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Time for a system reboot?

Photo: Paul Noronha

The writing on the wall: An unflinching focus on issues...

It is ironical that in the world’s largest democracy, the most avidly watched and yet the most vacuous election campaign to date should have been preceded by a slew of intelligent Hindi films dwelling upon our drying sensitivities and crumbling system. Interestingly, these celluloid visions were more than superfluous sermons on the collective afflictions caused by our much debated — and panned — stupor as the citizenry.

For once, it was a role reversal, where films seemed to step out of their fantasy, escapist worlds and take on some real issues, while politics became more about a willing suspension of disbelief, drivelling over non-issues and eschewing all the sanity that it is supposed to stand for. Contrary to their established images, cinema came across as attempting to be serious, while politics transcended all boundaries of frivolity.

Politics has historically lent itself well to the medium of cinema for the sheer vividness of human strengths and weaknesses, and everything in between, that it teems with. Which is why the varicoloured world of song-and-dance has seen inspired exceptions lately, segueing into the dark recesses of human mind and the darker alleys of socio-political milieus to question the status quo.

In doing so, they have taken care to not dilute issues to the point of cinch immateriality — which is what many anti-system films of the 1970s through 1990s, in turning battles against the system into highly personalised crusades, did with naively loud, cynical and lop-sided idealism—and have steered clear of suggesting absolute solutions, evidently because they leave no room for further thought or introspection, and can reek of different biases to different people depending on where they lie on the socio-political spectrum.

This was in utter contrast to the depravity of party politics witnessed through the election campaign, which took the electorate’s intelligence for granted, exploited the morass of its own making to manipulate popular emotions, tossed around quick-fixes and words like “development” with zilch sincerity to gloss over ideological bankruptcy, and addressed people as if it was placating a child bawling over a lollipop.

There were contradictions galore. Take debutante director Nandita Das’s “Firaq”, which chronicled the imperatives of trust in a Gujarat fissured by anxieties following the 2002 communal riots. Her story of human relationships, banished from the realm of physical or verbal expression by the numbing aftermath of a pogrom, revolved around everyday characters caught in the throes of fear, anger and apprehensions. Not long after she took a moving stock of a bitter truth of our times, trying in futility to cover itself up in the rags of syncretism, that very truth found itself being paraded in jamborees of electoral greed with no interest in real solutions to the issues of interfaith reconciliation.

The human toll of fundamentalism: A scene from “Parzania”.

Anurag Kashyap’s “Gulaal” bared the murky reality of student politics as symptomatic of the larger socio-political evils plaguing our immediate worlds; in Kashyap’s own words, “a manifestation of anger at the failure of the system” and “a deep-felt cry for democracy”. But political parties of all stripes, their worn out and out-of-beat icons parroting the youth mantra, could be seen putting up charades of youthfulness in a bid to exploit the young voter base, without an inkling of the real aspirations and frustrations that are unique to the budding generation and far beyond the wildest imagination of political cadres good at nothing more than seat arithmetic.

In the Sudhir Mishra-produced and Piyush Jha-directed “Sikandar”, the digression of a 14-year-old Kashmiri orphan into the folds of violence and victimisation resulting from battles waged on the ground by the militants and the army, and in rhetoric-laden sanctuaries by Z-security-protected politicians and self-styled custodians of faith could be the story of the youth in any simmering region of the country falling for the lure of the gun. On its part, the movie perhaps articulated the cry for hope far better than any of the electoral crowd-pullers ogling power in Delhi.

The human face of extremism has found several portrayals on the silver screen, ranging from Gulzar’s “Maachis”, Govind Nihalani’s “Droh Kaal” and Santosh Sivan’s “Terrorist”, to Mani Ratnam’s “Roja”, “Dil Se”, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “Mission Kashmir”. Of late, however, the focus appears to be shifting from outside terrorists to the demons within.

More appropriately, the intrigue around the “who” behind the act of violence — in the age of 24x7 news, that is perhaps as trite as the government’s customary first statement in reaction to any such incident — has made way for the hapless question of “why” that ordinary people are often left struggling to answer in the aftermath of inhuman assaults. We saw that in “Aamir” (its depiction of the everyday struggle of Muslims to prove their patriotism), “Mumbai Meri Jaan” (based on individual responses to the serial blasts that rocked suburban Mumbai trains in July 2006), or “A Wednesday” (remember Naseeruddin Shah’s enactment of everyman’s helplessness and craving for answers?). Many of these movies were also powerful reflections on the tenuous law-and-order balances and dilemmas confronting our times. However, in a political culture given to treating the law and order machinery as its fief, such dilemmas seem to matter little.

Where some of the recent films also stood out was their sharp, unequivocal objectivity in acknowledging unpleasant truths. In the likes of “Black Friday” (which took a riveting look at the ramifications of the 1993 Mumbai bombings), “Aamir”, “Black and White” (which attempts to unravel the psyche of a fanatic), or “Parzania” (also focused on the human toll of fundamentalism), the dictates of political correctness stood ripped, almost teaching us a lesson or two in confronting the real origins of violence, religious or otherwise, without being ambiguous, apoplectic or apologetic. That is a far cry from the politically expedient vacillations on issues of social mistrust and unabashed opportunism that makes ideology look as worthless as discarded underwear.

Thankfully, the recent crop of movies has carefully kept patriotism from degenerating into high-sounding, exaggerated jingoism, far removed from reality. One movie that perhaps best set the tone for more of its league was Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s “Rang De Basanti”, a period-present drama straddling India under British rule and India led by its own wayward children; their similarities and divergences defining the meaninglessness and meaningfulness of our identity as a nation; a thought-provoking critique of the Indian political system and a reminder of what can be done about it. At the other end of the spectrum was the recent “Coffee House”, again an unpretentious story about dreams and the yearning for a change, woven around the strands of commonalty connecting diverse Indians, be it their everyday exasperations with the system or the strong sense of Indianness that keeps them going through odds.

This has apparently made its way to vernacular cinema as well. If box office collections are anything to go by, Mahesh Manjrekar’s newly released Marathi-language film “Mi Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy” (This is Shivajiraje Bhosale Speaking) makes a successful case for inclusiveness, advocating introspection over finger-pointing, blasting self-pity and negative self-image as excuses for parochial politicking. Incidentally, the state of the movie’s setting has been witness to efforts to make a capital out of regional identity and selfish appropriation of the legacy of historic figures. The message that questions of identity need not necessarily preclude decency and rationality has had few takers in the State’s, and indeed the nation’s, politics.

Absolute messages and statements are known to spawn staunch detraction in India and film audiences are no exception. Which is why a majority of recent system-centric movies have carefully desisted from broad brushstrokes or sweeping generalisations. The purpose of this genre of cinema is to move people to thought, anger and action. While it may be too much to expect films to catalyse revolutions — in times of eroding respect and crises of faith, films are mere films, works of make-believe storytelling — they do hold a mirror to us. But why films indeed fail to keep up with politics is that the latter is not constrained by the rigours of a script needing a conclusion. For, it is keeping issues — and non-issues — alive that is key to the survival of political players and definitive conclusions could well make them irrelevant and shut their shops. At the end of the day, one feels that as far as election-year entertainment goes, our films cannot quite compete with the politicians themselves.

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