest things, and then covering it all with words like ‘culture’ and ‘custom’.

In a country where a leading political & royal family’s bahu proudly proclaims in an international fashion magazine that she got married at 16, in a society which still doesn’t want to educate girls because ‘uske baad par nikal aate hain’ (and this is in families living in hovels as well as high-rises and especially in the middle class, so don’t think the educated folk are any better)…where our ‘sanskaar’ have actually given social sanction to marriages in teens and most teenage pregnancies are justified as not unwed and so ‘legitimate’, a show like ‘Balika Vadhu’ should be under the same scanner, as far as social health is concerned, as smoking on screen and promoting alcohol in general media is…

Because that’s what it is getting away with for now – a small statutory warning at the end of the show – a throwaway 10 second message that says some random social ‘truth’ and attempts to warn us that this practice is injurious to health. Which was for a while, and then it became as random as ‘wearing lose clothing in summers is good for health’ etc.

(Update – now the child bride is all grown up so the present messages are suddenly not about child marriage or anything like that – now they are about ‘long lost lovers’.)

And if you thought one was not enough, the show made sure there were a few more, since they were at it. So the father-in-law’s older brother got married to a 16 year old. And got her pregnant within a few months. And then the girl fell in love with him and they are now ‘happy’ and well adjusted or whatever. Which is the classic ‘let them get married, love will happen’ spiel we’ve been given for ages.Or, in the words of an Alice Walker novel, I think – let him get his legs over her once, everything will be fine.  (Update - A newspaper reports now that same couple will get their 5 year old son married, in an effort to grab some eyeballs.) The issue is – it all has to end in a big fat happy ending. So you have shows where every form of violence and crimes against women are committed, and the women marry the very men who did it, or at least fall in love with them.

This is not a joke. There is something wrong with our country and our mindsets, and TV is a tiny window into how Khapps are still functioning. And always will.

I want his opinion on Indian TV shows. I'm sure it will be a scream. 'Disposable Balikas' anyone?

Frankly, we just watched a criminal offense being perpetrated on TV for the past 2 years or so, and in the great tradition of our CJI KG Balakrishnan, are now accepting the victim and the criminal should live together and even procreate. Which other country in the world is this regressive, I don’t know. I’m sure there are many, but which celebrates it and wears this idiocy proudly in the social sphere, I fail to find immediately. I can no longer laugh at the idiotic World Wrestling Entertainment fixed fights or the criminally insane bull fights and matadors, nor can I snigger at the way kid gymnasts are beaten, literally, into submission, in Chinese athletic schools or tut tut the way women are treated in Afghanistan. We just set the standard so low, it will be hard to go any lower.

Until the show on a blind child widow who is convinced into committing sati is aired.

And trust me, there are women, yes WOMEN, who support the practise of sati as religious freedom or something, so considering all this, such a show could not be far away.

Exhibit A – http://www.sawf.org/mezines/sunny/sunny.asp?sec=culture&edt=edit01222001&art=connect&kw=sati&title=Sati

I remember a scene from a Paddy Chayefsky film ‘Network’, where one of the protagonists, Howard Beale, a TV presenter, loses it over the way the world is and starts telling people on TV ‘I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore’…and people all over the city start opening their windows and screaming it out onto the streets, echoing his sentiments. Well, this was me opening the window and leaning out into the rain and screaming – I’m as mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore.

I hear no echoes across the city.

P.S I love how Cummings puts us all under the microscope.

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

Channels, trust me, have pawned their intelligence to buy a drink.

But why the hell are we getting drunk?

Roman Wilderness

(This article was published under the same title earlier at www.passionforcinema.com)

‘…because they’re spot.’

It was said nonchalantly, almost with a laugh. Which the kid had directed at someone who didn’t even know something as simple as that. As if. Well, I’m a bit old-fashioned for this I realised. When I got home that evening and narrated the same incident and the words to my wife Kamayani, she almost popped a vein. We both decided to not just IQ test our ADs when we make our films – we would EQ test them too.

But this got me thinking about why it affected me like this. (You’ll get to know the context of the comment and it’s portent really soon, just bear with me). And I remembered 2 names: Ayhan Ghanim, and Sameer Singh. And I thought back to the day, almost 8 years ago…

I land up at their office, bristling with ideas and the urge to be a cinematographer, and later, a director. Ayhan was a D.O.P and used to work in an office with Sameer Singh, both of them heading a team that made ad films, corporate AVS, branching out to do an indie when it seemed good enough. In other words, they were (like all of us) just trying to get along with the world till they could step aside and do their own thing and make their movies.

Ayhan had read my first ‘script’, a 15-page mess that was full of ideas that a million people had had before me, but I assume he saw some promise, hence the meeting. We talked of this and that, about poetry and literature and the world around us, and as is the rare case in this world, we just clicked. We understood each other, realised each other’s intelligence and respected it and wanted to work together. I was a complete greenhorn, hadn’t seen the inside of a film school or cinema appreciation group, the only ‘film’ experience I had had was making – actually, trying to – make this messy 15-pager into a short which ended up failing miserably. But Ayhan said a very simple thing – don’t think anyone is doing you a favour here, or the other way round. One would like to work with intelligent people – it increases productivity and gives us more joy in doing what we do – and I assume you would like to do the same. You will get paid for it so treat it like that, keep it in perspective.

And that was that. The biggest lesson I had learnt till then. Respect for ability. My own. Till then I was the standard issue kid who was cocky and arrogant but only to hide an unease about my own ability. But this made me realise – don’t do any favours in this field of work. Work with people you enjoy working with, will learn something from. Be kind in charity, in friendship, in interactions maybe, but not in work. Work should only be run on ability. I’ve struggled with this because of the numerous gigs I’ve worked on or been a part of since have shown me, strangely, that favours is the way it goes around here, heck our entire industry is almost entirely built on that. But that was also my other big lesson. Have your own set of rules when you can, and adhere to them when you have the chance to, in your own territory. The rest of the time, we’re all doing time in this world so grin and bear it.

But Ayhan is a quiet man. He speaks softly, and is easy on the ‘gyaan’. The person who actually made me think about writing this is Sameer Singh. Because the first day of my first official shoot as an AD, he gave me the title ‘Chutki’ – snapping of the fingers. And here’s why.

Knowing what I wanted to do and how I was seeing myself, he gave me my first job on set.

It was to light his cigarette every time he snapped his fingers. The sound of the ‘chutki’, and I would run with a lighter/matches, and light his cigarette for him. And if he liked my work, he’d give me more ‘important’ things to do.

I did my work diligently. I would be ready with a lighter even before he snapped his fingers, observing when he took out the carton. So I got more important work.

To carry his laptop bag and his handycam.

By evening, I was also getting tea.

Ayhan was hopping mad, arguing with Sameer, saying I was being wasted in doing these things.

But I think – and I may be giving Sameer more credit than is due, but he deserves all of it – he wanted me to learn a very basic thing.

Dignity of labour.

Whatever it is, however small it is, in film, on set, nothing, and I mean NOTHING is unimportant. And I can vouch for that – going without tea for an hour when the pressure’s mounting and the light is fading can paralyze an entire crew.

And that is something I have never ever forgotten. Respect. For EVERYONE on set.

By the end of the month, I was sitting with them on the scripts and in shot-breakdowns, just listening to them. I got books to read, had discussions on topics that befuddled me.

But the next day, I was out running errands in the blistering heat, getting printouts, cold drinks – you name it. And soon, I was promoted to ‘logger’.

But what stayed was my name – until a few years later, when I started writing my own shows, going it alone in Mumbai and Sameer started calling me by name. I still don’t know what prompted that change. But I think he realised I had learnt that very basic value – of humanity – completely. And had not forgotten it even in this mad city and in this field where showiness and trying to act important is everything.

Because that’s what I see all around. The moment someone gets an inch of space to call his or her own, there is an immediate breakdown of their sense of humanity. Suddenly they rant and rave and scream and want their food in restaurants before everyone else and fret in lines at stores if the assistants are taking time in swiping cards – it’s insane. I’ve seen a ‘hot’ director flip out over pepperoni pizzas (apparently he could not write without having 2 of those, on production money, of course, for some strange reason since he wasn’t part of the team required that day – and even that had to be ordered via the production – spending 500 from his own pocket or using his own or his assistant’s phone could end his life I’m assuming). I’ve seen director’s assistants get ballistic over trifles, things like why is the coffee from CCD and not Barista – I’ve seen production and crew and setting boys made to cry for lesser things – come on, wake up. If having the right brand of coffee is the only way you can direct well, I might as well pay Barista half your fee as a token of thanks. And the best part – most of these people are not even that good. They might be competent, maybe borderline good, but to become such divas – I never get it. Why should they, or stars or anyone behave like this and run everyone else around them down I never get. And the worst part – it filters down.

I am a firm believer that everything from the top filters down to the bottom – well, almost. So if the director or producer is like that, the assistants and the people under them are going to be worse. Because if the boss does it, it become legit. So I’ve had directing teams run the entire production to the ground simply because the director is a brat. I don’t have a problem if the ADs wear Ed Hardy and come in their own Mercs. But if they don’t talk to the man who is making their tea or the person cleaning the floor or even the light boy with basic human courtesy, I have a problem. And that’s the context of this post. A weak director lets an entire team lose and that costs us all. Because a logger, when asked why the setting boys are not coming with us for lunch turns around and says matter of factly:

‘…but they’re spot…’ , I know we’re in trouble. And we sure were.

I thought this was the one field where everyone was working on the same team, where spot to star, all are trying to make, to the best of their ability, the same movie. I thought this was a place for equals. But I guess we’re too ‘varna’ system driven to ever really get there. And the more we get ‘modern’, the more we are going back to that in our basic nature. This is spot, he stands there, he does not get the same food we do. He’s a light man, if he climbs 5 storeys high and puts a light and falls and injures himself, there is no insurance cover but if the star injures his or her thumb opening a can of Pepsi, we pay for their family’s trip to Rome to make up for it.

This is at the end of a third consecutive 18 hour day, at 11 at night. The light men get an average of 3 hours sleep at night. On a good night..

And the strangest part – none of the spots and setting and light people and production boys I’ve worked with have EVER complained. OK, they have, but for a bit – then work has somehow always gone on and finished. They work insane hours, literally put their lives at risk sometimes, but they somehow manage a smile and get the work done. But what I have also noticed is this – if you speak to them nicely, if you ask about their food and comfort sometimes, if you just treat them as human beings like yourselves – they work better. I’ve pulled off impossible shoots just because of this. Because we (the directing team) could make them feel like they were also part of the same crew and not lesser human beings. Because we always said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and pitched in whenever the work was heavy.

This is why I have very few friends and why Ayhan is still one of my closest friends and will be my D.O.P whenever I make a film. This is why working with Sujoy Ghosh is such a joy and why Sameer Singh will get a special thanks in my film’s credits. Because these are people who understand the importance of humanity in work as in life, who appreciate and respect others, who know how even the smallest job has dignity and no one has the right to rob the man or woman doing it of that, so what if ‘they’re spot’. Because they have the basic sensitivity that is needed when you work with people. Because if that same logger had said that the spot boys will not join us for lunch on a set run by either of the aforementioned three, because ‘they’re spot’, she would have, at that very moment, gone home without lunch. And without a job.

I know you need to segregate in order to achieve. Like in war, on a film set you need to have categories of people who do certain things and you need to have a chain of command and someone who orders and screams and yells to get work done. But if this means you take it seriously and become like that in life, it’s really not worth it. Hierarchy is a tool for productivity, not a yardstick for living. But sadly, as in life, we’ve taken the ‘varna’ system too seriously. Work will get done on a film set, no matter what. If you scream at them, slap them or serenade them – everyone wants work and the money associated with it and will work. But if you can get them to work with kind words and some human feeling and concern for their lives, I don’t think it will take away from you or your ‘importance’ on set, or anywhere in life.

But I guess the more ‘firebrand’ you are, the more people think you are a ‘genius’ or a ‘force of nature’ or whatever. Be all that, and more. Just don’t forget you’re still dealing with other human beings who, but for the accident of birth in this country, would have been in your place.

The title of this post was actually the title of the first ‘short’ I wrote and tried to direct/shoot with friends and a VHS camcorder, going the ‘Rebel without a crew’ way. It was a classic, pretentious short about 2 serial killers in an existential dilemma about their lives and the lack of god and the ‘right way’ in this world, who try to test out their theory of this being a world that god forgot by picking up a random hitchhiker and killing him – if there is a god, he will stop such a random act of injustice and sin. Of course, in the end, the hitchhiker turns out to be god and kills them both, intoning, as he does – I never forgot this world and its sinners – I just like to play with my food’ … ! (Yes, I know, embarrassingly puerile, but such is our mind when we’re young and think we own the world and our ideas are the smartest and never-heard-before and that we are all Fritz Langs and Orson Wells rolled into one;) )

The title came from ‘The End’ by The Doors.

‘Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain

And all the children are insane

Waiting for the summer rain…’

I posted this under the same title because when I heard that stray comment, and I hear a lot of those, when I see how we are treating other human beings, I realise, all over again:

All the children ARE insane…

I’ll have my lunch with the spot boys anytime.

P.S. E. E. Cummings says it best, again, putting mankind in perspective. The only problem – there is no hell of a good universe next door to go to.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born — pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

The White Lite

If you think the image on the right is better than the image on the left (which is how the unfortunate woman looks like – almost – in real life), read no further.

The White Lite Beyonce

The struggle was not extreme, nor did it last too long. He looked at me after the first volley, beseechingly, asking me not to be this cruel. But I couldn’t stop myself.

‘I didn’t order her by mail. I went to her college to ask her to marry me, so I’m OK with her skin tone, really. I didn’t suddenly realize it on the day after the wedding that she was dark…“

He looked at me as if I had asked him to extract his mother’s tooth and then sell her. I was not prepared for the next move.

Nothing.

He kept on re-colouring my beautiful wife’s picture.

I had to physically stop him then. There was no other option, frankly. While I abhor any form of physical violence, this was too much to bear.

‘No skinsblasmishremooval’?

He didn’t give up without a fight, I must say. I told him to desist.

And thus the world works in any colour lab in this country. It’s an automatic and involuntary activity. As soon as they take a picture, they rush to re-colour it.

But sometimes it gets too much. And I can’t fight any longer.

So we have accepted it. There is no way to escape it.

Our children will be born photoshopped Caucasian.

Blond, blue-eyed enough to make Adolf Hitler proud. and Alyque Padamshee want to bounce light off them till the end of time.

The signs are all there for us to see..I mean, quite literally. Any billboard, newspaper ad, ‘frandship’ classified – everywhere you look, you see only whitepeople. Whitepeople wear sarees and whitepeople wear next to nothing and attempt to dance in our movies and whitepeople’s whitekids promote clothing lines and whitepeople pretend to be brownpeople in movies, TV shows and in commercials (my vote goes to the Kaya skin clinic ad which shows an obviously Caucasian model and the legendary line: ‘For Indian skin’).

OK, I admit it’s not their fault that for most Indians, including Imtiaz Ali, they are not whitepeople at all since they are fair with dark hair so I guess they ‘look’ Punjabi and thus are desirable and acceptable to the largest community in the country. Don’t get be wrong – I’m not raving against this whitepeople ascendency. I’m all for people getting work and getting paid. And in that, we are proudly an equal opportunity country – as long as you are fair, or you are Bipasha Basu. The Gulf has oil, America has money- and we have whitepeople.

The Artist Formerly Known As Kajol

Who said Indian is still in the Dark Ages? We’ve been running after the White Light since as long as I can remember. And we’re getting closer and closer. A big actress whose name itself means ‘kohl’ recently revealed to the world she had a Caucasian twin in an ad for a beauty product. I still am to recover from the trauma. An actor endorses a fairness cream for men when his girlfriend is the only bona-fide ‘dark’ beauty in the country. We are a country of honorary whitepeople, and those of us who aren’t whitepeople enough have the luxury of various creams, soaps, Adobe Photoshop and shooting ourselves in the head.

And I would know since I’m on both sides of the story. I’m what can be called ‘fair’ and my wife is the warm, delicious shade of freshly ground coffee. And I’ve heard it all, from my relatives asking her the recipe for idlis (which is a polite way of telling me I didn’t marry by the right shade card, their own simian features notwithstanding – well, at least I married in the same species) to the polite ‘this colour won’t look nice on her skintype’. This last one we hear in malls all the time. I kid you not, the kind ladies at the cosmetics counters refuse to sell her bright colour shades- reds, pinks, you name it. So I go alone to buy her lipsticks and nailpolish now, convincing the ladies there that my wife is as fair as I am. (Or that I wear the lipstick and nailpolish myself, depending on the proclivity of the customer care executives in attendance – sometimes it gets me brighter shades with a ‘you go girl’ pat on the back too).

And till date, in the past 6 years, she has not died from radiation poisoning that we all know occurs when you are wearing a bright color on dark skin, nor have the people who meet her suffered any chromosomal abnormalities, even in their next generations.

I’m not against whitepeople, or against people trying or pretending to be whitepeople. Or against honorary whitepeople (read ‘fair’). To itch his or her own. But I do have a problem when I am told light bounces better off fair skin, when I am told what colour I can or cannot wear. I have a problem when every advertisement has a foreign model in it, when being white is equated with being better looking, when being dark can only mean being ‘sultry’ or ‘dusky’ or ‘sexy’, not beautiful. I have a problem when someone justifies fairness creams by saying – if it gives someone joy even for a minute, who are we to deny that? Well, I used to find joy in setting my lungs on fire, but I was told society demanded I be denied that joy of smoking, for the sake of my and society’s health. We sure need similar directives about our mental health too, don’t you think?

Brain Brightening Cream

When you have shade cards for your skin, evolution has really bypassed you, hasn’t it? And when every new kids store has images of blue-eyed and blond children even though it’s for our native populace, it really means you are ashamed of who your children are. Or that some freaky mutation has led to all Indians henceforth being born Caucasian. Seeing that no one has raised this issue, I’m assuming we are on the cusp of such a sci-fi moment in our lives and I have come to know of it just now.

But I’ll end on a positive note. Kamayani says she feels ‘like a foreigner in my own country because I’m dark’. So I have come up with a smart solution: I make sure she always carries her passport with her wherever she goes. Just in case someone tries to deport her out of this country of whitepeople.

And I’m thankful our children will be born photoshopped Caucasian.

Somewhere up (or down, depending where you’d like to place him) Herr Doctor Josef Mengele is pleased.

P.S. A little taste of who we really are. And no, we haven’t changed in all these years. The hilarious ‘Coopers’ in church sketch from ‘Goodness Gracious Me’.