Connecting to Desiness

During J's winter break, we were visiting with a friend of DB's whose wife recently had a baby. It is not often that we get five days of the immersive desi experience so it was almost like a trip to India minus the cost and the hassle. We had freshly cooked meals four times a day - both DB and I love to cook so we gladly pitched in. The mom-in-law caught her desi soaps on the living room TV and after the kids and grandma went to bed, we watched a Bollywood flick. This family is all set to return to India in the next couple of years - it has been their plan from the start. The amped up desi ambiance around the house is supposedly for the benefit of the kids who will find the transition easier. They socialize only with their kind to minimize the impacts of a culture that will soon become foreign to the children.

As we watched some of the ridiculous shows grandma is hooked on to, we could not help comparing them to some of  the entertainment Doordarshan provided in 80s and early 90s when there were no other options. They were infinitely more sensible and represented the India that we lived in. These folks go back every year and spend a few months in their home town - unlike DB and I, they have never grown strangers to India. It was interesting to see that they agreed with us. We would all love to see Indian television do something that spoke to us and our desi-ness. It certainly does not to me and many of my desi friends - maybe desi-ness as an idea and identity is in a state of flux right now. Until we are able to find our true voice, the popular media will sound cacophonous.

In the middle of all this, I decided to check out Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower and retired hurt. Past page thirty or so, I could no longer keep up with the burgeoning cast of characters. Adiga had pulled off an afternoon desi soap on the reader. The plot does not flow or expand on it's own merits but is padded and propped by characters and stories that contribute nothing to the denouement.

Our hosts recommended that we watch the movie Kaminey since neither DB or I had watched it before. We were advised to follow the plot closely because it was a complicated one. I am guessing the idea was to go for edgy, ironic and different - take done to death the twins separated at birth story and turn it on its head. Every few minutes there would be a part that was really nicely done -with that came an expectation of more and better to follow, but that did not seem to happen. The whole experience was like a roller coaster ride with frequent ups and downs. May have been fun for thirty minutes and under but intolerable for a full length movie.

Reading this story out censoring the sense out of American TV shows made me think about how our friends are preparing for their family's return to India. Maybe all of this is symptomatic of the state of confusion we are in as a people.

Delhi Belly

I have not watched a Bollywood flick for over a year now and decided it was time to get caught up. I chose Delhi Belly and was very glad I did. It is a funny, risque and smart little movie  - not your garden variety Bollywood caper. Each character does their part really well in making this movie come together rather nicely. The dude with the Delhi Belly is not the protagonist but his condition directly contributes to many twists and turns in the plot. The fact that I laughed as many times as I did watching this movie, made me realize that the desi in me is alive and well ; not having been back to India in over eight years has not taken that away from me. DB would have enjoyed it too - but his desi-ness is much too worn out for him to get what I did out of it.

What is specially neat about the movie is how well it captures the essence of the Indian experience - we are a people and country that can span centuries and millinea within a day of our lives. There is this dilapidated house with toilet fixtures from the early part of the last century shared by three guys with unremunerative, non-mainstream jobs, the offices are swank and very twenty first century, the electronics on the more well-heeled characters are state of the art , the wardrobes are deeply influenced by the west but not entirely subordinate to it. To that extent we have the ironic tee-shirts with distinctly desi flavor and the zari trimmed vest on a scooped top. There is the kathak guru upstairs from the three guys instructing young girls on a dance form thousands of years old in a setting not unlike what it was back then - very little if anything has changed about their world. The landlord who seeks comfort in the arms of a prostitute visits them in an establishment that looks as old as the trade itself.

The female characters in the movie range between conservative to liberated and everything in between. They are not the one-dimensional romantic interests for the male roles - among other things it was good to see female sexuality being acknowledged without subterfuge.There is a place in India for all of this to co-exist, the multitude of characters and locales that shape our communities grow with the wild profusion of a tropical rain forest. It may not be pretty or well-ordered but it is certainly not sterile and lifeless. All of these contradictions come together to create the Indian and desi experience. I have missed the time travel that everyday life back home can be. Delhi Belly was the perfect Indian sampling platter for someone who has not been home in a while.

3 Idiots

Watching 3 Idiots was a bitter-sweet experience which is probably an unusual reaction to a movie that tries for the most part to tickle your funny bone. It took me back to my own engineering college days in India, the experience of having let off steam after cooking for more than two years the ultimate pressure cooker that is the process of preparing for the entrance tests to get into one of these colleges.

A lot of kids (myself included) checked out of system completely - we bided our time until graduation and tried to get by applying ourselves as little as possible. After all the work it took to get in there, the education we were being offered was underwhelming to say the least. Many of us were not even interested in becoming engineers but had been goaded there by a combination of societal and parental pressures and had no idea what to do next. In the best case, we would go through the motions on auto-pilot, keeping our heads above the water and find ourselves gainfully employed at twenty two. In a sense, the whole business of competing for and getting into engineering college had killed our capacity to dream bigger more bolder dreams.

So many memories come back watching this movie - the hazing rituals, the nicknames that people acquire that have the ability to capture their essence of who they are in a word or a phrase, a learning focused on cram and recall instead of independent, creative thinking and then the psychotic professors. 3 Idiots covers much of that familiar ground.The bare bones story-line is entirely credible though you have to make the necessary discounts for the bravura Bollywood flourishes. It is also advisable not get too finicky about minor details such as why a man in his 40s is chosen to play the part of a teenager or if a vaccum cleaner can in a pinch become part of a midwife's emergency toolkit - such persnicketiness is not the ideal way to savor a Bollywood flick.

I was reminded of the suicides on our campus while I was a student there. The first time it happened, our class went into a state of shock, our seniors had seen it before and took it much more stoically. By the time of the final semester, we were to the point, where we counted ourselves lucky if the kid who had decided to end their life was not someone we were close to.

Back in the day, I have worried about hyper-competitive room-mates whose lives (literally and figuratively) rode on their performance in exams, campus interviews, GREs, GMATs, CATs and such. Then there were the great white hopes from impoverished families who had the dreams and aspirations of several generations riding on them - potrayed in the movie by the character of Raju Rastogi. If you have known one of them, you come to have a much keener appreciation for D.H Lawrence's Rocking Horse Winner.

The movie also brought back many happy memories - the anti-establishment kids we goaded and dared to needle professors we all hated, the brutally funny things we said about each other and about those who "taught" us, friendships that turned out to be life-changing and  romances that did or did not end up in fairy tale marriages. The final meeting between Chatur (the flatulent nerd with the personality of a sun-tanning gecko) and Rancho (sensitive alpha-geek with a burning desire to learn and far above the fray to need to compete - the kind of kid you never forget) is so reminiscent of the one-upmanship games that get played on Facebook walls and mailing list updates.

A lot of my former classmates still carry yardsticks from undergrad days to measure the worth of their peers. There is more than a little schadenfreude to see the class topper married to a senior who everyone knew was gay - the girl was so busy studying, she never got or read the memo. There is also awe and envy about kids on the fringe - the ones who failed to distinguish themselves in any way whatsoever - were no more than scenery on campus for four years - the "idiots" by this movie's definition,  but are now extremely successful.

Then there is the big, fat layer of mediocrity where many of us find ourselves today. Some are comfortable because they expected no better and then there are those who cannot imagine how they ended up where they are - they were destined for much better given their ranks, grades and other quantitative measures of success. To that end, the relentless point proving and point scoring - I am less mediocre than you, I make more than you, my house is bigger than yours, my cars are fancier than yours, I travel further and more often than you do, I look younger than you do, I am happier than you, my children and my spouse are better than yours.

In a movie, you can have that all end at one reunion after ten years in Ladakh - the winner gets the last laugh and the loser leaves chastised. In real life, it never really ends and it ceases to be funny after a while. Back to the 3 Idiots - would definitely recommend watching it. Aamir Khan (age notwithstanding) gives a superb performance and the rest of the crew is not half bad either.