Look left, right, and left again - NEVER look straight!
What scares me is that the professor could be me one day. Except it'd be some mysterious painting instead of a physics problem. Hehe.
Tip o' the Mad Hat to XKCD.
(Warning: May contain spoilers!)
“DOGVILLE” screamed the big black bold letters in our foyer. I wondered why it needed so much publicity. It was a Nicole Kidman film, after all – people would come to see it. Right?
Wrong.
Once we had all parked ourselves down on the jute chairs of our auditorium, we were literally begged by the presenter to “give the film a chance”. I wondered what was so strange about the film that we were expected to walk out. Now I’ve seen some strange films in my lifetime, so I figured that if I could sit through Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, I could sit through anything. The only film that I watched partially was Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex, because I found it unwatchable. I wondered if Dogville was something like that.
Wrong again.
Turns out, directror Las von Triers is pretty good at creating an atmosphere out of barely anything. As a co-founder of Dogme 95 – that class of filmmakers who refuse to make Hollywood-style big-budget productions with expensive special effects – Triers shot Dogville without any sets and bare minimum props. The film stands out right from frame one, in that it is shot on high-definition video and not film. The barren set with its markings designating the streets and homes is reminiscent of that little map that accompanies plays. The entire idea of bringing theatre on screen seems crazy but Von Triers pulls it off.
The story, told in nine chapters with a prologue, is about a beautiful fugitive, Grace (Kidman) who is on the run from gangsters. She arrives in the isolated village of Dogville, which has only 15 residents. The self-appointed leader of this village is Tom (Paul Bettany), an aspiring writer who is a habitual procrastinator as well. He hides Grace, and when the pursuing gangsters arrive, lie to them about her presence. The boss gives him a number to call if she shows up, and they leave.
Tom holds a meeting with the townspeople, and in return for their harbouring Grace, she agrees to work for them..jpg)
She spends time with blind old Jack McKay (who pretends he’s not blind), helps Chuck (Stellan Skarsgård) harvest apples, looks after Chuck’s and Vera’s children and teaches them, nurses the quadriplegic June, and helps the prim Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall, who still retains “The Look” and that sexy voice) tend her gooseberry bushes. As the days pass, the townspeople begin to like her. A “missing” poster of Grace does not deter them much. She and Tom begin to fall in love, and until the night she joins them in the 4th of July celebrations, things seem to be looking up.
However, the cops arrive just as they’re sitting down to eat, and while Grace is hidden, they replace the “missing” poster with a “wanted for bank robbery” poster. Even though Grace is clearly innocent (she was with them at the time of the robberies) Tom decrees that she must work longer hours for less pay because they are now harbouring a wanted fugitive. Grace is not very happy but agrees.
Now the residents start to show their true colours – all the women are abusive to her and all the men, except Tom, make sexual advances towards her. Little Jason takes perverse pleasure in getting Grace to spank him by threatening her that he’d tell his mother that she did it even if she doesn’t. It goes downhill when Chuck returns home one night and rapes her. He continues to rape her while harvesting apples, and unfortunately they are seen. An angry Vera thinks she has seduced her husband, and takes revenge. She tells Grace that she will break two of the seven porcelain figurines that Grace purchased with her payment, and if she can live up to the Stoicism she taught Vera’s children, she’ll stop. Grace breaks down, and Vera smashes all the seven figurines in pure spite.
Grace decides to flee, and tries to do so with the help of Tom and Ben. Tom steals his father’s money and gives it to her. Ben takes her to town, but backs out when he sees the police. To protect her, he takes rape as payment. Exhausted, Grace falls asleep, and when she wakes up she finds that Ben has brought her back to Dogville. And since Tom cannot admit to stealing his father's money for risk of being expelled, Grace is branded the thief.
She is now bound with a heavy iron collar with a bell, much to her pain and humiliation. She is regularly raped by all the menfolk except Tom. Finally, Tom gets Grace to address the village at the local hall and she calmly recounts the horrors she has suffered at their hands. The villagers are in denial and decree that she must be sent away.
That night, Tom tries to make love to her, but Grace turns him down. Partly furious at the refusal and partly knowing that he is stooping to the same level as the other men, Tom decides to keep to his morals and calls the gangster who had given him the card. Then they lock Grace up in her house.
Soon, the gangsters arrive – and the film ends with an unexpected twist. Turns out, Grace is the daughter of the boss and has run away because she cannot stand his line of work. He tells her she is being arrogant by forgiving the village people their abusiveness thinking she is above all that. Grace mulls over her ordeal and realises this is true, and the townspeople finally earn her wrath. Her mobsters shoot and kill every one of them in cold blood. Grace exacts revenge from Vera in particular by instructing the mobsters to kill Vera’s children first as she watches, and stop if Vera can hold back her tears. Finally, Grace herself kills Tom, the last man standing. The only living thing left in the village is a dog, Moses.
The film is set in 1930s USA, and portrays the changing face of human morality in times of conflict. The minimalist sets and the absence of any walls, with only chalk-like words demarcating the environment, evokes a weird atmosphere that combines the surreal and the phantasmal. The absence of slick editing and the irregular transition of camera angles, not to mention the fact that it’s shot on video, also add to the theatrical effect. But the wonderful thing is that this seemingly bizarre treatment leaves plenty of room for the actors to emote, helped to a great extent by the barren, smoky atmosphere that seems foreboding even in the sunshine.
The most interesting are the characters, daring in their portraiture. The residents of Dogville, except for Tom, appear a little menacing right from the beginning, while Grace is a helpless do-gooder. They are guarded and cautious, and more polite than friendly; Grace appears to want to desperately uphold her moral values. As the film progresses, one watches with extreme discomfort as Grace goes from being a cherished outsider to being abused, raped and humiliated; as the residents’ feelings change from watchful mercy to sadistic dominance. At the very end, Grace is the one wielding the power, yet still tries to cling to her values – but when she remembers her ordeal and sees the villagers in all their shallow pretentiousness, she decides to let go. The law-abiding citizens of Dogville pay a heavy price for exploiting Grace in return for harbouring her; and the wealthy and once-mild-mannered young woman refuses to forgive them despite their poverty and has them butchered.
In the end, they’re all the same - individuals who, when cornered by the wrongdoing of others, are incapable of reaching the standards they set for themselves.
Whatever happened to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema, where every frame is one of breathtaking beauty? At first glance, it doesn’t seem so odd that Saawariya has neither the silk-and-brocade opulence of Devdas, nor the intense light and shadow of Black. But as the film progresses (all the while creaking at the joints) it starts to look as it everything has been washed out and replaced by dull blacks and greys. Splashes of colour here and there don’t help. The sets are beautiful, no doubt – but the colour palette of blacks and greys with a piping of blue and green, which can be beautiful otherwise, somehow fails to lend poetry to the film.
The set and the characters do not match at all, and it’s hard to appreciate a film when you cannot assign it a certain time frame. While that may be exactly what Bhansali intended, the tale of this nondescript town somewhere in India, whose cobbled bylanes, palatial homes and inhabitants are a curious hodge-podge of Victorian, Mughal and modern day suburbia, does not work. Even the time-period is divided between the 50s and the 21st century and some era in between. There is a street named after RK – obviously Raj Kapoor – and even the grey colour palette and costumes are reminiscent of Awaara and other RK hits.
(My biggest peeve with the film is the director trying to nail its association with Raj Kapoor with a mallet, but I’ll come to that later.)
The story is simple enough – boy comes to town and charms everyone, meets girl and falls in love, girl is engaged to someone else – and is narrated in flashback by a prostitute, Gulab (Rani Mukherjee.) But the protagonists, who are no more than puppets, fail to add anything to the already toy-like ambience. Ranbir Kapoor plays Raj, a wannabe singer who comes to this town and makes it his home; he wins the hearts of Gulab, the other prostitutes and his landlady (Zohra Sehgal) and gets a job singing at the local bar. There seems to be no convincing explanation for development of their interpersonal relationships except for Raj's winsome charm. Then Raj meets Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) and falls in love. Except that Sonam has already given her heart to the brooding, mysterious Imaan (Salman Khan, the only character in the film who seems to have a personality) and looks upon Raj as nothing but a friend. Ultimately, after a lot of cat-and-mouse, Imaan returns home, Sakina returns to him, and Raj goes back to his lonely life.
In addition to the jerky development of the relationships between the characters, the characters themselves are no fun to watch. Both Ranbir and Sonam seem merely two-dimensional. And here’s where I rant about the Raj Kapoor connection – why, why, why can’t Bhansali just stay off the fact that Ranbir Kapoor is a scion of India’s biggest acting dynasty? He’s winsome and talented enough, especially as a dancer, if only the director had just let him be. It’s hard to see Ranbir without comparing him to his father and grandfather, especially when his on-screen character is rather lifeless but tries hard to ape the on-screen Raj Kapoor in every way. His character’s name is Ranbir Raj (Raj Kapoor’s birth name), the street is named RK, he wears his grandfather’s signature bowler hat, his clothes are similar, there’s a scene with Sonam under an umbrella that’s reminiscent of Shree 420 … and as if that is not enough, there’s even a cringe-inducing scene where Ranbir screams his father Rishi Kapoor’s dialogue from Karz to the bar audience: “Tumne kabhi kisi se pyaar kiya?”
(And I would very much like to debate on whether Ranbir Kapoor’s towel-dropping scene was a nod to Mera Naam Joker where Simi Garewal’s character bares her derriere, but I think I’ll skip it.)
Sonam Kapoor as Sakina is suitably beautiful, but like Raj, lifeless. Her character’s bouncing back and forth from being all shy and blushing with Raj to being suddenly breathless and pining over Imaan is too unstable to induce any sympathy. Zohra Sehgal’s crisp theatre-trained British accent and acting experience seems to have gone waste, even though she makes a convincing Anglo-Indian. Rani Mukherjee as Gulab looks the part and shows some spark, but she seems to have been photoshopped in. Perhaps Bhansali was deliberately trying to paint the town chastely in black and white and the prostitutes in a riot of colours, but Gulab and her ilk do not seem to belong to the same time-period at all.
Salman Khan as Imaan, who rather resembles an exotic Tuareg tribesman, with his startling kohl-rimmed green eyes and bulky physique completely obscured in black, is the only one who perfectly matches the sets, melting in and out of the darkness. The rest of it – Mughal architecture, English-style bridge over the river, Kashmir-style canoes and the characters speaking in a modern mix of Hindi and English – just cannot seem to come together, though each element is individually beautiful.
But the film does have its moments. In some scenes, the dark ambience seems to work, and it definitely makes Sakina seem more luminous. Imaan's entry into Sakina's life one black night, as the brooding yet mesmerising stranger who speaks mostly in monosyllables, is well-done and goes with the dreamlike ambience of the town. Ranbir's towel-clad song, after his meeting Sakina for the first time, begins with him standing at the window with towel open and bare to the world, with almost white sunlight streaming in. This short scene is the only one in the entire film that occurs in the morning, and perhaps for that reason alone, seems so alive.
The soundtrack of this film is not really outstanding, but the title track Saawariya and Masha Allah are noteworthy.
The panoramic, dreamlike view of the town, especially in the opening scene and from the clock-tower, with a steam engine chugging away over a bridge, is reminiscent of the land of the Spirits in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Salman Khan said about the film in an interview that if one were to make an animated film, it wouldn’t be as beautiful. Ironically, this particular scene IS animated!
In the end, it’s just a tediously told film and not even as visually gorgeous as Bhansali’s earlier films. Even Black, which was mostly shadow, was spectacular both visually and in terms of acting. Once again, this debacle proves that a film needs genius, not genes, to make it work.
Another year has almost flown by and yet again two of the most hyped and expensive films of the year have fallen flat when it comes to being examples of good cinema. Although, much to the relief of director Farah Khan, Om Shanti Om is still a crowd-puller, while Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya seems to have melted into the dark, much like its protagonists.
But for a film to be a crowd-puller or a “good time-pass” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a well-done movie. And while Farah has done a good job of both spoofing and paying tribute to the 70s film industry in first half of OSO, it falls flat in the second half, relegated to being nothing more than a showcase of Bollywood’s biggest stars. The story becomes clichéd - the ubiquitous cine-maa spots her reincarnated, long-lost son, they find the villain and take revenge, and live happily ever after. Sometimes clichés do work, but not when the audience is subjected to it again and again! The film seems almost like a direct lift-off from Karz (and remember Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai?) The only difference is that the protagonist is an actor, not a singer, and the film ends without hero having to win the girl’s hand.
In fact, Khan’s debut film Main Hoon Na was a much better film. The story flowed smoothly despite the masala and music. 
OSO has the protagonist Om Prakash Makhija (Shah Rukh Khan), as a junior film artiste, whose mother Bela (Kirron Kher) was also in the same profession. Together with his best friend Pappu (Shreyas Talpade, whose talent merits a meatier role in a better film) he dreams of being a big star with big dialogues. But, as Pappu says, without a Khan or Kapoor to his name, Om cannot get anywhere. (A clever jab by Farah, here.)
Om is also infatuated with Bollywood superstar Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone, easily the best thing in the entire film) who looks like a stunning copy of yesteryear “dream girl” Hema Malini, complete with bouffant hair and electric smile. One day, on a set, Shantipriya refuses to shoot since she has not been paid. In comes good-looking producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal), who convinces her to shoot. However, a fire on the sets, from which Shantipriya is supposed to be rescued by the hero, goes out of control. But the director (Satish Shah) refuses to cut for fear of escalating production costs, while everyone else either looks on or runs away, and finally Om rescues her without regard for his own safety. In a scenario that mirrors the romance between yesteryear superstars Nargis and Sunil Dutt, they both become fast friends.
From his talks with Shanti, Om is surprised to discover that, despite being such a popular and well-loved actress, she hates acting and is pining for love, but does not get too close to him despite his love for her. One day, she ignores him after a shot, and piqued, he follows her from a distance to a makeup room, where he listens and watches through a window. There, to his shock, he finds her meeting Mehra, to whom she has actually been married for two years, but cannot reveal so because no one would give a role to a married actress. All Shanti wants is to tell the world she is happily married to Mehra, but he will have none of it – all he cares about is his next project, a mega-budget film called Om Shanti Om that would collapse if news of Shanti’s marriage broke out. Then Shanti drops a bomb – she’s pregnant with Mehra’s child.
To her surprise, and to Om’s sorrow, Mehra seems delighted. Om walks away a dejected lover and throws himself back into his acting and tries to convince himself that he can find happiness in Shanti’s new-found bliss.
One night he is walking around the sets, when Mehra and Shanti drive up. He follows them out of curiosity, and Mehra takes Shanti inside a building to show her the opulent ballroom set that will be destroyed after a grand party to announce their marriage and pregnancy to the world. Then in a cruel twist, he tells Shanti that she shouldn’t have trusted him, and sets fire to the set – with her inside it. As he walks out, cold and detached, Om, who has been watching the scene with horror, tries to rescue her, but fails. Mehra's henchmen return to beat him up as well. Om is burnt but still manages to stay alive, but as he stumbles onto a road, he is fatally hit by a car – a car that belongs to Rajesh Kapoor, Bollywood’s biggest male superstar, who is rushing his wife to the hospital for the birth of their first child.
From here the reincarnation saga begins, and the film’s believability wanes. Kapoor names his son Om after the junior artiste whose death he had accidentally caused, and Om Kapoor (“Call me OK”) grows up to be an arrogant, spoiled Bollywood superstar brat who gets his way with scripts and films. But there are remnants of his past life – he has a pathological fear of fire, and nearly faints on a song-and-dance set which has pyrotechnics.
There is another problem - he is regularly pestered by the now-greying Bela, who insists that he is her long-lost son. (Another poke, this time at an incident in real life where a Hyderabadi woman insisted Shah Rukh was her long-lost son.) Of course, nobody believes her.
One day, Om goes for a shoot to a new place away from the city – a place, which, 30 years ago, was a grand film location, but which closed down and became abandoned – naturally, the same place where Om Prakash Makhija and Shanti worked and other yesteryear films were shot. It has been shut after what everyone thought was the unfortunate accidental death of Shanti. There, flashbacks follow quickly one after the other, and Om finally remembers who he was in his past life. He suddenly undergoes a change and becomes a humble, hardworking actor, and reunites with Bela and Pappu.
Meanwhile, Mukesh Mehra, now a Hollywood producer (“Call me Mike”) returns to India and re-enters Om’s life at his birthday party, in the midst of a thousand Bollywood stars. Om bristles on seeing him, and comes up with a plan to exact revenge on Mehra for Shanti’s murder. He convinces him to let him re-make Om Shanti Om, the expensive film that had been halted by Shanti’s pregnancy and which led to her murder.
Om and Pappu embark on a hunt to find the perfect replacement for Shanti. In walks Sandy (Deepika Padukone again, naturally), a bumbling, bubblegum-chewing fangirl from Bangalore who wants nothing more than to work with her idol, Om Kapoor. They also select another girl, Dolly, to play Shanti’s role in the film and use her to lure the lecherous Mehra into their plan. (Dolly’s mother Kamini is played by Bindu, who once again is a vampish older woman who cannot speak proper English. It’s as if Farah lifted her straight out of Main Hoon Na and placed her in this film!)
The plan goes smoothly in the beginning. Om and Pappu manage to freak Mukesh out by planting Sandy with ghost make-up in a place where he expects to find Dolly alone, placing her shots in the reels of OSO, and finally at the grand premiere of the film, where Om even recreates that night when Shanti was murdered, much to Mehra’s consternation.
However, Mehra is not so easily fooled – he has already discovered that the reel has been duplicated and that a very real Shanti is seen on the film, giving him doubts about her phantom-ness. Sandy again slips up when she drops a mask at the party, and in trying to get away, scratches herself against a candlestand.
A furious Mukesh calls the bluff on Om, and knowing his fear of fire, sets fire to the set. Meanwhile, Sandy is once again dressed as Shanti on the night of her death, and goes off to scare Mehra, but it is only after she leaves the makeup room that Pappu finds out that Mehra knows the truth. It’s too late to call her back, and Sandy appears in the midst of Mehra and Om as planned.
Or does she?
Turns out, it’s not Sandy – who’s actually far from the scene - but Shanti herself, or rather, her ghost. She tells the truth, to Mehra’s and Om’s shock – she was still alive, but Mehra returned and killed her. So Mukesh, faced with this blast from the past, dies a horrible death under the weight of the glass chandelier – the same spot where he killed Shanti. Om gets over his fear of fire, justice is served and everyone lives happily ever after (though Om and Sandy, thankfully, do not hook up.)
OSO gets flawed in the second half when Om’s remembrance of his past life is done away too soon, The fear of fire seems like a good start, but the faint “Om” mark on Om’s wrist is a bit forced. The unraveling of Om’s past life could have proceeded more believably, considering reincarnation is already something unbelievable! His reunion with Bela and Pappu too happens in rushed manner, as if to make space for that “mother of all item numbers” in which several Bollywood stars make a special appearance at Om’s birthday party. Perhaps the director wanted to finish the film as soon as possible, knowing that there isn’t much substance left!
To be frank, the item number by itself is quite enjoyable despite the bad music and silly lyrics, only because it’s a sort of nostalgia trip for 80s babies like me who watched people like Kajol, Rani Mukherjee, Urmila Matondkar, Juhi Chawla and Karisma Kapoor over so many years and in so many films. Their transition on-screen is so well-known to us that we can’t help but reminisce about their early days and films and how they’ve evolved since then (or disappeared altogether.)
The problem is that even though the stars are supposed to playing themselves, it’s completely out of place in THIS film. It’s as if Farah got bored of filming and said “Screw it, let’s have a big party!” The guest stars perform numbers very specific to them – Urmila Matondkar performs her Rangeela moves, Shilpa Shetty performs her moves from Khiladi (was that the film in which she made her debut? I can’t remember now) It gets even more complicated when Kajol and Shah Rukh perform the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai nose-touching gesture, because it was Shah Rukh, not Om Kapoor, who acted in that film! Finally, we even have three Khans – Saif, Salman, and Saif (with Aamir conspicuously missing) along with Sanjay Dutt, performing a bar dance. That’s a casting coup, right there. Farah needn’t even have made the rest of the film – releasing the item number itself in theatres would have raked in a lot of moolah!
Of course, OSO has its highlights too. It’s technically flawless, for one. The starting scene, where a white-clad Rishi Kapoor sings “Om Shanti Om” from Karz has been blended well with the scenes of the audience watching, though the addition of Farah herself and director Subhash Ghai looks too contrived. Was Farah trying to prove a point by deliberately inserting that scene from Karz, and naming her film after it, knowing the audience will instantly connect? Very clever move – unlike Ram Gopal Varma, who nearly committed blasphemy by remaking Sholay in the most miserable manner possible, she knows that we as a nation thrive on reminiscing, and so chose to make a film that is a tribute, spoof and remake all at the same time.
Also noteworthy is the song Dhoom Tana where Deepika Padukone’s scenes have been blended very well with songs from old films (except for some scenes where she performs alone.) The whole 70s look in the former half is quite authentic, thanks to Sabu Cyril.
In the latter half, the nostalgia trip works. The scene where Om receives a Filmfare awards is hilarious, with Abhishek Bachchan supposedly being a nominee for Dhoom 5 and Akshay Kumar a nominee for The Return of Khiladi! Even Rishi Kapoor and Rakesh Roshan do not spare themselves. It’s a refreshing change to see these stars poking fun at their own cinematic histories.
The song Main Agar Kahoon stands out from the rest of the soundtrack. Set to a waltz-y beat, it perfectly invokes a ballroom romance. Sonu Nigam is in his element.
But the one reason that makes OSO worth watching - the one thing that totally salvaged the film, for me - was the willowy, luminous Deepika Padukone. Irresistible smile, dancing dark eyes, and with a truckload of talent to match her looks, she easily outshines everyone else in the film, including King Khan himself. Whether it’s as the graceful Shanti, or the cute but clumsy Sandy, Deepika shows a refreshing versatility and potential. I look forward to seeing more of her in the future.
But once the audience had settled in comfortably with the jazz style, the magic began.
The next track, called Downhill, had been composed by Bruno Müller, the guitarist. It featured spectacular sax and guitar solos. The next two tracks, Out of the Blue (also by Müller) and Speedboat, by Von Kaphengst, were also mind-blowing. These two had some spectacular drum solos by May, and Müller showed his mastery over the guitar on Speedboat. He made it sound like he was playing two different guitars at the same time!
With every performance, the audience grew more and more rapturous and the applause that had been shy and unsure at the beginning got louder and louder, with whistles and "whooooo!"s (some of them from me) accompanying it. Müller in particular turned out to be a crowd favourite, partly because of his virtuosity with the guitar and general effervescence, and partly because he was good-looking. ;)
But May and Klewitz too gave the audience a taste of their respective skills. May had the crowd screaming in delight with his dextrous drum solos; Lauber performed a particularly spectacular sax solo towards the end that contained guitarish riffs in quick succession. Simply marvellous.
Von Kaphengst was pretty much in the shadows because the bass was mostly just an accompaniment to the other instruments. But he got his due in the end when he performed a really good bass solo with accompaniment from May.
Some malicious idiot hacked into my blog and posted spam. I tried to delete the content but ended up deleting my own blog. But thanks to the wonderful peeps from Blogger Help and a couple of geek buddies of mine, I'm back up and running!
I deserve it for being lazy. :P
Will post something soon!
I think I just fell in love with Depeche Mode.
Once again I'm shamelessly plugging the video re-edit I did of Limp Bizkit's version of Behind Blue Eyes (featured in the film Gothika) by cross-editing scenes of American History X to go with the music.
I deliberately chose the song and the film and put the words with the scenes. Hope you all like it.
(Here's the Google link in case Youtube doesn't work.)
Sorry the quality is bad, but neither Youtube nor Google accepted my high-res file despite the size being well below 100 MB.
Recently, I read the disturbing news on Slashdot that Google is cooperating with the Indian government to provide IP addresses of people subscribing to fanlists of underworld dons, and to remove anti-Indian groups from Orkut.
Now, the thought that folks are emulating murderers is disturbing, but what worries me is #2. Apparently, there's an orkut community called "We Hate India" that was started with the intention of complaining about the government policies. Fair enough. But many folks have, of late, started using this community as an outlet to bash the culture and people. And the government wants to ban them altogether.
I'm disturbed that India has begun to implement web censorship. Sure, it's natural for a government to feel threatened by such websites. But seriously, how is censoring a few hundred folks' public hatred of government policies going to help? And will it really affect the loyalty of almost a billion people to their country?
Recently a film about the Gujarat riots was banned in the state of Gujarat, and several petitions were sent to the government protesting the duct tape over our freedom of speech. Several months ago Blogger was temporarily shut down by the Indian government but several protests later, the blogs were back.
I checked out the community - fortunately, I found that it hasn't been shut down yet. I read through it and here's what it says:
"The sole purpose of this community isn't meant to offend india.Its about having a group of people who have enemity for india just coz of its oppressive & hostile approach.No matter how much proofs & justifications you give but there are many things which can't be denied & they won't be.You can flood anyone's scrapbook by talking trash & by misleading people like you've been doing it but it won't make any difference.I don't believe on any friendship bullshit.Though i didn't do much beneficial for my country but i tried to refrain myself from supporting indians & in embracing their Kaleidoscope culture.Damn you RAW*,BJP*,Shiv Sena*,Bajrang Dal* & all those bastards who think they are the most wisest dicks of all. There shall be no peace and no surrender. We will bring this scourge down once and for all."
Now, I think these guys simply don't know what they want. They hate India for some reason, and they don't know why. Which is fine with me, really, because everyone can't be pleased. I just hope they limit their hatred to words and not deeds, if you know what I mean.
The founders of the community are, strangely enough, Russians. The asterisked names you see are names of political parties that are mostly Hindu fanatic groups. I haven't the faintest idea what the hatred is for. Is "kaleidoscopic culture" an insult? I don't think so. Over aeons, Indians have descended from a mixure of the Greeks, Persians, Europeans, Africans - you name it. I've grown up in a very multicultural society and I like it that way. In India, cultural differences are mainly due to religion - and I'm not very religious, or rather, I don't follow a specific religion. So multiculturalism doesn't bother me in the least. I do my own thing, and I let others do their own thing as long as it doesn't involve murder, rape, slaughter of innocent animals or any such heinous crimes.
Some people have joined the community to defend India. This is getting weirder by the minute.
I checked out some of the forums and what I can see are nothing but stupid, mindless arguments. There's a smorgasbord of Indians, Pakistanis, Americans, Russians and lots of other folks, plenty of swear words directed at the community founders by some particularly red-blooded Indians, counter-arguments between one particularly vociferous Indian girl and one of the moderators. Crazy.
I'm happy this community hasn't been banned yet, though. Sure, I'm an Indian and while I too hate the way some things are running in the country, there are a lot of things about my country and culture that I like. All the same, I'm a believer of democracy and that people have a right to express their hatred of things as long as they don't express their hatred physically. These guys in particular have formed a community of their own (there's a reference to the "Red Army" on one of their profiles - Communists?) and they're free to express their dislike, childish and immature as it is. I don't think we need to bother about them unless they're planning a terrorist attack or something.
In my opinion, it's silly and mindless, and like most such communities, completely harmless. Every nation is screwed in some way or the other. Every country has its share of horror stories, terrorism and cowardice. And some are a lot worse than others. Yet, every nation has something unique - some things of beauty that the whole world enjoys, yet chooses to forget. I'm not one of those who forgets - I prefer to appreciate all the good things about the countries I know and their cultures as far as possible, and associate those things with their people.
I also believe that people have the freedom to hate, as long as they don't express it in a way that would offend the sensibilities of the people around them. I'm a vegetarian, for example, and I do my damnedest to avoid consuming meat and animal products - I even try to avoid silk and leather, though I'm unsuccessful at times - but at the same time I'm not rabid about it. Because, lets face it, it's not humanly possible at all times. It's wrong to hate the Eskimos for eating raw seal meat - I mean, what else do you expect them to eat? You don't get plants there, do you?
Over the past year I've grown even more accepting. I've also accepted that some people cannot like certain things, just as I don't like certain things. People have their own phobias. I'm okay if someone is uncomfortable with a sexual orientation different from their own, as long as it's put across in an inoffensive way. I'm okay if someone finds someone else's lifestyle or culture weird as long as they're not downright rude about it. Because I too find some things uncomfortable. It's okay to be different, as long as you're true to yourself. It's hypocrites that are way down at the bottom of the ladder, and they're the ones that ought to face the proverbial guillotines. Let everyone do his or her own thing, and as long as their (wrong) paths don't cross it's all good.
I hope the government leaves these guys alone. If they are doing something wrong, let them - it's only an online forum, after all, and the government should have the gumption to stand up to the freedom of speech mentioned in the constitution. Gagging is a sign of trying to hide something. If they really haven't done anything wrong, then why can't they just hold their heads high and continue forward? Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to ignore it.
