Found: There's No Place Like Rome.
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I have a holiday in Rome coming up, so I'm sharing all the places I can't
wait to see, shop, and, of course, eat. My annotated map included!
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Parzania is one of those films which'll either bore
you to death or make you tear at your own hair with anger. Not at the film but
at those who’re responsible for all the shit in the world, the shit in this
case being the Gujarat riots. And if it bores you, well then, you can always
rewatch Himesh Reshammiya's efforts at acting. Based on a real life story, it
features a Parsi family which gets entangled in a fight between two other
communities who’re most famous for being each other’s blood sworn enemies than
for anything else. Some may call the film a little biased, showing only the
Hindus butchering the Muslims and not the backlash where Muslims came forward
with their swords, but the plot was not about Gujarat riots in totality, it was
about how it affected a small family in the worst possible way, a small tale within the larger horror story. A family of
four gets tied up in the upheaval where Hindutva party workers and other
assorted Gujarati Hindu citizen thugs came in thousands to kill every Muslim in
the gated complex Parzan, the 10 year old, and his family were living in. It
didn't matter if they were Parsis, at the end of the day, they were not Hindus
too. They were wajib-ul-qatal, to borrow a term from our Muslim fundamentalist
brothers across the border. *al Salaam*
Parzan
gets separated in the crowd and then is never found again. The father tries
religion to find him, but Ahura Mazda turns out to be as bereft of existence as
Allah and Bhagwan. Maybe Osho is the way. There’s also an American who of
course is doing a thesis on Gandhi, successfully pronouncing the name as 'Ghandi'.
There of course is also a mentor Gandhian character who speaks Gandhian pearls
of wisdom in a heavily accented English that even I'd trouble following but the
American miraculously understood perfectly. The mentor never told him that
'ghandi' and 'Gandhi' have slight different meanings here, it seems.
There were a lot of other characters, notably Raj
Zutshi and Sheeba Chadda's. They played the good Muslim neighbours who lose as much as the Pithawala family. Zutshi
turns from being an over-the-top secular Muslim to a jihadi to a more sane
level of secularity. Chadda played the voice of thundering reason that brings
him back from the hardliner-kill-all-Hindus road. Asif Basra as the man
regretting his actions against his neighbours does justice to his role. Sarika was so natural in
her act that if I were to choose between her playing the mother and THE
Naseeruddin Shah playing the father, I'd go with the lady. Shah being
Shah was top notch. The two kids were fine but too cheerful to actually seem
real. Especially the little girl who played Delnaz. Her OTT cheerfulness was
giving me migraines.The cinematography was surprisingly very good, considering
it was a low budget film. The sound editing was so good and equally so bad at
places that it made me think that they had two different sound editors in
place. The art direction was good too and they made Hyderabad look exactly like
Ahmedabad.
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| Good neighbour Zutshi while in his temporary Jihadi career |
Getting the movie-review-ish part over, now let’s get back to the
title of this post. It is a very bad idea to watch Parzania primarily because
you’re again reminded of the horror your countrymen can turn into. Gujarat of
2002 is an ugly blot on the face of Indian history and no amount of gharba
dancing and thepla eating and Falguni Pathak can erase the image that Gujarat
in general and Ahmedabad in particular has come to occupy in the minds of most
Indians. For the ones in the saffron brigade though, Ahmedabad remains the
promised wonderland their swami baba had promised them in their wet dreams.
Parzania acts like that all knowing aunty who without any spoken word can stare
you down into shame and embarrassment and try as you want, you can never deny
the silent accusations.
But the flipside of being reminded of the riots is that
every time a you-know-which-BJP-Chief-Minister supporter shows you images of
flashy buildings and smoother-than-Hema-Malini’s-cheeks roads and the general
euphoria that the Gujaratis somewhat deservingly have about Gujarat Shining,
show them Parzania. It should shut them down and how. It is good to be reminded every once in a while of all the not so pretty things in the world.
Nandita Das debuted as a director with Firaaq, a poignant tale of
the after effects of the riots. Showing intervening lives of different
individuals reacting vastly differently to the mass killings, it was a more
balanced telling of the horror sans the killing. Parzania has its flaws. The
more sensitive Hindu viewers’ll feel it to be too harsh on them. The only Hindu
neighbours shown with more than 3 seconds of screen time don’t let the children
in during the riots because they’re not Hindus.
The viewing of the film coincided with an online verbal fight with
members of a secret Facebook group called ‘Protect Hindutva’ which aims to make
‘Hindustan for Hindus’ only. The extra loathing in my replies to them can be
safely attributed to the childhood memories and fears rekindled by Parzania. In
the film, Parzan and Delnaaz have their own imaginary world, Parzania, where
the roads’re made of chocolate and the buildings of ice-cream. We can pass the chocolaty
and ice-creamy part of the utopia, but it can sure be far better without some
of the 17th century thinking that many still cling on to.
