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Silchar:
An early morning text from a fuckingawesomebitch. I
qualified the Delhi University entrance test for B.A. English Honours. Yay.
“Respected parents, as much as
I love Architecture, I want to do this instead.”
Drama.
Drama.
Tickets booked for New
Delhi.
Bye bye, pleasant summer
sky.
New Delhi:
The sun burns patterns onto my skin.
Midnight strikes. First cut off. Delhi College of Arts and
Commerce, otherwise known as the college with the depressing, ugly buildings.
And inefficient, rude office staff.
Traveling from one table to another with more papers, forms,
certificates and photocopies of those certificates than two mortal hands can
carry. Frustrated people. Slowly moving fans. After going around for two days for a simple
admission procedure: Aaj aur nahin, kal aye. A girl tears off her forms in
teary anger. Somewhere a parent threatens to go to his old friend, the
principal – or was it the chairperson?
Yours truly is now a DCAC student.
Three days, the second cutoff and a few more annoying hours
at DCAC later, yours truly is a student at Kirori Mal College.
*insert happy theme music*
Red Fort. Jama Masjid. Humayun Tomb. Dargah Nizammudin Auliya. Qutub Minar.
No rain here. People dying because of floods back in Assam.
Haridwar:
4 am wakeup call. Sleepwalk to the car. Short
weekend-in-the-middle-of-the-week weekend. Plug in the earphone. Fiona Apple.
Sleep. Wake up. Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. Breakfast at fancy resort. Shekar
Kapur’s The Sadhu. Sleep again. Wake up. Pine trees and milder weather. UK.
Uttarakhand, not United Kingdom. Kilometres long traffic jam. Haridwar. Humanity at its
worst. Humanity at its best. Bhajans set to the tunes of item numbers. Bells
ringing. “Uttarakhand police aapko Devbhoomi mein swagat karti hain.” Gushing
Ganga. Dirty Ganga. People drinking Ganga, bathing in Ganga, washing in Ganga.
Guru poornima. Crowd on crowd. Lodge room opening out to terrace looming over
the ghat. Monkeys on the roof. Monkeys on the terrace. Monkeys on the light
posts. Monkeys on the temple shires, above the gods. Evening aarti.
Synchronised fireworks. An reddish tinge over the scene. Devotees crying and chanting.
This unbelieving heart quivers. Reason returns in a while. Night falls. Tiny
specks of blessed fire floating over the river. Jai Ganga Maiya. Jai Bhole
Nath. Jai – watch where you’re stepping. Beads and shawls. ‘Off season rebate,
madam!”. Studying the ghat from the terrace under the pale shadow of the full moon. Midnight walkers of the ghat. Naked bodies on show. Slowly sleep
comes.
Rishkesh:
It’s raining in Haridwar as we leave it for its cleaner,
less famous sibling, Rishikesh. A giant Shiva bids us farewell. Never see you
again. Porcupine Tree on the earbuds. Sleeps comes again. “Bhaiya, aa gaye.”
It’s raining hard. A crowded parking lot. 10 rupees worth plastic, green
raincoats. With hoods. A guide from Calcutta. We get mistaken as Calcuttans.Temples built where the Pandavas
had prayed. A suspended bridge named after the flawed god-king of Ayodhya. Temples
built for the ficklest of reasons. A government approved museum cum jewellery
shop. White stones from the icy mountains sparking fire. A ek mukhi rudraksh. "Not for sale, saar, only watching." Sriyantra to maintain the vastu of the ghar, for the surakhsha of the parivar
and sukh shanti of all. A navratna necklace. “Action with phasion, madam!”
Rains? Where's the rain? Raincoats gifted to the driver. Bye bye, Rishikesh. The giant
Shiva passes again. As does the Ganga, muddy with soil washed from the
mountains. Lunch at the yoga baba’s humble 5 star medical cum yoga cum
whateverelse centre. Shanti shanti shanti hi. Bye Uttarakhand. Bye Uttar
Pradesh. Oh hello again, burning Delhi.
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I'm in a mood to not let all the unpublished stuff go to waste, so I'm publishing this, even though I'd written this much time back.
I see that I've completely ignored my blog. Despite the promises made to myself of not screwing up the blog the second time round, I still seem to do the very same thing. Commitment phobia much? Anyway, a lot happened in these (many) few days. A few illusions and dreams broke. And broke with a lot of noise. But let's not dwell on the melodramatically sad stuff. I finally visited the country capital and it was just as I thought and better. Well, a lot of bling under the karakti sun lead to paining eyes but the pretty, pretty, pretty monuments undid it all. Witnessed no black SUV pulling in girls. Witnessed a LOT of beggars leaving their palm prints, the ones who still had their hands, on the car window glasses. And buildings from possibly all the time periods. Okay, not all, but most. A swanky airport. And the skin burning Delhi sun. A fort, three memorials to people long dead, a colonial gate and city children reigning over a fountain the masters left behind, the blocks of national governance, two towers, Two bazaars from different eras. A step well that was even older (seven freaking hundred years!).
I see that I've completely ignored my blog. Despite the promises made to myself of not screwing up the blog the second time round, I still seem to do the very same thing. Commitment phobia much? Anyway, a lot happened in these (many) few days. A few illusions and dreams broke. And broke with a lot of noise. But let's not dwell on the melodramatically sad stuff. I finally visited the country capital and it was just as I thought and better. Well, a lot of bling under the karakti sun lead to paining eyes but the pretty, pretty, pretty monuments undid it all. Witnessed no black SUV pulling in girls. Witnessed a LOT of beggars leaving their palm prints, the ones who still had their hands, on the car window glasses. And buildings from possibly all the time periods. Okay, not all, but most. A swanky airport. And the skin burning Delhi sun. A fort, three memorials to people long dead, a colonial gate and city children reigning over a fountain the masters left behind, the blocks of national governance, two towers, Two bazaars from different eras. A step well that was even older (seven freaking hundred years!).
UPDATE: Qualified for DU!
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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.
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| Sometimes, a memory that you hold dear may not be yours. Mother and Brother, Darjeeling, sometime in the late 80s. |
