Kitsch

There are many surprises in this world. Every time I turn around a corner, surprise stares me in the face. Sometimes, it is sneering. NO, make that often. I don't mind. Not so much, that I have gotten used to it. Surprises no longer surprise me.

Like the other day, I was browsing through comments on Rediff (which is the next best thing after FRIENDS to cure mild depression), and someone had written that Satyajit Ray was a traitor.

Oh why! I wondered, he is the only Indian to be awarded an Oscar, surely in a country where international success or any remote connection to it is lauded and worshipped, he ought to receive more respect than that. What treason could he have committed? I read on. Do you know why Satyajit Ray is a traitor? Because he depicted poverty in India. That abject thing that does not exist anywhere in India. He is a unpatriotic because he marketed India's poverty to the west. Won awards and recognition because that is what the west wants to see of us.

Now,take a director of the Johar ilk. Well! You know he is patriotic because he depicts true Indian values and traditions. Doesn't he make us all proud? My chest is so swollen with pride, it is going to burst any second now.

All along, I described the movies of the Johar kind (lets be kind to him as these movies predate him and call it the Bollywood masala) as shit, bullshit, horseshit, manure and crap. It has just dawned on me that they are not shit. If anything they are the exact opposite of it; the negation of shit. Kitsch, if you please.

I am reminded of Milan Kundera's definition of Kitsch in the The Unbearable Lightness of Being as “the absolute denial of shit”. Kitsch, he wrote, excludes from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world.

What the writer of that article was trying to say was that Ray's vision was against their ideal of India and therefore unacceptable. Ray, despite gaining eminence overseas is not worthy of being our hero. It has nothing to do with ciematic sensibilites or style.

Why does it surprise me or ought to? We, in India (maybe it is an universal phenemenon) are so thirsty for heroes to put up on pedestals that I expected Ray to be on one. A national hero. A role-model for filmmakers of the new generation.

Perhaps it is only fitting that he is not on one. (And perhaps... he is not on this pedestal, only to be put up on a different one)

Overheard

"I was so late today, I was fervently hoping that I hadn't missed the bus", the man panted to a halt. He hadn't missed the bus or his friend.

"No! You are alright. I think we have a couple of minutes before the bus arrives. What happened to you? You are the early bird. You should have been here before me."

"Don't get me started. Worst morning ever. I am surprised I didn't get run over by a cement truck. You got some water with you. I am..."

"Knackered with all the running you have been doing? Here! Drink some. Delayed at breakfast? Did the waiter serve you yesterday's remains or what?"

"Like that would be something new! The guy upstairs hung himself from the ceiling"

"Alright! That IS something new. Don't see someone commit suicide all the time. What happened to this friend?"

"Hey! He is no friend, OK? He just lives upstairs. I don't know what happened to him. Maybe love failure. Hung himself with the clothesline yesterday. No one realised anything was wrong until this morning when the lady who comes to clean the room knocked on his door and hearing no response decided to peep in through the window and saw him dangling from the roof"

"Then, what happened?"

"You think I am telling you a bedtime story? What else? She screamed her bloody lungs out and we had to break open the door and pull him down. As if that wasn't enough we had to call the police and an ambulance. Too much trouble for a monday morning"

"Who was this guy? Was he that tall fat one with french beard? Whatshisname... Thanikachalam or Arunachalam or something?"

"Oh no! Not that guy. Wish it was him, that arrogant prick. But if he was it would have taken us another hour to get him down from the ceiling. Or the rope would have sundered. This guy is the bald one. I don't think you have seen him"

"What an adventure man! My life, it is so boring. Nothing spicy ever happens"

"Yeah! I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't for the mobile phone I forgot to take in all this hullabaloo. What a terrible inconvenience!"

I'm Explaining a Few Things

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

Pablo Neruda