Recent picks from film music

Warning: what follows isn’t poetry, even if it looks formatted that way.

I remember I once entertained, quite honestly,

the idea that I would make a really good music director,

     (and look where I am now, with only a few days a month to scour

     flimsy flash websites for the cheap thrills of a catchy desi tune,

         (though, sometimes, in the trash, one does stumble upon rare real beauties,

         pieces of music that can induce a dreamy fog,

              (justifying, in some sense, what has been said, mostly by me,

              that the whole point of life is The Thrill of the Happy Surprise)

          like the Ilayaraja-ish melodies in Raman Thediya Seethai,

          where Vidyasagar once again asserts himself

          as the rightful heir to the Raja lineage)

               (and makes one wonder if Yuvan Shankar Raja ever realises

               that it is his sense of melody,

               not his wannabe-hip-hop or pseudo-rock,

               that carry the weight of his songs,

               that he should start being a son to his father)

     an act that, when carried out during work,

     inspires the innards of my heart with true and undescribable joy,

     by sheer comparison,

          (justifying, in some sense, what has been said, mostly by me,

          that The road to Happiness is the detour from Drudgery)

      as it did this time too, with the title song of Drona satisfying the craving,

               (the music director’s voice combining with catchy riffs

               to turn the core tune into a very listenable ditty,

                    (to give him credit, he proves the consistency of his talent

                    when he gets Sadhana Sargam to croon the lovely lullaby Nanhe Nanhe)

               contrasting very sharply with the music in this week’s other movie release,

               Kidnap, where Pritam’s best effort is a rhyming of Mausam with Awesome

                    (though, one has to admit, while staring at Minisha Lamba

                    playing a wet-white-T-shirted captive, words fail the best of men))

     and a guitar-dapli fusion called Vaada from an unknown movie called 1920, topping the joy to satiation,

           (Adnan Sami, the music director, shows how it is done,

           the tune the same,

           the arrangement different,

           the voices fresh,

           the themes timeless,

           the emotion renewed,

           the eternal meter)

                (plus, any song that goes “Vaada tumse hai vaada, pyaar ka, dard ka”

                gets my automatic love for adding those last two words)

     whereby we are merely glancing over, of course, over Shreya Ghoshal’s awkward attempt

     at high-pitched-Sunidhi-rock in the decent Tera Voh Pyar in Ru-Ba-Ru,

                (poor girl, even when she shouts all she can,

                it is the core soft melody that stands out in her singing)

     and the countless Pritam-esque soft-rock melodies imitations,

     which are quite ironic, imitations of a master imitator, hold up a mirror to a mirror,

                 (Hijack’s Aksar stands out somewhat, though)

     and other songs that I will hold off from mentioning (notably Mar Jawaan),

     mainly out of a respect for the reader’s ability to hold nested thoughts without brain-explosion,

                  (frankly, I don’t expect anyone to get here, did anyone?)

                       (unseen words, the thirst for mere recognition, of simple understanding, their despair)

     and instead, post the complete playlist below)

and now, the only scrappy hint of a tribute to that childhood idea

is an odd blog post about random new desi film music.

Thoughts on the financial crisis

• I am amazed to see how many times the word 'greed' has been mentioned when discussing Wall St and big corporations in the last couple of weeks. I simply don't get it. Isn't that the fundamental of a capitalist free market society?

  Even an every day deposit bank takes a fairly large amount of risk by 'greedily' loaning out huge sums of money in long-term loans while betting that most of its depositors will not withdraw their money. If they bet wrongly and a bank run ensues, a Government-sponsored body (FDIC) backs up the deposits with its own cash. Isn't this exactly the same thing that Wall St does - playing with other people's money to make more and more money, while banking (pun unintended) all the time on the Govt's backing to offset the risk - except that it is somehow condoned because all of us have deposit accounts?

  If you don't like greed, the only long-term solution is heavy regulation of the type found in socialist countries. But hey, we aren't Commies now, are we?

  
  

• The Republicans are close to losing all sense of ideological consistency, assuming, of course, that they ever had any. Less than a third of their party supports a bill sponsored by their own President, that takes a very free-market approach to the crisis by (mostly) infusing liquidity into financial organizations at the very top of the money pyramid (remember tax cuts?). What else do they want? If this was the Democrats' Presidency, I am sure the bill would work exactly the other way around with a Govt-sponsored "housing board" paying for all defaulting mortgages, even if they were signed by certifiably insane people.
  

• All the big media organizations have lost no time turning the financial bailout into a taxpayers vs big corporations debate, with repeated mentions of the 700 billion figure. Supposedly, there have been a huge number of calls to members of the House from their constituents protesting the use of their tax money, which could be behind the reason for the overwhelming show of dissent in the House. To me, if there is ever a situation where a Government can be too democratic, this is it. What ordinary person understands how balance sheets, credit default swaps and TED spreads work? Does the ordinary person realise that the value of the dollar is determined solely by the reputation of the US Govt in world markets and if that is threatened, 700 billion sitting in Federal Reserves would automatically become worth a lot less? It beats that me that lawmakers in a relatively well-educated country could succumb so desperately to common opinion.

Memento Mori

        Watched Memento recently. Before this, I remember watching it once in grad school. Even now, I liked the same things I remember from that time. Mainly, how the reverse time concept is not just a neat trick to introduce a suspense angle to what is, in retrospect (pun unintended), a fairly straightforward plot line. In fact, I was almost disappointed  once I could fully understand the entire plot because it felt like the twists were somewhat cheap, like a TV serial (Fringe/CSI/whatever), instead of those befitting a serious drama. But as a screenplay trick, the reverse time angle not only spices the suspense level up dramatically, it also gives you something to think about and since movies that do this are very rare, it explains why Memento became an acclaimed movie.

        However, what struck me then and what struck me even this time was how organic the reverse time trick is to the movie. The disorientation that the audience experiences with reverse-time mimics (to a fair extent) the disorientation of the lead character himself. Which is why I grew to respect Christopher Nolan’s screenplay skills and after Memento and Insomnia, I almost knew for sure that he would pull off the series of amazing Batman movies that he is now famous for.

        Anyway, Tony mentioned that the idea for Memento came from Chris’ brother, Jonathan Nolan (also co-writer: Batman, The Dark Knight), who sent him a rough draft of a story he had in mind. While Chris Nolan then took off to write his own screenplay, Jonathan took his own sweet time developing the draft into a full-fledged story of his own. You can read the story - ‘Memento Mori’ – here.

        Chris’ movie screenplay and Jonathan’s short story are a study in contrasts. In the movie, the reverse-time technique eclipses all other aspects of the screenplay, so much so that the movie works more as a thriller than anything else. A second viewing of the movie does not reflect too many emotional nuances, nor does Chris make a whole hearted effort to explore the state of a mind that is irrevocably wound back to the memory of a loss like a faulty alarm that keeps ringing at the same odd hour in the night. There are dialogues that make a stab in this general direction - “How am I supposed to heal if I cannot feel time?”, “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different” – but somehow, they don’t really find the spot.

        The story, on the other hand, steers completely clear of any suspense/thriller angle and focuses single-mindedly on getting you into the skin of a character that suffers from anterogade amnesia. Written as a series of diary entries (or notes to self), with bouts of disjointed action scenes interspersed, the plot covers the same base points as the movie without the cheap twists to neatly round it off. The problem, though, is that this swing to the other extreme of story-telling leaves the action feeling too disconnected/unrealistic to meaningfully propel the story.

         Anyway, whatever problems the story has, it has some very insightful passages on the nature of human personality. I am going to end this post quoting a couple that I thought were the best (emphasis mine).

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Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

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Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.

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... does it make a post?

He carries his proud, pale face with him, sitting inconspicuously at a corner of the street, peddling the frayed articles arranged neatly at his feet. They weren't of much value even before, but scarred by time, they are practically worthless now. He wonders idly if, at some point in the future, they could turn into antique objects of priceless merit. But he has never understood the mercurial line between the classic and the merely outdated, between the venerable and the merely old, so this thought doesn't give him much hope.

His proud pose does not hide the patent despair on his face. Ironically enough, it is the flicker of hope in his eyes each time he sights a curious customer that gives the lie and underscores the desperation in his heart. Desperation, hopelessness, melancholy - words do not serve to describe the feelings of abandonment that have gathered within him. And because he sits there all the time like a forgotten camera still ("never know when someone could drop by, what is night to some is day to others", he had told one of the rare visitors, who had promptly scurried away fearing his earnestness), he could never let the tears flow out of him, so they surge impotently within and crowd out all the color from his skin.

This is not to say that no one notices him. A couple of passersby a day walk up to him, drawn by the images on the articles, hoping to find a Playboy or a Penthouse tucked away in the collection. They scan the images hurriedly, without meeting his gaze, and leave muttering apologetically "Sorry, Mr. Google told us there would be something here". When they leave, he browses the papers at his feet closely once again, trying to understand why Mr. Google thought there could be something lewd stashed away here. One day, he resolves, each time this happens, he would find that bastard Google and ask him ...

He wishes he didn't have to feel this weak, that he could trust the quality of his wares and sit back, confident and defiant, certain that the bright blue of his links would soon turn dark with the feet of his visitors. But pretty soon, the doubts would creep in, like buzzing flies through broken glass windows, and he would feel compelled to reread the articles to drown out their noise, until he was sure they weren't flimsy throwaway junk, like a young girl's whining about sex or an aged film director's outspoken outbursts at his critics.

Ultimately, whether he admits it or not, it is not his fault. It is his father's, for having created him, for having entrusted him with these shreds of writings (he had called them "blog posts", whatever that meant), and then doing the disappearing act on him. In truth, we are always alone, but without being hedged in position on both sides by our parents and our children, we fall out of Time and flutter about meaninglessly like a torn sail in a sea storm. But he cannot admit this, and the bitter lie dawdles around in his heart, desultorily biting at the walls, turning his CSS styles into garishly outdated specters and his pithy captions into campy movie dialogues. Anguished, he asks himself - If a blog cries in the wild, does it make a post?

Apparently, it does.

Film music picks - Feb/Mar

Was pinged for some music recos, so here are some Hindi/Tamil/Telugu picks from the last month or two. Plus, someone also commented that this was degenerating into a music/movies blog, so the obvious retort is to blog more of the same. :)

And, if you are going to listen to just one song, let it be Lambi Judai (or the male version, Judai) in Jannat, which continues to showcase the amazing number of odes to tortured longing in Pak rock and to Mahesh Bhatt's selection from the same (I am pretty sure it isn't a Pritam original).

The most interesting number in all these for me was Aaja Mehbooba from this random gult movie called Krishnarjuna, where M. M. Keeravani plays around so skillfully with the violins to show how it isn't just beats that can create a racy number.

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Sochta Hoon Main

Been listening to Sonu Nigam's new album - Classically Mild - and found this gem amongst all the goodness. The beats mix elements of jazz and traditional tabla, the orchestration is almost overwhelming in parts and the lyrics cover the eternal Whys.

Sochta hoon main khel yeh kya hain
Insaan jeeke paata kya hain
Sadiyon se yeh raaz chupa hain

Of books and <cough>books ...

• The Kite Runner
  I am not even sure how I heard of this book or how I built up this notion of it being something I had to read at some point, but like one of those insidious little bugs that worm their way into the home when the doors are a crack open, I did. So two days ago, I picked it up from Half Price on a random whim.
  
  And man, it was a huge let down. I mean, I know this thing about expectations being the greatest killjoy ever, but this was so much more than that. It was so filmi, so over-dramatic, that even the few parts of innocent sentiment that I enjoyed midway were lost in the overall fog. I mean, where do I even start? First of all, if you are reading a book that uses the politics of Afghanistan as a background, you expect it to get a fair balanced presentation. Nope, the Taliban is bad and Russia is bad and America, by the mere situation of non-mention, is good. How about considering the contradiction that the country you (the author) migrated to pumped in a fair amount of money into Taliban? How about reflecting on the inherent belligerence of the region? Nope, we, the authors, try to keep our eyes open just enough that the odd teary happening clouds our entire vision.
  
  <Spoiler alert> And apart from relying on entirely over-precocious kids to voice life-sized epiphanies, we also indulge in every cliche ever known. A and B are friends who are torn apart by the actions of C, who is, and will be all through the book, a straightforwardly boring bad character (if this sentence feels like the book might, ever so might, be a melodramatic soap, you are right on). A then, being lead narrator and therefore, obliged to be haunted by a sense of personal tragedy, picks up on this one event of his childhood and proceeds to relate a fairly ordinary immigrant story with meaningless trite references to B. In an extended climax, A decides to right things, rushes in like fools do, only to end up eliminating C. Instead of rightfully concluding that it had all been C's fault anyway, A eulogizes B, who is conveniently dead (a lot of the characters have to die, this being a tragedy and all). End of story suckers, we had fun rehashing a standard Greek tragedy in Afghanistan.</Spoiler alert>.
  
  If you do get around to reading this, read it like it were a Grisham novel. With that bar, the narrative is surprisingly sensitive, events flow along smoothly enough to deserve the term 'gripping' and for 10 bucks, you have compensated for the lack of drama in your life with imagined pain (like in a movie theater).
  
  
• Om Shanti Om
  Anyway, in a strikingly contrasting use of 10 bucks, Om Shanti Om rocked. Farah Khan is amazing. Taking every possible opportunity to make fun of Bollywood and SRK (the Filmfare awards scene is just too much) and following the 70s re-incarnation plot without getting too involved, she manages to churn out what is simply a celebration of Bollywood. A point that is made rather elaborately explicit in an interminable 6 minute song that showcases most Bollywood legends. Nothing is too small to be made fun of (one scene cuts into a tied-heroine-begging-villain shoot where heroine goes: 'Mujhe Bhagvan ke liye chod do' and villain goes: 'Agar tujhe bhagvan ke liye chod diya, to mera kya hoga?') and nothing is too big (the same struggling junior artiste morphs into a celebrity when he is a star-son, thereby mocking ...). The best part is that the climax of the reincarnation plot manages to squeeze in a tiny bit of intelligent twisting towards the end, leaving you gasping for breath at the incredibly orchestrated nudge of brain into masala ('here you go, and I know you'll feel out of place, but someone will like you amongst all those <cough>books').
  
  Talking about coughing books, while the movie stays clear of any decent exposure, believe me, hardly a single sari stays put in the places a sari should. Things slip ever so slightly and demure eyes deny the drop ever so coyly, you are almost willing to overlook them as 'the saris just had too much zari on them, they were probably heavy', kinda thing. But, being a male and all, I can vouch for the intended-ness of the whole setup. I mean, it isn't new, but a whole bevy of loose-sari'd heroines in a movie is definitely not common, so I assume Farah Khan had something to do with it. Anyway, I am not complaining.
  
  
• Btw, two of the songs from the movie are worth listening to. They aren't great, but Vishal-Shekhar produce tunes that are simultaneously normal and authentically 70s, so they are worth checking out.
  

Random musings

• Some gult music director took it upon himself to copy My Humps into Telugu, with fairly and expectedly disastrous consequences. Original English lyrics, including the title, mesh with Telugu poetry to make the ultimate long island iced tea you wish you'd never drunk.
• Vel has got to be the worst movie I've watched in a long while. Reminds you that masala movies have standards too and if you thought they were all bad, wait till you see the worse.
• Murphy's Law is probably the best example of imagined pattern in randomness. Me spent a day believing in the Law and raging against myself for not getting a flu shot and landing up with what seems like a flu, before realizing that I had done this for 4 years so far without similar consequences.
• On related lines, flu is probably the most generic of the common diseases. What is a flu, really? How do you know exactly when you have it? Any weird linear combination of a fever, a cold and a headache seems like one. Calling this flu seems a lot like calling a variable foo.
• Phone numbers have a character all of their own, seems to me. Numbers that are predominantly odd (353-7549) really feel 'odd' and dialing them automatically invokes a sense of the weird. Ones that are mostly even (436-7688) somehow evoke the image of a solid, respectable dude, all his bets in order. 9's at the end (466-7599) really freak me out, like a sexy-pouty red-haired bitch in a movie who is surely up to some trouble. Unfortunately, cell phones with their neat alphabetical address books take all this fun out of dialing, me thinks.
• Back to bullets, I see, kicking this addiction is going to be tough.

Some more random bits ...

Two small pieces I came up with some time when I was bored. Both sound vaguely familiar, but anyway ...

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Mazaa aa gaya!

Watching this video is a deeply unnerving experience ...



If you haven't heard already, Tehelka's been at their hidden-cam sting-operation stuff again. And there are allegations that this is being sponsored/doctored by the Congress, and Tehelka's journalism and the video itself treads the boundary between sensationalist hyperbole and a notable expose rather shoddily, swinging so much toward the first. Me thinks all that doesn't matter. Just listen to what this guy (someone in the RSS/BJP cadre) is saying in the video. The guy looks like a kind uncle, the excitement in his words is almost genial, but then he is asked "To kaisa laga aapko unko maarke?" and all he says is "Mazaa aa gaya."

More videos here on Tehelka's site.