Delhi, the New Pink City!!

Thursday, 2nd July 2009. Delhi High Court, Court One, Item One on the cause list. 10.30 am. Justice Ajit Prakash Shah started to speak, reading from the 105-page order, as Justice S. Muralidhar looked on. Justice Shah began by quoting from one of Nehru's speeches, made at the Constituent Assembly in 1946, laying stress on the word 'inclusiveness'. A few minutes later, he pronounced the words that were as calm as they were momentous. "We declare that Section 377 of the IPC, insofar as it criminalises consensual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution." To cut a 149-year-long story short, soon queer activists were out under the overcast sky of monsoon-happy Delhi, weeping tears of joy. Section 377 of the IPC, put there by the lovely Macaulay in 1860, had been finally read down. I cannot remember the last time I saw news presenters and correspondents smile so much, no matter which channel I switched to. Be it NDTV or TIMES NOW or CNN IBN or NEWSX, it was same story everywhere. Beaming news casters, cheery correspondents! Most English news channels stayed with the story uninterruptedly till half past noon. By the evening, hapless religious leaders were wheeled into TV studios across the nation to be grilled live on prime time. Among the most amusing TV moments of last evening were Pranoy Roy's rhetorical questions to an unfortunate representative of the Christian community. "Why are you sitting on the fence?" he was asked where the poor cleric tried to play non-committal. This was followed by "Are you living in the 21st century?" I had to laugh at Roy's theatricality inspite of myself. But it was all in a good cause, of course. By the end of the evening, one couldn't help feeling more than a little sorry for the representatives of various religions that had been hauled up for my entertainment. It was so cruel, so bad, so delicious! Pro-gay guests were all but hugged by the newscasters! I'm not complaining. Not yet.

But a troubling trend is beginning to appear in the way TV discussion shows on homosexuality are put together. There seems to be underway the construction of a binary. Gay/Religious. One excluding the other. This may not help the Indian queer movement in the long run. Religion is important to countless Indians, and many of this countless section are queer. Homosexuality and atheism are not synonymous. TV channels seem to be implying that they are. I'd like to see this trend of simplifying homosexuality and religion into each other's enemy spend itself out soon. Very soon.

But in the meantime, let 'mithais' be distributed, let jubilant gay men wear cardboard signs saying, "Just had my first legal sex", let the bigots be grilled on prime time tv. This battle was won hard and won well. We will think about the challenges to be thrown at the verdict by bigots another day.

Micheal Jackson: The Unbearable Light of Fame?

Three magazine covers. One from 1971, one from 1987, one which was scheduled to appear a few months later this year. The beginning, the middle, the end. A life lived under incessant media glare. Today's The Daily Telegraph's headline is "Jackson, death by show business." If show business were such a brutal killer, there'd be a lot more fatalities. I don't think show business should be declared solely guilty of Jackson's death. His death was caused by an overdetermined set of circumstances over which he had tried to but had lost all control. At the heart of the Jackson tragedy was his foolhardy desperation to buy the childhood he never had. Perhaps nobody told him that while his childhood may not have been the one of any breakfast cereal commercial, but there were people in this world with childhoods infinitely more traumatic than his. While these people with damaged childhoods carry the scars inside them all their life, they learn to accept whatever has happened and they move on. Luckily for them, they are not cursed with wealth enough that they can think money can buy a redesigned, air-brushed past. MJ was cursed with wealth. He was cursed with "friends" who weren't perhaps firm with him when he decided to have a childhood at thirty! In a way, MJ is an intensification, a lurid caricature of the infantilism which marks the culture of his country. Disneyland was MJ's reality. Paul McCartney's referring to MJ as "boy-man" is appropriate. He was more boy than man. His dangling of his child from a hotel window could very well be a child dangling a toy. It is to this child, this boy in MJ that the world fell. He was that odd pop star. The word "sexy" could never be applied to him. He was asexual, like a child. He was that in the beginning, that in the middle, that in the end. Nobody ever took any of his marriages seriously. They expected them to end soon. They did. And now he is gone too.

Dear Micheal, if you are reading this somewhere, I'm happy that your painful, unhappy, lonely life has finally ended. Now you can be the child that you always wanted to be. Nobody will call you Wacko anymore. You will not be 'weird' anymore. God's sympathetic, kind eyes will cast a gentle light on your new childhood. May you be a child for as long as you want to be. But thanks for the songs. Thanks for "Ben", "She's Out of My Life", "Gone Too Soon" and the absolutely incomparable "Human Nature". You'll be the thriller as long as any human being has any ability to thrill to great music.

A Second Chance!

The Election Results were announced on the 16th. Six days later, on the 22nd, the first of the swearings-in took place at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. In the audience, among hundreds of bejewelled women and sherwani-wrapped men, were Youth Congress President and (fingers crossed) future Prime Minister of India, Rahul Gandhi, his brother-in-law and sister Priyanka. The ceremony started at 6:33 pm and lasted till 7:15 pm. Dr. Manmohan Singh was the first to take oath. Since I had never before watched a swearing-in ceremony with such attention, I discovered that there were two different kinds of oaths from which one could choose; one which required you to "swear in the name of God" and another which required you to "solemnly affirm". Both the oaths came in Hindi or English. Apart from the Prime Minister, 19 Ministers too oath. Their portfolios had yet been declared but there was talk that P. Chidambaram would be shifted to Home, Pranab Mukherjee given Finance, Sharad Pawar Agriculture and most exciting of all for the people of Bengal Mamata Banerjee would be given Railways. She was! I used to think life never gave you a second chance. Apparently life can be astonishingly generous sometimes. This was the Ministry which she had only a few years ago as Minister in the-then BJP-led Govt. Barely a year into her term, she had stunned and dismayed the nation by suddenly resigning. The image of her being a little touched in the head got stuck to her. Now is her chance to prove that she is not the madwoman in the static. If she simply does her job well, that will in itself be her 2011 state election campaign. Like most people in this state I wish her a cool head.

Didi Dum Dum Didi Dum Dum

On the day that results were to be announced I didn't bother to wake up early and station myself in front of the television because I had no great hopes. It was only when I went downstairs and found a Bengali channel in the sitting room announcing a spectacular lead for the Trinamul-Congress combine that I realized something major was happening. As the day wore on the extent of people's anger against the Left started becoming delightfully clear. Then at 4:10 pm or so, our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (how can I not be proud of this self-effacing, soft-spoken, extremely well-behaved man?) and Congress President Sonia Gandhi (who for me personifies quiet dignity and good taste) appeared in front of live television cameras to acknowledge the fact that the nation had given a clear verdict in their favour. I had to take a picture of that moment, not only for the image but also for the extraordinary ticker under it: "Mamata, Congress Beat Left in West Bengal"! Didi had not only taken Kolkata North (my Constituency), but Kolkata South, Jadavpur, DumDum, Barrackpore and fourteen other constituencies! Congress had taken some too, bringing the total to a spectacular 26! So how far were these figures from the ones bandied about my various exit polls? According to the CPI(M)-funded channel Chobbish Ghonta the Left was to win 28 seats and the Trinamul-Congress combine an unthreatening 13. (Their figures were the almost exact reverse of the actual results!!) NDTV gave the Left 22 and Trinamul-Congress, 19. Some other channels had given TMC-Congress between 19 and 20 seats and the Left between 22 to 23. Nobody had foreseen the Left being cut down to size with a victory in a measly 15 constituencies. This only means that most people surveyed had lied about who they would vote for. Good for them!! I always believed lying is underrated!:-)

The next morning when I went out to buy the papers, not ONE Bengali paper was available. Thank God my father had bought an Anandabazar Patrika, or I would have NO Bengali paper to save as souvenir of that historic morning.

Dum Dum Didi Dum Dum

What a General Election this has been! Exciting and historic enough to force me out of my stupor and get me blogging again! As I write this, just outside my window I can see the terrace of a nighbour's house from where three small Trinamul flags are flying and I still can't believe my eyes! Used as these 42-year-old eyes are to the ubiquitous white-on-red hammer-and-sickle, somehow the astonishing upset in the fortunes of the party that has ruled this state simply through corruption and nepotism for the last 32 years, still hasn't sunk in. But perhaps, I somewhere had hopes that this time things may change. Which is why I had decided to take a picture or two of Sudip Bandopadhyay when he passed by our house on 7th April. The man he was up against, Md. Salim, was so smugly confident of his victory that he didn't bother to drive through our low profile lane. As I leaned from my balcony, Mr. Bandopadhyay looked up from his open-top white jeep (with his name written under the windscreen) and flashed me a victory sign. I smiled.

On Election Day in Kolkata, 13th May, I cast my vote along with my father and sister at around 9:30 am. My politically-disinterested mom was forced out of the house by Dad late in the afternoon to cast her vote! She did!

CM Gets It Right, Reporter Doesn't

The excitement of the night of 7 September 2008 was such that I thought I wouldn't be able to go to sleep! Mamata Banerjee, inspite of the Left Front and the right-wing Bengal media's attempt to present her as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" (to use a phrase from another era used for another person in another country!) managed to pull off a spectacular triumph by forcing the ludicrously arrogant Left Front Govt. to capitulate and bow down to most of her demands. This whole Singur-Nandigram controversy has been fascinating for the clarity with which the CPI(M) kept consolidating its newfound position as the bosom friend of the capitalist and the sworn enemy of the farmer! Not surprisingly, a section of the media is very pleased with the Communist Party's newfound love of capitalism and have happily decided to vilify anyone who gets in the way of no-holds-barred money-making. Mamata Banerjee is such an easy target! Lacking as she is in English, in sophistication, in "class" she ready material for snobbish ridicule! Recently she was compared to the Roman Emperor Nero!! Her painting was declared equivalent to Nero's fiddling! So far so acceptable, because this comparison did not pretend to be a report, but merely a childish comparison! What stunned me was a report in Monday's press, of Sunday night's press conference at Raj Bhavan. In one newspaper, the reporter describes the scene thus: "A little after 10:30, when the talks ended, [Chief Minister] Bhattacharjee was a picture of chivalry as he and Mamata followed governor Gopalkrisha Gandhi to Raj Bhavan's Marble Hall to face the media."
""You get on the dias first," the chief minister said, and she did." Well, as the first image in this blog will tell you, it was the CM who was first up on the dias (he can be seen standing to the left of the Governor). Even after he has taken his position beside the Governor, Mamata Banerjee is still climbing the steps. I saw this bit of the drama over and over again so I know what happened. The CM did indeed ask Mamata B. to get on the dias first, but she firmly asked him to do so, repeating the "request" once! He sheepishly climbed up, followed by Partho Chatterjee in the green kurta and then the lady herself! CM got it right. He knew who was really wearing the dhoti last night. He did as Mamata B asked him to do. Our reporter probably had his eye play a trick on him. He blissfully reversed the order in which the CM and the "Mad Lady" got on the dias! Our reporter also does not realize that "chivalry" is a deeply patriarchal, patronising code of conduct towards the female and not really something to applaud anyone for, even if that anyone is a Capitalist-Communist Chief Minister of a Capitalist-Communist state so beloved of the capitalist media!

How courageous!

I'm back to blogging after a long time, because I have once again found a few things to write about. This extraordinary interview came to my notice recently. Published in The Times of India, Calcutta edition on 3 September 2008, this is an interview with starlet Anuj Swahney. It is fantastic how homophobic we can be even when we try to be gloriously liberated! Of all the things that Swahney talks about in the admittedly otherwise-insipid interview the newspaper thought it best to headline the story with a throw-away comment by our two-bit actor that he is open (mind, meet gutter!) to playing a gay character. Like that is the final frontier! The ultimate taboo! Child-molester? No problem! Drug-dealer? No big deal! Terrorist? Why not? Serial killer? Sure! Gay? Ermmmmm..... Let me get back to you about it!! Anuj may not be aware that at the last count at least ten two-bit actors like him have already played gay characters and the list is set to grow with Bobby Deol playing one in the film Dostana whose music will be released at the end of this month and which itself will (ahem!) open nationwide on 14th November! Soon to be released in the latest Madhur Bhandarkar film Fashion where homosexuality features more prominently than it has hitherto done in his previous homo-friendly movies such as Page 3 and other movies such as Rules - Love ka Superhit Formula, Life in a Metro, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd to name just three. While actors in other countries, even other Asian ones, don't think twice before signing on for a gay part, in India our actors have to take a deep breath, weigh seriously the enormous damage their (often-non-existent) careers will suffer, before signing on the pink dotted line! Anuj, - forget about Western films - I suggest you watch an Indonesian film called Arisan, or a Taiwanese film calld Formula 17 or a Filipino film called Duda (Doubt) and realize that it really shouldn't be a big deal even for an Asian guy to play gay! What is even more surprising about Anuj's line is that it is coming from someone who has been trained at the Barry John Acting Studio. Barry John, in one of his productions of Shakespeare, had turned a pair of heterosexual lovers into homosexual ones (Othello: A Play in Black and White). So, good luck with your career, Anuj and I look forward to seeing you play a gay character! You would be so brave!!