THE DELHI VERDICT: A vote against neo-liberalism?

It was a pleasant surprise anti-fascists like me and even for the AAP leaders such as Yogendra Yadav . There were many celebratory or congratulatory messages all over the social network for the AAP which swept 67 of the 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly. In parallel , I came across some BJP leaders reacting by claiming that this time,their vote share acquired in the 2013 assembly elections has been kept intact at 32 percent and that the AAP has only eaten into the vote bank of the Congress. This contention did look convincing to me for a moment.

Still , I wanted to find out what had led to the meteoric rise of the Aam Aadmi within a span of 15 months from the last assembly elections.  Some newspapers categorically stated that Arvind Kejriwal's positive and spirited campaign highlighting local issues such as water, electricity and his meticulous efforts at changing his 'anarchist' image had been very successful among the Delhiites. Some other reports unanimously stated that Narendra Modi's approach of targeting Kejriwal's politics during his campaign rather than discussing Delhi's issues , the BJP's rejection of the 'benevolent' Harsha Vardhan's candidature for Chief Minister in favour of Kiran Bedi , the Sangh's attempts at reconversion through Ghar Wapsi campaign had proved counter productive for the BJP juggernaut. The above factors , to me looked like reasonably explaining the public acceptance of AAP as a fresh viable alternative to the banal ,desperate politics of the BJP-Congress legacy.

Why the 'neo liberal' angle ??

Soon , I could not but help comparing the present Assembly verdict with that of the Lok Sabha polls held in May 2014. I was surprised to find that the BJP had won 46 Percent of the Delhi votes in comparison with 32 percent accumulated by the AAP. That signifies a 14 Percent drop in the vote share of BJP in the current polls. This fact almost nullified the BJP's claims that the AAP had grown only on the fallow lands of the Congress and not on theirs.

Now I have a question  as to why did the BJP lose 14 percent within a short span of 9 months since the formation of the new government at the Centre ? Narendra Modi , as predicted has been continuing to live up to the expectations of a strong Prime Minister , single minded in implementing economic reforms unbending to the whims and fancies of his allies and the opposition. He has been perceived as being very dynamic in dealing with the international powers of the West , in beckoning the Indian diaspora to invest in their homeland , in speaking boldly on issues of sanitation and in cleaning India to Godliness through his 'revolutionary' Swachh Bharat campaign. Some sections of Indian middle class believes that the Modi- led BJP is a complete antithesis to the corrupt , ineffective and bureaucratic Singh- led UPA government. So why was the BJP trampled down in the Delhi polls ??

Let me look at the performance of the NDA from another perspective.  First,the NDA was instrumental in clearing the UPA's plans of increasing FDI in the insurance sector , a move which was opposed by them when they were in the opposition. Second, the Cabinet has been pressing its Environment Ministry hard to dilute the Forest protection laws so as to remove all legal and bureaucratic procedures hindering faster acquisition of mineral and forest wealth for private purposes. This was also a continuation of the policy of the erstwhile government. In the diesel price deregulation issue , the present Government gleefully accepted the baton from the outgoing one and completed the UPA's  run. Very recently the Modi Government accepted a weak Nuclear Liability agreement with the U.S which exempts the foreign nuclear suppliers of all liabilities in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. This was another UPA initiative that met with vehement resistance from  the BJP when it was in the opposition. Modi 's celebrated Smart Cities programme inevitably hinges upon the ordinance on LARR that amends the act by dismissing the need for Social Impact Assessment before acquiring land for any purpose thereby trashing the need to obtain consent from the affected families occupying the land. The NDA government well aware of the pathetic condition of Indian agricultural sector that has witnessed  the suicide of 2.5 lakh farmers over the last 20 years , has instructed the state to set a cap on Minimum Support Prices on agricultural products and to reduce state procurement of food grains.

Have the educated urban intelligentsia of Delhi taken note of the fact that the new government is faithfully following the path laid out by the previous disgraced Government and sometimes for carrying out unpopular decisions,  is exploring newer ways of circumventing the democratic procedures to favour corporate oligarchs imperiling the interests of the common people? Have they understood that the aforementioned actions of the Government comply fully with the prescriptions of neoliberalism ?  Does the 14 percent drop in vote share of the BJP reflect that ?

Or have the Indians traditionally for the last 20 years been changing governments fully cognizant of the merits and demerits of neoliberalism and its socio economic impact ? Have they realized that there is no politics without economics? Have they been aware of the fact that a few months ago ,Kejriwal had stated in a CII meeting that ' The government should have no business in business'?

Movie Review : The Straight Story (1999)

Try asking someone at random , what life means to him? He would probably say, in short, a struggle. The struggle could be to make his ends meet. Or  to come to terms with its vicissitudes and imposing realities. Call someone else and pose the same question. He might reply , life is trust. Trust in someone or something. Trust that things will start working for him or trust that he will get better to brave problems. But I believe, that there is another word that shall subsume all the aforementioned propositions about life. Journey. Is there anything else  that a ‘journey’ cannot encompass in its broad meaning or anything that a journey cannot teach man?

David Lynch , as many might have known, is an American film-maker who is known for his surrealist movies. For the only time in his career , in 1999, he was hired by Walt Disney studios to merely ‘direct’ an already completed script based on a quirky old man , whose resoluteness transcended human understanding . It was about a man who was able to cross 310 miles of his country to reunite with his estranged old brother, with the help of a, lawn mower. The movie was ‘The Straight Story’ starring a 79 year old part-time actor Richard Farnsworth. The movie speaks not only about man’s doggedness in the face of adversity but also about another unmistakable fact. The intangible potential that a journey possesses to transform man even after age has rendered him impenetrable to learning and insensitive to experience.

David Lynch seems to have taken the time tested route taught by the Japanese film maker Yasujiro Ozu, who was the master when it came to handling lives of aged people in movies. The film is laden with Ozu’s pillow shots of magnificent landscapes embedding vast farmlands and thin roads that pierce through their interminable length and breadth.  Even the old man’s conversations that border on moralizing  ,those that recount both the happy and doleful experiences of youth and the diverse yet benevolent characters that help him accomplish his challenging journey,  all remind of Ozu’s memorable fables.

The old man has sinned , in his youth , against his brother and has been separated for a long time .The old man has only one aim , in his last few years of his life- to meet his invalid brother after ten long years and relive his childhood with him. The journey spans a horrendous five weeks in all to complete. There are occasions when people whom he meets, offer to take the burden of transporting him safely to his destination. The old man declines each time with different , totally untrue reasons. But the fact is ,that he feels that it is his burden, his ‘cross’ and his alone.  He probably assumes that the carrying of his burden shall relieve him of his any past sins or of any hauntingly distressful memories he may have had with his brother.  He deeply wishes that when he meets his brother , he must be a clean man, a man who is as guileless as a child, as he was probably once.  It is in a sense, a return to his childhood. A virtual time travel. The journey , he believes, is a catharsis.

The film , no doubt relies on the masterful act of Richard Farnsworth , whose sunken eyes and overgrown beard adds to the melancholy that shrouds the life of Alvyn Straight.

The film has plenty of metaphors which are easy to recognize.  Alvyn’s route in the long highway is always on the margin of the road that probably denotes the place , we have assigned to our seniors in our ever impatient society.  The mini-chamber and the baggage which Alvyn carries behind, denotes his past that continues to influence , undermine and dictate the progress towards his future. However the most striking of Lynch’s symbols is the accompaniment of the Divine, signified by the pillow shots which keep hovering  over  the old man throughout his solitary sojourn, overseeing him , shepherding  him with help and succor whenever needed and taking him to his destination  with safety, finally ,vanishing into the stars.

Lynch tempers the poignance of the mood with very fine sprinklings of ironical humor during the course of the journey. The old man witnesses a car in front of him colliding against a crossing stag ultimately killing it. The motorist gets out of the car and begins to bewail her ill-fated daily trips to work that had been killing plenty of similar stags over the last few weeks. The scene beautifully segues  into the old man appropriating the unclaimed stag for his dinner purpose, only to find that he is surrounded by many more stags staring at his ‘ruthless’ act with helpless indignation.  The pre-climactic sequence is also special where , the old man finds his motor going dead suddenly , leading him to brood over the unexpected predicament .  We begin to anticipate the old man , deciding to cover the rest of the distance by walk, but soon , he takes the advice of a passing tractor-man , to try restarting his engine. He tries once and the engine comes alive to our surprise. Absurdity!!

The Straight Story is one of David Lynch’s lesser known works. Lynch infuses so much poetry into the narrative as much as he impregnates with strong messages , all the more reason to consider the movie as a very important work in modern American cinema. 

Movie Review : Yennai Arindhaal (2015)

Gautham Menon is an interesting film maker. For one , he identifies himself with the mainstream , yet his movie characters manage to be an extension of his own persona allowed to operate in stories that are essentially fantasies of either his own wish-fulfilment or crushing of hopes.

When Yennai Arindhal was announced a year back with Gautham teaming up with Ajith Kumar I was more intrigued than excited. My intrigue arose from what I saw as the incongruity of the ambitions of a nascent auteurist with that of one of the biggest stars of Tamil Cinema , who hails from a world where film making is more about rewriting box office records than engaging with the consciousness of the audience.

I was getting mixed reviews before I caught up with the film.The first half of YA was refreshingly Gautham Menon. The protagonist is Sathyadev , a hero who is more flesh-and-blood than his alter-egoes in Anbuselvan and Raghavan. He is portrayed as a loser for most part of his life. He wants to be a cricketer some day but is ordained by fate to pursue something else. He becomes a police officer at last to satisfy his inexplicable 'itch' of eliminating bad guys in the society. He one day finds his lady love , manages to win her affection and hence finds some direction to his life. Destiny usurps her on the eve of their marriage and hell breaks loose yet again for Satyadev. Enraged he storms into the den of his enemies and when he finds himself besieged on all sides , he lapses into ruing the irrationality of his vengeful instinct. He doesn't even know who murdered his love and does not have the 'instinct' of Raghavan to help him out. His weaknesses do not end there . Raghavan in VV effortlessly pinned down the defence of Aradhana against his offer of marriage , supplementing it with naming Maya as his only daughter, thereby hinting at his ascetic disinterest in marital consummation. Here Satyadev is no such ascetic , we are shown that he needs what a superhuman Raghavan would have no qualms in doing away with. These touches along with Satyadev's delightful conversations with his ethereal dad on issues of honesty and dutifulness promised rock solid drama in the second half when he is expected to march into the darker recesses of the big bad world.

The second half began even better with an anguish ridden Satya taking his daughter on a distant journey of self seeking and catharsis. The idea of the journey providing much needed redemption is nothing new in Gautham's cinema as seen previously in Varanam Aayiram. But I felt it worked here beautifully in a grimmer context. The four year exile ends with a memorable scene of the daughter offering her dad with the boots for the ‘coronation’. I was whistling inside my head by then.

But from then on, the problems began to surface when the film tried to transform into a thriller from a solid action drama. The transition is not really a bad idea but its execution is pathetic and it ends up rendering the elements of drama in the first half completely redundant. I could not even appreciate the well conceived sequence of Satya awaiting Victor's late night onslaught that never finally happens.( The scene reminded me of a  similar waiting sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight). It is a remarkable plan to show the hero and his preparations to counter the impending offensive of the bad guy rather than adopting the conventional way of allowing the villain to dominate for some time ,letting us feel the hero’s predicament, then introducing to us the hero’s counter to the offensive with the preparations behind it.

Barring that scene in the thriller episode, the film nowhere retains even the little amount of tension that it managed to create and the way Gautham brings about the denouement was very hurried and unconvincing.

Gautham Menon , from Varanam Aayiram began taking baby steps in moving away from his comfort zone, and still has not graduated from infancy. Gautham tried something new with his technique in Neethane Yen Ponvasantham , where he kept his leads away from the audience POV during sequences depicting  their conflict and also narrating the story from the side of a woman. For all its problems, there were moments of grace and it was comforting to see a successful film maker do something what an A.R.Murugadoss or Lingusamy  never wanted to. In YA, it is good that Gautham though has not proceeded forward, surely has not placed his foot backward.

When I walked out of the hall , all I could see was my prognosis of an unseemly combination of auteur-superstar ruining the final product coming true. It looked as impossible a combination as a restrained Satyadev teaming up with a too loud Victor , working together on a mission.