An open letter to MS Dhoni from a hater

Hi Mr.Dhoni,

There have been plenty of occasions for me, in the past, to address you.This one, as India bows out of the World Cup Semi final, shall be the most appropriate for a Dhoni hater like me to do that. A Dhoni hater, as regarded by the ‘true’ lovers of the game,  are haters of the Indian team as such.They suppose that we are now celebrating India’s exit out of the tournament out of so much hate for you.I don’t have the time for them as to exonerate myself from the ignominy. Let us remain traitors, as such.

I actually wanted to address on the occasion of you, completing 100 wins as the ODI captain. I am your hater and I cannot unfetter myself out of my strong impressions on you to come out and congratulate, on such a humongous achievement. Enough said.

As I can see the whole of India, rarely in its 65 year long history, cutting across divisions, from a Brahmin to a Dalit, from a Christian to a Parsi, from a Kashmiri to a Kannadiga, from a CEO to a municipality scavenger, from a RSS-man to a Naxal sympathizer, as though in pursuit of an Alexandrian conquest, aligning behind a single individual.That is behind you. The social media likens you to a Rajnikanth or Ajith Kumar and not a single Kamal Haasan fan or a Vijay fan seem to be offended by it. Even during the India-Pakistan wars of 1971 or 1999 or the Indo-China war of 1962, did the nation display such unbreachable solidarity. Cricket, and (unfortunately) cricket alone has been succeeding in uniting India.

Therefore, in some ways, you are the privileged individual who symbolizes Indian unity.This is not to say that you are the first or the only one to conjure this sort of unprecedented euphoria. But, for people who are less than 30 years of age, like me, the Dhoni cult is something that is remarkably peculiar.(and for haters like me, obviously abhorrent)

In 2004, on a hot afternoon, a lanky,unattractive, long haired boy wicketkeeper was reported to be tearing the Pakistani pace battery to smithereens. He was said to be a MS Dhoni. “Enna da peru, Dhoni, kappal nu??” was my first reaction on hearing your name. You had ended up scoring 148 in an ODI. A few months later, during a Diwali eve, India lead by my Rahul Dravid, was chasing a mammoth 290-something against Srilanka in a home ODI series. I was talking with my relative that India will lose if Dravid loses his wicket ( I don’t remember Sachin playing the series, may be he was out on an injury) as we were losing early wickets. He replied immediately, “Dhoni irukaanla??” I saw you walking out of the pavilion to take strike. I went out, having no interest to watch India lose. After coming back, he beaming at me, “Dei India won”.

“Oh , enga thala evlo adichaaru?”

“183 da”

“Oh mass ah?”

“Dei Dhoni da”

“Avan evlo adichaan?”

“Dhoni than da 183 not out”

The next day newspapers carried an image of you holding the cricket bat with its handle to the crowd and the other end tucked within your elbow. It was your pose after hitting the winning runs. It was like seeing a ‘Predator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger posing with his AK-47.

This is precisely why the Dhoni cult is so peculiar to us.We still cannot divorce that old unforgettable image of yours from what you symbolize today.But there is a question, has India not witnessed a bigger cult formation before?Is Dhoni a bigger star than Sachin Tendulkar?

Sachin Tendulkar, many may recount, was a legend even before people of my age, had learned that an ‘over’ in cricket consisted of six deliveries. Sachin, to us was born with the halo around him. For you,we built it.Sachin was the cricket equivalent of the Superstar Rajnikanth. Mr Dhoni, you don’t have a cinema equivalent yet.

Inspite of all this, I still have serious reservations against you. I would have anyday rooted for your promotion up the batting order, to shepherd the team in difficult circumstances ,atleast when the Indian team was trying to regroup as a unit post the retirement of its ‘Fab Four’.I would still go to great lengths in defending my stand that you were the worst test captain India ever produced.Is it really unfair, to expect from a captain who has 3 ICC limited over trophies in his kitty, to reproduce atleast half of his virtuosity in the longer format of the game, especially in overseas conditions when it is all the more needed? People forget test debacles and try to defend you with your fabulous exploits in the ODIs which is precisely the act of burying the fully grown pumpkin under a small mound of rice. You were not interested in test cricket, just like these people are and were glad to retire when you felt you had a replacement. Isn’t test cricket, as my Dravid says, life source of cricket? You were a Basha in ODIs and a Lingaa in test cricket. Let me stop here, sensing my susceptibility to become interminable whenever I am asked to accuse you.And more importantly, what I have already said against you so far, is too much, for this occasion by any standard.

As a fan of cricket, (not a fan of Indian cricket, because my patriotism steadily declined to nought post the retirements of Rahul and Sachin), I am nobody to pass a judgement on India’s show in the CWC 2015, as absolutely clinical and uncharacteristically sublime, given the pathetic overall form of the team in recent months.

And personally, I felt that your hand in India’s stellar showing was all there for us to see. I genuinely admit, that there were moments in this World Cup, where I felt, my long dead patriotism was showing signs of resurrection before being overpowered by the Semi final disaster.

But, Mr Dhoni, none can deny your admission to the canon of Indian greats and there will be so much hate for all the love you will manage to win in the future as well. We will remain haters and we will have a reason to defend.

Now, as a captain, it will be really agonising to have lost a hard-won trophy, inspite of having outdone yourselves to retain it. But as you may see, you have so far, succeeded in building a team for the future,which is no less a marvellous and an equally thankless task. We need you to lead the team in the next edition of the WC as well.Let us hope that my next letter to you, after four years, at the end of the 2019 WC be less cold and more patriotic.

With hate,

Jeeva P.

The Fourth Class

From the little of what I have been able to understand about our educated, well paid middle class citizenry , I could split them into four broad classes evaluating them based on their political consciousness. These classes are unfortunately , not so distinct and may overlap here and there on various parameters.

The first class shall constitute the set of people who are not interested in politics or economics or even any discipline that does not help them earn an extra rupee. I express my admiration for this class ,the reason being that when you throw a political question to them , they in response, take out and brandish their ignorance proudly as a badge of honor. The second class involves people who are genuinely interested in politics and make very occasional,  desperate attempts to learn something . They are too time-constrained  to venture into these affairs since there is no contingent need for them to know .

The third class is an admirable section of people , who may be called as public intellectuals ,who have no qualms in stepping out of their domains and indulge into deep political learning to evolve a remarkable political consciousness.

The fourth class shall comprise of the set of pseudo intellectuals who theoretically belong to the first and second classes in terms of political knowledge, but succeed in masquerading as the first and only politically enlightened class of this country. It is this class which is special, that I shall talk about in this article.

THE FOURTH CLASS: WHAT ARE THEY TO ME ?

Let me begin generalization of the characteristics of this class even though there is not much diversity in them to work them into a clear hierarchy.

• ·         This class spends not more than one hour on news channels and papers and dedicate the rest of their leisure to social media.
• ·         This class has little or no knowledge on the very Indian concepts of caste, caste based reservation, license raj, strikes, secularism, Non- Alignment movement, feminism, National Freedom Movement, the Indian Partition theory but is equipped to speak for hours about them.
• ·         Since most of the aforementioned concepts have in one or the other way been ‘Indianised’ by M.K.Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru, they have a deep abhorrence and against these leaders and love fantasizing on conspiracy theories concocted about them by Hindu right wing groups.
• ·         This class firmly believes that India is poor because it is overpopulated and that Indian farmers have created large, unmaintainable  families for themselves and as a result commit suicide ,succumbing to their insatiable need to procreate.
• ·         This class believes that India languishes at the bottom of the table of developing countries only because of a lack of a well –built, dynamic Prime Minister who is not fettered by the compulsions of coalition politics.
• ·         This class has a sub-section of people who believe that the Muslim rulers of India were basically foreign plunderers who exploited our country and were transferring all the wealth of India to Persia and Arabia for more than five hundred years. They also equally believe that the British were no less than genuine evangelists of science, modernity and human progress who wanted to distribute the fruits of their prosperity to the barbaric, backward people of the Afro-Asian continents.
• ·         The class, as a whole believes that anyone who abstains from exercising his vote can be accused as a national traitor and that the present democratic system will help India reach unfathomable heights in the future.

MY COUNTERPOINT

I deem it utterly a purposeless exercise, in this space, to contradict or dispute the beliefs of the ‘fourth’ class and to establish through proper enquiry and analysis, an alternative outlook challenging their ideological foundations. In fact, during various casual ,verbal political discussions with these people , I have attempted to do so and failed grossly, and that was not precisely due to their overpowering erudition. These people , as I have mentioned earlier , speak passionately on the need for a utopian, rapidly modernized world without any social or economic divisions characterized by a very egalitarian distribution of wealth and prosperity. But behind this façade, there is a horrifying self-centredness that determines their political choices and beliefs. These people cannot be overcome through informed political discourse because their curtain of self-centredness shall  preclude any attempt to look beyond their spuriously formed beliefs.

A few years back, when UPA was in power, I was talking with my friend (whose upper caste origin I never related to his political belief till that very day),whom I genuinely believed to have a strong anti-Congress, anti-establishment leaning ,very similar to mine. He was so vehement in his opposition to the crony capitalism fostered by the Congress post liberalization and went on to add that , to obliterate the roots of Congress from the society , a well organised , spirited armed rebellion was necessary. I was nodding all the time in acquiescence till  he suddenly mentioned that a Narendra Modi can lead that rebellion and subvert the hegemony of Congress. I was surprised but I was able to establish with some facts that a BJP alternative to Congress was no less harmful to the country as the previous NDA regime had proved to be. I also added the tags ‘sectarian’, ‘communal’ tags to BJP during the conversation.  I was , meanwhile , apprehending the arrival of a counter-argument from him that would show the BJP in good light with the help of facts and events that characterized its seven year stint in the opposition. But the reply I received,  was shocking.  “The Congress have been running a government for Muslims for more than fifty years. The Hindu population in India has been waning ever since Independence. They brought reservation and stopped all upper-caste people from occupying Government positions and brought India to ruin. The Muslims ruled India for more than 500 years and now this Congress runs the government on behalf of them . How can India prosper ? Why you people are against ‘us’ ruling the country?”

The argument which was initially dwelling on economics and systemic failures threatened to veer into the territory of xenophobia and racism. I could not argue after that. That day marked a watershed in my understanding of public political opinion. I was able to find similar trends on various occasions with different sets of people. There were scenarios  when I had beaten some people with my argument that their beloved political dispensation was essentially pro-corporate and fascist, passing off as an egalitarian, welfare state. Their response suddenly , after so many hours of defending the system, used to be like “Yes. It may be bad. What about socialism then? Has it brought growth and development? Will it save India? Do the Russians and Chinese bathe in milk and honey? Didn’t millions of Russians die due to the Government’s policies??”

My point here is that the last question should have originated from the whole hearted acceptance of my contention that the system which they have been defending for so long, has been proving to be deeply ineffectual and socially deleterious and from a sincere eagerness to know whether a new form of government(not  a party) can change things for the better.  But it used to come out of their sudden frantic desperation to fill the holes of their darling system with the inadequacies of its supposed alternative. Walking out of the hall , everytime after a discussion, I used to get the feeling that they have not changed one bit and their “Yes.It may be bad” admission was just a passing lie . Their shattered drops of their conviction that the system is fair and just , would have regrouped and coagulated into its old firm solidity. When you meet them the next time and happen to talk about some other political development, you find that they are the same people with no noticeable change in what they think.

I do not have a problem with people like them if they openly declare that they vote for a political party only because it benefits them and there is no harm in doing so , in my opinion. But that’s the highlight of the ‘fourth’ class . They are no different from whom they vote for. They are a significant majority with whom I have long stopped talking politics. But I would be really glad to write more for them if they are willing to open themselves up for a mutual trade of ideas. You cannot speak high of capitalism all the time and remain protectionist , when it comes to ideas.

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.

Movie Review : Manhattan Murder Mystery(1992)

Before watching a Woody Allen movie, you would have already been primed up for the following from him- The film will center on middle and upper class people who are unhappily married. If Allen stars in it, he is going to be a misunderstood intellectual who is always apprehensive of his wife having feelings for someone else. There will be moments when you open up with both your hands to laugh at a funny sequence and instantly check your response and stifle it, perceiving the underpinning of sadness over which the humor has been so delicately assembled upon. There will be veritable references to literature and delicious historical vignettes here and there and an inevitable --blink-and-miss dig at the Nazis. But there is something else , which Allen specializes in , for which his hardcore fans canonize him ---- he is an desperate, yet an untiring excavator, who remains unhappy till he finds some meaning to all our mundane lives and existence ,which he believes is interred miles beneath layers of science , materialism and modernity.

But , case in point, Manhattan Murder Mystery, is, thankfully for some, a refreshing light weight movie where Allen has tried hard to extricate himself from his philosophical alter-ego , thereby taking a sabbatical from his regular job and deciding to pursue something  else that is completely uncharacteristic of him—pulling out a magnifying glass and follow fingerprints. He has become a sleuth. He has divorced Bergman and invited the ‘Rear Window’-ian Hitchcock to dine with his Chaplin.

The result is ,not surprisingly, delightful. Allen plays Lipton, an old publisher, married for quite a long time with a bored home-ridden Diane Keaton. The old couple meet their new neighbours- an another old couple who are in an enviably long blissful conjugation. The next day , the wife of their neighbor dies and the ensuing events suggest that the death could have been unnatural. Keaton is excited at the prospect of solving a possible murder mystery and brings her friend Alan Alda to help her with the new job. Lipton embodies the typical middle class city dweller indifferent to his abnormal neighbourhood, who descends into a perpetual paranoia of losing his wife to Alda, in the course of her new found obsession of sleuthing. Lipton turns ‘Aadhavan’ Vadivelu throughout the movie unable to stand his wife’s near neurotic prying in her neighbor’s affair.

In one stretch that happens at the neighbour’s flat, Keaton leaves her husband and the neighbor in the hall and goes to prepare coffee in the kitchen. The neighbor offers Lipton to display his achievements in stamp-collecting to which he is unable to immediately express his disinterest. Keaton,meanwhile discovers something fishy in the kitchen and soon she retreats to the hall with the coffee and starts a conversation with the neighbor, taking a seat on the couch along with her husband. The camera zooms on towards the couple as the dialogue progresses. You cannot choose whether to listen to the conversation or burst into laughing at the disgruntled Lipton, seemingly lost in a state of insuperable torpor after listening to mind numbing lectures on stamps by his neighbor. Allen is a riot here.

The best scene , indubitably, is the lift sequence where the couple is locked up inside for sometime, discovering to their horror , a dead body hanging over their heads. Here is where Allen’s prowess as a writer-comedian comes to the fore. In a sequence in Pandiya Naadu, Vishal would invite Soori to talk things over a ‘cutting’. The scene cuts to a saloon where Soori discovers the other ‘cutting’. The scene would have retained its humour had that ‘joke’ not been oversold. But, Soori would proceed on to say ‘Naan cutting na udane andha cutting nu nenachan.Indha cutting na vanthurkave maatan’.[Had I known that ‘cutting’ refers to literal cutting (of hair) I would not have come].  Here , Allen does the same thing but the result is doubly terrific , ‘Claustrophobia and a dead body, it’s a neurotic’s jackpot’. Don’t do that, unless you are Allen.

Allen employs the technique of moving the camera clandestinely behind his characters , many a time giving the impression of us following them secretly. The film is rich in tributes to the noir genre and the climax where the villain hostages the wife of the protagonist, is one.Manhattan Murder Mystery (1992) is one of Allen’s lesser known works, possibly an underrated one. 

“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction….But the key is to distract yourself” This was Allen , when he spoke about life and the pessimism that shrouds it.  MMM , was essentially a comedy thriller and his favourite theme of adultery ,remains very much at the surface. MMM is lesser known, possibly because Allen wanted to take a break from brooding over life, atleast once. He was content ,for a change, just to entertain and get distracted.

And Justice for All..

Having been part and prime mover of numerous political discussions and arguments on contemporary politics over the years with my friends, I have never taken the time and trouble to put on paper of what my stand is, on any specific issue. This endeavour, the first of its kind, for me, arises as a result of the combined effect of unexpected and unprecedented  public sympathy for a convicted incumbent Chief Minister of a state, and from a deeper wistfulness on my side, to establish myself as a writer in future, who can express himself on politics or any other sphere which has a profound impact on people and their lives.

I have been surprised greatly and it is not just limited to the rare, quirky successful conviction of a corrupt politician even after years of struggle and intentional protraction of judiciary proceedings.The middle class, the Indian urban intelligentsia of which I am very much part of,which was some months back, up in arms against any form or scale of corruption, under the Anna Hazare movement, has suddenly transmuted itself into a mass of forgiving altruists, ready to brush aside the malfeasance of their leader, simply as a childish, guileless peccadillo committed during her political infancy.

The reaction to the landmark judgment, can be split into two – one from the devoted partymen resulting in acts of violence and arson, and the other from the educated middle class.

The partymen, though their reaction to the event, has been weak and less pronounced than I anticipated, have continued to damage public property desperately trying to record their anger, and disrupt normal life as much as possible. Many of my friends, as well as, noted political commentators have credited Jayalalitha as an efficient political administrator, having a near perfect record of maintaining law and order throughout the state during her regime. The foremost duty of any Chief Minister, which should take precedence over all other public responsibilities and functions, shall be the establishment and sustenance of law and order, under any event or political exigency, throughout his/her administerial domain. The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, and a tall political leader at the same time, who elicits so much adoration and love from her supporters and partymen, could have atleast sent a word to them, to remain calm and composed, to renounce any acts of instant furore resulting in violence, assuring them that she can overcome all odds with resilience by herself, only through the mandated judicial procedure followed in the country. This could have gone a long way in sustaining the normalcy in the state and in addition, possibly could have enhanced the respect she already commands from many quarters.

The middle class on the other hand, have been complaining of the ruthlessness and vengeance underlining the judgment on the following grounds- the age, sex of the convict, the negligible degree of corruption and her achievements as the current Chief Minister.

As everyone might be aware, the corruption case filed in 1997, was in response to her frivolous acts carried out during her first term (1991-1996) as Chief Minister.

The case began in 1997, and had India been blessed with an robust and incorruptible judiciary, by all probability, it should have been closed by end of the millennium, with the accused successfully convicted with a 7-year term in prison, stripped of the eligibility to contest in polls.

This eventuality would have broken all bases of argument of her sympathizers. Firstly, the convict would not have aged more than 50 yrs at that time, which I presume, is not an age that would summon sympathy from most of us.

Secondly, the 2000s were the age where a crore still remained a humongous sum, when our politicians were not getting tired of dealing in lakhs of rupees.The magnitude of the larceny hence,no doubt, would have not looked negligible.

Thirdly, the successful conviction, as early as the 2000s, would have possibly sealed the fate of the ADMK leader, rendering her ineligible to contest any elections in the future. No one can doubt the gravity of such a development, bolstered by, probably, a case of rejection of the bail plea, on the party organization and its future. The political history of Tamil Nadu would have been rewritten possibly with Jayalalitha, having been denied another chance of assuming Chief Ministership  and salvaging herself from the ignominy by implementing expansionary fiscal policies in defence of the state’s poor.

But, to top it all, it was not just the malleability of the judiciary that was responsible for the delayed delivery of justice, but also, the malicious intent and wily execution on part of the accused which expertly bended the law, to its whim and fancy, to ensure that the justice delivered was either delayed or obsolescent, and the punishment as benign as possible.

A man’s world, cannot become a woman’s world immediately, if it forgives its delinquent women.

Bill Clinton lost his second election to his presidency, owing to many reasons, the chief one being his extra marital attachment to a woman, which in India, would sound very much trifling.

We, Indians, can take dubious pride, from being the only one among many other nationalities of the world, willing to sympathise with someone who has been found guilty and deserving punishment by its own judiciary.

We have been voting for aeons, not for the one whom we prefer, but for the one whom we dislike the least. Many of us, spend not more than ten minutes of our time daily, to politics and economics, which we very well know, control every minute of our lives till we are liberated from our existence.

Hence, I cannot be indignant on politicians as much as I am on my citizenry. I admit, that the instances of corruption, of which we are getting accustomed to, has been huge and outrageous than its precedents. But, it is on us, to remain insulated to regressive changes that the system forces on us and ensure that our perspectives are not diluted and flawed under any circumstance, and reflect the highest levels of morality, rectitude and reason.