Aurangzeb, which should have been much better, plays like a mashup of Hindi cinema before it became Bollywood. Like Trishul, it is the story of corporate battles involving fathers and sons in Delhi. (We’re now in the shining new India of Gurgaon.) Like Deewar, it is the story of a well-heeled crook who lives with the equivalent of the prostitute with the heart of gold. Like Don, it is the story of twins – one good, one bad – who are swapped. Like Do Kaliyaan, it is the story of children who transfer their affections, in a manner of speaking, from the parent they grew up with to the parent they move in with. Like any of those older films, this is the story not just of lovey-dovey leads, but of families, with a large ensemble of characters, young and old. And like the films of the time – and indeed, like the India of the time – Aurangzeb  is a story about morality, the battle of philosophies between a character who believes that apnon ki keemat sapnon se zyada hoti hai, that family comes first, and another who, like the eponymous Mughal emperor, is willing to sacrifice kith and kin in the pursuit of his dreams.

Sabharwal knows those films well, and his flourishes are old-fashioned in the best sense. Befitting a story about twins – Ajay and Vishal (played by Arjun Kapoor) – the director, after the swap, mirrors the moment where Vishal drapes a blanket over the sleeping Ritu (Sashaa Agha) with one where Veera (Tanvi Azmi) drapes her dupatta over a sleeping Ajay, her long-lost son. And when Veera reveals, early on, that she gave birth to twins, Vishal turns to a mirror and we get a hint of Ajay in the reflection. Sabharwal knows his way around deliberately worded dialogue that goes with these deliberate visuals. The character played by Anupam Kher says that he chose to reside in the suburbs because he wanted to distance himself from the city, but “Ab yeh shehar badhte badhte mere ghar mein ghus aaya hai.” With development, the city has invaded his home. After this rant and a heated exchange with his son Arya (Prithiviraj Sukumaran), Sabharwal leaves us with a grace note. Kher picks up an empty beer bottle and blows over its neck, the hollow whistle echoing into the night.

This is a movie about men, with the women reduced mostly to props during festivities like Raksha Bandhan and Karwa Chauth, but the most beautifully shaped lines often come about in the presence of these women – when Veera tells Ajay why she chose to leave him with his father, when Arya’s wife (Swara Bhaskar) tells him she’s pregnant, or when Ravikant’s wife (Deepti Naval) incites her husband like Lady Macbeth. These emotional stretches work very well. There’s a MacGuffin that hinges on an expressway being planned on agricultural land, but the real purpose of these scenes is to show that Vishal is bonding with his father, the predatory industrialist Yashwardhan (an excellent Jackie Shroff). Yashwardhan wants the farmers to sign their land away, and so, like an unctuous politician, he courts them with charm, even staging an impromptu cricket match in the fields. Vishal drops a catch. Yashwardhan laughs good-naturedly. And we cut to a moment of silence, with Vishal probably thinking of all the dropped catches he missed out on while growing up with his mother.

The film could have used more visual flair, but where it really goes wrong is with its miscasting in some of the major roles. Sashaa Agha is fatally lightweight as Ajay’s girlfriend (she has a few secrets of her own), and Prithiviraj Sukumaran’s line readings are just that – he just reads out his lines, as if off a page, long chunks of exposition or conversation that sound over-rehearsed rather than lived-in. It’s one of the stiffest performances I’ve seen. (I kept wondering what Kay Kay Menon would have done with this part.) And Arjun Kapoor, at this admittedly early stage of his career, seems to subscribe to the school of acting where making faces constitutes character. As the animalistic Ajay, he recycles his Ishaqzaade character, and as Vishal, he is so muted that we wonder how Yashwardhan doesn’t sense that something’s wrong. Their scenes, together and apart, needed to detonate with dramatic charge, but Sabharwal is more comfortable with the quieter moments – like the one where Yashwardhan whips up an omelette – than the stormy confrontations. Sometimes, you just have to break a few eggs.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

The girls, on the other hand, make out furiously with their boyfriends, but when a boy extends his hand in greeting in front of their parents, they respond with a demure namaste. Can these hormonal teens drive an emotional love story? That’s the challenge facing the director, Amit Kasaria. At first, Aayra tells Yuvaan that they can hang out. “But remember, we’re not a couple and I don’t love you.” A song follows, with the refrain I don’t love you. Some scenes later, she demands a promise from him that he’ll never leave her alone. The song, this time, comes with the refrain Do I love you?. Given this progression, you expect, any minute, a third song, with an I love you refrain – but before that can happen, Yuvaan misreads an I’m-home-alone invitation by Aayra. He unzips her dress, slips a hand down her back, and leaves her in tears. Wouldn’t this girl from London – she lands in Delhi and coos, “Kitna apnapan hai yahan” – know how to push away a boy who exceeds his boundaries?

The problem with I Don’t Luv U is that the wan leads haven’t an iota of chemistry. They could be siblings. And despite the ups and downs in the narrative – a beginning where someone jumps off a high rise and lands on the pavement, in a pool of blood; a tell-all diary (are today’s teens still scribbling thoughts on paper?) – the drama just doesn’t build, and a love story, in any generation, cannot sustain itself without the audience whipping itself into worry about the outcome. Worse, in the second half, the screenplay meanders into messagey territory, about television sensationalism and its effects on society. These portions are laughably simplistic, though they do make the case that today’s youngsters, behind the brash facades, are no different from those in earlier times, needing the support of emotionally nurturing adults (Yuvaan’s parents, the sympathetic cop played by Murli Sharma). I Don’t Luv U isn’t terrible and it could have been saved with a rousing climax, but the end is shockingly low-key. In Kasaria’s hands, Romeo would have ended up sharing a sandwich with Juliet.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Neram lives up to its title from the opening credits, which appear over a variety of time-indicating devices. Elsewhere, too, there are signs of time. It’s three weeks before Veni (Nazriya Nazim) agrees to Vetri’s proposal. And then, when her father assents to their getting married, Vetri asks for time to look for a new job. Months elapse. Meanwhile, he needs money for his sister’s wedding. So he goes to a bling-loving loan shark named ‘Vatti’ Raja (Simhaa), who threatens him with dire consequences if the repayments don’t arrive on time. And the timeframe of the events in the film? One day – the day an installment is due. Neram, therefore, is a ticking-clock thriller hinging on whether Vetri will settle ‘Vatti’ Raja’s dues within a specified period of time, but there’s a more diffuse aspect of time the director sets out to explore: its capacity to usher in fortune and misfortune. (In other words, nalla neram, ketta neram.) No one can accuse Putharen of lacking ambition.

Or attitude. A defining characteristic of these films is the tongue tucked firmly into cheek, and we have, as ‘Vatti’ Raja’s henchmen, Karuppu and Vellai, who, between them, occupy the ends of the complexion spectrum. Then we have the world-cinema instructor who refers to Bicycle Thieves, made, apparently, by a filmmaker named Victoria D’Silva. (It’s terrific how this joke is slipped in with little regard to whether the “common man” will get it.) And how can we forget Manick? His name, really, is Manickam, but the abbreviation points to his Anglicisation – he prefers to speak in English. The scenes with Thambi Ramaiah (as Veni’s dyspeptic father) and John Vijay (as a sub-inspector with an unprintable name who may know less about Carnatic music than he thinks he does) are gems, crafted not with silly one-liners but with deeply eccentric humour. Even the songs are one-of-a-kind, employed not as brakes to bring the movie to periodic five-minute halts, but to infuse jolts of electricity into dynamically filmed chase sequences. (The background, at other times, spins variations on Beethoven’s Für Elise.)

The leads are great together, and the supporting characters circle around them – and each other, and the locality of Mandaiveli – beautifully, showing up just enough to remind us of their existence, never overstaying their welcome. Almost everything is perfect on paper. But something is lost on screen. We feel we should be laughing more, and that there are a few too many flat passages. The conveniently plotted (and dismayingly tension-free) concluding portions don’t live up to the promise of the beginning, and by the time Nasser shows up as a big shot with a tendency to use the word “awesome” (his version goes “aa-sum”) and break into song in hospitals, we wish that, under these sprinklings of humour, there had been more meat. I wasn’t rooting for anyone in particular by the end – though you may say, and rightly so, that the point of these modest productions isn’t emotional investment but entertainment. And that we get… most of the time.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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The new Iron Man movie is, thankfully, less about Iron Man than Tony Stark, the man inside the metal. Choosing to showcase a human being over a superhero is always a risky enterprise, but unlike Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent, whose dour selves extinguish all the joy around, Stark comes across as a buoyant adolescent who’s just had every toy in the world dumped at his doorstep. Early on, at a scientific conference in Bern, an inventor desperate for funding hounds Stark and hands him a couple of business cards. Stark says he’ll take both, “one to throw away and one to… not call.” Downey Jr. owns the part so thoroughly now that we laugh at his imperiousness instead of sympathising with the snubbed inventor. And his trusted robot is imbued with an equal amount of attitude, intoning to its master, “I’ve also prepared a safety briefing for you to completely ignore.”

The film is as fun as you can hope a third instalment will be, which means that quips and stunts (and a neat twist regarding the villain) apart, it’s the same old saga – but what quips, what stunts. When Iron Man tumbles into the sea and lies trapped amidst wreckage, his own arm detaches itself and offers a helping hand. (If I could whistle, I would have.) An action sequence involving a sabotaged Air Force One threatens to end with the five-thousandth instance of hero and villains grabbing at seats to prevent being sucked out of the depressurised aircraft, but Iron Man jumps out to execute a superbly conceived stunt. (Again, if I could whistle, I would have.) People like to blame Hollywood for many things that are wrong with the movies today, but which other film industry is capable of executing these eye-popping stunts so smoothly that we buy into the illusion without a second’s hesitation?

And watching the film, I was struck by the thought that even in the days of extensive opening credits, Hollywood movies rarely listed the name(s) of the stunt coordinator(s). (These days, of course, all names appear at the end of the movie.) Even the costume designer would find a place in the credits, as would the special effects company, but the Bond movies apart – where the titles mention a “stunt coordinator” – not one mention of the head of the team responsible for the action sequences. And here, in our films that have such elementary action in comparison (your basic dishoom-dishoom stuff), the action coordinator’s names are always listed under “stunts” or “thrills.” Why this omission in the Hollywood movies? Is it because these stunts are conceived as part of the screenplay – “Iron Man falls into the sea… He lies there, trapped… His metal hand detaches itself and rescues him…” – and therefore owe more to the imagination of the writer(s), and the stunt people merely execute these visions?

I wonder if this is the reason stunt professionals aren’t more visible in Hollywood – as I said, the new Iron Man movie is less about Iron Man than Tony Stark, and you need a writer for the latter. This contention is bolstered by the excellent new Star Trek movie, which hits the ground running with an action stretch set on a foliage-cloaked planet whose leaves are such a shade of crimson that the surface appears to be bathed in blood. (And the film keeps getting better. As a fan of the TV series and the earlier films, even the bad ones, I was entertained and moved beyond all expectation.) The smaller action sequences consist of gunfights and hand-to-hand combats – what we’d call dishoom-dishoom – and these are fairly routine. But the big set pieces – a massacre in a high rise, reminiscent of the mob-assassination sequence in The Godfather: Part III; a tense flight through space filled with dangerous debris; a dogfight at warp speed – are predictably jaw-dropping, with top-grade contributions from both the stunt and the special effects teams.

But the drama comes from the characters, from the writing. Without characters to care about, without strong dramatic motivation, we’d see these action scenes as just popcorn entertainment – but with strong writing, we care also about the outcome of the action. We enjoy the action stretch as it unfolds, we enjoy the rush of adrenalin, but we’re kept hanging because of what the result of this action means to Kirk and Spock and to the villain, played by Benedict Cumberbatch with thrilling Shakespearean intensity. The interplay between these characters lays the ground for the action sequences, and this writing is why we care. Then again, it’s the stunt team that makes us believe the writer’s words, and watching these films, I felt sorry for the great numbers of people who’ve toiled away in anonymity, aware that there isn’t even a category in the Academy Awards for the work that they do, while there is one for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

She could have become a tragic figure, but Nair, thankfully, will have none of it. Gippi is often cruel to the friends who come to her aid, and especially to her younger brother (Arbaz Kadwani), who’s overweight and probably gay. (This being a Karan Johar production, the boy isn’t turned into an object of ridicule.) Gippi is seemingly about the triumph of the underdog – she competes with Shamira for the post of Head Girl – but it’s really just a slice of teen life, where we’re all alternately innocent and insufferable. Gippi is teased about her looks and her social awkwardness, but when the equally gauche Ashish (Aditya Deshpande) expresses interest in her, she brushes him aside for a hunk named Arjun (Taaha Shah), who’s the very embodiment of rebel stereotypes: leather jacket, a stubble, and non-stop smoking. (Ashish’s face falls when he learns that Gippi has a boyfriend, but he composes himself and sends her a congratulatory note. It’s one of the film’s loveliest scenes.)  “Main apni age se kaafi mature hoon,” she tells Arjun, but she really isn’t. Like all teens, she just thinks she is.

Like Mere Dad ki Maruti – and this week’s other release Go Goa Gone – Gippi follows a tried-and-tested Hollywood template, and it doesn’t try to do too much. Its triumphs are minor (though not insignificant). The Punjabi-ness of the characters isn’t shoved down our throats through boisterous clichés, but established quietly, through a character’s attire or a last name, and they lead convincingly low-key middle-class lives. When Gippi goes shopping for a dress, the store isn’t a repository of designer wear but an unremarkable hole in the wall. The film doesn’t make a big deal about physical changes – a conversation about breasts getting bigger is treated as casually as one about zits. And the characters gradually reveal surprising layers. We are shown why Gippi’s father is marrying that foreigner – it isn’t just the kids who aren’t happy with what they have and aspire for (what they think are) better things, but grown-ups too. And when we see what’s behind Shamira’s mean-girl façade, our sympathies lie with her, not Gippi, who has to realise that things have to be earned.

The strong charcterisations – along with the strong performances (the kids are all terrific) – help tide Gippi over the predictable course of events. We’re not surprised when Pappi slaps Gippi for being mean to her brother, but the scene that follows is staged gently, without yelling and tantrums, and with the gentlest of reproaches. The mother-daughter bond is established beautifully, and they frequently switch places, one providing comfort when the other needs it, always with chocolate – if not ice cream, then cake. (And like Gippi, Pappi must learn to feel comfortable in her skin.) The film’s most delightful subplot involves Ashish and Aanchal (Doorva Tripathi), Gippi’s best friend, who are most practical-minded when it comes to picking up the pieces and moving on. There’s a moral in these actions, but modestly scaled films like Gippi exist not so much to shape life as reflect it. And sometimes, in these reflections, we catch glimpses of our former selves.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

But Manivannan is blithely unconcerned about any of this. Nagaraja Cholan is now a scheming Deputy Chief Minister, and he has a son, Gangaikondaan (Raghu Manivannan), who’s cut from the same cloth. Given that Nagaraja Cholan’s wife (Sujatha), in the earlier film, refused to bear his children, how did this son come about? There are no answers. There isn’t even a picture of Sujatha on the wall. The film seems to be some sort of science fiction, unfolding in a parallel dimension even as the events in Amaidhipadai were taking place. But this isn’t the real problem with Nagaraja Cholan MA, MLA. If Manivannan wants to take a hit character from a hit film and spin a new story around him, that’s his prerogative – except that the story, this time, doesn’t stick. Amaidhipadai was a juicy melodrama, charged with the tragedy of a betrayed woman and the son who sought to avenge her death. Nagaraja Cholan MA, MLA, to its detriment, abandons the personal for the political.

The conflict here revolves around a Swedish corporation that wants to set up a factory in Tamil Nadu. As one of the film’s many punch lines go, such an undertaking would result in extensive deforestation and environmental pollution, and the people in Sweden will not stand for it – we, on the other hand, don’t care. The scenes with these zingers, delivered  either by Nagaraja Cholan or his sidekick Manimaran (Manivannan), do their job, leaving us smiling about the sad state of affairs in the country. But elsewhere, we are asked to be emotionally invested in the plight of the tribals whose land is being coveted – and the rambling narrative simply does not pack that kind of emotion. (It doesn’t help that a booty-shaking item song is followed by a scene with tree-hugging tribals.) Manivannan invokes Amaidhipadai in a stretch that recalls Sujatha’s murder, but he shouldn’t have ended with clips from that film, where we hear Ilayaraja’s rousing background score and are reminded of something else that’s gone missing.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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The second most impressive aspect of Go Goa Gone may be that it knows what it wants to do – clear a low bar – and does it pretty well, with a jaunty tone (the film opens with a Chiranjeevi music video based on Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and cheerfully foul-mouthed one-liners. The story is about a couple of joint-loving slackers – Luv (Vir Das) and Hardik (Kunal Khemu, who’s excellent; he really should do more comedy) – and their earnest roommate Bunny (Anand Tiwari) who go in search of an underground rave party in Goa and end up being chased by zombies. (They’re joined by the shapely Luna, played by Puja Gupta.) Go Goa Gone has nothing on its mind but laughs, so the portions that attempt to evoke an emotional response feel forced. And after a while, there’s a sense of sameness – even at 110 minutes, the film feels overlong. But there’s always a joke around the corner, like a boob-shaped squeeze toy or a boat named Tatinic or the sight gag involving an insane running-around-trees moment . The third most impressive aspect of Go Goa Gone? It may just be the most tongue-in-cheek anti-drugs PSA ever.

Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Psycho is widely seen as the progenitor of the modern-day slasher film, yet watching it today, I wonder if that credit shouldn’t actually go to the movie Hitchcock made immediately after – The Birds, where the “slashing” came through beaks and talons instead of a knife gripped by an unforgiving hand. In a sense, yes, the famous shower scene opened the sluices for everything graphic and gory we see today, but behind it all is a nagging moral tone that seems very much a vestige of the 1950s (Psycho was released in 1960) – hardly “modern-day.” Simply put, it’s this: crime doesn’t pay. More specifically, if you indulge in premarital sex (especially with a married man), and if you steal, then you’re going to come to a bad end. Even if you repent. The most touching aspect of Psycho is that the heroine, Marion Crane, dies after she decides to go back home and hand over the money she’s stolen and face the consequences. Only a wrathful Old Testament God could be so unforgiving: the mere thought of sinning is enough.

Today, though, God is largely absent from the screens, and when we see bad things happen to people, we do not think of it as His vengeance. The Birds is truly a modern-day movie, in the sense that it’s all chaos. Birds swoop in and attack and then, just as suddenly as it all began, it ends. People are punished – apparently – for nothing at all, for nothing more than simply existing with the usual shades of human foibles, like a mother’s possessiveness with regard to her son. They do  nothing more to invite misfortune on themselves than, say, the victims of the serial killers in The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en or Zodiac (though the serial killers themselves could probably be traced back to Psycho). That’s what we see and know today, that innocent folk suffer and die all the time, and that’s why The Birds, more than Psycho, appears to me the progenitor of the modern-day slasher film.

These thoughts came about a few weeks ago when I was unwell, confined to the indoors and thrown at the mercy of the people who programme television channels. There’s clearly some kind of unwritten law that the day(s) you’re actually free to watch hours of television, there will be nothing worth watching – but by some stroke of luck, I stumbled into Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho, a “modern-day slasher film” at least with respect to the year of its release. The film, as you may know, is a scrupulous attempt to replicate the Hitchcock classic. The non-numerical lettering of the date is the same: FRIDAY DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH TWO FORTY THREE PM. The cop who questions Marion, who’s fallen asleep in her car, still wears creepy dark glasses that block out his eyes. But it’s in colour – so we see, for instance, that the bars that fracture the screen in the opening credits are green. And the stolen amount has increased from  $40, 000 to $400,000.

Despite what’s been said, Van Sant’s film is not a shot-for-shot remake. In the opening scene in this version, Marion and her lover are in bed, after making love. In the older film, the implication is still that they’ve made love, but because of censorship restrictions, they couldn’t be shown in bed together – and we see him standing beside the bed. Then there are changes in the characters. In the older film, we get the feeling that Marion was making it up as she went along, whereas here, she has a crafty gleam in her eyes, an I-pulled-it-off look. The theft seems premeditated, and thus we don’t feel sorry for her when she’s killed. And because of this change, we don’t understand why she repents, why she wants to go back and return the money. But Marion’s sister, Lila, comes across better in the new version. She’s more aggressive. She wears pants, not skirts, and we believe her when she manfully snaps, “Patience doesn’t run in my family.”

For 1998, it’s strange that Van Sant didn’t feel free enough to do more with the scares, because, seen today, the original Psycho is hardly scary, more interesting as a director’s showcase than as a thriller that will make you jump out of your seat. The new film, therefore, is little more than a curio. And it was even more of a curio on TV, after the censors got through with it. This is what happens in the famous shower scene: Norman’s mother comes into the bathroom, she lifts the knife, Marion screams, and… we cut to Mother leaving. Stabbing, clearly, is too much for Indian television, never mind that our masala movies like Rowdy Rathore, featuring far more graphic violence, are allowed to run almost untouched. If Psycho is known for anything, it’s the shower scene, and now there’s no shower scene. The film is rendered ridiculous, and made worse by the coy subtitles. When we’re told that Norman was aroused by Marion, the word “aroused” was beeped out and the subtitle showed the word “a****.” It reminded me of a swearword I wanted to use on the censors.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

In the tribal village of Thekke Kadambara, the air is thick with the odour of goat droppings. The animals are everywhere – inside the houses, in sheds just outside the houses (these sheds are hoisted on stilts), and on the roads between the houses, steeply inclined roads carved from the hills. The goats that aren’t here have been taken out to graze in the nearby forest. You’d think that, at some point, a few of them might end up in a cooking pot, given that the price of mutton at the local store is a kingly Rs. 350 – but that rarely happens. These animals are far too valuable alive. When properly fattened up, they can be sold at the weekly Saturday shandy for something like Rs. 7000. K Rangasamy, tribal promoter and the government’s representative in the village, says that this money, if rationed out sensibly, can sustain a family for a long time. It’s their only guaranteed income.

Till about ten years ago, these Irulas – the other tribals in the Attapadi region, belonging to Palakkad district, are the Muduga and the Kurumba – had another source of income: agriculture. The main crops were corn and ragi, which people from bordering Tamil Nadu would buy at Rs. 300 per quintal. Rangan Marudhan, who’s 48 and who claims to own 22 acres of ancestral land in the forest, says that they had to stop because of wild animals – pigs and elephants. At night, the beasts visit the village too. This is why, he says, he’s had to become a daily-wage labourer, working at the plantations of settlers nearby or in works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or in construction projects in distant cities like Kannur. Contractors come in jeeps and trucks and take him and others like him to these job sites, where they will stay for months. Marudhan has just returned from one such project. He has two children. His daughter is married. His son, like him, is a labourer.

Marudhan is accompanied by Maari, who thinks he may be 45 and is the moopen (chief) of the village. (There are 187 tribal villages in Attapadi.) I ask Maari what a moopen does, and he says he officiates religious events and sometimes mediates disputes. He’s a labourer too, and when he’s away, the officiating and the mediating are left to the villagers themselves. He gets into something of a dispute himself when he says that the women of his village don’t work. Marudhan disagrees strongly. They finally come to the consensus that some women, not all, have ended up labourers like the men, though they are paid less – Rs. 250 per day. (The men make Rs. 300 per day.) I ask Marudhan about the satellite dishes resting on the roofs of a few houses. He says quite of few of them in this village of 90 houses and 120 families have colour TVs. This has not gone down well with the government officials, who say that the money given for living is being spent on lifestyle acquisitions.

Rangasamy joins them and takes us through the village, which comes under the Sholayur panchayat. He’s dressed in a red-checked shirt that says Lee Cooper and a saffron-coloured mundu. The houses with their characteristic sloped roofs were built in the late 1970s and they are now in a state of disrepair. For 10 days, he says, there’s been no drinking water, and the complaints to visiting ministers and MLAs have yielded no result. They have to climb down a well for water. The village used to get water from public taps every alternate day, but an elephant pulled out the main line and now they are waiting for a welding machine to fix the damage. The erratic irrigation is also a reason agriculture was abandoned. The goats, oblivious to these worries, have settled themselves into spots with shade. It is a very hot day.

* * *

In front of one of these houses, Veeramma watches us make our way towards her. If she isn’t surprised at this invasion of visitors, it could be because she has had many people drop in at her doorstep asking about her six-month-old girl, Kaaliyamma, who died of malnutrition. The child weighed two kilos at birth, and when she died, she weighed 2.4 kilos, gaining a mere 400 grams in a half-year. Veeramma isn’t very responsive to questions today, and PushpaNC, the health worker at the local anganwadi, becomes her self-appointed spokesperson. She gently chides Veeramma for not taking care of herself while pregnant. Veeramma ate what she wanted, whenever she wanted, and used to perform hard labour, at a brick kiln nearby, until the birth of the child. She did not know how to prepare for and care for a baby. By the side of the house is a shiny 100cc motorcycle, a TVS Sport. It belongs to Veeramma’s husband, Selvan, also a brick-kiln worker. I ask Maari how he was able to afford the bike. Installments, he says.

In the anganwadi, four-year-old Dinesh is asleep on a mat, under a heavy blanket to ward off flies, which are more intolerable, apparently, than the heat. Beside him is a solitary white pawn, although there isn’t a chessboard in sight. Pushpa shows us the kitchen beyond the hall, and further down, the storeroom with supplies. This kitchen isn’t used anymore because the smoke was suffocating the children. Now the food is prepared in a room that was built later, abutting the anganwadi. Earlier, when agriculture was practised, the tribals used to derive nutrition from their crops. She points to the red hand towel on Marudhan’s shoulder and says the grain was of that colour because it was so full of iron. Now, there’s nothing. There’s not much milk, either, despite the gift from the government, a year ago, of 90 cows. About half of them died because there wasn’t enough feed – milk from the rest is sold to a nearby cooperative. These are valuable animals, more valuable than goats. A good cow can fetch up to Rs. 15,000 at the weekly shandy.

Pushpa currently takes care of one nursing mother, three pregnant women and 10 children. These children, she says, are taught to count and told that they should keep quiet and not run about when they grow up and go to the local school, where a single teacher presides over Class I through Class IV. The walls of the anganwadi’s hall are decorated with pictures of birds (which the children cut out and pasted) and an instructive colour wheel. There’s also a schedule of the menu. Mornings: milk without sugar. 12:30 pm: kanji (rice gruel). 3:30 pm: wheat upma with carrots and onions. (Yesterday, it was green gram porridge with jaggery.) From Monday last, eggs have been added to the menu. For someone in charge of a health and nutrition programme, Pushpa’s teeth are stained brown. She says she started chewing tobacco with the tribals to alleviate a toothache, and the habit stuck. Recently, a team of doctors from a nearby medical college conducted a camp in the village. Their focus? The evils of tobacco use.

* * *

PV Radhakrishnan, at the Integrated Tribal Development Programme (ITDP), agrees that the recent spate of malnutrition deaths has to do with the change in the traditional diet of the tribals. Only 12 per cent of them practise agriculture now, he says, and they are mostly from the older generation – the younger lot has opted for quick-paying opportunities brought about by development. When AHADS (Attapadi Hills Area Development Society) was set up in 1997, small jobs with monthly salaries became available – the job of a watchman or a peon – and its civil works schemes too provided regular employment. This caused a shift from agriculture, which is dependent on rains and where the money is seen only at the end of a season, during harvest. As long as the tribals raised crops, they ate healthily, preserving extra produce in holes dug in front of their homes for consumption in the non-farming months. The food was especially wholesome because of the organic farming methods used – the droppings of goats and cattle enriched the earth.

The tall, soft-spoken Radhakrishnan has had a rough initiation into his job. He assumed the post of Project Officer at the ITDP at the end of February. About a month later, on March 4, Matrubhoomi reported four infant deaths. PK Jayalakshmi, the Minister for Welfare of Backward Communities, asked Radhakrishnan for a report, and the next day, he submitted his findings on these four deaths, and added to the report another death he stumbled upon in his inquiries –the case of Veeramma’s child. How so many deaths went unnoticed for so long is a question with no immediate answers, but the reason for the tragedy includes the fact that medical kits (with iron and folic acid tablets) were not given to the grassroots-level health workers for two years, and in the same period, the supply of milk, eggs and fruit to the nutrition programmes for pregnant women and young children was also stopped.

After the media picked up the story, the Kerala government has swung into action with swift measures, as is evident from Pushpa’s comment that the anganwadi has begun serving eggs again. The newspapers have quoted a figure of 33 deaths in the past 16 months. Radhakrishnan says there have been 18 deaths since December 1. He feels that the long-term solution is to convince the tribals to return to agriculture, to their traditional diet, by providing funding to purchase bullocks (for use in ploughing), to buy seeds, and, most importantly, to erect battery-powered fences that will keep away wild beasts without killing them. For now, though, a survey has been conducted (between April 11 and 19) to identify tribals suffering from malnutrition and anaemia. The 536 so identified – of which 346 are adolescent girls, pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five – have had their blood tested. The results are yet to arrive.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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It’s difficult to discuss Soodhu Kavvum – which centres on a botched kidnapping (sorry, “kednaping”) attempt – without spoiling it for the first-time viewer, because it isn’t about what happens so much as how these things happen. It’s about the vibe. It’s about the parking valet who bathes and changes into fresh clothes and applies sacred ash on his forehead and then sits down to have a drink, delivering an impassioned rant about the futility of reading newspapers. It’s about the loser who, like James Stewart in Harvey, introduces people to his invisible companion. It’s about a politician who seeks solitude while tucking into pizza. It’s about a kidnapper who picks up the ransom money coolly, as if he were a delivery boy for a courier company picking up a package. It’s about the funniest spelling mistake ever, where an innocent declaration of lunching out is reduced to an unprintable sexual act. It’s about a name like Nambikkaikannan.

The director’s uncompromising vision – in the current Tamil-cinema scenario, where box-office compromises are everywhere, you could even call this some kind of conscientiousness – extends to the songs and the fights, which don’t cut into the pace of the film but instead enhance the overall mood. The only full-fledged song (the irresistible Kaasu panam) is a dream sequence that takes place in an Indra sabha-like set, where the dancers are in gold ribbons and red sneakers. And a fight scene (featuring the excellent Yog Japee, who plays a “psycho inspector“) is cut as a montage, invigorated by backdrops that keep changing. The quirk, thankfully, isn’t overdone. Had every scene been saturated with colour, we’d have ended up exhausted – there’s just enough bizarreness to keep us wondering if, for instance, the casual shot of oranges at the corner of a frame has anything to do with a character thinking up a plot point about the fruit for a film named Honeymoon.

Soodhu Kavvum doesn’t quite explode the way you expect it to – I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I think the pacing in some stretches is a bit off – but that’s a small price to pay in the face of such riches. This is the kind of film that marries Tamil cinema with cinema from beyond. From the former, we get a line like “Yen da en nanban-a adiche?’ – a clever reworking of a cliché that invites not eye-rolls but laughs. And from the latter we have such surreal moments as the small song that reunites hero and heroine in heaven… in the middle of a torture scene. I am most curious to see how Soodhu Kavvum will be received – the noir-comedy isn’t a genre we dabble in all that often – but of at least one thing there is little doubt. These brave little films are here to stay. Vijay Sethupathi, the poster boy of this cinema, was welcomed in his first scene with cheers and claps usually reserved for mass heroes making their entry. It’s the sweetest sound I’ve heard in years.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.