How a Savage became a Citizen?

The below article is my attempt at understanding human history of civilization through the writings of Friedrich Engels' The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State. Engels in his theory links the creation of family to the origin of private property which ultimately birthed the state.

Engels begins his narrative from the phase of human history which he calls by the name 'Age of Savagery'. The age is characterised by the classification of human societies as 'tribes' which ultimately formed its smallest social unit. People had not yet learned to split themselves into the present day social units called 'families'.There had not yet been any kind of political divisions such as provinces or nationalities since there was no concept of even a 'governing state' as yet. This eventually meant that there was no king or an associated police force or an army and hence no need for taxation that shall support the state apparatus.

People heavily depended upon hunting for subsistence and whatever came out of it was shared equally among the tribe. People occupied their inhabiting lands as a whole tribe and since there was no further subdivision of the society there was no need to split and distribute land for individual or family possession.

The mother-right:

This kind of primitive society allowed people to mate among themselves and there had not yet been any restriction on part of the individual when it came to choosing sexual partners. People mated freely with their siblings, uncles or aunts and even with sons or daughters. As time progressed, there was need for some kind of restriction due to various reasons and tribes decided to prohibit people from engaging in what we call now as 'incest'. A tribe was eventually split into a 'gen'. This subdivision forced women to marry/mate with any men but not with those belonging to their own gens. Hence there was officially allowed polygamy in place even after restrictions had been imposed within the tribe.

At various places in the book, Engels tries to find out the point from where the tribe begins to get rid of polygamy and move towards monogamy. There is a Greek legend which speaks about the story of a son slaying his mother who killed his father since he had objected to her mating with another man. Engels posits that 'jealousy' on part of the male which ultimately led to killings and destruction would have forced the tribe to implement a new form of marriage which goes by the name 'group marriage'.

According to this custom, a group of men belonging to a gens within a tribe shall enjoy conjugal association with a specific group of women belonging to another gens. From this point onwards, the communal property which had so far been accumulated by the tribe and belonging to them as a whole, began to be split among its subdivisions- gens. In other words, with relation to property each gens had become a separate 'tribe'. This necessitated the development of new regulations with respect of dividing property among the gens. The regulations were strongly in favour of the mother lineage or mother-right which meant that on the death of the mother, the property belonging to the mother's gens will remain within the gens and will not be enjoyed by her husband since he belongs to the other gens. This phase of human development is of tremendous importance since this marks the beginning of division of property which was hitherto common to the whole tribe and hence indivisible.

During these times women were equally involved with men with respect to occupation and even after the emergence of agriculture, men could not deprive women of their position in the society.

Primitive democracy:

The tribe or the aggregation of gens had a 'council' that did not allow unrestricted power to any individual especially in times of peace. The military commander could issue orders only when they had to fight and could be deposed by the council if people unanimously voted him out. All decisions were reached democratically and no individual's opinion had a higher precedence over that of others.

It is to be noted that wars were fought only as a result of personal enmity that could have been triggered by say, an abduction of a woman from a tribe by another, etc. These wars were not fought over material possessions most of the time which is a way of saying that there was no need of plunder since most of the tribes were economically self-sufficient. They produced through agriculture or hunting whatever they needed and consumed it themselves. Since wars were far and few, there was no need for the masses to rally behind a single individual who would promise them safety to ensure their survival. When an individual was hurt, the tribe as a single unit felt that it was their duty to avenge it and this ensured wholesome participation in their assault. In other words, it was 'all for one and one for all'.

Monogamy and the rise of 'family':

As time progressed, man was becoming a 'barbarian' from being a 'savage' as Engels puts it. This phase of human development had already witnessed the splitting of tribes into numerous gens each of which had already graduated into becoming a separate tribe. As you may have already noted, this division was created owing to restrictions in marriage. By this time among various tribes in different parts of the world, there were newer rules that prohibited free marriages significant among them being 'the sibling nature of nephew/niece'. None could marry their nephew or niece or cousins which in course of time led to some inchoate set of prescriptions as to who should marry whom. Some groups of gens described themselves as a 'phratry' which means 'brother gens'. Hence marriage was not possible within the phratry even if one was to marry someone belonging to another gens of the phratry, since it was tantamount to marrying his/her own sibling. These restrictive practices slowly eliminated group marriages and with it the practice of polygamy. Please note that the concept of phratry and elimination of polygamy were not born together and that the latter was a result of passing of many generations of such restrictive practices in marriage.

It is to be noted that the emergence of phratries had brought with them newer restrictions with respect to property relations.

The elimination of polygamy slowly gave rise to monogamy which prohibited adultery on the parts of both male and female. Thus monogamy further split the hitherto smallest social division of gens into an even smaller unit- the 'family'. The man, his wife and children composed of a family and hence the property relations were radically altered during this phase. People who had hitherto accumulated property for their tribe or gens began to do the same for their families.

One remarkable event that probably coincided with the advent of 'family' was the division of labor among societies. In earlier societies there were not many occupations that a tribe had to engage themselves in, for the sake of subsistence. They hunted game, gathered fruit and sometimes involved themselves in horticulture. This did not require a diverse set of skills and each member of the tribe were able to manage all of them seamlessly. Man slowly learned to rear cattle for wool, meat and milk which was an entirely different occupation from hunting which meant immediate killing of an animal for immediate consumption. Man also learned fishing and even mining of metals to improve his agriculture and other household activities. Hence human intelligence led to development of science which expanded man's avenues to diversify his means of subsistence. A single individual obviously cannot master all these occupations since each occupation required a specific set of skills that need to be cultivated in him right from his childhood.

The atomization of society into smaller units of families came in handy at this moment as each family decided to pursue one among different occupations. Since there was no diversified occupation hitherto, men had been producing whatever they needed and consumed it themselves. But this was going to be no longer possible as each family slowly identified themselves with a specific occupation. The herder family needed cereal for their consumption and had to 'buy' it from the farmer. The miner needed milk and meat and had to purchase it from the herder. This was the beginning of the concept called 'exchange' which was hitherto immaterial and hence non-existent.

The exchange, as many of us would know was achieved through barter system. Something that needs special notice here is the fact that man till then had not produced more than what he needed. Since the emergence of diversified occupation, man began to produce more than what was needed, probably because he did not know how much was needed by the market. This led to surplus production for the first time in human history.

Since man needed someone to enable him to gauge the demand of the market, a new class of people called merchants was created. Before we go into mercantilism, we will check how the property relations had been altered ever since 'family' took the place of gens.

Private Property:

The emergence of family subsequently altered the rules of inheritance which allowed man to accumulate property and pass it on to his wife and children for the forthcoming generations. Property which was hitherto communal belonging to none but the tribe as a whole, began to be split leading to the emergence of 'Private Property'. This engendered what we call individual pursuit of prosperity. Man who was hitherto concerned about every individual in his tribe was slowly concerned only about his family. The well-being of society came secondary to him or sometimes as a superfluous concern when all that was paramount to him was his family's welfare. He no longer was worried about exploiting others to sustain himself. With such a diversified society, each family owning a means of production began to find ways to accumulate more wealth by exploiting the other families. The crudest form of such exploitation was slavery where the owners of surplus production needed slaves to accumulate more wealth. Such families had more than what they needed and were able to purchase slaves to expand their fortunes. Engels makes a point here that the word familus which gave rise to the word family, means a group of slaves whose head was their master along with his wife and children.

By this time, the class of merchants who had been created merely to bring the producer and consumer together began to assume more power over the processes of production. For the first time in human history, someone other than the producer of a commodity and the consumer of it, determined the way how the commodities must be produced. By then, the military commanders of the tribal days began to wield more power than they had hitherto since the class of merchants and producers, each class in pursuit of more markets for their products, had rallied behind him goading him to engage in war and conquer more territories. More territories meant more markets for the producers and merchants and hence more profits. The commander was well taken care of by them along with his retinue. The difficulties associated with barter were beginning to be felt which gave rise to a new concept called money. For the first time in human history, something other than a commodity that could be of some use in daily activity began to assume more value than others. A bunch of useless coins was soon bestowed with more value than a sackful of grain.

The emergence of money as a means of exchange allowed merchants to hoard commodities to generate demand thereby increasing their prices. Engels calls this phase where money was invented as the beginning of 'civilization'.

The State:

When merchants through speculative trading and landlords through surplus production by the labor of slaves, accumulated money, for the first time a highly disturbing and unprecedented 'contradiction' was beginning to be felt within the society. This was nothing but a feeling that for the first time people realized that in spite of being directly involved in production they were no longer able to access what they produced. When man was a barbarian, he labored hard and secured his means of subsistence and all the fruits of his labor was consumed by himself. But now, the more he labored the more his master accumulated while his wage or payment remained unchanged.

This realization among the masses manifested itself leading to slave conflicts and uprisings. The master did not have any forces at his disposal to suppress the uprisings and had to apply to his beneficiary, the military commander who had already become the king. The king realized that these conflicts were inevitable and systemic and his authority felt the need to create a state owned armed force to keep these elements in check. To maintain these forces the king, who had already been showered with lands and money by his merchants, needed funds. Taxes were brought into vogue which demanded a specific percentage of money from all that was produced, the majority of which had to be paid by the consumer who was part of the laboring class. The armed force will not only take care of any internal class conflict but also assist the mercantile class to expand its market by waging wars. The people were concerned about a sudden eventuality of an alien country invading them for plunder. This fear made them trust the state and its armed forces to ensure their security. In other words, the laboring class had to pay from its own pocket to support the apparatus that will keep itself in check.

This was the origin of state which was nothing but a higher power above the exploited and the exploiter to ensure that the status quo was maintained.

Aftermath and Conclusion:

As everyone would be aware, the state which was birthed by the interests of private capital needed legitimacy in the eyes of the people, which it believed could be achieved through universal suffrage. The primitive democracy of savagery which valued the interest of every individual equally, had withered with the beginning of human civilization. Men backed by private capital rose to the positions of contesting elections and people had to choose the less pernicious among them as their representative. The decimation of mother right and the emergence of father right, as a result of the monogamous family, showed women their places in their kitchen and empowered the financially independent man to subjugate his woman.

As we have seen so far, as long as man was in groups, he needed no money, no state to protect his interest since there was no need to depend upon someone else to ensure his subsistence. The origin of mercantile class with the displacement of barter by money system engendered speculative practices which took away the means of control of production from the producer and the consumer. This resulted in the consumer remaining oblivious to the dynamics of market forces which were every moment controlling the prices of commodities that he needed, ultimately holding his subsistence at its will.

As I wish to conclude, I would like to acknowledge the arbitrariness of whatever that is stated in this essay. The book by Engels, whose review is what I attempted to produce, is nothing more than Engels’ own interpretation of human history. I could find many gaps in its chronicling the history of civilization which I have to an extent filled through my own knowledge obtained from various other sources. Anyone who may wish to contest my postulates may write to me to which I would gladly revert.

 - JEEVA P

The Elixir of Life

       ‘And then it occurred! A pair of silver drops, one in each eye with a timid stealth came out as if to check whether her hands are going to decimate them by wiping it off. But this time it looked like they too are waiting to adore the beauty of their dancing. And as if those two drops had understood this and given the cue for their safety, within few moments, the other drops gushed out with glee to stage their flow and it was one colossal cascade from then on!!’

In case you are still wondering what I'm trying so desperately to describe, I guess, I've ultimately failed in trying to step into the shoes of a poet and poetize the most common phenomenon in the most uncommon way. Having said that, I do also know that this is the zenith of my ‘being poet phase’ and hence I’m going to deliberately ignore my failure and continue with the writing.

Human Tears! Arguably, one of the most distinct flavours of human emotions. And if you have already prejudiced like I'm going to give that one so called formula to live our life in eternal bliss devoid of tears like one of those mystical gurus in a prime time soap opera in our television, all I'm going to say is, please stand corrected!! (I stole the last three words from my Associate Dean, wondering how funny it was when it came out of his mouth). I’ll never stop you from crying. In fact I’m encouraging you to cry as much as you want. And this is what I'm going to ramble about in the next few stanzas.

Tears are one of the most aesthetic and sacred part of human emotions. Probably why, a wise man once said, ‘There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea’. It is one of those rarest assets to accompany us during the ying and yang of our human expressions - the saddest and the happiest occasions of our life. Every drop of them will have some stories to brag about, stories unheard and stories lost in time, be it the dreams aspired and achieved, the dreams shattered and lost, the people lost, the people united, the things sacrificed, the things yearned for and millions of other such unexpressed but deeply felt emotions. True tears often speak for the longed and venerated things in one’s life. Sometimes, they do speak for the compassion towards other co-existing creations of Nature. I still remember my mom crying for many things related to me. During my eleventh grade, I bunked my tuitions and went to movies. When my parents came to know about this, my father, as usual the gentleman he is, just said if you really feel like going for the movie either do it after the tuitions or better stop your tuitions totally and then watch by letting us know that you are actually going to a movie. On the other hand, my mom didn't say even one single word. Instead she started crying, crying and crying which was too hard for me to take. Finally, when she ended the ritual and the moment lightened a bit, I asked her, of course with anger, why are you crying for all the stupidest and mundane things on earth. Her face reddened and she shouted back, how dare you. You don’t have any right to stop me from crying for my son. I started laughing, probably one of the most stupid thing to do then. But thank god, it worked in my favour and she too broke into laughter. One other instance was the death of my pet dog before two years. Only the time that passed with me knows how long my eyes misted for that. It might look a bit weird for a twenty four year old to cry for his lost dog. People, including my parents, thought that I was so compassionate about the dog that I couldn't bear the loss. But when I look back at it now, more than the loss, it was my inability to do anything about it which agitated me more and maybe those inexpressible emotions vented out in the form of tears. Those were the moments, I guess, I realized that people’s tears are reserved only for their most prized possessions in life. After that, I stopped saying people not to cry. 

Our life is never going to be one ‘happily ever after’ ending fairy tale. And even if it is going to be one, we will need all those conglomeration of emotions to realize the eternal bliss which is going to be the crescendo of that story. Probably because without sadness you’ll never be able to define happiness as like without darkness there is no light. This is why, probably, Nature has conceived us as a bag of emotions. In fact, Nature herself exhibits her emotional tears as rain which gives life to every living being embracing her. Trying to suppress one of those feelings for the hegemony of other is equal to committing an ignominious act of questioning the Omnipotent, Herself. If we really weren't in need of a particular emotion, Nature would have taken it back in the course of evolution. Then we all would have been these always-smiling-idiots without nerves through all our adversities of life. I've also come across people who claim crying to be an act of cowardice. On the contrary, I feel, we don’t need courage to smile. But, to shed tears, we need immense courage, especially, a man’s tears! (Sorry, I'm still not able to divorce that male chauvinist in me). To me, a man who cries, disrobing all his pride, for the thing he loves and respects, is the rarest courage he would ever display and this courage is much nobler than what thousands of others would have displayed physically in any battle field. What about a woman then? A woman who cries is a poetry in motion! (Might look like I'm a sadist but poetry can be either euphoric or melancholic or at times both). Her beauty just gets enhanced by thousand folds with every drop that glides out of her eye. The irony is that then the (so called) powerless woman with her tears becomes the most lethal weapon a man can confront with. It’ll pulverize even the most cynic of hearts in the world.  This I had personally experienced with many right from my mother to the girl I adore.

  

Tears are the revered act of validating the things for which we have unconditional love and respect. It is also the things which we completely believe in. And if we don’t have the courage to stand up for those things, all we will end up is living a life of fallacy and hypocrisy. Tears are also the best form of emotional catharsis imbibed in the DNA codes of our cells and passed on through generations. Even the worst distress can be mollified by a few minutes of torrential outburst. That’s why I consider Tears as the elixir for all human agonies! So next time when someone says crying is an act of cowardice, better don’t listen to them. Because if we need to live our life to the fullest, it’s better to cry when we feel like doing so, even if it is going to be a stealth act inside our home or merely confined to our bathroom walls. Suppressing it is like amputating one of those important phases of your life. We live our present with our past and our future with our dreams and if our past has to be a memorable one, we should be courageous enough to at least cry for things which deserve it. Because after living our life, if we are going to turn and look at how beautiful our lives were, it is those embers of emotional tears which are going to make up the bright colours of that canvas of life. Believe me, then, our nostalgia will be more rejoicing than regretting!!

-          ARULMOZHIVARMAN T

Random thoughts on Malayalam Cinema

There is a trend in Tamil Cinema of remaking Malayalam movies of late and all I can say about it is, this was inevitable. Kerala has been doing the finest mainstream cinema for quite a while and each film has something that Tamil film-makers can take a cue from.

I am not going to make a list and grade movies but I will begin talking about the film I saw the latest, Premam. It is touted to be a blockbuster that has rewritten all box office records in Malayalam and that fact alone suffice to make me watch it. One word- ‘refreshing’ it was. To people who say it is a rehash of Autograph, I will have to strongly disagree. On first viewing a decade back, we adolescents were used to rejecting any movie that does not have a plot, that does not have a stunt sequence or a denouement that is not heavily charged. Autograph was refreshing in a way, that as far as I knew, it was the first attempt of a film-maker in Tamil to tell one’s own story even if it was heavily fantasized. The film had all its Tamil cinema must-haves, the romance and the concomitant melodrama, the comedy, strong character arcs and even some message-mongering. Try watching it again, you will find that the film begins strongly with wonderfully written adolescent episodes and slowly the movie deteriorates as Gopika vanishes and a tiring Balachander-archetype Sneha redeems Cheran’s life through outrageous sacrifices with her ‘angelic’ heart. So if you ask me whether I am saying Autograph is a bad movie, I will say no. All I am saying is that it has dated.

Coming back to Premam, what director Alphonse Putharan has done to the Autograph premise is infusing it with some kind of ‘aimlessness’. No scene in the film is in a hurry to leave its place and travel towards a pre-destined climax just like how we expect our movies to do. Every scene lingers at where it is set allowing you to internalize the milieu which the characters occupy. You are given ample time to study people and their actions. I am not saying that this is the first ever film that cares about its people more than its plot. Produced by Anwar Rasheed and supposed to be a commercial movie, it certainly is breaking some new ground. And less significant is the fact that Putharen’s urge to push the envelope is evident in the way his story shapes itself. In Neram, the leading man had no qualms in introducing his love as his ‘sister’ when caught red-handed by a traffic cop. Here too, you keep expecting someone from Tamil Nadu to emerge and ruin Nivin’s unseemly love for his teacher Malar. It happens, though with a tweak, but what I least expected was a reciprocation from her. And it was exciting to find whom Nivin marries finally, actually is.

But trying to push the envelope is fine, but Putharen wants to do it in every frame. The camera movement is supposed to be dynamic but here it is restless, in some scenes. I was told by my friend that the undulating camera movement is supposed to concretize the recurring ‘Butterfly’ motif of the film to the viewer. Also the introduction sequence of Malar, the camera revolves around the characters dizzying the viewer. May be Putharen wanted to propagate the dizzying intoxication of the protagonist on meeting his love through the movement. In a lesser movie, I would be raving about the kind of nuanced film-making the young director has sought to achieve. Here, for a film that is so exquisitely framed for most part-take the instance of Nivin’s introduction in the second episode which sent a usually stone-faced viewer like me into an irrepressible eruption of rapture, I would expect better craft that prevails over the exhibitionist ambitions of an amateur. This was one of the reasons why I liked his Neram a lot lesser than I should have actually. But with Premam, I would have to give it to Putharen to have shown extraordinary progress from his first film.

 

Let me talk about another movie that impressed me in Malayalam- Ayaalum Njaanum Thammil. It should have been the finest Malayalam movie I had ever seen, considering how rock-solid the plot and how terrific the casting were. Still, I was consistently gnawed by poor writing and equally ordinary direction.  When a deeply dejected Prithviraj returns after his unrealized marriage to meet an expectant Prathap Pothan, the latter walks up to his student and asks where his wife was whom he had promised to bring along. Prithviraj replies with a blank ‘No’ and Pothan turns away. Prior to this scene, we are shown how desperate Prithviraj is to realize his long-cherished dream of marrying his love and we are allowed to root for him. When the marriage unexpectedly is spoiled by Kalabhavan, we are left in a state of shock. All that matters at this juncture is how wrenching the pain would be for Prithviraj and how he takes it, which is what is shown to us subsequently through a song. The next scene ideally should reflect how Prithviraj begins to get along with the new life that is going to be completely devoid of any enlivening hope or direction. As a story-teller, I should be least bothered about the inevitability of Pothan getting to know about the unforeseen event, unless I am going to force the character to give Prithviraj some solace or inspiration. A separate scene to show the communication of the event to Pothan, that too in the most mundane manner possible, when it is in no way going to impact my story is utterly superfluous. This is one of many instances where I found the writing below-par.

Barring the scene in which Prithviraj is absolved by the ‘priestly’ Pothan of all his sins where the camera slowly glides out of the window to reveal the name of the ‘Redemption Hospital’, there is no other place in the movie that warrants some direction sense on the part of the film-maker.

All mainstream Malayalam movies I have seen are impressive, mainly due to the fact that their story-writers peak every time, successfully hiding the flaws of the story-teller. Malayalam cinema, to be concise, has great stories, decent screen-writers and okayish directors in spite of the fact that there is so much division of labour among the three, unlike in Tamil where the director proudly dons all the three roles.

Tamil cinema as always has been strongly star-dependent and whenever star power wanes, it chooses to go plot-oriented like it has decided to do now. I am sure we will find more remakes of wonderful Malayalam stories like Indian Rupee, Shutter, Bangalore Days and begin to chest-bang that we are back. Let me concede that we have superb musicians, excellent technicians and fabulous actors and that’s  that. But my dear Tamil film-maker, here I lay down my gauntlet to you- “Try remaking Premam and I will stop writing about you”

A Happy Arranged Marriage? You mus' be joking..!!!

‘Look at her. The way her mouth widens to reveal her wonderfully arranged teeth shrinking her eyes, while devouring the cake her husband offers her. Oh God!! She is terrific’

The first feeling that a wedding photograph of a beautiful girl in facebook elicits in me, is instantaneous envy. The envy is not something completely unfounded but it must be a disorder reserved only for males, to feel rejected even if you have made no attempt to apply for the position. The cheerful wedding selfies and the skillfully captured moments in the photographs do send a message to all the facebook spectators, that the girl is certainly living the best moments of her life and reveling in unparalleled happiness. But you never know until one of your close female friends get married that how difficult, marriages really are and how clueless these women are, at life altering moments such as these.

Recently, I had my colleague expressing with firm emphasis something that sounded like a Santhanam one-liner, ‘Campus-interview rejects and single people are similar. The first one is as unlikely to get a job as much as the second one will end up securing a happy marriage’.

Once women turn 24, they are slapped with a ‘over-aged female’ label and the parents begin to move like electrolyzed reactants inside a tank to finish the process of getting their daughters married. The prime criteria, is that the groom should belong to the exact sub-caste or division under which their family has been placed in the caste hierarchy even if the sub-caste has already been buried under seven layers in a particular community. A community, many a time, will have three or four sub-groups. Each sub-group shall form a caste. Each caste will have at least three sub-castes and each sub-caste will have even more divisions that may either be defined based on geography or languages that were associated with them many hundred years ago. This method of multi-layered distillation shall end up creating more difficulties such as a skewed sex ratio or a wide economic disparitiy among the competing families within the same division. Assuming that in a particular sub-caste that there are more well-to-do families, the concerned girl’s family, if relatively poor, will have to lose more in the ‘business transaction’ that is critical in executing an arranged Indian marriage. With lesser number of males to choose, there will be even lesser chances of getting a groom that matches at least ten percent of the girls’ expectations.

Even if the caste question is resolved and the economic feasibility of the project favourably defined, the parents do not skip any chance to obtain the ‘go-ahead’ signal from the most important ‘stakeholders’ in the project – no, not the boy or the girl- the astrologers. There are a proliferating number of astrologers who are completely oblivious to the personal lives of the boy and the girl, but are entrusted with the responsibility of deciding their next fifty or sixty years.

’Marry within six months or you will have to wait for seven years’

 ‘A love marriage for this boy will surely end up in a divorce’

‘Your man is located 150 kilometres east from your house and if you do not marry this guy, you will never get married in your life’

‘If you marry the guy of this star, you will lose all your wealth’

Please do not conclude that either I should be an atheist or a Periyar follower because I do believe, one hundred percent in the powers of these fore-tellers. Every time I have chosen a girl from a list of photographs my parents have shown to me, our family astrologer has never failed to reject her with only a cursory glance at her horoscope.  Atheism, shit.

Please don’t be led into believing that the aforementioned incident is purely personal and please be aware that I am the fifth guy in the gang of my six friends who have had this complaint. Needless to say, I had a female friend who used to complain that every guy the astrologer recommended to her resembled her father in his shape.

I have heard an even more atrocious incident about a middle class girl who had to choose a guy over another one, only because, only his family was ready to delay the marriage by six months since all the affordable marriage halls had been taken during that span.

To sum up, in India, anyone can decide the lives of the boy and the girl, even if it could be the unknown astrologer, or the owner of the marriage hall or even a mythical king, born thousands of years ago who allotted the clan their present place in the caste hierarchy, but certainly not the boy and the girl.

As I ruminate over all these issues surrounding a marriage, and when I take a look at the same photograph of that beautiful woman, my envy now looks certainly mitigated. But there is more as to why I feel less envious. I know very less about that beautiful woman, who is actually the best friend of my friend.

As I ponder about her, I get reminded of one totally random incident about this woman that my friend told me long back.

The woman, in her high school, had been in a romantic relationship with a guy and her parents had found it out. They had taken great pains to break their relationship and had succeeded. My friend had been present at her house when all this had happened and the girl had refused to eat for more than three days. He told me that her mother never once had spoken with her during the period.

After a long time, when she had broken the silence, she uttered the following.

“Dear, please complete your studies, land up in a job and we promise we will get a wonderful husband for you in the future”.

She reportedly, had grown out of that phase and moved on to join one of the most prestigious engineering institutions in the country. She currently works as a System Analyst in an IT company who was a bright student in her college and is currently being paid twice than what I earn right now. It seems she has had plenty of proposals for marriage from many of her college friends and colleagues but she had turned them down because of one reason. She believed in her parents’ judgement and they could not fail her.

One day, my friend showed me a WhatsApp message sent by her, a few days before her marriage.

‘I do not know whether to call this off or not. I don’t know why I consented to this marriage. I don’t want this marriage to happen. I feel like killing myself’.

DeMonte Colony and young Tamil Cinema

In the first scene of DeMonte Colony, when a young wannabe film maker starts narrating his story to his producer, the producer asks what the title is. He replies “DeMonte Colony” and the title appears on the screen with an eerie background score. This is how young wannabe movie buffs want to make cinema. They are triggered by an urge to do something different from what the audiences have been fed to all these days but are constantly pestered by the itch to ensure that their audiences are not left off the hook for even one moment, and they do it even if it needs the breaking of the fourth wall.

A similar scene in Pizza, Karthik Subbaraj’s debut movie, came at the end where the hero himself is caught in his own concocted story which turns real and the doors shutting around him, giving the audience, a desperate nudge to leave the hall with a shock. The film should have ended when the hero starts his bike in slow motion, getting away with his felony, and the truth is revealed that none of what the audience have been seeing all this time is true. It could have been pulling the rug or even the marbled floor beneath the feet of the audience. It is possible that a section of the audience could have been pissed off at such an ending which pulls off a trick at their expense. May be Karthik would not have wanted to alienate the elders in the audience who would not accept a movie that allows bad guys to live in impunity and happiness.  But if he wanted not to disappoint elders, he would not have spun the story around an unmarried couple living together, at the first place. So please tell me, why do directors do something that they would not want to, only because they have to please their masters (audience)? This is probably what every other working man who chose to do a mediocre job, does at his workplace.  

Today’s young film makers have great ideas and brimming love for cinema more than their predecessors in mainstream cinema possibly had. (Their ability and craft, I am not talking about right now). But they plant themselves in situations similar to a gala wedding, where you are pleased to see your crush which is a great chance to talk with her but, to your disappointment, she is flanked with a mutual friend whom you cannot avoid at all. You want to lavish your crush with all your heart and attention but at the same time cannot afford to disengage your friend and you manage by occasional questions to him about his pending visa process, his parents’ endeavors to get his sister married, etc. But you may know, whatever you do for your friend, he is going to feel disgusted with you.

But I am not going to sermonize, enumerating every tenet of the The Holy ‘Follow Your Heart’ Bible. Both DeMonte Colony and Pizza are well intentioned movies, to say the least. Both are horror movies and made by first time directors. Both are so self-conscious that they were doing something that others had not and both have nods to specific sections of audience through stars like Rajni(in the former),Vijay (in the latter). Pizza focused on ‘living together’ problems and DeMonte Colony features an extra marital affair, though a (needless) backstory. I am getting more similarities if I start rummaging through my ‘compare and contrast’ nerves of my analytical brain. But there is one striking difference. Pizza knew what it was doing. DeMonte Colony loses its consciousness the moment the titles begin.

It is a great idea to plot the story around an evil ghost, precisely because most of the horror movies center on ghosts that are either humanized or ennobled by their flashbacks. And a noble ghost rarely manages to spook me which is why I almost stopped watching horror after Kanchana. It is a great idea to leave the ghost unrelieved from its earthly origins even after the end and to remain mute throughout on why the ghost haunts. It is a laudable idea that there is no attempt to shoehorn a romantic track into the story or allow the audiences to get some comic relief from the ordeal of the haunting.

But the ideas remain attractive only as much as they appear now even after the viewing. As critic Baradwaj Rangan used to repeat in every review, ideas need to be shepherded from the brain to paper and reworked meticulously for the final journey on to the screen. I hear Ajay Gnanamuthu, the director belongs to my age which is possibly too young for any film maker. Dear Ajay, hundred people can have ideas. Fifty people can have good ones and twenty can have great ones like you do. But not even four or five get the stage to narrate them aloud. Since you have qualified into the last four, you can inspire others. We wannabe artists look up to young film makers like you to make it big on the stage. As we predicted, Karthik Subbaraj did it big with Jigarthanda. DeMonte Colony is already a hit, yet we don’t want to predict something for you the way M.S.Bhaskar did in that uninspired movie of yours.

Book Review: Catcher In The Rye

My friend Vinodh used to say: Don’t choose the music. Let the music choose you. Personally, this has been true for every best thing that has ever happened for me in my life till now. Maybe that’s why I got excited, when, in the opening frames of ‘Vinaithandi Varuvayaa’, Karthick ( I prefer Karthick than Simbu as I still think he is an over rated actor) would exclaim, “kathala thedi naama poga mudiyathu… athuva nadakanum...”, for love is the greatest art pursued through life. Likewise, when the book chooses you rather than the other way around, believe me, it can prove lethal. Especially the right book at the right moment can kill you. Catcher in the rye chose me at one such time. A time when every miniscule part of my life was falling apart that it appeared even my shadow was looking down upon me. I really wanted to go inside my cocoon and hit the hibernation button. “Try Catcher”, was all Jeeva said. Usually, I never ever do what he says (same goes with him for all I say) but that day I chose to go different. Maybe that was all needed to be done then.

The book was simple. The protagonist was still simpler. But his psyche looked convoluted. And here was I of the presumption that only my mind can put up such freaky outlandish shows when rattled. Only after a while I realized that his mind was not convoluted but naked. That was the moment of my epiphany. It was like speaking directly to you circumventing all those societal consciousness. I didn’t realize the exact moment but even before half the way down, the book had become anthropomorphous to me. It was like a shot in the arm, pure unadulterated bliss!! . I got kicked, bullied, embarrassed, sympathized, apprehended, impended, killed and I don’t know what not feelings of an adolescent kid intimidated by his mise-en-scenes. By the end of the last page, Holden Caulfield became my Jesus and J.D. Salinger, the Holy Father. The only thing I couldn’t comprehend after closing the book was how the fuck (I have even started revering swear words!!) could a man, half a century before my birth, record the blue print of my brain’s thought process. Then my dormant brain got hit by light. It was not specific to me but to my entire race - The Losers! The race which Fate had designed so deviously during Genesis to make their counter parts dwell in the glories of their own narcissistic world. I swear, this was a book written by a Loser about a Loser to a Loser!! How else could he have known every single stair in the caliginous castle of Losers? He should have dwelled in it.

Subjective narration at its best, it was neither Salinger nor Holden Caulfield but Holden’s mind, or to be exact Holden’s unabridged mind, that was unfolding the events through all the bizarre haphazardness. I remember having this recurring thought during my ruminations, of what if my mind had the capacity to think aloud. I mean what if that infinitesimal time lag between what you think and what you speak had by-passed all your inhibitions so that whatever you thought came exactly as words out of your mouth. How people would react to all those erratic blathers? Well, the book was the metaphor of that abstraction. Never before did a book have such a profound effect in me. There were moments when I put down the book and was laughing out loud with that particular scene going on in rewind mode in my mind. And was it funny? Yes, definitely. But more than that, it was nostalgically funny. Things which I had experienced in my teenage days owing to my vestigial brain started resurrecting. The particular instance where Holden enacts the dodging of bullet invoked my memories of the Anniyan-Ambi changeover scene from the movie ‘Anniyan’ that  my mind tried to emulate when my father got mad and scourged me for my carelessness during my eleventh board exams (It was the only acute moment my father had laid his hand on me!). One other instance was Holden’s penchant for ephemeral platonic romances. At times his he will start choreographing things for future with that girl even though his consciousness would remind him that it’s just a temporary fix.
Having said everything, the distinctive thought that hit me was Catcher in the rye should be felt through if not venerated at least. For every person a moment will come in life when self-detestation will reek in every breath of you for not being able to emulate the image of the societal embodiment that your mind had conceived of yourself. This book will shunt that moment like a blanket does for the poor soul lost in the frost.  Because, it’ll help, though not directly, to recognize the exact opposite of the conceived ideal You. In fact, it’ll celebrate and cherish the unorganized, the disoriented, the impulsive, the alienated and all those not so easily expressible layers of You. In short, it’ll help you to find those missing jigsaw pieces to identify You.

Had I got this book during my teens, my life would have been completely different. Different in the sense my understanding towards the same life would have been way better. For the first time in my life, I was proud of being the way I am. The exact randomness of my life which was a liability till then had all of a sudden become my biggest asset. I don’t know how long it is going to be this way. But I’m sure that whenever I feel like going back to my cocoon, Holden Caulfield would be waiting there with open hands to welcome me. I was jumping with joy like a mad man for my life being the way it is and was looking forward with open arms to confront the next weapon from the arsenal of life. Somewhere deep in mind I could hear the muffled voice of the commander from Tennyson’s verses,

“Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns! ”

-Arulmozhivarman T


   

Jeeva, Why do you read?

This piece shall be in response to a single question that has been put to me numerous times by my group of friends that predominantly consist of people who have not been bitten by the reading bug, possibly yet. “Why do you read?”

Even after multiple instances of encountering such a question, the first time I really felt inclined to answer it, was when I had completed Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It was some two years ago. I was possessed by Emma’s ghost (Madame Bovary) then and I replied with the serenity of a hermit, “Reading makes me forgive everyone. It helps me empathize even with the insane, the borderline psychotics or even the most sinister minds of the world”. The answer was strongly backed by a very puerile perception that since I was able to empathize even with Emma who in spite of having been blessed with a loving husband and a comfortable existence, subjected herself to adultery and consequent ruin. In fact, I was into believing then, that should a similar real life situation arise of my wife cheating me, I would be able to forgive her and let her free to unite with her illegal lover. Now I am 26 and on the verge of getting married and when I reconstruct such a scenario inside my head, I see no reason why I should not chop the parts of my wife’s anatomy and keep it in refrigeration to show it to my friends.  I am no longer, a Messiah who would carry all the sins of the world and grant them eternal salvation.

Very recently, to the same question of why I read, I had found a different answer when I was under the spell of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was a ‘magical realist’ novel. I told my inquisitive friend that the book appealed to a centre of my brain which I did not know that it existed before. If that sounds rather vague, I would like to explain better. None can dispute the fact that one cannot draw oneself to reading, unless one of the characters of his book has some traits that resemble that of the reader. The book should look like the reader himself has been installed to operate in a different universe. ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger is one such novel which appeals to almost all of the reading populace solely because Holden Caulfield, its protagonist acts in some ways, as the adolescent alter ego of the reader. But you cannot expect all novels which you come across to reflect yourself and you are bound to be disappointed sometimes. When I started ‘One Hundred Years’, I could sense that I was in for such a disappointment since there were too many characters and lot of story in it and the author did not care to detail his characters to make them flesh-and-blood so that I would try caring for them. It did not have anything that conforms to the rule book of classic literature but when I was halfway through it, I was not able to pull myself out of the strings through which it had managed to tangle me to its web. As mentioned earlier, there was some unknown centre in my brain that had responded to the call of the book and I still descend into a reverie when I think about the book.

Still I feel I have not responded to the question of my friend convincingly and he might have asked back, ”Alright it appealed to your brain but so what? How did it make you feel better? Did it make you any wiser or help you look at life better?” Frankly I don’t have an answer.

Alright. Let me handle the question with a very different contention.“Reading in many ways kindles your imagination”. You are very much part of the storytelling as much as the writer is. The writer directs you to create his world inside your head and the onus of executing his directions is with you. When Kalki describes Arulmozhivarman as ‘a muscular warrior blessed with enchanting beauty and charisma’, he does not paint his image and display it to me like an Agra doll hawker. It is my duty to construct the image based on his instructions and, for example, to make things easier, when I imagine a slim Sivaji Ganesan for the role, the job is only half done. But when he is prescribed to be muscular, I develop his image of him further by burnishing him with some pounds of neatly sculpted lat muscles supporting a stubborn chest. Now the figure of Arulmozhivarman is neither Kalki’s altogether nor Sivaji Ganesan’s. I chiseled him myself into a man whom you cannot replicate or find anywhere.

In many ways, the writer does not invite you into his head and make you look at exactly the same things he has been seeing so far. It is, to reduce it to simple terms, the act of a carrying mother inviting her husband to place his palm over her protruding womb to feel the agitations of the moving baby. The husband need not, and cannot feel what exactly the woman feels.

Not one explanation I have given above can wholly answer the question. But it cannot be denied that I do empathize with people better than before; I have a better imagination engine inside me; I love more people than I used to do.

Sometimes people ask me, “Ivlo padichu enna kilicha?”(What have you achieved out of reading so much?) I can reply boldly “Why should reading give me some definite measurable output? Why should everything we do be measured solely in terms of the worth of its end product? “  

I slowly realise I can never answer the question properly but I have to the best of my knowledge tried doing that. If this is an examination, I might fail. But as I said earlier, the writer can do only so much. The onus of passing me rests with the reader.