India’s daughter can give it back guns, noisy iron rod, ciggie punches et al

**1/2

It is ok to roast and beat up people to pulp with irons rods these days or so it appears. It seems to be what gets the eyeballs. So one should not grudge sturdy iron bars that go crunch crunch on all bones in sight. If you thought Badlapur was violently gross wait till you see this one. And the sad part is this violence is for real. It is the case of art imitating life. Coincidentally or otherwise the premise of these stories always ends in up some towns north of the country, close to the capital. Is the movie industry not so subtly trying to give a message? Or is it because the instances of rustic raw criminality there are so numerous that it cannot be missed. Ordinary people exhibit courage in scenarios  gut wrenching enough to make the most strong hearted go weak in the legs.

The director in a tearing hurry to set the premise, packs the first few minutes with many aspects of the urban working woman, some relevant and some not so, to the latter part of the movie. Like the central female character is an advertising professional in a corporate company who smokes, has had a cross cultural love marriage established purely by cooing sexily in a south Indian language, is confident, mischievous, raring to go and explore the country side with gay abandon and of course loves to initiate intimacy with her partner. All this is put together so breathlessly, that perhaps the director was worried that we might misconstrue the victim who is also the main protagonist as an ordinary submissive wife and actually derives her strength from smoking and being of liberal values. Really?

While you are gasping and wondering about the opening shot that has a minor parallel story of hooligans scaring her while driving on the streets of Delhi  and she attempts in vain to book a case and instead is given a fatherly sermon of how she should perhaps avoid venturing out at late night. ( You naughty Delhi lawyers look what you started now )

The director is restless by now and decides that it is time to drop the unsuspecting audience right into the middle of a rustic rural setting alongside a bypass of the main highway in question. To be fair this story there on jerks you up and gets you all agog with admiration for the cinematic-ally natural brilliance with which it is handled and setting the the tone for the rest of the movie where urban male egoes clash against an equally explosive rural male ego. The couple out on a holiday and stopping by at the roadside hotel are sucked into the middle of a tragic honor killing. A honourable intervention driven by need to pander to ones ego goes wrong and takes the holidaying couple on a chase filled with bloodbath and bones crunching all around before ending in a climax straight out of Nana Patekar’s Prahaar.

There is a slightly weak and not fully fleshed out story of honor killings in the north of India and subtly suggests that there is no democracy beyond the frontiers of Delhi ‘s Gurgaon which it appears is a fully self governed violent world of its own. Aunty Leslee must be rubbing her hands in glee over this submission. But India’s own daughter Anushka decides to take things in her own hand and hopefully gets some semblance of a justice.

How she does it does makes you want to applaud the very tight and slick direction from the director Navdeep Singh. While there is nothing startingly new about the tale that one has maybe heard on the news channels every other day, there is a taut narration coupled with action  that the director uses to hold your attention. You may want to uncheck that strong grip you have on the theatre's armrests when the going gets tough and orthopedists are badly required.

No one can take away the fact that Anushka puts her life into this role as a producer and more as an actor and is given able support by her supportive movie hubby Neil and a scary performance by Darshan of Mary Kom fame who I felt was not fully exploited.

There are spurts of extremely admirable detailing ( watch the scene where they chase the offenders for the first time or when the female protagonist hurls abuses at her enemies in frustration while throwing stones at them, erasing abuses on the walls of a public toilet or simple horror drawn up by a villager leaning against a car window) and else where the director seems to be in a tearing hurry and is probably  in a mode of ‘let’s get on with it and finish it’. This is obviously a director to watch out for.

Obviously the recall value is maximum with the grating iron rod that reverberates through the theatre. The cast performance is of top order from most of the main cast. The plot is smart but too thrifty on creativity

I can only applaud week after week as new directors emerge on the scene to take us far away from the world of murky B graders. The movie is topical and almost felt like a silent answer to the documentary. We know how to handle it when things go wrong. India’s daughter can give it back guns, a noisy iron rod, ciggie punches et al

Choking on Nobility

I think it was the teaser that hit me first. We know that certain foreign channels make excellent documentaries. They work on the subjects like they would for a movie. They take their documentary making quite seriously. Good art, great sound, smart cuts, excellently timed fade in and fade outs accompanied by a manipulative background score are normally above the bar. It was very clear that this one clearly with the capital city gang rape as the fulcrum was not going to be different.

He wore a neat almost new checkered blue shirt (I wondered in jail?), had a freshly trimmed beard (sounds nasty but seemed like professionally trimmed) and a funnily confident smile on his face. No camera consciousness something that comes after being in front of a camera for long.  He spoke with smugness that one found on simple people who win competitions on TV and are asked how they felt.

She asked for it. She resisted. If she had not probably she would have been let off. In a very matter of fact way. The teaser jerked me up at this stage. This was not cinematic victory. This was a certain abusive rawness that was being commented upon a subject who was no more and that by a perpetrator who suddenly seemed like the main protagonist. Disbelief. I watched the teaser again. There were a couple of more people from the legal field who spoke like some villains in a B grade cinema.

I willed myself for a moment carried away by the slickness and the suspense of what was to come, as classy documentary creativity. It was seconds before uncontrollable repulsion rose within me. Did he just say those things? And they actually filmed it. The combined scenario of the well clothed man mouthing what seemed like well-practiced and nuanced rubbish felt rigged to perfection.

I wondered how they must have hit on the whole idea. Some International festival awards in place. Creative team sits  moping around papers with articles on sensitive subjects cut out.

“Look here’s one. It has all the elements in place. The same country from where the previous award winner on slums came from. We have plenty of poverty, nasty guys, victim with an already established international sympathy, weak authorities who fall over themselves and get overwhelmed when they have external requests for shooting especially if it comes from established brands”

“So then what is the underlying theme of this motion work that we want to make? Should we study the xyz spring type uprising that exploded following the incident. Should we focus on the weak decision making in the law system there? A definite lack of will to punish ‘

“No wait perhaps we could focus on gender inequality that causes rape there”

“Yeah but rapes happen everywhere, almost multiple times more in well developed countries”

“Yeah true but these masses don’t know that. They are suckers for anyone who shows them their reflection. More so they lap it up if it comes from outside.”

“But will this not be a repeat of the countless debates that happen already in their country. Their channels already have an international class and do give ours a run for our money in coming up with fiery political and social debates”

“No, not if we get an USP element into our story. We interview the perpetrator, put in a clever clause to protect our editorial rights, spread the social research buzz words and they will lap it up”

A fictional conversation. But somehow cannot help feeling that is what then leads to an in depth doctoral research on culprits heading to the gallows. They need to be rehearsed of course. After all they are the uneducated criminal scum from the bylanes of poverty who cannot really make a clear judgment on right or wrong let along speak with eloquence. 

The authorities sense trouble. The social media is abuzz. The divided media catches on. The channel that was to telecast it is cautious. The players on the other side who do not have the telecast rights go all out searching for the ulterior reasons and in many cases hit the right spots.

The maker panics. They need to put on their cap of righteousness. They were here to save the world and the country from this problem of rabid men who go on a raping spree all over the country apparently. To focus on sociological analysis of why men rape.No wait. Let’s change gear to a more noble pursuit. Let’s make it about gender inequality. The pseudo crowds which haunt twitter accounts and have twitching fingers will simply let the message go viral. There was this poor maker who came with a noble pursuit …sob… and was being hauled over the coals for the wrong reasons. The man recounting the violent rape in detail is actually going to free the masses from this whole gender inequality issue once they watch it. 

Please believe me. It is only these 54 minutes of outstanding creativity which is going to transform the men of this nation and let their women live and get me that award. Oops. Strike out that last sentence. Sob. Gender inequality. We even got two perverts from the professional fields who are supposed to fight out and hopefully free these rape re-tellers elucidate in detail. Again carefully cultivated to speak freely. Wonder what they must have been told. This is your chance at glory. The translators must have told them to speak from their heart. Let the world hear of your manly views. We can prod you on if you forget. There must be some applause at the end of each take too as the men look mighty pleased with themselves.

The well-dressed criminals move into the frame from a deep chamber within as doors clank with an authority. Framed against a plain background. Perhaps to pivot all attention to the process of freeing gender inequality. But what emerges as he begins to speak is a detailed remorseless and in fact sounding like your favorite story teller, of how those with him pulled out the entrails of the victim. That must have been the core of this victorious exercise. They had got their winning shot. Something that could make the world gasp.  Show how this country seemed to reek of repulsive men whose actions bordered on the cannibalistic. Suckers within the country and outside would lap this up. Achieving the heights of atrocity that a human can render to a fellow being. It did not matter that this was one of the 0.7 Bn. They were sure this was how the rest behaved. And they would make sure the world believed.

Now the most important part to get a local stakeholder believe in you. One had to find somehow with an international class to partner with where they could conduct soul searching discussions. One is never sure if the local stakeholder got innocently trapped believing they were indeed contributing to a global social issue. Really helping the country

There are pleas to the topmost authority in the country. Please note that I have come to 

save your country. Deliver your nation from the burden of gender inequality.  Then the rest is left to us the millions of self-appointed critics and decision makers of the country who have their own tools to let the world know of what they thought of the issue.

It is very important in all such cases to pronto take sides with nobility in this case gender inequality. And if you have your own grouse with the authorities accuse them of throttling your freedom. Combine the two and you have an explosive mix.

So the self-appointed conscience keepers of the nation which incidentally of course includes yours sincerely and who of course do this in their free time after they have earned their daily bread and have settled down in the time slot between that evening social drink with other butterflies from the society and the timing of the favorite soap, punch away at the keyboard of their smart phones on all the social networks. Anger, esteem, furious at the so called clamping down of freedom of expression, saving the nation, our own pop justice assuming the role of freedom fighters of today’s society colonized by apparent dictatorial authorities.

Look at the anguish of the maker. See how pained the person is at the opportunity to change the world being taken away. We need to get every citizen watch this by coercion even if that means taking away another form of freedom. Freedom to choose to decry this work.  Some lead the expression. The mob follows. Safety in numbers. So there is a mass social movement on how the work should not be banned. Let’s not disrespect the English version of “Aap ko Kaise lag raha hain”.

Nobility be damned the sponsor decides things are going out of hand. They have commerce to take care of. The new authorities are a different tough lot. Need to move before they do. Lest the world will never get to know how this country is deteriorating. 

What’s it about this nation that seems to draw social issue guardians like bees to honey. For one this nation with strength of its population never seems to fade away on the economic charts. If anything it looks stronger than ever before. Economy world over faltering. Some regions destroying themselves standing on the rusting stools of misunderstood ethics of a way they follow. And there was this country that seemed to enjoy their growth, entertainment, cricket, poverty, richest billionaires. Something surely must be wrong with this country. Yes they worship their women but don’t respect them. Pick out an illustration will you. And damn them with that. And in the process of course arouse curiosity around the world and roll in the moolah.

It seems like so much of a paranoid theory of what’s wrong with the situation, the world at large. But dig in deep. There are hardly any institutions who position themselves on pedestals of real ethical nobility. Be it governments, companies, media houses. And digging you find a curious and intriguing web of connect between all of them with their hidden conflicting motives.

I tell my friend nothing ever is as clear as it seems. Glorifying this work is as insane as decrying it and suspecting it to be a global conspiracy at work.

At a much simplistic level what bothers me is that there is hardly anything here that has not been debated countless times, wept for, felt for, aroused passions, resulted in enacting of laws and brought about a continuous change in the treatment of harassed men or women. So why then are we allowing ourselves to be trapped in this Stockholm syndrome of fuzzy but manipulative world opinion because of pretentious nobility? I am choking on it.

There is honestly no right or wrong in opinions but what needs to be done is not to create a vote bank abroad, appreciating their views of us, but take a 'selfie' of our nation with us in control of the ethics camera.

Don’t choke on nobility.