In Indian Trees

All of sudden

In the Indian trees

New fruits started

Hanging; strange

From orange trees

From apple orchards

From guava and grapes

New fruits; new shape

Trees looked at each other

And wondered, why and how

Banyan tree asked the fig tree

Mango tree asked jackfruit tree

Why those fruits were like that

It was when the people

Realized that those were fruits

In the shape of humans

With rope like stems

In India

We have trees

That bear human fruits

Mosquitos Talk to Me Now

Mosquitos talk to me now

In different tunes

Some like drones

Some like thorns

Mosquitos talk to me now

They want blood

They know how to get

Risking life for it

Mosquitos talk to me now

What a sharp focus

Like sunrays and lens

Burning a dot, intense

Mosquitos talk to me now

No politics or intolerance

No religion or inheritance

No sedition, no nonsense

Mosquitos talk to me now

They take what they want

Thankless they fly away

While your reflex shy away

Mosquitos talk to me now

When I am deep asleep

Even like a forlorn sheep

They suck blood from deep

Mosquitos talk to me now

At times I feel it is better

To have a dialogue with

Mosquitos than with men

Women, children and hen

For all of them beguile

With words and deeds

Mosquitos do not ask

For cheque-book

Bank balance

Party affiliations

Love quotient

Intelligence

They do not ask for

Certificates

They don’t reduce one

A tightrope walker

Between one and thirty one

Mosquitos just take blood

A little bit for their existence

It is up to you to let them or deny

Because they talk things simple

Make things simple

Until you find a dried stain

On your bed linen; a life

Wasted for a living. 

Magic Could be Black or White

This is magic; black or white

That one has to decide

Days come and go, nights too

Dreams persists yet slippery

Seasons change like minds

Sometimes hot and then cold

Fans and polar bears sleep

Then they keep awake for months

Mountains sigh, sweat and rage

Rivers bear the brunt; later

Sun throws fire and ropes of despair

To which farmers dangle by neck

This is magic; black or white

That one has to decide

Swords always do not cut

Sheaths always keep in place

Horses could run wild but

Only they rein who have killed

Without swords but with words

Gates of hell and heaven

Are divided by a thin line of magic

One needs to learn magic

To be inside both at once

There are two keys: patience

Unlocks the locks that turn

Only once to one side

But the other key, the grievance

You say it could open the locks

But not the magical ones

That lay hidden inside sleeping eyes.

Dystopian Mahabharata of Soumen Bhowmick

(Soumen Bhowmick)

Legend goes like this: Someone, after seeing this monumental work, ‘Guernica’ asked Pablo Picasso, “Is it about war?” Picasso reportedly said: “It is not about war but there is war in my lines.” There are several versions to stories pertaining to Guernica. Yet another person asked the artist: “Did you do this?” “No, you did,” Picasso said. He was telling the viewer who perhaps would have thrown his lot with the Franco regime that the war was a result of his apathy and the apathy of many others like him. Had they decided to the autocrat in the beginning itself Guernica would not have been bombed. At Triveni Gallery, New Delhi, when one stands before the drawings of Soumen Bhowmick, if at all one asks whether he has done it, he would definitely say, ‘No, you did it’. What Europe was going through in 1930s, we have it right here and now. When the Fascist forces are in an upward swing, artists have to retreat to the wastelands of broken imageries; Picasso had done it, exactly the way T.S.Eliot had sung it with a great force in 1922. Now in India, Soumen in his works does the same.

 (work by Soumen Bhowmick)

I do not have any intention to compare Soumen with Picasso. In fact such comparisons could only bring embarrassment to a sensitive artist like Soumen, and if I attempt it, it would be quite unbecoming to my declared stance as an art critic. Yet, I would say, Soumen has the same force and sensibility that Picasso had shared with all his contemporaries who stood against the forward marching of the fascist forces in Europe. Today in India where culture is a spectacle intermingled with quasi-spiritualism packaged and marketed in corporate style, such voices and expressions of Soumen may not get enough attention for the minuteness of his scale and the creative arrogance to stand straight. Those who have waded through slush and rain on the Yamuna bank in order to catch a glimpse of the displaced cultural spectacle would definitely not venture into a small gallery space where Soumen’s works are exhibited. Middleclass patrons of spirituality and ‘culture’ are always like that; they want a medium to forget and self-deceive than to mull over and respond. Culture for many today is a drug so is religion both divests the human beings of their rational and cognitive abilities.

(work by Soumen Bhowmick)

Soumen’s show is titled ‘Chronicles of V’ and the artist explains it in his small brochure as an abbreviation for ‘Vigilante, Vendetta and Vengeance’. According to his elaboration, he has taken this ‘V’ word from the 19^th century Spanish parlance which originated in a society where people turned the executors of law and order when the government authorities largely failed in dispensing justice. Soumen, as a young man carrying the revolutionary spirit in his personality, art and life style, thinks that if each person becomes ‘vigilant’ then definitely the social injustices would never happen. One should not go to the far off lands like Spain to understand the meaning of ‘vigilant’. It was right here in our philosophy which always gives stress to ‘Arise and Awake’ (Uthishtata, Jagrata in Katha Upanishad). In due course of time we have forgotten the very idea of being ‘alert’ and today we have a totalitarian regime in place. In such a scenario, an artist like Soumen responds to the socio-political realities with a razor sharp perspective. He conceives a world where everything has gone upside down. In his world or the world that creates in his works everything has taken the feel of a vaudevillian show. Comedy, necromancy, cannibalism and autoeroticism become the hallmarks of his dystopian land.

 (work by Soumen Bhowmick)

Karl Marx had said, History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. As far as Indian realities are concerned, history has presented several tragedies; Bengal division in 1905, Bengali famine in early 40s, partition of India in 1947, Gandhiji’s assassination in 1948, Emergency in 1975, Babri Masjid demolition in 1991, Godhra in 2002, Muzafarnagar in 2014 and so on were the prominent tragedies and even if Marx had tried to envision them as farces he would have failed in it. But the election of the right wing forces to the center was the real farce presented by a willing electorate; slaves could not have chosen a better shackle than this one. Even if Soumen says that being vigilant one could resist such negative forces, he recognizes the futility of this resistance. In this confrontation between the oppressors and the oppressed both of them in a bizarre decomposing alchemy changes into decaying flesh and horrifying skeletons. Those who have fallen in the fight and those who have still got time left to warm their seats undergo this degeneration and like zombies they celebrate.

 (work by Soumen Bhowmick)

I would call Soumen’s works as the scenes from a dystopian Mahabharata in a Philip Guston mode. Here the war has become a farce; killing and dying have become games to be played. The way war is contrived, the resistors too are sucked into the war game. In the pandemonium of words, symbols, gesticulations, trapeze acts, cannibalizing and erotic stimulations and so on, the viewer sees the total collapse of sense and sensibility of our times. There is no Gandhari to cry over the dead bodies, there is no Krishna to pacify the heartbroken widows. Many a fighter have been cajoled into the mazes of conspiracy and got them killed and a vast land of eeriness is left behind. Only the Emperor and his sycophants are left in a devastated land. In their regalia they look extremely comical; any king would look comical when he loses his kingdom. A country without citizens and subjects does not need a king; that is the irony of it. In the wilderness, like King Lear, one could just rage and rave. Even the wise fools have been killed. That’s the reality Soumen presents in his works. I have only one word of difference; for the artist vigilantes are the upholders of civil rights but for me vigilantes are hooligans who with the blessings of the government do moral policing to convert ongoing tragedies into irresistible farces.   

This Shell of Mine so Warm

This shell of mine so warm

Comforting as nothing else

I sit through out crouching

Over the annals of dreams

And pains that many had

Been through, many years

Perhaps eons; blood and sweat

Poured into the mold of will

Out they come one by one

The eternals and the humbles

Sing alike and sigh alike like

Mothers who have sons

Who gone out to become

The warriors of light; letters

This shell of mine is so warm

And comfortable as nothing would

Out there worldly men seethe

Bees on rotten fruits fly thick

Both mindless, oblivious of

The unborn ones in wombs

They fight the fights of stupidity

Argue, shout, scream and yet

No hope, each step an expletive

They win the cup of a race

Loose many that they never size

Guns and Thighs: Ram Gopal Varma’s Life in a Book

(Ram Gopal Varma's Book Cover)

“I would say that the media is more dangerous than terrorists because it attacks under the guise of safeguarding values.” One may conclude that this statement is by one of those angst ridden anti-right wing seditionists who has just walked out an Arnab Goswami shouting match at the prime time news hour in the Times Now Channel. Surprisingly, this is the concluding sentence of a book of memoires written by the much maligned film director Ram Gopal Varma. Published in 2016, this page turner titled ‘Guns and Thighs- The Story of My Life’ is full of incisive observations which only a dare devil insider could talk about the Indian film industry (read Bollywood) which is controlled by absolute business interests than emotional quotients of the people involved. What makes this book a good reading is the emotional no-bar-hold-ness of Ram Gopal Varma, who started off as a video cassette lending shop owner and ended as an ace director of the Indian film industry.

This fifty films old director is fifty four years old now. Like all the fathers who brought up their sons in 1960s and 70s, Ram Gopal Varma’s father too thought that he should have a college education, which would fetch him a good job and eventually settle him down as a good, law abiding householder, exactly like him. However, Varma had a different plan about his life. As he was studying in an engineering college in Vijjayawada, he spent most of the time in movie theatres and streets. As the legend goes, he learnt the ropes of surviving in the big bad world from the movies than from the university. From the very beginning he was hooked to the workings of gangsters and policemen. He hung out with local goons and in college, he himself became a gang leader by keeping six of his well-built fellow students at the edge of their sense. Despite Varma’s diminutive figure they thought he was a born leader because he could make them believe that if one turns against him, he had five of them stand for him. Sooner than later he realized that’s how governments, politicians, policemen and the underworld kings worked. It was simple yet a reliable method. Ram Gopal Varma, the film maker who has a special appetite for underworld stories was born in college itself. He just needed the right opportunity.

 (Director Ram Gopal Varma)

Every week end I go to my favorite book store in Delhi with a list of books to browse. I come out with none of them. Instead I will have something like this book, which I have never thought of even existing. I was not aware of Ram Gopal Varma’s books. But the chance meeting of such books always gives me a different high. I have to confess that the best books I have picked up ever are always out of chance meetings with them in some inconspicuous corner of a book store. I take a fancy of these books like Varma’s because they are not the regular writers but definitely they have something interesting to say. I have to confess after reading this book by Varma that out of his fifty films, I have seen only one so far! That’s ‘Company’ done in 2002, the launching pad for Vivek Oberoi. I watched this movie not because I was so much a fan of Ajay Devgun or the debutant Vivek Oberoi but because of the presence of Mohanlal, one of my favorite actors from the Malayalam film industry in the movie as a soft spoken police commissioner namely Sreenivasan. I wrote a very fulfilling article (at least for me) at that in one of the leading journals in Malayalam and even predicted a good future for both Mohanlal and Vivek Oberoi in the Bollywood industry. Contrary to my predictions, Mohanlal settled back to his comfort zone of Malayalam films and Vivek by wrongly choosing a series of movies ejected himself out of the industry, despite his occasional efforts to stage a coming back. Varma tried to re-launch Oberoi in his Rakta Charita in 2010 and Mohanlal in the legendary Thakur’s role in ‘Ram Gopal Varma’s Aag’ in 2007, both turned out to be box office disasters.

‘Guns and Thighs’ however is not a lamentation on the flops that Varma has famously churned out from his stable. He has worked in the Telugu industry with the stalwarts like Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Venkatesh and so on, and was also instrumental in launching many careers including that of Urmila Mathondkar, J.D.Chakravarty, Vivek Oberoi and so on. He could easily cross over to the Hindi movies because his way of story-telling was fresh and forceful. Varma was game for trying out something extremely new, whether it was raw eroticism or raw violence. While most of the Bollywood thrillers focused on the cop-thief chase stories to a greater extent, Varma thought of the leisure times or the scheming times of the cops and the thieves, or in other words what the underworld kings, sharp shooters and the investigators did just before committing a crime. Were they just normal people like us or they looked different? Varma realized from newspapers and television that the sharpshooters, rioters, killers, hit men and so on looked very ordinary. Sometimes a gangster could live next door and you would never come to know about his real identity until one day he is implicated in a heist or a hit. If so, what did this ordinary looking people did when they were not hitting or shooting? That’s why he came up with movies like Shiva, Satya and Company. Varma was a hit maker.

 (Company film poster)

Varma is very philosophical about many of life’s accidents and chances. According to him a good failure is better a bad success. It all depends on who talks about success and failure. If a successful person is successful, he says, that there should be a reason. Somebody who aspires for that kind of success should silently watch what makes the other successful and if possible emulate and improvise upon the given. Varma has always been doing that. He hates the ‘inbetweenists’. According inbetweenists are those people who have a very flexible philosophy and always want to be in the right side of things. They could be the nastiest people and most often they remain where they are in their lives. Varma quirkily points out that what makes the successful people successful because there are more inbetweenists in the world than the real achievers. Inbetweenists always have an opinion on anything and everything. And if that opinion goes absolutely wrong, they don’t have any problem to go back on their stance and come up with some pedestrian philosophy to explain why they are so. One cannot do nothing but agree with Varma.

The book progresses through various anecdotes both comic and tragic but Varma never tries to judge any of them. He only judges once that too his wife of that time for her insisting him to stay back at home for celebrating her birthday than going for a recording in Chennai. One should listen what Varma has to tell her in this matter:  “I don’t celebrate my birthday in spite of having achieved whatever little I have, whereas you have achieved nothing so why do you want to celebrate your birth? If you think the mere fact that you were born calls for celebration, don’t forget that when your parents had sex, the last thing they would have had on their minds while doing it was sot conceive you in particular. Your dad had a desire and your mom obliged, and it was sheer accident that the particular spermatozoa which managed to enter your mom’s womb just happened to be you. Your dad could alternatively have gone to a prostitute and the particular spermatozoa through which that woman might have conceived could have been you and you could have ended up in a brothel. In effect, when you have absolutely no control over or no contribution to the process of what, who and why someone gave you birth, why should you make such a big deal about celebrating it?” Varma says further to us: Needless to say, she slapped me. Let me quote further: “I believe that the obsession with birthdays is primarily a function of the fear of most individuals have that their existence might not matter to anybody else. So on that one particular day if an X number of people greet them, it makes them feel stars for at least that day and then they can wait like nobodies for another year to go by to become stars for yet another day.”

(Cartoon on Varma's visit to the Taj Hotel with the CM on 26/11)

Does it sound too chauvinistic? But the truth is those who have gone through this horrendous experience of their womenfolk bringing the house down for forgetting their birthdays or greeting them on that day or even taking them out for a dinner or buying them a new dress, know for sure that all those go with a birthday thing of a non-achiever is total waste. Like Varma says, one should celebrate whatever little they have achieved. Irrespective of gender people should celebrate the days that made sense to them rather than celebrating a birthday.

Coming back to the opening sentence of this essay, which happened to be the closing sentence of the book, I would say that it was not Varma’s views on the right wing media but on the media in general that is hungry for making nothing out of something. On 26/11, when Varma visited the Taj Mumbai where there was terrorist attack, along with the then Chief Minister Vilasrao Desmukh and his son and film actor, Ritiesh Desmukh, the media went hysteric saying that there were nefarious plans behind Varma’s visit with the CM’s contingent. In fact, he says, he was tagging along and the places that were shown to them were already been cleared of investigations and were already shown in television for mass consumption. But the media, instead of discussing vital issues pertaining to a horrible terrorists’ attack, spent many precious hours discussing the inanities of Varma’s visit to the place. Let me conclude my views in this book with the same sentence once again: “I would say that the media is more dangerous than terrorists because it attacks under the guise of safeguarding values.” 

Being Simple and Solving Problems

Being simple is a very complex thing for many; and being complex is the easiest thing. Let’s just take a common place example. We walk into a coffee shop. A Smart, smiling and English speaking boy or girl, complete with her brown apron greets you from the other side of the counter and asks what you would you like to have. You settle for a Café Latte or Espresso, whatever. Soon comes another query: Sir, small, medium, large?  You have already decided it is medium and you say it. ‘Sir, you would like it strong or light?’ You answer that question hiding your discomfort. Would like to have cream or without cream? Now, what’s that? You have asked for a coffee and the boy has already complicated things. You get a medium cup of coffee and an atrocious bill. You pay and drink the concoction as if it were hemlock. Drinking a cup of coffee could be that complex an affair. There are people who suddenly tell you: I will take you for a wonderful filter coffee or some delicious ice cream. Some may even suggest a ‘pan’. Then they drive you around the city for twenty minutes and all the way you will have to listen to their narratives on the kind of filter coffees or ice creams they have had. While you invent some equally bombastic story, from the back seat, a little nine year old chimes in, ‘Mom, you did not tell about our funny ice cream trip in Alaska last summer.’ You have already lost the game before that claim.

Life could be much simpler. Asking too many questions for the sake of asking questions is one way that most of the people make simple things complex. If you understood what someone has just said, you don’t have questions. If you have not, you have some. But after some stage in your life, you don’t have many questions. You don’t need to be really old to realize this. People make things complex at times to invite questions. So in answering those questions a major chunk of the time in office or anywhere is spent. People feel important when they ask questions and in turn make things complex. A person with an average IQ could understand anything around him/her without asking too many questions. Even if an issue is explained at the board room, if you are a staff member and worth of your salt, you would immediately grab the nuances of what is stated; that’s why you are there in the boardroom. But somehow, in the name of brainstorming so many precious human hours are spent without much result. People fly off to retreats and sea shores or hills to do brainstorming. A majority of the problems that human beings face today could be solved while sitting in the loo. There is nothing very complex about life. There are no such problems that do not have an answer. One just needs to silently face those questions; loo is the best place to do that.

I have seen a number of people wasting their time in arguing certain issues and feeling miserable when they are not able to convince the other party. First of all argument is one way of making simple things complex. In life nothing could be achieved by arguing with anyone. An argument starts because the other party believes in something different than what you believe. If both the parties are stuck at their own belief patterns no argument is going to win one over the other side. Then how issues could be solved? If arguments do not arise then issues automatically die out. There at some corner of the country, a good for nothing fellow clad in some religious attire makes an absolutely foolish statement and the so called intelligent people take the cue and start arguing. Look at our debate television. Apart from being mere entertainment and slight persuasion, these television programs are a huge amount of wasting human energy and time for silly matters. If we decide to simplify things, then definitely the arguments will start. If someone says, JNU students use 3000 condoms per month we should just laugh it off. If some cartoonists come up with brilliant cartoons on the issue, we should enjoy it and make our lives simple. In the name of involving in the democratic process, we enter into arguments regarding things about which most of us do not have in depth knowledge or authority. In the free for all scenario, we make life complex and miserable.

To make life simple, as people believe generally, they need not go to faraway places seeking solace and simplicity. Rural areas are as complex as the urban places as in rural areas too we find human beings who do not have much to do with their brains. We could be very simple people by being intensely aware of things and keep off from many things. We make a lot of noise about growing traffic. The best way is to take off our car from the roads. We get morally agitated when the city is littered by filth. What we need to do is to avoid littering the city ourselves. When there is water shortage, instead of complaining, use water judiciously. In the name of organic life, instead of driving kilometers to buy organic vegetables, better plant some vegetables in your backyard. When life is simplified, problems vanish. Many people think that our presence in social matters is a must to maintain the democratic process. The best way is to choose your representatives judiciously; instead of making a ruckus after selecting anti-social people as your representatives. People need a high amount of awareness to lead a simple life.

Unfortunately, simple life is always misunderstood. Many people think that a simple person is a ‘poor’ person. Most of the great personalities are very simple people. I have come across so many great people with great contributions to society but absolutely unassuming in their presence, manners and mannerisms. Once I was visiting a museum located in a mall in Delhi and at the corridor I happened to cross paths with the famous writer Arundhati Roy. She was walking in such way that she was almost hiding herself and not making a big deal about herself being the ‘Arundhati Roy’. Simplicity is a way of life; it does not have anything to do with what you wear, how you travel and what do you eat. When you are simple, you are caring about the other people. You understand a simple human being your pain as well as the pain of others. Simplicity is largely about shedding the ego. One does not attend yoga classes or get into spiritual retreat to kill ego. One just needs to understand what simplicity is. Simplicity and ego are inversely proportional; when one increases the other decreases. So when you are a simple person, you don’t have any problem with the other. I have seen people, crossing their legs in packed metro trains as if they own the whole space. It comes from three things; lack of confidence and self-worth, high amount of arrogance and total ignorance. A simple person need not assert; his/her simplicity is simply the assertion of being a good soul.

Simplicity in life is the ability to hark upon the voices that comes not only from inside but also from outside. Generally, the spiritual gurus tell you to listen to your inner voices. But however you try, you will be able to listen to your inner voice unless and until you could hear the voices of outside. What you hear generally as the voice of the outside world is the undefined cacophony. We recognize conversations out of habit. We understand the traffic because we are tuned to the noise of the traffic. That is not the outside voice. There are innumerable voices that lay outside us. The chirping of birds, whispering of beetles, ants, crickets and other creatures, the gurgling voice of a stream, the softy voices of dew drops, the hissing of bamboo thickets, rustling of leaves, clattering of rain drops on a roof, lisping of a child and the noises made by butterfly wings and smiles on the lips of the people. Once you hear these voices above all the din of the routine noises, you automatically hear the inner voice that advices you to be simple. The day you hear your inner voice, you cannot nothing but be simple in your life. Stop arguing; give more time to listening. When you listen to the voices of the other, you understand that it is not different from your own. But when you argue you fail to hear the other. You are in a race and in an argument with one and all that’s why you need a vacation to go to hills to listen to the voices that are right next your window pane. Listen to it. You are simple and alright.