Over the top

by Guest Blogger Partha Banerjee

Caution: Don’t spend your time, money or patience on it. Believe me. I just did. By default, I’m now a free idiot.

Is the new-generation India so painfully dumb that it can’t understand the difference between truth and make-believe, reality and dream, or even fun and pain? Or, it’s way too complicated when it’s a new-wave Bollywood version of entertainment-awareness-social-change-cocktail served by Coke messiah Amir Khan?

When truth is layered-in with a fake cake in such a cumbersome way that you don’t really know which one to choose: cheap fun or grim reality? You want to be a part, if not protagonist, of the desperately-needed social change, but you know that something’s dead wrong in the messaging, and yet, you can’t quite figure out where the problem is. But you paid handsomely at the box office to get in, and you don’t want to come home not laughing or not crying. However hard you need to force yourself to do it, like a bad gas that simply wouldn’t pass. (Sorry, but Khan used the element plenty.)

Three hours of non-stop Hindi Blitzkrieg of dialoguing, monologuing, dancing, donkeying, monkeying, stomping, romping, jumping, kissing, pissing, sciencing, philosophizing, teaching, testing, teasing, cheating, beating, stealing, healing, sobbing, crying, tear-jerking, gate-crashing, driving, dying and birthing…you name it…just to drive on one message…like that bad gas…that it’s time the Indian supercolonial academia change…and free itself of learning by rote…and enter an era of free thinking!

Wow!

Unfortunately, every bit of masala Amir Khan and his idiots uses to cook up the story is straight from the dingiest Bollywood kitsch kitchen, where the entire purpose of filming is done around the known theme of profit by making the dumb dumber, and the dumber the dumbest. And when so many idiots are employed, free and licensed to teach free thinking to new-generation India, it’s no more a dream. It’s a nightmare.

It’s a nightmare just to sit through the three endless hours of plotting, subplotting, sub-subplotting, flashbacking and backflashing. It’s three hours of a very painful trial. Trial of your civility, social skills and patience. When completely disgusted after an hour and a half into the show, you just want to stand up, scream, kick the back of the front seat in the darkness of the theater, and leave. But you can’t. After all, you’re not really free to do that. Even an idiot wouldn’t do it.

My readers, friends, supporters and especially my critics always want to know what my problem is: why can’t I simply get some fun and be happy with fun and happy stuff? Why do I always have to be such a naysayer and badmouther at every Bollywood benchmark? After all, what’s so cool about always blasting big media and thereby making myself depressed, even more so than ever before? I did that with notable, famed and prospered big-ticket items such as Born Into Brothels and Slumdog Millionaire; I’m now web-spewing the same, predictable criticism of another big blockbuster that’s taking Indian families by storm — both in India and abroad! Why can’t I make some peace with reality, and learn to live with it?

Yeah, that’s a serious mental case, indeed.

Now, people are so tired of rave reviews, critiques and eulogies that 3 Idiots (I’m sure you’ve long figured it out) got, it wouldn’t be wise to do a shot-by-shot, sequence-by-sequence post-mortem, although one would be tempted to do it, just for the “fun.” I’d rather select a handful only for a hindsight.

1. The opening sequence of idiot Farhan’s faked illness on a just-took-off Air India plane. (Please don’t try it. You’ll be quickly arrested, beat up and jailed, maybe, even on terrorism charges). The once-wildlife-photographer-aspirant, father-forced engineering student, who’s now suddenly an accomplished photographer with a number of books out, gets a call from one Rancho, his face turns green, as if scared to death. But Rancho, they later tell us, is only his pal, his soul brother he met ten years ago — calling from some unknown place for some unknown reason. But to answer him, Farhan decides to feign a heart attack on board, and forces the pilots to turn around for an emergency landing. He then walks out of his wheelchair with a simple comic gesture, and dissolves into the street crowd.

(My critic: “But didn’t you get the fun, you wet blanket? Oh, it was so funny! Loved it.”)

2. Rancho straps himself with idiot Raju’s critically ill, paralyzed father on a scooter, and drives him to hospital for a save, thereby meeting his doctor girlfriend Pia who was also, as it turns out, daughter of the Hitler-ish college director. (Please don’t try this method to save a patient. You’ll kill them; and law will quickly get back to you. Unless you’re an Indian Amir or a member of his now-famous idiot club). In my time I’ve seen quite a few Bollywood insanities, and this one would definitely make a short list. And it’s so inhumane to the point of cruelty, only to match with Raju’s poor mother scratching his bed-ridden husband’s eczema with a roller pin and then using it to make rotis for her son and his invited friends.

(Critic: “Ha ha, was it funny! Laugh laugh laugh…giggle giggle giggle…”)

3. A climax-subclimax drama of idiot Rancho and his idiot Indian engineering gang delivering Pia’s sister Mona’s baby at the college, taking online-video instructions from Pia. (Please don’t try it, period). Other than the totally ludicrous and nonsense drama of the pingpong-tabletop-childbirthing under Rancho’s stewardship and collective laboring, the corniness is simply absurd and truly unbearable. I’ve never seen so many otherwise healthy-looking men crying so much, so pathetically.

(Critic: “You just don’t get it. It was a metaphor, a symbol, a dream scenario. Like, this is how it should be. It’s an Amir utopia. He’s making the young generation think. Love it.”)

I have another metaphor in my mind. In ten years the movie spans, no one idiot grows up. Telling, the globalized Indian generation considered. We might say, not ten, it’s twenty.

I have a feeling had one looked carefully, they could even find those idiots wearing the same stars-and-stripes underpants they wore ten years ago. The ones they flashed globally. That was “balatkar” indeed, in my opinion.

Ah…”All Izz Well.”

Partha Banerjee is a New York-based writer, teacher and media and human rights activist .

Burma watchers get used to hearing about the grizzly punishments meted out upon the countries dissenting voices. This week however the military junta returned to worrying ways when it sentenced two of its own to death. Others were sentenced under Burma’s seemingly ludite ‘electronics act’. Which is a surprisingly broad act that can be applied to anyone who uses anything ‘tech’.

Majors Win Naing Kyaw and Thura Kyaw were given the death sentence for leaking a report about a weapons shopping trip that a senior junta member made to North Korea and of details of a bizarre tunnel network that Pyongyang is apparently helping to build in Burma, whilst the electronics act was applied to 3 others presumably for having some part in the act of transmitting the data.

It comes only days after a journalist, Hla Hla Win, was jailed for 20 years simply for working for my own organisation, the Democratic Voice of Burma. He was convicted on new year’s eve, a day before the country’s promised election year on its ‘road map to democracy’.

Which is what is so troubling about such sensitivity towards information, the horrible truth, not unlike discovering that, as suspected, one’s wife is having an affair, is that the junta probably have no intention of delivering anything resembling accountable governance or freedom of expression and association.There has, as yet been no official date for an election, with speculation and rumour variously suggesting March or October. With most opposition groups refusing to take part, largely due to the last mass exercise in polling, a referendum on a 2008 constitution, that was roundly dismissed.

Indeed in keeping with Burma’s dictatorial traditions it was illegal to campaign against the constitution and passed with over 98% of the supposed vote, indeed people I have met say that shortly after they were battered by cyclone Nargis survivors names were taken and simply marked as yes votes by the village head, at the behest of the millitary. The document is deeply ‘undemocratic’ insuring that military personnel cannot be prosecuted by civilian courts and guaranteeing that at least 25% of parliamentary seats be assigned to the military amongst other such legal offenses to the notion of democracy.

The serious millitary projects such as the tunnels and the other Korean acquisitions also betray an insincerity towards civilian government. Ever since the pivotal protests of the late 80’s and early 90’s when Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as the leader of the democratic opposition the military has drastically increased numbers of men and expenditure on foreign hardware. The relationship with North Korea has predictably lead to fears that the generals want to join the nuclear club. All have ultimately been to perpetuate the institution of military rule.

People wait eagerly for the ‘elections’, whether with genuine hope or just for any sense of change, anything to break the monotony of military rule, but as two men wait to meet their end for leaking a document, what is probably best, as Robert Mugabe used to say about himself; ‘Watch what I do, not what I say’.

Joseph Allchin

Mass-Murder on CCTV

CCTV clips now give us an unprecedented ringside view of blasts, blood and carnage, making voyeurs of us all. The suicide bombers of the Southasian Northwest tend to blow themselves up in public spaces or secured spots that have close-circuit television cameras as a matter of course. Such video sentinels do little to prevent the carnage, but do provide us with graphic real-time playback of the last tragic moments of the unfortunate victims.

At the Marriot Hotel blast in Islamabad, 20 September 2008, a truck comes to a halt at the gate. There is a small explosion and resultant fire in the driver’s compartment. The guards scatter, then mill about in confusion. One comes up with a fire extinguisher and gingerly starts spraying the cabin. Then the blast happens.

At the gates of the Peshawar Press Club on 22 December, Tuesday, three men are talking in the slanting sunshine. A man walks up to the gate, and constable Riaz Uddin goes up to check him out. The on-screen clock turns 22:45:17 (undoubtedly set wrong) the detonation takes place and flying dust immediately covers the screen. A side camera shows the wildly swinging gates after the blast, no one is left standing.

A week later, on 28 December, a CCTV camera looking down over the M.A. Jinnah Road in Karachi shows the Ashura procession, thousands walking calmly down the boulevard. The front row is about 100 across, full of banners. The mass reaches back as far as the camera’s eye can see. The procession approaches a traffic crossing. Suddenly, about fifty or so deep in the crowd, on the far side, a blast erupts. It rips through the crowd, the dazed procession survivors scatter, and a momentary mushroom cloud develops overhead.

Given such easily available CCTV footage, we are now provided with access to images of blasts that kill and maim, without actually viewing the blood and gore. The very nature of the footage tends to maintain a distance between the victims and the onlookers – there is no zoom nor pan from the automated camera. All of that is left to the television reporters that will arrive before long. Alongside, private television channels manage to get the publicly held CCTV footage to the public in no time, while the victims are still being rushed to hospital.

Just as warfare by remote-controlled drones has been introduced to the world through Northwest Southasia, so has this new way of viewing carnage become specific (thus far) to the Subcontinent. One question arises in my mind, it must give the planners of these gruesome killings of the innocent through suicide bombers a macabre sense of achievement. These mass murderers are able to see the success of their project almost as it is carried out. At the same time, the public gets to see the graphic horror of a suicide bomber at work.

Is it appropriate to broadcast CCTV footage of bomb blasts? I think not, because it provides murderers a sense of gruesome fulfilment and probably whets their appetite for more.