and a country of mind divided

because of movies.

…

Before I went to bed, I thought of writing a small review-ish note to self on watching a movie, “Hyderabad Blues -2” (HYDB -2) two evenings ago when I was laid up in bed with a case of a screwed up stomach. For those of us who had enjoyed and raved about the original makeshift movie that was “Hyderabad Blues”, way back in 1998, Nagesh Kuknoor’s 2004 sequel to his original urban sleeper hit, which attempts to carry that story a bit further, maybe a bit of a letdown, if not a total drag.

This might be because Kuknoor had moved up the Indian cinematic ladder in those six years, i.e., he had become mainstreamed or Bollywood-ized. Consequently, HYDB-2, in spite of retaining the same non-professional acting cast, lacks the personal memoir-as-film feel that the original movie had. Besides, after that abortion of an ending of “Hyderabad Blues” (two lovers who broke up, break up their marriages in progress to others in progress to wed each other), Kuknoor should have perhaps left HYDB - an excellent restatement of that old truism “you can’t ever go back home” – very well alone. But he didn’t, and so the viewer gets to meet the same cast of characters again, speeded up six years.

One meets the now married protagonist [who labeled himself, by mistake I suppose, American Indian - dude, those are the feathers and war paint folks, not the dot wearing Indian Americans - in HYDB -1], running a call center in Hyderabad, i.e., putting his still unmolested American accent to good use. I suppose this is how the world became Thomas Friedman-ically Flat in this series of urban Indian movies. The movie plot etc doesn’t deserve a comment other than that it is an almost regular marital melodrama that one often encounters in desi “fillums”. The saving grace is the conversational dialogue, even though many of the punch lines have already made their appearance previously in Kuknoor’s oeuvre. So we have the actors conversing mostly in English, laced with potent Hyderabadi (yes, it is a language in itself), and some extremely tortured Telugu. In other words, a near linguistic self portrait of yours truly that, perhaps, cuts too close to the bone. One final comment: one positive upside of having larger budget was that HYDB-2 has two very lovely and must-listen songs by a Pakistani band “Fuzon”; here is my translation of “Mora Saiyan”, one of these two songs.

…

After watching HYDB-2 as I began writing out my impressions, I decided to YouTube for clips from that movie so that folks who may have not seen it can get a flavour of what I was talking about. Instead I ran into clips of this really old black and white Telugu movie, “Maabhoomi”, directed by Gautham Ghosh. Btw, these clips have English subtitles. I had heard of this movie before in connection with the New Wave film movement in Telugu cinema that was essentially engineering by Bengali directors with their ground breaking movies in what was (and is even more today) a mindless Telugu “fillum” industry; these movies were Ghosh’s Maabhoomi, Shyam Benegal’s Anugraham, and Mrinal Sen's Oka Oori Katha. Also look at this article for a summary of offbeat Telugu cinema.

Watching clips from Maabhoomi, set in feudalistic Nizam Hyderabad right after watching Blues-2 set in Cyberbad was quite a shock; a shock because what is shown in these clips still exists in India, even though outsiders watching HYDB-2 might come to think the concerns of most Indians are now existentialist in nature just like anywhere else, such as whether to have a baby or not after five or six years of marriage rather than how to pay off debts, how to feed the family, or how to simply not kill oneself by drinking insecticide as many farmers are now doing in rural India. The latter are themes that run through Maabhoomi, only under a slightly different guise.

This brings to my mind a memory from my childhood of watching a Telugu movie “Aakali Rajyam” (The Country of Hunger) on tape at home. Aakali Rajyam is a movie that deals with unemployment of educated youth in late 1970s India. The anti-hero of this movie is a revolutionary poetry chanting (Sri Sri’s no less, a sample from my memory translated into English from Telugu: “Is this some living, my friends?/ This living like stray dogs and pigs in the alley/ Is this some living, my friends?) philosophy graduate (played superbly by Kamalahasan) who ends up in Delhi, singing wonderful songs such as:

“saapadu etu ledhu paata aiynaa paadu brother Rajadhani nagaramu lo veedhi veedhi manadhe brother” (Since there is nothing to eat, why don’t you atleast sing a song brother? In this capital city of ours, each and every street belongs to us brother)

to ward off hunger and despair. In particular, there is a wonderful scene in this movie when the heroine (played by Sridevi) comes to visit the hero and his roommates all of whom are unemployed, and are waiting with resignation to get an interview letter. In this state of penury, they also end up pooling clothes and money for food. In the beginning of this scene Kamalahasan is lounging in his underwear for there are only two lungis for three people when Sridevi knocks on the door. Then he quickly wraps a straw mat around himself like a lungi and asks her to sit down. She says “why don’t you do the same instead of standing?”, and he says “I better not, or this lungi might tear”.

This segues to Sridevi asking them if they have eaten lunch (they were invited by her earlier to go with her to the audition of a play) and if they were ready to leave. One of the roommates accidentally says “not yet”. Then Sridevi insists that eat there lunch before they leave as it might be late by the time they return. What follows is a piece of priceless satire in which the three roommate use water as rice, as curry, as sambar, with Sridevi watching them all the while through a window. When she can’t take it anymore, she enters the kitchen, and one of the three roommates, unaware that she is watching them, pretends to have eaten too much by letting out a satisfied belch. Kamalahasan slaps him on the back of the head and quips, “this fellow is given to too much overacting.”

What remains in my mind is not just this scene, wonderfully acted as it was, but my reaction and that of my father’s who was watching this movie again with me and my sister. I couldn’t contain myself because of the satire and I was rolling around the floor laughing uncontrollably, while my father was getting angrier with my antics. At that instant I couldn’t really fathom why my father was angry to what I found was a funny scene. It was only later when I looked at the path he had taken (leavening home in his late teens, working odd jobs in building construction until into his twenties, till he managed to find a clerical/typist job in a government company) that I realized what I found to be satiric can be very painful as well.

I suppose since then, I live with this awareness of such dichotomies; dichotomies such the facile existential doldrums I construct for myself sometimes (as does the main protagonist of HYD Blues -2) vs. the more severe aches of homelessness, hunger, and disempowerment (as captured brilliantly in Ghosh’s “Maabhoomi” – which by the way was surprisingly also a box office hit!) that many people still labor under all over the world. Useful awareness to have…on a night that is divided.