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!