Monday, February 23, 2009

It lured me into dreams
I couldn’t tell it from the shadows
On your painted wall-paper.

I followed my fear
Into the den of magic neons
Burning bright beside the bed.

There’s a princess
And six apples inside the casket,
Tired looking and pale.

Even without my senses
I could have sworn on
Lifelessness of aeons before my time.

There I closed my eyes
With you sharpening against my vigil
And a weary princess staring hard
At the casket, before the sun is out.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

..............

Jonmechhi aageo aami, jawkhon tumi Padmabati
kawbekaar pnuthir sholok tomaar mawtoi osrumoti.

Osrur ekti phnotaay jonmo aamar, aamar mawron
nirobey jaatishmor er golpo bawlaa tomaar dhoron;
jhorechho aageo awnek, brishti hoye aabar jhawro,
ey kemon kaanna tumi aamay jokhon aador kawro!

-Kabir Suman

It will be all for today.


Sunday, February 15, 2009

Remember?

Freedom is a word I rarely utter without thinking of her…..

It’s almost one of those clichéd little stories you come across every now and then. A story about me and my loss of liberty, a story about me and your loss of liberty, a story about you and my loss of liberty, a story about us and our loss of liberty.

The piper at the gate of dawn shrieks like a banshee, out of some infamous folklore. You took away my flute, just as someone had taken away yours. We both now live inside the rusty cage of golden inhibitions. Amiable, ain’t it? Only if we could play our flutes like we did before….

All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

A methodological take on the Slumdog movie

Any form of art is an expression of subterranean human effort. You may not feel the rigour while observing it and yet it is there, almost like a tribute to the tremendous power of the human mind. However one might try to conceal the effort, it shows. Art and its aesthetic appeal always suffer from the danger of foppery. This is precisely why the tale of a slumdog fails to reach the benchmark of mediocrity, even when it promises to tie a knot between surreal drama and an otherwise biting reality.

Mediocre cinema we grew up with. It is not of that realm. Strangely enough, it is not from the top drawer either. It tried to take the middle road, one of the most interesting vistas of India explored by stalwarts like Tapan Sinha, Basu Bhattacharya, Gulzar and others. In taking that path, it fails to keep up the rhythm of storytelling and confuses between the genre of real fantasy and fantastic reality. While it uses up the glitz of Bollywood to tone up the movie, in trying to adjust the shades it forgets to make a salutary notation to the touch of entertainment. Moreover, it never tries to humanise poverty to get rid of its grotesque Bollywoodness. No matter how unique the selling point has become, because of this dichotomy, or because how this dichotomy provokes the unique selling point of the movie, the poverty-porn tag is going to haunt it for quite sometime.

Let's talk about the last kiss [of course, it’s the first one too] with an ear-splitting background score. Even within the probable boundaries of magic reality, the kiss looks mawkish. The genre of magic reality transcends the boundary of its own probabilistic domain because of this mawkish outcry of directorial emotion, and the last kiss turned into the act of last rite for the movie itself. It became a hotchpotch of so many stylistic attempts at one go. Apart from some non-profit-organisation-boardroom-humour and cheap imitations of shanty-town-dialect [In Hindi of course; they usually speak idiomatic English, with ridiculous accents, bless magic reality!!!], this movie fails to touch the tip of real possibility.

It is only a concoction of confused genres.