Rubina@Slumdog Millionaire for sale/Tehelka hacked

I completely share the angst and anger of director Shekhar Kapur on the sting operation on Rubina, that little girl from the Bombay slums who acted in the award-winning Slumdog Millionaire.

"I was aghast though at the sting operation done by that British Tabloid, which instead of being condemned world wide is being heralded as a great piece of journalism !" says Kapur on his blog.

What has happened to our sense of morality? Newspapers should direct their resources and investigative skills at unearthing corruption in government and military and not on poor folks. India's Tehelka has shown it time and again, hasn't it?

Shekhar goes on:

Not a single thought was given to the trauma that the little girl would go through with world wide publicity that her own father was trying to sell her. And what was the tabloid trying to do ? Trying to push a father to name a price for his daughter's adoption ? To go to a poor man in a slum who has spent his life not knowing where the next meal is going to come from, and then dangle a few hundred thousand pounds in front of him to entice and entangle him into a negotiation for the adoption of his daughter ? By enticing him to say those words that would make headlines all over the world ? How dare they judge and manipulate other people and their moral predicaments from their comfortable colonial point of view. I would rather have them arrested for obscene suggestions and offers than the father for coming to the negotiating table.

More

On a separate note, looks like investigative newspaper website Tehelka has been hacked! Does anyone have any clue?

Shekhar the philosopher

Went to Shekhar Kapur's blog after a gap of few weeks. Liked these nuggets of wisdom that he has shared with his readers:

On Courage

To me courage is the ability to live. Courage is the ability to be quite ordinary and yet be content, and not see life as a huge burden. Ambition or what we call drive is often driven by innate anger, which can turn completely negative.

But beyond all that true courage is the ability to be comfortable with the unknown and welcome it as the natural order of the universe. It is not just the acceptance of death, but also the acceptance of control as the great illusion. True courage is the ability live in the moment fearlessly and with immense love with no opposing force.

On passion, desire and attachment

Passion belongs to the moment and Attachment is addicted to the past or the future. Attachment is desire while Passion is pure acceptance. Desire brings with it the fear of non achievement, but Passion has no fear. Mira's passion for Krishna was not a desire for Krishna but a Pure Passion. It was not an attachment to Krishna but a love so pure and passionate that she was one with Krishna. Passion is universal and flows consistently and is limitless, the bhakti of Mira was never ending in it's force of expression.

Shakespeare wrote a great line for Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) " he is a beggar that can measure his worth". She was speaking about love. Passion is beyond measurement, it explodes through the clouds of contextualization. For it has no measure to compare it to.

Attachment and desire are contextualized and contained by measurement - they are reigned in by fear of non achievement - and by comparison, self loathing and envy. Passion is not only selfless but the letting go of the self. Passion is action not addicted to a defined result. Pure Passion leads to pure action. Attachment leads to reaction, not action".

The year that was

We are saying goodbye to 2007 today. So far, things were going fine--despite the subprime crisis in the US, the news was good for Asia. The Asian economies have been doing well. Things were looking up. Though there were some immediate issues that bothered us all--Modi's win in the Gujarat elections, Pakistan's and Thailand's political turmoil, the Indian discontent in Malaysia--we were hopeful that in time the issues will be resolved. People will learn to live with them or create better conditions.

Then came the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

That evening I came home after watching Wang Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights. I had enjoyed the movie and thought that it was such an assured work. Wang Kar Wai's earlier films had a lot of energy in each and every frame, the stories were so pulsating--but here, with this film, he had shown to have matured a bit. The characters seemed to deal with their situations in a calmer manner (even though some scenes betrayed the director's restlessness). Was it because this was a film about American characters? And in many of the scenes and characters, I could see how there were overlaps with what we had seen in some of his earlier films. But I was generally happy with my experience.

My wife was watching the BBC World and Benazir's news was just being broken. I was suddenly engulfed with a sense of grief. My immediate reaction was to share it with others I knew. I sent out some smes. Some of my friends expressed dismay at the news. "Oh, don't tell me this," said one. What?!, said another. Those who were aware of the news sent me cold, resigned smes.

I remembered, when Benazir was Pakistan's PM, she was regularly connected with India's then PM Rajiv Gandhi--both were young, descendants of slain national leaders and were now they were leading two big countries. Who had imagined both will die the same way, as victims of terrorism.

There are many things to talk about today (like how I recently took my two-year old daughter to watch the film The Golden Compass and how she got bored within half an hour in the theatre) but I leave you with these questions from filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, and I will talk to you again next year:

Who killed Benazir ? Suicide bombings were unheard of in Pakistan before 9/11. And before the US ordered Musharraf to send his army against his own people in Pakistan's western regions to flush out the Taliban. Why ? The supposed reason was to look for Osama Bin Laden. But that was EIGHT years ago, and Osama could be dead of natural causes by now. No one talks about him anymore in any case, and the Keyword has become Al Quaeda, about whom no one knows very much. Because Al Quaeda has now becomea 'philosophy of terrorism ' as an acceptable tool of warfare, rather than a cohesive organization anymore. It is the usual construct of the Western World looking for simple answers to vastly complex problems of cultural divide, religious divide and harsh economic disparities......

And if Al Quaeda is now a philosophy of warfare, then how is it helping that Musharaf sends his troops to fight his own people, and causing huge alienation by killing civilians and calling it collatoral damage ? The philosophy of suicide bombings is merely being exported out of the region by alienating people and encouraging them towards terrorism.

Black Friday

I have been a fan of Anurag Kashyap even before I had seen his directorial debut, Black Friday (2004, as per IMDB records). Actually, his directorial debut was Paanch which was never released (not yet at least).

Anurag has been doing terrific work with directors like Ram Gopal Varma (Satya), Mani Ratnam (Yuva) and Deepa Mehta (Water), among others. But I've been a fan simply because of his doggedness to his purpose. Such a talented man and yet he had to wait for nearly one and half decades for his film to see the light of the day. But he never gave up. He was extremely depressed but he kept on walking. And finally, he has made it. Anyone who sees Black Friday will recognize the talent that he is. Even if we have had half a dozen filmmakers like Anurag in Bombay, the face of Hindi cinema would change. Look what has happenend to great Indian filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Muzaffar Ali, Gulzar, and Govind Nihalani--they are either spent forces or they don't get the financial backing for the kind of projects they want to do. But they seem to be living in a time warp, and they don't have the idiom to portray the dangerous realities of contemporay lives (or maybe they have become complacent--been there, done that kind of feeling).

I don't have much hope from filmmakers like Aditya Chopra (he looked promising in Mohabbatein), Sanjay Ghadvi (Dhoom 1 and 2) and Karan Johar and co. They are all into commecial cinema, big budget, big bucks cinema. I thought Ram Gopal Varma was India's Tarantino but he too seems to have got enticed by the business of filmmaking at the cost of its artistic side.

Similarly, after showing talent in Black, Sanjay L Bhansali has got back to the tested and tried stuff, as in his upcoming Saawariya. I respect Bhansali, not because he did a great job in Black (which he did) but because he let Ravi K Chandran take such beautiful shots throughout the film. Each and every frame was mindblowing (not in a realistic way though, not the kind of realistic cinematography that you would see in a Satyajit Ray film) but beautiful in its own right.

I had great hopes from Shekhar Kapur too (after Bandit Queen) but he seemed to have lost it after he made his foray in Hollywood. But thank God, after watching the trailer of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I am confident that Shekhar will bounce back with his best work ever.

Sorry for the digression. All I wanted to say was that Anurag is a great talent and he should not waver from his integrity and purposefullness. I hope he emerges as India's Oliver Stone (yes, I too hate these comparisions but how else can I say it).

Black Friday is just perfect. The film, based on Hussain Zaidi's book tracing the origins of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts, can be summed up by the first and last lines (quotes/titles) of the film. The film begins with Gandhi's quote: An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. And it ends with the title card: And now Bombay is called Mumbai. In between lies the truth, told from the persective of police investigators and the statements issued by the Muslim "terrorists". The acting is natural, and Pavan Malhotra, Aditya Srivastava and Kay Kay are amazing. Pavan too could have become as good as Irfan Khan but he perhaps lost it somewhere.

I have only one minor grouse aganist the film. What is it with the red filters Mr Kashyap? They look so odd, and give the viewers a feeling of discomfort. Just because some South East Asian filmmakers use it does not make it automatically cool. Please follow your own instintcs.