EVERYONE LOVES A SCANDAL

I watch with awe as I see my aunts and even my young teenaged cousins get overwhelmed everyday during primetime television. The melodrama that K-series (and its apes) dish out sensationalise millions of people whose lives otherwise clearly lacks adventure.

I wonder how different are the husk-sifting rural women who entertain themselves with who-ran-away-with-whom and who-is-pregnant-with-whose-child gossip from the urban women who cannot miss the primetime scandal even for a day and have to get the update on the phone or at the kitty parties where the gossip runs on a very similar line. Probably what is different is the ambience, the language or the attire. At heart we all (mere mortals) love a scandal!

But if we all love scandals so much I will tell you which is the place to go. Ever tried the ancient epics?

No really what is popularly discarded as the high-brow stuff is the Centre for All Things Outrageous. They have gone where a seasoned K-Series scriptwriter fears to tread. Consider the Mahabharata for instance, where on any soap on earth will you find a woman with five husbands. Or which serial can depict the infamous vastraharan or where can a hero flirt around and have such a swell time with thousands of gopis. The epics have lost the punch because of having heard or seen them so often.

On the Westside story, there is Oedipus who is the victim of (terribly unfortunate) circumstances. And so is Electra. The epic-plays challenge our ideas of morality our archetypal model of mother-son relationship. That is the reason they are timeless. They will never cease to question us, scare us.

But did the writers intend to just scandalise us? Did they want to make us face our own demons? Some explain it as catharsis. The other explanation is that we feel we are secure and normal when we see characters enacting such roles.

Probably writers in the past had more courage to be, what we now call, politically incorrect. But then that is the essence of good art, to shake you gently to your guts.

- Ashwini Muley Kulkarni.

JULY 2009 PUNK ROCKER KAMALA DAS

	Looking at her pictures it was hard to believe she was 75. There was an unmistakable, fearless child in the face. Kamala Das, the woman meant many things to many people and everyone had to have an opinion about her. Isn't she one of those woman women love to love?

Her urge to utter the notorious truth in an equally blunt manner was almost like a punk rocker's . Das spoke her mind, while the orthodox cringed their nose, the media lapped it all up in a rare interest for any poet. There was her legacy, the family she came from, and there was the individuality which Das carried without being bothered.

Probably one of the few of her generation who could write openly about being in an incompatible relationship in her marriage. In the poem Maggots, she uses allusion of the Radha-Krishna relationship, paralleling the woes of her own marriage. There was love-hate relationship with blurred lines where Das referred to the husband in the poem The Stone Age as,

Fond husband, ancient settler in the mind, 
Old fat spider, weaving webs of bewilderment,

Yet Das found the greatest support and respect in her husband when it came to her writing and Das was equally vocal about how she loved to revel in that glory too. And in that we realise that the relationship was beyond the realm of love or hate or marriage.

Sexuality is a recurring theme, one which a few could dare to venture on the Indian terrain, including men. Taboo subjects which were not even discussed in general or political discussions, forget art, were subjects of her poetry, like female anatomy and desires. In one poem Dance Of The Eunuchs she finds beauty and grace in eunuchs, the social outcasts. She finds unusual similes for their limbs,  half-burnt logs from/ Funeral pyres.

This was year of great loss for the Indian literature and art scene, as it lost some of its precious gems like Habib Tanveer, Dilip Chitre, Tyeb Mehta and of course Kamala Das. Now of course, even the writers seems to be a product of Publishing House gimmicks, with billon dollar cheques, added advantage of good looks or good money. Kamala is of the bygone where all that poets and writers did was weaving heartfelt words, nothing else.

By Ashwini Muley Kulkarni.

THE SWEET PILL AT DOCTOR'S VISIT

Our professor Rajaraman at Somaiya College was surprised at the answers, as he asked the nominal question for admission into the Diploma course in Journalism and Mass Communication, "What do you read in a newspaper?" He told us later as the course began that 80 percent of them had said "Bombay Times!” He went on to express more about current generation's general complacency and ignorance.

In case you are wondering I wasn't in the majority. Well I don't read Bombay Times, I read the Mumbai Mirror! Which did not exist then, hence with all honesty I did read Bombay Times. But still with more honesty that was not the answer I gave, I had said, "I read the front page headlines". Now that was not very honest. But what the hell, it was an interview, you prepare for it and there's always an FAQ. On groom-hunting interview what are the odds they won't ask you if you like cooking or no. So there!

Commerce is a factor that is difficult to be ignored. Entirely man-made but it can control and bend values. Take the constant tiff between management at a media house and its editorial board. Excluding the masthead, the most visible thing on the frontpage is the advertisement on the ears or the solus space. The editor doesn't like it but the management can't do without it.

But the twain does meet. Principled as the editorial board may be, it knows it needs readers more than anything. Hence along with the news comes a good dose of entertainment. It works and how! Mostly these days news gets read along or after the entertainment section. People go through their share of the Archies, Peanuts and others, before glimpsing the headline.

The cartoons have reflected the common people and the changing (apolitical) world view. Sluggo has jealously watched Nancy adoring Rollo, the spoilt-rich-superkid, as he went from computer to laptop, and from one next generation gadget to another.

And Archie and his gang who seem to have drunk on the fountain of youth, (why Nancy has gone from stuff toys to acne but Veronica's never complained of a wrinkle ever!) have evolved technologically, Archie has gone from the phone to the pager to the mobile! I said apolitical because they do not and cannot talk anything about the hardhitting issues. All-American in everyway, they do talk about July 4th and Thanksgiving but they do not talk about the 9/11. Riverdale seems to be somewhere far away from that reality. But in essence they cannot do so because they will fail to entertain.

You might think this entertainment section is a product of the consumerist culture but no long before that entertainment has been part of the newspapers. In the 19th century someone, who was going to be one of the greatest novelists, was writing captions for artist Robert Seymour's illustrations. What was to be later compiled as Pickwick Papers was written by Charles Dickens whose loveable character Pickwick and his gang were to entertain people in series more like soap operas but only less tedious and domestic.

If we find the hard-hitting reality of the headlines too hard to digest we slip into the shell of the entertainment section. The Page 3 "news", its denizens who continue to party come hail, come rain, come bomb, make us believe everything's not wrong with the world. Look at these people so well-dressed and they look happy.

A worldly-wise broadsheet editor might give in to the tabloid fever and report as Amitabh sneezes then sneezes again as the world reads on and the circulation rises. But somewhere a principled editor might fume at news being sidelined the answer is, as put by the management, "entertainment will be preferred, do not complain Mr Editor of the nightmare of 30 blank pages staring at you waiting to be greyed, we are only making your job easy, and colourful!"

-Ashwini Muley Kulkarni.

OCTOBER 2008: REINTRODUCING GANDHI

In a country where deification is a compulsive habit, why even a disease, it doesn’t come as a surprise that a man who was called ‘Mahatma’ would be spared in any way from the pedestal. Deservedly though.

But as a candy floss, tear-jerkers -loving nation we often miss out on humour. The politics of our living is being politically correct. You belong to certain opinion. In effect, you either love a person like Gandhi or hate him. And if you say you like Savarkar, then it means you don’t like Gandhi. Parallel popular history, (which in my opinion has a tremendous impact on the course of history,) is full of such radical, rigid discourses.

Do I have a point? Because I just seem to be making claims. Yes I do. Gandhi was the man who gave all the peace-loving people in the world a weapon to fight with. Truth, Non-Violence, quintessential Gandhism is great. But this preachy tone is something that probably stops endearing Gandhi to the younger generation. (The one exception however I would make here is that of the film Lage Raho Munnabhai.) Gandhi as a legacy should be carried forward for all the right reasons.

For someone who has only recently been through adolescence I could say the quick appeal to the young mind lies in a persona which is go-getter, witty and charming, probably someone like Che Guevera. But it is wholly false that youth has false pride, less compassion and a casual rudeness. Ideas like Communism, Peace, True Friendship or Love appeal the most to the young, whose naiveté has not yt been robbed by the Big Bad World. Beneath the cold complacent exterior, lies both passion and compassion.

We have ignored a very beautiful dimension which is also Gandhi. That is of Gandhi, the strategist. As soon as I mention the word, I am eyed with suspicion. By strategist, I do not mean a conniving, scheming person who had an agenda.

What I mean is a cerebral being who had the charisma and wit to hold his own in the ego-centric British regime. Someone who could, when asked, “What do you think about Western Civilisation?” get away by saying, “I think that would be a good idea.”

He had a body language that was charged and ready. You would need actual physical energy to keep pace with him if you were walking along. He probably seems like a good Gujarati business brain who knew how to hardsell without being obvious. He had a product which was also a campaign, Non-Violence, and slogans like ‘Do Or Die’ delivered in his convincing speech and Viola! He had created a mass movement. Just as he put his own idea in his words, “In your own gentle way, you can shake the world.”

But due to various reasons, academic, political, this side of Gandhi is never in focus. If we really wish to see Gandhian principles in function in the modern world, we should bring out the thinking man in Gandhi and give the Mahatma a break for a while. Simply because then it would seem more possible, more human.

- Ashwini Muley Kulkarni.

AUGUST 2008 SIMPLY AIN'T FUNNY

Some things are simply not funny. Like the urge to laugh out aloud when at a funeral. You feel bad too and there’s nothing even remotely funny about the situation.But some things are supposed to be funny. Like a cartoon. Play a little Freudian slip with anyone; it is most likely people will say something similar to ‘funny’ or ‘kids’. So a word like ‘offensive’ is not an obvious association. Sarcasm or Parody are understood. Caricatures are interesting too. But is there anything remotely funny about the Obama cartoon? If anything the cartoon reeks of racism and prejudice.

Cartoons entertain. Mickey, Donald, Tom and Jerry, each evokes nostalgia of giving us a childhood lesson, besides making us laugh, that we are different from each other but life is about enduring and enjoying each other. Tom and Jerry fight more than love or help each other, but they are inseparable. Best friends do not just sing praise songs of eternal friendship but real best friends have the right to make your life miserable. At their creative best, cartoons can be Chuck Jones’ Blue Danube.

Great works of art have always been called blasphemous before they became classics. There is no end to accounting how many artists and writers have faced wrath of public ignorance and intolerance in their quest and desire for artistic liberty. Apparently, the poetic or artistic licence is of no value when it reaches the public domain. Consider MF Husssain's Bharatmata painting even in these modern times. But when it comes to humiliating a living person that is plain spiteful.

Like any art, commercial art cartooning has been on the criticism radar much too often. Cartoonists vary in their style and themes. Almost all newspapers and magazines have cartoonists. We have our legendary R K Laxman who always seems to capture the zeitgeist of India with his Common Man. In his subtle way, he always seems to hit the nail on its head.

Famous American cartoonist, Robert Crumb, founder of the underground comics movement was loved and loathed by many for his content. He (had also famously denied illustrating an album cover for the Rolling Stones; reason: he hated their music,) drew frequently satirical, sexual and politically outrageous comic books. But they were contextually correct; they were most of the times a comment on the mindset or simply to question people's ambiguous definitions of morality.

Trouble begins when cartoons defy the entertainment and experimental purpose and take the crude way. Cartoons are definitely an easy way to take a dig at someone.

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has been packaged as the Post-Bush-Breeze-of-fresh-air,  Modern, Young,  Secular, Global, face of America.Yet it is difficult to understand the logic behind New Yorker’s cartoonist Barry Blitt's satirical magazine cover showing a Muslim-robed Barack Obama and a gun-toting Michelle Obama. Why in such an offensive manner? There’s absolutely nothing funny about it. Of course, while the intention is clear in the given circumstances, the debates will be on full blaze but there’ll be no end to what people will do in the name of freedom of expression and artistic licence.

-Ashwini Muley Kulkarni

MARCH 2008 WOMEN IN LITERATURE

For art, woman has always been a subject of great interest. But most of Popular Art, and even to a large extent, the Classic (the Romantic Ages,) art has been happy portraying woman as an object of beauty. Sometimes she was demure, submissive and sometimes the nurturing image of Madonna. Putting her on a pedestal ensured she did nothing on the negative side of human, meaning she couldn’t show she had brains. If she was ever free-spirited, humorous and conniving, religion and literature gave her a name, ‘witch’. Today, ‘bitch’.

Looking at our Eastern examples, only few ancient texts can make it to the ‘fair is fair’ league. Kalidasa’s heroine in Shakuntala is a complete picture of (chauvinistic) male fantasies, so are Rembrandt’s paintings in the West. ‘Nudes’ have essentially been female. There might be a few exceptions here and there, but only a few might have found reverence like the ‘David’. But calling it (not him) ‘nude’ rather than ‘Art’ sounds almost perverted.

More than a couple of millennia BC, Ramayana’s Sita was one important example among many. In fact, Ramayana was an epic of Platonic perfections. So if Rama was a ‘Purushottam, Sita was his female counterpart, sacrifice here was equal, except that it was voluntary on Rama’s part and forced on Sita’s.

This is the reason why my favourite heroine among the ancient texts is Draupadi, (the other such bold Draupadi is Mahashwetadevi’s fierce heroine in Dopadi,) probably the oldest feminist. She did all things that might sound scandalous even today. She was much-married, free-spirited and not even in the moment of their empirical downfall was she scared of her voicing her opinions. In fact, her tongue-in-cheek comments on Duryodhana lead to the Great War of Mahabharata. So she had a sense of humour, although disastrous.

In the less politically conscious, folk literature of India, portrayal of woman varies from a nurturing mother to being a daughter who is a burden upon her family. There is a rustic longing in the songs simply stating that the girl should leave her parents’ home which is not really her home and go to serve at her husband’s home.

In the West, the Mills and Boons, the heroines are happy being the ‘object of desires’ to their men even today, she could be coy or she could be a femme fatale, she still has to survive the ‘punishing kiss’ if she shows even hints of a revolt. This world of stereotypical fantasy is yet to meet the real world, which has gotten an awareness of the sexual politics.

Our beloved bard, Shakespeare was a much smart man. Although his source play of shrew genre might have been different, Shakespeare’s Katherine, The Taming of the Shrew, critics say, was not a shrew at all and that her seeming shrewishness is only a defence mechanism against the hurt inflicted on her by a misogynistic world. He also had his defence ready by making his women wise protagonists. Portia, The Merchant of Venice, is the solution-finding, smart woman, albeit dressed as a man.

Portrayal of woman in the post-modern, politically conscious world has become a more complex task. There are many layers yet to be shed before we reach the core and find the essence of the character. Hard task, as they say, all men are same and every woman is different!

Although today when the equations finally seem balanced, there is still a hint of slight tipping here and there. Unequal payments for women, share of domestic responsibilities, just to name a few. Literature to a great extent reflects what happens in the real world, and for the woman in the book to change, the real woman has to change herself.

The good thing is questions are being asked, and there is a lot of self reflection happening. It is being asked whether being a feminist means not being feminine. What’s wrong with being a woman, why strive to be a man (and now the men want to wear skirts to their office!)? Is nurturing and taking care that bad a thing even if it’s personal choice. What’s wrong with being an object of desire? And why not, it’s not just women on the posters that are good-looking, it’s the men too. And eye candy is a unisexual term!

- Ashwini Muley-Kulkarni

MARCH 2006: STORIES ARE US

Without any scientific evidence at hand I would like to believe that the art of storytelling is as primitive as the discovery of fire or cultivation of food. People complain that the reading habit is dying. But stories have not seized to exist, in the form of a movie, a soap opera, stories have continued to fascinate popular imagination and in some or the other form, through next next next generation of technology, from sublime to crass, stories will continue to live as long as people will.

People who love to read come across various stories from various cultures. They also get introduced to the culture’s ethos, rituals and idiosyncrasies. My favourite myth ritual is the Native American ‘dream catcher’, just a net that will catch your feather-light dreams, so that they wont fly away. It is a ritual, a story, and a symbol of a civilisation still relatively unpolitisised, so innocent, and so close to fantasies.

Stories have been with us forever. May be from the first time a person pondered, “Why am I here?” From the simple folklore describing our relationship with the nature, to the fairy tales that interlaced magic into the young minds, or the grand epics after the realisation of our collective egos of the glorious heights of our civilisation and our heroes, stories have been us, growing with us.

But all through that (successful) journey and here now, what are the stories we want our children to hear when they are growing up. And what part of ‘his-story’ will we be hiding from them?

After the Beckettian era, we realised that we are already beyond saturation point. There is no inspiration, no events that surprise us, and no words – that’s the complaint. That can’t be true? We’re all alive and trying to make our lives meaningful, trying to find a purpose. Let’s not think about the world, let’s talk India first. Why? Because that is still us. Globalisation is fine. But there are still ‘boundaries’. We still need visas. And countries are still attacking each other. So let’s just talk India.

How real are our stories? What do they say about us?

African American writer Ben Okri wrote in one of his essays, “Happy countries tell themselves sad stories and sad countries tell themselves happy stories.”

So, considering that the biggest and most popular story-telling machine of India, Bollywood, churns out tons of candy floss, how happy or sad are we? It is as much true as the depiction of India as the land of snake charmers and poor starving people. How can anyone typecast a whole nation? We could easily put the blame on the media by talking about its complacency and cashing-on-our-woes tendency but the truth is, we have chosen to hear these stories. The real stories are being told. And they are stories of courage, of perseverance and of hope.

Like this story that this man Narendra Jadhav has to tell, that of his father’s, a man from the previously segregated section of the society, whose spirit and hope inspired this writer to attempt and succeed in flying to higher altitudes and keep soaring. I love this story as much as I love the Rosa Parks story or even more because it is our story and such a story has come after a long while. And it did find a voice among all the chicklit chaos.

So, such stories are being told. Within the candy floss they stick out like bitter gourds, (like Page 3, Hazaaron Khwaahishe Aisi and Bawandar.) Such inspirations, true ones should be told, not just of human beings, but of creatures as well. Most Americans know the Seabiscuit story. It is proudly a part of the American dream. But how many of us know the story of Chetak, the fiercely loyal martyr of Prithviraj Chauhan’s kingdom, his horse.

But when telling these stories let us face our conscience and be honest enough to admit that we are the ones responsible for the mess the next generation is seeing around. That we are the people who chose the meaning of progress as chopping off trees and creating a concrete jungle and filling pure air with poison. We are the ones who are running the risk of putting tigers and dinosaurs in one category:extinct . We are the ones murder our kith and kin in the name of religion, race, and gender.

But while telling the story let's also tell them that we have begun the attempts to fix it. This to avoid the shock when their wakefulness comes they do not feel they woke up into a nightmare.

- Ashwini Muley Kulkarni.

JANUARY 2006 : NEW AGE READING

If there are people getting worried that the reading habit is dying, there are some who are finding solutions as they hunt for alternative verbs for reading like “seeing” or “listening,” so as long as it remains literature.

For true-blue booklovers nothing matches the pleasure of curling up on the couch with your favourite book. But the audio-visual and Internet phenomenon took over the world and today such a creed is a dwindling minority. The newspaper turned to News Channel and the reading time turned into Prime Time and later into WebPages. But publishing houses, however, are not complaining as manuscripts keep pouring in and they anyways gain their revenue. So, are there still ways to keep the rest of the minority on this side?

Keeping in mind that in this era people read their News not by holding the papers in their hands, on their desktops, giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are already wrestling to put the War and Peace online, literary!

Whether this war will lead to peace is yet to be seen, but there are few who have gone ahead the ahimsa way and done some service to all those who complain of lack of time for reading. They have introduced “Audio Books”. And one such book available in India is the audio book of Gandhiji’s autobiography. The book features the voices of famous director, Shekhar Kapur as Gandhiji and actress Nandita Das as the narrator.

But the work of The Poetry Archive can truly be said to be a treat for poetry lovers. This archive is the brainchild of British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and Richard Carrington, a recording engineer specialising in the spoken word. The archive aims at preserving and collecting records of poets reciting their poetry in their own voice.

The earliest recording on the site is Browning reciting part of a poem at a dinner in 1889, the year of his death. The site also features Tennyson reciting his The Charge of Light Brigade in 1890. The later recordings include Rudyard Kipling and W B Yeats. The more modern ones include voices of Harold Pinter, Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood.

But there are some who are willing to give-in to the audio-visual-multimedia-animation trend. Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor is India’s first graphic novel. Granting value to the medium itself there are characters in the novel called Digital Dutta and DVD Murthy. It has also been “translated” into French. And the success has been encouraging enough for the “author” to come up with a second novel Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers and a “book” of short of stories called City of Gates.

- Ashwini Muley Kulkarni