Tahe dil se

It seemed at first as if it would never end. One week’s taxing work was no sooner done than we were preparing for the next week’s uploads – viewing clips, writing, editing, racing against time. It was made a little more difficult by the very nature of the subjects – heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching. There were topics that almost defeated some of us. Old Age, Ep 11, was one for me; writing about old people abandoned by their children was almost more than I could take. Listening to the Ep1 song, O Ri Chiraiya, and the Ep 4 song, Naav, are among the things that still make me tear up. 

It’s been an emotionally wracking project.

People have been talking about channel ratings and eyeballs and TRPs and seasons, but through all the din I can’t help feeling that Satyamev Jayate is not just another TV show. It is like no other show that has been done. In its essence it is not another programme that ends with the finale – Satyamev Jayate has lit a spark in the hearts and minds of a considerable number of its viewers. These viewers are ready for change – from elsewhere or within themselves. They want to change and bring about change, they have written in asking how they can go about it. 

This momentum should not be squandered. Satyamev Jayate by itself cannot do everything. In its way, it has raised a halla bol, it has given things a push, it has shaken people up. It can’t do very much more. The task has to be taken up by the army now – the army of people all over India who have watched and wept and laughed and hoped again for their country. 

My fear is that we will, like Everybody, hope that Somebody will do something. Anybody can do it, but if Nobody does it, then it will have been a scream in outer space – which no one hears. There has already been a good deal of change happening; the government has responded and organizations have taken up causes with renewed vigour, and overall there is a feeling that if we come together, we can do it.

But my fear is that as individuals we will be unable to change. Our systems, our institutions and our collective functioning may well undergo a transformation, and for that I am sure we will be grateful. My fear is that while outside the home we will become proud Indians, we will raise our arms in the Satyamev Jayate salute; when we step into our front doors we will once again go back to being our venal, indifferent, cruel individual selves. That will be the greatest tragedy.

The only way India can become a better place is if we become better people.  All of us. From the PM to the peon.

Namashkaar, Aadaab, Khushaamadeed, Satyamev Jayate

How I got into working - albeit somewhat peripherally - with the mad realm of television is another story. But the point is that my days and nights have merged - not always seamlessly - and the door that I opened has led me to a whole new world of sight and sound and terminology. All related to shooting and editing. 

In short, I agreed to an urgent request to come on board and help write material for the website for Satyamev Jayate, Aamir Khan Productions' new television show.  

One fringe benefit was that I got to meet Aamir Khan. And I mean meet in the real sense of the word - at work meetings with the team, sitting for endless hours over notes and briefings and presentations and more notes, and tea, and food, and once I even got to pet one of the cats at Chez Khan.

It's only towards the end of the second meeting that I realised with a sudden jolt that I was actually sitting about four feet away from Aamir Khan and talking quite normally (ie, not swooning) with him. It was like a slight time-warp shift at that moment, but there isn't time for daydreaming on the AKP caravan. One moves on, fataafat. It's electrifying, working with Aamir, because his energy is seemingly boundless. He's calm, sharp, doesn't miss a trick, and has a marvellous sense of humour. 

What I like the most about him is that his heart is so evidently in the right place, and moreover he's chosen to do something about it with the resources at his disposal. I've heard cribs that he's just another celebrity trying to cash in on the politically correct thing of being socially aware. But it's much more than that. If it was just that, he could have lent his face to some other production house. He could have done a social awareness ad campaign. He could have contributed a soundbite to some other kind of serial (a la Ashok Kumar in Hum Log, perhaps). But Aamir has put his entire might behind Satyamev Jayate. He's much more than a show host. If viewers are watching one and a half hours of an episode, Aamir has watched tens of hours of rushes and documentation and video testimonies and reconnaissance footage, he has spoken with countless people about their experiences, he has pored over scripts and edited episodes till the wee hours, he has done takes and retakes until he is satisfied that what he wants to say is coming across the way he wants it to.

He's no celeb riding on a bandwagon. He's a guy who is doing the job he has set out for himself, and doing it as well as he can.To my mind he's not a film star or any kind of star. He's someone who has seen things that are wrong, has felt a deep desire to do something about them, and has translated that desire into action. Many of us do do what we can. Lawyers fight cases, teachers teach, activists mobilise. Journalists write. Aamir Khan's medium is film. But one film would not have done what Satyamev Jayate is doing. Aamir has taken his expertise from the big screen to the small one - from the multiplexes to the living rooms and community halls of India. He's doing what many others have done before him and will do after him too. The fact that he is a “celebrity” is, to my mind, incidental. But the advantage of being a celebrity is (apart from the hazard of being constantly a target of many kinds) that one's reach is wider and possibly more potent than most other people's. The effect of that reach is making itself evident in the number and quality of the responses in all avenues of media from people who watched the first episode of Satyamev Jayate. 

There are late nights when the long corridor is empty and silent. Doors along the length of the corridor on both sides conceal the frenetic activity that goes on behind them - sound and colour and mixing and "please let me include just two more minutes" when the editor is already wondering how to squeeze in everything that the director wants.

These are nights when sometimes a little tiredness comes and taps on our shoulders. We think longingly of a couch and of "having nothing to do". Will that day ever come, we wonder.

Then the serial is launched, the world explodes with tearful applause, and those bleary eyes, those cramped feet, those aching shoulders all become worth it because Satyamev Jayate has touched hearts. Just the way Aamir wanted it to. The way the team wanted it to.

Yirrabat huxtable yorabata hay!

"Yirrabat huxtable yorabata hay!" started with a thread on a discussion forum hosted by expatsingapore.com. The poster said he had heard these words in a Peugeot car ad, and wanted to know what they meant. A couple of other posters provided more information: a link to the advertisement, and the revelation that the misheard words were actually "Tera husn bahut mujhe bhaata hai". I love good ads, and this one caught my fancy. Not only that, the mondegreen tickled me even more, so much so that I put the words on a t-shirt that I wear now and then even till date - seven years later.



That old discussion was fun, but no one may remember it. I do, thanks to "Yirrabat huxtable yorabata hay!" It's a yodelly yell, a celebratory exclamation with a joyous bounce which lifts my spirits. And the "huxtable" makes me giggle. Anything which does that must be good.

Can you write about rice-lentil cakes?

Born of an online debate about authenticity, Indian writing in English, etc... It got too much at one point and instead of bursting into song, I burst into prose. Two vignettes:


Idlis 1

My mother would make idlis at home, soak the rice and the dal, grind it into batter, leave it to ferment overnight. When I went into the kitchen for a glass of water before going to bed there would be the gentle, slightly sour hint of the next day's delights - idlis fresh out of their cups in the copper steamer, just-ground chutney with coconut and coriander, or perhaps a different chutney, with garlic and dry red chillies in the coconut. And golden sambar, unmatched, into which to dunk the idlis. It was a heavenly breakfast.

Whose mother whips up the batter for these bucketloads of idlis, I wonder. Do these people eating them remember the kitchens of their childhood, remember for a brief moment the long-ago whiff of fermenting idli batter, and do they perhaps console themselves with mass-produced chutney?


Idlis 2

The cafe was dark, as always. Light came from the bulbs, hanging overhead in ancient holders that had given their original enamel up to a patina of grime which, in a way, lent a sort of uniformity to the otherwise anachronistic decor, if that is the word, of the place. Dada's aunt had - once upon a time - chosen the paint and finishings but her son had taken issue with her choice and changed things around, and then after he died she changed some stuff around again, and by the time Dada had come to run the place it didn't have very much to say for itself in terms of character. That came with time, though. Time, and the small band of regulars who argued, thumped the tables, drank the tea, criticised the bhajiyas, chose a new government, but never made so much noise that they had to be hushed.

Sunita didn't know any of this, of course, when she walked in looking for a refuge from the afternoon sun. Neither did she know that she was to become more intimate with that little wayside cafe than she would ever have thought possible.

She saw a plate of idlis with sambar and chutney being served at another table and so that is what she ordered. But it was an illusion, as she realised when the idlis arrived before her. Where they should have been fluffy, or at least yielding, they were crumbly and almost hard. Not just that they were cold, they had also not been made with any sort of care. She tried dunking a piece into the sambar but the idli batter had obviously been specially treated to resist absorbing anything. Had it been ground in haste, left too coarse? Not fermented enough? Had it been made ages ago, and did it lose its youth in the refrigerator? Perhaps everything that could be done wrong to an idli had been done, here.

Should I say something to the guy, she thought. Or should I just forget it - it's a little chai shop in the back of beyond in Goa, how could I expect nice idlis here anyway? I might as well just have the tea and go. I'm not even staying here, I'm just waiting for my bus. What was I thinking, asking for idlis? I should have gone for pakoras instead. No, too oily. Maybe bhaaji-pao. Dip the pao into the tea.





(First posted on anothersubcontinent.com.)

Gold-laden idol

They looked for God in a gold-laden idol
To which they gave a name
And in which they thought they found their idea of God.
But the gold dazzled them
And what they thought they saw was neither real nor the truth.

Contemplation of the spiritual

One does not need to retreat into the Garhwal hills to contemplate the spiritual. Stay still long enough and the spiritual will present itself to you for your contemplation, say when you are chopping vegetables. Do not be too surprised when it arrives; you have to save your fingers too, in addition to your soul.