Morning Raga

Worth the watch, mainly because the music is so much fun.

Here's how I hope this film was made:

A film maker was listening to Sudha Raghunathan singing Thaiye Yashoda. She was moved, moved to tears imagining the love of Yashoda - the foster mother who loved Krishna and Balarama as her own sons. She felt sad that Yashoda is not celebrated in popular culture. Bollywood is saturated with Nirupa Roy like mother characters, who draw on the Jungian archetype of Kunti. But where are the characters like Yashoda? Or Radha - the charioteer's wife who loved Karna as her own son?

So the filmmaker decided to set things right. Despite not having much money, she decided to make a film that showcases both the spirit of Yashoda and Sudha Raghunathan's rendition of Thaiye Yashoda, and to give both a contemporary multi-cultural flavour. And so she made Morning Raga.

If that's how the film was conceived, it worked. Because the last scene, the rock concert in a Deccan fortress with a pulsating Carnatic fusion performance of Thaiye Yashoda, it was cathartic. It washed away 90 minutes of grumbling about amphigory art-house films.

By the way, or, bye the bye, do not watch this scene for the first time on Youtube. I considered posting a link and decided against it. The sense of catharsis, and the emotional resonance of Thaiye Yashoda are greater for having sat through the whole film.

Before the grumbles, what else worked?

Location. Or was it Rajiv Menon's camera work? Almost every location was a visual treat...the traditional south Indian home, the temple, the rock fortress where the concert was held, the bridge.

More music. Pibare Ramarasam was sung beautifully by Kalyani Menon, Rajiv Menon's mother. The reflective, introspective way it was sung made more sense in the context of the movie. The beat version of Mahaganapathim was also fun.

Associations. The film brought back memories of Shankarabharanam and Shubha Mudgal's Ab ke Sawan, both favourites.

Shabana Azmi and Nasser were excellent, as usual.

And the newcomer Sanjay Swaroop was brilliant as a restaurant owner. He asks a searching and insightful question about whether Indian youngsters who want to be rockers think they white, or black? In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to declare that I am generally sympathetic to Sanjay Swaroop. His father, Lakshman Swaroop, is a dashing sportsman who played cricket and hockey for the Madras Cricket Club, and was once featured in a print advert for Enfield Bullet motorcycles.

And the grumbles?

The script and acting were cringe-worthy.

Prakash Rao played Abhinay, the central character, Krishna to Shabana Azmi's Yashoda. He reminded me of the cricketer Yuvraj Singh. The only emotion he communicated was angry, disgruntled arrogance. Though his task wasn't made any easier by the scripting, like "I don't want to write jingles for bubble gum. I want to make music that is remembered for five hundred years. Like the Charminar."

Other cringe-worthy elements included a psychedelic-shirted, wild-haired drummer called Bajali. Alias Bals. Not Balls, just Bals. A guitar player who is stares in fascination at women's bottoms and (literally) gets picked up off the street. A villager who talks to his cow, Annapurna. A south-Bombay-ish socialite who scandalizes the villager by leaning on his arm. Pleeze. A stylish script is the one thing a budget film can afford.

But don't walk out on the film even when the cringes start to hurt. Redemption is around the corner. The cringes make the cleansing release of Thaiye Yashoda that much more welcome.

The Point of County Cricket

Here is Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the eve of a gripping finale to the county cricket season:

...county cricket... fulfil its primary function, the production of a sufficient supply of tough England cricketers for the rigours of the international circuit...

What?

Surely the point of playing county cricket is to win the county championship. At least 90% of the England qualified players competing for the championship have no real chance of playing for England. If nobody cares about winning the championship, not even CMJ, its not surprising that the county scene has "greater issues".

What really got me was that this was not CMJ's main point. It was a point made in the passing. In CMJ's mind, county cricket being nothing more than a talent screening service for international cricket is an unremarkable truism.

Unfortunately, what CMJ thinks is usually a good reflection of what the ECB establishment thinks. They seem to have learnt the wrong lesson from the BCCI's success and concluded that the point of cricket is to promote national pride through international success.

The point of the English Premiership is not to produce England internationals. The point of the ATP Tour is not to produce Davis Cup heroes. The point of the IPL is not to produce Indian internationals. These contests are worthwhile as ends in themselves. Players push themselves to the limit because they care about winning. That intensity of effort, that edge, is what produces the drama which brings in the fans. National flags don't need to be flying for sport to fascinate.

And what terrible timing to be damning the county game with faint praise.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the finale to this season's championships. Notts, the team I support, are in the race. Notts' victory march has just been checked by Imran Tahir, an exciting young leggie from Natal. I'm clicking into Cricinfo between meetings to check the latest scores on Notts v. Hampshire, Somerset v. Lancashire and Durham v Kent. Sky Sports are covering the Notts game live. Exactly what the guys responsible for marketing county cricket should have been praying for.

Anybody want to swap Mark Mascarenhas for CMJ?

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.

Schism in the Soul?

Many elites in the United States are disavowing what is best in our culture and imitating what is worst. Some are trying to reinvoke old norms and reverse the process, but most are succumbing to "proletarianization." This rift is similar to ones experienced historically by disintegrating civilizations.

These words were written by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute in 2001. Charles Murray is both an arch-conservative and a genuine intellectual. Murray is invoking Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, a chapter beautifully titled Schism in the Soul.

In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a "lapse into truancy" (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship) and a "surrender to a sense of promiscuity" (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that "are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of 'proletarianization.'"

Murray was writing in the aftermath of the Clintonian scandals, when the meaning of "surrender to promiscuity" was obvious.

Eight years later, what does this election tell us about the spirit of America, and more generally of of Western Civilization? Is the schism in America's soul going to heal? Or widen?

In Obama and Palin, both parties have nominated candidates from outside the traditional elite, candidates from what Toynbee would have called the internal proletariat. Is the internal proletariat aspiring to be a part of what is best about America? Toynbee would consider this a sign of a healthy growing civilization.

Or is the internal proletariat rejecting the values of the American elite, invoking a mythic "archaist" indentity, and hastening the disintegration of a great civilization? Time will tell. Either way, for an observer like me, this is politics at its most compelling.

My Blueberry Nights and the Theory of Script Writing

All great stories are built around one essential element: somebody wants something really badly, and has difficulty getting it.

Frodo Baggins really wants to destroy the ring. Dorothy really wants to go home to Kansas. Jai and Veeru really want to get Gabbar Singh. Bhuvan, in Lagaan, really wants to beat the British. Hamlet really wants to avenge his father's death. Romeo really wants Juliet. There is no story if Romeo and Juliet are just sort of fond of each other. Or if the Montagues and Capulets are willing to let bygones be bygones.

My Blueberry Nights fails because it ignores this basic rule.

Its about a charming, pretty and kind girl (Norah Jones) who is abandoned by her boyfriend. She leaves her apartment keys with a hunky guy who owns a cafe (Jude Law), sets off on a journey to nowhere specific, randomly runs into interesting people on the way, and returns to New York to fall into the arms of the hunky guy who runs the cafe. At no stage is the desire powerful enough, or the obstacle to attaining that desire steep enough, for the viewer to care about what happens next.

The real tragedy is that so much good work is wasted because of this lack of purpose. There is a beautifully crafted sub-plot about an alcoholic cop. Natalie Portman is electric in a bit role as a roving gambler. The sound track is moody and hypnotic. The photography is completely stunning. Not enough; because film isn't about visual technique. It's about story-telling.

Michael Mukherjee, Ayman al Zawahiri and a liberal education

Watched and enjoyed the Mani Ratnam film Yuva recently. This got me thinking about social change, revolution, terror and education...a train of thought led to me being an even more ardent fan the American ideal of a broad, liberal university education. Like, for example, the core College curriculum at the University of Chicago, which my cousin Shakti just finished. Probably not the point Mani Ratnam wanted to make. But then, that is why minds have windmills.

Yuva features Abhishek Bachchan as Lallan Singh: a violent underworld hit-man with a thread of gold running through his heart. Lallan Singh works for powerful establishment politicians. Ajay Devgan features as Michael Mukherjee: an idealistic middle-class student of Physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. Michael has many friends and a very gorgeous girlfriend who teaches French. He turns down a scholarship offer from MIT, takes on the violence of Lallan Singh and his wicked, venal political masters, and promises to change the system by standing for election as Mr Clean. He duly wins the election. The movie ends with Michael and friends striding confidently into the Bengal assembly. The implied feel-good conclusion is that Michael's idealism will reform the system.

What started me on the train of of thought was that I found Michael Mukherjee's idealism more scary than Lallan Singh's violence. Michael was sure. He was never in doubt. He never paused to re-consider. He never changed his mind. He couldn't have. Michael's charisma stems from his conviction, in his own personal integrity and in the completeness of his ideas. And, while Ajay Devgan isn't a gifted actor, yet he played Michael perfectly, instinctively. I know real people like Michael, people who derive their sense of self from ideological conviction.

People who share Michael's conviction are often revolutionaries. Could be the Communist Revolution, the Islamist Revolution, the Environmental Revolution, the Freedom Movement, racist supremacists, religious evangelists of any hue…you get the picture. What Michael Mukherjee and all these people share is a world view that is complete. When this world view is adopted, the mind comes to rest. The psyche now has the basis for action. The action is usually both bloody and futile, because the real world is never that simple.

Was it just chance that Michael Mukherjee was a student of physics?

A theory I heard from Professor Ahmet Evin suggests not. Professor Evin was lamenting the (relative) failure of modern Turkey to create a vital civil society. He attributed this to the fact that the Turkish leadership, and therefore all of Turkey, prizes a technical education above a liberal one. The Engineer’s Mind tends to see society as a problem to be solved with a simple, specific and well-designed intervention. Not as an amorphous mass of humanity which needs to be inspired, jollied and cajoled towards another amorphous vision of beauty, virtue and justice (or words to that effect).

While this has to be unfair to my many well-read engineer friends, this theory really resonated with me, as an Indian. My friends from China and Mexico tell me the same narrowness of vision is true of their countries as well.

The prevalence of a technical education among the Al Queda top brass is fascinating. Osama bin Laden is a civil engineer, apparently a pretty good one. Ayman al Zawahiri is a medical doctor. His fellow Al Queda ideologue, Dr. Fadl, is also a medical doctor. Mohamed Atta is an architect who did a Masters degree in Urban Planning at Hamburg University. The pattern is clearly not perfect: Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s ideologue, had apparently read up on the Vedanta and Buddhism. But there still seems to be a pattern here.

The problem could only be the dog that did not bark. A solid base of engineering knowledge could hardly be a bad thing, in any circumstances. The problem might be that these smart, sensitive, idealistic young people, who were going to be influential in their societies anyway, had no exposure to history, politics or law. They knew nothing of the genius of the Medici family in making the Renaissance possible in tiny, vulnerable medieval Florence. They knew nothing of C. Rajagopalachari’s dissenting views on Indian socialism, and on organizing independent India into language based states. They never wrestled with the differing world views of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, or with Friedrich Hayek's notion of The Fatal Conceit, the conceit that societies can be engineered.

Maybe, in that half light between education and ignorance, it is easy to imagine that building one mega-dam, or embracing the one true faith, or ridding the world of one hated oppressor, or anointing one master race, or detonating that one perfect suicide bomb, is the key to liberation.

In that case, the point of an education should surely be to dispel that half-light. Education, as opposed to technical training, should be about exposing plastic minds to this dazzling diversity of thought, none of which are complete or correct.

This, unfortunately, is a concept of education alien to Indian Universities. In India, understandable middle class anxiety frames education as a means to earn a decent living. I'm fairly close to my company's graduate hiring program at British Universities. I don't often run into this ideal in Britain either, where 18 year olds are encouraged to make definitive choices between chemical engineering, medicine or architecture. Though the PPE program at Oxford points in this direction. This ideal seems to be best developed in America, where a liberal university education often precedes technical specialization, therefore cultivating humanity.