Dasavatharam



Time: Circa 1981. The first scene of a new movie opens. A music studio is seen where the recording for a song is about to begin. The easels for the violin notes are shown in a row. As the camera pans to each stand, one easel is blank without the notes sheets. That violinist is a blind man. The title card appears: Raaja Paarvai, literally, The Emperor’s Looks.

Kamal Hassan, who ventured into story and screenplay writing for the first time, also acted as the blind man in Raaja Paarvai. For the first time in the Tamil industry a hero artist played the blind man’s role. That and other novel and aesthetically subtle nuances of the movie made the critics to sit up and take notice. The movie bombed miserably at the box office. But those who longed for good cinema tightened their fists with the hope that here’s someone who is going to tread treacherous yet sweet unchartered waters of art.

Montage shots swiftly shuffle the years across. Circa 2008. The title card opens: Dasavatharam, Ten Incarnations. Of the same artist who thirty years ago came with heaps of promise. The movie begins with sloppy graphics work passed off as the glorious twelfth century. Then the scene pans to twenty first century to a huge auditorium with, again graphics crowd that looks like the first semester project from a multimedia student. As the story progresses, and as each avatar of the lead (and the only) actor unveils, weariness engulfs as we tiresomely expect the movie to pick up progress. It doesn’t. It drools on at the celebrated multi-fadedness of the artist and refuses to focus on the story. The story, a fugitive hunt a-la Fugitive, Bourne Identity, rushes hurriedly, slows down to adore the actor, again attempts to pick up pace and again slows only to infuriate the viewer. Sloppy and juvenile dialogues make the viewer scream in agitation. Sample: An American to a Japanese in combat: ‘Remember Hiroshima!’, Japanese Response: ‘Remember Pearl Harbour!’

The artist, over the years, owing partly to the hyperbolical endearment culture of Tamil Nadu, has grown incessantly narcissistic. The overt self-admiration and the unchecked plagiaristic practices seem to have cost him his art. Dasavatharam that stands as the empirical evidence to the effete Kamal Hassan, is an insipid, half-hearted attempt at the height of his narcissistic indulgence. As the substandard graphical portrayal of Tsunami brings the three hour horrid drama to an end, the jaded audience crawl out of the theatre lamenting at what had become of one of the most promising artists in the Indian Cinema.

Nuked



The Indo-US Nuclear Deal, which I had so long considered to be the only achievement of the present Congress government, bit the dust yesterday thereby leaving the performance score an absolute zero.

In an interview to Financial Times, UK, Ashley Tellis, senior official in the Bush cabinet and the original architect of the deal commented that the 'deal is almost dead.'

According to Raja Mohan, a political commentator for The Hindu, there is a faint chance of this deal surviving if Sonia Gandhi talks tough with the Left and decides to go ahead with the deal. If any, this would probably be the best time because BJP’s victories in state elections should have put a fear in the mind of the Left and they would probably do nothing to upset the status quo. However, it is very unlikely that Mrs. Gandhi would take such a stand. On issues equally or more serious, she has remained inactive in the past. The only time she had taken a bold stand was when she helped Quottrocchi escape from the clutches of CBI.

With economic experts such as P Chidambaram and Manmohan Singh the domestic economy is in trouble. With veterans like Pranab Muherjee, A K Antony and Arjun Singh, the performance of various departments are at astandstill. Nothing much has been done with respect to improving the infrastructure on a nationwide scale. The blatant corruptions and administrative breaches of B-grade state politicians T R Balu, Anbumani, and Lalu are severely overlooked or worse, ignored. Constitutionally this government has been admonished several times by the courts for violations. Politically they have blundered on Ramar Sethu (Ram Bridge) and Farmer’s Loan waivers. The only discredit in Abdul Kalam’s presidential tenure was when he was forced to dismiss the yet-assembled Bihar assembly extra-constitutionally for which he was reprimanded by the Supreme Court. (He later apologised)

So far, I have believed that V. P. Singh’s was the worst government India ever had. Now Madam’s Proxy government is officially in the race. This government only need to insult Indian Army and unleash a Mandal like atrocity to top this chart.

Karnataka and After



Some called it a new leaf in the history book; some alerted the public about the dangerous expansion of Hindutva forces; some attributed it to the decades of constant hard work.

Polemics aside, it cannot be denied that newness has entered Karnataka. BJP, the saffron party, the so called Hindutva Brigade has wrested the power in the state with reasonable success.

Had the elections been held earlier, the numbers would have been larger and the term ‘reasonable’ would have been absent from the above paragraph. But the legacy of the dirty politics institutionalised by Indira Gandhi now played far more crudely by today’s Congress ensured that BJP’s success rate is contained at three seats short of majority. This would mean that though they are in power, their stability would remain somewhat precarious for the whole term.

However the momentum gained in this election and the media’s hyperbole that ‘BJP has stormed beyond the South of the Vindhyas’ is going to play effectively in the minds of the people as well as the party cadres. This means that in the oncoming state elections in November, BJP will be battling with much renewed vigour and Congress with lot more scepticism and bellicosity. The fiendish chapters of Indira Gandhi’s era are already being applied in a coarse form in Rajasthan with Gurjar’s agitation.

Nevertheless, in Karnataka, when the hyperbole-induced rush dies down and the reality stares hard at the government and the people both are going to realise that nothing much is going to change. Karnataka is a curiously complex state that houses some of the economically most progressed societies and also the least progressed. The capital is the home to Infosys and Wipro, the software giants whose combined annual turnover exceeds the GDPs of all of India’s neighbouring countries put together, and some district capitals do not even have covered bus stands.

It is not going to be an easy task for any government to try to achieve this without the support and cooperation of the people. As it stands, the capital dwellers are too busy consuming the resources and crying for more and the peripheral districts are too busy battling over the literary superiority of Kannada over their neighbouring languages, while their farmers are hanging themselves over the bad debts of as little as ten thousand rupees. The government must actively propagate people’s social and civic responsibilities in working on development projects. It is very unlikely that the new government is going to indulge in that. They are going to be too busy basking in the new found glory as the creaking infrastructure quaks under their ground.

As for the Congress, their wily madam’s deceitful arrogance is going to take them down further in the coming elections. Indira’s Congress destroyed the naïve optimism of the post-independence society. Sonia’s Congress is pulling at all the stops to destroy the naïve optimism of the post-reforms society. The Madam is trying to prove her mettle at the game of her Mother-in-law. With the nation staked at the table.