Watching The Namesake again is like recounting a few favourite memories of your life.  Memories made of the way, Irrfan Khan’s Ashoke runs an anxious finger across his baby Gogol’s little toes, just to make sure he is all there. Or  Ashoke taking Gogol by the hand and walking him to the edge of  the frothing sea, telling him to remember this moment forever. There is Gogol again, his big eyes looking bigger through a glass wall of his parent’s new home in American suburbia.  Gogol, all grown up and Americanised, watching the Taj Mahal with a stunned face on a family holiday.  Gogol, suddenly estranged from the world his parents have brought up in, cutting loose to embrace the freedom that being American brings with it. He is Nikhil, or rather Nick  now and he is closer to his white girl friend’s parents than his own. And yet, the seeds of indoctrinated tradition and the roots linking him to the history of his parents are just below his skin, waiting to sprout at the first opportunity.   
Though Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was a detailed, evocative account of a Bengali couple’s journey through the American culturescape over a span of thirty years, Meera Nair takes the film far, far beyond the book.
The best kind of cinema as the Bengali masters taught us, blurs the line between the imagined and the lived. With The Namesake, Nair goes beyond anything she has ever done before to create the detail, the warmth, the pathos, the expanse of a lifetime in  one film. 
Whether it is Ashoke cajoling his homesick wife out of the bathroom with a lullaby or she cradling him at night when he has woken up with a start or Ashima painstakingly sticking sequins on handmade greeting cards to send back home, or the camera lingering on the disorientating airport graphics when the family is going back to Kolkata to mourn Ashima’s father’s death or the quiet, sweet goodbye Ashoke bids his wife on his way to a lecturership in a new city, the helpless terror she feels in her lonely home when a phone call changes her life, Gogol’s painful journey back into the family’s fold, the teeming streets of Kolkata, there is so much to see and absorb and feel in this film. It is impossible to take it all in one viewing. This film like a good book will require many return journeys to be fully appreciated. The book may have been  about dilemmas of immigration but the film has a universal poignancy which may just take it to the Oscars next year.
What can one say about Irrfan Khan? There is very little for him to do in this film and dear God, look what he does with the cinematic space he is given. His love-filled eyes as he nods a goodbye to his wife on a busy airport, his halting narration of the story behind why he named his son Gogol, his discomfort when his son’s girlfriend kisses him, his sense of wonder when he first touches his first born, are moments made of pure emotion. Tabu is Tabu like always. Hugely expressive and unbelievably natural in a few scenes and just a notch short of blinding brilliance in others because she is laidback to a fault.  Despite being draped in layered Kanthas and bulky overcoats, she however radiates the beauty and dignity of a woman who has lived through great love and greater loss. Kal Penn is a revelation and you realize that Nair has integrated her actors so much with the characters they play that they ring true even in those exquisite moments of silence and grief that make this film so special. The film belongs to Nair, her screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala and cinematographer Frederick Elmes and together they create a montage of images one cannot shake off, days after you have seen the film. The film does not have a pat ending and we do not know if Gogol/Nikhil found a way to unify his Indian identity with his American aspirations but we do know that life like Ashoke’s favourite quote is about shaking off the blanket of security and traveling light through the world.It is about making the world your home and never forgetting the home that was once your world.  

Someone whispers in Ayesha Dharker’s wake, “There goes good breeding!” A rare compliment..rarer if paid to an actor who has been on the sets of Star Wars as Queen Jamillia, been applauded on breakthrough shows like Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, stole Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams with her wicked charm and  parted the waters at international film festivals as the mesmeric Malli in The Terrorist, a film which incidentally Samuel L Jackson was once running around with in his  trailer!
Despite all this and more Ayesha sits in a cramped coffee shop,  cheerful as a sunbeam dressed in stilettos and talks like an old friend who remembers exactly when you had met her last!
She was at Bangalore’s Landmark store recently to read poems from her mother Imtiaz Dharker’s latest book The Terrorist At My Table and displayed not just the obvious gifts of being a child of two diverse cultures but a sharp intelligence that misses nothing. She is full of disbelief at the way an art exhibition in Gujarat was stormed and an art student jailed while the people who assaulted him and vandalised property walked away free.
“If there is an issue, it should be handled by law, not by those who believe they are the law. This isn’t the 13th century or is it? We cannot hope to understand the political agendas that control things around us but we always have the capacity to change things if we don’t grow apathetic. Lets not fall for the jargon. No one can think on our behalf. Being a Hindu or a Muslim is such a narrow definition of who we can be. It is sad that we are less and less able these days to say such things but it is important that each one of us should have the freedom to be who we are. We cannot be put in a box with a label.’’
Eyes wide open to life, tresses flowing free like her spirit and a smile as spontaneous as that of a happy child, Ayesha speaks about why she felt the need to lend her voice to her mother’s poetry, “Her work is necessary for the times. Today Television has replaced story telling. Kabul is not just Murdoch’s territory, it is not just a news story but that is what it has been reduced to because of political agendas. History has been systematically stripped away from countries like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, we need more storytellers like my mother to reclaim these lost territories from oblivion.’’
As an actor who picks her roles carefully out of a platter piled with offers as diverse as Joan Of Arc and Marlow’s Mephistopheles on stage and an Asian in films like Anita and Me and most memorably as a chilling self-detonating human bomb in The Terrorist, Ayesha knows that she is in a unique position to make a difference with her work and her voice. She  knows that Outsourced (in which she stars), “a clever independent film set in a call centre’’ will make some witty observations about cultural osmosis between America and India. “It is important to have creative control over the work I do. I love stretching myself in different directions but I won’t do any accent other than my own,” she says.’’
It is a “quietly subversive thing,’’ she chuckles but she won’t exchange her cultural identity for even the most interesting roles in the world. She can’t see herself running around the Swiss dales in a chiffon and pigtails either but films like Omkara have rekindled her interest in Hindi cinema. She says,“It is good that Indian cinema is not polarized anymore and there is a growing audience and space for all kinds of films. Never say never is what I believe in and who knows what may come my way?’’
As for the world going to pieces around us, she smiles, “Hope is an empowering thing. Even in the face of the worst kind of terror, the hoping mechanism survives. Isn’t it great that we can still find something to smile about despite all that is going wrong?’’   

Can a token verdict heal ten years of pain, wishy washy laws and open wounds of the Uphaar tragedy? What must it be like to go on year after year in mourning, to live on without your children or a sibling or a parent who died in a hell hole without an exit?
How does one cope with the fact that the men whose carelessness and apathy brought on the tragedy,  evaded the law for a decade? What must it have been like to live without a sense of closure?
NDTV ran a story some time back to pay tribute to the victims of Uphaar and those who are digging in their heels and still fighting for justice. An old lady broke down while  remembering a granddaughter who went for a movie and never came back.
A couple recounted how after the death of their teenaged son and daughter, conversation has died in the house and only the clock can be heard ticking away the years of unbroken silence.  “They recorded jingles..loved music..sang very well,’’ said the mother.
59 lives were lost  in the asphyxiating confines of Uphaar and yet not one man was held accountable for more than a decade.
The  gangways as we know by now, had been narrowed, emergency lights were on the blink, some exits were even locked and the cinema staff had fled when the fire broke out.
Someone once told me that the human race is the cruelest species on earth. I am tempted to agree after watching how people accused of the worst kind of crimes in this country, refuse the burden of guilt and accountability and get away with murder, rape or more.
Life is what it is but I cannot forgive film makers who create suffering and pass it off as entertainment.  The other day, I decided to put myself  through the uniquely Indian torture of watching what was once known as the 80’s family social. While suffering through the unrelenting  misery of our heroine Kalpana ( played by Rekha) in a weepy called Mehandi Rang Layegi,  I was reminded of family socials of almost every decade and how each one had their  own uniquely dysfunctional dynamics.
The 50 and the 60s had dowry hungry mothers-in-law like Lalita Pawar. Then we  were obsessed with the rich, divisive and snooty daughter-in-law who tore the family apart with her painted talons and jagged tongue in films like Do Raaste. Then it was the turn of the greedy sons to disown parents for ambition and a rich wife in films like Avtaar and the entire Ghar Ek Mandir series. Only somewhere at the meeting point between the 70s and the 80s did we see a totally unexpected central figure  in the celluloid families. It was the unsung but unvanquished woman protagonist who took endless joy in her own  joyless life and fulfilled the ambitions of her family at a great personal cost. She could have been the spinster sister in Tapasya who gave her life’s blood to her largely ungrateful family or the hugely successful doctor of  Mehandi Rang Layegi who always missed the bus when it came to love or the harried bread winner of  Jeevan Dhara or the successful lawyer of Dard who raises her jailed lover’s son all her life, the point was to ensure that the audience and the heroine did not find one moment of respite from heartbreak.
The keynote of these films was Tyag or sacrifice so the moment our heroine found an opportunity  of personal fulfillment, she giftwrapped it and passed it on to someone else. So in Tapasya, Rakhee continues to torture herself and her suitor Parikshit Sahni for decades by refusing to marry him when the two could have jolly well taken care of her orphaned family of young siblings together. In Jeevan Dhara, Rekha discovers the picture of her lover under the pillow of her widowed sister and so emotionally arm twists the poor sod into marrying the sister instead. These films were dispirited, defeatist, miserably soggy and it was almost as if the film makers were telling us, “so what if these woman are self-dependent? They are still going to be kicked around by fate…isn’t that reassuring?’’
The heroine at this point was not the wronged wife or the raped sister or the vacuous girlfriend. She was the man of the house but with a woman’s ability to put herself last. In Mehendi Rang Layegi for instance, Rekha for all her education cannot confess her feelings to the man she loves. She meekly agrees to marry a man she does not know anything about, finds out that he is already married, ensures that the first wife gets her due, divorces him and on the verge of being reunited with her first love, discovers that he is engaged to be married to an emotionally unstable girl. Her last piece of dialogue as she walks out of his life for good, is a gem, “Everyone becomes a Mrs so and so. Iam the only one to have the privilege of remaining a Miss!’’  Someone pass me some laughing gas before I pass out! 

“Chamakte chaand ko toota hua taara bana dala…meri awaragi ne mujhko awara bana dala,’’ this Ghulam Ali ghazal summed up Awaargi, Mahesh Bhatt’s ode to futile love, sometime in the eighties. The film was about how a henchman (Anil Kapoor) discovers his conscience through a woman (Meenakshi Sheshadri). Mohit Suri’s Awarapan is similar in premise but with an emotional core all its own. Something about Suri’s work takes you by surprise everytime. Who expected Kaliyug to address pornography with sensitivity or Zeher to actually have a woman as its real hero? One can argue with the premise of Woh Lamhe but Shiney Ahuja’s almost insane love for a woman over the brink, was both bitter and sweet.
A Mohit Suri film works through ugliness and pain, without sparing you either and then leaves you feeling purged somehow. Suri’s latest is his most emotionally intense work. You may not agree with the violence in the film that is primarily about a journey back to faith but you cannot wash the film off your memory either. Awarapan has come from a personal place because the pain steeped songs linger as do the tortured silences of  Emran Hashmi whose underrated talent gets played like a high strung guitar through the film.
On the eve of his film’s release a few months ago, the twenty something director spoke over a long-distance telephone line about his kind of cinema.
About the edginess in his films, he says, “You would not be talking to me if I was making bubbly, candy floss cinema. My films stand out because they are edgier than the films made by other directors of my age. It is not that I don’t like happy films. I loved Lage Raho Munnabhai and Rang De Basanti but I make films I  would enjoy watching.’’
Suri stands out also because unlike a lot of products from Vishesh Films, his films are not slip-shod copies of foreign DVDs.
He loyally defends Mahesh Bhatt who was at one time accused of sleep walking through a dozen films on the floor despite giving Indian cinema  two of its most startlingly original works, Arth and Saraansh. Says Suri, “Mr Bhatt often says originality is all about hiding the source of your inspiration from everyone. When he was working on simultaneous films, that was the need of the hour, the prescribed path.  There are  time constraints under which people sometimes borrow ideas. I am lucky that I have the liberty and the time to work with ideas. And I don’t think Mahesh Bhatt does not have it in him anymore. I could not have asked anyone but him to write Woh Lamhe.’’
Does he think the industry is divided between producers who rule the  multiplexes with marketing blitz and those who struggle to get smaller films noticed? He responds, “I don’t believe in creating films with marketing gimmicks around big stars. I don’t mind if the money is spent on genuine films like Rang De Basanti and Munnabhai where stars have added to the film. I can’t imagine Munnabhai being played by anyone but Sanjay Dutt. But if an actor is being used only to package a film which is in turn being passed off as a serious film, I have a problem. At the end of the day, there is no division except between  popular films and unpopular films.’’
His take on cinema? “I believe in having a point of view. In starting with a quest, working through a conflict and ending with an answer. I want to take my audience from one plane of feeling to another. They should take something back with them. Whether it’s a scene, a message, a tune or the memory of having laughed, cried or being entertained. Also for me, communication with my actors is very important, star status notwithstanding. I should connect with them because without communication, an actor cannot deliver. I also know for sure that you cannot preach to an audience. You can’t  teach them anything and they may agree or disagree with what you say  but yes, you can let them discover something new through the journey  they take with you. Awarapan is about one such journey. I have always questioned the belief in God. The story of  a murderer who became Valmiki has always fascinated me. The idea that a protagonist has to face his past and learn from the consequences of his actions interests me.’’
Most films he says, go wrong in their climax. He recalls, “Once the great Rajkumar Barjatya walked into the office and asked me what I was doing. I told I was working on a  film. He asked me, “Have you written the last scene?’’ I told him I hadn’t. He said something I will always remember. He told me, “You must always write the last scene first. Everything else should lead to it and whatever doesn’t, should be left out.’’ I make sure now that I write the last scene first. I know now the importance of clarity.’’
He is already working on the sequel of Raaz, a film he once assisted Vikram Bhatt with. So has Mohit Suri’s journey come full circle too? He says, “I would rather not draw my arc now. There much more to come.’’ We agree.             

The good thing about cheaper DVDs flooding the market is that one no longer has to think twice before picking up a film. My recent acquisitions include Raj Kapoor’s Prem Rog, Raj Sippy’s kidnapping caper Inkaar, Gulzar’s Khushboo and a few others picked at at insanely low prices. None of the above films are masterpieces from any angle. They just recreate another kind of filmmaking which is almost extinct today. Intimate, emotive and stamped with a certain directorial conviction for better or for worse. Prem Rog is hugely flawed with its vulgar comedy track involving a middle aged groom and a young teenager, the unbearably melodramatic portions where a young widow and her suitor are about to be burnt alive in public but it has these staggeringly moving moments that you just sit back and watch, transfixed. My favourite scene in the film and which for me is worth the price of the DVD, is the one where the patriarch Thakur of a Rajput family (An imperious Shammi Kapoor) offers his widowed niece to her lover Dev (Rishi Kapoor), not in marriage but for elopement. Marriage of a widow, he tells Dev, is not a possibility in a Rajput household but yes, if she elopes, she will be first cursed, berated and then forgotten. The haveli in which this conversation is taking place, is bathed in candle light because there is no power and Dev locks eyes with the old man and tells him, “Ye to dharmyuddh hai…issme samjhauta nahin hoga. Ya to poori tarah haar hogi  ya poori tarah jeet.’’ Which when roughly translates means, “This is a war of faith…and it will be fought without compromises. Either I win completely or lose completely.’’
And just then, a few dozen chandeliers burst into blazing glory overhead. Dev smiles and says, “Ab ijazat dijiye (I take your leave) and walks away. Rishi Kapoor was marvelously low-key in an otherwise overwrought film and in scene after scene he proved to you with gentle passion just how greatly under-rated  an actor he really was. His unspoken farewell in the first half of the film to his childhood love during her wedding is a text-book moment in emoting tenderness  without killing it with too little or too much emphasis.
Inkaar, ofcourse till date, retains its charm as a slick and intelligent account of a child’s kidnapping and his recovery by a team of CBI officers led by  the charismatic Vinod Khanna. Gulzar’s Khushboo has that rare quality. A mellow serenity, a sense of time far removed from the frenzied filmmaking of today. Khushboo was based on a Sarat Chandra story which inevitably meant that it was about a woman who nurtures a childhood passion for a man against all odds, loves him to the point of self-negation like Paro in Devdas and the abandoned bride of Parineeta  and yet has self-respect that won’t brook violation in any form. This was one of Hema Malini’s best performances. She was able to convey so much introverted passion so convincingly in films like Khushboo, Palkon Ki Chaoon Mein and Meera because perhaps her own life ran a parallel to the unrequited love intrinsic to these stories. She was never really the only woman in the life of the man she gave up the world for and in films like these, you felt that pain coming right through. Her Kusum in Khushboo waits all her life for the man she was betrothed to as a child but refuses to marry him when his mother conveys to her, more pity than affection. “I am not someone they can reject or accept at will,’’ she fumes. She won’t mind picking up her man’s shoes but will also tell him that she is not servile, just hospitable.
When the man (a subdued Jeetendra) asks her in the end what is it that he lacks that she won’t accept his overtures, she says, “You lack something. It is the knowledge that you have as much right upon me as I have on you. Why don’t you break my stubbornness with your authority…why don’t you hold my hand and take me away?’’
Aah, the fragrance of nostalgia. There is nothing quite like it.       

The Nandigram violence and the conflict between the rights of the many vs the clout of a few, brought back to memory BR Chopra’s Naya Daur, a rousing tribute to one man’s refusal to disappear quietly into the night. One also realized that the more things change, the more they remain the same. What has changed however is the way Hindi cinema reacts to contemporary issues. Unlike the BR Chopras, Bimal Roys, Gurudutts and even a Hrishikesh Mukherjee to some extent, there are few filmmakers today who  react in any meaningful way to the dichotomies and conflicts facing this country if you discount a stray Rang De Bsasanti or a Swades or Madhur Bhandarkar’s occasionally effective but mostly overbaked versions of reality.
Hindi cinema at the moment is all about Apna Sapna Money Money, Cash and heroes roller blading in South-Africa. The Nandigram of Naya Daur has fallen off the cinematic map.  Watching Naya Daur’s colourised version is surreal. It is like rediscovering rural India or atleast a sentimental version of it on a film screen after ages. It is like finding a gushing, cleansing waterfall in an arid multiplex and recovering your sense of sentiment, your lost simplicity, your ability to identify with actors who do not have coloured hair, tattoos, six-pack abs or designer clothes but the ability to move you, inspire you, make you smile at simple things and cringe at violence which is more emotional than digital. Watch Dilip Kumar sweet-talk his horse in the opening scene. You smile despite yourself. Where are actors who can create a MOMENT out of nothingness like this man could? What a pleasure to see an iconic actor at the prime of his craft especially today when he has  been reduced to a cruel parody by insensitive comedy shows. The Dilip Kumar of Naya Daur needed no snazzy camera angles and just a camera to create magic. Whether he is flirting with a pretty Vaijyanthimala on his tonga or setting out to inspire Lagaan’s Bhuvan by agreeing to race his Tonga against a motor or veering between passion and desperation in the final moments of the race as he exhorts his horse to go a bit faster, you watch him in awe and wonder at the ease with which he lived so many lifetimes on screen.
But there is so much more to Naya Daur. Ajit playing the jealous friend has a bravura moment in the climax when he props a bridge with his shoulders just so his estranged buddy can cross to the other side with his tonga. There is moonlit Chaand Usmani conveying so much suppressed passion for a man who does not even acknowledge her existence. And the fantastic conviction with which the driven hero marshals his village together to build a road to success against odds like communal intolerance and short-sighted selfishness. And the music! So this film was made in 1957, was it? This is 2007 and Naya Daur shows no signs of growing old.     

A few months back, Panchayat elders in Katleri village near Karnal, Haryana snatched away a ten day old baby away to punish his young parents for daring to marry within the same gotra. When the child was reunited with the parents, not one of the interfering old men or even the girl’s family showed any remorse. So deep-seated is this aversion for marriage within the convoluted configuration of family names and clans in Haryana that even the police tries not to interfere in `family matters’ and ministers like the appallingly uncultured Meena Mandal (who snapped at the TV cameras, claiming she did not know that a baby was involved in the whole case) refrain against taking a clear stand against the rigid and sometimes murderous caste systems. No wonder then that a marriage  against the community’s wishes ends up in tragedy. Recently, a brother in Rohtak committed a `honour killing’ by murdering his sister for marrying errantly.
What is it about institutionalized ideas, hegemonies of religion, marriage or caste that people are willing to forget the basic tenets of humanity to protect them? Is it that people identify themselves so strongly with their names, their rituals, their castes that anything even remotely threatening provokes them into defensive rage? Every bloody war or riot or street fight through history has been fought to defend the collective identity of one  group against another.
Any society where individuality is considered less important than collective identity will always engage in dehumanizing practices. A righteous mob or collective ideology without a conscience is the most dangerous thing in the world. Whether it takes a baby away from his parents or bombs Hiroshima or attacks Iraq or spawns suicide bombers or takes on the Babri Masjid with Trishuls in the name of Rama or  turns WTC towers into melting human and steel rubble in the name of Allah or rapes and murders in the name of honour/revenge, the justification is always the same. Every murder, every bomb, every crime is always about avenging or reiterating a cause that is bigger than the individual. The human cost of such beliefs is immeasurable and yet, there is no respite. Or maybe, there is. Atleast, now the media can report such falsehoods and we can become aware of the immoral morality of those who proclaim that they are acting in our best interest.       
Recently I received a call from a Delhi correspondent of an Irish newspaper, asking for information about the sweat shops being run by an international denim brand in Bangalore. I did not know of any such practices but a few days later Guardian, a London-based newspaper, reported that workers in Bangalore making clothes for prime UK brands are being paid a pittance for a 48-hour week.  For a long time, we have known about companies from Europe and America callously labour shopping in our hungry third world but nothing has been done to stop this.
Exploitation of child labour is not restricted to the 10,000 children in Punjab who stitch footballs for foreign brands but is rampant in local fire cracker industries, cheap eateries and homes. How many laws, inquiries and newspaper reports will it take before businesses, both big and small learn the importance of ethical practices?