The Joys of Ironing

The phone rings as I stand by the ironing board, ready to help a wrinkled shirt out of its misery. I let the hot iron stand in abeyance to attend to this call. It’s a consultant breaking the bad news of my candidature getting rejected. I muster a forced thanks to her for all the help, and put the mobile down. My first instinct is to curse the company for rejecting me. The second is to wallow in misery till dusk. That’s when my attention is drawn back to the gymnastic & slender ironing board, as if it’s telling me the unfairness of being left high & dry.

And I return to my task, asking myself if there could be a better way to crawl out of the bad news. Something inside says, ‘Focus on doing the present work the best you can’. And I take the suggestion. So there flies the shirt for a split second and rests on the plank; water sprinkled from the finger tips dipped in a mug, and the iron begins to work its way through the creases & the wrinkles. You might recommend using a steam iron. Well, speaking from my sample of one, I don’t find the ‘sense & simplicity’ in the steam iron (Philips, are you listening?), because most of the times the water spouts or the steam jets get mistimed, or the gadget simply relieves itself on the clothes, not being able to contain its bladder. Plus, the water leaves its impurities’ marks on the vents, which sometimes reach your favourite shirts. So, it’s back to basics for me.

This reminds me of the iron-men found in the by lanes of my hometown. How they would magically turn a crumpled mess of fabric into a neatly folded pile of smart attire, in a matter of half an hour! And that archaic coal iron, with its triangular vents, and a heavy duty body, with a firm wooden handle on top: every time the iron-man moved in with his artist’s stroke, the iron would merrily click in its metallic timbre. Indeed, the locality iron-man was an artist, besides being a repository of neighbourhood gossip, which he told with his trademark contempt for the sahibs residing behind the fortified gates.

I’m also reminded of those Sunday mornings at home, when my dad used to impart me (my brother was never into learning all this, preferring to tonk the rubber balls to the farthest roof in sight) the skills of ironing the clothes. I savour those moments now, much as I detested them then, being tutored by a perfectionist master, who wouldn’t mind chiding regularly, or reddening my ear with a firm twist, every time I erred. But he taught me the perfect way to treat a pair of trousers or a shirt to the iron: basically, a lesson in fending for yourself in this world. Thanks Pa, how have these guised lessons in life’s philosophy come handy to me all this while!

But if you ask me my favourite fabric to iron, I’d say it has to be a starched Taant-er Saari of mom’s. I just love the crisp obduracy of the fabric in yielding! How it would make the water droplets hiss, by not letting the iron unravel its knots. It required a patience of an angler sitting by a pond. And to be rewarded by the sight of ‘my mommy most beautiful’ in a group of smiling women, thanks to the extra edge given by that beautifully woven expanse of magic, whose beauty  was highlighted by little help from a little boy wielding iron. :)

As I get to the end of the pile of clothes, which had been mocking me for the last few days, I sense a smoothening of my mind’s creases, knots & wrinkles. It’s become easier to read now. The iron has indeed worked its warmth through all the rough and tumble the washing machine of this world has provided me with. I marvel at the iron-y of how a mundane task can alleviate you to the proximity of the sublime.

No One (could've) Killed Hope

Da-da-da-da-Dilli Dilli Dilli Dilli Dilli.......

Like the rat-a-tat-tat of a remorseless machine gun, the opening lines of the casting song rain on your senses, and like an incantation, spellbinds you to a piercing ride through a land of powers almost magical, called Delhi. Its a place where power gets heady, and goes out of control. The rest of the song is a boiling cauldron of epithets to the city, surprisingly from a lyricist (Amitabh Bhattacharya) who's an outsider. The ominous tunes of the number set the pace of things to follow (and what a fitting tribute to that number from Delhi-6 eulogizing the city, this one from Amit Trivedi has turned out!)

Alas, as the movie 'No One Killed Jessica' (NOKJ) unravels, it starts doing so verbally as well. Aimed as a 'largely authentic' version of the turn of events that marked the Jessica Lall murder case, it promised to hold a mirror to today's India, whose reflection is unflatteringly disfigured & yet corrigible. But it loses its way in the bylanes of Bollywood cliches. Perhaps the director took the task of dramatization of the real life events too literally. 

There are moments of brilliant writing & performance in the movie, but sadly are interspersed with minutes & minutes of theatrics, which was the stuff you had wanted to avoid in the first place, when you queued up to buy the tickets of a different & stimulating movie. Sample this, the tunes of 'Aetbaar' haunting the on-screen proceedings, telling you of how trust is betrayed, defiled and how searing can the lachrymose aftermath be (with the repeated use of aetbaar in the lyrics, hammering home the point), and you want to join in the wailing of Sabrina Lall on her terrace, enacted here with a wasted sincerity by Vidya Balan; you want to scream out at the zillion instances of injustice being met out all around, on a daily basis - but sorry, the director denies you the chance of empathy - you want to feel for the characters but you can't.

Even the other protagonist of the film, Meera, is played with too much of a polemic aplomb by Rani Mukherjee, that it comes unstuck. She's a good-hearted bitch, who swears (and that's Rup-a-rup, borrowing from her song in the movie; given the aptly worded verbal lashing she belts out to a co-passenger in a flight), smokes & has NSA sex. To this, you might shrug and go 'so what?' Precisely, my point - friggin' predictable! Plus, all these above mentioned qualities would not even begin to describe a modern day bitch. They almost sound like virtues. But, as said before, the only department at full force in this movie are music & lyrics. Meera's song has a genuinely catchy 'Dhinchak dhinchak' opening piece, and some spirited singing (8 singers in the number!). 

The movie also hashes up with the candle light vigils that became the hallmark of the silent common man's protests. One harks back to a similar scene from Rang De Basanti which urged you to stand up and be counted. The movie refers to it, but doesn't live up on the call-to-action quotient; perhaps this was the one failure on the part of the music department to challenge the pride within all of us. (I wonder if RDB started the trend of candle light vigils, or those had been in vogue before it too.)

But enough of laments. The one thing great that this movie does, is underline again the sliver of hope that still lights up our dark ages. And that is the greater common conscience, still alive in all of us. Despite the scores of miseries, and travesties of justice that we go through, we still spring back on our feet.  This has come to play on number of occasions in the past - Kargil, 26/11, Mumbai 2005 deluge, Babri judgement in 2010, cases of Jessica Lall, Priyadarshini Mattoo, Nitish Katara, Ruchika Girhotra. 

Alas, this feeling needs to be woken up repeatedly, else it keeps going back to sleep. Wonder what would it take to awaken all of us, permanently, to bring in a much-needed silent revolution: - borrowing from a dialogue in NOKJ, maybe a piece of G@&*d F@@du cinema.......which unfortunately this one ain't!

It Happened One Night

"Drop the 'the'. Just 'Facebook'. Its cleaner. "

Thus departs Sean Parker, essayed with flair by Justin Timberlake, from the Chinese restaurant in NY, after his first meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. It turned out to be his biggest contribution to the phenomenon (that's a gross understatement!) called Facebook, which started out with the hence-dropped prefix to its name. Did you know?

Sitting in the theater, watching the journey (supposedly fictional) of the social networking site (which renders the movie its name) from its genesis in a drunken night's vendetta on his now ex-girlfriend, to its revered & feared status of being the third biggest 'country' in the world, and growing, is an experience that warms the cockles of your heart, and tugs at your grey matter too. No wonder the critics are raving about it being 'the smartest movie out this year'. You sit in the darkness, smiling, and thanking God & David Fincher for such a wholesome brain food.

There are scenes after scenes, which satiate your hunger for quality cinema. Especially the one where Zuckerberg calmly whiplashes a lawyer, with his candour, and then turns away to the window saying, "Its raining outside" (or was it the other way round - Need to watch it again to find out). 

I can already begin counting the multiple Oscar nominations - costumes, background score, editing, Performances (deserve the capital P, and I'll return to it), direction, cinematography, but most of it, and allow me to be repetitive, MOST OF IT, to some superlative writing, and crackling lines, by the scores!. Sample one (and you'll be queuing up outside the theaters for the flick):

Marylin Delpy: What are you doing? 

Mark Zuckerberg: Checking in to see how it's going in Bosnia. 

Marylin Delpy: Bosnia. They don't have roads, but they have Facebook.  

And don't we just need to queue up at the box office, if for nothing more but to pay obeisance to the new age religion & its founder, considering all of us, who're reading this now, spend a substantial chunk of our daily existence either being on the site, or when logged out, wondering what to post next, or who to add/poke, and what to like or dislike. Its an addiction indeed, and there's no respite in sight. Boo, did I just go?

The movie's a clever adaptation of the book 'The Accidental Billionaires', and that's another lock-in for an Academy nomination, though I haven't flipped those pages yet. Hope the book lives up to the movie. :-)

The performances are great, with Jesse Eisenberg playing the protagonist with the required geek-quotient, and bringing to life the uneasy genius of the man. A special mention needs to be kept aside for Justin Timberlake. I didn't think he could act as well as he crooned. He just brought sexy back! And Andrew Garfield is going to step out into raining female adulation. Tobey Maguire might not be missed in the next Spiderman flick.

The experience of the movie makes you sit up and take stock of your own life. Here's a Harvard grad (alright, he already is 'up there' by the virtue of his pedigree), passionate yet vengeful, not necessarily of the virtuous variety, and we may find him, being boiled in hot oil in the pan next to ours, on judgement day, but Goddamit, he's made 25 billion dollars and counting! You twinge in jealousy one minute, but then the script plots his decline, ending up friend-less, and possibly lonely, and you weigh the price of fame. The end credits usher you out, wondering thus, and simultaneously, cocking a snook at your more ordinary existence, with the Beatles' number, "Baby, You're A Rich Man"

Now where did my elusive BIG idea go! Let me get back to the search. :-)) 

The Day The Music Died

'There's so much to hear' thus spake A.R. Rehman in the Worldspace ad on TV, with the lilting jingle playing in the background. Alas! the bad tidings that Santa brought the Worldspace subscribers the world over, this Christmas: there won't be anymore to hear!


On December 31st, 2009 midnight, as the world drowns in the crescendo of celebrations, the lights will & sounds will go off at several Radio stations, as also at numerous (5 Lakh & counting) receivers across the world. Music would've died in its latest avatar: the fee-based, ad-free, genre segregated, crystal clear radio service, that enthralled so many, for the past 10 years. What was that about them whom god loved, dying young. Rings so true for you, mi amigo!


My affair with Worldspace started more out of necessity than heart's call. Being in sales takes you to places where its hard to find your moorings. So you seek out influences that save you from going crazy. So in came the radio, with receiver, antenna and thick cable in tow, into my one room abode at Rajkot (Gujarat). My first memory of her is of watching a muted FIFA World Cup 2006 match on my TV, with Rabindra Sangeet playing on the Radio Sonar channel of Worldspace. What a cocktail of deft movements on the field, being choreographed for me on the balmy soul music of Bengal! 


I remember my pining for unrequited love, as I looked out of the window of my ninth floor perch in a high rise in Surat (Gujarat), in utter darkness, watching the cotton bale clouds waft across a moonlit sky, with the radio heightening my woe & yet nursing it, by playing Don Mclean's Crying Channel Amore, a station devoted only to love ballads! Boy, you should've heard the channel on valentines: a recourse availed by singles like me, stuck in thankless jobs in hapless small towns; they played almost all of the best love songs ever written.


And she taught me how to appreciate various other genres, by staying on a channel for sometime. So I had my first taste of Mozart & Chopin at Channel Maestro, lots of Jazz at Radio Riff, contemporary pop & rock at channels Voyager, Spin, and specially fusion at Radio Moksha, the first ever channel dedicated to well-being. Its here, while getting ready for work on countless days, I fell in love with Prem Joshua, Trilok Gurtu, and the ilk. It was here that I first heard the new age spiritual Guru, Vasudev Jaggi's discourses, and he shook me with his usage of the gen-x lingo. I discovered a modern day Osho & perhaps even better.


And how can I forgot how she brought me close to my Raaz, Pichhle Janam Ka, by making me a slave to Radio Upcountry, a channel for Country Music, straight out of Nashville, Tennessee. Having no previous initiation into the genre, I fell in love hook, line & sinker with the genre. Some days the country songs give me a strong feeling of a previous life spent in the grasp of country music. This is one cosmic connection I need to decipher; if it takes me going all the way to the place, so be it!


So much has she become a part of my daily existence, that when I know she's gonna fade away in the next few days, I feel like I'm losing a beloved, who's been diagnosed with an advanced stage of a fatal disease, and has only little time to live, and yet doesn't still know about it. So she goes about humming her manifold tunes through the days, and I just smile achingly back at her, holding back my pain, yet approving of & thanking her for another blessed day she's been with me through.


On second thoughts, I question her destiny of having to go away. Why can't some big industrialist buy out her sick parent company, and revive her. I'm sure her fans will be ready to shell out much more than now to keep her with them. 


But in my heart, I know this is not the end. She'll be born again, somewhere, in some other form, and I shall wait for her to come back, and sing to me again. So long, my friend. Here's to a misty eyed farewell.


R.I.P. Worldspace! Long live the music

An Ode To Phuntsukh Wangdoo

"Give me some sunshine, 

give me some rain,

give me another chance,

(I) wanna grow up once again..."

A dejected final year student, Joy Lobo strums the melody on his guitar, minutes after having his invention-in-the-works, the camera-coptor trashed, alongside the dream of making his dad proud of 'the first engineer to come out of their village'. A couple of scenes later, the gizmo does fly, capturing the hostel life in myriad moods, courtesy the three protagonists of the film, culminating a song, which ends in the horror of them finding the inventor hanging from his room fan, captured on the telly connected to the gizmo flying up the hostel storeys. You know Joy's fait accompli even as the song begins, but the spectre of the suicide stays with you, in your shudder. The scene is simply one of the most memorable seen this year!

'Its not a suicide, its murder' says Rancho (Aamir Khan), and you agree. Its a telling aftermath of the rat race that our education system has become. That poignant fact kept in mind, the movie doesn't fall into a dreary treatise on the subject: it sings, dances, revels in toilet humour (sans the vulgarity), gives you lump in the throat several times over, travels far with incredulity & clichés, but never goes off-track with its core philosophy: proud to be an IDIOT (I Do It On (My) Terms)!

You're still wondering who the hell is Phuntsukh Wangdoo, if you haven't yet caught the movie. Go, figure, but when you do, you'll agree of it being the first time a Tibetan has been incorporated into a mainstream Indian film, and you feel that the actor who plays him, actually looks the part! 

Its when you rise up from your seat, as the end credit rolls, you thank actors like Aamir (and even Abhay Deol) for making you eagerly await their next piece of work. Each moment spent before it & during it is well worth & some more! From Ram Shankar Nikumbh, to Sanjay Singhania, to Ranchhoddas Shyamaldas Chanchad (yes, that's what the moniker Rancho expands to) in a space of three Christmases, Aamir makes every other actor of his generation look like wanna-bes. Its the characters you watch for those 3 odd hours (including a successful suspension of disbelief here on a 44 year old playing an under-grad) and not the actor behind them, very unlike some 'superstars' who play a variation of themselves in all that they do.

Of course, you do cringe occasionally at howlers like final year students staying in a 3-seater room, but then again, the movie still is decently researched. And yes, its not completely '5 Point Someone', but different, and jolly good fun! In fact, the difference makes the movie a fresh experience, unread of, in the book which inspired it.

The music of the film appeared bland in comparison to some of Aamir's earlier ones before entering the theatre, but at least a couple of songs grow on you, and stay with you, most likely to be 'Sunshine' and 'Behti Hawa Sa'. Even the talismanic 'Aal Iz Well' turns out a bright spot in the scheme of things. Songs weave themselves into the narrative as fluidly as the roller-coaster of emotions written into the script, where you smile one second, go misty eyed the other.

And you also catch your guilt pangs of laughing at Raju's (Sherman Joshi) poor household, spinster sister, maudlin mother & a paralysed dad: where other movies make you go for the handkerchief, Raju Hirani & Abhijat Joshi's script makes you chuckle, yet not falling into a mock slapstick. And you wonder also at the comic Chatur Ramalingam (Omi), or Viru Sahasrabuddhe or Virus (Boman Irani) being worked out of typical bollywood definition of South Indians or professors, but you're ready to barter all that for a handful of good laughs these characters evoke.

The cinematography really should come in for some generous compliments for making the Shimla-Manali-Leh road look like American highways, as also capturing the beauty en-route dreamily. It has a convert in me, now wanting to master that route by bike sometime soon.

So, will the movie become a phenomenon? You bet, it will. It will sit pretty, in its own right, up there with the serious messages conveyed emphatically in RDB & TZP. Will I watch it again, paying 300 bucks? You bet again! In fact, quite feel like doing what Madhavan & Sherman do in a 'hats-off' scene for Aamir: pull down their pants, bow in salute, and say" Jahanpanaah, tussi great ho!"