Message Is In The Medium

The election fever is soaring in the country with no one but politicians and media people going crazy over the supposed festival of democracy. Though they always find a reason to bellow through microphones, the season of election gives them a particularly bizarre energy. The powerful become vulnerable and the forbidden questions resurface. For the past one month I am being bombarded with advertisements and promises of Utopian worlds and fears of broken ones. I get calls from Arvind Kejriwal himself telling me what my problems are; Narendra Modi hopefully looks at me with innocent eyes from every web-page that I open. Suddenly everyone is a well-wisher. As an example, someone allegedly(they told me) from Aam Aadmi Party called me to inform me about my name being struck off the electoral roll. Though I was skeptic from the beginning, I played along and asked what I should do. The person at the other end told me not to worry in a completely mechanical tone, as if he had said the s...

Recently, I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, and incidentally found out that the Constitution of India is less than half of the length of the fantasy novel. This piqued my curiosity and I wondered why more people do not read the Indian Constitution; why is it such a feared document and left only for the evil group of people who academically study law. Of course Indian people were never fond of reading and the times of literary dominance in Indian culture dates back to days when not much was really written and all literary works were composed orally and passed through spoken words. But even the tiny reading community of India shies away from the document defining and describing the rights of the citizens. I tried to look into the reasons why it is not a readable book for Indians. The Indian Constitution is accepted to be the longest constitution in the world. That might seem a daunting fact but the document is nowhere a tome, standing ...

It started with  Simmba , I believe, that Indian audiences began venting out frustration through revenge drama-comedies. (Dramedies?) It was triumphantly carried forward by  Uri: The Surgical Strike . The trend of the protagonist with all his swagger avenging injustice is toxic. The injustice, in the plot, is also what our hero decides and revenge, of course, is justice. It is a one-man show (reflecting politics, maybe). This trend furthers in upcoming Amitabh Bachchan starrer  Badla . Read: Is Uri: The Surgical Strike a propaganda film. (Movie Review) Read: Simmba- The great Indian aspiration of bullying. (Movie Review) There isn't anything wrong particularly in the movies due to their revenge theme. It is reflection of the society after all. But the trend in itself is quite dangerous. It speaks of the general anger and frustration in us all. Considering the earlier two movies were little more than escapist crowd pleasers, the state of people is all the...

The Great Indian Novel  by Shashi Tharoor sits on the shoulders of two mammoth Indian fables everyone discusses still no one really knows about. The epic myth Mahabharata by Vyasa and India's historical struggle for freedom, that come together in this book, are both tales so far behind in the past they might as well be the same for the  young  India of today. Tharoor binds the two sagas, dwindling between facts and myth, which feels like a fading memory or an elaborate dream, to create this masterpiece. But one must not consider it religious just because it follows the plot of a Hindu epic; the book tells the history of India. The epic myth Mahabharata provides the satirical vehicle for the story. The Great Indian Novel  tells the tale of India's freedom struggle and the subsequent culture of majoritarian democracy in the country through the characters and events of the Mahabharata. The characters in Tharoor's novel lie somewhere between their counterparts in ...

Skimming through popular news and avoiding rampant hateful opinions, I stumbled upon a trivial news about filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia. He found grand success of films like  Total Dhamaal  worrying. Tigmanshu Dhulia has directed films like  Paan  Singh  Tomar  and  Sahib Bibi Aur Gangster.  He played the famous Ramadhir Singh in Anurag Kashyap's crime opus  Gangs of Wasseypur . It seemed unlikely an artist of that statute be jealous of a fellow filmmaker's talent. Yes, he could be jealous of a fellow filmmaker's bank balance, of course. So, I dug in. You see, I need to give out a long introduction for Tigmanshu Dhulia. He is not famous enough. Though, this could be a reason for him to crib about  Total Dhamaal , it surely was reason enough for the news portal to not give him even 200 words to explain his side. Nevertheless, it got me thinking. He says success of such films talk of poor state of the audiences. Poor state. Not poor taste...