Womanly Tales

There’s been much drama about the making and release of ‘My Name is Khan’, a Karan Johar – Shah rukh Khan – Kajol production. I went to see it yesterday partly because I am a closet Karan Johar fan, partly because I enjoy watching Shah Rukh Khan some of the times and partly because I wanted to ‘pay’ by way of support against the ugly bullying that the movie and it’s producers have been at the brutal end of in the hands of the Shiv Sena.
So much so that I was OK to destroy that sense of beauty that still clung to my mind like perfume to clothing, courtesy, A Single Man that we’d watched the previous night.
Karan Johar as a film maker is known for making ‘bubble gum’ movies – guaranteed to give me a headache [K3G]. The good news however is that the headache only lasts as long as I am in the cinema hall. Having learnt the hard way, I strongly believe that KJ films are best watched on television. You can leave the room as many times as you want and come back for the songs.
With MNIK, however, all this changes. I didn’t get a headache this time around thanks to the remarkable restraint on KJ’s part. There’s only one scene where Kajol breaks down over the dead body of her son that threatened a headache but then again, had that not happened, Kajol would have missed out on being anything in the film. Ok, so yes, we all love Kajol and she remarkably has lost some more weight despite being a mother for this many years – but that isn’t a reason to go watch a film. Though I’d guess that was precisely why half if not more had turned up. There’s something about our wholesome women that we so love and desperately want to retain given the current onslaught of size zero.
What changed with me about MNIK is that I left the film with a huge dollop of indigestion, thanks to the sheer volume of content and concepts that KJ served up Punjabi style. This director is no shy reticent recluse. No, he loves his entertainment and dishes it up super-sized – In the past this was OK because the bubble-gum variety didn’t stick. With MNIK however it’s not like that. I desperately want Colin Firth’s A Single Man to come back into the forefront of my emotional existence but sadly it can’t. And it’s all thanks to MNIK and all this gaseous residue in my head that I need to figure out how to purge.
Interestingly I did have a lot of gas [CO2] pumped into me recently and without going into the gory details there is some similarity here. Firstly you just don’t know where the gas once injected into your body will actually end up. For me it was mostly shoulder, ribs and wrist pain. With MNIK as well, I suspect that the residue will surface up in odd places, least of all where I expect them to!
Speaking on gases and the ‘Windy City’ — I wonder sometimes if it isn’t really Mumbai that deserves this name instead of Chicago. And I am not refering to the climate at all. Reading the news report about the gaseous discharges of Bal Thackeray and Son Uday, I am surpriced the Mumbaigoers haven’t all shipped out to better, cleaner, fresh pastures. Surely if it is the people that maketh the city, and nothing can be truer about Mumbai, then these same people could ship out and make something out of a place free of the Thackerays.
In response to the bomb blast in Pune, Udhay Thackeray has blamed the Mumbai government stating that had it not deployed all the security forces protecting cinemas showing MNIK, the death of 9 innocent lives could have been prevented. Of course, he failed to mention that the reason most of the security forces were protecting cinema halls showing MNIK was because his party goons had threatened to beat up [if not kill] anybody and anything that contributed to the succesful release of MNIK.
So we have bombs exploding on one hand by unknown individuals and on the other 1000+ misguided ‘party workers’ benefiting the luxurious accomodation of state prisons because they openly committed crimes of assault and vandalism in the run up to the release of MNIK. The victims in both cases were innocent civilians. Why Bal Thackeray and Uday Thackeray are not behind bars still alludes me. Does a terrorist always have to be deemed the un-known, un-trace-able, un-catchable? The list of innocent lives keeps getting longer and yet very few ‘terrorists’ are caught. Can we take these individuals of the Shiv Sena that repeatedly threaten and assault innocent human beings and book them under the same laws that apply to ‘terrorists’? These are afterall disenfranchised, misguided individuals whose words and actions contribute to that list of innocent lives [not that I think anybody in the Indian govt cares about the list]. This partial blind spot renders the system ineffective with the imbalances increasing and spawning further ‘You’re either with us or against us’ dogma.
There was a time when protesting meant candle light vigils in the spirit of non violence and passive resistance. There were other times, more popular, where ‘party workers’ would burn effigies and beat cardboard cut outs with slippers and sticks – a bit juvenile but nevertheless an example of disturbing forms of violence. The Shiv Sena ‘party workers’ are perhaps at the very top of the class of this kind of violence where cardboard cut-outs have been replaced by other people’s property and in many cases other human lives. When the number of human casualty exceeds a certain unknown figure, it’s then logged as a riot that can only be incessantly continued before it shows any sign of dying down.
There seems to be something terribly wrong about these acts and very little value for an innnocent life, never mind a few hundred.
MNIK is one way of voicing these issues in search of a solution. In the FT magazine this week there was an article of a similar exercise in Morocco where a woman was resolving social disputes via a television show. No, this isn’t the Jerry Springer variety but one that has the full backing of muslim clerics. Disputes in the past, the host said in the article, were not resolved in tribunals but within society and in souks.
There is a lot of merit in voicing our stories, especially our fears – not like the Americans do it though – which is like an orgy of pseudo entertainment, referred to as ‘reality’ television, very rapidly infiltrating Indian television as well. Instead KJ has chosen his film as a media to raise issues of human identity as unique to the many myriad ways by which we erroneously and sometimes detrimentally classify ourselves.
There’s a scene in the movie where a Christian society sponsors a $500 dinner with President Bush to alleviate poverty in Africa. Rizwan Khan the main protagonist of the film is not allowed to participate because he’s informed this is a dinner for Christians only. Khan doesn’t accept this – instead he insists on contributing the $500 to the contribution to alleviate poverty in Africa, saying, it would perhaps go to all those who are also not Christian in Africa.
In vedic astrology, Rahu/Ketu, the lunar nodes are reflective of ‘terrorists’. Every chart drawn has both a Rahu and a Ketu. Their positions, aspects and influences can further spell out what it is that is ‘terrorizing’ about that individual. We are all in our own ways terrorizing to one another. Some of us more than others. This isn’t my attempt to simplify or belittle the actions of those that were behind 9/11 or the Mumbai attacks – but instead, just the opposite. This is a complex thread across our society and we cannot afford to isolate a religion, a race or a perceived identity to help us escape the fear of not understanding what’s going on. Rizwan Khan quotes the Koran when he says the death of an innocent will cost us our humanity. We can no longer justify violence merely to escape our own fear.

Nor has the answer come from our judicial systems. Beyond the labor of law [and I believe as a pre-cursor to tribunal investigations], there are social norms that we need to voice that have to do with our identities as human beings and not our classifications.
KJ with MNIK has succeeded in voicing this conversation and while it certainly feels like a bout of indigestion, if we pursue with it, it will do us all some good in the long run.