Given the reports I have read about the awfulness of the recent remake of "Umrao Jaan", I am thinking of re-watching the classic version (full movie on Youtube!) before bed tonight - nothing like "ugly" Naseeruddin Shah and "jokerish" Farouque Shaikh tangling with the beauty Rekha. It should nicely agument my recent detours into Hindustani classical music. Also this is an essay that touches upon the Urdu novel "Umrao Jaan Ada" on which the movie is based.

can be such a nice refrain of a poem, I think. Yet it was also (approximately) the title of a documentary (titled "Covered In Ashes") that I saw last night here, at the first Indo-American Film Festival. The documentarian's eye in this film takes a reverential look at the subset of the holy men - the Naga sadhus - who are found wandering up and down the Ganges river in India, plying their spiritual trade.

The main object of this documentary, supposedly, is to tag along a holy man as he tests and initiates an thriteen year old lad into his order, and as his disciple. Yet, it branches endlessly (and boringly because of lax editing) as it seeks to be somewhat comprehensive in its treatment - this means that you get to meet other holy men, who are shown smoking ganja, talking on cellphones, watching TV, toting trendy wrist watches, and dispensing religious cliches to the camera as they rub ashes over their bodies. As a documentary, this film is a complete failure but it perhaps works as a record of a Westerner's curious bewilderment at (and no perhaps, fascination with) the numerosity of religious experience to be had in India*. While I would have left half way through this documentary (as quite a few non-Indians in the audience did), I sat through it, mainly because of my personal history.

You see my parental great-grandfather , after a short sint in the world of family, work, business, and politics (he had spent approximately an year in a British Indian jail as a political prisoner/ Gandhian agitprop-er), abandoned the world, and covered himself with ashes. He was supposed to have attained "nirvana" of a kind, and more importantly (I would like to think since I am self important) passed down his restless questing genes down the chain of samsara to his progeny. And yes, he wrote some kickass poems invoking Rama (in the mode of Thayagaraja) too. This also means that I should stop blogging, and get to work on writing that book I want to write (a la Garcia Marquez turning his family's history into "One Hundred Years of Solitude") to chronicle this story.

* See Gita Mehta's "Karmacola: Marketing the Mystic East" for an excellent expose and antidote to such google-eyedness.