Malvika’s Ramblings

(Poster from bollywoodmantra.com)

Ok, so its been quite a while since Chokher Bali made news, got reviews and I am presuming you have no problem if I reveal turning points in the story.

The movie is based on a book written by Rabindra Nath Tagore and is full of complex characters and relationships within a family. The story has four main protagonists

Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) - a widow (unrelated to the family)
Ashalata (Raima Sen) - young wife
Mahendra (Prosenjit) - husband
Bihari (Tota Raychaudhuri) - younger brother of the husband

Binodini comes to live at the house of the young couple. She befriends Ashalata. Ashalata is eager to alleviate Binodini’s sorrows in her life as a widow with no jewelery, man or epicurean pleasures like chocolates and tea. There is so much intimacy that ultimately Binodini starts sleeping with the husband, Mahendra.
Ashalata is fooled and tricked by her own naivette. Ha ha! Ashalata ki Googly!

Binodini leaves the house and goes to Bihari saying “Give me support. make me your wife. Well, Ok then, make me your mistress”. He rejects her, not even a one night stand. Heh heh. Binodini ki Googly!

Mahendra leaves his home to go to Binodini. She says that they should go to Bihari. He says “Why? Do you want him as a witness to our marriage?” She says “No. I want you as a witness”. LOL. Mahendra ki solid Googly.

Finally Bihari does come around, stepping down from his pedestal of freedom fighter, disciplined man with control over his lust and emotions. He proposes to Binodini who accepts. He returns the next morning to take her away but finds her gone. Poof! Bihari ki Googly!

Overall satisfactory movie with lots of back.

(Scream by Edvard Munch)
Sometimes you don’t recognise your friends
You look at them harder and longer, recalling them..
You look through narrow slits as if they were headlights
You know they don’t know, they have no idea
The general chatter, some talk is going on and they don’t know the distance
Laughter, joke, chuckle, pause, chatter

You go out for a breath of fresh air
You have to carry yourself
You feel like you are finally in touch with reality
Out of yourself
Looking aerially at this Malvika Jain with whom you have to spend the rest of her life
So stuck in one person
Balloonface, slow motion, inverse colour, falling forwards flat on the face, Looped action, Never ever really falling and getting there with face on the table

I must write this down, record this reality
I grasp pencil and paper and write in an ugly scrawl
I remember people use pens and pencils to write
They write on paper
The human race had achieved this feat - this art of writing
Since quite some time
The magnitude of the accomplishment dawns upon me
I also remember that people laugh and people cry, a whole range of emotions
What is laughing and what is crying, why is it done, I cant figure out as hard as I try

This is so real and so scary and such a zap

So many thoughts running in my head, running ahead till they stumble, fall over each other, catapult and leap over each other’s head to make it first
Which ones are reaching my mouth, forming words and getting spoken..
Which ones are only thoughts?
Of all the millions of thoughts which are words, which are in my head I have no idea
Its scary to wonder how much of my mental state is revealed and what is in me
What thoughts of mine do my friends know?
Am I expressive to them right now, am I being bold and insane or am I dropping pearls of wisdom
We so often continue to act according to the impression we are making
No reference point for my being in company when I don’t know what i am to them
They look puzzled, they are prodding me
Maybe in all this deafening rush of thoughts nothing was spoken
I was silent all along
I want to speak
I want to say something
Having spoken I cant understand whether I just spoke or was that just a loud thought in my head
I feel stifled with thoughts
I want to speak
I want to get back in touch with that substance of yesterday and all the years before
I am out there in reality and cant contact Malvika Jain or the medium she uses for communication
I am too much out there, flung far away
They still shake me and ask me to say something

Later I discover that I was actually speaking and the people around me were just playing with my mind. Dummbfucks!

Yes, thats right.

My family and I went to the amusement park near Pinjore Gardens. We desultorily studied the swings - Water wars, Shooter, Toy train, those Banging Cars etc. Finally we reached the snacks counter. Everyone suddenly perked up and began taking an interest in the park.

And here is what we had - ice cream pakodas. They actually do fry the ice cream and it doesn’t melt! As for people who dont know pakodas, its an eatable like fried dumplings.

Here is what caught our eye first -

And here is what the cook does. He rolls a scoop of ice cream in coconut crumb, rolls that in some fruit jelly and again rolls it all it coconut crumbs. He fries this ball in bubbling oil. When he serves it to you, Lo Behold! Its hot outside and properly frozen cold inside.

I have been looking for the lyrics of the song “Soni de nakhre” from the film Partner. It looks like the song is very popular but no one really knows what it is!

A guy at NIFT explained to me that “Popping up the chain” is a special dance move and he spent a long evening before he figured out that the lyrics were “Can we pop up the chain, can we?”

Here is what searching online gave me -

Soni de nakhre sone lagade o mainu

Oh keinde, funk funk funk (more…)

Independence day. Time to fly a kite on Nani’s terrace. Nope, never done it before. Novice. Debutante. So here is an account of kite flying from my thirteen year old cousin Pranav :

 About a week ago my cousin and I found a kite sitting on top of our roof. Neither of us had ever flown a kite before so we decided to try to get it up in the sky. It was a valiant effort but we failed miserably. Ever since then we’ve been determined to find someone to teach us how to fly a kite.
        Today our neighbor came over with her husband and two cousins and started flying kites on our roof. We thought it was amazing how they even got the kite to fly. They admitted that they weren’t very good but to us they looked like stars. Our neighbor’s husband was the most experienced kite flyer. Most of the time his kite would get cut but sometimes he cut other people’s kites which I thought was very cool.
        My main problem in flying kites is getting it up in the air. I asked my neighbor’s husband to get the kite up so that I could try flying it. He did that and soon I had the kite flying high. For about five minutes everything was going smoothly. I was just minding my own business flying very peacefully but then another kite came out of nowhere and cut mine. I was a bit disappointed but I still had a lot of fun.
         The funnest part of the whole experience was when we were flying our last kite and it got cut. Then another kite’s string just fell into our hands and we started flying that. It wasn’t long until that kite was cut though. Then we thanked our neihgbors and they left.
         All in all the evening was very fun and exciting. I hope to be able to fly a kite at a reasonable level after about a year. I didn’t realise how fun kite flying is until this afternoon. If you’ve never tryed kite flying before, I think there’s a good chance that you’ll have fun learning.    

The last time I visited Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri it was about 8 years ago. The beauty of the architecture did not leave an indelible mark on me. What I was struck by was the number of dancing bears I came across - 12 bears on the short road between Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri. These large animals that should be shaking branches of trees violently with thier powerful arms or ambling down a forest path were tied to the end of a string, muzzled with ghungroos and made to dance for tourists on the hot tar road.

I visted Taj Mahal again in August 2007 and was very happy to see no bears on the road. We passed a bear rescue organisation and a large board that pointed to a bear and read “Bear dancing is fun? Ask him”. I was one of the many tourists who had felt bad and gone on my way to appreciate Mughal architecture, but Kartick Satyanarayan and Geeta Seshamani did not look in the other direction and did do something about the cruel practice. Kudos to them!

They founded Wildlife SOS in 1995 which manages the World’s Largest Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre for Sloth Bears in Agra. As http://wildlifesos-india.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html says, “Wildlife SOS has rescued over 390 sloth bears from leading miserable lives as “dancing bears”; they now live peacefully at our rescue centres in Agra, Bhopal, Bangalore and Hyderabad.”
Visit the site for more information on rescues and steps taken towards stopping cruelty towards animals.

The locals who used to be involved with bear dancing now look at Wildlife SOS for employment. Here is a photograph, taken from the website, of Ehsaan…a young Kalandar boy-turned-Bear keeper at the Wildlife SOS-managed Agra Bear Rescue Centre.

This evidence of bear rescue alone, made the trip worthwhile. Apart from that, the children who frisk around in Fatehpur Sikri offering to recite Urdu poetry for money made my day too! Who can fail to be flattered by :
“…Toh yeh hai Taj Mahal ki murat,
Par usse acchi hai hamari madam ki surat!”
(So this is the picture of Taj Mahal, but more beautiful than that is madam’s countenance!)

The Taj Mahal was OK. What I really enjoyed about it was all the optical illusions incorporated in the architecture. The illusion is so obvious that you dont need any imagination at all to perceive it. For example, one of the minarets has four sides to it, but due to the zig zag lines drawn on it, it appears to have 8 sides when you stand back and look at it! Touching the minaret tells you one thing and looking at it tells you another!

I guess Shah Jahan owed it to Mumtaz Mahal to build the Taj Mahal. After all she must be an exhausted woman after giving birth to 14 children of His Majesty’s. 6 of the children lived, 8 died. 4 of the six were boys, the youngest of them being Aurangzeb who had no qualms about killing his brothers and imprisoning his father to claim the throne. With a childhood full of artistic pleasures he decided that he had had enough of it when he became King and banned music altogether from the kingdom. He also put a stop to the second Taj Mahal that was to be built in black marble stating that enough wealth had been frittered over beautiful and useless pursuits and it was time to take matters into a firm hand. So Shah Jahan spent his last days imprisoned in the Agra fort, which lies a little distance away from the Taj Mahal. Everyday he would get out of his cell to gaze at the white marbled monument and pine after his beloved wife.

Mumtaz Mahal had extracted 3 promises from Shah Jahan -
1 To never remarry (She was the third and most loved wife, the only one to bear him children)
2 To build a memorial that would be so beautiful as to keep the memory of her alive forever
3 To love their children unconditionally
Well, Shah Jahan followed the first two promises and looks like he followed the third as well with no rewards.

It is interesting to see the Brit presence in Taj Mahal. The Chandelier gifted by Lord CUrzon hangs over the graves as a reminder of the toe the East India Company managed to wedge in during the Mughal rule. It is said that he arrived on such a big horse to view the Taj that they decided to mark the moment by putting up the horseshoes of his ride on the monument’s door. The horseshoes can be seen as giants among those of other lesser normal horses.

A happy trip to make, a skip away from Delhi with a mall that pops up surprisingly on the lonely highway. Once you get over the Hansel and Gretel feeling, its OK to go inside that chocolate chimneyed and sugar windowed mall.