Ee.Ma.Yau

Life is absurd. So is death sometimes. And sometimes, when you are dealing with death in life, absurdism can take an even more….absurd turn. By showcasing how death is a better fate when compared to dealing with the predisposition of people to selfishness and petty ways, director Lijo Jose Pellisetty has created one of the best satires that I have come across in contemporary Indian cinema. The theme of absurdism in the context of a funeral is not exactly an oft-repeated theme in Indian movies - although whenever we have come across such movies, they just knock it out of the park. Thithi, the Kannada movie made in the recent past, is one such gem.

Ee.Ma.Yau or Eesu.Mariyam.Yauseppe (Jesus, Mary, Joseph or interchangeably R.I.P) starts on a quirky note, if the movie title is anything to go by. Set in Chellanam, up on the coast near Ernakulam, it's a movie about how a small family (in the conventional sense) and a larger family (in the unconventional sense) deal with the sudden death and ensuing funeral of Vavachan Mestri. In a coastal community, death is never only your own. And this is evidenced how the entire community starts handling the funeral arrangements like its clockwork, when it's actually anything but. In fact, it is just utter chaos. And herein does the filmmaker shines in demonstrating how ghastly life can be, when dealing with death.

Vavachan Mestri comes home to his village and is greeted by pettiness immediately - a fisherman accuses Vavachan's daughter of having pre-marital relationship and being pregnant. Angered by being greeted with such gossip, Vavachan strikes the guy who informs him, before scurrying along home. The touch of absurdity is everywhere in this movie - you see how Vavachan callously picks up his bag carrying a live duck that he is carrying home. He gets home to find a flickering tubelight by the door that he starts adjusting being being greeted by a bickering wife. His daughter and daughter-in-law get on with cooking the duck for dinner, but he cant shake off what he heard and hence sits remorsefully outside. His son, Eeshy comes home and is told by his family about his father sitting and sulking outside and he decides the best way to console his dad is just by offering him drinks. Soon, they drink together and Vavachan starts talking about his contribution to the local church, how lavish the funeral to his father was and starts talking about his own funeral. Guilt-striken, his broke son promises him an equally lavish funeral and the absurdism oozing out of these scenes are about how happy the thought of a grand death makes Vavachan feel.

And it comes as no surprise that Vavachan falls dead soon in the living room, after chiding his son about the absurdity of how he hides smokes but openly drinks with his father. The womenfolk find him lying lifeless on the ground and the banshee shrieks begin almost immediately. Eeshy rushes in and is completely gobsmacked- but almost on cue, his neighbour and friend, Ayyapan (also the "committee" worker) arrives and starts trying to put the unforeseen chaos into order. What follows is how chaos becomes the hero - be it in reactions of people or the situations themselves. And the characters that you are introduced to, all bring their own ingredients to throw into the chaotic pyre. Be it the boyfriend character trying to get stolen moments with Vavachan's daughter, the "customized" howls from his wife strewn with topical jibes about her husband depending on the audience, the son scampering around to find money to try to make good of his promise of a grand goodbye to his father or the no-nonsense nurse who needs to pronounce the man dead or the Vicar who is convinced that there is foulplay in the death - the characters infuse soul into this lively satire. I loved the absurdist scenes which make you chuckle discreetly or guffaw guiltily - how the doctor can't come to confirm the death because he is lying drunk, how the nurse won't ride pillion on a bike in the middle of the night because it's unsafe but will ride the bike herself, how the "negotiation" for the coffin with "imported wood and velvet finish" at the funeral home takes place, how there is that annoying broken clarinet playing in the funeral band, how the dog scratches itself lazily as the clergymen walk past and ask an existential question that begets a theological answer, how the gossip mongers drink alcohol in the vicinity of the bereaved house and spin yarns, how the grave digger ironically digs his own grave, literally. P.F.Mathews just kills it with the spot-on screenplay.

Then the thundering cloudburst ushers in the crescendo of the movie with the second wife and her family arriving and throwing a spade into the funeral set-up. As rains get more torrential, so does the chaos. Eeshy breaks down completely and acts like a raving lunatic, when all he is feeling is immense grief and tremendous remorse for not being able to turn his promise of "first class coffin, first class band set,18 men with ceremonial staff holding the silver cross, the blessings of the Bishop" into a reality. Chemban Vinod Jose delivers a stellar performance as the well-intentioned son, who is equal parts confused and equal parts convinced about how his father's remains need to be treated. The rest of the cast, however little screen time they get, make an indelible mark.

I must confess - as much as I watched this movie because the director made another recent favourite of mine - Angamaly Diaries, I also watched this movie for Shyju Khalid, the cinematographer. As if to perfectly complement the sombre subject of the movie, the lenses weave magic with a deeply blue filter outside the house and a dimly-lit setting contrasting the jarring colours of the wall, inside the house. And the rain scenes and claustrophobia-inducing crowd shots heighten the mood even more.

This movie is not only a treatise on people's petty reactions but also makes you question the absurdity of rituals and how seriously they are taken as well. Is a life truly lived only if it ends well on a "first-class" note? And yet, the world over, why are funeral traditions as important as any other custom associated with life. What's mankind's obsession with getting death right? Well, when we know, maybe it will be too late!

Kumbalangi Nights

Men in Movies. 

Seldom have I loved the men portrayed in movies as much as I have done in Kumbalangi Nights. Seldom have I felt as moved by the representation of masculinity as I felt watching this movie. Seldom have I questioned why women blindly or sometimes implicitly propagate ideas about ideal "manly" behaviour should be, as much as I did from the women in this movie. 

Seldom have I savoured the melancholy about disturbing tales of dysfunctional families accepting the innate societal prejudice towards them, as much as I did from the central family in this movie. Seldom has the "mood" perpetuated by awe-inspiring cinematography and melodic music in a movie left me with a kind of serenity that this movie inspired. 

Kumbalangi Nights gave me many such "seldom" moments to go through and think through. It felt like the crew of this movie somehow transformed into a single conductor who brings together this symphony of all your senses together in perfect harmony, mesmerizes you in unison and leaves you in trance. Idyllic scenes of Kumbalangi, a fishing village outside of Kochi evoked a nostalgia I never knew I could be capable of. Fishing nets, lush greenery, coconut trees, balmy weather and cheerfully painted boats fill your screen and your senses. The frame meanders across the backwaters, before stopping to focus on a dilapidated brick-exposed house, that is clearly past its glory years. You are introduced to the house from the vantage point of Franky, the youngest of 4 brothers, who is clearly embarrassed to admit to his teenage soccer buddies that this is his humble adode. Now the vantage point shifts to the 3rd brother, Bobby - carefree, unemployed but the embarrassment has taken the shape of deep-seated anger at their squalor. The frame then moves to the oldest brother, Saji - the de-facto head of the family, as he folds his lungi and stirs up the fish curry that he is making. Embarrassment of their situation is still a common theme, except that it has turned into muted acceptance of reality with him. Speaking of muted, there is the "other"/second brother, Bonny - who watches and feels all of this internally and more quietly, as he cannot speak. This is a tale woven together by the perspectives of these four brothers, inhabiting a broken home with no women or doors.

Cut to the other end of neighbourhood, there's another tale of a completely credible family - the patriarch has passed away but has been replaced by the son-in-law , "the complete man". And this conveyed to you, with an image in the mirror of a perfect moustache. The shot expands to focus on the face of this man - who doesn’t have a hair out of place. After all, he has the "respectable" job of being an owner of a barber shop. So what if he's moved into his wife's family home - that doesn’t make him any less of a man because he has a "respectable" job. He has assumed the role of being the "chetta" to his wife's sister, Baby as well as the saviour of the three women in the household including his mother-in-law. The women seem to be at ill-at-ease with him, although you are left to wonder if it's out of fear or reverence. 

The film is eternally in first-gear-mode but it's a ride that you feel that you ought to enjoy at that languid pace only. There are perhaps two turning points where the film threatens to shift gears, both metaphorically and otherwise. I don’t want to give out spoilers but what these events lead to, makes you sit up and think about what masculinity truly entails. Or if it should be definable at all. In the same breath, it also makes you question about the role of women and femininity. It also, very beautifully, addresses the mental anguish suffered by the common man. In most occasions, the concept of mental trauma is often not acknowledged or wilfuly ignored or blatantly scoffed at. Does crying belligerently so much that you drench your shrink's shirt with tears make you less of a man, especially when you have been doing the heavy lifting of a family including being a mother to step brothers? Does the fact that you wrestle physically with your younger brother make you less of a brother, even though you offer unwavering support to your brother when he wants to marry a girl, whose family thinks lowly of you? Does the fact that you unfairly exploit a co-worker to feed your family make you less of a father figure,  especially when you readily bring in his wife and newborn baby into your household upon his sudden demise? The character of the eldest brother, played adeptly by Soubin Shahir, is complex to say the very least. And only Fahaad Fasil can ensure a role oozing toxic masculinity is not turned into a caricature. Each of the characters bring their own neat edge to the tale. A myriad of themes are explored through these characters and one that got me thinking for a long time is what being "progressive" is all about too.

In the off chance that  the sharp screenplay and brilliant acting don’t  enthrall you, the vivid camera work and the  enthralling soundtrack would definitely enamour you. The "nights" of Kumbalangi are near magical. If backwaters during nighttime can be romanticized to this level, I wouldn’t have slept a wink when in Kerala. Reflections of serial lights and dark blue hues of dusk hug the waters as silhouettes dance around. There are very few cinematographers who make you feel like you are flipping through an album of picturesque postcards that yet somehow fluid. This sensory assault on your pupils is accompanied by the most mellifluous background score and songs.

No movie in the recent past has made me want to pull up my laptop and start penning down my thoughts about the film, just so that I can remember how I felt watching the movie and long after it. Easily, the best to come out of Indian cinema in 2019

The Gita

I have taken to reading the Bhagavad Gita and also a book dedicated to the 3rd Chapter - Karma Yoga: The Path Of Action (Thanks Arjun!). While I probably need to finish reading the books in their entirety to write about that the thoughts that it invoked and the effect that it has had on me, I would nevertheless like to dogear certain verses here from time to time:


"The Yogi who is established in his Self and who is even minded all the time and at all the places develops the equal vision where by he sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self".(Chapter 6: Verse 29)

"Restless senses can forcibly carry away the mind of even a wise person striving for perfection. One's intellect becomes steady when one's senses are under complete control. One develops attachment to sense objects by thinking about sense objects. Desire for sense objects comes from attachment to sense objects, and anger comes from unfulfilled desires. Delusion or wild idea arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when mind is bewildered. One falls down from the right path when reasoning is destroyed." (Chapter 2: Verses 60-63)

Apparently the not-quite-the-right-fit works!

The media is abuzz about Bobby Jindal's being elected the governor of Louisiana. Now, I can't proclaim to make a confident political commentary nor am I inclined to make any sort of personal comments, but thought I would quickly jot down some of the facts that you can ponder about!

1. Louisiana is one of the states with lowest immigration stock.
2. It is also the nation's poorest state, measured by per capita and one of its unhealthiest; the worst in infant mortality; and the least educated. It is last in attracting new college-educated workers (Source : The NY times)
3. Bobby Jindal, in his owns words, is 100% against abortion. He originally belongs to the country with the second highest population in the world.
4. Jindal is an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq. In 2005, Jindal led other freshman Republican House members in dipping their fingers in purple dye to celebrate the 2005 Iraqi national elections (Source : Wikipedia)
5. His comments on the Hurricane Katrina "The storms didn’t cause all of our problems —they revealed a lot of our problems. It’s an incredible opportunity to change the state.”

A Brief Sojourn at The Coffee Kingdom

You would think writing about a blissful holiday should be something that one would normally jump at...But then again, you are also probably one of those kinds who does not know how to get an assprint permanently embossed on your chair. So trust me, you would not understand!

Late last August, we decided to take a break from the oft-repeated off-beaten tracks of Goa and venture into something that we have not tried too much together. I could only muster up a couple of days off and so the war between coffee kingdoms was won by Chikmagulur. Honestly, I have been very keen on doing Coorg, but we thought it would be better if we could try that when we have more time on my hands and more dough in our pockets (I don't know whether that will EVER happen!).

Chikmagulur, for the slightly intiated, is Cafe Coffee Day County. For the totally uninitiated, is nestled between the big and beautiful mountain ranges of Baba Budan Giri, about 260 kms off Bangalore. Known for its rich coffee estates on its outer fringes, it is actually a quaint little town with little country clubs where the rich coffee lords and their plump wives get together and drink anything but coffee!

We took an overnight KSRTC Volvo bus from Bangalore (started at about 11.30 p.m) and the journey to Chikmagulur took around 6 hours. So in the wee hours of the morning, we found ourselves in the middle of a quiet bus stand. Luckily, I had earlier managed to get some contact details of hotels on karnataka tourism website and had done a phone booking at what seemed (online!) to be a decent place called Planter's Court. It turned out to be fairly decent hotel, with a nice Udipi restaurant bordering it. That place served the best coffee that I have had in a very loooong time(Not counting Mum's..) - strong, dark, not-so-sweet and more importantly, non-stringent!!

Armed with a very scanty knowledge about the town , we set out to check out 'Ratnagiri Park', which was part of the town itself. This park had its own little toy train, tree house, a pond and the likes. Pretty much the standard stuff, but the main attraction was the breathtaking view of the surrounding hills.



It was about mid-afternoon, when we made our way to the bus-stand again to enquire about how to get to either Mullainagiri or Baba Budan Giri. From whatever little information we could gather from the locals, the former was the highest peak in Karnataka and the latter was the main point of attraction. Given the time we had on our hands, we decided to rent a jeep to head to Mullainagiri. The ride was quite torturous thanks to the generous monsoon-induced potholes on the road. Couple that with the absence of any sort of barricades on the mountain paths, beyond which there also seemed to be abyss all fogged out, the ride was quite a memorable one!

We reached the point from where we had to trek up a flight of stairs to get to a little temple. This was supposed to signify the highest point in Karnataka. The trek turned out to be a bit more arduous than we expected, simply because it was VERY chilly AND it was raining!! We didn't have windcheaters and since we didn't want to get out sweatshirts wet, we had to endure the climb wearing only our t-shirts. Needless to say, we were soon soaked to the bones due to the rain! Not to mention, we were virtually unprotected against the cold wind. We eventually managed to get to the peak and as it turns out, the temple itself was closed! We would have ideally lingered on there for longer, but for the rain and cold wind...So we got our asses back to firm ground soon!

Dinner was at the Club house in the hotel itself...Being a Sunday night, there seemed to be a lot of the usual family dinner outings in progress..Most of the tables there seemed to house people belonging to either one of these categories:

a) the newly-wed kinds crouching towards in barely-visible corners.
b) the quintessential nuclear family types ( You know..with the husband staring jealously at the men who get to smoke, the wife stealing glances at the fake jewellery of the woman in the next table, the children looking ever so bored even while staring at the TV screens)
c) the oh-so-long table - with all the uncles on one side and all the aunties on one side and the conversation same-sex based!
d) And One table for the resident "tourists"! Us! Our camera, our extra layers of clothing in otherwise warm room, the hoots of excitement at finding a peg of premium whiksky for less than 50 bucks et al - think all these gave us away ;)

We began Day 2 with what else but filter coffee!! After a nice Udipi breakfast, we headed again to busstand from where we were to take a bus to Baba Budan Giri. After a wait of nearly an hour in the bus, which was spent in reading aloud a play and gathering some "why-don't-you-just-shut-up" glances, we began our nearly two hour journey to the hills..

The picturesque ride was quite worth all the effort! The road winds and unwinds through the green ranges..
We passed a few estates and were told that the monsoon is not the best time to visit these estates because of the impending danger of leeches! The mid-day mist seem to a large icing on the big green cake that the ranges were! We reached the point beyond which we had to take a jeep to reach the waterfall, which was about 3 kms up...We could have trekked this journey, but for the lack of time - we had to be back by 4-4.30 in order to catch the return bus back to Chikmagulur...


More than waterfall itself, the instant thing to greet you were the amount of clothes strewn around near the waterfall!
We suspected it to be chaddis which people flung after taking a shower in the waterfall! There were also these stones which were being worshipped as a deity...In true southie style, people broke coconuts before this deity..Of course these seem to be offerings more for the monkeys in and around the place than for the God!!

The view of the valley from this point was so breathtaking and it was made even more enjoyable by the hot chai and pakodas! We then headed to this cave shrine which was popularly known as the "hindu-muslim" temple! It actually turned to a beautiful dargah tucked away beneath the ground in a cave, where natural rock formations were being worshipped..Although Photography was prohibited, I couldn't help sneak in a couple of shots of the place!

We began the journey back down and were back in Chikmagulur by the dusk...Dinner was back at the Clubhouse..But it was a lot quieter that day! And this time, we ensured we didn't look the part of tourists so much! After sleeping for a few hours, we were up before dawn to catch the bus back to Bangalore...It was a trip unlike anything we have ever had and we are sure to remember the beautiful town and its heavenly surroundings for a looong while!

I remember....

The smile that this evergreen opening credits inspired..

Off you go..down the memory lane!

P.S: Sidd/Nitin - This is for you guys!

Last Kiss

Much as I am a sucker for movies with good soundtracks, the real reason I wanted to pick up the DVD for this movie, 'Last Kiss' was the whole plot surrounding the big ‘3-0(h)’ crisis. True, it’s probably NOT the most original of concepts (It’s also adapted from an Italian movie called ‘L’Ultimo Bacio’) – The protagonist is fast approaching his 30th birthday, has a job that he is good at, has a girlfriend who just seems perfect in more ways than one and is going to have a baby with her. It’s sort of like the ideal situation that he has always wanted to be in when he hits the 30 mark. But of course, not all is fine. The fact that life seems too programmed and planned out is a little too scary for him. There doesn’t seem to be any lofty surprises in store in the future too. So he chokes, acts on the first temptation that comes his way and then everything comes crashing down hard.

So what’s interesting about a ‘rosy-life-suddenly-turns-sour’ story, you ask? Well, for one – the movie is a mere instrument to tell the story, as it is. It’s completely brazen in its honesty. While the story unfolds with the choices that the protagonist makes and the repercussions that it has on his relationship with his girlfriend, it does not falter into taking sides and getting into an unnecessary imbroglio of pity-induced patronage of the victim and unabated bashing of the wrongdoer. There’s no good vs. evil spin here and most of the characters are in some sort of fix when it comes to their relationships. All due credit needs to be given to the right casting choices as well. Zach Braff is just right for the role of the guy who is thrown into the throngs of confusion by how well life has worked out and how not very happy he is with that situation. Even though he visibly screws up by sleeping with a college girl, he does not immediately end up becoming hate-worthy in the eyes of the audience.

The movie just brought back the thoughts that I have always had about relationships. After being in one for close to four years now, I have come around to accepting one thing - ultimately you cannot escape that one truth about relationships– More often than not, it does not come easy. Sometimes, you just can’t expect it to assume its natural course. It does not all fall into place and you have to work very hard at it. Especially if you are one who has always lived life on your own terms, there will be times when your priorities, desires, ambitions and even inhibitions INDIVIDUALLY would threaten to gain more importance over the pathway that both of you have laid out for each other as a couple. When it comes down to a collision path such as that, I guess compromise works. But then again, I do believe the answer is finally lies in – well, the choices you make. Sometimes they are hard, sometimes they are plain friggin’ obvious. But heck, one way or the other, you have ‘em!