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191 Responses to “The Attacks of 26/11, I, Me aur Main, Kai Po Che (ongoing), the rest of the box office”
I was trying to post in the previous thread, but its been closed:
Kinda late to this Godhra discussion, but my 2 cents worth of experiences: I have been to Godhra many times, either by train or driving through from Baroda to Dahod and onwards to Ratlam. I have relatives in all these towns. One thing that will strike anyone visiting Godhra is the distinct division of this town into Muslim and Hindu/Sindhi areas. The division is not so pronounced in other towns/cities of Gujarat. Godhra has had a long history of communal skirmishes/riots/murders, people throughout the 30-40 yrs prior to 2002 tended to be very sensitive to any communal issues. We used to be advised to keep away from sensitive areas. Communal flare-ups in Gujurat were very common, and if it happened at Godhra, it would be carried forward to Baroda, Ahmedabad, etc.
Coming to the riots, on the morning of this incident, when the train stopped at the junction of Dahod, which arrives about 50 mins prior to Godhra (for any Western Railway train going from MP to Gujarat), there were several oil cannisters being loaded by strangers, unknown to the regular folk in town. Dahod is a small town of 100k, almost everyone knows traders who load/unload goods from trains, and this loading of several oil cannisters was deemed most unusual. This was told to me by relatives/friends who cite eye witness accounts. People out there speculate that this was the source of oil used to burn the carriage at the next stop. Another thing to note, Godhra station is just besides a Muslim dominated area. It was there that the train was forcibly stopped by pulling the emergency chain. The entire exercise was done to exact some sort of harm on the Kar-sevaks in those carriages. It was fool-hardy at best, cause whoever the mastermind was, he did not foresee the sharp retribution to befall the entire Muslim community of Gujarat.
The secular press did its best to downplay the raison d’etre of the riots, specifically by pooh-poohing all evidence wrt the train fire. They have been trying hard to this day to shift the blame to ‘murky’ evidence. The ground reality out there is known to one and all, and this is what causes much chagrin to the secular press.
This still does not justify the merciless killing of Muslims that occured in the days that followed. Blood of innocents cannot be traded away. Inspite of the progress which Gujarat has witnessed, there is no doubt that 2002 will remain a permanent blot on its history. The only positive that has come out of the past 10 yrs is that many Muslims whose lives were destroyed, have found a way back to prosperity. I should know, cause the companies I work with hire many educated Muslims, and they are all the happier to work in a new productive environment, building back from destruction, brick-by-brick. Is it it any surprise then that the BJP recently won municipal elections by a landslide, in a muslim dominated constituency which has voted Congress forever?
Lol at your biting sarcasm. But no, I have no Pandit relatives from the valley. Or any Sikhs in Delhi, or any other victims/perpetrators of riots in other parts of India. I am a Sindhi born in Gujrat, and do know at lot more about this pogrom, more than what the mass secular media is willing to let you know.
Thanks for your note,Kaviji. And, I agree with you. The ‘educated’ Muslim or the one who wants to live peacefully has come to terms with post-Godhra riots and conditions. Modi’s programme is not of torture or continued victimisation of Muslims. Godhra happened and now the Muslims who want to live peacefully and prosper have no problems or restrictions.
If I had to stare a relative of an innocent Muslim killed in post-Godhra and say I was ok with it, I definitely would not be able to do so as it WAS morally wrong. If someone asks me if the post-Godhra handling has improved the situation, I would say – Yes without hesitation.
The argument that it will cause Muslims to harbour resentment doesnt wash as there are some who dont need a reason to fight with Hindus and create mischief and there are those who just want to co-exist peacefully and move beyond. Not to retaliate against Muslim violence/vandalism/mischiefs for the fear that they weill feel bad is a bullshit argument.
yes but as I said yesterday the post-Sena and then post-Dawood (bombings) situation in Bombay is pretty good too. What does this mean? Is this the sort of Wild West logic we’re looking for?
Also and again to repeat the point from yesterday the people who commit the acts are not the same as the ones who are then killed. Does it really stop any committed terrorist for instance if people from his or her community are killed? Going by your logic it would be perfectly understandable if Muslims were massacred in NY after 9/11. Because they would have been taught a lesson. Let’s say a mob shows up at your house back home one day and says it’s extracting revenge for what happened post-Godhra? would this be ok? You had nothing to do with any of it! Isn’t this precisely the Firaaq logic from the other side which many rightly found upsetting (including myself)? But one cannot then start using it from the other side!
The problem is precisely painting entire communities in certain ways. I will offer a radical formulation — the ‘Muslim’ does not exist. the ‘Hindu’ does not exist. So on and so forth. All these labels are already abstractions that in many situations are also politically dangerous. For instance if Muslims start killing certain lower castes as part of the ‘Hindu’ label they would be grossly in error or at least unaware that caste violence in North India (not only here) has a history infinitely more violent than the Hindu-Muslim problem and across a much longer span of time. The ‘Hindu’ label is meaningless for those lower caste groups. This is so in many different situations. The most brutal civil wars in Europe were fought within christianity. Compared to this the Crusades were a birthday party (literally!). Which is not to say that these labels don’t have some loose value in terms of indexing certain kinds of belonging to a group. But one cannot take this too far. Because a very different kind of indexing would create huge differences within the very same group. So ‘Hindu’ means a certain set of things. On the other hand the caste debate within ‘Hindu’ tears apart this label. In a somewhat lesser sense a ‘North-South’ divide might do the same. So on and so forth.
On a related note I’ll repeat an older point. You often here a certain formulation or at least a logic that’s like it where someone says ‘hey I’m not anti-Muslim, I actually have Muslim friends’ or ‘I’m not anti-Hindu, many Hindus are nice people’. The problem is that this structure of the exception proves the bias. It doesn’t argue against it. Because it highlights how can only think of the ‘other’ in those abstract terms to which the particular (the friend or whatever) becomes an exception. So the friend is a ‘nice Muslim’ or ‘nice Hindu’ precisely because he or she does not behave in the ways one otherwise expects from ‘Muslims’ or ‘Hindus’.
By the way there’s an Obama twist on this. He would frustrate a lot of the racially-inclined opposition less if he just belonged to the obvious stereotypes in these matters. Say the Chris Rock kind of black guy or maybe a sports icon. By being black but not so in ways where he can be absorbed into American registers he disturbs people even more!
“Going by your logic it would be perfectly understandable if Muslims were massacred in NY after 9/11. ”
I agree Modi did (overlooked or colluded with perpetrators) is not correct especially when you are constitutionally required to guard for all the people of your State.
But I do have issues with suggestion that fire in train happened in isolation or there was no external involvement. It is probabilistically impossible that a train would stop near Muslim dominated area ferrying kar sevaks and it caught fire and half of the people got burned in bogey by kerosene stove. There was something more, we can conjecture and give accounts but there was something fishy.
General rant:
Minorities in any part of earth try to preserve their identity (like teaching my daughter to learn Hindi in US English). But to preserve my identity I shouldn’t stop her from learning other things like English or anything which is done by majority of people. I think it is important when you feel minority in any situation, it is advisable to follow majority and at same time try preserving your minority identity. In ideal world you should be left to do whatever way you want to live. But real world people judge others and some of them act also.
ps – I always say that we Indians are the most racist (of all the people I know). We distinguish on everything, Caste, region, skin color…I might not agree with many things in US but at least in coastal US I don’t see any kind of discrimination, just because someone is from other country. May be people from other countries don’t demand the share of pie like Hispanics or Afro Americans. May be by the same reason Muslims generate more reactions in Majority Hindu State than say a Sikh or Christian!
ps1 – There are more things to say but I am not good at writing.
Munna, I’m not taking an absolute position on the Godhra matter one way or the other even if all the scholarly literature on this leads me to believe the event is minimally murky but on the other hand it is not as if political conspiracies or engineered pogroms have never happened in history. You might well be right on Godhra (which still does not argue against an engineered pogrom) but this has not been established beyond a reasonable doubt, certainly by any impartial observers who follow these sorts of events around the globe for a living. for instance if a bomb explodes in a Muslim neighborhood isn’t it sometimes the case that the local Muslim leader is himself responsible for such an event to then whip up his followers?
On your last paragraph I’d agree with the African-American exception. It’s way better than it used to be, there’s no comparison but it’s still not a level-playing field in any sense.
Agree on the assimilation bit, at least as a pragmatic matter, but the logic runs both ways. So blacks for example cannot simply assimilate if whites don’t wish to return the favor.
By the way your writing is perfectly fine. You furthermore have the gift of concision which I should learn about one day!
Will add this as a more general matter about Godhra. It’s become one of those defining events for both communities. So no matter what other narrative one ‘compromises’ on one cannot on this one.
One of the problems in these discussions always is that people aren’t willing to mourn the loss of human life and/or empathize with human misery in any absolute sense. It’s always part of an ‘economic’ debate where a negotiation comes about and if the misery of ‘a’ is accepted then the misery of ‘b’ is in turn considered by the other side. And so on. I remember some 9/11 debates on this blog and others along the same lines. One can criticize American imperialism and justly talk about all the politics on all sides that has contributed to a certain kind of violence. But all of this shouldn’t limit one’s sympathy for the victims of 9/11. It is absolutely true that even in a global sense every human life is not worth the same. 3000 Americans are for instance worth more than say 500,000 Rwandans. Vulgar as this sounds it is unfortunately true. But recognizing this structure does not mean that one should start subscribing to it from the other side. Any life lost is so in a singular sense. The same holds for any kind of violent atrocity that a human undergoes.
In the debate yesterday this was in some ways the most essential point I was trying to make. That one cannot start trading victims. Whatever version of events one chooses to believe one ought to be able to accept at least this. I’m not talking about what happens as matter of course in politics where one riot leads to another or one event triggers another. I’m just talking about the morality of the debate. And even this has a practical value to it. One of the ‘pragmatic’ reasons one shouldn’t trade victims this way is because there are different points at which a history of tragedy can be made to begin. There is nothing obvious about choosing one point as opposed to another. So for instance one could say that Godhra triggered what followed and without this there would be no issue. Even accepting this more ‘traditional’ version of the event one might accept that logic except that it’s not the complete story. Because without a larger and much longer cycle of communal violence and suspicion Godhra itself wouldn’t mean as much. So one cannot pretend that history began yesterday. There are of course precipitating events but without the history these events would have far less important consequences.
And here a related problem is the easy ways in which people believe or are made to believe that riots just happen spontaneously or fluidly flow out of precipitating events and nothing can be done and so. All of this is a structure that allows everyone concerned to evade responsibility. Because it is always an abstract, uncontrollable mob that does these things. But this is the case actually only a minority of the time in the history of riots in any country. For the most part there are political forces that manage the economy of how and when these riots take place. Even in India when the machinery of the state govt is really determined to control violence there are never very major events along these lines. But what happens is that much as “war is politics by other means” riots (or even pogroms) too follow the same logic. So the ‘spontaneity’ of riots is quite often a myth.
Finally in the context of the entire discussion yesterday this is where Hey Ram within a commercial format offered such a provocative way or thinking about these things. So you have a protagonist who was let’s say a ‘Nehruvian’ of sorts or believed in the AAA view of the world. Then he goes through a very traumatic crisis and becomes a monomaniac of sorts. How does this happen? He loses his wife in a brutal riot and then he starts blaming an entire community for this. Which is at one level completely natural and a normal human reaction. But the film argues against this. Because what happens to Kamal’s character is nonetheless particular. No matter how many people are involved in a riot it is still not everyone or even a majority. But he resorts to an abstraction once this happens and blames precisely ‘everyone’. The Gandhi assassination moment is very important later on not for the usual polemical reasons (‘right-wingers killed Gandhi..’) but for indexing how any such extremist political ideology is minimally cannibalistic on itself. This is what happens historically. The quest for purity starts imagining more and more people who even when they belong to the same grouping are considered impure. This moment is then necessary as bridge between the film’s bookends. At the end a similar crisis happens, this time the protagonist is saved by his old Muslim friend. But this too is a very particular incident. It is one man, one friend or one family that protects him. The rest of the mob, Muslim, is still after him and in fact that self-cannibalizing moment mentioned earlier is mirrored here when SRK’s character is fatally attacked. So there are larger rules of the game. All abstractions fail. The reason this film is very skilfully structured is because it gives one over completely to this dangerous logic by way of Kamal’s character and then starts deconstructing it from the inside. It might well be ‘human’ to behave in certain ways but it is certainly not the only human possibility in this or any other situation. And part of arguing for a greater, less-cramped notion of humanism is precisely not succumbing to these easy definitions we inherit as a cultural archive.
Getting back to the old debate the classic right-wing grievance (here I won’t question the narrative in other ways..) about how Muslim conquerors destroyed cultural monuments and desecrated archives and so on. A lot of this is true. Again I won’t argue about the ‘a-historical’ standards used (for instance I could call everyone who kept a slave in 19th century America a disgusting human being but of course this was an institutional problem and many ‘nice people’ who treated their slaves very well were part of it.. and so Muslim conquerors did a lot of this stuff as did many other conquerors even down to our present day) but the point once again is: where does this history begin? Or end? If you destroy a mosque in the present as part of this larger cycle of historical vengeance what’s to stop the other side returning four centuries later in very different circumstances and doing the very same?! And why is it only about Muslims and Hindus? Why not Hindus and Buddhists? The latter faced at least as much trouble from orthodox Hinduism and was eventually chased out of India (this the land of its birth!). What about ‘Dravidian’ grievances about how ‘Aryans’ from the North destroyed a lot of their culture? So on and so forth. Any framing becomes politically convenient. Tamilians in Sri Lanka have been brutally suppressed for the longest time. This is not to condone LTTE violence but their grievances with the Sinhalese majority predate the formation of the LTTE. In some future if these Tamilians have more power over the Sinhalese the answer wouldn’t be to start massacring the latter or whatever. It would be historically ‘understandable’ inasmuch as these things happen in a lot of places but it would still not be right. And the proper response then wouldn’t be too argue ‘hey they did it first’. Because one then subscribes to the same sort of violence. One cannot say ‘I am not a monster except if monstrous things are done to me’! In at least the land of the Mahatma we should be able to follow this logic… It is a brutal historical irony not to say a deeply tragic development that in present-day Gujarat Modi is more of a hero for more people than Bapu…
Politics doesn’t appear out of a vacuum.. we make it in our image..
I see where you are coming from Satyam.
The problem is there has to be a solution. The situation cannot be allowed to fester. There might be (MIGHT) be historical argument for the continued resentment the Muslims harbor but they have to learn to move beyond it. There is no place in today’s India where the average Hndu doesnt care unless provoked. Most Hindus are happy to co-exist and leave in peace. The loss of lives has to be mourned but the status quo was unacceptable. A lot of people were responsible for the situation but the least responsible party was the ‘regular’ Hindu who doesnt want any of this shit. History, politicians, Muslim mindset all played a role. I have no qualms about absolving the ‘regular’ Hindu of blame here as I have been one and lived with those. However imperfect the Modi solution might be, it has atleast worked so far. Nothing else has made a difference.
One can compare the post-Gdhra to Nazi progroms but would be dishonest as the context is different. There IS no continued victimisation of Muslims. If Modi is popular, there isa reason.
Most people are not cruel and vindictive. They just want to live peacefully and prosper. If someone continually gets in the way,they want a solution. In the process, some who were presumed innocent but were guilty by association and indifference suffered.Ifone has a constructive alternative solution to the situation, feel free to criticise Modi. But, the status quo WAS NOT accpetable. At some point, enough is enough.
Rajen, again I would accept a lot of what you’re saying but I think there are some very questionable ‘phantom’ assumptions here. So you have on one side the ‘regular Hindu’ who just wants to lead a normal life and not be subjected to violence and live a life of peace and so forth. This sounds suspiciously like the claims that are made about contemporary Americans! Now in a literal sense this if course true. Most regular Hindus are exactly as you describe them much as most regular Americans are also the same. But for some mysterious reasons the minorities in India don’t have such a tame view of the majority nor does the non-American world have a similarly benign view of Americans. Why?
The other problem is most people in all communities are just like the regular Hindu or the regular American. The average Muslim in India is not about secret Jehadist plots of Kashmiri separatism or what have you. The ‘Muslim’ who is the problem for a larger national malaise is an old fantasy that finds different formulations in different political spaces. The ‘Jew’ was such a fantasy in other contexts. In each case this label is made to bear the weight of a number of social, political or economic ills. And beyond a point it becomes ‘obvious’ in its force even though very few people who have this complaint have any direct experience of such violence at the hands of this other. I was once in a debate on NG with someone on this very topic. Forget who it was. At one point he said that Muslim areas were terrible and I didn’t know what went on in them and so on. A bit later when challenged on this he said these areas were so miserable that even the police didn’t go into them. So somehow this person was offering direct testimony for something that apparently even the police had not witnessed. This is the power of myth. There are lots of problems in black neighborhoods in America. The inner cities are not places we venture into. The communities are challenged in all sorts of ways. But there is no great problem in the US that is so ‘because’ of this minority. The trick in a fascist discourse is to precisely perform this switch and convince people that this is so. So ‘the Jew’ becomes a vessel into which a great deal is thrown in. Again in the lower caste view of the world the upper class Hindu is what the Muslim is for the latter. But here there are historical facts. These groups have been dominated. Similarly it’s one thing to argue that when Muslims ruled India a minority was in charge and quite another to argue that in a democratic state somehow 11% of the population is calling the shots! I too have heard very many claims similar to yours but these all operate in the space of fantasy and then when an event happens it is seen as confirming this larger fantasy. Not because anyone believes these things cynically. It’s just a narrative that takes hold. Muslims are in many cases in India a more depressed economic community than even many lower castes. Their visibility in the film industry or certain other areas doesn’t prove anything. There are other reasons for this. But by and large the national metrics on this group are abysmal. They are themselves to blame for this in some respects. But the point is that it is simply not plausible (and certainly not supported by any objective facts) that this minority is somehow dominating the majority anywhere. It is a right-wing fantasy construction that has unfortunately had great success even outside right-wing circles. There are a million similar examples of the same just in recent history. Obviously no one is doing to the Muslims what the Nazis did to the Jews. There’s no comparison. But the terms of the debate are eerily similar. Discrimination and violence are not terrible only when they rise to Nazi levels. The US has a black president, that doesn’t mean institutional and literal racism against blacks does not exist.
so again there was ‘no’ problem with the status quo. Before Godhra happened were there marauding Muslim gangs in Amdavad or wherever terrorizing Hindus everywhere?!
That’s all fine Satyam but here is a question- why is it that more than 90% of terrorist attacks are being carried out by Muslims? Isn’t there an institutional problem somewhere? But no one wants to answer this
There absolutely is a problem within Islam. there absolutely are political varieties of Islam that are absolutely repellent. But this isn’t close to being everyone. Notice how when the recent Mideast ‘revolutions’ happened the one thing that wasn’t visible was ‘Islamism’. weren’t we told for years that these regions were hotbeds of religious extremism with the entire population sympathetic and what not. what happened? In Egypt the Muslim brotherhood has taken advantage of a chaotic situation as they had the most institutional advantages but they hardly did great in the election. It is always easy to for a minority to take control of the discourse. Unlike many I don’t believe that there’s no problem within contemporary Islam. There absolutely is. from the other side the view once was (and often still is) that 100% of the colonizers are Christians! In the US you have people who make the argument that most crime concerns blacks. Now the stats on this are a bit dubious but even accepting them once again you have to cross-tab things. Assuming a certain economic set of circumstances, assuming a certain history, assuming continued institutional racism in the present certain things become more possible. if you and I were living in those neighborhood with those histories we might well be criminals too! It doesn’t take religious extremism to make a suicide bomber as the Palestinians proved long ago and as the LTTE did even more profoundly. People can use this means for all sorts of reasons much as in a war the same weapons can be used by any side. Nor is religious extremism in our own age limited to Islam (as many scholars and journalists have documented) though it often finds it’s most violent manifestation in the latter. But on that note in most of these studies the Hindutva brigade in India is taken as one of the primary examples of religious extremism and violence related to the same. Of course no one likes hearing this much as Muslims refuse to accept that there’s any problem within contemporary Islam. The stats at any rate can be very misleading. In most revolutions you really just have a minority that gains control and then acquires absolute power. In some of the more disreputable claims people like to state that most German were sympathetic to Nazis. Well Hitler never got more than 32% of the vote! So yes 90% of the terrorists might be Muslims but that 90% on the Muslim side might be drawn from a 5% slice. Which is still a problem but there’s a universe of difference between those two stats. Again note no matter how much I have criticized Modi I have never come even close to suggesting that somehow ordinary Gujaratis are responsible or that the majority feel the same way and so on. The whole problem lies in such generalizations.
and here’s a good example of how pernicious these stereotypes can become over time. In any major city in the US if you’re white (or Asian or Hispanic!) and walking down a relatively quiet street and if you see a black man approaching from the other direction your automatic reflexive reaction is one of anxiety if not fear. Then the guy passes you by and you tell yourself ‘phew he’s not one of those’! So the black man is minimally defined as a criminal.
Another example — Asians including those from the Indian subcontinent are among the most racist people on the planet (though they only notice racism when it’s directed at them by way of whites). In many conversation they congratulate themselves on becoming successful after migrating to another country and seeing their kids do very well while on the other hand there are those ‘lazy’ blacks who refuse to work hard in the same way or assume any kind of responsibility. These sounds rational as far as it goes. But there’s a great slippage here. Because the Asians in this case come from drastically different socio-economic circumstances than most blacks. They already come with certain strengths. The situations are just not analogous. But if one essentializes things and talks only in terms of labels like ‘Indians’, ‘Japanese’, ‘Blacks’ one accepts the former view.
Excellent points Satyam! Personally, I belonged to this “classic right-wing grievance school of thought” for a very long time. The feelings were hardened while growing up, whenever I heard of the misery that befell my own ancestors when they were forced to leave their homeland and cross over the border. But, as you rightly said, events do not just precipitate out of nowhere, there is a deeper history behind it all. If one rationally analyzes the past 1000 yrs of sub-continental history, a conclusion can be made that there really was no ‘Hindu’ vs ‘Muslim’ in all those wars/pillaging of the past 1000 yrs. A conqueror could not have set foot past the Khyber, if there really was a unified Hindu nation. The people across the Indus were already significantly divided into castes and languages, rendering them incapable of putting up a unified fight. The invaders that came took advantage of this, and in fact played one side vs another in conquering the land bit-by-bit. And there was no single set of conquerors either. We had Turks, Mongols, Arabs, Persians, Afghans, etc. all coming in at diff intervals, none of them aligned to each other. In fact, the ones that came would quickly be assimilated into an ‘Indian culture’, so much that they would fight together with the locals agains the next set of invaders. The Mughals could not establish power without the help of the Rajputs. Even then, they could hardly conquer anywhere beyond the Deccan, because there were other alliances down south between Muslims and Dravidians that trumped the alliances from the North. There never was a ‘Hindu’ vs ‘Muslim’ fight for 1000 yrs. So therefore, this entire ‘Hindu right-wing grievance’ is misplaced. First of all, the Hindu right needs to introspect, and ask themselves, why were they so divided 1000 yrs ago. Have they done anything to fix/eradicate the caste malaise that existed back then? If not, how can they just force 1 billion people to subscribe to their theories?
How much ever we may revere Gandhi, he too made mistakes. If he had only allowed Ambedkar’s proposal to organize Dalits politically, and be given special Dalit-only seats in the constituent assemblies, it would have created a third political force to counter-balance the Hindu vs Muslim frictions. Jinnah would have been assured that there would be no post-independence Hindu monopolization of power. What Gandhi stopped in 1930, eventually happened post-Mandal in 1990. The myriad political formations today exhibit the real balance of power that a true democracy has created. However, this balance of power has not been extended to the Muslims of India. Pakistan was created for Muslims, but they actually stopped Muslim migration from India in the 1950s itself! As a result, Muslims of India have been deprived of real political representation, being used only as votebanks by self-serving non-Muslim political parties. They live today in small geographical pockets in a state of permanent siege, worrying about threats from a Hindu majority (which really is not a majority), and unable to grab opportunities to better their own lives. Had there been no parition, there indeed would have been real political representation for all muslims, and a real balance of power between every group and sub-group of caste/religion in the sub-continent. Due to miscalculations and errors of our founding fathers, we exist in a permanent conflict-zone, with issues that can never be resolved.
If we sympathize with Hindus who lost their homes and hearths in 1947, I believe we should equally sympathize with the Muslims who went to the other side and got tagged as Mohajirs. We should sympathize with the Ghanchi Muslims living in pockets such as Godhra, forever in a siege mentality, that causes them to take foolish steps such as what happened in 2002.
Some great points here Nykavi, specially in the first paragraph. Because this is the other problem of reading things ‘a-historically’. To be Muslim in 16th century India, specially if one is a kind or prince and if one has arrived from Central Asia, is not at all the same as being Muslim in say Bombay in 2013. The larger belief system is the same but the contexts are radically different. Being Muslim in an earlier age did not mean the very same thing that it does today. Or even today being Muslim in Turkey or Bosnia is very different from being Muslim in Indonesia. everything that a Muslim conqueror did wasn’t necessarily done in the name of religion. And even when it was a lot of times it was a cynical decision to use religion as a political doctrine. But as you rightly point there would have been no Muslim rule in India without very many intricate alliances between Muslims and Hindus (or those that were nominally so in each case). Much as in South India when the British arrived you often had Muslim princes helping the British to defeat each other. So every act that a Muslim or Hindu rules takes part in is not automatically a ‘religious’ one. in fact these rulers were most successfully precisely when they used religion as a political or tactical weapon. The Akbar compact as it turns is a much smarter one than the Aurangzeb one! In most Mughal courts there were first of all Rajputs who had pride of place among ‘Hindu’ dynasties, then among Muslims there was a Persian contingent which was influential but not entirely trusted because of course Persia was a rival power, there were ‘original’ Central Asians, then there were local Muslim rulers who were actually fairly low down on the scale in most cases. The Rajputs one could say only with a little bit of exaggeration were among the most influential players in every Mughal era at least for the longest time. These alliances crosses ‘party lines’ all the time. Because maintaining dynastic or ‘tribal’ control (if you will) was more important than anything else. Similarly in Europe even at the height of the Crusades you often had one Christian ruler siding with a Muslim one against another Christian. Sometimes because they belonged to different sects but sometimes it was just about dynasty. it is in fact a fairly modern understanding and re-definition of religion that converts it into the equivalent of national identity. These boundaries were often much more fluid in an older age. They are still so today in many instances but less recognized as such in the national hegemonic narrative. And the same holds for ethnicity and language and so on. People who live in border regions of two states, speak two languages, they in a sense belong either to both states or to neither one but politics forces them to accept one identity more fully.
Satyam,
I will give you an example and there are hundreds of cases like this.
I have an associate I work with closely. When he was in college, he used to share a hostel room with a Muslim. At one time there were usual Hindu-Muslim riots and a crowd came to the hostel looking for his friend. He hid him under the bed and told the crowd he was not there. and, after giving him a hard time,the crowd eventually left.
Fast forward 20 years. The same Muslim roommate now has turned fundamentalist. On a recent visit to India, he tried to meet him and the erstwhile Muslim room mate would not take his calls or return them!
I am not in favor of denouncing an entire community or a religion. But, the progressive Muslims HAVE to play a part.
They may argue – why is it their responsibility? It is not a question of responsibility but one of survival. The progressive and innocent Muslims will be carried away by the tide with the fundametalists eventually. One cannot bury ones head in sand and deny that there is a problem with a section of Muslim community. And, it is a vocal group and is often successful in corrupting a few of the rest. History cannot be used to justify their behaviour.Nor can it be used as an excuse.
Indians have moved past their hatred of the English. Where the grouse is more legitimate and wounds more fresh.
Nykavi, I do agree with many of your points but frankly the idea that Muslims live under constant fear in India and that they are not being properly represented is a bizarre statements. Muslims in India enjoy as much liberties as Hindus if not more. I very clearly remember that during 2000 when the match-fixing controversy happened and Azhar was accused he made a ridiculous statement that he is being selectively targetted because he belongs to a minority community. I lost a lot of respect for him then though he still remains my favourite sportsperson
yes but that kind of liberal white-washing which I’ve criticized in the past is really the other side of the ‘bias’ coin. In other words it’s only because there is institutional bias and so on that there is liberal overreaction on the other side. The same happens in the US in a very different context.
By the way can’t stand it when folks like Azhar (or SRK more recently) play this card very cynically and poison the discourse even more. Because it plays to the worst kind of minority paranoia that ‘hey even SRK can’t get a fair shake in India’. Meanwhile it also offends the majority who can’t believe SRK given his singular status is playing to these elements. These guys are really the worst offenders.
But notice how even the ‘progressive Muslim’ (mostly engineers and doctors) are also turning fundamentalist (and as we know at times have been found to be involved in the terror attacks). Raj Kumar Gupta’s Aamir, for all its political problems, dealt with the above issue very issue
Aside, It’s important to keep in mind that BJP or Right is not only about insane folks like Thackeray and Modi. For every Modi there is/was an Atal, Sushma Swaraj and Pramod Mahajan. I belong to the right but I have zero tolerance for Modi and Sena. I believe that Atal was always a follower of the secular and all-inclusive Nehruvian model.
Also on somewhat related note I would recommend everyone to see this. Looks really good
That’s quite right. In the US there was that Pakistani female professor at MIT or some place who was arrested for being involved in a plot. She’s currently serving a life sentence somewhere. But see the thing is I don’t find define many of these people as crazy. Doing so lets them off the book and plus one underestimates the dangerousness of the ideology. Or to put it differently and rely on a somewhat theoretical register they might be ‘rational’ actors but not ‘reasonable’ ones. if I say I’m stocking up on food because aliens are going to attack the earth tomorrow my actions are rational inasmuch as they follow from that initial premise but unreasonable to the degree that the initial premise is problematic (to say the least!). And so a number of discourses can seem rational as long as the premises are accepted.
In any case my point there isn’t that there isn’t a problem with these Islamist discourses. Actually in many other contexts my commentary on all of this is considered by many to be absolutely hostile to Islam! That isn’t true much as in this current debate I am by no means a supporter of Islam. Nor am I engaging in some very idealistic argument which even if true isn’t workable. I am not offering a prescription in any sense, just analyzing things. And again I actually found Firaaq rather offensive as a film, wrote a piece on it, this despite the fact that it was on the very subject we’ve been talking about these past two days. For a lot of liberal opinion Nandita Das was on the money. I happened to disagree violently. My proposition is actually a fairly modest one — that people often behave miserably in specific circumstances because of political ideology and one must question the latter and certainly the former as individuals but that questioning the community ‘as such’ misses the mark. But related to this when there’s a controversial event one shouldn’t automatically look at it from the prism of one’s identity. This is hard of course. we all have our biases. But looking at Godhra from say the ‘Hindu perspective’ versus the ‘Muslim one’ is to already miss the point. One will have done no more than confirm the hegemonic framing in these matters. It is true that people from Gujarat often feel defensive after Godhra and everything that followed, as if they have to answer for this the way Germans have to forever answer for the Nazi past. In this case before liberal opinion in the media or even nationally in certain other ways. But that isn’t my position.
on a related note two older comments from a few months ago (this was in response to the Owaisi video and the question someone raised was whether Muslims are expected to denounce this sort of thing every time):
[perhaps not every time but certainly there should be prominent voices denouncing it ‘some’ of the time. But we don’t see this very often. This also happens worldwide in certain ways where the excesses of various nations are highlighted and criticized as they should be but when it then comes to turning the mirror towards oneself, as it were, there is silence. And while I understand some of the politics here, one doesn’t want to play into the hands of the other, the fact is that nothing excuses silence when it comes to certain issues.]
[You’re correct on many counts Ami but the problem is there is an asymmetry in this sense in more ways than one. The Hindutva brigade is often criticized in the media by the ‘secular left’. Quite appropriately in my opinion. But no such attention is given to Muslim extremist rhetoric. Because they are as usual afraid that by doing so they will tar all Muslims and hence betray their liberalism. Now I prefer a weak liberalism to the alternative but it is often susceptible to this kind of blackmail which both extremes (the Hindu right and Muslim right) collude in. In other words both sides are very happy with these easy definitions of the majority and the minority because it serves their purposes. The great move in Nihalani’s Dev was opposing the Hindutva-type (Om Puri) to the normative Hindu (Bachchan). Note how the latter is shown doing puja and so on while the latter is simply committed to a political program. It is always the classic move on the right to really be about politics but do so in the guise of tradition and family values. And when there isn’t a vibrant liberal discourse defending both normative Hindus and normative Muslims you have extremes hegemonizing the discourse at both ends. So the Hindutva message is simple — the left doesn’t want any kind of Hindu faith in India and in addition they’re about appeasing Muslims. From the Muslim Imams and so forth the symmetric counter-message is — the country is really for Hindus, look at Hindutva, the secular left is just a scam trying to cover this deceit. Not surprisingly BJP leaders also throw grand Iftar parties and the Imams happily attend. They have the same agenda!
The secular/liberal left should call out both sides and not just establish credibility for itself but also provide a voice for ‘silent’ normative majorities on both sides who are otherwise either pushed into the arms of the extremes for lack of representation and continue with their mode of enforced silence. One should not look at all kinds of faith with suspicion but the problem is that a certain brand of liberalism (not only in India, and there are certain philosophical reasons for this…) celebrates all kinds of faith but only as ‘cultural values’. If it’s about authentic faith then everyone has a problem. It’s like someone showing bad manners at a social gathering. Politeness requires that we follows our practices but without really ‘taking them too seriously’ as Zizek would say. The space then for Bachchan’s character in Dev is a rather shrunken one. And so to get back to the initial point one shouldn’t at all worry about violently criticizing such extremist rhetoric. One should take the risk because such a risk minimally opens up a better political space. The blurring of the boundaries in the existing arrangement doesn’t upset the reigning extremism (on both sides) at all!]
and here I should add that contra what I and Rocky were joking about yesterday Rajen is really on the Bachchan (Dev) side of the equation. However sometimes both extremist and liberal opinion conspire to make this very space claustrophobic and one is then unable to express certain questions except in a much sharper formulation.
or differently still the liberal media has often conflated criticism of Modi and the violence surrounding Godhra with Gujarati stereotypes and so on. It is then understandable if one finds oneself to be somewhat defensive on this issue. This is why the Nandita Das film was lapped up. In no other context would this kind of political film get such acceptance across the board in at least liberal opinion.
There is a larger global point to be made here. We live in an age where religion is supposed to be merely about cultural values in many cross-sections of society all over the world. It’s not ‘cool’ to take it more seriously than this. So if you really insist on believing in it more you are likely to be labeled an extremist. So again the Dev analogy. Bachchan is normal or normative Hindu. He’s not an agnostic about things. He’s a comforting old-fashioned type in this regard. But the discourse on both sides conflates the two. For the liberal believing serious is some kind of extremism to begin with and for the Om Puri (Dev) type what matters is really the political activism and so on (he’s never shown praying in the film). Both sides then tell the Bachchan kind of Hindu – you’re really one of us so stop vacillating. And there’s no adequate political representation for this kind of Hindu. what you get is Bollywood variety (say Karan Johar) where religion is reduced to a private fetish! And the same is true in most other countries of the world. Not as much so in the Islamic world where religion is still taken a lot more seriously and where this same sort of skeptical discourse often has less force.
I think that the solution is exactly what we’ve been doing here for the last two days! I know this sounds crazy but one cannot only think in revolutionary terms and seismic shifts. One has to start somewhere. Now if either one of us or both were in politics or let’s say we were editors of newspapers we could do other things to keep a more responsible conversation alive. We cannot do that of course but I think this ain’t nothing! But there is no easy solution or certainly no obvious one. It would help greatly if there were more serious commentary at least to begin with on the liberal side of the equation (Outlook or whatever). But even this isn’t easy because politics constantly tries to co-opt such opinion. Still one shouldn’t only think in terms of the numbers. It’s the cliched ripples example. You thrown a stone in the water, a ripple is created and it keeps extending. Maybe 10 people have been following our debate these last two days, maybe a 100. Whatever the number it’s better than zero. Whatever side people fall on they will have witnessed a certain airing of the issues. A candid discussion among friends where no one reading should have been offended.
Of course this can’t solve every problem. The RNBDJ criminals are still around..
Satyam, aapko pata hai ki aapke likhne ki gati meri sochne ki gati se bhi zyaada hai!
Great points. Especially loved your line that each tragedy is singular. A somewhat related film on this was De Palma’s very fine work Redacted- probably the most disturbing anti-war film I have seen and really abt ‘singularity’ of atrocity.
I also have zero tolerance for those North Indian Hindus who howl and cry (rightly so)when they are mistreated by Sena in Maharashtra but otherwise support these same folks when they get down to to their dirty communal activities.
And someone please define me the meaning of the Marathi Manoos! I am from Lucknow but have been studying in Maharashtra for the past 4 years. What I end up having a permanent residence here. Would I then not be entitled for the Marathi Manoos tag! How is a Bohra from Bombay any less Maharashtrian than say a Gaekwad.
I’ve personally always felt that Bombay should have had a Delhi-like status. It was a rather special example. Gujaratis for instance had in many ways as much right to the city. They have been great contributors in a historic sense. But of course these things always become a cold numbers game. Defining it as a Maharashtrian city was always problematic but of course over time this has been made a reality at certain levels. Specially the very ugly politics that the Sena unleashed and everything it led to was a great tragedy for this city.
“There is a larger global point to be made here. We live in an age where religion is supposed to be merely about cultural values in many cross-sections of society all over the world. It’s not ‘cool’ to take it more seriously than this.”-
Superb point here. I would also add that Hinduism was never a religion (atleast in the Catholic sense of the word) in the true sense but ‘a way of life’. Infact Hinduism allowed a ‘Hindu’ to be an atheist and yet be allowed to keep the title of being a Hindu.
Saurabh, I did not mean to say that Muslims live in fear. But certainly, they lack a confidence in the freedom which they enjoy in India. How else can we explain the invoking of “Islam Khatrey mein hai” at every perceived slight incident.
Ironically, Pakistan is the one place where Islam is truely in Khatra. They have adopted a Wahabist-exclusive policy, and relegated every other Muslim sect to second class citizenship. Indian Shias must be thanking their lucky stars to have not migrated to Pakistan.
satyam you tend to write remarkably well indeed from hstory,program to prejudice and finally the d factor
lets go into program forget old history lets start from recent history:
jinnah calls for direct action day in kolkata which started the onslaught of masscare with slogans like islam khatre main hai and ladke lenge pakistan which ultimately resulted in castrophe resulting into death of over ten lakh people right in fourty’s
in the great bangladeshi liberation war when pakistan army started slaughtering and rape as tool in eastern parn casualities where mostly hindus and the target to
one ayodhya which is on hindu revered site and the structure which is disputed for last one hundred fifty years resulted in close to one lakh demolition of temple in pak and bangladesh again a so called reaction ….again a writer like taslima nasreen in exile because he hasn’t written anything on islam but in lajja on mostly condition after ayodhya and plight of hindus and one know what happened to her… secularists and one wonder so called intellectuals are silent on that
in the late eighties when call for kasmiri pandits was given to leave the valley but they leave there women behind was again termed a jagmohan’s consiracy by muslim voice only living in a big deniel
for your analogy of dawood and things being normal in bombay is again wrong….it had to be normal because its financial capital of india and attracts investment…..where is bollywood and most of financial set up …here the stake of india is there….still twenty six by eleven happened which was huge and bigger than anything and so do regular communal riots which for past 5 years are entity especially during festivals
recently for over fifteen days riots happened in bareilly why there was big silence on that….in assam what happened for close to one month and so in myanmar….when threats are being issued and a big chunk of north eastern people where leaving southern india where was machinery
right after plagues which engulfed surat in 90’s to earthquake and finally riots progress of gujrat is remarkable and so is administration ..to ignore godhra in a way and being silent on place history is again makes one delusional only
lets talk about so called prejudice and resentment…today english and modern education along with family planning is essential for development and if a certain communities doesn’t want to embrace it they will always fall behind ….its time to compete and certainly not make excuses
Rockstar, those things are not mutually exclusive. For instance what the Pakistani army did in what was then East Pakistan was the worst kind of ethnic and religious cleansing. Because there was a huge anti-Bengali ‘racial’ bias, but also the ‘Hindu’ one and so the lines between Muslim and Hindu were constantly blurred in this ‘genocidal’ imagination. Rape as a weapon of war was used in modern times first in East Pakistan, and then more recently in Bosnia. What happened in 1971 remains one of the very terrible atrocities of the recent past. Many years ago I came across an article where a Pakistani commander who had taken part of campaign denied the charge of genocide and without any humor suggested that it was really more ‘genderdicide’ as they really went after men. Yes because they slaughtered the latter and only committed the worst rape campaign against the others!
On the subject of Bombay I don’t quite agree with everything you’re saying though note how 26/11 did not lead to anything. Nothing on the scale of the Sena riots/pogroms has happened in Bombay since 1993. Now I should add here that it is also true that sometimes when there are severe riots and everyone gets hurt from an economic point of view people then get smart about these things for a generation or so. For instance in 1986 there were important riots in Bhiwandi. But in 1993 when there was all this trouble in Bombay Bhiwandi was perfectly calm. But in any case my larger point still is that 95% of the time riots are not as spontaneous as they might seem. Even if not engineered they are often utterly predictable. The Jinnah point you raise is the perfect example here.
In any case this gets to my larger point. Whether it’s what happened in 1971 or what happened in 2002 I have the same absolute condemnation for these things. as a matter of fact though Pakistan does not really accept any responsibility for East Pakistan. That guy I quoted notwithstanding they claim that this has been Western exaggeration and so on or that India committed half the atrocities and blamed it on them on so on. There are always these denials. No one really accepts they did those things.
one came make thing go in circle by quoting certain selective history, blacks ,crusade and caste wars and what not but these are mostly things of past and if occuring on present drastic steps are being taken to control and they where termed problem by not living in denial
in today’s time regular violence in name religion is blasphemous again this should be liberal’s position but again one see huge silence on that … god doesn’t need blasphemous law to protect itself and so do violence and attack on other faith who are worshipping other ways to reach god only if one is beleivers and if one is cynical its again explores a whole different avenues
jews under them doesn’t have had any sort of political aspiration and never dream of making big inspite of resentment …there was a whole things being done to finish off a race mostly in camps ya correct but again it can be said of anything..it applied and fits remarkably on pundits who where thrown out of there native town and made to live in refugee camps
do you see camps running on there for destruction ….but there right throughout the world these camps are there where people are being brainwashed and trained to kill in name of religion…..let it whosever be
these are are just few random history even in context of indian history good one can go on and on if one is talk about exclusivity
btw good to see you yourself accept that most of these things are spontaneous and thats whats this movie kai po che depicted that after a certain time one has to move on
things where stable after twenty six by eleven because again it was an attack on financial capital to broke india again a restraint but in same city without any provocation azad maidan happened
No I’m saying the opposite, that most of these things are not spontaneous and it is a classic ideological move to evade responsibility and consider these things spontaneous.
but responsibility again can’t be done or look at selectively …
you yourself talk about intelligent and maturity of people after twenty six by eleven similarly even gujratis never allowed things to happen again and elect someone who is working thrice despite press going ballistic on him and one understand why because vajpayee term was the first where a non congress government compleated five year term in history of india and the press can’t feed the hand which has served them for to long
aside if a mob destroys symbol of indian defense forces in open and start riots without any provocation or anything what would this be called ….a resentment
yes but I’ve never blamed Gujaratis in the first place. If you read my comments I’ve made this very clear. Holding Modi responsible is not the same as holding Gujaratis responsible. I never make this illegitimate move from a particular set of political actors to wholesale condemnations of a group. So for instance I blame Nazis not every German! But if you want my view on this Modi emerged so tainted out of the whole episode within Indian and internationally that he knew he couldn’t have a repeat irrespective of anything else. Now of course he’s being suggested as a candidate for PM. Hope this never happens but I have my doubts whether this can happen. My sense is that outside Gujarat there are doubts about him even among supporters of the BJP. Specially in North India.
And again the whole point of my comments was that I precisely don’t look at these things selectively. However I also don’t think one should have to forever bring up other examples because that too is an evasion of responsibility. Either a killing is wrong or it isn’t. Because others are also indulging in the same sort of killing doesn’t justify this one. Here one must distinguish between what is ‘historically’ understandable or predictable and what is ‘right’ or not. These are two very different questions.
things didn’t happen because administration was tough on them later a things which is not being followed even in rest of india where these things are happened continuslly
same man despite that his risen by leap and bounds and is a future pm candidate without any political dynasty support so he must be doing things right to come with that and the same image internationally has risen which is shown by business gujrat is doing but again its a different deal alltogether
that doesn’t mean anything. Many fascist leaders are very successful electorally. Here’s part of an older comment:
[nor do I think that economic success in a state justifies pogroms. This is precisely the fascist tradeoff. No one ever did a better job on a country in terms of providing dynamic leadership than Hitler did with an unbelievably depressed German economy. I do not define incidentally economic success as ‘progressive’ unless it is leveraged in a certain way. But that too is another issue. I am not prepared to overlook atrocities because a leader is successful in other areas. I find such a tradeoff ‘inhuman’.]
and when I use Hitler or Nazi Germany as examples these are in a sense ‘absolute’ ones but there are plenty of other fascist leaders who behave in the very same way. A violence is not acceptable just because it falls short of rising to Hitler’s standards! If you were Jewish in Nazi Germany the German economic miracle would have been a bit irrelevant for you!
And to repeat an older point my argument is the very same whether Sikhs are being massacred in Delhi in ’84 or Pandits are being chased out of Jammu and so on. This is my whole point. If you asked me about one of these episodes I would condemn then in absolute terms. I wouldn’t say ‘before I comment on the plight of the Pandits let’s first look at what’s happening to Muslims elsewhere’!
Finally ‘once’ is more than enough. One doesn’t get brownie points for engaging in a pogrom or engineering riots just once!
This logic by Satyam will put an end to all the excuses. How can a pogrom is justified when there is constitution, courts etc. to solve issues? Hyderabad is relatively peaceful without resorting to any pogrom and so is Madhya Pradesh which has a sizable muslim population. There also we have BJP government but the CM is able to achieve this. And Karnataka is one more example under BJP. So BJP can be successful without Modi as these states prove.
thanks for that comment Sanjana.. even better examples are Kerala and TN. They don’t have BJP govts of course but they have every sizable Muslim/Christian populations. So whatever this Muslim ‘threat’ is supposed to be it should be massive here given the numbers. Yet these are the most violence-free states around (Hyderabad still had riots during the Rath Yatra period, nothing since, but yes those were more regular riots). Karnataka seems to be the most prone to right-wing politics in some ways but then this is also a Southern state at the crossroads of ‘North’ and ‘South’ if you will. But that’s a separate debate. Your larger point stands.
but this is connected to my other claim that riots/pogroms are always a ‘means’ of doing politics and not simply an ‘excessive’ moment not connected to political decisions. Much as ‘war’ is also a means of doing politics. And here to also clarify an earlier example (where I used the LTTE one), within the framework of the Indian nation-state Tamil linguistic nationalism is relatively benign. Because it can never be hegemonic (beyond in a regional sense) and the linguistic framework keeps the the religious or ethnic tensions much more in check than would otherwise be the case. Or at least this is the choice that Dravidian politics has mostly made. But linguistic nationalism isn’t as harmless in other contexts. In TN one way or the other everyone speaks Tamil, as a more or less natural matter. The Maharashtra example, specially the Bombay one, uses a similar linguistic nationalism in much more ugly ways. Firstly by tying it to notions of ethnicity and so on and then by trying to impose it on a city (Bombay) where Marathi is not as natural for the entire population (Telugu language politics in Andhra vis-a-vis Hyderabad is somewhat similar but not quite as insidious). Put different modern Tamil identity (which is to say over the last century or more) is premised on a linguistic nationalism which is much more inclusive whereas the Marathi kind insists on certain exclusions or is always able to define such because of course in Bombay (for example) everyone isn’t a ‘native’ Marathi speaker in the same sense. Hence when you have something absurd like Amitabh Bachchan being attacked by Raj Thackeray it is merely a symptom of something that is inherently problematic in this discourse. Again I mentioned yesterday that Gujaratis had as much of a right to the city as Maharastrians (obviously the greater numbers of the latter won out) if the city wasn’t going to be a city-state like Delhi (an idea briefly floated) because of their enormous contributions to the ‘making’ of Bombay in modern times but once upon a time, much moreso than today, Gujarati was a lingua franca in many parts of the city. Hindustani before all else but then these other pockets. Much as Marathi in many parts. Over time though a certain politics sought to make Marathi hegemonic and this was a problem. This politics has an ethnic and a religious charge. Hence depending on the Sena mood they’ve attacked Tamilians, North Indians and Muslims (from anywhere)! Usually the most powerless ones. Gujaratis cannot be attacked in the same way because they’re commercially very powerful in the city in a structural sense. In TN on the other hand everyone is in any case speaking Tamil. All that the politics then insisted on was for this to be the dominant identity feature as opposed to religion as so on (they were hostile to religion anyway.. the AIADMK of course changed all this). Whether everyone agreed with this move or not no one has to change anything. But the other kind creates integration challenges because you have the construction of a state which then insists on imposing a certain ethnic unity on a cosmopolitan city, a process which can never be ‘completed’, hence keeping the politics alive (note how in Andhra the whole question of who gets Hyderabad if the state splits up cannot easily be resolved..). My own sense is that wherever this problem occurs the city should be separated from the state and kept independently. But of course there are always economic interests involved and even symbolically no one wishes to lose the ‘jewel in the crown’. Here though one must cite the Bangalore example which despite the larger political trends in the state has overall moved towards a more pan-Southern and even pan-Indian model.
Don’t wanna get into this too much as of now–
But ‘political correctness’ has issues and limitations and is a bugbear in these situations,
Things have to be dealt with an unrelenting unashamed and heavy handed manner
For eg love the way America hasn’t allowed another major incident after 9/11 –overzealousness or not!
When the outcomes are so overwhelmingly favourable, all measures are justified (& nothing should be ruled out)
Ps: sanju– do relax and watch a lite fun film & let us know the review lol
But what if after the attacks of July 2005 the British govt decided that it somehow had to come down hard on everyone of South Asian origin (among others) and refused to distinguish between Muslim and non-Muslims? Do you think you would have had quite this nonchalant attitude then? In all these debates the folks who are least bothered by the ‘heavy-handedness’ are those who never expect to be affected by it! This applies even to Muslims by the way. In the US for instance a lot of Muslims turned against the Republican party post-9/11 because they felt they were being targeted. But the same never had a problem with all kinds of exclusionary politics before this. Why? Because they often belonged to a ‘class’ where they weren’t bothered by this stuff. But post-9/11 they couldn’t be ‘above it all’ in the same sense. I actually never had much sympathy with these folks. Because it only started mattering to them when it hit home.
again same old comment from where it started and so on your assumption relying on conspiracy theories on godhra and ya this is political correctness/lip service to hilt
politics itself is in question because man in charge has only risen…point certainly is not bjp but selective framing…remember what rajiv said about 84
‘”when big tree falls earth shakes'” and this guy was an aspring pm and tytler was minister very recenly…what can one assume that its like nod to an enginerred program openly
viscious circle has started on kerla and tn but this whole twists to argument is selective
there is a silence on malabar riots and appeasement policy which many groups are complaining ….if a professor hands gets chopped openly it itself says about things …was these things ever part of gods own country history
a vishwaroop type of incident and owais where not part of bjp/rss ideology
a kalam or rahman are certainly not role model for radicals
yes I know about the stuff in Kerala (Marad and so on).. I wasn’t trying to suggest that nothing happens in these states, just that it’s far less compared to many other much more polarized states. There was for instance a communal riot in Tirunelveli just last year.
On a different note (I raise it here because this seems to have become the “politics” thread :)), I wish there were more coverage in India (at least outside West Bengal) of the ongoing “Shahbag” movement in Bangladesh: it has been very encouraging to see youngsters and civil society erupt in the context of the war crimes tribunal, and against the likes of the fascist Jamaat-e-Islami. [The Jamaat’s response over the last few days has been violence and intimidation; hardly surprising, but a reminder the battle is far from one.] The 1971 slaughter and refugee crisis had profound implications for India, even apart from the human dimension, yet on our English-language news channels there is more coverage of relatively minor events in the US than of these seminal events in Bangladesh…
It is understood, infact incumbent of a govt to ensure the ‘high handedness’ is targeted and appropriate not blanket /diffuse!
Though agree this may not always be possible
The problems arise when proven mass murderers with clear evidence are kept for years and punished with a sense of insecurity and ‘guilt’.
I’m more into the American model here lol. also I toggle the Atlantic v frequently (& love both for various reasons!)
Finally
In an obamaesque tone–lemme make it clear
It’s NOT the peace loving people who need be defensive and apologetic!
It’s trouble makers who have to forced to be apologetic and infact pursued till proper outcome–no debate here
‘People’ here includes all people (no exclusion!)
satyam, is there a way to move this discussion to a separate thread? i am not trying to be whiny but it is hard to sift through stuff to get to the actual film discussions. just wondering, thanks.
probably should have earlier, too late now as there are too many comments. I guess we should stop anyway as we’ve all said everything we needed to on the subject!
Haha Antya you are being wicked as always but then most Delhi girls are like that (sorry for the generalisation).
On a serious note, is there a way I could get in contact with you through email. Sorry if it’s too personal a thing though i needed to discuss something with you regarding ‘films only’
Alex, I would first advise you to find out whether antya is Mr ya Miss (not talking of the Antara Mali movie here..) & then proceed..we need to learn from our mistakes to make any headway don’t we??
Whatta meeting– tired now
Ha Ann jo — WHO is proceeding ? lol– Ive even forgotten how to send emails lol
It’s been v obvious that anya is thr nu anjali Singh …but then it’s such fun n entertaining — it might as well be u for all we know lol
Anyhow look@ his film choices– django, ZDT, thirst, stoker — ALL torture/ porn.
But hey, i somehow don’t feel like being rude to him- 🙂
God bless him…
Ps: now4sumfun– any suggestions….
AA: but then it’s such fun n entertaining — it might as well be u for all we know lol–
no I don’t need to be a cross-dresser; I am naturally darn offensive in the way God threw me out on this Earth..I don’t need to get into anyone else’s skin to be more offensive!!
Kai Po Che had a decent first week of around 25.75 crore nett. The film was steady on the weekdays though collections were low in some circuits. The film has performed best in Mumbai city, Pune and Bangalore.
The film has held on well as far as screen time is concerned in the second week in the big metros and the second week is all important for the film.
The new releases have not opened well and could it be that Kai Po Che leads the box office race in week two as well but more important will how big are the second week collections.
Films like ABCD – Any Body Can Dance and English Vinglish collected 10 and 11 crore nett respectively in their second weeks and Koi Po Che would have to collected at least as much as those films to come out with a decent final total.
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks Of 26/11 Open Poorly
Friday 1st March 2013 11.30 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
The new releases of the week I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 both opened to a dull response of around 15% at multiplexes. The Attacks Of 26/11 was ahead of I Me Aur Main as the film opened far better than I Me Aur Main in the Mumbai/Maharashtra belt.
Both films will need quick improvement in collections especially at the multiplexes if the weekend collections are to be worthwhile. The attacks of 26/11 will have better collections in the single screens of Maharashtra and a few other parts but that will not be enough for the film. But films will find tough competition in the form of Kai Po Che which could out gross both films despite being in its second week.
The other release of the week Bloody Ishq opened to very poor houses on a limited release.
Ramu and 26/11 are being thrashed left, right and centre by the reviewers on twitter. Namrata Joshi, Shubhra Gupta and Fadnavis are lampooning RGV. Really sad for the guy
In 2009, a 48 minute documentary titled Terror in Mumbai – Dispatches, co-produced by Channel 4 and HBO, and directed by Dan Reed, was released. Consisting of interviews with victims, actual CCTV videos of the terrorists at various sites, video testimony of the captured Ajmal Kasab soon after he was caught and most terrifying of all, actual audio intercepts between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, Dan Reed’s thoroughly disturbing film has never been shown (or excerpted or discussed) on Indian television. Which is no surprise, perhaps, because it contains chilling and irrefutable proof, among other things, of how unregulated media coverage actually aided the terrorists and their Pakistani controllers in stretching the ordeal out further by giving them a clear sense of what steps the Indian law enforcement agencies were taking. If you want to watch a gripping film on 26/11 that shows you what actually happened and leaves you with a lasting sense of unease – instead of letting us pat ourselves on the back for sacrifice and moving patriotically on – Terror in Mumbai is available on the internet. Watch it.
“The way the soundtrack is used to denote unimaginable brutality and violence in that sequence reminded me of the massacre sequence in Ramesh Sippy’s “Sholay”, where Gabbar Singh sadistically raises a gun, points it at a defiant child (Master Alankar) and then the soundtrack cuts to the sound of a train chugging into the railway platform.
Varma, in the finest filmmaking foray of his career since “Satya” and “Company”, offers us no comfort of cinematic licence in “The Attacks Of 26/11”. Not his fault, really. The unspeakably aggravated violence of the events we see unfold in front of our disbelieving eyes happened in, and to, Mumbai just five years ago. Believe it or nuts.
“
The first half of “Stoker” passes in a rapture of dread, as the viewer anticipates terrible things to come. This is partly because the director, Park Chan-wook, here making his English-language debut, is an internationally renowned master of bloodshed. His “vengeance” trilogy — in particular the middle chapter, “Oldboy,” currently being remade by Spike Lee — is cherished by many cinephiles, in South Korea and beyond, for its blend of visual elegance, melodrama and extreme violence.
So it may be Mr. Park’s reputation that induces a state of queasy anticipation in the early scenes of “Stoker.” But it is also, unquestionably, his craft. We find ourselves in a world of lurid, saturated colors; languorous camera movements; temporal displacements; and jagged shards of sound: an atmosphere that replicates the inner experience of India Stoker, a Connecticut teenager who manifests the funereal demeanor of Wednesday Addams and the seething intensity of a poem by Sylvia Plath.
India, played by Mia Wasikowska, is an introspective, solitary teenager who, on her 18th birthday, loses her father (Dermot Mulroney, in flashbacks) to a car accident. She mopes around the lawns and hallways of her family’s enormous estate, seething at her mother, Eve (Nicole Kidman), who seems to India insufficiently grief-stricken. The girl’s mood grows darker with the arrival of Charlie (Matthew Goode), a handsome uncle she never knew she had
Ms. Wasikowska has played Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and there is something literary about the watchful, musically gifted India. The territory staked out in “Stoker” — a landscape of family secrets, sexual subtext and aristocratic entitlement — is at times reminiscent of a Henry James tale. The patterns and symbols that pop up around India may be signs of a sinister external presence, or they may be figments of her own feverish imagination.
Her psychological state — an unstable amalgam of grief, longing, curiosity and rage — dominates the film’s atmosphere, though not everything is happening in her own head. The family’s housekeeper (Phyllis Somerville) disappears, and a visit from a concerned relative (Jacki Weaver) signals further danger ahead. Charlie seems to be seducing Eve, which disgusts India, even as her suspicions about her uncle are complicated by other feelings and his apparent interest in serving as her protector.
A great deal of information has been withheld, perhaps from India and certainly from us, and Mr. Park, with sadistic relish, takes his time with revelations that are both ghastly and a bit disappointing. The exquisite sense of mystery that has built up around India begins to dissipate as the focus shifts to Charlie, and tantalizing ambiguities are resolved into a tale of madness and murder.
Which is not so bad, though the final act of “Stoker” walks a fine line between the sensational and the silly. Mr. Park is less interested in narrative suspense than in carefully orchestrated shocks and camouflaged motives. Learning the truth about Charlie does not so much explain what had come before as turn everything upside down, scattering the puzzle pieces in a colorful, brutal cascade.
Compared with the mayhem of “Oldboy” or “Lady Vengeance,” the violence in “Stoker” is relatively restrained, though its cruelty is extreme. But the ugliness that is uncovered in the Stoker family history is finally less haunting, and less interesting, than India herself. Ms. Wasikowska has a remarkable ability to use the watchful stillness of her features to hint at the girl’s emotional turmoil; her eyebrows, widening in alarm or contracting in fury, may be the film’s most potent effect. She faces appalling and occasionally preposterous circumstances with a mixture of innocence and skeptical intelligence that is close to heroic. That goes for the actress as well as the character she plays.
In the case of Stoker, the approach differs. Although Park has completely transplanted his film onto American soil, it is very much his own. I think it wasn’t about Park adapting himself to H’wood stds of making films but Fox and Scott Bros wanting PCW to make his kind of movie in an American setting. Of course the story and script clicked as well so it was easier for Park. Else he wouldn’t have jumped right in.
Reworking of his movie Oldboy is a misstep that Hollywood has made. Here it is not just about the director’s sensibility but the fact that the film is cannot be reworked or adapted to a setting that is purely American with the same throbbing intensity as the Korean original.
As with adaptations, it isn’t necessary at all that the later one religiously be in line with its source (Stoker itself proves it) but in case of OB any tweaks will only weaken the new.
OB’s transgressional themes and insanely violent brutality emerge from the milieu the story is situated in and of course how Park envisioned it to be. It is in a way quite an original movie and is sufficient to be just one of its kind.
Great points Arthi. How would you compare Park’s film to the original
On Oldboy, you must be aware that Sanjay Gupta had already remade this as Zinda (Dutt playing the lead with John as the baddie). The violence was slightly toned down and the removed the hallucination and incest angle. The film, while not half as good as Oldboy, worked due to Dutt’s scintillating act which I prefer to the Korean actor’s. And they had set the film in Bangkok if I remember
Saurabh: I’d also add that Zinda featured a very good soundtrack, with songs like “Zinda hoon mein,” “Har saans”, and the best ever Strings song “Ye hai meri kahaani”…
Sanju just looked the right guy for the part in a way the original didn’t…
If you are referring to Stoker, haven’t watched it yet. Usually press play after the euphoria dies down. Also comparisons can’t quite be made here because both films fork into different directions..
Don’t know about Zinda, so did a quick G / wiki search but there is no story given. Seems Sanjay Gupta made this movie without seeking the necessary copyrights.
Stripping the plot of incest and the repercussions of that relationship, not sure what remains in Z. But this said, a remake of such a film in the far East would work to an extent. So say in Zinda, despite the exclusion of the main themes, one could extrapolate to create other reasons for such blinding vendetta because the dynamics in these countries are not alien to each other. There are just degrees of variation. (Zinda was set in Bangkok and not in any Indian city probably because it made it easy for the director here to blatantly duplicate certain aspects…)
But when one jumps continents it becomes much more difficult because the worlds change drastically.
I haven’t watched Z but ‘m pretty sure I’d not rate him higher than the Korean actor.
” I think it wasn’t about Park adapting himself to H’wood stds of making films but Fox and Scott Bros wanting PCW to make his kind of movie in an American setting”
Some good points there arthi and I agree
Not much into park but just caught promos of stoker
I think these sort of deals DO have a role and expand the viewership base.
For eg wasn’t interested into this till now but after checking the hollywoodised version promo, it does seem interesting now
Mia is ace casting for this role
Kidman seems to be a bit of a distraction and comes with her own baggage but seems will add ‘value’ to this project
Also agree to what u mentioned as ‘throbbing intensity’ in the Korean version (?)
Sometimes it is culture and setting based as well. This particular hw take has potential and even worthy of a spoof 🙂
Seems some good casting choices around lol
Ps: saw bits of few films including ‘thirst’. Park is definitely an innovative quirky unique film maker — I have issues but may elaborate later …
oh, saurabh! you are lucky i am so fond of you. favoring dutt over min-sook who is practically a chameleon and one of my favorite international actors. gasp! only my fondness for you is preventing me from going into full-on bitch mode.
Haha anya — nice fun
Uve uplifted my mood lol
Reminds me–there was apparently a wired scene in Zinda with senior citizen dutt makin out with Lara dutta.. Also dutts hairstyle resembled your description of sunny deols recently!
Anyhow folks–seems like Kim kardashian — i will hav to do an ‘Aa takes America’ show …
Like everywhere, Most here hav a ‘role’ –for which they have been ‘brought up’ !
Procuring key info is also one of those ‘roles’.
Ps: oops I forgot how to send an email 🙂
Haha Antya, you are allowed to speak your mind out atleast with me. On the fondness, it’s both ways.
I think Oldboy is the only film I have seen of that actor so I am not qualified enough to talk more abt him. But as I (and Q) said I far preferred Dutt and not because I am a fan of the latter.
Recently filmmakers have been dusting off fairy tales and giving them a revisionist feminist spin. As movies like “Red Riding Hood” and “Mirror Mirror” suggest, striking a balance between the old (and often sexist) and the new (and vaguely progressive) is trickier than it might seem. The makers of “Snow White and the Huntsman” tried to reconcile two potentially irreconcilable ideas— a thoroughly modern miss and an old-fashioned happily ever after — by putting a sword in Snow White’s hands so she could ride alongside her heroic hunk. The results weren’t half bad, even if this butched-up Snow White didn’t magically transform into a genuinely liberated princess.
The makers of “Jack the Giant Slayer,” by contrast, have generally opted to stick to the original boy meets beans, boy loses beans, boy meets giants, and so on, embellishing the familiar bedtime story with 3-D and other effects, noisy battles and an occasional wink at the material. Partly what distinguishes this Jack from earlier farm boys who logged adventures with big men and legumes is that he’s played by Nicholas Hoult, yet another one of those anodyne young British actors — along with the seemingly nice likes of Andrew Garfield and Eddie Redmayne — whose sensitive eyes and droopiness make them unthreatening romantic playthings. This Jack lives with his hectoring uncle (Christopher Fairbank) instead of his mother and tries to sell the family’s horse rather than its cow.
Mostly what separates Jack from his storybook forerunners, though, and suggests that this old tale has been refurbished with more than the usual digital bells and whistles, is that he has a promising doppelgänger in Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson). A lover of tall tales and exploits, Isabelle is being raised by her father, the king (Ian McShane), and has been promised to the shifty Roderick (Stanley Tucci, bewigged and gaptoothed). Jack and Isabelle meet cute when he tries to scare off ruffians who hassle her while she’s watching a theatrical performance about giants. Jack’s bravery foreshadows greater deeds, much as the onstage battle between giants and men augurs a deadlier offstage fight. Isabelle’s pluck is similarly suggestive, but, alas, this isn’t “Jack and Jill, Giant Slayers.”
There are more once-upon-a-time niceties and eventually a bean does sprout. It’s a beaut — a long, twisting thing that rises out of the earth to pierce the clouds like a god’s monstrous, multi-plaited spear. At the other end, waiting in an otherworld called Gantua, is a race of male giants, a cannibalistic brotherhood led by General Fallon (Bill Nighy). Nicely realized through a combination of digital wizardry and motion-capture performances, the giants are best in show, from their plug-ugly heads to their leathery, ulcerated toes. The director Bryan Singer clearly enjoys playing with these oversize, puppetlike meanies and finds queasy comedy in their threat, especially when Jack, Isabelle and some others, including a knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor channeling Errol Flynn), nearly become finger food.
For its first 90 minutes, “Jack the Giant Slayer” is painlessly diverting. The visual design for the giants and the beanstalks keeps your eyes busy, even when the story sets your mind to wandering. If it drifts with increasing frequency it’s because, well, this finally is just a digitally souped-up, one-dimensional take on “Jack and the Beanstalk,” capped by the kind of interminable blowout that makes many big-studio entertainments feel as long as the last Oscars. As the movie unwinds, it also becomes evident that, for all her daring, Isabelle is more decorative than narratively necessary. In the metaphorically rich original tale, a boy wakes to discover he’s produced a mighty stalk. Here, the boy is now a man, and while the stalk is still impressive, the movie just doesn’t have staying power.
Anurag Basu’s Kishore Kumar biopic moved to next year
Filmmaker Anurag Basu, who will be directing a biopic on late actor-singer Kishore Kumar, says the film is taking a lot of time and will now start next year. However, he will start another film by May this year.
Filmmaker anurag basu
Filmmaker Anurag Basu, who will be directing a biopic on late actor-singer Kishore Kumar, says the film is taking a lot of time and will now start next year. However, he will start another film by May this year.
“I am writing three films right now and will select one of them and then make it. This is because the biopic of Kishore Kumar will take a lot of time and now it might start next year,” Basu said here Thursday at the inauguration of Wassup Andheri Fest.
“But before that, I have to make another film. It will start soon by April or May. So the preparations for that are going on,” he added.
While Ranbir Kapoor will essay the role of legendary singer Kishore Kumar, the search for a female lead to play actress Madhubala is still on.
Screw these releases..The attacks of 26/11 is not released in DC/MARYLAND area..I got to drive all the way to Virginia or NJ to catch it..Guess I got to catch it on torrents again..which I hate..
The same happened with KADAL..
Thanks for the info KARBARK…the media is really lashing out at RGV..am not sure how much of that is valid or an over-reaction to settle scores with RGV who always shows the finger to them..
RGV ne trailer Word pe banaya hai ki Flash pe. So badly edited. He is destroying his own legacy. Aside Bhoot 2 too was beyond pathetic and I was a fan of the 1st part
1. The opening sequence: We have heard about Indian fishermen venturing into Pakistani waters and RGV uses this fact to maximum effect. A low angle shot of two boats bumping against each other, kind of prepared me for what was to come.
2. Modus operandi: ‘Contract’ had featured the coastal area and the paths terrorists use to enter in big Indian cities but ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ shows the exact roads. Locations have always played an integral part of the narrative in some of RGV’s acclaimed films, and ‘The Attack of 26/11’ makes him walk the same old path.
3. The grey shade: Be it ‘Satya’ or ‘Company’, the police were always human in Ramu’s stories. Here, Nana Patekar, who plays the Joint Commissioner of Mumbai Police, is very reasonable in his approach. Varma showed the top police officials as a sensible lot in ‘Company’ and ‘Satya’ (Remember Paresh Rawal) as well.
4. Point of view: Varma didn’t prefer to go for extreme experiments in the camera departments in his earlier films and that gave the narrative a chance to sink in, so when frames don’t shake much in ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ the audience feels relieved and concentrate better on the mammoth canvas of devastating terror attacks.
5. The chanting: Though it’s been used miserly but the loud chanting of shlokas in the background is apt enough to take you down the memory lane to ‘Sarkar’. Don’t you think ‘Govinda, govinda’ was as significant as Subhash Nagre himself?
6. The relaxed stride: ‘Rangeela’ and ‘Bhoot’ had characters which were not in great urgency till the climax and that made the developments smooth in most part of these films. The calm and composed terrorists in Varma’s latest offering will bemuse you the way the gatekeeper in ‘Bhoot’ or Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff) in ‘Rangeela’ did.
7. The linear structure: Most of the times, the writers are tempted to give the background of the story which has the potential of hampering the flow but ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ doesn’t waste much time in foregrounding and directly comes to the point. ‘Shiva’ and ‘Raat’ had a similar narrative structure.
8. Bullet in the head: He has directed and produced a number of films which propagate the theory of karma. These films display the complete cycle of events culminating at a point where the lead character meets the expected end, ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ is no exception.
9. Religious symbols: They have always been very significant in Varma’s films and ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ takes the tradition forward. In the Taj massacre scene, the camera zooms in on an idol when the terrorists are on a shooting spree. Isn’t this what happened in the climax of ‘Satya’?
10. The silence: ‘Department’ was a very talkative film and the audience missed the chance of witnessing the facial twitches in slow motion, but ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ fulfils their wish and allows the developments to take place in a silent zone.
Nope– won’t let anyone forget rgv spoil my holiday with any gloomy stuff 26/11 et al
Hail uncle Sam –America at her best …
Znmd style ‘road trip’ now
Anya wanna join the gang? 😉
Ps: life’s short /make the most of it folks …
According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, “she received it in a modern American hospital”.
No one here wants to talk about John Abraham’s I Me Aur Main. The story seems to be good. And there is Prachi Desai with Chitrangada. Same case with ABCD which was also quite a good movie and a clean hit. Seems only certain stars sell.
Haha Q, actually I did not mind John till he appeared in that phallic pose in the poster of Force where he was out-manned by a certain Vidyut Jamwal.
Agreed on Zinda’s soundtrack. I also like Strings’ Aakhiri Alvida from Shootout (a film saved only by Dutt’s mean cop act- especially love the scene where he meets Amrita Singh’s character)
Kai Po Che held on strongly on day eight as it collected around the 1.75 crore nett mark. The collections were down just around 50% from its first day.
The collections at multiplexes were far better than both the new releases especially in the metros. It takes the business of the film to around 27.50 crore nett and the film should do weekend business of at least 7.50 crore nett as Saturday should see a big jump at multiplexes as the new releases have not impressed.
The film is strong in the metros while collections in other tier 1 centres are low but pretty steady. The ten day business of the film will be in the 33-34 crore nett range.
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks Of 26/11 First Day Business
Saturday 2nd March 2013 10.30 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 both collected poorly on day one and collections for both films were in the 1.50 crore nett range as per early estimates.
I Me Aur Main was better in places like Delhi/UP and East Punjab while The Attacks Of 26/11 was better the circuits in which Maharashtra fell into like CP Berar and Nizam.
The Delhi/UP contribution was around 30 lakhs for I Me Aur Main with The Attacks Of 26/11 being just 20 lakhs while CP Berar it was the other way around with The Attacks of 26/11 being 12 lakhs and I Me Aur Main just 6 lakhs. As the openings are so low there is very little chance for both films at the box office.
a movie that talks about the worst terror attack India has ever seen, that claimed hundreds of lives, and then made as a RGV thriller is pretty offensive and insensitive IMO. RGV should have stayed away from it. I doubt if ill want to check it out, no matter how competently it has been made
Agree tony–sounds a depressing premise to film
Though I feel there’s some undue negativity against rgv who seems to have made a better film than some of his recent efforts(haven’t/won’t see it though)
Ps: just to lighten the mood
Just happened to watch bits of a crap telly show since wad playing somewhere –haha unintentionally hilarious
“Kim and kourtney take Miami” or something like that
Hahaha it was Sooo crap that it was Roflol
Check it out folks (also for Kim) 🙂
There is a new show on Zee dramabaaz for small kids which is gaining high trps. The judges are Anurag Basu of Barfi fame, Sonali Bendre and Vivek Oberoi.
“There is a new show on Zee dramabaaz for small kids which is gaining high trps”
Hahaha sanju –Sounds something catering for me 🙂
Am a bit caught up but seems worthy to be caught up–any links ?
Ps:: so nice to be back in the ‘Internet zone’
It feels u r in Antarctica when not in www range lol
Sanju –I’m also a small kid –infact a perennial child 🙂
Btw only for sporting folks –sorry no offence meant
Just found the antics of these sisters hilarious on telly
Was having breakfast somewhere –was playing there
So I did NOT have a choice but to watch this
Btw Kim seems to have found a new treatment for psoriasis http://blogs.babycenter.com/celebrities/why-kim-kardashian-01292013-is-using-kourtneys-breast-milk/
Disclaimer –I do NOT endorse any such stuff. Just passing it on for these who may find this of interest
Ps: Satyam : if u find this irrelevant to the 26/11 thread(!) plz feel free to remove it (after reading it lol)
This author’s views represent a tiny % of Pakistanis. Just read the comments by all who have criticized him. He will be dead soon, if he does not watch out.
This is very good news if true..but Amitabh is fasting in Bhopal..so don’t know how this will pan out..hope AB Sr throws out his political correctness and his wee-bit instinctive ‘jingoism’ (there is ample proof of that in his blog when he talks of Hollywood) and talks about Hollywood the way one ought to..enough of ‘we have our films’, ‘they have their films’ crap..Professionalism, story-telling, researching, casting, attention to detail.. in all these Hollywood is WAY, WAY, WAY, ahead of us and we BETTER acknowledge that..got to know and admit where one’s lacking to even begin improving..
Remember, both the ‘woods’ started making films nearly at the same time!!
Lingusamy does not want refund from Mani Ratnam!
By MOVIEBUZZ
Source : SIFY
Leading director and producer Lingusamy through his Thirrupathi Brothers had distributed Mani Ratnam’s Kadal in three areas in Tamil Nadu.
The film bombed and some other distributors led by Mannan Films had asked Mani for compensation!
They had protested outside Mani Ratnam’s office and the noted director had to ask for police protection. However, Lingusamy a great admirer of Mani sir has made it clear in his press note that he would not ask for any compensation.
Lingusamy made it clear: “I had distributed Kadal in three areas and has suffered losses. But I will not knock Mani sir’s door and ask him for compensation. Film trade, like any other business has losses and profits and it’s all part of it. Mani sir is my guru, and I respect him a lot as a filmmaker.”
Well said Lingusamy, it is a fantastic gesture which will go a long way in giving a soothing touch to Mani Ratnam during his troubled times.
Q, you might not like it as I much as I did (because I love Ajith) but firstly the director here is Venkat Prabhu (Chennai 600028, Saroja). The plot is about a heist of cricket betting money during IPL- basically a mix of neo-noir and Masala. The technical aspects are pretty strong with a damn good bg. And I have always felt that Ajith always plays a shady guy with aplomb. Surprisingly Arjun too is not bad here
Saurabh, ‘Aaranya Kaandam’ is great film..Don’t miss it…After a long time, I like Jackie Shroff in it :)..It is one of well made crime dramas/Thrillers made from South…I’am sure this will remade in Hindi soon..Thanks for note on ‘Mankatha’..did not know about that..
OTT: Just completed ‘House of Cards’..Can’t wait for Season 2…
If Kevin Spacey does not an Emmy for this, it will be a huge disappointment for me..Superlative performance from him..His character is ruthless (and clever) and yet you cheer for him..
Those who have Netfilx here, should not miss this series…
Now I’am hooked up to ‘Breaking Bad’ :)..Catching it late, but a great series it is.
http://www.india-forums.com/bollywood/hot-n-happening/31409-kai-po-che-not-modi-propaganda-abhishek-kapoor-clarifies.htm
Director Abhishek Kapoor is upset with those who see “Kai Po Che!” as a tool spreading Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi propaganda.
The filmmaker, who has based his third directorial venture on Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller “The 3 Mistakes of My Life”, which tells the story of three friends living in Ahmedabad, took to Twitter to express his disappointment.
“Strange how some people are seeing ‘Kai Po Che!’ as Modi propaganda. They are obviously missing the point and looking for something that it’s not…” he tweeted.
Reportedly, some people have been criticising “Kai Po Che!” for watering down the 2002-Godhra riots incident in the film by depicting it as something that was the sole decision of one the Hindu local leaders.
However, Kapoor describes “Kai Po Che!” as a film for youth.
“‘Kai Po Che!’ is about the innocence of youth and their coming of age… not a witch hunt… accept it for what it is… and you might see the light,” he tweeted.
Starring, Sushant Singh Rajput”>Sushant Singh Rajput, Raj Kumar Yadav, Amit Sadh and Amrita Puri, the film came out last week and is doing well at the box office.
Kai Po Che was rock steady in its second weekend as it collected around 8.25 crore nett. The drop from the first weekend was just 45% as the film had a huge jump in business on Saturday.
The business of the film in ten days is around 32.50 crore nett and should end the second week with business in the 37-38 crore nett region.
The film managed to hold well across the board though the Gujarat belt is the disappointment. The film always going to find it tough in mass centres and be stronger in the metros and that has what has happened but with the film being set in the region of Gujarat it was key circuit as the biggest mass circuit could have come on board due to regional setting but it was not to be.
The lifetime business of the film will cross 40 crore nett and should end around the 45 crore nett.
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks Of 26/11 Flop At The Box Office
Monday 4th March 2013 10.00 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 started poorly on Friday and the weekend business remained dull with limited growth.
I Me Aur Main grossed in the 5.25-5.50 crore nett region while The Attacks Of 26/11 grossed in the 5-5.25 crore nett region. The business on the Monday will not fall heavily as compared to Friday as Friday itself was so poor.
Both films have investments in the 20-22 crore region and with such low weekends the domestic theatrical returns will not be much more than 5 crore for both films.
The Attacks of 26/11 had better collections in Maharashtra while I Me Aur Main was better in most of the other areas. The other release of the week Bloddy Isshq was a total washout.
March 3, 2013
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fizzle: ‘Jack’ Disappoints at the Box Office
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — “Jack the Giant Slayer” bombed at the North American box office over the weekend, teaching Warner Brothers a harsh lesson about derivative subject matter, flawed release dates and imperfect marketing.
The movie, a PG-13 adaptation of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale directed by Bryan Singer, took in about $28 million, enough for No. 1 but roughly half of what would have been considered a success. First place does not always mean as much at a time when studios spend so heavily on so-called tentpole films designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Warner Brothers and a financing partner spent about $190 million to make “Jack the Giant Slayer.” Global marketing costs added another $80 million or so to the price tag. Jeff Goldstein, Warner Brothers’ executive vice president for domestic distribution, defended the movie’s performance in a telephone interview on Sunday.
“Our audience in the United States was a little bit more narrow than we wanted, but the Canadian numbers are really strong, and the overseas reaction has exceeded our expectations,” he said. “The story on this movie is far from being written — we need more time.”
The problem: Disney’s “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which goes after a nearly identical audience, rolls out around the world next weekend and is attracting very strong advance interest, according to box office analysts.
“Jack the Giant Slayer” took in $13.7 million over the weekend from release in 10 Asian countries, a result the studio called “stellar.” Warner Brothers hopes that “Jack the Giant Slayer” could ultimately take in $225 million or more from foreign theaters — possibly enough for the movie to break even. (About 50 percent of global ticket sales go to theater owners.)
Regardless, “Jack the Giant Slayer” extends a grim streak for Warner. The studio won best picture at the Oscars for “Argo” — no small feat — but has now sustained four box office failures in a row, starting with “Gangster Squad” and continuing with the fantasy “Beautiful Creatures” and “Bullet to the Head.”
Mr. Goldstein noted that American moviegoers had not been responding to much of anything of late. For the weekend ticket sales totaled about $110 million, a 35 percent decline from the same three days last year, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office data. Ticket sales so far this year total $1.55 billion, an 8 percent decline compared with the same period in 2012; attendance has declined 9 percent.
“Identity Thief” (Universal Pictures), one of the few movies to break out in recent months, was second for the weekend. It took in about $9.7 million, for a four-week total of $107.4 million.
“21 & Over,” a new R-rated teenage comedy from Relativity Media, was third, selling an estimated $9 million in tickets; it cost $13 million to make. “The Last Exorcism: Part II” (CBS Films) was fourth, with about $8 million in ticket sales. Fifth place went to “Snitch” (Lionsgate), which had $7.7 million in sales, for a two-week total of $24.4 million.
“Jack the Giant Slayer” received mixed reviews but a B-plus score from ticket buyers in exit polls. The film gestated at Warner’s New Line division and was partly paid for by Legendary Entertainment; at one point it looked like a solid bet. It had a marquee director in Mr. Singer, best known for his work with the “X-Men” franchise, and thematic similarities to “Alice in Wonderland,” which took in more than $1 billion worldwide for Disney in 2010.
So what made this beanstalk wilt so terribly?
Start with a glut of bedtime-story adaptations following the success of “Alice,” longtime film producers and box office analysts said. When lightning strikes in Hollywood it prompts an immediate imitation reflex among studios. But the results are rarely good, and this instance has been no different.
Universal’s “Snow White and the Huntsman” did the best, with about $400 million in global ticket sales. But the disappointments have been many: “Beastly,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Mirror Mirror,” “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.” “The problem is that the audience is really savvy today and judges each film as its own entity,” said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for Hollywood.com.
Warner also got tangled in the elaborate computer-generated effects needed to make “Jack the Giant Slayer.” Digital Domain, a visual effects company hired by the studio to work on the movie, started to sputter financially while the film was unfinished. Warner was also having a hard time striking the right tone — too scary could turn off families, too tame might alienate Mr. Singer’s fanboy base. The studio changed the title from “Jack the Giant Killer” last summer after deciding that “Slayer” would be a better draw for young men and would go over better with parents.
The initial plan was to release the movie last June. But with the visual effects still not up to snuff, Warner bumped the movie to early March, a tricky time for attracting the broad audience that big-budget pictures need to earn back their investments. Disney succeeded with “Alice” in 2010 yet failed badly with “John Carter” last year.
But “Oz the Great and Powerful” was already camped out in mid-March, when spring break starts.
As studios increasingly churn out behemoth movies designed to play globally, release windows have narrowed. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, cited a crowded Christmas as one reason his studio’s “Rise of the Guardians” fizzled; it took in more than $303 million worldwide but still required an $87 million write-down because of high costs.
“Increased competition makes the need for quality release dates critically important,” Mr. Katzenberg said last week.
Uninspired advertising was the next problem that “Jack the Giant Slayer” encountered, according to multiple people who worked on the movie.
A big push for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and the Oscar campaign for “Argo” strained Warner’s resources; the studio also continued to have a hard time deciding what audience to go after.
The bickering eventually spilled onto Twitter, with Mr. Singer apologizing for terrible “airbrushed images” that “do the film no justice.”
Mr. Goldstein dismissed the notion that advertising was a problem. “Sue Kroll’s group did a fabulous job,” he said, referring to Warner’s marketing chief. “It’s always a tremendous challenge when you try to hit a broad spectrum.”
Haha tony– btw this film is definitely NOT to be watched but just skimmed this review wid my breakfast–sounds interesting (& a bit familiar)! 🙂
Won’t mind watching bits of this if someone spoon feeds this flick b4 my eyes….lol
John Abraham is surrounded by women; all the time. That’s true in real life as well, but let’s just talk about his (not as enviable) situation in debutant director Kapil Sharma’sI, Me Aur Mainfor now.
Mother, sister, girlfriend, boss, friend—all the key people in his life on the reel are women. So you’d think he’d be an ace at handling them, but…then we wouldn’t have a movie about it, would we?
John Abraham and Prachi Desai in a still from the film I, Me Aur Main. Courtesy: Facebook
Abraham’s character Ishaan is a self-centered, spoilt brat. He’s been brought up since childhood by his mother (Zarina Wahab) to believe that no matter what, he is the best; indulged through the years by his sister (Mini Mathur), who’s always covered his tracks for him; humoured by his boss (Raima Sen) at the music label company where he works; fawned over by singers desperate for their big break; and tolerated by his hot, successful corporate lawyer girlfriend, Anushka (Chitrangada Singh).
The first time we see her, we wonder if we’ve accidentally walked into the screening of Inkaar 2. Either that, or she had no time between wrapping up the original and starting this movie to even change her hairstyle or nail polish, never mind get a new wardrobe. Ok, maybe I’m nitpicking. But there’s so much time to get distracted during this film that it was bound to happen, and I will generously forgive myself. http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/movie-review-i-me-aur-main-and-the-sexy-idiot-645768.html
Rachel saltz — apparently this directors dad was an astronaut–ha
Btw the scripts realistic & not like the ‘escapist’ stuff around hehe
Vanity, thy name is man! Or in the case of “I, Me aur Main” (“I, Me and Myself”), a workaday Bollywood romance starring John Abraham, thy name is Ishaan. When his girlfriend, Anushka (Chitrangda Singh), murmurs sweetly to him, “I love you,” Ishaan murmurs sweetly back: “I love me too.” He can’t help grinning when he looks at his handsome, beefy self in the mirror. (Mr. Abraham is one of those Muscles From Mumbai actors.) “You’re the best,” he says.
Ishaan, of course, has some lessons to learn over the attenuated course of this movie. And he gets some help from the women in his life: the mama who spoiled him; the sister who’s wise to his ways; the girlfriend who spurns him; and his new love interest, the spunky Gauri (a not charming enough Prachi Desai). A modern girl, Gauri lives alone, downs shots of whiskey, can fix the electrical wiring and flirts with other women on the dance floor.
The most interesting thing to watch in “I, Me aur Main,” the directorial debut of Kapil Sharma (his father, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space), is the changing moral landscape. What can a 2013 Hindi-film romance handle, and how will it handle it? (Semi-spoilers ahead.) Anushka’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy isn’t a big shock. But the movie’s setup suggests that she and Ishaan, the baby’s father, shouldn’t be together. Will duty triumph over true love? Or can new endings be written? http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/movies/i-me-aur-main-a-bollywood-romance.html?_r=1&
News round up folkz —
remember that i take u thru current affairs as well lol
Apparently am American resident doctor refused to/ couldn’t resuscitate a dying patient!! Hmmm…
Obama employing walmarts Lynsey burr well–I wonder what’s her exact “job”–& no she doesn’t seem like lewinsky ( a bit better and more intelligent) !!
Ps:Also there have been some ‘creature(s)’ of doubtful structure and gender etc around here. I ‘own’ them and will assess/analyse em later but am quite busy right now. Others who try to analyse em, are warned–they shall be ‘punished’ !! Lol
***Thumbs-up for the movie from assistant commissioner of police***
Assistant Commissioner of Police N R Mahale retired from the Mumbai police force last month.
When 26/11 — the attack by 10 terrorists in Mumbai on November 26, 2008 — occurred, he was the senior inspector in charge of the D B Marg police station, which captured terrorist Ajmal Kasab [ Images ] alive.
Watching Ram Gopal Varma’s [ Images ] film on that horrific event was quite an experience for Mr Mahale as A Ganesh Nadar discovered.
Ha contd from above -a Kwik break -another one on this spoilt manchild take
Haha hilarious
One should never see these flicks –but their reviews are soo much fun
Do try it folks 🙂 http://mumbaiboss.com/2013/03/04/the-vigil-idiot-i-me-aur-main/
Ps: am dreading more wrk now..Urrgh.
Chennai Box-Office (February 22 to 24)
Tuesday, 26 February , 2013, 19:06
Inspite of the new releases, Kamal Haasan`s Vishwaroopam is holding on very well in its third week at the CBO. It is the number one at the CBO.
Jayam Ravi`s Ameerin Aadhi Bhagavan which released this week carries mixed reports and is at the number two position. In the third place is the Bruce Willis actioner in English and Tamil, A Good Day To Die Hard.
And in the fourth place is Vanayudham and at number five is Haridas which is getting good reviews.
Yay vishwaroopam is doing well @ box office –any updates
Apparently the total gross isn’t worse than robot? The latter havig Shankar, rajni Kant , ash as well rahman going for it
VR performance is creditable…
Yeah-vigil idiot is damn funny–esp for films like this–do check out the I, me main review –hahaha
It’s doing well but it’s by no stretch of the imagination anything approaching Robot. of course box office reporting on Kamal’s films always has to be taken with a pinch of salt. He has tremendous institutional support. And so every film of his that is rated a certain way I tend to bring down by a notch or two.
BOI is not giving verdicts for Special 26, ABCD and Murder 3. It seems they are trying to do some favours.
The attacks has disappointed inspite of such a contemporary subject. It did neither get critics praise nor audience approval.
I Me proves that John Abraham as a solo hero cant sell.
Only Kai po che and Special 26 and Race 2 proved to be successes. Even hollywood films are not creating any waves except maybe that tiger flick.
Saraswatichandra which is telecast as a daily soap was also a bollywood film of 1968 starring Nutan with great songs. SLB has made it into HDDCS television version.
Q. Which films have been the most liked over the last five years including this year, not looking for the biggest buts but best word of mouth and most liked?
A. 2009 – Three Idiots, 2010 – Dabangg 2, 2011 – Ready, 2012 – Rowdy Rathore, 2013 – Special 26 (Just 2 months of year).
That’s a nonsensical list by BOI. There’s a world of difference between the trending of 3I and the rest. And this is what ‘liking’ a film is about. An initial can come about for all sorts of reasons but it is then trending that tells you how much a film has been ‘liked’. Last year for instance OMG was probably the best trending. Certainly one of the very best. Kahaani trended very well. The Dabanng 2 trending is that exhibited by just about every 100 crore grosser! Rowdy on that score was better than many. and of course BOI give the game away by having Special 26 at the end. Because this film had a very moderate opening. So if you are going to do this why not have truly fantastic trenders in earlier years?! Every film on that list barring 3I is a Salman or Akshay film!
Tomar told Pandey that he has been assigned to inspect examination centres in three districts of Chambal region, following specific “intelligence inputs” on mass cheating practices during board exams.
Moved by his gestures, Pandey believed what he said and took him along to an examination centre for inspection.
Tomar inspected St Marry School where Class 12 thstudents were undergoing their exams for General Hindi and English. After this, Tomar asked Pandey to arrange for a vehicle so that he can inspect more centres in Murena, Bhind and Sheopur districts.
This was when Pandey thought something was wrong. “CBI would never write such a letter asking a DEO to arrange for vehicles and other facilities,” Pandey told TOI.
While Tomar was busy inspecting the school, Pandey called up the police and asked them to verify his credentials with the CBI office at Bhopal. Within 15 minutes Pandey got a call from a police officer confirming that he was a con. He took him to Kotwali police station.
“I was amazed by his confidence and the way he entered police station. He pulled a chair in front of the SHO and sat on it. He maintained on his stand that he was a CBI officer, but broke down within a few minutes and spilled the beans,” said the DEO.
He was arrested under Section 419 (cheating by personation), 420 (fraud), 466 (forging a document purporting to be a record or proceeding of Court of Justice) and 467 (forging a document which purports to be a valuable security) of IPC. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhopal/Bhopal-Special-26-CBI-officer-nabbed/articleshow/18814253.cms
Great news. Michael Mann to finally direct a film-
It’s been nearly four years since Michael Mann last directed a feature film, but the wait for his next project may be over: The “Public Enemies” director has attached himself to helm an untitled thriller for Legendary Pictures with Chris Hemsworth attached to star.
Mann had been developing the project for over a year, co-writing the script with Morgan Davis Foehl, who is also penning “Mass Effect” for Legendary. Plot details are unknown, other than that the film takes place in a world of cyber threats and attacks.
Thomas Tull, Mann and Jon Jashni will produce with Alex Garcia exec producing
How fickle the world is! Till recently everyone was in favour of hanging Dhoni publicly and now they have to eat their words. One more defeat, again the chorus will start to hang him.
Saw Chashme Baddoor trailer. The old one was vegetarian stuff and the new one is literally non veg. Hope Siddharth gets noticed as he is the only one who is acting.
March 4, 2013, 9:31 am10 Comments
Heeeeere’s Napoleon: Spielberg Developing Kubrick Script as TV Miniseries
By DAVE ITZKOFF
While another collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg would seem to require a time machine, a Ouija board or some sort of interdimensional extraterrestrial monolith, plans are nonetheless underway for these two celebrated filmmakers to work together again.
Speaking to Canal+ Television in France, Mr. Spielberg said that he intended to turn an unproduced screenplay by Mr. Kubrick about the life of Napoleon into a television miniseries.
“I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for a miniseries, not for a motion picture, about the life of Napoleon,” Mr. Spielberg said in the interview. “Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, long time ago, and the Kubrick family — because we made ‘A.I.’ together — the Kubrick family and I, and the next project we’re working on is a miniseries, is going to be ‘Napoleon.’”
Mr. Kubrick, who died in 1999, spent years researching Napoleon, reviewing more than 18,000 documents and books while assembling a card file that cataloged every significant moment in the French leader’s life.
It was announced in 1968 that Mr. Kubrick would direct “Napoleon” for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; then in 1970 it was reported that he had put that project on the back burner in favor of “A Clockwork Orange.”
In 1972, Mr. Kubrick (who had not yet made “Barry Lyndon” at the time) told Sight & Sound magazine that “there has never been a great historical film” and that he still intended to make “Napoleon.” But the project was never realized.
The two filmmakers worked together on the 2001 science-fiction film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” which Mr. Spielberg was producing for Mr. Kubrick, and which he directed after Mr. Kubrick’s death. One could also argue that the Kubrick influence hovers over Spielberg films like “Minority Report,” and its world of oppressively ubiquitous technology. Both directors also appreciated space aliens as well as Tom Cruise.
Ok, some more confessions of my ass-hollery
Was called 2 a party yesterday, but used it fulfill my fetishes.
With NOBODY understanding a word of it, forced (like a baby) for this to be played!!
Well, but then the groove took over and this was repeated umpteen times on the dance floor… Requested repeatedly by those who don’t follow a word
I’m proud of Bollywood 🙂
Many gals there–liked one of em a lot (& she danced well as well)–(but came 2know later she has a kid) hehehe enjoy the song
Ps:Saw SLP yesterday, probably cloud atlas 2nite—any1 seen it here? ……
Know it is kinda late but got 2 watch 26/11 in theater..if properly sozzled, will try 2 get down 2 brassstacks..must say this though..RAMU is being penalized by the Indian reviewers..
Shah Rukh Khan-Aamir Khan flee Twitter terror
Nurse wounds inflicted by internet trolls while their teams take the virtual blows
A star and his followers have always had a storybook affair, until social networking empowered the latter with an open platform and a mask of anonymity. To follow a star does not necessarily translate into exchanging terms of endearment. ‘Followers’ now tweet to berate, bully, abuse or heckle the stars. As Deepa Mehta had said in an interview to this newspaper, it gives the anonymous, armchair critic a sense of empowerment. And no one knows this better than Shah Rukh Khan, who has quit Twitter again, after a fresh surge of attacks brought on by his views on being a Muslim superstar in India.
This is SRK’s second boycott of the popular medium after being hounded out by trolls under similar circumstances last year. But the star showed just how vulnerable he still is, when he tweeted: Sad, i read so much judgements, jingoism, religious intolerance on the net & i use to think, this platform will change narrow mindedness, but no!
TOI has learnt that SRK is now putting together a strategy to handle his online presence. He will no longer take the virtual punches on his chin, but his media managers will do the needful.
“Shah Rukh is distraught with the negative energy on Twitter.
The abuses and the vicious attacks on him after every tweet have made him very cynical about the medium,” explained a friend of the star. “You can see from his last tweet that he is disillusioned with the medium.”
But SRK is not alone. Aamir Khan, who is perhaps not subjected to such intense scrutiny, seems to have taken a break from Twitter because of similar reasons.
“It’s been over six months since Aamir has actually updated his Twitter account. He occasionally posts on Facebook, which is linked to his Twitter handle. No one knows about it, but he has actually stopped checking his Twitter account,” said a friend close to the actor, adding, “This way he is immune to the negativity of trolls.” We believe his team monitors the rest.
Apparently, Aamir’s nephew Imran Khan has taken a leaf out of his book. “Imran was being attacked by trolls who were unsparing in their comments on his acting abilities. Imran has not just stopped checking, he has deleted his account,” said a source close to the actor.
One could argue that social networking is a double-edged sword. As Ranvir Shorey says, “Stars live in a bubble. The medium grounds them.” There are some who use the medium to ‘deny’ unflattering stories that appear in the media or even settle scores with those with a so-called agenda. There are also others, who are yet to figure out how to deal with the self-styled virtual vigilantes – masked, anonymous and very, very powerful.
Some people just like to abuse famous people on Twitter. You either get used to it or choose to ignore it. When I get such negative tweets, I know only a handful of them are being nasty. —Vir Das
People who send negative energy should know that it doesn’t affect anyone but them. So, no it doesn’t affect me. A few negative people are easily ignored. —Arjun Rampal
I am not on Twitter for a reason. I don’t need to know so much about others, neither do I want to talk about myself there. —Zoya Akhtar
thanx sanju–interesting to see both aamir and srk running away from twitter just when it began to hurt back!
when the going gets tough, the tough go skiving lol
Hey Satyam–have u been watching ‘inkaar’ ha
can i have your take plz–would be interesing thanx
found it pretty boring. Chitrangada Singh made it worthwhile in some ways (!) but the whole framing structure used here was incredibly repetitive after a point. The film has its moments but it’s mostly a very dull film. Mishra is just getting worse with every film. I have a weakness for Hazaaron…. Khoya Khoya chand was passable. This is easily weaker even than the latter.
hey i wanted a ‘longer’ review on this one
“Chitrangada Singh made it worthwhile in some ways (!)”
cmon satyam–i thought u had ‘grown’ after your cocktail ‘red bikini’ moment that ranks one of the lowest points in your accomplished blogging career 🙂
ps-how is the sexual harrassment angle at work place handled and is it ‘fair’ (to the male perspective)
does it do justice to the fact that many males can/do suffer this ‘plight’ lol
The only thing ‘low’ with respect to Cocktail is watching it (or liking it) for any reason other than the one I had! This might seem like a revolutionary idea but when I want to watch a good film I watch a good film, not Cocktail. Other than water-boarding I don’t think much else could convince me of the ‘merits’ of this film. But I better take that back before Utkal starts comparing its [Cocktail’s] spiritual lessons to that of the Gita and makes water-boarding the somewhat preferable option!
ha when time permits i HAVE to take u through cocktail–its more than what it appears -believe me lol
anyhow will come back to that later …watch this space…
ps–what did u feel about those issues above on inkaar (privided u noticed anything other than chitrangada here lol)
ps2–somehow i dont really find chitrangada that hott now–she seems to be trying tooo ‘hard’
Saamy is not some kind of masterpiece but it’s a terrific moment in Vikram’s career and Dutt in his current form especially couldn’t be farther from the sort of spirited performer one needs for this kind of deal.
Libtard Mani Shankar Iyer at his worst..watch atter 10:00 ..
I think he was drunk or had just been beaten up with a stick by his wife..it is ridiculous; the blind, hypocritical hate they have in their eyes…& Shashi Tharoor is now the enemy within friends since he is of the opinion that Wharton shouldn’t have disinvited Modi!! & of course you also the icing on the cake..Mr. Suhel Seth, the jackass of all trades and master-bator of everything..surprisingly appearing neutral..
Really want to read this, but will wait till I watch the movie…
Another post in Kafila has a problem with, among other things, the dress that Muslims are shown wearing. [Link]
Every time we see a Muslim character, the males are wearing kurta pyjamas and topees and the females are wearing burkhas. The film only exacerbates a prevalent attitude that Muslims look and dress different. This may be true some of the time but it is not true all the time, as Kai Po Chewould have us believe.
Whoa. So let’s see. If Muslims are shown wearing shirt and trousers, the criticism would be that the only Muslims that are shown to be acceptable are those that un-Islamicize themselves in order to blend into the Hindu-defined “Indian identity. You almost feel that you cannot win. http://greatbong.net/2013/03/06/on-kai-po-che/
SATYAMSHOT 
March 1, 2013 at 12:25 AM
Saibal Chatterjee’s review: Still not the best but watchable..
http://movies.ndtv.com/movie-reviews/movie-review-i-the-attacks-of-26-11-i-788?pfrom=home-topstories
Rediff gets a ‘front-line’ bimbo-journalist to review the film..and she gives it half a star….
http://www.rediff.com/movies/review/review-the-attacks-of-26-11-gave-me-a-headache/20130301.htm
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March 1, 2013 at 12:38 AM
Rediff is losing credibility by giving such reviews. First it was Matru Bijli Ka Mandola and now this.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:13 AM
I was trying to post in the previous thread, but its been closed:
Kinda late to this Godhra discussion, but my 2 cents worth of experiences: I have been to Godhra many times, either by train or driving through from Baroda to Dahod and onwards to Ratlam. I have relatives in all these towns. One thing that will strike anyone visiting Godhra is the distinct division of this town into Muslim and Hindu/Sindhi areas. The division is not so pronounced in other towns/cities of Gujarat. Godhra has had a long history of communal skirmishes/riots/murders, people throughout the 30-40 yrs prior to 2002 tended to be very sensitive to any communal issues. We used to be advised to keep away from sensitive areas. Communal flare-ups in Gujurat were very common, and if it happened at Godhra, it would be carried forward to Baroda, Ahmedabad, etc.
Coming to the riots, on the morning of this incident, when the train stopped at the junction of Dahod, which arrives about 50 mins prior to Godhra (for any Western Railway train going from MP to Gujarat), there were several oil cannisters being loaded by strangers, unknown to the regular folk in town. Dahod is a small town of 100k, almost everyone knows traders who load/unload goods from trains, and this loading of several oil cannisters was deemed most unusual. This was told to me by relatives/friends who cite eye witness accounts. People out there speculate that this was the source of oil used to burn the carriage at the next stop. Another thing to note, Godhra station is just besides a Muslim dominated area. It was there that the train was forcibly stopped by pulling the emergency chain. The entire exercise was done to exact some sort of harm on the Kar-sevaks in those carriages. It was fool-hardy at best, cause whoever the mastermind was, he did not foresee the sharp retribution to befall the entire Muslim community of Gujarat.
The secular press did its best to downplay the raison d’etre of the riots, specifically by pooh-poohing all evidence wrt the train fire. They have been trying hard to this day to shift the blame to ‘murky’ evidence. The ground reality out there is known to one and all, and this is what causes much chagrin to the secular press.
This still does not justify the merciless killing of Muslims that occured in the days that followed. Blood of innocents cannot be traded away. Inspite of the progress which Gujarat has witnessed, there is no doubt that 2002 will remain a permanent blot on its history. The only positive that has come out of the past 10 yrs is that many Muslims whose lives were destroyed, have found a way back to prosperity. I should know, cause the companies I work with hire many educated Muslims, and they are all the happier to work in a new productive environment, building back from destruction, brick-by-brick. Is it it any surprise then that the BJP recently won municipal elections by a landslide, in a muslim dominated constituency which has voted Congress forever?
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March 1, 2013 at 6:24 AM
thanks for the note Nykavi..
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March 1, 2013 at 8:25 AM
Any Pandit relatives or friends in the valley Kavi?
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March 1, 2013 at 11:28 AM
Lol at your biting sarcasm. But no, I have no Pandit relatives from the valley. Or any Sikhs in Delhi, or any other victims/perpetrators of riots in other parts of India. I am a Sindhi born in Gujrat, and do know at lot more about this pogrom, more than what the mass secular media is willing to let you know.
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March 1, 2013 at 12:02 PM
Thanks for your note,Kaviji. And, I agree with you. The ‘educated’ Muslim or the one who wants to live peacefully has come to terms with post-Godhra riots and conditions. Modi’s programme is not of torture or continued victimisation of Muslims. Godhra happened and now the Muslims who want to live peacefully and prosper have no problems or restrictions.
If I had to stare a relative of an innocent Muslim killed in post-Godhra and say I was ok with it, I definitely would not be able to do so as it WAS morally wrong. If someone asks me if the post-Godhra handling has improved the situation, I would say – Yes without hesitation.
The argument that it will cause Muslims to harbour resentment doesnt wash as there are some who dont need a reason to fight with Hindus and create mischief and there are those who just want to co-exist peacefully and move beyond. Not to retaliate against Muslim violence/vandalism/mischiefs for the fear that they weill feel bad is a bullshit argument.
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March 1, 2013 at 12:20 PM
yes but as I said yesterday the post-Sena and then post-Dawood (bombings) situation in Bombay is pretty good too. What does this mean? Is this the sort of Wild West logic we’re looking for?
Also and again to repeat the point from yesterday the people who commit the acts are not the same as the ones who are then killed. Does it really stop any committed terrorist for instance if people from his or her community are killed? Going by your logic it would be perfectly understandable if Muslims were massacred in NY after 9/11. Because they would have been taught a lesson. Let’s say a mob shows up at your house back home one day and says it’s extracting revenge for what happened post-Godhra? would this be ok? You had nothing to do with any of it! Isn’t this precisely the Firaaq logic from the other side which many rightly found upsetting (including myself)? But one cannot then start using it from the other side!
The problem is precisely painting entire communities in certain ways. I will offer a radical formulation — the ‘Muslim’ does not exist. the ‘Hindu’ does not exist. So on and so forth. All these labels are already abstractions that in many situations are also politically dangerous. For instance if Muslims start killing certain lower castes as part of the ‘Hindu’ label they would be grossly in error or at least unaware that caste violence in North India (not only here) has a history infinitely more violent than the Hindu-Muslim problem and across a much longer span of time. The ‘Hindu’ label is meaningless for those lower caste groups. This is so in many different situations. The most brutal civil wars in Europe were fought within christianity. Compared to this the Crusades were a birthday party (literally!). Which is not to say that these labels don’t have some loose value in terms of indexing certain kinds of belonging to a group. But one cannot take this too far. Because a very different kind of indexing would create huge differences within the very same group. So ‘Hindu’ means a certain set of things. On the other hand the caste debate within ‘Hindu’ tears apart this label. In a somewhat lesser sense a ‘North-South’ divide might do the same. So on and so forth.
On a related note I’ll repeat an older point. You often here a certain formulation or at least a logic that’s like it where someone says ‘hey I’m not anti-Muslim, I actually have Muslim friends’ or ‘I’m not anti-Hindu, many Hindus are nice people’. The problem is that this structure of the exception proves the bias. It doesn’t argue against it. Because it highlights how can only think of the ‘other’ in those abstract terms to which the particular (the friend or whatever) becomes an exception. So the friend is a ‘nice Muslim’ or ‘nice Hindu’ precisely because he or she does not behave in the ways one otherwise expects from ‘Muslims’ or ‘Hindus’.
By the way there’s an Obama twist on this. He would frustrate a lot of the racially-inclined opposition less if he just belonged to the obvious stereotypes in these matters. Say the Chris Rock kind of black guy or maybe a sports icon. By being black but not so in ways where he can be absorbed into American registers he disturbs people even more!
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March 1, 2013 at 1:35 PM
“Going by your logic it would be perfectly understandable if Muslims were massacred in NY after 9/11. ”
I agree Modi did (overlooked or colluded with perpetrators) is not correct especially when you are constitutionally required to guard for all the people of your State.
But I do have issues with suggestion that fire in train happened in isolation or there was no external involvement. It is probabilistically impossible that a train would stop near Muslim dominated area ferrying kar sevaks and it caught fire and half of the people got burned in bogey by kerosene stove. There was something more, we can conjecture and give accounts but there was something fishy.
General rant:
Minorities in any part of earth try to preserve their identity (like teaching my daughter to learn Hindi in US English). But to preserve my identity I shouldn’t stop her from learning other things like English or anything which is done by majority of people. I think it is important when you feel minority in any situation, it is advisable to follow majority and at same time try preserving your minority identity. In ideal world you should be left to do whatever way you want to live. But real world people judge others and some of them act also.
ps – I always say that we Indians are the most racist (of all the people I know). We distinguish on everything, Caste, region, skin color…I might not agree with many things in US but at least in coastal US I don’t see any kind of discrimination, just because someone is from other country. May be people from other countries don’t demand the share of pie like Hispanics or Afro Americans. May be by the same reason Muslims generate more reactions in Majority Hindu State than say a Sikh or Christian!
ps1 – There are more things to say but I am not good at writing.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:44 PM
Munna, I’m not taking an absolute position on the Godhra matter one way or the other even if all the scholarly literature on this leads me to believe the event is minimally murky but on the other hand it is not as if political conspiracies or engineered pogroms have never happened in history. You might well be right on Godhra (which still does not argue against an engineered pogrom) but this has not been established beyond a reasonable doubt, certainly by any impartial observers who follow these sorts of events around the globe for a living. for instance if a bomb explodes in a Muslim neighborhood isn’t it sometimes the case that the local Muslim leader is himself responsible for such an event to then whip up his followers?
On your last paragraph I’d agree with the African-American exception. It’s way better than it used to be, there’s no comparison but it’s still not a level-playing field in any sense.
Agree on the assimilation bit, at least as a pragmatic matter, but the logic runs both ways. So blacks for example cannot simply assimilate if whites don’t wish to return the favor.
By the way your writing is perfectly fine. You furthermore have the gift of concision which I should learn about one day!
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March 1, 2013 at 1:45 PM
Will add this as a more general matter about Godhra. It’s become one of those defining events for both communities. So no matter what other narrative one ‘compromises’ on one cannot on this one.
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March 1, 2013 at 12:07 PM
One of the problems in these discussions always is that people aren’t willing to mourn the loss of human life and/or empathize with human misery in any absolute sense. It’s always part of an ‘economic’ debate where a negotiation comes about and if the misery of ‘a’ is accepted then the misery of ‘b’ is in turn considered by the other side. And so on. I remember some 9/11 debates on this blog and others along the same lines. One can criticize American imperialism and justly talk about all the politics on all sides that has contributed to a certain kind of violence. But all of this shouldn’t limit one’s sympathy for the victims of 9/11. It is absolutely true that even in a global sense every human life is not worth the same. 3000 Americans are for instance worth more than say 500,000 Rwandans. Vulgar as this sounds it is unfortunately true. But recognizing this structure does not mean that one should start subscribing to it from the other side. Any life lost is so in a singular sense. The same holds for any kind of violent atrocity that a human undergoes.
In the debate yesterday this was in some ways the most essential point I was trying to make. That one cannot start trading victims. Whatever version of events one chooses to believe one ought to be able to accept at least this. I’m not talking about what happens as matter of course in politics where one riot leads to another or one event triggers another. I’m just talking about the morality of the debate. And even this has a practical value to it. One of the ‘pragmatic’ reasons one shouldn’t trade victims this way is because there are different points at which a history of tragedy can be made to begin. There is nothing obvious about choosing one point as opposed to another. So for instance one could say that Godhra triggered what followed and without this there would be no issue. Even accepting this more ‘traditional’ version of the event one might accept that logic except that it’s not the complete story. Because without a larger and much longer cycle of communal violence and suspicion Godhra itself wouldn’t mean as much. So one cannot pretend that history began yesterday. There are of course precipitating events but without the history these events would have far less important consequences.
And here a related problem is the easy ways in which people believe or are made to believe that riots just happen spontaneously or fluidly flow out of precipitating events and nothing can be done and so. All of this is a structure that allows everyone concerned to evade responsibility. Because it is always an abstract, uncontrollable mob that does these things. But this is the case actually only a minority of the time in the history of riots in any country. For the most part there are political forces that manage the economy of how and when these riots take place. Even in India when the machinery of the state govt is really determined to control violence there are never very major events along these lines. But what happens is that much as “war is politics by other means” riots (or even pogroms) too follow the same logic. So the ‘spontaneity’ of riots is quite often a myth.
Finally in the context of the entire discussion yesterday this is where Hey Ram within a commercial format offered such a provocative way or thinking about these things. So you have a protagonist who was let’s say a ‘Nehruvian’ of sorts or believed in the AAA view of the world. Then he goes through a very traumatic crisis and becomes a monomaniac of sorts. How does this happen? He loses his wife in a brutal riot and then he starts blaming an entire community for this. Which is at one level completely natural and a normal human reaction. But the film argues against this. Because what happens to Kamal’s character is nonetheless particular. No matter how many people are involved in a riot it is still not everyone or even a majority. But he resorts to an abstraction once this happens and blames precisely ‘everyone’. The Gandhi assassination moment is very important later on not for the usual polemical reasons (‘right-wingers killed Gandhi..’) but for indexing how any such extremist political ideology is minimally cannibalistic on itself. This is what happens historically. The quest for purity starts imagining more and more people who even when they belong to the same grouping are considered impure. This moment is then necessary as bridge between the film’s bookends. At the end a similar crisis happens, this time the protagonist is saved by his old Muslim friend. But this too is a very particular incident. It is one man, one friend or one family that protects him. The rest of the mob, Muslim, is still after him and in fact that self-cannibalizing moment mentioned earlier is mirrored here when SRK’s character is fatally attacked. So there are larger rules of the game. All abstractions fail. The reason this film is very skilfully structured is because it gives one over completely to this dangerous logic by way of Kamal’s character and then starts deconstructing it from the inside. It might well be ‘human’ to behave in certain ways but it is certainly not the only human possibility in this or any other situation. And part of arguing for a greater, less-cramped notion of humanism is precisely not succumbing to these easy definitions we inherit as a cultural archive.
Getting back to the old debate the classic right-wing grievance (here I won’t question the narrative in other ways..) about how Muslim conquerors destroyed cultural monuments and desecrated archives and so on. A lot of this is true. Again I won’t argue about the ‘a-historical’ standards used (for instance I could call everyone who kept a slave in 19th century America a disgusting human being but of course this was an institutional problem and many ‘nice people’ who treated their slaves very well were part of it.. and so Muslim conquerors did a lot of this stuff as did many other conquerors even down to our present day) but the point once again is: where does this history begin? Or end? If you destroy a mosque in the present as part of this larger cycle of historical vengeance what’s to stop the other side returning four centuries later in very different circumstances and doing the very same?! And why is it only about Muslims and Hindus? Why not Hindus and Buddhists? The latter faced at least as much trouble from orthodox Hinduism and was eventually chased out of India (this the land of its birth!). What about ‘Dravidian’ grievances about how ‘Aryans’ from the North destroyed a lot of their culture? So on and so forth. Any framing becomes politically convenient. Tamilians in Sri Lanka have been brutally suppressed for the longest time. This is not to condone LTTE violence but their grievances with the Sinhalese majority predate the formation of the LTTE. In some future if these Tamilians have more power over the Sinhalese the answer wouldn’t be to start massacring the latter or whatever. It would be historically ‘understandable’ inasmuch as these things happen in a lot of places but it would still not be right. And the proper response then wouldn’t be too argue ‘hey they did it first’. Because one then subscribes to the same sort of violence. One cannot say ‘I am not a monster except if monstrous things are done to me’! In at least the land of the Mahatma we should be able to follow this logic… It is a brutal historical irony not to say a deeply tragic development that in present-day Gujarat Modi is more of a hero for more people than Bapu…
Politics doesn’t appear out of a vacuum.. we make it in our image..
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March 1, 2013 at 12:25 PM
I see where you are coming from Satyam.
The problem is there has to be a solution. The situation cannot be allowed to fester. There might be (MIGHT) be historical argument for the continued resentment the Muslims harbor but they have to learn to move beyond it. There is no place in today’s India where the average Hndu doesnt care unless provoked. Most Hindus are happy to co-exist and leave in peace. The loss of lives has to be mourned but the status quo was unacceptable. A lot of people were responsible for the situation but the least responsible party was the ‘regular’ Hindu who doesnt want any of this shit. History, politicians, Muslim mindset all played a role. I have no qualms about absolving the ‘regular’ Hindu of blame here as I have been one and lived with those. However imperfect the Modi solution might be, it has atleast worked so far. Nothing else has made a difference.
One can compare the post-Gdhra to Nazi progroms but would be dishonest as the context is different. There IS no continued victimisation of Muslims. If Modi is popular, there isa reason.
Most people are not cruel and vindictive. They just want to live peacefully and prosper. If someone continually gets in the way,they want a solution. In the process, some who were presumed innocent but were guilty by association and indifference suffered.Ifone has a constructive alternative solution to the situation, feel free to criticise Modi. But, the status quo WAS NOT accpetable. At some point, enough is enough.
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March 1, 2013 at 12:44 PM
Rajen, again I would accept a lot of what you’re saying but I think there are some very questionable ‘phantom’ assumptions here. So you have on one side the ‘regular Hindu’ who just wants to lead a normal life and not be subjected to violence and live a life of peace and so forth. This sounds suspiciously like the claims that are made about contemporary Americans! Now in a literal sense this if course true. Most regular Hindus are exactly as you describe them much as most regular Americans are also the same. But for some mysterious reasons the minorities in India don’t have such a tame view of the majority nor does the non-American world have a similarly benign view of Americans. Why?
The other problem is most people in all communities are just like the regular Hindu or the regular American. The average Muslim in India is not about secret Jehadist plots of Kashmiri separatism or what have you. The ‘Muslim’ who is the problem for a larger national malaise is an old fantasy that finds different formulations in different political spaces. The ‘Jew’ was such a fantasy in other contexts. In each case this label is made to bear the weight of a number of social, political or economic ills. And beyond a point it becomes ‘obvious’ in its force even though very few people who have this complaint have any direct experience of such violence at the hands of this other. I was once in a debate on NG with someone on this very topic. Forget who it was. At one point he said that Muslim areas were terrible and I didn’t know what went on in them and so on. A bit later when challenged on this he said these areas were so miserable that even the police didn’t go into them. So somehow this person was offering direct testimony for something that apparently even the police had not witnessed. This is the power of myth. There are lots of problems in black neighborhoods in America. The inner cities are not places we venture into. The communities are challenged in all sorts of ways. But there is no great problem in the US that is so ‘because’ of this minority. The trick in a fascist discourse is to precisely perform this switch and convince people that this is so. So ‘the Jew’ becomes a vessel into which a great deal is thrown in. Again in the lower caste view of the world the upper class Hindu is what the Muslim is for the latter. But here there are historical facts. These groups have been dominated. Similarly it’s one thing to argue that when Muslims ruled India a minority was in charge and quite another to argue that in a democratic state somehow 11% of the population is calling the shots! I too have heard very many claims similar to yours but these all operate in the space of fantasy and then when an event happens it is seen as confirming this larger fantasy. Not because anyone believes these things cynically. It’s just a narrative that takes hold. Muslims are in many cases in India a more depressed economic community than even many lower castes. Their visibility in the film industry or certain other areas doesn’t prove anything. There are other reasons for this. But by and large the national metrics on this group are abysmal. They are themselves to blame for this in some respects. But the point is that it is simply not plausible (and certainly not supported by any objective facts) that this minority is somehow dominating the majority anywhere. It is a right-wing fantasy construction that has unfortunately had great success even outside right-wing circles. There are a million similar examples of the same just in recent history. Obviously no one is doing to the Muslims what the Nazis did to the Jews. There’s no comparison. But the terms of the debate are eerily similar. Discrimination and violence are not terrible only when they rise to Nazi levels. The US has a black president, that doesn’t mean institutional and literal racism against blacks does not exist.
so again there was ‘no’ problem with the status quo. Before Godhra happened were there marauding Muslim gangs in Amdavad or wherever terrorizing Hindus everywhere?!
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March 1, 2013 at 12:32 PM
That’s all fine Satyam but here is a question- why is it that more than 90% of terrorist attacks are being carried out by Muslims? Isn’t there an institutional problem somewhere? But no one wants to answer this
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March 1, 2013 at 12:58 PM
There absolutely is a problem within Islam. there absolutely are political varieties of Islam that are absolutely repellent. But this isn’t close to being everyone. Notice how when the recent Mideast ‘revolutions’ happened the one thing that wasn’t visible was ‘Islamism’. weren’t we told for years that these regions were hotbeds of religious extremism with the entire population sympathetic and what not. what happened? In Egypt the Muslim brotherhood has taken advantage of a chaotic situation as they had the most institutional advantages but they hardly did great in the election. It is always easy to for a minority to take control of the discourse. Unlike many I don’t believe that there’s no problem within contemporary Islam. There absolutely is. from the other side the view once was (and often still is) that 100% of the colonizers are Christians! In the US you have people who make the argument that most crime concerns blacks. Now the stats on this are a bit dubious but even accepting them once again you have to cross-tab things. Assuming a certain economic set of circumstances, assuming a certain history, assuming continued institutional racism in the present certain things become more possible. if you and I were living in those neighborhood with those histories we might well be criminals too! It doesn’t take religious extremism to make a suicide bomber as the Palestinians proved long ago and as the LTTE did even more profoundly. People can use this means for all sorts of reasons much as in a war the same weapons can be used by any side. Nor is religious extremism in our own age limited to Islam (as many scholars and journalists have documented) though it often finds it’s most violent manifestation in the latter. But on that note in most of these studies the Hindutva brigade in India is taken as one of the primary examples of religious extremism and violence related to the same. Of course no one likes hearing this much as Muslims refuse to accept that there’s any problem within contemporary Islam. The stats at any rate can be very misleading. In most revolutions you really just have a minority that gains control and then acquires absolute power. In some of the more disreputable claims people like to state that most German were sympathetic to Nazis. Well Hitler never got more than 32% of the vote! So yes 90% of the terrorists might be Muslims but that 90% on the Muslim side might be drawn from a 5% slice. Which is still a problem but there’s a universe of difference between those two stats. Again note no matter how much I have criticized Modi I have never come even close to suggesting that somehow ordinary Gujaratis are responsible or that the majority feel the same way and so on. The whole problem lies in such generalizations.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:25 PM
and here’s a good example of how pernicious these stereotypes can become over time. In any major city in the US if you’re white (or Asian or Hispanic!) and walking down a relatively quiet street and if you see a black man approaching from the other direction your automatic reflexive reaction is one of anxiety if not fear. Then the guy passes you by and you tell yourself ‘phew he’s not one of those’! So the black man is minimally defined as a criminal.
Another example — Asians including those from the Indian subcontinent are among the most racist people on the planet (though they only notice racism when it’s directed at them by way of whites). In many conversation they congratulate themselves on becoming successful after migrating to another country and seeing their kids do very well while on the other hand there are those ‘lazy’ blacks who refuse to work hard in the same way or assume any kind of responsibility. These sounds rational as far as it goes. But there’s a great slippage here. Because the Asians in this case come from drastically different socio-economic circumstances than most blacks. They already come with certain strengths. The situations are just not analogous. But if one essentializes things and talks only in terms of labels like ‘Indians’, ‘Japanese’, ‘Blacks’ one accepts the former view.
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March 1, 2013 at 12:42 PM
Satyamji..apki arguments mujhey iss song ki yaad diya di:
n’you
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March 1, 2013 at 1:47 PM
Ha! Good one! I’m literally exhausted at this point!
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March 1, 2013 at 1:18 PM
Excellent points Satyam! Personally, I belonged to this “classic right-wing grievance school of thought” for a very long time. The feelings were hardened while growing up, whenever I heard of the misery that befell my own ancestors when they were forced to leave their homeland and cross over the border. But, as you rightly said, events do not just precipitate out of nowhere, there is a deeper history behind it all. If one rationally analyzes the past 1000 yrs of sub-continental history, a conclusion can be made that there really was no ‘Hindu’ vs ‘Muslim’ in all those wars/pillaging of the past 1000 yrs. A conqueror could not have set foot past the Khyber, if there really was a unified Hindu nation. The people across the Indus were already significantly divided into castes and languages, rendering them incapable of putting up a unified fight. The invaders that came took advantage of this, and in fact played one side vs another in conquering the land bit-by-bit. And there was no single set of conquerors either. We had Turks, Mongols, Arabs, Persians, Afghans, etc. all coming in at diff intervals, none of them aligned to each other. In fact, the ones that came would quickly be assimilated into an ‘Indian culture’, so much that they would fight together with the locals agains the next set of invaders. The Mughals could not establish power without the help of the Rajputs. Even then, they could hardly conquer anywhere beyond the Deccan, because there were other alliances down south between Muslims and Dravidians that trumped the alliances from the North. There never was a ‘Hindu’ vs ‘Muslim’ fight for 1000 yrs. So therefore, this entire ‘Hindu right-wing grievance’ is misplaced. First of all, the Hindu right needs to introspect, and ask themselves, why were they so divided 1000 yrs ago. Have they done anything to fix/eradicate the caste malaise that existed back then? If not, how can they just force 1 billion people to subscribe to their theories?
How much ever we may revere Gandhi, he too made mistakes. If he had only allowed Ambedkar’s proposal to organize Dalits politically, and be given special Dalit-only seats in the constituent assemblies, it would have created a third political force to counter-balance the Hindu vs Muslim frictions. Jinnah would have been assured that there would be no post-independence Hindu monopolization of power. What Gandhi stopped in 1930, eventually happened post-Mandal in 1990. The myriad political formations today exhibit the real balance of power that a true democracy has created. However, this balance of power has not been extended to the Muslims of India. Pakistan was created for Muslims, but they actually stopped Muslim migration from India in the 1950s itself! As a result, Muslims of India have been deprived of real political representation, being used only as votebanks by self-serving non-Muslim political parties. They live today in small geographical pockets in a state of permanent siege, worrying about threats from a Hindu majority (which really is not a majority), and unable to grab opportunities to better their own lives. Had there been no parition, there indeed would have been real political representation for all muslims, and a real balance of power between every group and sub-group of caste/religion in the sub-continent. Due to miscalculations and errors of our founding fathers, we exist in a permanent conflict-zone, with issues that can never be resolved.
If we sympathize with Hindus who lost their homes and hearths in 1947, I believe we should equally sympathize with the Muslims who went to the other side and got tagged as Mohajirs. We should sympathize with the Ghanchi Muslims living in pockets such as Godhra, forever in a siege mentality, that causes them to take foolish steps such as what happened in 2002.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:36 PM
Some great points here Nykavi, specially in the first paragraph. Because this is the other problem of reading things ‘a-historically’. To be Muslim in 16th century India, specially if one is a kind or prince and if one has arrived from Central Asia, is not at all the same as being Muslim in say Bombay in 2013. The larger belief system is the same but the contexts are radically different. Being Muslim in an earlier age did not mean the very same thing that it does today. Or even today being Muslim in Turkey or Bosnia is very different from being Muslim in Indonesia. everything that a Muslim conqueror did wasn’t necessarily done in the name of religion. And even when it was a lot of times it was a cynical decision to use religion as a political doctrine. But as you rightly point there would have been no Muslim rule in India without very many intricate alliances between Muslims and Hindus (or those that were nominally so in each case). Much as in South India when the British arrived you often had Muslim princes helping the British to defeat each other. So every act that a Muslim or Hindu rules takes part in is not automatically a ‘religious’ one. in fact these rulers were most successfully precisely when they used religion as a political or tactical weapon. The Akbar compact as it turns is a much smarter one than the Aurangzeb one! In most Mughal courts there were first of all Rajputs who had pride of place among ‘Hindu’ dynasties, then among Muslims there was a Persian contingent which was influential but not entirely trusted because of course Persia was a rival power, there were ‘original’ Central Asians, then there were local Muslim rulers who were actually fairly low down on the scale in most cases. The Rajputs one could say only with a little bit of exaggeration were among the most influential players in every Mughal era at least for the longest time. These alliances crosses ‘party lines’ all the time. Because maintaining dynastic or ‘tribal’ control (if you will) was more important than anything else. Similarly in Europe even at the height of the Crusades you often had one Christian ruler siding with a Muslim one against another Christian. Sometimes because they belonged to different sects but sometimes it was just about dynasty. it is in fact a fairly modern understanding and re-definition of religion that converts it into the equivalent of national identity. These boundaries were often much more fluid in an older age. They are still so today in many instances but less recognized as such in the national hegemonic narrative. And the same holds for ethnicity and language and so on. People who live in border regions of two states, speak two languages, they in a sense belong either to both states or to neither one but politics forces them to accept one identity more fully.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:32 PM
Satyam,
I will give you an example and there are hundreds of cases like this.
I have an associate I work with closely. When he was in college, he used to share a hostel room with a Muslim. At one time there were usual Hindu-Muslim riots and a crowd came to the hostel looking for his friend. He hid him under the bed and told the crowd he was not there. and, after giving him a hard time,the crowd eventually left.
Fast forward 20 years. The same Muslim roommate now has turned fundamentalist. On a recent visit to India, he tried to meet him and the erstwhile Muslim room mate would not take his calls or return them!
I am not in favor of denouncing an entire community or a religion. But, the progressive Muslims HAVE to play a part.
They may argue – why is it their responsibility? It is not a question of responsibility but one of survival. The progressive and innocent Muslims will be carried away by the tide with the fundametalists eventually. One cannot bury ones head in sand and deny that there is a problem with a section of Muslim community. And, it is a vocal group and is often successful in corrupting a few of the rest. History cannot be used to justify their behaviour.Nor can it be used as an excuse.
Indians have moved past their hatred of the English. Where the grouse is more legitimate and wounds more fresh.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:37 PM
“But, the progressive Muslims HAVE to play a part.”
here I agree completely..
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March 1, 2013 at 1:46 PM
Fair enough Rajen though doesn’t this lead back to the Hey Ram example? More than this I am certain there are as many stories on the other side.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:18 PM
Put another way many whites have been the victims of crimes at the hands of blacks. This still doesn’t mean that most blacks are criminals.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:37 PM
Nykavi, I do agree with many of your points but frankly the idea that Muslims live under constant fear in India and that they are not being properly represented is a bizarre statements. Muslims in India enjoy as much liberties as Hindus if not more. I very clearly remember that during 2000 when the match-fixing controversy happened and Azhar was accused he made a ridiculous statement that he is being selectively targetted because he belongs to a minority community. I lost a lot of respect for him then though he still remains my favourite sportsperson
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March 1, 2013 at 1:39 PM
yes but that kind of liberal white-washing which I’ve criticized in the past is really the other side of the ‘bias’ coin. In other words it’s only because there is institutional bias and so on that there is liberal overreaction on the other side. The same happens in the US in a very different context.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:49 PM
By the way can’t stand it when folks like Azhar (or SRK more recently) play this card very cynically and poison the discourse even more. Because it plays to the worst kind of minority paranoia that ‘hey even SRK can’t get a fair shake in India’. Meanwhile it also offends the majority who can’t believe SRK given his singular status is playing to these elements. These guys are really the worst offenders.
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March 1, 2013 at 1:56 PM
But notice how even the ‘progressive Muslim’ (mostly engineers and doctors) are also turning fundamentalist (and as we know at times have been found to be involved in the terror attacks). Raj Kumar Gupta’s Aamir, for all its political problems, dealt with the above issue very issue
Aside, It’s important to keep in mind that BJP or Right is not only about insane folks like Thackeray and Modi. For every Modi there is/was an Atal, Sushma Swaraj and Pramod Mahajan. I belong to the right but I have zero tolerance for Modi and Sena. I believe that Atal was always a follower of the secular and all-inclusive Nehruvian model.
Also on somewhat related note I would recommend everyone to see this. Looks really good
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March 1, 2013 at 2:16 PM
That’s quite right. In the US there was that Pakistani female professor at MIT or some place who was arrested for being involved in a plot. She’s currently serving a life sentence somewhere. But see the thing is I don’t find define many of these people as crazy. Doing so lets them off the book and plus one underestimates the dangerousness of the ideology. Or to put it differently and rely on a somewhat theoretical register they might be ‘rational’ actors but not ‘reasonable’ ones. if I say I’m stocking up on food because aliens are going to attack the earth tomorrow my actions are rational inasmuch as they follow from that initial premise but unreasonable to the degree that the initial premise is problematic (to say the least!). And so a number of discourses can seem rational as long as the premises are accepted.
In any case my point there isn’t that there isn’t a problem with these Islamist discourses. Actually in many other contexts my commentary on all of this is considered by many to be absolutely hostile to Islam! That isn’t true much as in this current debate I am by no means a supporter of Islam. Nor am I engaging in some very idealistic argument which even if true isn’t workable. I am not offering a prescription in any sense, just analyzing things. And again I actually found Firaaq rather offensive as a film, wrote a piece on it, this despite the fact that it was on the very subject we’ve been talking about these past two days. For a lot of liberal opinion Nandita Das was on the money. I happened to disagree violently. My proposition is actually a fairly modest one — that people often behave miserably in specific circumstances because of political ideology and one must question the latter and certainly the former as individuals but that questioning the community ‘as such’ misses the mark. But related to this when there’s a controversial event one shouldn’t automatically look at it from the prism of one’s identity. This is hard of course. we all have our biases. But looking at Godhra from say the ‘Hindu perspective’ versus the ‘Muslim one’ is to already miss the point. One will have done no more than confirm the hegemonic framing in these matters. It is true that people from Gujarat often feel defensive after Godhra and everything that followed, as if they have to answer for this the way Germans have to forever answer for the Nazi past. In this case before liberal opinion in the media or even nationally in certain other ways. But that isn’t my position.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:23 PM
on a related note two older comments from a few months ago (this was in response to the Owaisi video and the question someone raised was whether Muslims are expected to denounce this sort of thing every time):
[perhaps not every time but certainly there should be prominent voices denouncing it ‘some’ of the time. But we don’t see this very often. This also happens worldwide in certain ways where the excesses of various nations are highlighted and criticized as they should be but when it then comes to turning the mirror towards oneself, as it were, there is silence. And while I understand some of the politics here, one doesn’t want to play into the hands of the other, the fact is that nothing excuses silence when it comes to certain issues.]
[You’re correct on many counts Ami but the problem is there is an asymmetry in this sense in more ways than one. The Hindutva brigade is often criticized in the media by the ‘secular left’. Quite appropriately in my opinion. But no such attention is given to Muslim extremist rhetoric. Because they are as usual afraid that by doing so they will tar all Muslims and hence betray their liberalism. Now I prefer a weak liberalism to the alternative but it is often susceptible to this kind of blackmail which both extremes (the Hindu right and Muslim right) collude in. In other words both sides are very happy with these easy definitions of the majority and the minority because it serves their purposes. The great move in Nihalani’s Dev was opposing the Hindutva-type (Om Puri) to the normative Hindu (Bachchan). Note how the latter is shown doing puja and so on while the latter is simply committed to a political program. It is always the classic move on the right to really be about politics but do so in the guise of tradition and family values. And when there isn’t a vibrant liberal discourse defending both normative Hindus and normative Muslims you have extremes hegemonizing the discourse at both ends. So the Hindutva message is simple — the left doesn’t want any kind of Hindu faith in India and in addition they’re about appeasing Muslims. From the Muslim Imams and so forth the symmetric counter-message is — the country is really for Hindus, look at Hindutva, the secular left is just a scam trying to cover this deceit. Not surprisingly BJP leaders also throw grand Iftar parties and the Imams happily attend. They have the same agenda!
The secular/liberal left should call out both sides and not just establish credibility for itself but also provide a voice for ‘silent’ normative majorities on both sides who are otherwise either pushed into the arms of the extremes for lack of representation and continue with their mode of enforced silence. One should not look at all kinds of faith with suspicion but the problem is that a certain brand of liberalism (not only in India, and there are certain philosophical reasons for this…) celebrates all kinds of faith but only as ‘cultural values’. If it’s about authentic faith then everyone has a problem. It’s like someone showing bad manners at a social gathering. Politeness requires that we follows our practices but without really ‘taking them too seriously’ as Zizek would say. The space then for Bachchan’s character in Dev is a rather shrunken one. And so to get back to the initial point one shouldn’t at all worry about violently criticizing such extremist rhetoric. One should take the risk because such a risk minimally opens up a better political space. The blurring of the boundaries in the existing arrangement doesn’t upset the reigning extremism (on both sides) at all!]
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March 1, 2013 at 2:24 PM
and here I should add that contra what I and Rocky were joking about yesterday Rajen is really on the Bachchan (Dev) side of the equation. However sometimes both extremist and liberal opinion conspire to make this very space claustrophobic and one is then unable to express certain questions except in a much sharper formulation.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:40 PM
or differently still the liberal media has often conflated criticism of Modi and the violence surrounding Godhra with Gujarati stereotypes and so on. It is then understandable if one finds oneself to be somewhat defensive on this issue. This is why the Nandita Das film was lapped up. In no other context would this kind of political film get such acceptance across the board in at least liberal opinion.
There is a larger global point to be made here. We live in an age where religion is supposed to be merely about cultural values in many cross-sections of society all over the world. It’s not ‘cool’ to take it more seriously than this. So if you really insist on believing in it more you are likely to be labeled an extremist. So again the Dev analogy. Bachchan is normal or normative Hindu. He’s not an agnostic about things. He’s a comforting old-fashioned type in this regard. But the discourse on both sides conflates the two. For the liberal believing serious is some kind of extremism to begin with and for the Om Puri (Dev) type what matters is really the political activism and so on (he’s never shown praying in the film). Both sides then tell the Bachchan kind of Hindu – you’re really one of us so stop vacillating. And there’s no adequate political representation for this kind of Hindu. what you get is Bollywood variety (say Karan Johar) where religion is reduced to a private fetish! And the same is true in most other countries of the world. Not as much so in the Islamic world where religion is still taken a lot more seriously and where this same sort of skeptical discourse often has less force.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:19 PM
How about a SOLUTION? What IS the solution????
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March 1, 2013 at 2:31 PM
I think that the solution is exactly what we’ve been doing here for the last two days! I know this sounds crazy but one cannot only think in revolutionary terms and seismic shifts. One has to start somewhere. Now if either one of us or both were in politics or let’s say we were editors of newspapers we could do other things to keep a more responsible conversation alive. We cannot do that of course but I think this ain’t nothing! But there is no easy solution or certainly no obvious one. It would help greatly if there were more serious commentary at least to begin with on the liberal side of the equation (Outlook or whatever). But even this isn’t easy because politics constantly tries to co-opt such opinion. Still one shouldn’t only think in terms of the numbers. It’s the cliched ripples example. You thrown a stone in the water, a ripple is created and it keeps extending. Maybe 10 people have been following our debate these last two days, maybe a 100. Whatever the number it’s better than zero. Whatever side people fall on they will have witnessed a certain airing of the issues. A candid discussion among friends where no one reading should have been offended.
Of course this can’t solve every problem. The RNBDJ criminals are still around..
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March 1, 2013 at 2:44 PM
Satyam, aapko pata hai ki aapke likhne ki gati meri sochne ki gati se bhi zyaada hai!
Great points. Especially loved your line that each tragedy is singular. A somewhat related film on this was De Palma’s very fine work Redacted- probably the most disturbing anti-war film I have seen and really abt ‘singularity’ of atrocity.
I also have zero tolerance for those North Indian Hindus who howl and cry (rightly so)when they are mistreated by Sena in Maharashtra but otherwise support these same folks when they get down to to their dirty communal activities.
And someone please define me the meaning of the Marathi Manoos! I am from Lucknow but have been studying in Maharashtra for the past 4 years. What I end up having a permanent residence here. Would I then not be entitled for the Marathi Manoos tag! How is a Bohra from Bombay any less Maharashtrian than say a Gaekwad.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:52 PM
I’ve personally always felt that Bombay should have had a Delhi-like status. It was a rather special example. Gujaratis for instance had in many ways as much right to the city. They have been great contributors in a historic sense. But of course these things always become a cold numbers game. Defining it as a Maharashtrian city was always problematic but of course over time this has been made a reality at certain levels. Specially the very ugly politics that the Sena unleashed and everything it led to was a great tragedy for this city.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:54 PM
“There is a larger global point to be made here. We live in an age where religion is supposed to be merely about cultural values in many cross-sections of society all over the world. It’s not ‘cool’ to take it more seriously than this.”-
Superb point here. I would also add that Hinduism was never a religion (atleast in the Catholic sense of the word) in the true sense but ‘a way of life’. Infact Hinduism allowed a ‘Hindu’ to be an atheist and yet be allowed to keep the title of being a Hindu.
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March 2, 2013 at 1:32 AM
Saurabh, I did not mean to say that Muslims live in fear. But certainly, they lack a confidence in the freedom which they enjoy in India. How else can we explain the invoking of “Islam Khatrey mein hai” at every perceived slight incident.
Ironically, Pakistan is the one place where Islam is truely in Khatra. They have adopted a Wahabist-exclusive policy, and relegated every other Muslim sect to second class citizenship. Indian Shias must be thanking their lucky stars to have not migrated to Pakistan.
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March 2, 2013 at 2:47 AM
satyam you tend to write remarkably well indeed from hstory,program to prejudice and finally the d factor
lets go into program forget old history lets start from recent history:
jinnah calls for direct action day in kolkata which started the onslaught of masscare with slogans like islam khatre main hai and ladke lenge pakistan which ultimately resulted in castrophe resulting into death of over ten lakh people right in fourty’s
in the great bangladeshi liberation war when pakistan army started slaughtering and rape as tool in eastern parn casualities where mostly hindus and the target to
one ayodhya which is on hindu revered site and the structure which is disputed for last one hundred fifty years resulted in close to one lakh demolition of temple in pak and bangladesh again a so called reaction ….again a writer like taslima nasreen in exile because he hasn’t written anything on islam but in lajja on mostly condition after ayodhya and plight of hindus and one know what happened to her… secularists and one wonder so called intellectuals are silent on that
in the late eighties when call for kasmiri pandits was given to leave the valley but they leave there women behind was again termed a jagmohan’s consiracy by muslim voice only living in a big deniel
for your analogy of dawood and things being normal in bombay is again wrong….it had to be normal because its financial capital of india and attracts investment…..where is bollywood and most of financial set up …here the stake of india is there….still twenty six by eleven happened which was huge and bigger than anything and so do regular communal riots which for past 5 years are entity especially during festivals
recently for over fifteen days riots happened in bareilly why there was big silence on that….in assam what happened for close to one month and so in myanmar….when threats are being issued and a big chunk of north eastern people where leaving southern india where was machinery
right after plagues which engulfed surat in 90’s to earthquake and finally riots progress of gujrat is remarkable and so is administration ..to ignore godhra in a way and being silent on place history is again makes one delusional only
lets talk about so called prejudice and resentment…today english and modern education along with family planning is essential for development and if a certain communities doesn’t want to embrace it they will always fall behind ….its time to compete and certainly not make excuses
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March 2, 2013 at 8:08 AM
Rockstar, those things are not mutually exclusive. For instance what the Pakistani army did in what was then East Pakistan was the worst kind of ethnic and religious cleansing. Because there was a huge anti-Bengali ‘racial’ bias, but also the ‘Hindu’ one and so the lines between Muslim and Hindu were constantly blurred in this ‘genocidal’ imagination. Rape as a weapon of war was used in modern times first in East Pakistan, and then more recently in Bosnia. What happened in 1971 remains one of the very terrible atrocities of the recent past. Many years ago I came across an article where a Pakistani commander who had taken part of campaign denied the charge of genocide and without any humor suggested that it was really more ‘genderdicide’ as they really went after men. Yes because they slaughtered the latter and only committed the worst rape campaign against the others!
On the subject of Bombay I don’t quite agree with everything you’re saying though note how 26/11 did not lead to anything. Nothing on the scale of the Sena riots/pogroms has happened in Bombay since 1993. Now I should add here that it is also true that sometimes when there are severe riots and everyone gets hurt from an economic point of view people then get smart about these things for a generation or so. For instance in 1986 there were important riots in Bhiwandi. But in 1993 when there was all this trouble in Bombay Bhiwandi was perfectly calm. But in any case my larger point still is that 95% of the time riots are not as spontaneous as they might seem. Even if not engineered they are often utterly predictable. The Jinnah point you raise is the perfect example here.
In any case this gets to my larger point. Whether it’s what happened in 1971 or what happened in 2002 I have the same absolute condemnation for these things. as a matter of fact though Pakistan does not really accept any responsibility for East Pakistan. That guy I quoted notwithstanding they claim that this has been Western exaggeration and so on or that India committed half the atrocities and blamed it on them on so on. There are always these denials. No one really accepts they did those things.
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March 2, 2013 at 2:58 AM
one came make thing go in circle by quoting certain selective history, blacks ,crusade and caste wars and what not but these are mostly things of past and if occuring on present drastic steps are being taken to control and they where termed problem by not living in denial
in today’s time regular violence in name religion is blasphemous again this should be liberal’s position but again one see huge silence on that … god doesn’t need blasphemous law to protect itself and so do violence and attack on other faith who are worshipping other ways to reach god only if one is beleivers and if one is cynical its again explores a whole different avenues
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March 2, 2013 at 3:09 AM
for your analogy of nazi’s and what not….
jews under them doesn’t have had any sort of political aspiration and never dream of making big inspite of resentment …there was a whole things being done to finish off a race mostly in camps ya correct but again it can be said of anything..it applied and fits remarkably on pundits who where thrown out of there native town and made to live in refugee camps
do you see camps running on there for destruction ….but there right throughout the world these camps are there where people are being brainwashed and trained to kill in name of religion…..let it whosever be
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March 2, 2013 at 8:44 AM
these are are just few random history even in context of indian history good one can go on and on if one is talk about exclusivity
btw good to see you yourself accept that most of these things are spontaneous and thats whats this movie kai po che depicted that after a certain time one has to move on
things where stable after twenty six by eleven because again it was an attack on financial capital to broke india again a restraint but in same city without any provocation azad maidan happened
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March 2, 2013 at 8:50 AM
No I’m saying the opposite, that most of these things are not spontaneous and it is a classic ideological move to evade responsibility and consider these things spontaneous.
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March 2, 2013 at 9:04 AM
but responsibility again can’t be done or look at selectively …
you yourself talk about intelligent and maturity of people after twenty six by eleven similarly even gujratis never allowed things to happen again and elect someone who is working thrice despite press going ballistic on him and one understand why because vajpayee term was the first where a non congress government compleated five year term in history of india and the press can’t feed the hand which has served them for to long
aside if a mob destroys symbol of indian defense forces in open and start riots without any provocation or anything what would this be called ….a resentment
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March 2, 2013 at 9:07 AM
yes but I’ve never blamed Gujaratis in the first place. If you read my comments I’ve made this very clear. Holding Modi responsible is not the same as holding Gujaratis responsible. I never make this illegitimate move from a particular set of political actors to wholesale condemnations of a group. So for instance I blame Nazis not every German! But if you want my view on this Modi emerged so tainted out of the whole episode within Indian and internationally that he knew he couldn’t have a repeat irrespective of anything else. Now of course he’s being suggested as a candidate for PM. Hope this never happens but I have my doubts whether this can happen. My sense is that outside Gujarat there are doubts about him even among supporters of the BJP. Specially in North India.
And again the whole point of my comments was that I precisely don’t look at these things selectively. However I also don’t think one should have to forever bring up other examples because that too is an evasion of responsibility. Either a killing is wrong or it isn’t. Because others are also indulging in the same sort of killing doesn’t justify this one. Here one must distinguish between what is ‘historically’ understandable or predictable and what is ‘right’ or not. These are two very different questions.
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March 2, 2013 at 9:23 AM
things didn’t happen because administration was tough on them later a things which is not being followed even in rest of india where these things are happened continuslly
same man despite that his risen by leap and bounds and is a future pm candidate without any political dynasty support so he must be doing things right to come with that and the same image internationally has risen which is shown by business gujrat is doing but again its a different deal alltogether
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March 2, 2013 at 11:25 AM
that doesn’t mean anything. Many fascist leaders are very successful electorally. Here’s part of an older comment:
[nor do I think that economic success in a state justifies pogroms. This is precisely the fascist tradeoff. No one ever did a better job on a country in terms of providing dynamic leadership than Hitler did with an unbelievably depressed German economy. I do not define incidentally economic success as ‘progressive’ unless it is leveraged in a certain way. But that too is another issue. I am not prepared to overlook atrocities because a leader is successful in other areas. I find such a tradeoff ‘inhuman’.]
and when I use Hitler or Nazi Germany as examples these are in a sense ‘absolute’ ones but there are plenty of other fascist leaders who behave in the very same way. A violence is not acceptable just because it falls short of rising to Hitler’s standards! If you were Jewish in Nazi Germany the German economic miracle would have been a bit irrelevant for you!
And to repeat an older point my argument is the very same whether Sikhs are being massacred in Delhi in ’84 or Pandits are being chased out of Jammu and so on. This is my whole point. If you asked me about one of these episodes I would condemn then in absolute terms. I wouldn’t say ‘before I comment on the plight of the Pandits let’s first look at what’s happening to Muslims elsewhere’!
Finally ‘once’ is more than enough. One doesn’t get brownie points for engaging in a pogrom or engineering riots just once!
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March 2, 2013 at 12:18 PM
This logic by Satyam will put an end to all the excuses. How can a pogrom is justified when there is constitution, courts etc. to solve issues? Hyderabad is relatively peaceful without resorting to any pogrom and so is Madhya Pradesh which has a sizable muslim population. There also we have BJP government but the CM is able to achieve this. And Karnataka is one more example under BJP. So BJP can be successful without Modi as these states prove.
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March 2, 2013 at 1:08 PM
thanks for that comment Sanjana.. even better examples are Kerala and TN. They don’t have BJP govts of course but they have every sizable Muslim/Christian populations. So whatever this Muslim ‘threat’ is supposed to be it should be massive here given the numbers. Yet these are the most violence-free states around (Hyderabad still had riots during the Rath Yatra period, nothing since, but yes those were more regular riots). Karnataka seems to be the most prone to right-wing politics in some ways but then this is also a Southern state at the crossroads of ‘North’ and ‘South’ if you will. But that’s a separate debate. Your larger point stands.
but this is connected to my other claim that riots/pogroms are always a ‘means’ of doing politics and not simply an ‘excessive’ moment not connected to political decisions. Much as ‘war’ is also a means of doing politics. And here to also clarify an earlier example (where I used the LTTE one), within the framework of the Indian nation-state Tamil linguistic nationalism is relatively benign. Because it can never be hegemonic (beyond in a regional sense) and the linguistic framework keeps the the religious or ethnic tensions much more in check than would otherwise be the case. Or at least this is the choice that Dravidian politics has mostly made. But linguistic nationalism isn’t as harmless in other contexts. In TN one way or the other everyone speaks Tamil, as a more or less natural matter. The Maharashtra example, specially the Bombay one, uses a similar linguistic nationalism in much more ugly ways. Firstly by tying it to notions of ethnicity and so on and then by trying to impose it on a city (Bombay) where Marathi is not as natural for the entire population (Telugu language politics in Andhra vis-a-vis Hyderabad is somewhat similar but not quite as insidious). Put different modern Tamil identity (which is to say over the last century or more) is premised on a linguistic nationalism which is much more inclusive whereas the Marathi kind insists on certain exclusions or is always able to define such because of course in Bombay (for example) everyone isn’t a ‘native’ Marathi speaker in the same sense. Hence when you have something absurd like Amitabh Bachchan being attacked by Raj Thackeray it is merely a symptom of something that is inherently problematic in this discourse. Again I mentioned yesterday that Gujaratis had as much of a right to the city as Maharastrians (obviously the greater numbers of the latter won out) if the city wasn’t going to be a city-state like Delhi (an idea briefly floated) because of their enormous contributions to the ‘making’ of Bombay in modern times but once upon a time, much moreso than today, Gujarati was a lingua franca in many parts of the city. Hindustani before all else but then these other pockets. Much as Marathi in many parts. Over time though a certain politics sought to make Marathi hegemonic and this was a problem. This politics has an ethnic and a religious charge. Hence depending on the Sena mood they’ve attacked Tamilians, North Indians and Muslims (from anywhere)! Usually the most powerless ones. Gujaratis cannot be attacked in the same way because they’re commercially very powerful in the city in a structural sense. In TN on the other hand everyone is in any case speaking Tamil. All that the politics then insisted on was for this to be the dominant identity feature as opposed to religion as so on (they were hostile to religion anyway.. the AIADMK of course changed all this). Whether everyone agreed with this move or not no one has to change anything. But the other kind creates integration challenges because you have the construction of a state which then insists on imposing a certain ethnic unity on a cosmopolitan city, a process which can never be ‘completed’, hence keeping the politics alive (note how in Andhra the whole question of who gets Hyderabad if the state splits up cannot easily be resolved..). My own sense is that wherever this problem occurs the city should be separated from the state and kept independently. But of course there are always economic interests involved and even symbolically no one wishes to lose the ‘jewel in the crown’. Here though one must cite the Bangalore example which despite the larger political trends in the state has overall moved towards a more pan-Southern and even pan-Indian model.
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March 2, 2013 at 12:30 PM
Don’t wanna get into this too much as of now–
But ‘political correctness’ has issues and limitations and is a bugbear in these situations,
Things have to be dealt with an unrelenting unashamed and heavy handed manner
For eg love the way America hasn’t allowed another major incident after 9/11 –overzealousness or not!
When the outcomes are so overwhelmingly favourable, all measures are justified (& nothing should be ruled out)
Ps: sanju– do relax and watch a lite fun film & let us know the review lol
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March 2, 2013 at 1:13 PM
But what if after the attacks of July 2005 the British govt decided that it somehow had to come down hard on everyone of South Asian origin (among others) and refused to distinguish between Muslim and non-Muslims? Do you think you would have had quite this nonchalant attitude then? In all these debates the folks who are least bothered by the ‘heavy-handedness’ are those who never expect to be affected by it! This applies even to Muslims by the way. In the US for instance a lot of Muslims turned against the Republican party post-9/11 because they felt they were being targeted. But the same never had a problem with all kinds of exclusionary politics before this. Why? Because they often belonged to a ‘class’ where they weren’t bothered by this stuff. But post-9/11 they couldn’t be ‘above it all’ in the same sense. I actually never had much sympathy with these folks. Because it only started mattering to them when it hit home.
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March 2, 2013 at 1:14 PM
again same old comment from where it started and so on your assumption relying on conspiracy theories on godhra and ya this is political correctness/lip service to hilt
politics itself is in question because man in charge has only risen…point certainly is not bjp but selective framing…remember what rajiv said about 84
‘”when big tree falls earth shakes'” and this guy was an aspring pm and tytler was minister very recenly…what can one assume that its like nod to an enginerred program openly
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March 2, 2013 at 1:28 PM
viscious circle has started on kerla and tn but this whole twists to argument is selective
there is a silence on malabar riots and appeasement policy which many groups are complaining ….if a professor hands gets chopped openly it itself says about things …was these things ever part of gods own country history
a vishwaroop type of incident and owais where not part of bjp/rss ideology
a kalam or rahman are certainly not role model for radicals
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March 2, 2013 at 3:56 PM
yes I know about the stuff in Kerala (Marad and so on).. I wasn’t trying to suggest that nothing happens in these states, just that it’s far less compared to many other much more polarized states. There was for instance a communal riot in Tirunelveli just last year.
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March 3, 2013 at 1:05 AM
On a different note (I raise it here because this seems to have become the “politics” thread :)), I wish there were more coverage in India (at least outside West Bengal) of the ongoing “Shahbag” movement in Bangladesh: it has been very encouraging to see youngsters and civil society erupt in the context of the war crimes tribunal, and against the likes of the fascist Jamaat-e-Islami. [The Jamaat’s response over the last few days has been violence and intimidation; hardly surprising, but a reminder the battle is far from one.] The 1971 slaughter and refugee crisis had profound implications for India, even apart from the human dimension, yet on our English-language news channels there is more coverage of relatively minor events in the US than of these seminal events in Bangladesh…
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March 2, 2013 at 1:38 PM
It is understood, infact incumbent of a govt to ensure the ‘high handedness’ is targeted and appropriate not blanket /diffuse!
Though agree this may not always be possible
The problems arise when proven mass murderers with clear evidence are kept for years and punished with a sense of insecurity and ‘guilt’.
I’m more into the American model here lol. also I toggle the Atlantic v frequently (& love both for various reasons!)
Finally
In an obamaesque tone–lemme make it clear
It’s NOT the peace loving people who need be defensive and apologetic!
It’s trouble makers who have to forced to be apologetic and infact pursued till proper outcome–no debate here
‘People’ here includes all people (no exclusion!)
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March 2, 2013 at 1:50 PM
satyam, is there a way to move this discussion to a separate thread? i am not trying to be whiny but it is hard to sift through stuff to get to the actual film discussions. just wondering, thanks.
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March 2, 2013 at 3:51 PM
probably should have earlier, too late now as there are too many comments. I guess we should stop anyway as we’ve all said everything we needed to on the subject!
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March 2, 2013 at 1:51 PM
Read my lips !!
No mischief, no serial offenders, no spin
And no damned political correctness
Swift fast justice
Oops Obama has entered me now 🙂
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March 1, 2013 at 1:46 AM
Official first look of Vidya Balan and Farhan Akhtar starrer ‘Shaadi Ke Side Effects’
https://www.twitter.com/Muvi/status/306272431264366592/photo/1
Btw was the ‘peekaboo’ (Vidya) necessary!
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March 1, 2013 at 1:57 AM
Oh Chill Saurabh. Let the girls get some air.
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March 1, 2013 at 2:58 AM
Oh boy don’t I deserve this.
Work f hard party harder
Techno trance humans packed like sardines yo 🙂
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March 1, 2013 at 8:24 AM
They are getting lot of air after marriage for sure…at least they are real compared to nar-real narials of some ms takia 🙂
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March 1, 2013 at 8:26 PM
heh! saurabh is a ‘good boy’ (using my best baby talk voice)
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March 2, 2013 at 11:13 AM
Haha Antya you are being wicked as always but then most Delhi girls are like that (sorry for the generalisation).
On a serious note, is there a way I could get in contact with you through email. Sorry if it’s too personal a thing though i needed to discuss something with you regarding ‘films only’
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March 2, 2013 at 1:45 PM
you can e-mail me at n underscore tyg at yahoo dot com
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March 2, 2013 at 1:49 PM
Thanx anya 😉
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March 2, 2013 at 4:25 PM
Boys will be Boys 😀
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March 2, 2013 at 1:56 PM
Thanks much.
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March 2, 2013 at 6:38 PM
–AA: Thanks Anya–
Alex, I would first advise you to find out whether antya is Mr ya Miss (not talking of the Antara Mali movie here..) & then proceed..we need to learn from our mistakes to make any headway don’t we??
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March 2, 2013 at 9:46 PM
Whatta meeting– tired now
Ha Ann jo — WHO is proceeding ? lol– Ive even forgotten how to send emails lol
It’s been v obvious that anya is thr nu anjali Singh …but then it’s such fun n entertaining — it might as well be u for all we know lol
Anyhow look@ his film choices– django, ZDT, thirst, stoker — ALL torture/ porn.
But hey, i somehow don’t feel like being rude to him- 🙂
God bless him…
Ps: now4sumfun– any suggestions….
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March 2, 2013 at 10:03 PM
AA: but then it’s such fun n entertaining — it might as well be u for all we know lol–
no I don’t need to be a cross-dresser; I am naturally darn offensive in the way God threw me out on this Earth..I don’t need to get into anyone else’s skin to be more offensive!!
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March 2, 2013 at 10:09 PM
i do feel bad for aa. become a staunch defender of a fake blog poster once and the jokes follow you forever. not fair!
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March 2, 2013 at 10:13 PM
Some lovely places here for sat nite — wowie ….hail Uncle Sam…
Ps: Koreans again!!!
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March 2, 2013 at 11:11 PM
Haha Satyam & ann jo -hangover3!! Yo– would’ve loved if u guys were here
Anyhow will ‘cope’ –cute airheads –purrfect 🙂
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March 1, 2013 at 6:29 AM
Top 5: ‘Kai Po Che’ has rocking Rs 29.50 cr Week 1
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March 1, 2013 at 6:30 AM
Kai Po Che Has Decent First Week
Friday 1st March 2013 11.30 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
Kai Po Che had a decent first week of around 25.75 crore nett. The film was steady on the weekdays though collections were low in some circuits. The film has performed best in Mumbai city, Pune and Bangalore.
The film has held on well as far as screen time is concerned in the second week in the big metros and the second week is all important for the film.
The new releases have not opened well and could it be that Kai Po Che leads the box office race in week two as well but more important will how big are the second week collections.
Films like ABCD – Any Body Can Dance and English Vinglish collected 10 and 11 crore nett respectively in their second weeks and Koi Po Che would have to collected at least as much as those films to come out with a decent final total.
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March 1, 2013 at 6:57 PM
i am so glad that KPC will miss the 3i b.o. mark just by abt 160 cr or so 😉
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March 1, 2013 at 6:31 AM
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks Of 26/11 Open Poorly
Friday 1st March 2013 11.30 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
The new releases of the week I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 both opened to a dull response of around 15% at multiplexes. The Attacks Of 26/11 was ahead of I Me Aur Main as the film opened far better than I Me Aur Main in the Mumbai/Maharashtra belt.
Both films will need quick improvement in collections especially at the multiplexes if the weekend collections are to be worthwhile. The attacks of 26/11 will have better collections in the single screens of Maharashtra and a few other parts but that will not be enough for the film. But films will find tough competition in the form of Kai Po Che which could out gross both films despite being in its second week.
The other release of the week Bloody Ishq opened to very poor houses on a limited release.
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March 1, 2013 at 7:02 AM
Ramu and 26/11 are being thrashed left, right and centre by the reviewers on twitter. Namrata Joshi, Shubhra Gupta and Fadnavis are lampooning RGV. Really sad for the guy
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March 1, 2013 at 8:30 AM
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/movie-review-the-attacks-of-2611-is-trite-bloody-and-asks-no-tough-questions-645227.html
In 2009, a 48 minute documentary titled Terror in Mumbai – Dispatches, co-produced by Channel 4 and HBO, and directed by Dan Reed, was released. Consisting of interviews with victims, actual CCTV videos of the terrorists at various sites, video testimony of the captured Ajmal Kasab soon after he was caught and most terrifying of all, actual audio intercepts between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, Dan Reed’s thoroughly disturbing film has never been shown (or excerpted or discussed) on Indian television. Which is no surprise, perhaps, because it contains chilling and irrefutable proof, among other things, of how unregulated media coverage actually aided the terrorists and their Pakistani controllers in stretching the ordeal out further by giving them a clear sense of what steps the Indian law enforcement agencies were taking. If you want to watch a gripping film on 26/11 that shows you what actually happened and leaves you with a lasting sense of unease – instead of letting us pat ourselves on the back for sacrifice and moving patriotically on – Terror in Mumbai is available on the internet. Watch it.
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March 1, 2013 at 8:33 AM
subhash Jha:
“The way the soundtrack is used to denote unimaginable brutality and violence in that sequence reminded me of the massacre sequence in Ramesh Sippy’s “Sholay”, where Gabbar Singh sadistically raises a gun, points it at a defiant child (Master Alankar) and then the soundtrack cuts to the sound of a train chugging into the railway platform.
Varma, in the finest filmmaking foray of his career since “Satya” and “Company”, offers us no comfort of cinematic licence in “The Attacks Of 26/11”. Not his fault, really. The unspeakably aggravated violence of the events we see unfold in front of our disbelieving eyes happened in, and to, Mumbai just five years ago. Believe it or nuts.
“
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March 1, 2013 at 9:23 AM
Something for Antya-
A. O. Scott’s review of Park Chan-wook’s Stoker-
Darkness Descends on a Family-
A.O. Scott
The first half of “Stoker” passes in a rapture of dread, as the viewer anticipates terrible things to come. This is partly because the director, Park Chan-wook, here making his English-language debut, is an internationally renowned master of bloodshed. His “vengeance” trilogy — in particular the middle chapter, “Oldboy,” currently being remade by Spike Lee — is cherished by many cinephiles, in South Korea and beyond, for its blend of visual elegance, melodrama and extreme violence.
So it may be Mr. Park’s reputation that induces a state of queasy anticipation in the early scenes of “Stoker.” But it is also, unquestionably, his craft. We find ourselves in a world of lurid, saturated colors; languorous camera movements; temporal displacements; and jagged shards of sound: an atmosphere that replicates the inner experience of India Stoker, a Connecticut teenager who manifests the funereal demeanor of Wednesday Addams and the seething intensity of a poem by Sylvia Plath.
India, played by Mia Wasikowska, is an introspective, solitary teenager who, on her 18th birthday, loses her father (Dermot Mulroney, in flashbacks) to a car accident. She mopes around the lawns and hallways of her family’s enormous estate, seething at her mother, Eve (Nicole Kidman), who seems to India insufficiently grief-stricken. The girl’s mood grows darker with the arrival of Charlie (Matthew Goode), a handsome uncle she never knew she had
Ms. Wasikowska has played Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and there is something literary about the watchful, musically gifted India. The territory staked out in “Stoker” — a landscape of family secrets, sexual subtext and aristocratic entitlement — is at times reminiscent of a Henry James tale. The patterns and symbols that pop up around India may be signs of a sinister external presence, or they may be figments of her own feverish imagination.
Her psychological state — an unstable amalgam of grief, longing, curiosity and rage — dominates the film’s atmosphere, though not everything is happening in her own head. The family’s housekeeper (Phyllis Somerville) disappears, and a visit from a concerned relative (Jacki Weaver) signals further danger ahead. Charlie seems to be seducing Eve, which disgusts India, even as her suspicions about her uncle are complicated by other feelings and his apparent interest in serving as her protector.
A great deal of information has been withheld, perhaps from India and certainly from us, and Mr. Park, with sadistic relish, takes his time with revelations that are both ghastly and a bit disappointing. The exquisite sense of mystery that has built up around India begins to dissipate as the focus shifts to Charlie, and tantalizing ambiguities are resolved into a tale of madness and murder.
Which is not so bad, though the final act of “Stoker” walks a fine line between the sensational and the silly. Mr. Park is less interested in narrative suspense than in carefully orchestrated shocks and camouflaged motives. Learning the truth about Charlie does not so much explain what had come before as turn everything upside down, scattering the puzzle pieces in a colorful, brutal cascade.
Compared with the mayhem of “Oldboy” or “Lady Vengeance,” the violence in “Stoker” is relatively restrained, though its cruelty is extreme. But the ugliness that is uncovered in the Stoker family history is finally less haunting, and less interesting, than India herself. Ms. Wasikowska has a remarkable ability to use the watchful stillness of her features to hint at the girl’s emotional turmoil; her eyebrows, widening in alarm or contracting in fury, may be the film’s most potent effect. She faces appalling and occasionally preposterous circumstances with a mixture of innocence and skeptical intelligence that is close to heroic. That goes for the actress as well as the character she plays.
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March 1, 2013 at 8:28 PM
thanks saurabh! will read this after i catch the movie, it’s my duty as a park fan. although my expectations are not high, hollywood ruins everything.
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March 2, 2013 at 3:50 AM
In the case of Stoker, the approach differs. Although Park has completely transplanted his film onto American soil, it is very much his own. I think it wasn’t about Park adapting himself to H’wood stds of making films but Fox and Scott Bros wanting PCW to make his kind of movie in an American setting. Of course the story and script clicked as well so it was easier for Park. Else he wouldn’t have jumped right in.
Reworking of his movie Oldboy is a misstep that Hollywood has made. Here it is not just about the director’s sensibility but the fact that the film is cannot be reworked or adapted to a setting that is purely American with the same throbbing intensity as the Korean original.
As with adaptations, it isn’t necessary at all that the later one religiously be in line with its source (Stoker itself proves it) but in case of OB any tweaks will only weaken the new.
OB’s transgressional themes and insanely violent brutality emerge from the milieu the story is situated in and of course how Park envisioned it to be. It is in a way quite an original movie and is sufficient to be just one of its kind.
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March 2, 2013 at 4:03 AM
Great points Arthi. How would you compare Park’s film to the original
On Oldboy, you must be aware that Sanjay Gupta had already remade this as Zinda (Dutt playing the lead with John as the baddie). The violence was slightly toned down and the removed the hallucination and incest angle. The film, while not half as good as Oldboy, worked due to Dutt’s scintillating act which I prefer to the Korean actor’s. And they had set the film in Bangkok if I remember
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March 2, 2013 at 6:46 AM
Saurabh: I’d also add that Zinda featured a very good soundtrack, with songs like “Zinda hoon mein,” “Har saans”, and the best ever Strings song “Ye hai meri kahaani”…
Sanju just looked the right guy for the part in a way the original didn’t…
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March 2, 2013 at 12:00 PM
If you are referring to Stoker, haven’t watched it yet. Usually press play after the euphoria dies down. Also comparisons can’t quite be made here because both films fork into different directions..
Don’t know about Zinda, so did a quick G / wiki search but there is no story given. Seems Sanjay Gupta made this movie without seeking the necessary copyrights.
Stripping the plot of incest and the repercussions of that relationship, not sure what remains in Z. But this said, a remake of such a film in the far East would work to an extent. So say in Zinda, despite the exclusion of the main themes, one could extrapolate to create other reasons for such blinding vendetta because the dynamics in these countries are not alien to each other. There are just degrees of variation. (Zinda was set in Bangkok and not in any Indian city probably because it made it easy for the director here to blatantly duplicate certain aspects…)
But when one jumps continents it becomes much more difficult because the worlds change drastically.
I haven’t watched Z but ‘m pretty sure I’d not rate him higher than the Korean actor.
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March 2, 2013 at 12:15 PM
” I think it wasn’t about Park adapting himself to H’wood stds of making films but Fox and Scott Bros wanting PCW to make his kind of movie in an American setting”
Some good points there arthi and I agree
Not much into park but just caught promos of stoker
I think these sort of deals DO have a role and expand the viewership base.
For eg wasn’t interested into this till now but after checking the hollywoodised version promo, it does seem interesting now
Mia is ace casting for this role
Kidman seems to be a bit of a distraction and comes with her own baggage but seems will add ‘value’ to this project
Also agree to what u mentioned as ‘throbbing intensity’ in the Korean version (?)
Sometimes it is culture and setting based as well. This particular hw take has potential and even worthy of a spoof 🙂
Seems some good casting choices around lol
Ps: saw bits of few films including ‘thirst’. Park is definitely an innovative quirky unique film maker — I have issues but may elaborate later …
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March 2, 2013 at 12:18 PM
Haha qalander abut dutt ‘suiting the role’ better
There’s something that suits the decrepit senior citizen role …lol
Anyhow–Mia & mat Goode in stoker –sounds an interesting project now
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2013/feb/27/stoker-mia-wasikowska-matthew-goode-video?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
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March 2, 2013 at 2:04 PM
oh, saurabh! you are lucky i am so fond of you. favoring dutt over min-sook who is practically a chameleon and one of my favorite international actors. gasp! only my fondness for you is preventing me from going into full-on bitch mode.
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March 2, 2013 at 2:05 PM
argh! min-sik. can’t. think. straight.
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March 2, 2013 at 2:25 PM
Haha anya — nice fun
Uve uplifted my mood lol
Reminds me–there was apparently a wired scene in Zinda with senior citizen dutt makin out with Lara dutta.. Also dutts hairstyle resembled your description of sunny deols recently!
Anyhow folks–seems like Kim kardashian — i will hav to do an ‘Aa takes America’ show …
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March 2, 2013 at 2:31 PM
Like everywhere, Most here hav a ‘role’ –for which they have been ‘brought up’ !
Procuring key info is also one of those ‘roles’.
Ps: oops I forgot how to send an email 🙂
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March 2, 2013 at 2:37 PM
Haha Antya, you are allowed to speak your mind out atleast with me. On the fondness, it’s both ways.
I think Oldboy is the only film I have seen of that actor so I am not qualified enough to talk more abt him. But as I (and Q) said I far preferred Dutt and not because I am a fan of the latter.
Check your mail
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March 2, 2013 at 2:41 PM
saw it. will get back to you.
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March 1, 2013 at 9:55 AM
Bryan Singer’s ‘Jack The Giant Slayer’
Manohla Dargis- The New York Times
A Mighty Beanstalk Grows a New Twist
Recently filmmakers have been dusting off fairy tales and giving them a revisionist feminist spin. As movies like “Red Riding Hood” and “Mirror Mirror” suggest, striking a balance between the old (and often sexist) and the new (and vaguely progressive) is trickier than it might seem. The makers of “Snow White and the Huntsman” tried to reconcile two potentially irreconcilable ideas— a thoroughly modern miss and an old-fashioned happily ever after — by putting a sword in Snow White’s hands so she could ride alongside her heroic hunk. The results weren’t half bad, even if this butched-up Snow White didn’t magically transform into a genuinely liberated princess.
The makers of “Jack the Giant Slayer,” by contrast, have generally opted to stick to the original boy meets beans, boy loses beans, boy meets giants, and so on, embellishing the familiar bedtime story with 3-D and other effects, noisy battles and an occasional wink at the material. Partly what distinguishes this Jack from earlier farm boys who logged adventures with big men and legumes is that he’s played by Nicholas Hoult, yet another one of those anodyne young British actors — along with the seemingly nice likes of Andrew Garfield and Eddie Redmayne — whose sensitive eyes and droopiness make them unthreatening romantic playthings. This Jack lives with his hectoring uncle (Christopher Fairbank) instead of his mother and tries to sell the family’s horse rather than its cow.
Mostly what separates Jack from his storybook forerunners, though, and suggests that this old tale has been refurbished with more than the usual digital bells and whistles, is that he has a promising doppelgänger in Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson). A lover of tall tales and exploits, Isabelle is being raised by her father, the king (Ian McShane), and has been promised to the shifty Roderick (Stanley Tucci, bewigged and gaptoothed). Jack and Isabelle meet cute when he tries to scare off ruffians who hassle her while she’s watching a theatrical performance about giants. Jack’s bravery foreshadows greater deeds, much as the onstage battle between giants and men augurs a deadlier offstage fight. Isabelle’s pluck is similarly suggestive, but, alas, this isn’t “Jack and Jill, Giant Slayers.”
There are more once-upon-a-time niceties and eventually a bean does sprout. It’s a beaut — a long, twisting thing that rises out of the earth to pierce the clouds like a god’s monstrous, multi-plaited spear. At the other end, waiting in an otherworld called Gantua, is a race of male giants, a cannibalistic brotherhood led by General Fallon (Bill Nighy). Nicely realized through a combination of digital wizardry and motion-capture performances, the giants are best in show, from their plug-ugly heads to their leathery, ulcerated toes. The director Bryan Singer clearly enjoys playing with these oversize, puppetlike meanies and finds queasy comedy in their threat, especially when Jack, Isabelle and some others, including a knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor channeling Errol Flynn), nearly become finger food.
For its first 90 minutes, “Jack the Giant Slayer” is painlessly diverting. The visual design for the giants and the beanstalks keeps your eyes busy, even when the story sets your mind to wandering. If it drifts with increasing frequency it’s because, well, this finally is just a digitally souped-up, one-dimensional take on “Jack and the Beanstalk,” capped by the kind of interminable blowout that makes many big-studio entertainments feel as long as the last Oscars. As the movie unwinds, it also becomes evident that, for all her daring, Isabelle is more decorative than narratively necessary. In the metaphorically rich original tale, a boy wakes to discover he’s produced a mighty stalk. Here, the boy is now a man, and while the stalk is still impressive, the movie just doesn’t have staying power.
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March 1, 2013 at 12:29 PM
Anurag Basu’s Kishore Kumar biopic moved to next year
Filmmaker Anurag Basu, who will be directing a biopic on late actor-singer Kishore Kumar, says the film is taking a lot of time and will now start next year. However, he will start another film by May this year.
Filmmaker anurag basu
Filmmaker Anurag Basu, who will be directing a biopic on late actor-singer Kishore Kumar, says the film is taking a lot of time and will now start next year. However, he will start another film by May this year.
“I am writing three films right now and will select one of them and then make it. This is because the biopic of Kishore Kumar will take a lot of time and now it might start next year,” Basu said here Thursday at the inauguration of Wassup Andheri Fest.
“But before that, I have to make another film. It will start soon by April or May. So the preparations for that are going on,” he added.
While Ranbir Kapoor will essay the role of legendary singer Kishore Kumar, the search for a female lead to play actress Madhubala is still on.
http://www.india-forums.com/bollywood/hot-n-happening/31342-anurag-basu-kishore-kumar-biopic-moved-to-next-year.htm
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March 1, 2013 at 2:59 PM
The Attacks of 26/11 is competently made, RGV neither messes up nor overdoes it.
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March 1, 2013 at 4:26 PM
So Mr Basu is writing three films right now – Take that David Dhawan, Priyadarshan.
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March 1, 2013 at 5:37 PM
Screw these releases..The attacks of 26/11 is not released in DC/MARYLAND area..I got to drive all the way to Virginia or NJ to catch it..Guess I got to catch it on torrents again..which I hate..
The same happened with KADAL..
Thanks for the info KARBARK…the media is really lashing out at RGV..am not sure how much of that is valid or an over-reaction to settle scores with RGV who always shows the finger to them..
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March 2, 2013 at 1:43 AM
Trailer of RGV’s “Satya 2”
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March 2, 2013 at 1:59 AM
RGV ne trailer Word pe banaya hai ki Flash pe. So badly edited. He is destroying his own legacy. Aside Bhoot 2 too was beyond pathetic and I was a fan of the 1st part
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March 5, 2013 at 8:22 AM
RGV is determined to sabotage himself. Didn’t this idiot learn anything from the sholay 2.0 debacle? there’s no reason for this sequel whatsoever….
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March 2, 2013 at 8:08 AM
LOL, terrible.. is he directing it?
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March 2, 2013 at 9:13 AM
Yes
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March 2, 2013 at 2:06 AM
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/the-attacks-of-2611-10-scenes-that-reminded-me-of-the-better-films-of-the-old-ram-gopal-varma/376075-8-66.html
Spoilers
1. The opening sequence: We have heard about Indian fishermen venturing into Pakistani waters and RGV uses this fact to maximum effect. A low angle shot of two boats bumping against each other, kind of prepared me for what was to come.
2. Modus operandi: ‘Contract’ had featured the coastal area and the paths terrorists use to enter in big Indian cities but ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ shows the exact roads. Locations have always played an integral part of the narrative in some of RGV’s acclaimed films, and ‘The Attack of 26/11’ makes him walk the same old path.
3. The grey shade: Be it ‘Satya’ or ‘Company’, the police were always human in Ramu’s stories. Here, Nana Patekar, who plays the Joint Commissioner of Mumbai Police, is very reasonable in his approach. Varma showed the top police officials as a sensible lot in ‘Company’ and ‘Satya’ (Remember Paresh Rawal) as well.
4. Point of view: Varma didn’t prefer to go for extreme experiments in the camera departments in his earlier films and that gave the narrative a chance to sink in, so when frames don’t shake much in ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ the audience feels relieved and concentrate better on the mammoth canvas of devastating terror attacks.
5. The chanting: Though it’s been used miserly but the loud chanting of shlokas in the background is apt enough to take you down the memory lane to ‘Sarkar’. Don’t you think ‘Govinda, govinda’ was as significant as Subhash Nagre himself?
6. The relaxed stride: ‘Rangeela’ and ‘Bhoot’ had characters which were not in great urgency till the climax and that made the developments smooth in most part of these films. The calm and composed terrorists in Varma’s latest offering will bemuse you the way the gatekeeper in ‘Bhoot’ or Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff) in ‘Rangeela’ did.
7. The linear structure: Most of the times, the writers are tempted to give the background of the story which has the potential of hampering the flow but ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ doesn’t waste much time in foregrounding and directly comes to the point. ‘Shiva’ and ‘Raat’ had a similar narrative structure.
8. Bullet in the head: He has directed and produced a number of films which propagate the theory of karma. These films display the complete cycle of events culminating at a point where the lead character meets the expected end, ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ is no exception.
9. Religious symbols: They have always been very significant in Varma’s films and ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ takes the tradition forward. In the Taj massacre scene, the camera zooms in on an idol when the terrorists are on a shooting spree. Isn’t this what happened in the climax of ‘Satya’?
10. The silence: ‘Department’ was a very talkative film and the audience missed the chance of witnessing the facial twitches in slow motion, but ‘The Attacks of 26/11’ fulfils their wish and allows the developments to take place in a silent zone.
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March 2, 2013 at 2:30 AM
Nope– won’t let anyone forget rgv spoil my holiday with any gloomy stuff 26/11 et al
Hail uncle Sam –America at her best …
Znmd style ‘road trip’ now
Anya wanna join the gang? 😉
Ps: life’s short /make the most of it folks …
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March 3, 2013 at 12:06 PM
hard to feel sorry for the maverick film-maker turned douchey internet troll. he brought it upon himself.
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March 2, 2013 at 3:22 AM
OTT http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Mother-Teresa-saint-of-the-media-controversial-study-says/articleshow/18760028.cms?
‘Miracle of medicine’
According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, “she received it in a modern American hospital”.
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March 2, 2013 at 3:44 AM
Trailer of Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘Me and You’ (lo e te)
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March 2, 2013 at 6:19 AM
No one here wants to talk about John Abraham’s I Me Aur Main. The story seems to be good. And there is Prachi Desai with Chitrangada. Same case with ABCD which was also quite a good movie and a clean hit. Seems only certain stars sell.
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March 2, 2013 at 6:44 AM
Re: “No one here wants to talk about John Abraham’s I Me Aur Main.”
I for one don’t: Abraham is pretty off-putting!
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March 2, 2013 at 6:53 AM
Haha Q, actually I did not mind John till he appeared in that phallic pose in the poster of Force where he was out-manned by a certain Vidyut Jamwal.
Agreed on Zinda’s soundtrack. I also like Strings’ Aakhiri Alvida from Shootout (a film saved only by Dutt’s mean cop act- especially love the scene where he meets Amrita Singh’s character)
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March 2, 2013 at 7:54 AM
Mani Ratnam and Aamir ?
http://entertainment.oneindia.in/tamil/news/2013/mani-ratnam-aamir-khan-kareena-kapoor-104461.html
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March 2, 2013 at 8:14 AM
would be stunned if there were any truth to this rumor!
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March 2, 2013 at 1:42 PM
surely a rumor, probably stemming from an old project that mani had planned with aamir and kareena which never materialized.
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March 2, 2013 at 8:19 AM
Kai Po Che Holds Strong On Eighth Day
Saturday 2nd March 2013 10.30 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
Kai Po Che held on strongly on day eight as it collected around the 1.75 crore nett mark. The collections were down just around 50% from its first day.
The collections at multiplexes were far better than both the new releases especially in the metros. It takes the business of the film to around 27.50 crore nett and the film should do weekend business of at least 7.50 crore nett as Saturday should see a big jump at multiplexes as the new releases have not impressed.
The film is strong in the metros while collections in other tier 1 centres are low but pretty steady. The ten day business of the film will be in the 33-34 crore nett range.
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March 2, 2013 at 8:20 AM
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks Of 26/11 First Day Business
Saturday 2nd March 2013 10.30 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 both collected poorly on day one and collections for both films were in the 1.50 crore nett range as per early estimates.
I Me Aur Main was better in places like Delhi/UP and East Punjab while The Attacks Of 26/11 was better the circuits in which Maharashtra fell into like CP Berar and Nizam.
The Delhi/UP contribution was around 30 lakhs for I Me Aur Main with The Attacks Of 26/11 being just 20 lakhs while CP Berar it was the other way around with The Attacks of 26/11 being 12 lakhs and I Me Aur Main just 6 lakhs. As the openings are so low there is very little chance for both films at the box office.
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March 2, 2013 at 8:21 AM
a movie that talks about the worst terror attack India has ever seen, that claimed hundreds of lives, and then made as a RGV thriller is pretty offensive and insensitive IMO. RGV should have stayed away from it. I doubt if ill want to check it out, no matter how competently it has been made
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March 2, 2013 at 12:23 PM
Agree tony–sounds a depressing premise to film
Though I feel there’s some undue negativity against rgv who seems to have made a better film than some of his recent efforts(haven’t/won’t see it though)
Ps: just to lighten the mood
Just happened to watch bits of a crap telly show since wad playing somewhere –haha unintentionally hilarious
“Kim and kourtney take Miami” or something like that
Hahaha it was Sooo crap that it was Roflol
Check it out folks (also for Kim) 🙂
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March 2, 2013 at 12:27 PM
There is a new show on Zee dramabaaz for small kids which is gaining high trps. The judges are Anurag Basu of Barfi fame, Sonali Bendre and Vivek Oberoi.
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March 2, 2013 at 12:34 PM
“There is a new show on Zee dramabaaz for small kids which is gaining high trps”
Hahaha sanju –Sounds something catering for me 🙂
Am a bit caught up but seems worthy to be caught up–any links ?
Ps:: so nice to be back in the ‘Internet zone’
It feels u r in Antarctica when not in www range lol
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March 2, 2013 at 12:38 PM
It is dramabaaz enacted by precocious tinytots. Coached by their over ambitious parents, especially the mothers.
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March 2, 2013 at 12:46 PM
Sanju –I’m also a small kid –infact a perennial child 🙂
Btw only for sporting folks –sorry no offence meant
Just found the antics of these sisters hilarious on telly
Was having breakfast somewhere –was playing there
So I did NOT have a choice but to watch this
Btw Kim seems to have found a new treatment for psoriasis
http://blogs.babycenter.com/celebrities/why-kim-kardashian-01292013-is-using-kourtneys-breast-milk/
Disclaimer –I do NOT endorse any such stuff. Just passing it on for these who may find this of interest
Ps: Satyam : if u find this irrelevant to the 26/11 thread(!) plz feel free to remove it (after reading it lol)
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March 2, 2013 at 5:51 PM
I doubt whether the writer is still alive in Pakistan..for writing thus..you see, not EVERY country can claim to have OUTLOOK and Vinod Mehta..
http://dawn.com/2013/02/05/coexistence-with-india/
http://dawn.com/2013/02/19/coexistence-with-india-ii/
& also this guy..
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March 6, 2013 at 1:53 AM
This author’s views represent a tiny % of Pakistanis. Just read the comments by all who have criticized him. He will be dead soon, if he does not watch out.
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March 2, 2013 at 9:49 PM
Amitabh to moderate a session with Spielberg
http://legalpronews.findlaw.com/article/0asS3Yx3y6dv8?q=Hollywood
Ps Ann jo– do check out Kim kardashian link above– it may interest u lol
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March 5, 2013 at 3:08 PM
This is very good news if true..but Amitabh is fasting in Bhopal..so don’t know how this will pan out..hope AB Sr throws out his political correctness and his wee-bit instinctive ‘jingoism’ (there is ample proof of that in his blog when he talks of Hollywood) and talks about Hollywood the way one ought to..enough of ‘we have our films’, ‘they have their films’ crap..Professionalism, story-telling, researching, casting, attention to detail.. in all these Hollywood is WAY, WAY, WAY, ahead of us and we BETTER acknowledge that..got to know and admit where one’s lacking to even begin improving..
Remember, both the ‘woods’ started making films nearly at the same time!!
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March 3, 2013 at 7:50 AM
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks of 26/11 Day Two Business
Sundday 3rd March 2013 14.00 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 showed limited growth on Saturday the two day all India collections for both films are as follows.
I Me Aur Main
Friday – 1,50,00,000
Saturday – 1,80,00,000
TOTAL – 3,30,00,000
The Attacks Of 26/11
Friday – 1,40,00,000
Saturday – 1,65,00,000
TOTAL – 3,05,00,000
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March 3, 2013 at 7:53 AM
Lingusamy does not want refund from Mani Ratnam!
By MOVIEBUZZ
Source : SIFY
Leading director and producer Lingusamy through his Thirrupathi Brothers had distributed Mani Ratnam’s Kadal in three areas in Tamil Nadu.
The film bombed and some other distributors led by Mannan Films had asked Mani for compensation!
They had protested outside Mani Ratnam’s office and the noted director had to ask for police protection. However, Lingusamy a great admirer of Mani sir has made it clear in his press note that he would not ask for any compensation.
Lingusamy made it clear: “I had distributed Kadal in three areas and has suffered losses. But I will not knock Mani sir’s door and ask him for compensation. Film trade, like any other business has losses and profits and it’s all part of it. Mani sir is my guru, and I respect him a lot as a filmmaker.”
Well said Lingusamy, it is a fantastic gesture which will go a long way in giving a soothing touch to Mani Ratnam during his troubled times.
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March 3, 2013 at 8:02 AM
Great gesture. It is heartening to note that there are still some people who value people more than money.
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March 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM
Loved Mankatha. Masala as it should be- intelligent. Possibly the best in the genre since Khaaki. Ajith is in sparkling form
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March 3, 2013 at 10:19 AM
Oh I should check this out — what’s the story? I don’t really care for ajith but if the film is good then I can bear him…
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March 3, 2013 at 11:17 AM
Q, you might not like it as I much as I did (because I love Ajith) but firstly the director here is Venkat Prabhu (Chennai 600028, Saroja). The plot is about a heist of cricket betting money during IPL- basically a mix of neo-noir and Masala. The technical aspects are pretty strong with a damn good bg. And I have always felt that Ajith always plays a shady guy with aplomb. Surprisingly Arjun too is not bad here
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March 3, 2013 at 11:20 AM
I loved chennai 600028, the best Indian sports film I have seen (YouTube had a subtitled version when I saw it some years ago).
I do think ajith plays negative roles well: he was effective in Vaalee, and was way better in Billa than SRK was in Don…
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March 3, 2013 at 10:03 AM
Also have been long wanting to see Aaranya Kaandam but cannot get hold of a subtitled version
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March 4, 2013 at 3:31 PM
Saurabh, ‘Aaranya Kaandam’ is great film..Don’t miss it…After a long time, I like Jackie Shroff in it :)..It is one of well made crime dramas/Thrillers made from South…I’am sure this will remade in Hindi soon..Thanks for note on ‘Mankatha’..did not know about that..
OTT: Just completed ‘House of Cards’..Can’t wait for Season 2…
If Kevin Spacey does not an Emmy for this, it will be a huge disappointment for me..Superlative performance from him..His character is ruthless (and clever) and yet you cheer for him..
Those who have Netfilx here, should not miss this series…
Now I’am hooked up to ‘Breaking Bad’ :)..Catching it late, but a great series it is.
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March 3, 2013 at 10:06 AM
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/music/news-and-interviews/My-mother-was-my-best-ally-Sonu-Nigam/articleshow/18763700.cms?
Sonu Nigam talks about his struggles, his mother and other things.
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March 3, 2013 at 8:35 PM
had to post this, didn’t know it had been a decade
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March 4, 2013 at 5:57 AM
http://www.india-forums.com/bollywood/hot-n-happening/31409-kai-po-che-not-modi-propaganda-abhishek-kapoor-clarifies.htm
Director Abhishek Kapoor is upset with those who see “Kai Po Che!” as a tool spreading Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi propaganda.
The filmmaker, who has based his third directorial venture on Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller “The 3 Mistakes of My Life”, which tells the story of three friends living in Ahmedabad, took to Twitter to express his disappointment.
“Strange how some people are seeing ‘Kai Po Che!’ as Modi propaganda. They are obviously missing the point and looking for something that it’s not…” he tweeted.
Reportedly, some people have been criticising “Kai Po Che!” for watering down the 2002-Godhra riots incident in the film by depicting it as something that was the sole decision of one the Hindu local leaders.
However, Kapoor describes “Kai Po Che!” as a film for youth.
“‘Kai Po Che!’ is about the innocence of youth and their coming of age… not a witch hunt… accept it for what it is… and you might see the light,” he tweeted.
Starring, Sushant Singh Rajput”>Sushant Singh Rajput, Raj Kumar Yadav, Amit Sadh and Amrita Puri, the film came out last week and is doing well at the box office.
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March 4, 2013 at 6:25 AM
Kai Po Che Rock Steady In Second Weekend
Monday 4th March 2013 11.00 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
Kai Po Che was rock steady in its second weekend as it collected around 8.25 crore nett. The drop from the first weekend was just 45% as the film had a huge jump in business on Saturday.
The business of the film in ten days is around 32.50 crore nett and should end the second week with business in the 37-38 crore nett region.
The film managed to hold well across the board though the Gujarat belt is the disappointment. The film always going to find it tough in mass centres and be stronger in the metros and that has what has happened but with the film being set in the region of Gujarat it was key circuit as the biggest mass circuit could have come on board due to regional setting but it was not to be.
The lifetime business of the film will cross 40 crore nett and should end around the 45 crore nett.
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March 4, 2013 at 6:26 AM
I Me Aur Main And The Attacks Of 26/11 Flop At The Box Office
Monday 4th March 2013 10.00 IST
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
I Me Aur Main and The Attacks Of 26/11 started poorly on Friday and the weekend business remained dull with limited growth.
I Me Aur Main grossed in the 5.25-5.50 crore nett region while The Attacks Of 26/11 grossed in the 5-5.25 crore nett region. The business on the Monday will not fall heavily as compared to Friday as Friday itself was so poor.
Both films have investments in the 20-22 crore region and with such low weekends the domestic theatrical returns will not be much more than 5 crore for both films.
The Attacks of 26/11 had better collections in Maharashtra while I Me Aur Main was better in most of the other areas. The other release of the week Bloddy Isshq was a total washout.
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March 4, 2013 at 6:31 AM
Midweek: ‘Kai Po Che!’ leads, new releases fail!
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March 4, 2013 at 6:54 AM
20% gap between Taran’s numbers and BOI’s, even at this lower level gross.
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March 4, 2013 at 7:57 AM
Inflation at Taran’s end.
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March 4, 2013 at 8:31 AM
March 3, 2013
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fizzle: ‘Jack’ Disappoints at the Box Office
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — “Jack the Giant Slayer” bombed at the North American box office over the weekend, teaching Warner Brothers a harsh lesson about derivative subject matter, flawed release dates and imperfect marketing.
The movie, a PG-13 adaptation of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale directed by Bryan Singer, took in about $28 million, enough for No. 1 but roughly half of what would have been considered a success. First place does not always mean as much at a time when studios spend so heavily on so-called tentpole films designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Warner Brothers and a financing partner spent about $190 million to make “Jack the Giant Slayer.” Global marketing costs added another $80 million or so to the price tag. Jeff Goldstein, Warner Brothers’ executive vice president for domestic distribution, defended the movie’s performance in a telephone interview on Sunday.
“Our audience in the United States was a little bit more narrow than we wanted, but the Canadian numbers are really strong, and the overseas reaction has exceeded our expectations,” he said. “The story on this movie is far from being written — we need more time.”
The problem: Disney’s “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which goes after a nearly identical audience, rolls out around the world next weekend and is attracting very strong advance interest, according to box office analysts.
“Jack the Giant Slayer” took in $13.7 million over the weekend from release in 10 Asian countries, a result the studio called “stellar.” Warner Brothers hopes that “Jack the Giant Slayer” could ultimately take in $225 million or more from foreign theaters — possibly enough for the movie to break even. (About 50 percent of global ticket sales go to theater owners.)
Regardless, “Jack the Giant Slayer” extends a grim streak for Warner. The studio won best picture at the Oscars for “Argo” — no small feat — but has now sustained four box office failures in a row, starting with “Gangster Squad” and continuing with the fantasy “Beautiful Creatures” and “Bullet to the Head.”
Mr. Goldstein noted that American moviegoers had not been responding to much of anything of late. For the weekend ticket sales totaled about $110 million, a 35 percent decline from the same three days last year, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office data. Ticket sales so far this year total $1.55 billion, an 8 percent decline compared with the same period in 2012; attendance has declined 9 percent.
“Identity Thief” (Universal Pictures), one of the few movies to break out in recent months, was second for the weekend. It took in about $9.7 million, for a four-week total of $107.4 million.
“21 & Over,” a new R-rated teenage comedy from Relativity Media, was third, selling an estimated $9 million in tickets; it cost $13 million to make. “The Last Exorcism: Part II” (CBS Films) was fourth, with about $8 million in ticket sales. Fifth place went to “Snitch” (Lionsgate), which had $7.7 million in sales, for a two-week total of $24.4 million.
“Jack the Giant Slayer” received mixed reviews but a B-plus score from ticket buyers in exit polls. The film gestated at Warner’s New Line division and was partly paid for by Legendary Entertainment; at one point it looked like a solid bet. It had a marquee director in Mr. Singer, best known for his work with the “X-Men” franchise, and thematic similarities to “Alice in Wonderland,” which took in more than $1 billion worldwide for Disney in 2010.
So what made this beanstalk wilt so terribly?
Start with a glut of bedtime-story adaptations following the success of “Alice,” longtime film producers and box office analysts said. When lightning strikes in Hollywood it prompts an immediate imitation reflex among studios. But the results are rarely good, and this instance has been no different.
Universal’s “Snow White and the Huntsman” did the best, with about $400 million in global ticket sales. But the disappointments have been many: “Beastly,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Mirror Mirror,” “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.” “The problem is that the audience is really savvy today and judges each film as its own entity,” said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for Hollywood.com.
Warner also got tangled in the elaborate computer-generated effects needed to make “Jack the Giant Slayer.” Digital Domain, a visual effects company hired by the studio to work on the movie, started to sputter financially while the film was unfinished. Warner was also having a hard time striking the right tone — too scary could turn off families, too tame might alienate Mr. Singer’s fanboy base. The studio changed the title from “Jack the Giant Killer” last summer after deciding that “Slayer” would be a better draw for young men and would go over better with parents.
The initial plan was to release the movie last June. But with the visual effects still not up to snuff, Warner bumped the movie to early March, a tricky time for attracting the broad audience that big-budget pictures need to earn back their investments. Disney succeeded with “Alice” in 2010 yet failed badly with “John Carter” last year.
But “Oz the Great and Powerful” was already camped out in mid-March, when spring break starts.
As studios increasingly churn out behemoth movies designed to play globally, release windows have narrowed. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, cited a crowded Christmas as one reason his studio’s “Rise of the Guardians” fizzled; it took in more than $303 million worldwide but still required an $87 million write-down because of high costs.
“Increased competition makes the need for quality release dates critically important,” Mr. Katzenberg said last week.
Uninspired advertising was the next problem that “Jack the Giant Slayer” encountered, according to multiple people who worked on the movie.
A big push for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and the Oscar campaign for “Argo” strained Warner’s resources; the studio also continued to have a hard time deciding what audience to go after.
The bickering eventually spilled onto Twitter, with Mr. Singer apologizing for terrible “airbrushed images” that “do the film no justice.”
Mr. Goldstein dismissed the notion that advertising was a problem. “Sue Kroll’s group did a fabulous job,” he said, referring to Warner’s marketing chief. “It’s always a tremendous challenge when you try to hit a broad spectrum.”
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March 4, 2013 at 10:06 AM
films based on pronouns
i me aur mai
u me aur hum
find the next one in the series..
my answer is..
woh, me aur they
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March 4, 2013 at 10:23 AM
Haha tony– btw this film is definitely NOT to be watched but just skimmed this review wid my breakfast–sounds interesting (& a bit familiar)! 🙂
Won’t mind watching bits of this if someone spoon feeds this flick b4 my eyes….lol
John Abraham is surrounded by women; all the time. That’s true in real life as well, but let’s just talk about his (not as enviable) situation in debutant director Kapil Sharma’sI, Me Aur Mainfor now.
Mother, sister, girlfriend, boss, friend—all the key people in his life on the reel are women. So you’d think he’d be an ace at handling them, but…then we wouldn’t have a movie about it, would we?
John Abraham and Prachi Desai in a still from the film I, Me Aur Main. Courtesy: Facebook
Abraham’s character Ishaan is a self-centered, spoilt brat. He’s been brought up since childhood by his mother (Zarina Wahab) to believe that no matter what, he is the best; indulged through the years by his sister (Mini Mathur), who’s always covered his tracks for him; humoured by his boss (Raima Sen) at the music label company where he works; fawned over by singers desperate for their big break; and tolerated by his hot, successful corporate lawyer girlfriend, Anushka (Chitrangada Singh).
The first time we see her, we wonder if we’ve accidentally walked into the screening of Inkaar 2. Either that, or she had no time between wrapping up the original and starting this movie to even change her hairstyle or nail polish, never mind get a new wardrobe. Ok, maybe I’m nitpicking. But there’s so much time to get distracted during this film that it was bound to happen, and I will generously forgive myself.
http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/movie-review-i-me-aur-main-and-the-sexy-idiot-645768.html
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March 4, 2013 at 10:26 AM
Rachel saltz — apparently this directors dad was an astronaut–ha
Btw the scripts realistic & not like the ‘escapist’ stuff around hehe
Vanity, thy name is man! Or in the case of “I, Me aur Main” (“I, Me and Myself”), a workaday Bollywood romance starring John Abraham, thy name is Ishaan. When his girlfriend, Anushka (Chitrangda Singh), murmurs sweetly to him, “I love you,” Ishaan murmurs sweetly back: “I love me too.” He can’t help grinning when he looks at his handsome, beefy self in the mirror. (Mr. Abraham is one of those Muscles From Mumbai actors.) “You’re the best,” he says.
Ishaan, of course, has some lessons to learn over the attenuated course of this movie. And he gets some help from the women in his life: the mama who spoiled him; the sister who’s wise to his ways; the girlfriend who spurns him; and his new love interest, the spunky Gauri (a not charming enough Prachi Desai). A modern girl, Gauri lives alone, downs shots of whiskey, can fix the electrical wiring and flirts with other women on the dance floor.
The most interesting thing to watch in “I, Me aur Main,” the directorial debut of Kapil Sharma (his father, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space), is the changing moral landscape. What can a 2013 Hindi-film romance handle, and how will it handle it? (Semi-spoilers ahead.) Anushka’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy isn’t a big shock. But the movie’s setup suggests that she and Ishaan, the baby’s father, shouldn’t be together. Will duty triumph over true love? Or can new endings be written?
http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/movies/i-me-aur-main-a-bollywood-romance.html?_r=1&
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March 4, 2013 at 10:36 AM
News round up folkz —
remember that i take u thru current affairs as well lol
Apparently am American resident doctor refused to/ couldn’t resuscitate a dying patient!! Hmmm…
Obama employing walmarts Lynsey burr well–I wonder what’s her exact “job”–& no she doesn’t seem like lewinsky ( a bit better and more intelligent) !!
Ps:Also there have been some ‘creature(s)’ of doubtful structure and gender etc around here. I ‘own’ them and will assess/analyse em later but am quite busy right now. Others who try to analyse em, are warned–they shall be ‘punished’ !! Lol
🙂 enjoy folks
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March 4, 2013 at 11:27 AM
***Thumbs-up for the movie from assistant commissioner of police***
Assistant Commissioner of Police N R Mahale retired from the Mumbai police force last month.
When 26/11 — the attack by 10 terrorists in Mumbai on November 26, 2008 — occurred, he was the senior inspector in charge of the D B Marg police station, which captured terrorist Ajmal Kasab [ Images ] alive.
Watching Ram Gopal Varma’s [ Images ] film on that horrific event was quite an experience for Mr Mahale as A Ganesh Nadar discovered.
http://www.rediff.com/movies/review/brilliant-cop-who-first-quizzed-kasab-on-26-11-film/20130304.htm
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March 4, 2013 at 3:06 PM
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March 4, 2013 at 11:32 PM
http://thebigindianpicture.com/2012/10/issue-1-the-moveable-feast-directors/
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March 4, 2013 at 7:14 PM
Correction–nurse refused to do CPR (not resident dr!)
Shouldnt blame already overworked residents …
http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/1961407
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March 4, 2013 at 7:18 PM
Ha contd from above -a Kwik break -another one on this spoilt manchild take
Haha hilarious
One should never see these flicks –but their reviews are soo much fun
Do try it folks 🙂
http://mumbaiboss.com/2013/03/04/the-vigil-idiot-i-me-aur-main/
Ps: am dreading more wrk now..Urrgh.
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March 4, 2013 at 8:41 PM
vigil idiot is hilarious! i get my entertainment by reading the reviews of all these movies that i’d never throw money at.
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March 4, 2013 at 10:47 PM
http://behindwoods.com/tamil-movies/vishwaroopam/vishwaroopam-box-office-mar-03.html
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March 4, 2013 at 10:49 PM
Chennai Box-Office (February 22 to 24)
Tuesday, 26 February , 2013, 19:06
Inspite of the new releases, Kamal Haasan`s Vishwaroopam is holding on very well in its third week at the CBO. It is the number one at the CBO.
Jayam Ravi`s Ameerin Aadhi Bhagavan which released this week carries mixed reports and is at the number two position. In the third place is the Bruce Willis actioner in English and Tamil, A Good Day To Die Hard.
And in the fourth place is Vanayudham and at number five is Haridas which is getting good reviews.
http://www.sify.com/movies/boxoffice.php?id=15021274&cid=13525926
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March 5, 2013 at 12:21 PM
Yay vishwaroopam is doing well @ box office –any updates
Apparently the total gross isn’t worse than robot? The latter havig Shankar, rajni Kant , ash as well rahman going for it
VR performance is creditable…
Yeah-vigil idiot is damn funny–esp for films like this–do check out the I, me main review –hahaha
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March 5, 2013 at 1:13 PM
It’s doing well but it’s by no stretch of the imagination anything approaching Robot. of course box office reporting on Kamal’s films always has to be taken with a pinch of salt. He has tremendous institutional support. And so every film of his that is rated a certain way I tend to bring down by a notch or two.
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March 5, 2013 at 3:57 AM
BOI is not giving verdicts for Special 26, ABCD and Murder 3. It seems they are trying to do some favours.
The attacks has disappointed inspite of such a contemporary subject. It did neither get critics praise nor audience approval.
I Me proves that John Abraham as a solo hero cant sell.
Only Kai po che and Special 26 and Race 2 proved to be successes. Even hollywood films are not creating any waves except maybe that tiger flick.
Saraswatichandra which is telecast as a daily soap was also a bollywood film of 1968 starring Nutan with great songs. SLB has made it into HDDCS television version.
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March 5, 2013 at 4:03 AM
Teaser trailer of Steven Soderbergh’s Matt Damon and Michael Douglas starrer HBO film “Behind the Candelabra”
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March 5, 2013 at 6:26 AM
Q. Which films have been the most liked over the last five years including this year, not looking for the biggest buts but best word of mouth and most liked?
A. 2009 – Three Idiots, 2010 – Dabangg 2, 2011 – Ready, 2012 – Rowdy Rathore, 2013 – Special 26 (Just 2 months of year).
BOI
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March 5, 2013 at 6:43 AM
That’s a nonsensical list by BOI. There’s a world of difference between the trending of 3I and the rest. And this is what ‘liking’ a film is about. An initial can come about for all sorts of reasons but it is then trending that tells you how much a film has been ‘liked’. Last year for instance OMG was probably the best trending. Certainly one of the very best. Kahaani trended very well. The Dabanng 2 trending is that exhibited by just about every 100 crore grosser! Rowdy on that score was better than many. and of course BOI give the game away by having Special 26 at the end. Because this film had a very moderate opening. So if you are going to do this why not have truly fantastic trenders in earlier years?! Every film on that list barring 3I is a Salman or Akshay film!
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March 5, 2013 at 6:56 AM
agree. A highly controversial list.
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March 5, 2013 at 8:03 AM
Tomar told Pandey that he has been assigned to inspect examination centres in three districts of Chambal region, following specific “intelligence inputs” on mass cheating practices during board exams.
Moved by his gestures, Pandey believed what he said and took him along to an examination centre for inspection.
Tomar inspected St Marry School where Class 12 thstudents were undergoing their exams for General Hindi and English. After this, Tomar asked Pandey to arrange for a vehicle so that he can inspect more centres in Murena, Bhind and Sheopur districts.
This was when Pandey thought something was wrong. “CBI would never write such a letter asking a DEO to arrange for vehicles and other facilities,” Pandey told TOI.
While Tomar was busy inspecting the school, Pandey called up the police and asked them to verify his credentials with the CBI office at Bhopal. Within 15 minutes Pandey got a call from a police officer confirming that he was a con. He took him to Kotwali police station.
“I was amazed by his confidence and the way he entered police station. He pulled a chair in front of the SHO and sat on it. He maintained on his stand that he was a CBI officer, but broke down within a few minutes and spilled the beans,” said the DEO.
He was arrested under Section 419 (cheating by personation), 420 (fraud), 466 (forging a document purporting to be a record or proceeding of Court of Justice) and 467 (forging a document which purports to be a valuable security) of IPC.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhopal/Bhopal-Special-26-CBI-officer-nabbed/articleshow/18814253.cms
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March 5, 2013 at 10:07 AM
Great news. Michael Mann to finally direct a film-
It’s been nearly four years since Michael Mann last directed a feature film, but the wait for his next project may be over: The “Public Enemies” director has attached himself to helm an untitled thriller for Legendary Pictures with Chris Hemsworth attached to star.
Mann had been developing the project for over a year, co-writing the script with Morgan Davis Foehl, who is also penning “Mass Effect” for Legendary. Plot details are unknown, other than that the film takes place in a world of cyber threats and attacks.
Thomas Tull, Mann and Jon Jashni will produce with Alex Garcia exec producing
http://variety.com/2013/film/news/mann-hemsworth-team-for-legendary-thriller-1118066230/
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March 5, 2013 at 12:57 PM
How fickle the world is! Till recently everyone was in favour of hanging Dhoni publicly and now they have to eat their words. One more defeat, again the chorus will start to hang him.
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March 5, 2013 at 1:08 PM
Saw Chashme Baddoor trailer. The old one was vegetarian stuff and the new one is literally non veg. Hope Siddharth gets noticed as he is the only one who is acting.
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March 5, 2013 at 1:30 PM
March 4, 2013, 9:31 am10 Comments
Heeeeere’s Napoleon: Spielberg Developing Kubrick Script as TV Miniseries
By DAVE ITZKOFF
While another collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg would seem to require a time machine, a Ouija board or some sort of interdimensional extraterrestrial monolith, plans are nonetheless underway for these two celebrated filmmakers to work together again.
Speaking to Canal+ Television in France, Mr. Spielberg said that he intended to turn an unproduced screenplay by Mr. Kubrick about the life of Napoleon into a television miniseries.
“I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for a miniseries, not for a motion picture, about the life of Napoleon,” Mr. Spielberg said in the interview. “Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, long time ago, and the Kubrick family — because we made ‘A.I.’ together — the Kubrick family and I, and the next project we’re working on is a miniseries, is going to be ‘Napoleon.’”
Mr. Kubrick, who died in 1999, spent years researching Napoleon, reviewing more than 18,000 documents and books while assembling a card file that cataloged every significant moment in the French leader’s life.
It was announced in 1968 that Mr. Kubrick would direct “Napoleon” for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; then in 1970 it was reported that he had put that project on the back burner in favor of “A Clockwork Orange.”
In 1972, Mr. Kubrick (who had not yet made “Barry Lyndon” at the time) told Sight & Sound magazine that “there has never been a great historical film” and that he still intended to make “Napoleon.” But the project was never realized.
The two filmmakers worked together on the 2001 science-fiction film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” which Mr. Spielberg was producing for Mr. Kubrick, and which he directed after Mr. Kubrick’s death. One could also argue that the Kubrick influence hovers over Spielberg films like “Minority Report,” and its world of oppressively ubiquitous technology. Both directors also appreciated space aliens as well as Tom Cruise.
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March 5, 2013 at 2:22 PM
very interesting news
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March 5, 2013 at 8:28 PM
Ok, some more confessions of my ass-hollery
Was called 2 a party yesterday, but used it fulfill my fetishes.
With NOBODY understanding a word of it, forced (like a baby) for this to be played!!
Well, but then the groove took over and this was repeated umpteen times on the dance floor… Requested repeatedly by those who don’t follow a word
I’m proud of Bollywood 🙂
Many gals there–liked one of em a lot (& she danced well as well)–(but came 2know later she has a kid) hehehe enjoy the song
Ps:Saw SLP yesterday, probably cloud atlas 2nite—any1 seen it here? ……
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March 5, 2013 at 8:51 PM
OT-interesting-list price=joke price lol
And some good stuff from the hospital for souls-
Ps: and yeah–‘side effects’ is also another option …mr soderbergh! Let’s see what life brings in lol
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March 6, 2013 at 12:14 AM
Know it is kinda late but got 2 watch 26/11 in theater..if properly sozzled, will try 2 get down 2 brassstacks..must say this though..RAMU is being penalized by the Indian reviewers..
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March 6, 2013 at 12:41 AM
Production value is low…And some of the dialogues are not upto the mark.
Decent movie..could have been more dark.
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March 6, 2013 at 2:47 AM
Shah Rukh Khan-Aamir Khan flee Twitter terror
Nurse wounds inflicted by internet trolls while their teams take the virtual blows
A star and his followers have always had a storybook affair, until social networking empowered the latter with an open platform and a mask of anonymity. To follow a star does not necessarily translate into exchanging terms of endearment. ‘Followers’ now tweet to berate, bully, abuse or heckle the stars. As Deepa Mehta had said in an interview to this newspaper, it gives the anonymous, armchair critic a sense of empowerment. And no one knows this better than Shah Rukh Khan, who has quit Twitter again, after a fresh surge of attacks brought on by his views on being a Muslim superstar in India.
This is SRK’s second boycott of the popular medium after being hounded out by trolls under similar circumstances last year. But the star showed just how vulnerable he still is, when he tweeted: Sad, i read so much judgements, jingoism, religious intolerance on the net & i use to think, this platform will change narrow mindedness, but no!
TOI has learnt that SRK is now putting together a strategy to handle his online presence. He will no longer take the virtual punches on his chin, but his media managers will do the needful.
“Shah Rukh is distraught with the negative energy on Twitter.
The abuses and the vicious attacks on him after every tweet have made him very cynical about the medium,” explained a friend of the star. “You can see from his last tweet that he is disillusioned with the medium.”
But SRK is not alone. Aamir Khan, who is perhaps not subjected to such intense scrutiny, seems to have taken a break from Twitter because of similar reasons.
“It’s been over six months since Aamir has actually updated his Twitter account. He occasionally posts on Facebook, which is linked to his Twitter handle. No one knows about it, but he has actually stopped checking his Twitter account,” said a friend close to the actor, adding, “This way he is immune to the negativity of trolls.” We believe his team monitors the rest.
Apparently, Aamir’s nephew Imran Khan has taken a leaf out of his book. “Imran was being attacked by trolls who were unsparing in their comments on his acting abilities. Imran has not just stopped checking, he has deleted his account,” said a source close to the actor.
One could argue that social networking is a double-edged sword. As Ranvir Shorey says, “Stars live in a bubble. The medium grounds them.” There are some who use the medium to ‘deny’ unflattering stories that appear in the media or even settle scores with those with a so-called agenda. There are also others, who are yet to figure out how to deal with the self-styled virtual vigilantes – masked, anonymous and very, very powerful.
Some people just like to abuse famous people on Twitter. You either get used to it or choose to ignore it. When I get such negative tweets, I know only a handful of them are being nasty. —Vir Das
People who send negative energy should know that it doesn’t affect anyone but them. So, no it doesn’t affect me. A few negative people are easily ignored. —Arjun Rampal
I am not on Twitter for a reason. I don’t need to know so much about others, neither do I want to talk about myself there. —Zoya Akhtar
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March 6, 2013 at 4:30 PM
thanx sanju–interesting to see both aamir and srk running away from twitter just when it began to hurt back!
when the going gets tough, the tough go skiving lol
Hey Satyam–have u been watching ‘inkaar’ ha
can i have your take plz–would be interesing thanx
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March 6, 2013 at 4:35 PM
found it pretty boring. Chitrangada Singh made it worthwhile in some ways (!) but the whole framing structure used here was incredibly repetitive after a point. The film has its moments but it’s mostly a very dull film. Mishra is just getting worse with every film. I have a weakness for Hazaaron…. Khoya Khoya chand was passable. This is easily weaker even than the latter.
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March 6, 2013 at 4:38 PM
hey i wanted a ‘longer’ review on this one
“Chitrangada Singh made it worthwhile in some ways (!)”
cmon satyam–i thought u had ‘grown’ after your cocktail ‘red bikini’ moment that ranks one of the lowest points in your accomplished blogging career 🙂
ps-how is the sexual harrassment angle at work place handled and is it ‘fair’ (to the male perspective)
does it do justice to the fact that many males can/do suffer this ‘plight’ lol
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March 6, 2013 at 4:42 PM
The only thing ‘low’ with respect to Cocktail is watching it (or liking it) for any reason other than the one I had! This might seem like a revolutionary idea but when I want to watch a good film I watch a good film, not Cocktail. Other than water-boarding I don’t think much else could convince me of the ‘merits’ of this film. But I better take that back before Utkal starts comparing its [Cocktail’s] spiritual lessons to that of the Gita and makes water-boarding the somewhat preferable option!
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March 6, 2013 at 4:51 PM
ha when time permits i HAVE to take u through cocktail–its more than what it appears -believe me lol
anyhow will come back to that later …watch this space…
ps–what did u feel about those issues above on inkaar (privided u noticed anything other than chitrangada here lol)
ps2–somehow i dont really find chitrangada that hott now–she seems to be trying tooo ‘hard’
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March 6, 2013 at 4:15 AM
First look pics from Sanjay Dutt starrer ‘Policegiri’ (Saamy remake)- directed by K. S. Ravikumar-
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March 6, 2013 at 5:13 PM
Saamy is not some kind of masterpiece but it’s a terrific moment in Vikram’s career and Dutt in his current form especially couldn’t be farther from the sort of spirited performer one needs for this kind of deal.
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March 7, 2013 at 8:55 AM
Libtard Mani Shankar Iyer at his worst..watch atter 10:00 ..
I think he was drunk or had just been beaten up with a stick by his wife..it is ridiculous; the blind, hypocritical hate they have in their eyes…& Shashi Tharoor is now the enemy within friends since he is of the opinion that Wharton shouldn’t have disinvited Modi!! & of course you also the icing on the cake..Mr. Suhel Seth, the jackass of all trades and master-bator of everything..surprisingly appearing neutral..
Shaina is hottttt…
http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/india-decides-9/wharton-should-have-heard-narendra-modi-after-inviting-him-says-shashi-tharoor/267399?hp
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March 7, 2013 at 10:47 AM
Really want to read this, but will wait till I watch the movie…
Another post in Kafila has a problem with, among other things, the dress that Muslims are shown wearing. [Link]
Every time we see a Muslim character, the males are wearing kurta pyjamas and topees and the females are wearing burkhas. The film only exacerbates a prevalent attitude that Muslims look and dress different. This may be true some of the time but it is not true all the time, as Kai Po Chewould have us believe.
Whoa. So let’s see. If Muslims are shown wearing shirt and trousers, the criticism would be that the only Muslims that are shown to be acceptable are those that un-Islamicize themselves in order to blend into the Hindu-defined “Indian identity. You almost feel that you cannot win.
http://greatbong.net/2013/03/06/on-kai-po-che/
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March 7, 2013 at 10:59 AM
Trailer of the orginal Chame Buddoor-
http://www.rediff.com/movies/slide-show/slide-show-1-original-chashme-buddoor-is-back/20130307.htm
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March 7, 2013 at 8:23 PM
Sanjana:
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ibnlive-poll-k-balachander-not-satyajit-ray-is-indias-greatest-director/377240-8-66.html
There are some surprises.
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March 7, 2013 at 8:23 PM
Hey I’m cheering Sajid Khan didn’t win the poll!
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