Minding the Gap: Thoughts on Gulabo Sitabo

My Mirror column:

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual atmospherics and banter, but both its laughter and its nostalgia come at a cost

A screenshot from the film Gulabo Sitabo (2020)

Twenty minutes into Gulabo Sitabo, the film's septuagenarian protagonist Mirza Chunnan Nawab (Amitabh Bachchan with a prosthetic nose, a cotton-puff beard and a bent back) makes his creaky way up to the room that his rent-witholding tenant Baankey Rastogi (Ayushmann Khurrana) shares with an otherwise all-female household. The family is prepared. The youngest sister lies down immediately, another places a white bandage on her forehead, the third stands by gravely. The mother emerges on cue with an empty atta tin, while Baankey holds up an old blender they could sell to buy food. It's a fine performance, and even the suspicious Mirza is fooled. As he turns to leave, though, a loud ping breaks the melodramatic silence. It's the microwave with the family's actual dinner.

Things are not quite what they seem.

That gap between appearance and reality is the recurring motif of Shoojit Sircar's new film – and not always a consciously adopted one. At first glance, Juhi Chaturvedi's script appears to concern itself with an old nawabi Lucknow, centred on a decaying but still impressive old haveli and its khandaani Muslim inhabitants. But that Lucknow, of inherited feudal grandeur and flowery late-Mughal culture, has been in the grip of slow stasis since at least the mid-1800s, when the British exiled its beloved ruler Wajid Ali Shah, he of the brilliant shairi and thumri and kathak -- not just a connoisseur of the arts but an actual artist. What little survived of that culture through a century under the British has crumbled to nothing in the 70 years since independence. And so the characters that Chaturvedi and Sircar prop up as representatives of that past cannot live up to our imagination of it.

We may want crabby old Mirza and his 94-year-old wife, Fatima Begum (the inimitable Farrukh Jaffar, Bollywood's resident Sharp-Tongued Old Lady from Peepli Live to Photograph) to be all quiet gentility and noblesse oblige. But given that their sole resource is a building they don't have the money to repair, why is it surprising that they are instead skinflint, petty creatures -- one handing out coins as if they mean something, and the other actually exchanging them for tenners?

Amitabh Bachchan as Mirza sells off pilfered odds and ends in a scene from Gulabo Sitabo

Right from the start, the film's constant refrain is that Mirza is laalchi (greedy) and miserly. But there's something pathetic about a man who spends every day trying to redeem paltry rents from ever-dodging tenants, money he doesn't even control when he gets it. It is clearly because he has no money that he is reduced to thievery. So limited is his experience of cash that even calculating the sum of 30,000 rupees is difficult for him – and when the chaatwala pronounces the amount, Mirza falls over in shock. A much larger sum, later in the film, is entirely beyond his comprehension.

Yes, he speaks rather hopefully of the Begum's impending death (and Sircar and Chaturvedi milk every drop of humour from Bachchan's goggle-eyed shock when she recovers from every physical setback). Yes, he confesses to having married the Begum essentially for her haveli. But he has also stayed married to a woman a decade and a half his senior, and looked after her and her house as best he could, receiving little for his pains, his younger and ghar-jamaai status keeping him at semi-attendant level.

Thinking of Mirza as a villain, even a comic villain, or as a greedy heartless sort, seems to me to miss the wood for the trees. And as the film proceeded, it became increasingly clear to me what that wood is -- a whole city full of people on the make, using whatever they can to climb that one rung up the ladder that might insulate them from the vagaries of fortune in the economically vulnerable, socially depleted, politically compromised world that is present-day Lucknow. The small-time lawyer (Brijendra Kala) who thinks he can make a deal on Fatima Manzil with the local mafioso builder, the Department of Archaeology official (Vijay Raaz) who wants to get it declared heritage property, Baankey's girlfriend who ditches him for a richer match, or his sharp younger sister Guddo (Srishti Srivastava), perfectly matter-of-fact about sleeping with a useful contact – they're all in it for what they can get. Strangely, none of them get labelled greedy. 

Waning Moons, a recent PSBT documentary watchable on Vimeo, features two real-life Nawabi descendants, Mirza Nasir Abbas Maliki and his sister Naaz, who describe their father as having lost all their money because of his “seedhapa” (straightness). Naaz, who was never really sent to school, describes an actual haveli roof collapse that destroyed many antiques. But somehow, those selling their antiques for a pittance are greedy -- not those who re-sell them at massive mark-ups?

It is not just the chandeliers of Fatima Manzil that are disappearing. The city that held them up is gone, too. Even the overblown nazaakat that 1950s and 60s Hindi cinema capitalised on -- in Lucknow-set Muslim socials like HS Rawail's Mere Mehboob (1963), poetic romances like Mohammed Sadiq's Chaudhavin ka Chand (1960) or joyfully bantering ones like Subodh Mukherjee's marvellous Paying Guest (1957) – has long disappeared, leaving a shell in its stead.

Abhishek Chaubey's Dedh Ishqiya (2014) played the perfect double game with that fact, creating a dark comedy that seemed to cater to our fantasy of gorgeously-dressed, poetry-spouting old-world romance, only to ruthlessly undercut it. Let it be noted that Gulabo Sitabo's ostensibly gentle comedy about an old Muslim Lucknow, with its gratitude to the Uttar Pradesh Police, UP's Minister of State for Minority Welfare and the ex-Vice President of the BJP's Youth Wing, comes to us in the midst of a pandemic during which Muslims have been constantly attacked by both media and the government. Nostalgia and mockery combine well, not just on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Jun 2020.

State secrets, secret states

My Mirror column:

Raazi successfully inserts itself into existing Bollywood narratives — on Indo-Pak ties, Muslims, nationalism and womanhood — and makes subtle departures from them.

Bollywood’s fascination with the Indo-Pak relationship has tended to produce two kinds of cross-border narratives. The first is the nationalist we-will-go-across-and-kill-the-terrorists plot, the standard elements of which are intelligence agencies, secret identities, and wish-fulfilment — and given that we’re talking of India and Pakistan, increasingly coded in the Hindi film universe as Hindu and Muslim, that wish-fulfilment can involve both revenge and romance. I’m talking here of films like Ek Tha Tiger, Agent Vinod, Baby and Phantom. The second type of Indo-Pak film builds on the baseline assumption that individual citizens of both countries are capable of forging a warm human connection, despite all the obstacles placed in their way by politics, religion and highly-policed state borders.

As I noted in these pages in 2016, this second kind of Indo-Pak film has frequently involved a very specific plot device: in which a primary character is stuck on the wrong side of the border, and must be rescued or helped to return to the right side. Veer-Zaara might be the epic romantic version of this (though we must acknowledge the complicating presence here of Gadar: Ek Prem Katha). In recent years, the romantic cross-border rescue plot has been replaced by other comic variants: Nitin Kakkar’s 2014 film Filmistaan centres on a goofy Indian abductee with a Hindi cinema obsession; in 2015’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it is a mute Pakistani child who is mistakenly left on the Indian side; in 2016’s Happy Bhag Jayegi, Diana Penty’s runaway bride from the Indian side of Punjab finds herself in the hands of a genteel bunch of Pakistanis.

Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi — a spy thriller set against the backdrop of the 1971 Indo-Pak war — ticks many boxes that would seem to place it in the first category. What makes the film hard to classify purely as a nationalist wishfulfilment narrative is that it is based on Calling Sehmat, Harinder Sikka’s retelling of the real-life story of a Kashmiri woman who married a Pakistani army officer with the express purpose of gathering classified information for Indian intelligence agencies.

What makes the film even more interesting is that elements of the second Indo-Pak narrative are mixed in with the first kind — the human connection, as well as the eventual cross-border rescue. The plot is as follows: a Kashmiri man (Rajit Kapur), who has earned the trust of aPakistani brigadier by supplying him with nearly-true but harmless Indian information, decides that winning the Bangladesh war requires an Indian secret agent working out of Pakistan. He would do the job himself, but he is dying of a “tumour” (the use of this unspecific term for a terminal illness may seem odd now but propels the film correctly into a ’70s universe). So, he decides to send his college-going daughter, Sehmat, instead, after arranging for her to receive a crash course as an Indian secret agent.

The marriage of Sehmat (a wonderfully well-cast Alia Bhatt) to the Pakistani brigadier’s son (Vicky Kaushal in a small but effective role) is one of the film’s core set pieces, both visually and symbolically. The heroine’s innate, almost unquestioning devotion to her father is both an entirely believable South Asian emotion and an unspoken stand-in for her loyalty to the nation. The marriage works as metaphor at another level, too: the beti leaving her babul’s home for her sasural here is also leaving her country for the enemy nation. And if one might be allowed the privilege of a gender-related speculation here, the deep otherness of Sehmat’s new home can be read as a subversive coded comment on the otherness of all sasurals for all new bahus.

The bahu-as-spy is a perfect set-up in terms of the film’s action, too. The doll-like figure of Alia Bhatt, with her porcelain beauty, works perfectly as the unsuspected mole planted into the most intimate inner circle of the Pakistani military establishment. Her lessons in surveillance, signalling, code language, shooting are, of course, essential to her success as a secret agent, and to watch the soft-hearted young woman, who would once risk her life to save a squirrel and couldn’t stand the sight of blood, transform into a ruthless creature with nerves of steel gives Raazi some of its most thrilling moments. But what stayed with me long after the film is the image of the sweetly-smiling dulhan at her father-in-law’s breakfast table, eavesdropping on conversations he has with his army officer sons, or gaining access to senior army officers’ homes through their wives and children to gather intelligence. The female spy is so fetishised precisely because the seductive and nurturing aspects of femininity are placed secretly in the service of cold strategy — and yet in the end, that larger cause is to be understood as an undeniable good.

The most significant ways in which Raazi subverts the Hindutva zeitgeist are also the simplest. In a cinematic milieu in which the burkha-clad female silhouette has either been a source of comic disguise (for heroes and heroines alike) or a symbol of oppressed Muslim womanhood who needs to be liberated, there is something quietly radical about a heroine in a mauve burkha. This is a burkha-clad figure who needs no saving, and her stealth and determination are harnessed to a nationalist cause. That this is a Kashmiri girl is, of course, no accident — from Kajol in Fanaa (2006) to the child in Bajrangi Bhaijaan to Haider, Bollywood returns repeatedly to Kashmiri femininity as the test site for nationalism. Sehmat passes the India test, with flying colours, but the film’s coda allows for something like love across enemy nations — based on a respect for each other’s nationalism. It is a fascinating new spin on the idea that we are essentially alike.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 June 2018.

The Life Poetic

My Mirror column:

The 1957 classic Paying Guest still feels young as it turns 60. But there are things in its frothy shairana universe that now seem almost worthy.

There's a delicious little scene in Paying Guest when the penurious tenant Ramesh (Dev Anand) has returned home to pursue his newly-minted courtship with Shanti (Nutan), who also happens to be the daughter of his landlord. For several seconds, they look deep into each other's eyes, each uttering the other's name in typically soulful lover-ly fashion. "Shanti." "Ramesh." "Shanti?" "Ramesh?" But Ramesh wants more than sweet nothings. "Bolo?" he urges. At which Shanti flutters her eyelashes and says — in the same dulcet tones as before — "Kiraye ke paise laaye? [Did you bring the rent money?]" "Kaisi gair-shairaana baatein karti ho! [What unpoetic things you speak of!]" responds Ramesh, pretending to go off in a huff.

The scene doesn't do very much by way of plot, but it is typical of the sort of bantering courtship, of romance between witty equals, that makes the film such fun. Very little that is gair-shairana -or gair-shararati - is allowed in the Paying Guest universe. The delightful 1957 film was directed by Subodh Mukerji, but its spirit was the product of Nasir Hussain's penmanship. Hussain, for whom this was the second collaboration with good friend Mukerji (the first being Munimji, 1955) - produced with the script and dialogue here a perfect balance between banter and poetry, between sharpness and sweetness. It was this lightness of register would go on to characterise his films as director, starting with Tumsa Nahin Dekha, his directorial debut, which also released in 1957.

Akshay Manwani, in his detailed and thoughtful book on Nasir Hussain's cinema, suggests that it was Husain's writing that allowed Dev Anand to metamorphose into the witty, flirtatious, charming trickster figure that became almost his signature in the latter part of his career. Some of Anand's earlier 1950s films - the noirish ones like Baazi, Jaal, Taxi Driver and House No. 44 -had lent him "a certain brazenness", but as "a man of the streets, a survivor who is at home in the urban underbelly." It was Hussain - with his scripts for Munimji and Paying Guest and later Jab Pyaar Kisise Hota Hai (1961), which he directed as well - who set him free to play the fun-loving young man, dashing and quick-witted and happy to turn his energies to romancing the heroine with an enviable lightness. Manwani goes further, citing the writer and lyricist Javed Akhtar to argue that Husain was responsible for Hindi cinema's departure from the melancholy or dramatic protagonist to the carefree, urbane, contemporary hero (embodied first by Dev Anand and then by Shammi Kapoor from Tumsa Nahi Dekha onwards).

The marvellous silliness of Dev Anand in disguise as an old man - something Husain and Mukerji had had him do with great success in the more intricately plotted Munimji a couple of years before - is one of the harmless pleasures of Paying Guest. Ramesh is a lawyer, with not very much work on his hands but with the gift of the gab, and Anand proves surprisingly good at delivering Husain's witty repartee and make-believe tales, both as the youthful Ramesh and in the doddering Mirza Wajahat avatar which enables him to successfully rent a room from Shanti's watchful father. In the context of Lipstick Under My Burkha's marshalling of our squeamish response to an older woman romancing a young man, one must note that Paying Guest is probably one of the earliest Hindi films to establish the trope of the hero, ostensibly desexualised by age, flirting with the young heroine; here for instance Anand-as-Mirza-Sahab constantly calls Nutan "Aziza" [dear], telling her father that the house feels like his sasural, and pretending to rescue her from the attentions of his own younger avatar.

Watching Paying Guest in 2017, exactly sixty years after it was made, one notes many other things with a sense of wonder and not a little sorrow. There is, first and foremost, the fact that a young professional with a Hindu name thinks nothing of first renting a room in the house of an old Muslim gentleman (where a Hindu father and daughter have been tenants for decades). And when, for the purposes of romantic plot, he needs to dress up as an old man, his first recourse is to conjure up another old Muslim gent. To take a room in the house of Babu Digambarnath, his most innocuous disguise is as Mirza Wajahat.

The second setpiece I enjoyed thoroughly was a public 'debate' between Shanti and her college classmate Chanchal (Shubha Khote), on the subject of whether love or money is more essential to the success of a marriage. Conducted in a combination of prose, recitation and sung couplets, the linguistic pleasures of the debate are really those of baitbaazi - a traditional form of poetic competition that was part of Urdu literary life.

This is, it should be noted, a film set in Lucknow, where Mukerji and Husain had both studied. Perhaps the particular history of that city was responsible for some of the ease of these characterisations - a world of lawyers and students who whether they were Hindu or Muslim, shareef tenants or shareef landlords, men or women, could partake of Urdu repartee. But the film was a hit, and not only in the shairana world of Lucknow. In the India of 1957, it seems, there was nothing here to remark on.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Aug 2017.

Of Dowries and Denouements

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Dowry had almost vanished from our cinema, even as it continues to rock real lives. Daawat-e-Ishq takes on a messily difficult subject, and despite many misses, hits upon some inconvenient truths.

Parineeti Chopra and Anupam Kher pretending to be Dubai-returned millionaires in Habib Faisal's Daawat-e-Ishq 

The trailers of Daawat-e-Ishq were intent on making us believe it was a film about food and love. The film, on the other hand, is intent on making us believe that it is a film about dowry. Depending on how sympathetic you are to the imagined pressures on a fine filmmaker like Habib Faisal (and how susceptible you are to the imagined pleasures of a fine biryani), you might accept Daawat-e-Ishq as both these things -- or neither. 

If you intend to watch the film, this paragraph contains spoilers. Parineeti Chopra stars as Gulrez "Gullu" Kadir, a Hyderabadi "school topper" who works as a shoe salegirl and dreams of training in the US as a shoe designer. Gullu and her court clerk father (a marvellously subtle Anupam Kher) spend the film's first hour or so dealing with the humiliating dowry demands of largely unsuitable boys. Then Gullu devises a two-birds-with-one-stone scheme, with which she will both fulfil her American dream and take revenge on the male species. Father and daughter assume fake identities as Dubai-based millionaires, and head to Lucknow to find a rich bakra whom Gullu will first marry and then file a dowry harassment case against, under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code. But the lamb to the slaughter is restaurant-owner Tariq "Taru" Haider, a rather winsome fellow who turns out not to be the money-minded brat they'd set out to phansao... you get the drift. 

In the much-maligned 1980s, when filmmakers did decide to make a film about dowry, at least they didn't beat around the bush. Anwar Pasha's Dulha Bikta Hai (1982), for instance, cast a woebegone Raj Babbar as a cash-strapped elder brother who marries off two sisters without dowries by pretending that he will marry the sisters of both grooms. When the hapless girls are turned out of their marital homes, Babbar must raise money by selling himself as a groom. It is a heavy-handed drama with a bizarre denouement, but as with many other 1980s films, DBH does not shy away from depicting the nastiness and violence of the Indian family. One sasur maligns his daughter-in-law's morals and beats her up with a cane; another mother-in-law is actually shown trying to set the daughter-in-law on fire. Of course, we were as invested in happy endings then as now, but filmmakers seemed to trust us with digesting some brutal stuff along the way.

This seems no longer to be the case, at least not in mainstream Bollywood. Think back to the Hindi movie weddings you've watched in the last few years. Even if one sets aside love marriages, where let's assume dowry plays no role, we've had quite a variety of views of arranged marriages, from wedding planners (Band Baaja Baaraat) to the paid fake baraati (Shuddh Desi Romance). Intentionally or not, these films provide a pretty good sense of the economics of weddings. But dowry almost never comes up. (I'm not counting the ridiculous -- eg. Humpty Sharma ki Dulhaniya, with an entire plot driven by Alia Bhatt's quest for a Rs 5 lakh wedding lehnga.) 

Before Daawat-e-Ishq, I can think of one film this year that dealt with dowry: coincidentally another Alia Bhatt starrer, Two States. There Bhatt got to do a bit of grandstanding as the feisty TamBrahm who shows the money-minded Punjabis how not to behave. I'm all for showing down dowry-seekers, but making it seem that dowry figures only among rapacious Punjabis belies the fact that dowry harassment cases are high (and rising) all across India, including Tamil Nadu. (In 2013 alone, Tamil Nadu recorded 118 dowry deaths, and 6,008 women in the state filed harassment petitions against their spouses with district collectors, police and dowry prohibition officers, under the Dowry Prohibition Act.) 

Daawat-e-Ishq doesn't have that problem. As a new-age Muslim social (the second this year, after the charming Bobby Jasoos), it seems keen to both create a recognizably Muslim universe and simultaneously have it pass as pan-religious. So, for instance, we have a whole film about dowry among Muslims -- like BJ, D-e-I chooses not to have non-Muslim characters -- without any mention of meher: the mandatory gift of money or property given to the bride by the groom in a Muslim wedding. The meher can be a token amount, or it can be a significant sum, but either way, director Habib Faisal appears to want not to distract audiences with such complicated facts. 

One wishes Faisal, whose previous work includes the middle class comic gem Do Dooni Chaar and the flawed but memorable Ishaqzaade, wasn't trying so hard to be uncomplicated. Because the dowry issue isn't. For one, dowry takers and dowry-givers aren't as clearly separable from each other as we'd like -- as Dulha Bikta Hai's 'exchange' solution showed, the same family might be a chest-thumping recipient for their son, and revert to supplication when it comes to their daughter. All of society is in on the game. 

Daawat-e-Ishq tries to take a more consciously woman-centric position, grounded in a view of our society as skewed against women. The film's understanding of 498A is muddled, and tragically misinforms its audience. But by showing the frustrated ladkiwale consciously choosing to abuse a legal provision created to safeguard women against domestic violence (including but not limited to dowry-related harassment), it unwittingly reveals how the law is often treated as another weapon in the sad battlefield of Indian marriage.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Sep 2014

Woman, Uninterrupted

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Vidya Balan's free-spirited performances have opened up a space in our cinema where not just she, but other women, too, might begin to be comfortable in their skin.

In most Indian cities, it is still a rare joy to see a woman out and about on her own terms: walking, working, eating -- just being; a woman who sits comfortably in her skin, not 'adjusting' by squeezing into the smallest possible space simply because the men on either side have spread themselves out, as men do. 

And for me, at least, that joy is amplified when that woman isn't obsessively chronicling her every look, her every laugh and eyebrow twitch in some imagined mirror that is a man's face. 

Within the world of Hindi cinema, Vidya Balan is that woman. And in Bobby Jasoos, you see Balan do again what our film industry, like our public spaces, rarely let its women do: take the centre seat, settle in, and thoroughly enjoy herself. 

After the slow drying-up of Priyanka Chopra's A-for-Ambition appearances (Fashion, What's Your Rashi, Saat Khoon Maaf) -- and up until Kangana Ranaut's Queen (and the disappointing but risk-taking Revolver Rani) -- Balan has been the only heroine with commercial billing to test the Lakshman Rekhas the industry draws around its female actors. 

Having bid a loud and lusty goodbye to her good-girl reputation with Ishqiya and The Dirty Picture, she went on to carry a thriller like Kahaani entirely on her shoulders. 

After some years of grief, Balan has also figured out that her performances are enough to soar above the low-level depredations of the KJo-led fashion police. That liberation from starry compulsions translates into Balan's roles as well - can you think of anyone else in contemporary Bollywood who wouldn't have balked at doing a whole film with a big pregnant belly? Or embraced Silk Smitha's larger-than-life physically, literally spilling out of her clothes, with such joyous lack of inhibition? Or jumped with such gusto into the atrociously loud outfits of fashion-magazine-obsessed Neetu in Ghanchakkar? 

Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else. And in Bobby Jasoos, she gets to do it in the most enjoyable way possible. As an intrepid, if somewhat inept female detective, Balan's Bobby gets to walk the crowded alleys of Hyderabad's Mughalpura as everything from a turban-wearing beggar man to a young bangle seller with a wispy moustache. Balan looks like she's having as much of a good time as Bobby is meant to -- and I certainly revelled in watching Bobby, disguised as a large Kanjeevaram-clad mami with an impressive shelf of a bosom, suddenly start jumping with joy upon receiving her largest payment cheque ever. 

But it isn't just playing dress-up. For most Indian women, the idea of being able to melt invisibly into the -- inevitably male -- crowd is a pervasive fantasy. Bobby Jasoos taps into that often unarticulated yearning by having its heroine achieve, in multiple forms of masquerade, the freedom she might not have otherwise. 

By making Bobby a roza-keeping Muslim woman who's never without her dupatta, the film aims for a social realism of sorts. This is a conservative lower middle class milieu, in which a woman who hasn't married and borne children by thirty is beyond the pale, and a man having a serious chat with his son sends his wife -- who's massaging his head -- into another room. It is no surprise that Bobby's father can only respond to the gift of his daughter's first salary with the pronouncement that "This household doesn't run on women's earnings." 

Yet when Bobby wears a burqa, it is only as another form of disguise. Her usual uniform is a loose salwar-kameez, her hair escaping an untidy plait and a packet of Parle-G biscuits peeping out of her satchel. Her workaday look is also a reflection of her priorities: we have here a woman whose response to having the car door opened for her by a personable young man is to say caustically, "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna". Bobby is the elder sister who, when she needs to enter a five star hotel on assignment, gets one of her more feminine younger sisters to do her make-up. 

And yet, even while Bobby (and it's important that she insists on being called that, instead of the more feminine Bilqees) does largely what she wants, she continues to crave approval from her father (and in an interesting mirroring, from the life-changing older man who becomes her mystery client). 

The other remarkable thing about Bobby's character is that she's too busy working to bother chasing men -- and when love does appear, it is gentle and unbombastic. 

Especially for a film that returns us, after an aeon, to an all-Muslim milieu, Bobby Jasoos almost makes no concessions to romantic nazakat Muslim Social style. In fact, it sustains its tenor of comic mystery quite remarkably: if there's any gazing at feet in this movie, it's to look for a man with a missing toe. 

With Bobby Jasoos, Balan gives us a reel-life heroine who's neither a doormat nor a head-tossing rebel without a cause. She'd be a treasure even in the real world.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.