whatzisnehim

01:42 am: Not quite lust: an outsider called Helen
A Review of Helen: Life and Times of an H-Bomb by Jerry Pinto

The detective in film noir is typically an outsider whose moral indifference to a crime or a crisis allows him an entry into the subterranean worlds of seemingly happy families. Like many of the films that Helen acted in, Jerry Pinto’s biography has a noirish feel to it. Beginning with his own elusive and unsuccessful attempts to speaking to Helen, Pinto is forced to play the role of the detective investigating the death of a phenomenon called Helen. While Helen may have been resurrected in her new respectable avatar as the dancing grandmother in Khamoshi or as the mother in law of Salman Khan, Pinto is interested in finding out more about the woman with a mysterious past and his investigations takes him and us to the many secrets beneath the calm of the Hindu Undivided Family of Hindi film.

Like the proverbial private eye, Pinto has a few clues that he begins with and his starting point is the fact that ‘it wasn’t quite lust that Helen aroused’. The lustful gaze of the male audience for Pinto is merely the red herring in the plot, and his focus instead is on the fact that ‘Helen was the desire that you need not be embarrassed about’.

The central concern for Pinto is Why Helen. After all there have been many mangled bodies scattered in the erotic landscape of Hindi films. A Bindu here, An Aruna irani there and yet in the middle of it lies the mystery of Helen, the vamp with the bullet in her golden heart.

By now, the official story of Helen is well known and is often capable of being summed up in a whole host of clichés such as ‘the original item number’, the greatest vamp in Indian Cinema and a dancer like none other. Sometimes these clichés are buttressed by a few biographical details: Helen: A refugee of French-Burmese parentage and entered the film industry in 1951, as a chorus dancer in films who made it big with performance in the song Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu in O.P. Nayyar's hit film, Howrah Bridge. As a journalist Pinto might have been satisfied with telling the story of Helen the working actress and dancer who struggled to find her place as a footnote in the archives of Hindi film.

But as an investigator, Pinto has to move beyond the clichés and the official reports, and find himself wading through the unofficial archives stored in the bars, night clubs and cabarets of the cinematic city in the sixties and seventies. Pinto takes us through a vibrant journey far beyond the world of clichés and allows us a peek into the secret spaces of Hindi cinema where many guilty pleasures and transgressions reside. This unofficial archive is not recorded in faded family albums, and is more likely to be recorded in police documents and court records. Consider for instance the following extract of an FIR from a case in the seventies that involved the famous cabaret dancer Temiko. “The artist was Accused No. 1, Miss. Joyce, also called Temiko. We are concerned with her cabaret show in this case. The prosecution alleged that Temiko, accused No. 1 was dressed in a transparent gown. She was smoking when she entered the hall accompanied by cabaret music. Spotlight was on her. All other lights were off; she danced for a few minutes. Then she started moving around the table shouting aloud. She nudged various customers
at their backside and blew smoke on their heads. She approached the customers in the dance hall of Blue Nile to remove her clothes”.

This legal document almost mirrors Helen’s space in Hindi Cinema: The amoral outsider whose pleasure sits uneasily with the established legal and moral order within the film and outside of it as well. Pinto’s search for Helen is at the same time a journey into the nights of Hindi cinema, where the action takes place in a cabaret and girls go by the names of Suzie, Jenny and Rita. Pinto reveals that the reason why Helen the vamp with the golden heart had to die is in order to restore the moral order of the Hindu Undivided film family. (She almost always fails, which was perhaps the secret of her success. In failing she kept the moral universe intact”). In an interview Pinto says that While Bollywood was willing to make secular gestures by representing Muslims as positive characters, Parsis and Catholics could easily be caricatured because they were 'Westernised' -- they did not watch Hindi cinema. In that sense, therefore, yes, I felt that I was an outsider who was looking at another outsider”.

Helen’s status as the outsider enabled a world of narrative and extra narrative possibilities which freed Hindi cinema from its boring interior spaces and opened out various spaces of pleasurable transgressions. The book teases out the spaces of transgression that Helen occupies in a reflexive and analytical manner. As the ‘other’ of the chaste Indian woman Helen’s sexuality was an onscreen transgression which could was sustained by the ethnic and racial ambiguity that marked Helen. This ambiguity enabled her to move in and out of many identities ranging from the generic Anglo Indian woman to gangsters moll, a Spanish courtesan and even a Chinese spy. At the same time watching Helen was a private invitation to a collective transgression by the audience.

In an incredible paragraph that contrasts the pedagogic moral universe of the state with the domain of pure pleasure Pinto observes “Looking back, it seems odd that Helen had such a hold on my generation. I grew up in the seventies -- the decade when Helen's career was already in decline -- and like most middle-class boys, I was allowed one film a month at the theatres by parents suspicious of its moral and aesthetic values (in that order). Helen could not invade my space through television, either. Hindi films had exactly four hours a week on the air. There was the three-hour pre-censored film on Sundays, the half hour of uninterrupted film songs that was Chhaayageet and another half hour of a film interview, Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan, conducted by a bubbly, harmless child-star-turned-character-artiste, Tabassum. This was all the government would allow on Doordarshan by way of bread and circuses. The rest of the time, we were 'educated' on such improving topics as the use of copper sulphate on the farms of the hinterland or we watched kabaddi tournaments played in deserted stadia”

Thus Pinto reveals the secret behind why Helen has to die, and it is so that we may return guiltless to our half hour of Chhaayageet.

As a book, Helen: The life and times of an H-Bomb also manages to bridge the film theory/ journalism divide. The problem with most film theorists lies in their inability to convey an enthusiasm about he films which they see, and the problem with film journalists is their inability to engage with any depth with the films that they write about. Jerry Pinto’s Helen: The life and Times of an H-Bomb successfully combines a film buff’s pure thrill and enthusiasm with a series of insightful analysis that would make any film theorists proud.

02:03 am: Kafka and the Delirium of Intellectual Property
Kafka, the patron saint of delirium undoubtedly served as the inspiration of Deleuze and Guattari, when they characterized capitalism as a very special delirium. They in turn repaid their debt, by re reading Kafka against the usual grain which portrays Kafka as the existential self loathing neurotic. They would argue that we have never given enough due to delirium, which lies at the heart of desire. Sebastian Luetgert recently pointed me out to an absolutely fascinating diary entry by Kafka that enables us to think through the idea of the delirium of intellectual property. The entry brilliantly combines The Trial and myriad tales of plagiarism to produce an uncanny parable of property and personhood.

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Franz Kafka, Diary Entry 28 February, 1912

Sunday morning, while washing, it occurs to him that he hadn't seen the Tagblatt yet. He opens it by chance just at the first page of the magazine section. The title of the first essay, “The Child as Creator,” strikes him. He reads the first few lines—and begins to cry with joy. It is his essay, word for word his essay. So for the first time he is in print, he runs to his mother and tells her. What joy! The old woman, she has diabetes and is divorced from his father, who, by the way, is in the right, is so proud. One son is already a virtuoso, now the other is becoming an author!


After the first excitement he thinks the matter over. How did the essay get into the paper? Without his consent? Without the name of the author? Without his being paid a fee? This is really a breach of faith, a fraud. This Mrs. Durège is really a devil. And women have no souls, says Mohammed (often repeated). It's really easy to see how the plagiarism came about. Here was a beautiful essay, it's not easy to come across one like it. So Mrs. D. therefore went to the Tagblatt, sat down with one of the editors, both of them overjoyed, and now they begin to rewrite it. Of course, it had to be rewritten, for in the first place the plagiarism should not be obvious at first sight and in the second place the thirty-two-page essay was too long for the paper.


In reply to my question whether he would not show me passages which correspond, because that would interest me especially and because only then could I advise him what to do, he begins to read his essay, turns to another passage, leafs through it without finding anything, and finally says that everything was copied. Here, for instance, the paper says: The soul of the child is an unwritten page, and “unwritten page” occurs in his essay too. Or the expression “surnamed” is copied too, because how else could they hit upon “surnamed.” But he can't compare individual passages. Of course, everything was copied, but in a disguised way, in a different sequence, abridged, and with small, foreign interpolations.


I read aloud a few of the more striking passages from the paper. Is that in the essay? No. This? No. This? No. Yes, but these are just the interpolated passages. In its spirit, the whole thing, the whole thing, is copied. But proving it, I am afraid, will be difficult. He'll prove it, all right, with the help of a clever lawyer, that's what lawyers are for, after all. (He looks forward to this proof as an entirely new task, completely separate from this affair, and is proud of his confidence that he will be able to accomplish it.)


That it is his essay, moreover, can be seen from the very fact that it was printed within two days. Usually it takes six weeks at the very least before a piece that is accepted is printed. But here speed was necessary, of course, so that he would not be able to interfere. That's why two days were enough.


Besides, the newspaper essay is called “The Child as Creator.” That clearly refers to him, and besides, it is sarcasm. By “child” they really mean him, because he used to be regarded as a “child,” as “dumb” (he really was so only during his military service, he served a year and a half), and they now mean to say with this title that he, a child, had accomplished something as good as this essay, that he had therefore proved himself as a creator, but at the same time remained dumb and a child in that he let himself be cheated like this. The child who is referred to in the original essay is a cousin from the country who is at present living with his mother.


But the plagiarism is proved especially convincingly by a circumstance which he hit upon only after a considerable amount of deliberation: “The Child as Creator” is on the first page of the magazine section, but on the third there is a little story by a certain “Feldstein” woman. The name is obviously a pseudonym. Now one needn't read all of this story, a glance at the first few lines is enough to show one immediately that this is an unashamed imitation of Lagerlöf. The whole story makes it even clearer. What does this mean? This means that this Feldstein or whatever her name is, is the Durège woman's tool, that she read the Gutsgeschichte, brought by him to the Durège woman, at her house, that in writing this story she made use of what she had read, and that therefore both women are exploiting him, one on the first page of the magazine section, the other on the third page. Naturally anyone can read and imitate Lagerlöf on his own initiative, but in this cast, after all, his influence is too apparent. (He keeps waving the page back and forth.)


Monday noon, right after the bank closed, he naturally went to see Mrs. Durège. She opens her door only a crack, she is very nervous: “But, Mr. Reichmann, why have you come at noon? My husband is asleep. I can't let you in now”—“Mrs. Durège you must let me in by all means. It's about an important matter.” She sees I am in earnest and lets me come in. Her husband, of course, was definitely not at home. In the next room I see my manuscript on the table and this immediately starts me winking. “Mrs. Durège, what have you done with my manuscript. Without my consent you gave it to the Tagblatt. How much did they pay you?” She trembles, she knows nothing, has no idea how it could have got into the paper. “J’accuse, Mrs. Durège,” I said, half jokingly, but still in such a way that she sees what I really mean, and I keep repeating this “J’accuse, Mrs. Durège” all the time I am there so that she can take note of it, and when I go I even say it several times at the door. Indeed, I understand her nervousness well. If I make it public or sue her, her position would really be impossible, she would have to leave the Women's Progress, etc.


From her house I go straight to the office of the Tagblatt and have the editor, Löw, fetched. He comes out quite pale, naturally, is hardly able to walk. Nevertheless I do not want to begin with my business at once and I want to test him first too. So I ask him: “Mr. Löw, are you a Zionist?” (For I know he used to be a Zionist.) “No,” he says. I know enough, he must be acting a part in front of me. Now I ask about the essay. Once more incoherent talk. He knows nothing, has nothing to do with the magazine section, will, if I wish, get the editor who is in charge of it. “Mr. Wittmann, come here,” he calls, and is happy that he can leave. Wittmann comes, also very pale. I ask: “Are you the editor of the magazine section?” He: “Yes.” I just say, “J’accuse,” and leave.


In the bank I immediately telephone Bohemia. I want to give them the story for publication. But I can't get a good connection. Do you know why? The office of the Tagblatt is pretty close to the telephone exchange, so from the Tagblatt it's easy for them to control the connections as they please, to hold them up or put them through. And as a matter of fact, I keep hearing indistinct whispering voices on the telephone, obviously the editors of the Tagblatt. They have, of course, a good deal of interest in not letting this call go through. Then I hear (naturally very indistinctly) some of them persuading the operator not to put the call through, while others are already connected with Bohemia and are trying to keep them from listening to my story. “Operator,” I shout into the telephone, “if you don't put this call through at once, I'll complain to the management.” My colleagues all around me in the bank laugh when they hear me talking to the telephone operator so violently. Finally I get my party. “Let me talk to Editor Kisch. I have an extremely important piece of news for Bohemia. If you don't take it, I'll give it to another paper at once. It's high time.” But since Kisch is not there I hang up without revealing anything.


In the evening I go to the office of Bohemia and get the editor, Kisch, called out. I tell him the story but he doesn't want to publish it. Bohemia, he says, can't do anything like that, it would cause a scandal and we can't risk it because we're dependent. Hand it over to a lawyer, that would be best.


On my way from the Bohemia office I met you and so I am asking your advice.

“I advise you to settle the matter in a friendly way.”

“Indeed, I was thinking myself that would be best. She's a woman, after all. Women have no souls, says Mohammed, with good reason. To forgive would be more humane, too, more Goethe-like.”

“Certainly. And then you wouldn't have to give up the recitation evening, either, which would otherwise be lost, after all.”

“But what should I do now?”

“Go to them tomorrow and say that this one time you are willing to assume it was unconscious influence.”

“That's very good. That's just what I'll do.”

“But because of this you needn't give up your revenge, either. Simply have the essay published somewhere else and then send it to Mrs. Durège with a nice dedication.”

“That will be the best punishment. I'll have it published in the Deutsces Abendblatt. They'll take it; I'm not worried about that. I'll just not ask for any payment.”

Then we speak about his talent as an actor, I am of the opinion that he should really have training. “Yes, you're right about that. But where? Do you perhaps know where it can be studied?” I say: “That's difficult. I really don't know.” He: “That doesn't really matter. I'll ask Kisch. He's a journalist and has a lot of connections. He'll be able to give me good advice. I'll just telephone him, spare him and myself the trip, and get all the information.”

“And about Mrs. Durège, you'll do what I advised you to?”

“Yes, but I forgot; what did you advise me to do?” I repeat my advice.

“Good, that's what I'll do.” He turns into the Café Corso, I go home, having experienced how refreshing it is to speak with a perfect fool. I hardly laughed, but was just thoroughly awakened.

09:30 pm: ein klein nacht gaana
There is something to be said about the recent euphoria over the globalization of Bollywood, and I have had my share of uncanny encounters with Bollywood; I am sitting here in a slightly cold and grey Barton Fink room in Graz; switching channels hoping to find some bad austrian porn and suddenly find Sharukh Khan and Aishwarya from Devdas speaking in shudd viennese. Will just have to pretend that Dhola re Dhola re is an Austrian lesbian flick.

The last time this happened was in Cambodia, sitting in a small restaurant while the staff had their eyes glued to Nagina which was blaring "main tera dushman, dushman tu mera" in khmer, and while i could hum the tune, had no clue what the lyrics were saying. To her credit, Sridevi is a better actress in Khmer than she is in Hindi.

I am however still waiting for that magic moment when Bollywood saves my life, or if nothing that dramatic then at least gets me a free beer or a meal. Almost every Indian who has travelled out has a story of how someone approaches him/her and says do you know Sharukh Khan, and then they are given a free tea. Damnit, I have had dinner with Amitabh Bachan and Abhishek Bahcan and still havent had that proverbial free bollywood lunch.

Of course, everyone knows that Raj Kapoor was a big star in the fifties, especially in all the newly wannabe socialist countries like China, and Mao was supposed to have greeted him as Awara Hoon. But there seems to be some kind of leap from Raj Kapoor straight to Sharukh Khan, dont know what happened to the Bachan years. But there has been a major resurgence, and not just amongst diaspora types, Bollywood is allegedly huge in remote villages in Tibet and China. There you go, yet another Phd dissertation topic for some person doing a Phd on Popular Aspects of Everyday Life in Asia or Travelling Cultures: Myth, Memory and Identity. I think we should start a small consultancy for students doing their doctorates on India, it will be a superb business, locating native informants, identifying photo opp moments, staging ethnographic dilemmas. We will need a specialised team assisting students working on identity, labour and call centers.

Anyway back to Raj kapoor, there was an article recently in rediff called But for Raj Kapoor and Hrithik Roshan, which is about how a journalist was saved in Iraq because he knew hindi film songs. Another piece called "How Sharukh Khan helped me cross the border". There was a story in school by Jug Suraiya as well called "How Raj kapoor saved my life" with a silly ending in which he turns out actually to be a spy.

I am waiting of course for the really interesting one called "How Aamir Khan got me Laid" or perhaps even better "How Aamir Khan laid my wife". Also found an interesting photo of Diya Mirza in China.

Ok, I can hear Dola re set to some Viennese Waltz tune coming up.

07:24 pm: How Rambo Lost to the Green Papaya
a piece that I wrote for Tehelka recently, so taking the lazy copy and paste route.......a kind of tribute to national market, and an acknowledgment of the eternal debt, that we collectors owe to it.....now we know we will never die

How Rambo Lost to the Green Papaya


As you step out of National Market in Bangalore, you are faced with a cartographic puzzle. Diagonally opposite the national market -a haven for pirated goods- is the Bangkok Plaza, and a few meters away you have the Burma Bazaar. Smiling across the Burma Bazaar is the New Hong Kong Bazaar, announcing itself with it’s not so new signboard in which the Kong is only a matter of an educated guess. While globalization is supposed to have redrawn boundaries and shifted our ideas of time and space, you are still not quite prepared for this distorted sense of Asia, in which you step out of the national to encounter Bangkok, Burma, Hong Kong, gesturing towards a very different experience of the global and of modernity. All these markets which specialize in non legal media commodities from phones to DVD’s and software, are the nightmare of global policing institutions such as World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. They also serve as an appropriate metaphors of the contemporary, in which rules of property collides with unofficial cultural flows.

In the early days of globalization, travel writer Pico Iyer set out in search of what he despairingly called the Ramboization and Coco Colonization of Asia. This is a trope that has been adopted by a number if critics of globalization, who argue that what has taken place is merely the Americanization of the world, with the hegemonic spread of American businesses and culture across the globe. And yet if one were to careful look at what is being sold in the DVD shops in any of these markets and elsewhere in the country too, you find that apart form your standard Hollywood and Bollywood fare, you also increasingly find a range of films from coutrnies whose films do not have any official circulation in India. Whether it is the Korean cult classic Old Boy (Aka non incestuous Zinda in India), or lesser known films from all parts of the world. If Iyer were to make his trip again, this time stopping to check out the movies that circulates through what Sasken calls the underbelly of globalization, he would find that Rambo has lost to the scent of green papayas.

While the question of who has control and who has access to knowledge and culture is an age old one, the question seems to have gained an urgency in the context of the ‘information revolution’ of the past few years. As with all revolutionary moments, older structures of power are challenged and potentially overturned. In our era, the information revolution promises a radical shift in the paradigm of how information, knowledge and culture get to be produced, disseminated and accessed. But yet this promise has to overcome the challenges of severe restrictions that run the risk of making access to knowledge and culture more difficult for people.

The transformation of Intellectual Property Law, from being an esoteric legal subject to a topic of daily conversation and debate has occurred in relatively short span of time. Over the past few years, the aggressive acceleration of property claims into every domain of knowledge and cultural practices has interpolated almost everyone, from the academic to the musician into the heart of the debate. No account of the contemporary moment would be complete without an examination of the dominance of the copyright sign or the small print of the trademark on our lives. In many ways, the mere act of looking at, reading, listening to, making, understanding, or communicating any objects that embody thought, knowledge or feeling are as fraught with danger and anxiety today, as the appropriation of material wealth, or, the trespassing into private property, were through much of human history.

This anxiety and conflict is certainly not restricted to a set of geographical locations, but
the nature of the conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. In the US the crisis is represented as a crisis of creativity; the dominant fear is that of the shrinking of the public domain and the commons by the extension of copyright; In Africa the price of life saving drugs and learning materials imposes a heavy costs to governments, already plagued by other pressing developmental needs and in many parts of Asia the proliferation of cheap technologies of reproduction creates a parallel economy that threatens the monopoly of old media players, while these countries also face the risk of facing sanctions from the US for violating its copyright.

In the midst of the aggressive expansion of ‘intellectual property’, there has also been a parallel movement, which argues for a rearticulation of the importance of the commons of knowledge and cultural production. Thus even as systems of copyright, patent and trademark attempt to entrench themselves alongside the older structures of capitalism by creating a new language of criminality, there is another language that has been emerging as a response to this regime of proprietary knowledge, and that is the language of ‘openness’, ‘collaborative production’ and ‘freedom’ with respect to information goods, cultural production and participation in the information economy. This new language has been enabled to a strong extent by the success of the Free Open Source Software movement with its poster boy product, the GNU Linux operating system. These non proprietary approaches to knowledge and culture force us to rethink our assumptions about the knowledge economy, need to explored more seriously by anyone interested in questions of ownership of knowledge and culture. But for the moment we shall stick to the globalization of media.

Arundhati Roy has aptly said that global media does not abet the neo liberal regime, it is the neo liberal regime. Intellectual property is central to the imagination of a media empire. If you take the different elements of a media empire, a global copyright licensing structure and an enforcement regime become essential to the maintenance of these empires. At the level of technology, you need a strong patents regime and digital rights management to prevent easy democratization of the same, at the level of the brand, you have trademarks law that protect the empire’s brands. It is now almost impossible to speak of a media commodity except as a highly complex bundle that contains a variety of ‘intellectual properties’.

In 2001, the value of the copyright industry in the US alone stood at 535 billion dollars and a tight control of the global market is critical to the imagination of the media empire. There is now no way of understanding media except as global media. In the official imagination of global cultural flows, a media commodity traverses well ordered routes, manned and patrolled by IP watchdogs. Lets look at the how the flow of global media and regimes of property intersect.

A deceptively simple media commodity like a film first has its theatrical release, which is divided according to geographical zones. So you have the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, other parts of Asia, Latin America and finally Africa. There is therefore a first level disaggregation of the media product in terms of spatiality. After the movie releases you have the release of a soundtrack. The soundtrack gets disaggregated further into various media forms from C.D’s to cassettes and MP3’s. This again gets broken down into geographical regions. One of the critical components of this strategy of spacing out the releases as per time and geography is the ability to control the time/space of the commodity flow which assist in profit maximization.

This practice, also called ‘windowing’ in film distribution mirrors older strategies of power in late capitalist expansions which lies in the ability to overcome the constraints of time and space. After the release of the music, you could have the various kinds of home consumption-in the form of DVDs, VCDs, video cassettes, video games and merchandising tie ups.

Digital technology basically disrupts the balance of power in the film industry. If power in late capitalist expansions existed in its ability to overcome the constraints of time and space, digital technology presents a major challenge to existing power due to its capacity to erase space and reward speed: While technological innovations is intrinsic in furthering capitalist market expansions, when used subversively it also undermines and challenges copyright industries need to command space and control time. A bootleg print of the film, The Phantom Menace, which opened to much fanfare in the U.S. on 19th of May, 1999. On 22nd May, the CD was available in Malaysia, on 24th May in Singapore, 25th May in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao, 26th May in Thailand, 27th May in Indonesia and Australia, 28th May on the website in Korea and on 31st May in Pakistan and logically, after Pakistan, the CD was available on 2nd June in India.

Here then is an alternative route that the pirated media commodity circulates through, in complete defiance of the way in which it is supposed to travel. It is supposed to follow the logic of windowing in a very elaborately planned manner but the rapidity of digital technology, is challenging the ability of capital to control time and space. If, in the classical regime, the reward of capital was its ability to control time and space, the new reward that digital technology offers, is speed.

So all of a sudden you have a strange situation where a billion dollar film can be copied on a 800 rupee CD writer. This has ensured the cheap and easy availability of a vast array of media commodities from software and games to music and movies, while at the same time creating a parallel industry which manufactures low cost cd and DVD players to meet the bourgeoning demand created by cheap media

The response of the media empires has been to evoke the language of criminality and there are discursive attempts at linking piracy to terrorism etc. But once we remove our legal lens we see a whole range of possibilities; if the promise of globalization was supposed to be about the shrinking of national and cultural boundaries, the reality has been the flattening of cartographic spaces for the realization of universal markets.

There is currently a lot of excitement about the contemporary Art scene in China, and indeed it seems to be the flavor of the month in the global art circles. There are thousands of people who are lining up to join art schools, and one of the Chinese curator’s had this to say “When you can buy Tarkovsky for a dollar, you will obviously produce many mor artists”. It is perhaps in this space that we can insert out account of the world of non legal copies, which enable unofficial cultural flows. Sure, there is a major crisis inaugurated by new technological innovations with media commodities, hardware and technology being made available to technologically unequal societies, the question is who is it a crisis for, and is the crisis such a bad thing after all?

09:57 pm: Voice Versa
If children are best heard and not seen, then heroes are best read and not heard. After many years of worshipping at the altars of Saint Foucault, someone pointed me out to his Berkeley lectures which are available online, and I should have known better….. Sometimes its best to imagine some voices as they speak to you through silent pages. How the mighty doth fall, some make a shrill exit like Eliot reading the wasteland, while others like Auden suddenly remind you of your dad gargling his throat. The only person whose voice was a I imagined it to be is Cummings where you can hear him prancing about, queen like as he reads out "may i feel said he".....so back to dear old Foucault, he of the fearless speech and the revealer of the order of things, he whose genealogies make you want to be one, even though you are not sure what it actually entails....while one would have imagined the thick French accent underlining every savoir laden sentence... somehow in one's mind you always discounted the (delightful only in films ) nasal acoustics of Paris that accompany most French speakers....So for the sake of one’s faith one must retain the sacrosanct virtues of silence, or else Borges will suddenly turn into your neighborhood vegetable seller assaulting you with hoarse cries of soppu and Benjamin turns out to be the unkissed frog….sometimes it is true that the book was better...but for die hards do have a look at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html

04:56 pm: Censor and Sensibility
I was at a meeting in Bombay with the members of the Censor Board ( though they keep reminding you that they are not called that anymore), to discuss issues of censorship and films. Needless to say it was all rather amusing and heated. Earlier this month, an earnest college teacher Pratibha Natthani had filed a PIL to prevent cable operators from showing films that had been granted an A certificate. The usual complaints were being made that films had a direct impact on morality and children tended to ape whatever they saw in films and on TV. The Chairperson, La Tagore was very impressive in her opinions, but every time she mentioned the word censor, I had flashes of An Evening in Paris with her taking out her two piece bikini from her purse and declaring that her costume was ready. But in any case I am glad that it is Sharmila, and not Asha Parekh who is in charge at the moment. A friend told me the most amusing story about Asha Parekh. Throughout the sixties Asha Parekh would appear in film after film, wearing the tightest of churidars. The camera would of course follow her lovingly as she went to the mandatory pooja room, where hands joined, she would look earnestly at the statue and say "Bhagwan, Main aayi hoon tumhare paas ek choti si aas le kar", at which point the camera would zoom into the widest hips in the history of Bollywood. Another version has the statue winking and saying , Jhooti kahi ki.

So many highlights in the conference, one being the speech Bombay's Commisioner of Police whose main grouse against the Censor Board was the fact that Hindi Films always got the heirachy within the police system all wrong. Maamuli Inspector bhi Commissioner ka uniform pehnta ha, and that rules forbid any policeman from growing his hair, while all the policemen in Hindi films tended to have long hair. An earnest member of the Board volunteered to cut all these unrealistic representations, to which another one pointed out that it might be beyond their brief to cut the hero's hair.

But the greatest promise for me is their offer to let us see all the cut scenes from the fills that they have to watch on a day to day basis. After much debate and argument with them on why censorship was rather ridiculous, they said why dont you guys sit for one full days watching all the scenes that we have cut, and delicious thoughts of an Indian Cinema Paradiso immediately came to mind.

In any case thought I would share an interesting tit bit from the history of censorship and cinema in India. Way back in 1928, the brits were highly anxious about the spread of the new technology of cinema in india, and their particular concern was the fact that the native audience could not distinguish between different kinds of white people, and were worried that all the scenes of immorality and violence would lower the 'prestige of the empire'. ( though the real reason was the fact that Hollywood was kicking the shit out of the Empire Films, and they wanted more quotas for films from Britain).

So they constitute this huge committee, The Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) which interviews hazaar people from the father of the nation (who does not watch movies but knows they are evil) to aam janta. One of the most interesting interviews from the ICC is the one that they have with Lala Lajpat Rai, which is worth reading. In any case I used it strategically with the members of the Board for Film Certification ( thats what they are now called) to make nationalist type argument.

Interview with Lala Lajpat Rai, ICC, 1927-28


Q: There have been a lot of opinions expressed to us, both by Europeans and Indians, that the cinema has a pernicious influence on our people, especially the youth of the country. Of course you don’t go cinemas, I think?
A: I don’t go to cinemas in India, but I have been going to cinemas in England and in America
Q: Do you think that the cinema has any pernicious effects on the youth of our country?
A: No more than it has any effect in other countries. I have never heard of any particular complaint
Q: One European gentleman who is in charge of the college youths in this province told us that there is a danger of the youths of this country being demoralized in their impressionable age on the undue emphasis that is laid on sexual films?
A:I do not agree with that view at all, and I will give you my reasons too., First of all, the influence of the cinema is no more and no greater than the influence of the novel or the drama. The college youths read a lot of novels, both American and European, and it is from their subjects of these novels, that most films are produced and I have no apprehension that the films are likely to be more harmful than the reading of novels and dramas. The fact is that the western civilization is spreading across the world. It has its good effects and its bad effects, and we cannot have the one without the other. I am sufficiently confident that our people will be able to resist the evil influences of the cinema on account of the general atmosphere of sexual morality that prevails in this country. Of course there will be a few individual people who may go astray here and there, but I don’t want to make that the basis of action

Q: The point which is emphasized is that in some scenes nudity is prominent, and some of the films contain, what they call close up scenes, and as my friend Col. Crawford, puts it, cabaret scenes, underworld scenes. I mean that such scenes are made to appear so largely that they have a pernicious influence on our people. It is also said that such scenes tend to lower the esteem of the western womanhood in the estimation of the people here

A: I don’t want the youth of this country to be brought up in a nursery. They should know al these things, because they will be better able resist those things when they go out. They should see all those things here and they will be able to understand all the points of modern life.

Q: You think that the good will be done by the cinema should outweigh any such apprehension
A: The fact is that you have to provide some amusement for people, because a people without excitement or amusement would be absolutely dull. I don’t know why we should be so much afraid of it , if not other things

Q: I may tell you that a great Indian public man (Referring to Gandhi) for whom you and I have got the great reverence has written to me to say that cinema is all evil and whether it is productive of any good remains to be seen

A: Then if the cinema is altogether deleted from Indian life, then it is a different thing. But if it is going to stay, then I am afraid it is very difficult to make distinctions as to what kind of films should be shown and what ought not to be shown. It has its own bad side and good side and some of us Indians who are talking of some ancient ideals of Hinduism or Indian morals, they rather lay too much emphasis on the bad side of it. The circumstances are against their effects being permanent

Q: Now I suppose you admit that knowledge of one portion of the empire of the activities of another portion of the empire is essential

A: I think that knowledge of the world is essential

Q: True, but apart from that, the knowledge of other portions of the empire is necessary so long as we belong to the empire

A: I don’t know if there is any special reason why we should know more of the empire than of the rest of the world

Q: Don’t you think that the empire…..

A: Well, you will pardon me Mr. Chairman, I have no use for the empire at all. The empire treats us as helots everywhere, and therefore I have no affection for this empire. My point of view cannot agree with those who love this empire

Q: I quite see that, but I mean you say that the empire treats us as helots. May not one of the reasons be ignorance?

A: Not at all, it is self interest, it is economic self interest, political prestige and racial bias.

Q: You don’t think that there is any possibility of friendship being brought about?
A: I don’t believe it is possible, so long as the present political conditions persists. Of course if conditions improve, then there will be friendship because then their mutual interests will bring them together. Then it will be time to consider preference

Q: Apart from preference, could there be some sort of reciprocal arrangement?

A: I don’t see in what way we can have reciprocal arrangements with any part of the Empire. You see there are two or three things in it. Of course my opinions are already known, I have given expression of them to the Assembly. First of all I don’t agree that this is not Imperial preference. In my judgment it is Imperial preference being brought in through the back door. They have already introduced it in the steel industry

09:25 pm: inspirations
One of my all time favourite sites, and one that I constantly go back to has to be http://www.itwofs.com/. Incredible work of collaborative research on inspired hindi film songs and their sources. Sometimes I think it is a little naive in its accounts of creativity and originality, but what a super resource :). al_lude and his band of merry trivia men can have multiple orgasms on this one.

12:57 pm: Dictionary of War
A very interesting collaborative project Dictionary Of War which tries to look at creating new concepts relevant to the era of war. One edition has already taken place and some of the concepts can be read here

Form the introduction to the website

DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an “analyzer of power relations” that constitutes current changes.

Changes that have been producing ever new wordings: The new war, post-modern war, global war, immanent war - all sorts of labels that indicate that the juridical model of sovereignty would seem to have had its day: war as an armed confrontation between sovereign nation states is a thing of the past.

While this still refers to conflict between different interest groups that are defined by the degree of their intensity and extension, unlike in the past war serves to regulate rather than destroy or renew existing power relations.

War is a “constitutive form of a new order” that no longer knows an inside or outside, that not only destroys but also produces life. In this new world order there is no difference between war and non-war: war is perpetual and everywhere.

So like so many other things these days, war too seems to be subject to a de- and re-regulation process that radically challenges old certainties and replaces them with new premises that shall not be questioned. DICTIONARY OF WAR sets out to oppose war and, at the same time, calls for "desertion" from a war of words in which facts are created with such force in their communication and propaganda that they can no longer be challenged.

The aim of DICTIONARY OF WAR is to make the creation or revaluation of concepts transparent into more or less open processes in which we can and need to intervene; at the same time, the aim is to develop models that redefine the creation of concepts on the basis not of interdisciplinary but rather undisciplined, not co-operative but rather collaborative processes.

“At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something.” The idea of DICTIONARY OF WAR, then, begins by referring to the theory of creating concepts proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: Concepts must be invented, created, produced; concepts refer to problems without which they would be meaningless. It is not about definitions, anecdotes, original opinions or entertainment, but rather about developing the tools with which to attain new ideas.

02:33 pm: Why Bangalore Rioted
A number of people wondered about what happened to bangalore when Annavaru died, hope this helps in establishing the reason for the riots

Evidence 1

If you come today.. its too early

If you come tomorrow.. its too late!

You pick the timeeeeeee

tick tick tick tick...........



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PFURM9eA_Q&search=rajkumar <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PFURM9eA_Q&amp;search=rajkumar Evidence 2 Love me or hate me Kiss me or kill me Oh darling, please do something to me Do roo roo roo roo roo roo roo Do roo roo roo roo roo roo roo Do roo roo roo roo roo roo roo.......... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzwmcbrLv7Y&search=rajkumar

02:35 pm: Confessions of a Video geisha-1 1/2
Before I continue on the personal story of video, two small excerpts of interviews which provide an account of the emergence of video culture in Bangalore. These interviews were done by Mayur Suresh, as a part of our course. He then went on to do more work on the history of video in India. He has collected Some amazing archival stuff from Screen documenting the eighties and the transition.

Interview with PK, One of the first People to start a Video Parlour in Bangalore



P. K opened a video parlour and a video library in the late 1980’s. Using family money he invested one and half lakh rupees in opening the video library and another 2 lakh rupees in opening the parlour. The video parlour was situated in Rajajinagar, Bangalore, and was described by PK: “No there was nothing like pretty. It was a small shady room, where some 10 benches or sometimes a small type of chair was offered. And on one stool one tv was kept, and the windows were closed or some black curtain was put just to create a black effect so that people could watch properly.” The room seated about 100 people, and ticket prices were ten rupees a head. They showed the latest “English action fighting movies” since they were most in demand by the “low class and student” clientele. This also enabled the video parlour to show six shows a day. There were no fixed timings and the number of shows varied between “4,5,6 even 7. because there was no interval, no news, no rules or regulation, no trailer or anything. Straight was the movie, so within two hours one movie was over. So if you are running it for 12 hours you can have 6 shows if the crowd is there. Otherwise one more show, one less show, it all depends.”

The video parlour itself was started in an interesting way. “I was running a restaurant. In restaurant I was selling tea coffee, bondas and snacks. So in the dull hours there were hardly any people. So just there was a radio or a gramophone in the restaurant to entertain the customers. One would play radio. So the bright idea come to our mind that let’s have tv and show on tv this video pictures. So when the video was on in the restaurant and there was regular table and chair, and people used to drink coffee and eat snacks and watch the movie freely. Somebody would watch for 10 minutes, half an hour 2 hours. Some crazy people might watch for entire 3 hours, enjoying one coffee. So then we observed that the business started growing steadily. Within one month we realised that business is more, and when we started the movie, it was house full. People used to sit for three hours, but we didn’t much business. So slowly slowly it came to our mind that if you order one thing you cannot sit for more than one hour. So if you wanted to see the whole picture for 3 hours you had to order 3 times. And there were chairs on both sides and half the people were sitting ulta. So slowly slowly we thought, let us forget the benches and let everyone face the tv side, and we offered them only coffee in the hand. We closed down the puri bhaaji and heavy snacks, for which you require a table, and slowly slowly we increased the coffee charge also and then slowly slowly we thought, you give us 10 rupees, forget coffee. So this is how it all started.”


“Sometimes people would say that we have a TV, but no VCR. So we would like to see some movie, in our house, with our friends and family. So, since we were purchasing the cassettes and giving them on rent, we thought it would be profitable to purchase a VCR and give it to rent to somebody. So just to see if the copy is proper we had a VCR in our house. So the idea started that our own VCR, we give on rent to somebody we got some profits. We thought we would have one or two extra VCR’s and who ever wanted we could circulate that also. Rent was to my knowledge, 100 rupees a day. And a VCR at that time was costing say 15000 rupees. A lot of brands were there. There was Akai and another was national, pioneer… We used to take addresses, because the amount was 15000, no body could pay that much. But normally only the nearby residences would come. We would like to see their house and would like to have some guarantee. We did not lend it to everyone. If we gave it to some college student, because he would run away with it. We gave it to family people where address is properly known. When ppl took the vcr they would like to use it to the fullest extent. So the rent was for one day, so at the most they could watch 3 movies of 3 hours length.

“What kind of problems? Yes… mainly police. They used to come and say why you are showing this? What permission have you got? So initially, in the beginning there were no rules, no permission, so we said that we do not know what permission we have to bring. That’s the way we were watching movies in our house. In fact the way this idea came that I was running a restaurant. In restaurant I was selling tea coffee bondas and snacks. So in the dull hours there were hardly any people. so just there was a radio or a gramophone in the restaurant to entertain the customers. One would play radio. So the bright idea come to our mind that let’s have TV and show on TV this video pictures. So when the video was on in the restaurant and there was regular table and chair, and people used to drink coffee and eat snacks and watch the movie freely. Somebody would watch for 10 minutes, half an hour 2 hours. Some crazy people might watch for entire 3 hours, enjoying one coffee. So then we observed that the business started growing steadily. Within one month we realised that business is more, and when we started the movie, it was house full. People used to sit for three hours, but we didn’t much business. So slowly, slowly it came to our mind that if you order one thing you cannot sit for more than one hour. So if you wanted to see the whole picture for 3 hours you had to order 3 times. And there were chairs on both sides and half the people were sitting ulta. So slowly, slowly we thought, let us forget the benches and let everyone face the TV side, and we offered them only coffee in the hand. We closed down the puri bhaaji and heavy snacks, for which you require a table, and slowly, slowly we increased the coffee charge also and then slowly, slowly we thought, you give us 10 rupees, forget coffee. So this is how it all started.

So then it came to the knowledge of police, and it came to knowledge of tax people. Police came and enquired so the police was also not very sure what section to book us, what rules to be applied. But for some time the police was giving us warning, saying you see we also don’t know what is to be done, but something is to be done. Now there is a queue and people are making rush, and there is some nuisance near the place and all this nuisance how to tolerate and all. And in the mean time sales tax people also approached saying all these cinema’s are paying tax now you are charging and showing. In the beginning we were telling that like radio, we are showing TV. So what we should do. Our customers are eating and viewing free of charge. Since the TV is lying empty in my house, I bring it in the morning and when I go home I take it home and sleep. I am the owner of the hotel and I am keeping it. So that’s how they were also confused. So then we were showing movies only, it was unable for us to also explain more. Then some tax people forced some penalty also. Rightly or wrongly, we paid that little penalty also and then police also said that something should be done. So ultimately we went to some lawyer. So lawyer said if that is the thing let us go to court. So ultimately we went to court. And the court first time gave the direction, since there are no rules, government must make some rules, and till that time the stay is granted, and no government body shall disturb these people. They are doing it for their livelihood, so let it continue. So it was continued for a few months.”


Interview With Prabhu, Video Library Owner, Austin Town

“We were always talking about movies. Me and my friend. So we bought one VCR player and that time it was in demand and we started hiring it out. So he bought one and we became partners so we said “why not we open a library with that?”. We invested a little money and bought some cassettes. One other guy next to Galaxy theatre, Sagar King it’s called. He helped us out. We stocked initially 300 cassettes. That guy, Sagar King near Galaxy theatre, since we knew him, whatever extra cassettes that he had we took it from his shop. The 5000 rupees we invested, we bought a VCP. I bought a VCP and my partner bought a VCP. And we said okay we are partners. Which ever goes out we share the profit, and if both go out we share the profit. So we spoke to that guy. We said that there’s a shop. It was an egg shop. We told him ‘give us some place.’ We will pay you whatever rent you want. We’ll have a video cassette shop. He was very happy. He said egg shop being converted to a cassette shop. He was very happy. So this Sagar King guy said ‘okay I’ll give you 300 tapes, and you have to give me 1 rupee per tape everyday.’ So it was 300 rupees everyday. No matter 10 goes out or 20 goes out. It was very good. We took all the 300 kept it in the shop, and we started distributing pamphlets everywhere. The response was excellent. Whenever there were new movies, everyone wanted them. We used to run, get the movies give them. Business was traveled like anything. We had a fantastic business immediately. ‘Cause we were the first people to start. From far away places people used to come for English Hindi, Tamil and all that.

So later we said that this money was not enough, so we took another partner. And then we took the whole egg shop, because we said we didn’t want eggs. So he also joined us as a partner. So then we started off the full fledged cassettes shop. So business was very good. We went on like 4 –5 years like that.”

By the late 1980’s there international linkages emerge. Says Prabhu: “none of these distributors were there in Bombay, like they have now. Only Bambino was there, Video Palace was there, that’s it. Not as many distributors as there are now. Those days there was a guy called Mansur. He used to supply in the name of Horse. He used to get them from Dubai. Those days all the Hindi movies used to come from Dubai. I mean the good prints. They used to go there, and get us good prints and on Friday, Saturday it used to be in India. Because Friday is a holiday there, and Thursday the print goes from here. They copied and then they used to send. In Fridays it used to be in every library in India. So that’s how it was. So we used to make copies and circulate.”

11:51 am: Confessions of a Video geisha
The first time I encountered the magic machine was as a five year old in the Dum Dum airport in Calcutta. A cousin who had gone to Hong Kong for a holiday was returning, and she had promised us Mickey Mouse watches. We were therefore understandably distraught when we found out that she was held up in the customs, and worried that our prized watches would suffer the wrath of a frugal self sustaining nation that frowned upon Charlie perfumes and electronic goods. I was rather relieved to find out that the delay had little to do with out watches, and the haggling over custom duties was over a new machine called the video cassette recorder.

The VCR was greeted with adequate reverence when it was finally unpacked, and no one seemed too impressed by our watches. Over the next few weeks, our house on the main road of Bow Bazaar transformed itself into an expatriate pleasure dome where Kung Fu films and Chinese mythologies would be played throughout the day to the fascination of friends and relatives. The house itself, had a bad habit of dancing to the rhythms of the tram lines and occasionally an enthusiastic tram would cause the VCR to stop playing, giving people just enough time to run to the toilet. An enterprising relative decided that there might even be some money to be made out of this social service, and he came up with the idea of running all night shows on the terrace where people would pay five rupees and could watch films from ten at night to five in the morning. The blankets and green tea were on the house. The most popular fare of the period were two HK TV serials Sun Tiu and Sey Tiu which transported the largely Chinese population from Terreti Bazaar and barrack maidan to other magical worlds.

When I shifted to Bangalore, one of the things that I missed most about Calcutta was the VCR, and I would often enquire from my parents about my uncles, aunts, cousins and the VCR. While we bought our first TV (a black and white EC with knobs) in 82’ to catch the Asian games in Delhi, and it wasn’t until a few years later that the video would return to my life. My dad, a staunch cinephile of the 70 MM variety had never been convinced about watching films on TV. But like many before, and after him he too would eventually succumb. In the meanwhile I had to be content with my two weekly pleasures. Ten rupees every Saturday as money paid for helping out with packing noodles through the week, would ensure that I had enough to watch the Saturday morning show at Sangeet theatre and five rupees for the weekly trip to Mecca Stores on Commercial street to buy old Amar chitra kathas.

Our house was opposite the Shivajinagar police station, and sometime in the eighties Bangalore saw a major riot over a controversial article in the Deccan Herald titled Muhamad the idiot. The riot meant a few days off school, and since we were living in a ‘sensitive area’ where curfew had been imposed, it also meant that my father would sometimes pick me up from school early if the situation was getting tense. One particular day, he interrupted our class and told the teacher that the situation was tense and that he would have to take me home. He had a slightly excited look, uncharacteristic of a parent worried about the riots, and my confusions grew, when instead of taking me home, he took me to Blue Moon where The Ten Commandments were showing. So in Marquez fashion, when I face the riotous death squad I will think of the Ten Commandments.

In the meanwhile the first video library “Modern Video World” had opened in Shivajinagar just opposite our house, as if to spite me. By this time I was plotting schemes of thefts, assassinations and murders to be able to get a video. I was thankfully spared a career of crime with the introduction of a scheme where you could hire a video for twelve to twenty four hours along with cassettes of new releases. This of course converted your house into a mini movie theatre with neighbours finding more excuses to bring Biryani home. What they made of the Chinese TV serials, I am still to fathom, but I guess some strange sense of hospitality and ethics on the part of my mother ensured that we also got to see some Paksitani TV serials.

But more than films or serials, what I remember most of this period were wedding videos. This was the new fad, and every wedding worth its name had to have been captured on video, and since being in Bangalore, we missed a number of weddings in Calcutta, we would relive them through the eyes of Peter Chen, a much in demand videographer known for his special effects and wide collection of Chinese music. I cant imagine sitting through one of these wedding videos now, much less subject my friends to them, but for whatever reason, at that time we just loved them. Especially when the camera lovingly captured the roast piglet or steamed fish in the banquet. It was perhaps around this time that I was also introduced to the wonderful pleasures of pornography, and what better way to learn than from your parents. They would wait till they thought that we had fallen asleep before putting on some raunchy movie or the coveted ‘blue film’, but unbeknownst to them, the insomniac had suddenly found a calling in life.

When we finally shifted to Austin Town, the video was a way of ensuring that I did not get into trouble. Since my parents would return rather late from the shop, they figured that the baby sitter was the video. All of a sudden my relation to this object changed, and I suddenly had the freedom to choose the kind of movies that I saw. So no more Kung Fu or wedding videos, it was now time for the big league, and the biggest of them was of course Sylvester Stallone. I cheered him when he shot down a few hundred thousand Chinkis in Vietnam, I felt his pain as a hundred leeches sucked his blood and felt triumphant when he won the arm wrestling competition. All of a sudden my little room was now a mini gym and I had transformed myself from the poor man’s Bruce Lee to a foul smelling, matchstick chewing Vietnam vet.

The only thing that tempered me down was the relative lack of interest in Stallone and his antics whenever I went to Calcutta. There, they were still stuck in some time warp and were watching either old Dilip Kumar films or the new craze, the video films, with its hint of sexuality that you never saw on screen. I don’t remember the names of these films any more but they were produced by Nari Hira and had their own stars like Neeta Puri and Aditya Pancholi. What I do remember is thinking about one of the lines in the film for many days “Kya aap mere saath dinner karenge, aur kya pata, shaayad breakfast tak ruk Jaaye”, pure unadulterated literature.

In one of the Cacutta holidays I ended up making friend with Kaana who ran Video Star. His brother was a much feared goonda in the area, so the best way of mixing pleasure and business was to hang around and work with Kaana in the video shop. All the promises of a life in the underworld remained unfulfilled, but learnt everything there was to know about fixing videos, repairing cassettes, and the virtues of piracy sitting in Video Star.

Ok , more later.

12:51 pm: I Crave your Distinguished Indulgence
Turn on your computer, connect to the net and start downloading your mails, and inevitably you will receive a slightly shady mail from someone who claims to be the relative of a deposed dictator in an African country, seeking your assistance to transfer some insane sum of illicit money. These 419 mails (so named after Sec. 419 of the Penal Code in Nigeria which deals with fraud: our equivalent being the char sau bees section of the IPC) have always fascinated me. For one I couldn’t believe that people actually fall for this, but have since then discovered that these 419 scams have been rated as one of the biggest economic frauds in the US by the FBI. This is of course fantastic, given that the scam works precisely on the colonial stereotype of all Africans being immoral and corrupt.

Recently read two articles which provide a fascinating insight into how these scams actually work, one is a New Yorker article providing a loving and detailed account of a psychotherapist falling for a 419, and the other is an article "I Crave your distinguished indulgence" from salon.com which does a literary analysis of the 419’s as a new genre of writing. Enjoy

05:16 pm: Tantarara, Dishum Dishum-2
Inspired by Anurag Kashyap's superb article Tantarara, Dishum Dishum on terrible movies that we loved when we were younger, but would probably be too embarrassed by now, here is my own top ten list. Of course the great thing about doing popular culture and cultural theory is that you don’t have to be embarrassed about anything anymore, since you can now redeem Bandh Darwaza as a quaint object of enquiry.

Every once in a while when I am looking through the Hindi VCD (these rarely come out in DVD’s) section in Landmark, I come across a copy of the subsequently embarrassing films, and they still manage to evoke very pleasurable memories.

1. Hotel

A horrible Ramsay Brothers type murder mystery in which Marc Zuber plays the sleuth out to investigate a series of murders in a new hotel, and of course he turns out to be the killer himself avenging the rape of his girlfriend or sister (those were the days before they turned out to be the same). Always remember it for the sidiest hairstyle in the history of Indian cinema, Marc Zuber’s white streak running in the middle of the head making him look like a male version of Indira Gandhi. It was rumoured that Zuber was a gigolo and a porn star, watch Hotel and you will know why.

2. Love 86

This was a brilliant one, early Govinda/Neelam/Farha film with a song that had all of them dressed as Robots (the kind that tell your future in Shivajinagar) that went “Oh Miss de de kiss aaaya hai 86, 86 nahin yeh hain computer zamana”. Amazingly sexy rain song that had young whatzisnehim having many sleepless guilty nights. Tried bribing a friend who stayed near my place to teach me to do break dance like Govinda, turned out to be much tougher than saying Virar, and figured early that I could never dance to save my life.


3. Teri Meharbaniyan

When Inniritu was but a glint in a Mexican eye, we had Teri Meharbaniyan. Jackie Shroff still had hair back then and romances Poonam Dhillon, a very supple village belle. A magic Alsatian dog that avenges the killing of the two lovers completes the meange a trois. Also present are the eviler than evil villains who pillage and loot at the drop of a popcorn. Hai Allah, what more could one ask of a Hindi film. The then virginal Poonam Dhillon made me a lifelong love slave, but the bloody Alsatian made me a cynophobe for life. This is the film that also triggered my list since Anurag mentions it. Favourite scene in the film was when the dog steals Poonam Dhillon’s clothes when she is bathing, pure delight. Indeed Amores Peros.

4. Aaj Ka Goondaraj

My introduction to Chiranjeevi. Sangeet used to be a sexy theatre, because for five bucks you could get the latest Hindi flick every Saturday morning at 12, don’t remember much about AKG except that Chiranjeevi clearly left quite a mark on me with his mean growls. Also remember trying to convince my friend Arvind Narrain that this was the most exciting thing to happen in recent times, and that he should not miss the movie, but he preferred sticking his nose up to me to, and his eyes to P G Wodehouse. Only time will tell which decision was for the better or the wooster.

5. Boxer

One of the first Hindi films that I cried in, this was the Rocky remake with Mithun as Rocky and Danny as the drunk failed boxing father. The scene in which Mithun jumps onto the ropes and then leaps with a flying fist that lands square on the villain’s jaw: cinematic magic before WWF. If I saw this movie today, I guess I would still cry, albeit for different reasons. Incidentally the villain in this film made his comeback as the boxer/villain Raunak Singh opposite Aamir Khan in Ghulam.

6. Lal Dupatta Mal Mal Ka

Only the video revolution and the T series cassette revolution could have ensured that this film was a hit. The worst actors in the history of Indian cinema, a terribly young Gulshan Kumar making cameo appearances as a Fakir in Himachal Pradesh, and a string of super hit sings including…Kya Kehte the saajana, Ab dawa ki zaroorat nahi etc. saw this movie some five times and of course was delighted when I found the VCD recenhtly, the sixth viewing is due very soon.

7. Aaj ka Shiva

India’s second 3D film after Chota Chetan had Jackie Shroff playing a super hero Shiva, who is a bit of a cross between Zorro and Spiderman. Great stuff this one, but the 3D effects primarily consisted of him circling his stick before your eyes for five minutes. Fuck, sheer torture, but because it was a 3D film that featured stars, I had to see it five times in case they never made a 3D film ever again right.

8. Morcha

The first authentic martial arts film in India, till it was followed up by the more well known Karate with Mithun. I think I liked this one because the hero was the closest that I had seen a chinki Bahadur looking actor playing the lead, and no, I don’t count Danny’s various two bit films. Dont remember much about this, except that it was this movie, and not Drunken Master that inspired me to start learning Karate. ah could have been a star but have to now just feel content at actually understanding what they say in wong karwai films.

9. Bistar

Hmmmm….now this one was quite wonderfully accidental, and my introduction to the pleasures of B grade soft porn. Read the title as B-Star since the I was written as some kind of knife, the main attraction was the usual cleavage focused posters, so thought this would be good time pass. Turned out to be one of those rape revenge flicks which turn you on perversely. But I probably remember it most for running into my aunt in the same movie, what the fuck was my aunt doing watching Bistar. I think she was as shocked. Film itself, bit of an aunty climax.

10. Love Love Love

After QSQT, Amir and Juhi were paired in a range of bad films including Tum Mere Ho and of course Love Love Love. Saw this in what was then the Drive In in Bangalore, and loved every moment, but especially the songs which were all ripped of Pet Shops Boy (Try singing Love Love Love to Its a Sin, and you will know why this was a masterpiece). The film also made me realize that my dad and me had irreconcilable differences, when I recommended the movie to him, and he said it was the lousiest movie that he had seen, realized that his generation didn’t know what love meant, not once but thrice.

07:53 pm: Kingdom of Piracy
Globally there is a lot of wild interest in Chinese art at the moment, and generally everyone who has ever pronounced avant garde is ooohing and aahing about contemporary chinese art, especially of the new media variety. The cunning Chinese, an opportunity are getting into their mass manufacturing mode, and there is a staggering 500,000 plus students who apply to art school in China.

An interesting Chinese Art curator had the most poignant thing to say, and according to him "if you can get Tarkovsky at a dollar, of course you are going to have five hundred thousand people who want to become artists". This is when I sigh and agree with otherwise enemies, the Bombay First that India should become like China.

A photographer friend has just returned with some of the yummiest loot, and even though national market rules and all, atleast on Chinese film, for most parts you are still stuck with the Wong Karwai's and the Chen Kaiges, so happy to get this new set of contemporary chinese cinema, not otherwise available.

Incidentally for anyone interested, there is a very interesting new media and internet art group called Kingdom of Piracy who do a lot of interesting stuff on piracy and other similar pleasures.

08:33 am: Linebaugh on the History of May Day
One of the member's of the Warwick Social History School, and the author of the fantastic book"Many Headed Hydra", Peter Linebaugh provides an interesting account of what he calls the 'Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day' . Linebaugh was in Delhi in Jan 2005, where he delivered a scorcher of a talk on a subaltern history of the Magna Carta and its relevance to the contemporary world order. For those of us raised on critical legal studies, the idea of the rule of law has always been viewed with a certain suspicion for its historical association with a rule of state violence and terror. Linebaugh's lecture attempts to recover a history of the rule of law from a wholly different perspective. Worth listening to just to get a sense of how exciting social history can be.

07:16 am: My Private I
Adorno says of Benjamin that his writing is that in which "thought presses close to it's objects, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself"....never read anything that has come closer to this than this yummy Atwood poem on Chandler, never been a big detective fiction fan but this account makes me want to read all of Chandler at once, except that we now do know that the blonde was just a killer in drag

In Love with Raymond Chandler




An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because of the
mangled bodies and the marinated cops and hints of eccentric sex, but
because of his interest in furniture. He knew that furniture could
breathe, could feel, not as we do but in a way more muffled, like the
word upholstery, with its overtones of mustiness and dust, its bouquet
of sunlight on aging cloth or of scuffed leather on the backs and
seats of sleazy office chairs. I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness,
satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his cold blond unbodied
murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating
crocodiles; of his chaises longues, with their malicious pillows. i
knew about front lawns too, and greenhouses, and the interiors of cacs.
This is how our love affair would go. We would meet at a hotel, or
a motel, whether expensive or cheap it wouldn't matter. We would
enter the room, lock the door, and begin to explore the furniture, fin-
gering the curtains, running our hands along the spurious gilt frames
of the pictures, over the real marble or the chipped enamel of the In
urious or tacky washroom sink, inhaling the odor of the carpets, old
cigarette smoke and spilled gin and fast meaningless sex or else the rid
abstract scent of the oval transparent soaps imported from England.
it wouldn't matter to us; what would matter would be our response to
the furniture, and the furniture's response to us. Only after we had
sniffed, fingered, rubbed, rolled on, and absorbed the furniture of do
room would we fall into each other's arms, and onto the bed (king
size? peach-colored? creaky? narrow? four-posted? pioneer-quilted?
lime-green chenille-covered?), ready at last to do the same things to
each other.


Margaret Atwood

01:24 pm: Statues behind the iron Curtain
Just visted a fascinating park in Budapest which has basically collected all the relics from the period of the Communist regime in Hungary and made an outdoor museum park out of it. Recall the opening credit of Golden Eye, which is littered with soviet style gigantic tributes to communism, busts of Lenin, Marx and the Triumph of the worker etc. Well, this park is like a live version of the sequence, it is quite a surreal experience walking through the stony witnesses of a turbulent period of east and Central European history. For some images from the park click here, and of course in true post neo liberal style, at the end of the park you have a shop selling the various memorabilia of the communist world. Another movie which captures this transition period very well is the fascinating Goodbye Lenin, particularly a scene in which Lenin’s statue is being air lifted. Most of the statutes in this park were commissioned by the communist party and then removed, or damaged after the coming of democracy in this part of the world.

Incidentally the initial name for the park was going to be Lenin park, and the idea was to have a park which had all the statues and busts of Lenin that used to be placed in prominent public places in Budapest. This park is unique because unlike in many other parts of Eastern and central Europe where many of these monumentalist memories of communism were just destroyed with the collapse of the iron curtain, this one remains as one of the few testimonies to the communist era. For those of us who grew up watching the images of the collapse of the Berlin wall (the only source of international news at that time was The world this week hosted by a young Prannoy Roy), it is quite an experience to walk through the statue park, and it is difficult not to be overawed by the slightly bizarre proportions of socialist realist aesthetics. Could not help imagining a slightly science fiction like scenario of India in the future, when all the Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar statues being lined up in some kind of park.

As with any other use of memory and public space, the relationship is always a little fickle, and the best testimony to this is the statue of Freedom on top of gellieard hill in Budapest. The statue, a truly gigantic one of a lady holding her hands up to the sky was initially commissioned by the king in memory of his son who was killed in an air crash. Before the statue was finished, the communist took over, and they named it the Statue of Liberty, an ironical answer to the more famous woman of the same name. With the collapse of the communist, the new government renamed the statue the statue of Freedom.

In recent times of course we have seen similar images with the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the rather pathetic and painful manner in which his statue was removed. Clearly the removal of old relics of power has become such a standardized ritual, with great media impact that this was supposed to be one of those images that would be fed to us over and over again, but for anyone who saw it live, it seemed like a slightly chutiya and often hilarious attempt.


ok, from the introduction to the park.....(also my tribute to the statues.


On the outskirt of Budapest, a mere fifteen minutes from centre city by car or bus, you can find a museum that is unique, not just in Eastern Europe but in the World: The Statue Park Museum. All the statues of Budapest gathered together here that once stood in public places, as beacons for the political and ideological culture of the former socialist period.

The Statue Park was first conceived by the literary historian, László Szörényi, in an article published in the periodical Hitel (July 5th, 1989 issue to be precise), when he suggested that there should be a "Lenin garden" where all the various Lenin statues from all over Hungary could be gathered into one place. The issue of what to do with all the statues dating from the previous political system was one of many that occupied public debate after the political changes of 1989/90. On December 5th, 1991, the Budapest Assembly came to a decision concerning the future fate of the statues in question - the choice of statues to be removed or kept would be decided by each district individually.

The Cultural Committee of the Assembly invited a tender for "what is to be done with the statues", which in effects was a tender for the design of the future Statue Park. Three proposals arrived. The winner was Ákos Eleőd architect (Architectural Studio Vadász and Partners). The park was finally located on the space offered (on the Tétényi plane) by the XXII. district after many other proposals were rejected.

In the Autumn of 1993, the museum was finally opened, but it was not completely finished. What was missing was the continuous brick wall, which would have gathered all the statues into a unified setting. Also missing were features that would have aided the visitors. In spite of these deficiencies, the park has been receiving visitors from the day of its opening.

The early days saw a boom of interest, which has now stabilised. Nowadays, visitors to the park are composed of Hungarian and foreign tourists in equal proportions. Now that the great excitement and controversy over the opening of the Statue Park has died down, it looks set to take its place among the many museums and sites of Budapest.

07:23 pm: Foucault's Love Slave
For all theory children, whose lives have been ravaged by the discovery of strange beings like discourse, construct, affect and the like, scary article on being a slave to theory....

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory,
well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the
Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier...."

07:23 pm: Viral Home Videos and future of Broadcasting
Came across this decent article in FT by John Gapper which looks at the Google Video and youtube phenomenon. Am even more convinced that this is going to be the next big thing, just need video camera prices to fall, then the revolution may be televised.

From the Article

"Even by the standards of the internet, the rise of viral video has been rapid. Since YouTube launched in mid-December (with Google Video following in January), there has been an explosion of strange, funny and weird video clips that anyone can watch online. Most are made not by broadcasters and advertisers but by people messing around at home.

Among the 40m videos being watched daily on YouTube are films of a Gulfstream aircraft landing at night, film trailers and sporting clips, and two young women dancing around a room and lip-synching to the song “Hey” by the Pixies. The last may not sound like must-view material but it has been watched 30m times and attracted 2,400 comments". For Full text

06:14 pm: The Secret Desires of Mobile Phones
its one of those lazy bastard sundays...when boredom inspires genius, and the brilliant discovery of today is a new dictionary that i am starting that documents the secret desires of mobile phones.....

when you use the T9 function on your mobile, you sometimes end up getting bizzare words in place of the ones that you type..... anyone for the return of the repressed, this is especially true for sexual content....try typing Fuck for example and you get Dual ....Ooooh ! sex and punny wars as the bedrock of civilization....no totems, no tabooos...

so when i tried to tell al_lude that i lusted for his movies, my embarassing secret that i lusted for his mother was revealed.....mere paas bhi ma hain

a few others include

kiss=lips
home=good
Gand=hand
cunt=aunt


Mr. Johnson, let me in