A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

Faces in the crowd

My Mirror column (17 May 2020):

As we are schooled ever more to view India's labouring poor as an undifferentiated mass, Kamal K.M.'s I.D. and Geethu Mohandas's Liar's Dice help us see our co-citizens in their individual humanity.

A still from Kamal K.M.'s film I.D., in which an upper middle class migrant is forced to think about the life of a poorer one

“A painter came to this house. I did not even ask his name. I mean, who does, right?”

The young female protagonist who says these words in the thought-provoking 2012 film I.D. is speaking to a male friend, who has to strain to understand what she’s on about – and not just because they’re in the midst of a raucous party. “I don't get you,” he responds at one point. Even to Charu (Geetanjali Thapa), her own words feel like the verbal equivalent of a shrug. There is a niggling sense that she could have done better – but following close behind is an attempt to reassure herself, that her lack of interest in the working class man who came to her upper middle class apartment wasn’t out of the ordinary.

The opening scenes of Kamal KM’s astutely crafted film have already established Charu as an ordinary member of her class and gender. She is a migrant, too, but that status does not mark her. Having moved to Mumbai recently from her home state of Sikkim, she shares a rather nice three bedroom apartment in Andheri with two other women her age. We hear her telling a friend on the phone that she has already booked a new car, though we know she’s still at the interview stage for a telecom marketing job. Meanwhile, through the glass walls of her bedroom, we see a city brimming with construction and labour. One man leads a buffalo through the streets, another kneels on the road to repair his auto, yet another carts eggs on a bicycle. Two urchins make a possibly obscene gesture as a young woman in a form-fitting dress climbs into her car.

When a man arrives to repaint a wall in the house, Charu lets him in, a little grudgingly, asking only one question: how much time will the work take? She is not exactly rude, but she displays the wariness that the upper middle class, likely upper caste Indian woman has internalised about the poor or lower middle class man. When the painter squats beside her to help her pick up some broken glass, she is standoffish. She does not offer him water until he asks. When she hears a thud, her first instinct is to tiptoe out of her bedroom looking for signs of violence, as if she fears a dacoity or worse. So distant does she feel from this stranger's humanity that she can't bring herself to touch him to revive him. She doesn't even think to sprinkle water on his face. Instead her only instinct is to call for help – the aunty downstairs that she has never before spoken to, the old security guard whom she has never before accompanied to the roof where he has to go each time the building lift misbehaves.

Gitanjali Thapa sets out to trace an unknown man's identity in I.D.

But the painter has fallen unconscious in her presence, and Charu is now the only person who can take him to a hospital, pay the bill, file a police report. She begins to feel compelled to find out who the man is, so she can inform someone who knew him. From inquiring after this nameless man at the labourers’ naka near her home, to following the contractor home when he stops taking her calls, to following a possible lead to the desperately filthy lanes of the Mankhurd slum he might possibly have lived in, Charu becomes our route into the beeping, blinking city whose SOS signals she – like all of us reading this paper – have learnt to keep switched off.

A still from Liar's Dice, India's official entry to the Oscars in 2013.

I.D. is about how extraordinary circumstances force one woman out of her ordinary privileged cocoon, from suspicion to empathy. Another woman is forced out of a different cocoon in Liar’s Dice (2013), India’s official entry to the Oscars that year. Also starring Geetanjali Thapa and produced by JAR Pictures (in association with whom the Kochi-based Collective Phase One produced I.D.), Geethu Mohandas’s pensively framed road movie views the migrant labourer in the city from the other end of the telescope. Thapa won a National Award for her role as Kamala, a barely-literate woman who leaves her Himachali village to search for her construction worker husband who hasn’t answered his phone for five months. Mohandas makes us painfully aware of the dangers the outside world poses to a woman like Kamala, forcing her to rely on a stranger. The limping, unkempt Nawazuddin (played with relish by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) has a taciturn, unreliable presence: himself a possible threat that Kamala must bet on. The film could have been better written, and banks too much on a cherubic child actor (Manya Gupta) and a baby goat for charm and watchability. It also turns a predictable cinematic gaze on Old Delhi, all rickshaws and dingy hotel rooms bookended by picturesque shots of street performers and the Jama Masjid.

But it works as a companion piece to I.D., both films bringing into focus the India we consider normal – in which a man can simply disappear, with no-one held responsible for what happened to him. As even our existing labour laws are suspended in state after state, with governments using the pandemic as a cover for less regulation and oversight of working conditions, the lives of our nameless, faceless co-citizens are being pushed ever more out of sight. I.D. and Liar’s Dice give us a rare chance to start seeing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 May 2020

Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.

"You Maid Me Better"

Forgot to put this up earlier: my Shelf Life column for April. (Shelf Life is a monthly column I write for the website 'The Voice of Fashion', on clothes seen through the prism of literature.)

Doris Lessing, who debuted with the great novel The Grass is Singing

As the national COVID-19 lockdown enters its third week, privileged Indians are being forced to acknowledge how many of our comforts are enabled by the labour of those we euphemistically call 'help'. Servants are the invisible glue that keeps the Indian family together, taking up the physical and emotional burdens of domesticity that most middle class men dump so blithely on their wives. But if dependence is one aspect of our unacknowledged relationships with servants, the other is intimacy.

In 1765, British judge Sir William Blackstone listed the master-servant relationship as the first of three “great relations of private life” (the other two were between husband and wife, and parent and child). He saw something many are still loath to admit. The greater the ubiquity of domestic staff, the more the social distance between employers and servants is policed. In her wonderfully readable Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain, Lucy Lethbridge remarks on the separation of social spaces enforced by the British aristocracy, “whose most intimate secrets, paradoxically, had long been shared with the valet or the ladies' maid who undressed and bathed them”.

Clothes have been central to this relationship. For centuries, the personal servant took care of the employer's clothes, laid out their outfits – and often actually dressed them. The servant's role in the master's or mistress's toilette has been at the centre of many literary depictions. One such relationship is between PG Wodehouse's bumbling young aristocrat Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, his valet. Jeeves rules Bertie's wardrobe with an iron hand, perpetually giving away clothes that he thinks inappropriate for a true scion of the upper classes, scotching Bertie's attempts at fashion. Under Jeeves' stiff upper lip lie unutterable depths of emotion: Bertie's one-time decision to grow a moustache creates a rift between him and Jeeves that feels almost lover-like.

That “almost” ripens to fullness in Sarah Waters' marvellous thriller Fingersmith (2002), in which a petty thief sets herself up as ladies' maid to an heiress. The orphaned Sue Trinder is a perfect Dickensian character. Her version of Fagin is called Gentleman, a trickster swell who teaches her the ins and outs of clothes she has never had occasion to wear. Beginning with the delicious double entendres of Gentleman's first lesson (“Are you ready for it now, miss? Do you like it drawn tight?...Oh! Forgive me if I pinch.”), Waters imbues the Victorian lady's wardrobe with frisson. The layers of garments are secret links between mistress and maid: the chemise, camisole, corset, the stays that hold the body close, while the nine-hoop crinoline floats, unwitting, above it all. Sure enough, Sue's pleasure in the keeping of Maud's gowns and silken petticoats blooms slowly into a sensual attachment to the keeping of Maud herself—a secret love that will not be suppressed.

Sue's relationship with Maud's clothes reminded me of the chilling scene in Daphne Du Maurier's iconic 1938 novel Rebecca, when the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers insists on making the book's unnamed young heroine caress the late Rebecca's nightgown, laid out on her bed as if she might walk in any minute. “'Feel it, hold it,' [Mrs. Danvers] said, 'how soft and light it is, isn't it? I haven't washed it since she wore it for the last time... I did everything for her, you know... We tried maid after maid but not one of them suited. “You maid me better than anyone, Danny,” she used to say. “I won't have anyone but you.’”

The fictional Rebecca's inability to find a single maid that “suited” was probably Mrs. Danvers' wishful imagination, but it may have also reflected an upper class predicament that grew more widespread, as the First World War and then the Second altered the social aspirations of the working class in Europe. In the colonies, of course, there was an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour only too grateful to find work in the white man's household. The friction in the early years of empire resulted from attempts to train domestic staff across the vast gulf not just of class, but of cultural knowledge–and racial suspicion. Emma Roberts was likely fairly representative of the colonial memsahib in India when she complained in 1835 that native ayahs did not take the “slightest pains to make themselves acquainted with the mysteries of the European toilette; they dress their ladies all awry, and martyrdom is endured whenever they take a pin in hand: they have no notion of lacing, buttoning, or hook-and-eyeing...”That clueless privileged voice, complaining of the 'uncultured' servant, can still be heard all around us.

But a class of colonial servants was gradually trained, and as Lethbridge points out, the domestic life of the British in India grew to levels of display unmatched in world history. In the more remote outposts, in Africa for instance, English-style formalities could be impossibly tough to keep up. Among the great depictions of such fraught intimacy between black servant and white mistress is in Doris Lessing's stunning debut novel The Grass is Singing (1950). Towards the end, a white visitor is shocked to find the native servant Moses buttoning up his mistress Mary's dress. He attempts to joke about it, telling Mary about an empress of Russia who “thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress in front of them”. Lessing is astute as always, commenting: “It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him.”

Anthropologist Raka Ray's fieldwork in Kolkata poses a similar question: how do people reconcile having male servants with a highly sex-segregated society like India's? Male servants walk in and out of bedrooms, are present at intimate moments when other men wouldn't be and handle women's clothes. One elderly lady says to Ray, “A servant isn't really a man; a servant is a servant.”

Among the subtlest fictional portrayals of this space of unsettling intimacy is Manto's short story 'Blouse'. When Shakeela Bibi flings off her vest for the teenaged Momin to take to the shop, he finds himself rubbing it between his fingers. “[I]t was soft as a kitten”, “the smell of her body still resided in it”, and “all this was very pleasing to him,” writes Manto. Shakeela's newly stitched purple satin blouse triggers a dreamscape whose eroticism is not even part of Momin's conscious mind. The deputy saab's wife and daughters remain oblivious, like saabs and memsaabs too often are: “Who could play that much attention to the lives of servants? They covered all of life's journeys on foot, from infancy to old age, and those around them never knew anything of it.”

As our unacknowledged intimates, servants have too long been treated as shock absorbers for our inner lives, our troubles. It is high time we recognise that they have their own.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 13 April 2020.

The Pearly Gates

My Mirror column:

An octogenarian Uttarakhandi farmer offers up an unusual model of the good life in an inspiring new documentary called Moti Bagh.

 

“In two minds am I this year,

To till or keep fallow my soil?”

The old man's tinny voice wafts out over a visual of his feet, loose inside his dusty leather shoes. A mynah hops alongside, perhaps waiting for the insects that will be dislodged as two brown cows drag the wooden plough through the field that Vidyadutt Sharma is clearly not leaving fallow. 

“Almost seven times a day/ the monkeys my fields do visit,
And the wild boars—they at night are my visitors.

Crows, parrots and their kin my fruits enjoy,
While jackals and porcupines await their turn.”

Back under the wooden roof of his own balcony, Sharma, 83, ends his little self-composed ditty, his hands performing a little hopeless flourish to go with the words:

“These animals it is beyond me to understand --
Earlier 50-50 was the arrangement,
But this year a full share they want.”

Then the camera pans out into the valley, and a langur turns to look at us from a distant treetop, its fur brilliantly white against the hillside's verdant green. Between the song, the cows, the mynah and the langur, we instantly get a sense of a universe shared with other creatures, of what it might be like to live off the land in Pauri, a district in the hill state of Uttarakhand.

Nirmal Chander's 59.23 minute documentary Moti Bagh, in which this scene appears, has been described as being about the struggle of a farmer in a remote Indian village. That isn't untrue, but neither does it do justice to Moti Bagh, which is as gentle, quirky and determined as its octogenarian protagonist. Vidyadutt Sharma, who happens to be Chander's uncle, first began to farm the consolidated farm for which the film is named in 1966. He had had other jobs – as a survey expert in the Uttar Pradesh government (a position from which he resigned at age 28), and later as the manager of a government school in Mundeshwar, during which time he went on a hunger strike to pressure the government into keeping its word on granting it high school status (It is now an inter-college.)

Sharma's educational and professional background might be considered by most people to be at odds with his choice of vocation: farming. But in many ways, that is what Moti Bagh is about: one man's realization that getting a formal education need not automatically translate to an office job. For Sharma, nurturing the land is both philosophy and praxis. “Bade bade granth likhna bahut aasaan hai, lekin tamaatar ka daana uga ke dikhaye koi (It's easy to write big books, but let's see someone grow a tomato seed),” he says. Sharma's dry wit somehow cohabits perfectly with his deep sense of belief. “Physical work has a special importance,” he says later, while carrying a pitcher of water up to his house. “Even if you don't get tangible results from it at the end of the day, you're sure to get a deep sleep!”

Chander's film is an affectionate portrait of Sharma as well as a cinematic glimpse of the socio- economic context of Pauri which makes him such an outlier. That context is the large-scale migration out of Uttarakhand – especially of educated upper castes -- into urban areas in the plains, leaving thousands of villages empty and much fertile land uncultivated. “The new generation is afraid of physical labour. They want to live purely off intellectual labour,” says Sharma. And earlier, perspicaciously, “The producer has become a consumer. We shall suffer the consequences of that...”

Nepali migrants, like Ram Singh and his family who work on Sharma's land, have replaced local farmers as agricultural labour, and the film points to the resulting tensions: jealousy and discrimination from locals, and the instability of devoting their lives to a land that they might well be ejected from.

Moti Bagh won first prize for Best Long Documentary at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (shared with Pankaj Rishi Kumar's Janani's Juliet), and the filmmakers have been claiming that this counts as a "nomination to the Oscars". The film recently received media attention because the Uttarakhand Chief Minister mentioned this with pride -- which is interesting not just because it is untrue, but also because the film is, as much as anything, an indictment of political corruption and the lack of political will (on such matters as forest fires, government school closures and land consolidation, which Sharma argues would help farmers to cultivate more efficiently and to stave off animal depredations).

Watching Vidyadutt Sharma shooing monkeys away from his orchards, I was reminded of another old man in total synch with a difficult environment: the crabby old shepherd of the atmospheric fiction feature The Gold-Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain (2018). Moti Bagh also brings to mind another film funded by PSBT: Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh's deeply inspiring 2012 documentary Timbakt. Timbaktu is a farming collective in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, which has weaned a large area away from chemical pesticides and mono-cropping into sustainable, organic agriculture, thus also helping restore the surrounding forest. (Timbaktu is available on Youtube.)

At the end of the documentary, Chander asks Sharma a grave question: what will become of Moti Bagh once he is gone. “That's not for me to worry about!” says Sharma, starting to laugh delightedly. “Let others worry about that!” Unlike Timbaktu, Moti Bagh isn't a movement. But sometimes all it takes to start one is one man with an infectious grin – and a willingness to be the odd one out.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Sep 2019.

The dream machine - II

My Mirror column:

What might we learn about our relationship with machines from Ritwik Ghatak’s classic Ajantrik and Buddhadev Dasgupta’s recent Urojahaj – with a detour through Naya Daur? The second of a two-part column

In last week’s column, I suggested that there might be something to be learnt from comparing two Indian films made 60 years apart, each about a man besotted with a machine – Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s most recent feature, Urojahaj (The Flight), and Ritwik Ghatak’s 1957 arthouse classic Ajantrik. 

In Urojahaj, the protagonist is a happily married man with a child, and his attachment to the broken-down Second World War plane he finds in the forest comes across as selfish. The mechanic’s quest for something so impractical can only be individualistic. The plane is an obsession that takes Bachhu Mondol away from those he loves. And as he hears more tales from ghosts of betrayed humans, he begins to be suspicious of those that love him: in one sadly revealing moment, when his wife tells him the police are looking for him, he actually asks her if it is she who has reported his discovery of the plane.


In Ajantrik, in contrast, the taxi driver hero Bimal has no-one else to love. The battered taxi seems to fill up the space in Bimal's heart where a person might have been. When Bimal speaks of Jagaddal, it is as a trusty companion – and when the car collapses, he sees it as betrayal.(“Even if I give you my all, I can't win your favour?”) His hunger for human company may be inarticulate, but when he encounters a young woman who has been cheated by her lover, something buried deep within the usually misanthropic Bimal bubbles up to the surface. When Jagaddal appears not to cooperate in his mission to help her, Bimal delivers a well-aimed kick to its engine. That unprecedented moment of anger kickstarts the process that will eventually bring the machine to its knees – and it might be said to stem from Bimal's frustrated effort to assist another human being.

Despite their differences, the close relationship between man and machine in both films seems to turn on excluding the rest of humanity. The same year as Ghatak made Ajantrik, the Hindi film industry also produced a hugely popular narrative about man and machine. Released on August 15, 1957, BR Chopra’s Naya Daur ('The New Age') starred Dilip Kumar as Shankar, a tangawalla who becomes the focal point of a battle between the horse-cart drivers of his village and the evil capitalist son of the village’s feudal landlord. The legendary climactic race between Shankar, straining at the reins of his horse-drawn cart, and the villainous Kundan at the wheel of his bus was staged such that the underdog would win. 

But even within Naya Daur’s wishful dream universe, laced with the labour-capitalist bhai-bhai rhetoric that was often as far as Hindi cinema socialism went, Shankar’s victory could only be presented as a one-time thing, a reprieve. The film was intended only to give us pause as we hurtled into the machine age, to consider the fate of the masses who would be left behind if we were not careful.

Ajantrik seems to occupy a mindspace so different that is scarcely recognisable as belonging to the same cultural landscape. Instead of a race between a tanga and a bus, Ghatak has his taxi compete with a train. The creaky, decrepit Jagaddal cannot win. But that does not lead us to anything so simple as a win or a loss for technology. Driving too fast on a curving hilly road to catch up with the train, Bimal must draw back from the edge in the nick of time – and the moment when he does is also the moment when he finally sees the world in which both taxi and train have arrived: disruptions, but here to stay.

What Ghatak shows us through Bimal’s eyes is a festive gathering of the Oraons: women singing with flowers in their hair, bare-chested men with drums, dancing in unison. There is something about Bimal’s gaze that seems to see but not see, the marvellous sight of the human body moving to a rhythm that has existed long before the rhythm of the machine. And yet, as the Oraon man who pushes the broken-down jalopy to Ranchi Station says to his sweetheart, it is the train from this station that takes “our people to Assam and Bhutan, to work in the tea gardens”. A single machine may die, Ghatak seems to suggest, but the machine is here to stay. 

Ajantrik extended the concept of pathetic fallacy from nature to the machine. But the human hero of 1957 still saw his favourite machine in human terms, giving his car a name and human attributes; a sense of life and death; even a kind of burial, at the scrap dealer’s. Sixty years later, at the end of Urojahaj, it is the human hero whose life and death are in balance. Bachhu Mondol, running from the irrationality of a tyrannical state, speeds through the forest and out onto what looks like a runway, and the camera pans over the ground, rising higher as if looking on from high. What Bachhu sees is what a plane would see, if it could. The man in search of freedom now models himself on the machine.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Sep 2019

Book Review: Heat (Vekkai)

I reviewed a modern Tamil classic now in English translation, for Scroll.

Poomani's vivid 1982 novel Heat, translated by N. Kalyan Raman, is about a boy on the run, and the gap between law and justice. 

Poomani, the name by which generations of Tamil readers have known the writer P Manickavasagam, published Vekkai in 1982. It was his second novel, unfolding in a subaltern rural Tamil landscape, like his first, Piragu.The two books together established Poomani, then in his mid-thirties, as a new star in the Tamil literary firmament.

A thirtieth anniversary edition of Vekkai was brought out in 2012, acknowledging its status as a modernist Tamil classic. In 2014, Poomani won the Sahitya Akademi award for his magnum opus Angyadi, a historical novel set in the late 19th century (for which he researched the Nadar community in Madurai and Tirunelveli with the aid of a two-year grant from the India Foundation for the Arts).

Despite Poomani’s undisputed stature in the Tamil world of letters, it has taken nearly four decades since his literary debut for his first two novels to be available in English. An English translation of Piragu is being brought out later in 2019 by Chennai-based Emerald Publishers, while Vekkai was recently published as Heat, in N Kalyan Raman’s spare yet vivid translation.

Here is how Heat opens:

“Chidambaram had only planned to hack off the man’s right arm.

He was aiming for the shoulder, but instead the sickle had sliced through the upper arm, its sharp tip entering the ribs. The severed arm had dropped near his feet. He kicked it away, grabbed the sickle and fled. As he ran, he heard the man’s scream rise and fade like the final cry of a goat in a butcher’s yard.”

It is a grisly way to begin a tale. But it does not quite portend the tone of what is to come. Little about Poomani’s novel is predictable. Neither his characters nor the events he describes have predetermined outlines that might be fillable with a broad brush. People, relationships, histories are built up slowly, with small, deftly drawn strokes that make for the finest sort of shading. So the 15-year-old protagonist may have killed a man, but he is not a killer.

Chidambaram’s father Paramasivam, whom he calls Ayya, may lose control of himself whenever he drinks, but that does not tar him as an alcoholic. The narrative may begin with a murder, but it is neither a mystery or a thriller or a police procedural. Much of Heat unfolds in flashback, and read backwards, it might be seen as a revenge saga: I’m waiting to see if this is how it will be interpreted by Tamil film director Vetri Maaran, of Aadukalam, Visaranai and Vada Chennai fame, who is adapting it into a film.

The nuance I flag seems to me crucial not just to Poomani’s storytelling, but to his worldview. For instance, Chidambaram is indeed a fugitive: he is running from the law. But what the book reveals, over conversations present and past, is that it is not so easy to slot him under that common phrase: a “fugitive from justice”. Poomani is centrally concerned with the difference between law and justice. The enmity between our protagonists and the murdered man, Vadakkuraan, stems from Vadakkuraan’s avaricious desire for their land, and the cycle of violence he starts. The law, it seems, will never punish him – so Chidambaram decides to.

We have, of course, developed an extended tradition of popular cinema in India that is concerned with this gap between the legal and the moral – in Hindi cinema, for instance, that trajectory has only grown sharper from Awaara (1951) to Deewar (1975) to Raman Raghav (2016). I imagine Vekkai,published in1982, was an early fictional instance of such open criticism of the police. “[E]very policeman is allowed to keep a weapon tucked behind his arse and one more in front, long with a round club in his hand,” complains Paramasivam to his brother-in-law. “But we are not allowed to carry weapons... if we do the same thing, it’s a crime.”

At another point, he warns Chidambaram to beware police corruption, based on class and caste loyalties and actual bribes, “The police may not come after us today. But if our enemy gives them money, they’ll come running like hound dogs. So many atrocities take place in our courts. The law is what the rich people lay down.”

Poomani doesn’t wish to make this about caste, but he makes it clear enough that the systemic violence stems from the astounding inequity at the foundation of our social structure. Families like Chidambaram’s are resisting a long history of socio-economic oppression. A third of the way through the novel, we realise that the father, Paramasivam, committed a crime that sent him to jail in his youth – and that, too, was in retaliation for unwarranted, long-term oppression. “The rich guys couldn’t stomach the fact that we were farming our own piece of land.”

The novel also details other forms of informal justice, which might use the law strategically – “A good man from that village gave evidence” – or remain outside it entirely, like the cotton-thieving ganglord Muthaiah, whose men “will never step inside land that belongs to a poor man”, and who is a respected mediator of local disputes.

The other way in which to read Heat is as a palpably experiential journey into the Tamil countryside. This is a world in which cash crops like cotton and sorghum are beginning to be grown, and a ginning factory figures prominently, but which is also still brimful of wild plants and trees and animals whose ways a fifteen year old boy knows well enough to live off: the sour-bitter taste of a guduchi vine, the joys of cactus fruit, a rabbit killed by a vulture. And these are supplemented by cultivated pickings: sugarcane, sweet tubers left buried in a field, padaneer collected in toddy tappers’ pots which the boy climbs for.

And yet, even as a fugitive, Chidambaram is never purely utilitarian. Whether it is making a garland of kurandi flowers to put around the neck of a temple horse, crafting a hammock out of roots and palm leaf mats, or just admiring the skill of men hunting and skinning a snake, he wanders through his ordinary world with an unerring eye for its beauty. Seeing through his eyes might make you see it, too.

Published in Scroll, 22 Jun 2019.

A Dormant Volcano

My Mirror column:

Mrinal Sen's Chorus, 25 years after it was made, is a chilling reminder of how long India has spent making strides in the fake solutions department -- while letting the real problems fester.

Utpal Dutt in a still from Chorus 

Between 1970 and 1973, the late Mrinal Sen made three explicitly political films that together came to be known as the Calcutta Trilogy. Speaking to his biographer Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, Sen later said, “After Bhuvan Shome I found the smell of gunpowder in Calcutta's air something I could neither dismiss nor avoid.” Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik were almost documentary in their realism, with the Naxal-riven Calcutta of the 1970s brought to the screen with real footage of bomb blasts, firings and demonstrations.

Chorus, too, was concerned with the state of the nation, but it took a different aesthetic tack. Right from the opening scene, when Robi Ghosh appeared seated on a high white throne amid a circle of white-clad sages, it was clear that Sen had made a conscious departure from his previous work. Then Ghosh, already a recognisable comedian, broke into a kirtan, a Vaishnava-style devotional song, its deceptively genial rhythms carrying a chillingly sardonic message. “Once upon a time a king sat in his court and said to his wise men, show me a land where there is no want. Replied the pandits promptly, if there were no want, then there would be no God.” The song ends with the darkest line, “Abhaab rochen jini, tini shoktimaan [He who creates want, is the powerful one]”.

From this profound and cynical vision of religion and religiosity, we descend to another fictional milieu – a grand palace with a revolving surveillance camera atop it, within which a suited-booted man is handling two telephones in order to keep the crowd at the gates under control. As happens often in the Calcutta Trilogy films, words flash upon the screen. “SITUATIONS VACANT. USE PRESCRIBED FORMS TO APPLY. FORMS RS. 2”. 

Back inside the building, we hear the cigarette-holding executive in a tie and shirtsleeves calmly order large numbers of extra forms to be printed, “Accha, chakri dite na paren, form to dite paren [Accha, you may not have jobs to give, but you can give forms]... And we're earning money from them anyway.” Cut to Utpal Dutt, playing a senior bureaucrat in a Mrinal Sen film for the second time after Bhuvan Shome, though the tenor of the role could not be more different. He seems urbane and benevolent, even reasonable, until he is informed that the crowd is getting restive. Then the camera captures his shrieking transformation in ruthless close-up: “What is security doing? Control!” We hear the sound of marching boots in the distance, an effect that recurs through the film as a symbol of state repression.

Then we see a serpentine queue, in a white expanse outside what looks a lot like the Reserve Bank of India building, with a disembodied voice on the megaphone announcing that the counter will only open at the allocated time of 10am. A wave of disappointment runs through the queue. The murmurs are followed by a sarcastic commenter singling out an oldish gentleman for having lined up. The jostling spirals out of control. Grenades are thrown. The old man falls, his glasses crashing to the floor. The word “Attention” repeats on the megaphone, sounding more and more like “Tension”.

A journalist has appeared to capture the chaos, clicking away, even climbing up and down for better angles. What Sen produces here is an early cinematic indictment of the news media. The journalist witnesses the scene, never intervening. When a man in the queue asks if all law and order has been abandoned in the country, he replies casually: “There's a war on. How can there be law and order? This isn't a game of cricket, is it?”

He does record three different characters at the scene – the old man, a young rural man, and a young college-going woman -- whom the film then follows into the arenas of their individual lives, adapting the documentary form interestingly. The film has other threads running in parallel, all a little surreal. In one, a crafty village pradhan called Chhana Mondol manages to hide his corruption and his rice-smuggling from the powers-that-be, and tells his beholden job-seeking nephew to literally go underground. In another, a millworker called Mukherjee becomes a traitor to his union, drunkenly declaring that it is his administration now.

Meanwhile, having received 30,000 applications for 100 vacancies, the bureaucrats holed up in their fortress start to imagine a countrywide conspiracy to overthrow them. Utpal Dutt's character calls in the police, who randomly start to harass 150 of the job applicants. “We are seated on a volcano. We must do something to survive. But we need some kind of excuse, a provocation.” Dutt yells. “Why the hell don't they provoke us?”

The inspirations for Chorus were many, including an actual queue of over a thousand people Sen witnessed in Dalhousie Square in Calcutta. Sen's fantasy of a tyrannical state disconnected from a jobless people left even his regular audiences baffled, though it won several National Awards and prizes at Moscow and Berlin. In a truly remarkable instance of life imitating art, the Emergency was declared less than a year after Chorus released.

Sen was prescient. But nothing ended with the Emergency. Twenty-five years later, our queues of job seekers remain as desperate. Only the megaphones have grown louder.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Feb 2019

The work of home

My Mirror column: Alfonso Cuaron’s exquisite portrait of 1970s Mexico places a maid at its centre, producing a film that is as stately as it is intimate, as harrowing as it is tender.

Not too far into Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, which released on Netflix on December 15, a man gets a much younger, slighter woman to carry his bags. It is only after the 20-year-old Cleo has, with some difficulty, dragged the heavy luggage out and lifted it into the car boot that the man of the house walks up, making an ineffectual offer of ‘help’. It’s as if it’s her luggage, not his. What the scene really reveals, though, is how both master and servant see it as her job, not his. It is a minor scene, but one that typifies the magisterial new work from the director of films as various as Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gravity and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: unobtrusively shot, exquisitely performed, and relentless in laying out the unquestioned social hierarchies that underpin our lives. Set in the early 1970s, in the Mexico City of Cuaron’s childhood, Roma takes us through a year or so in the life of an upper middle class family— but from the perspective of the household’s maid, who also doubles up as nanny to the four children. It is a large and boisterous household, and Cleo and the other maid Adele are constantly on their feet: cleaning up after the dog, attending to the children, cooking the meals, washing and ironing and sweeping and scrubbing. In one of the film’s loveliest moments, one of the children lies down in the back courtyard, pretending to be dead. Cleo leaves the clothes she is scrubbing for a minute and joins him, the washed clothes on the line dripping gently onto them. “Hey, I like being dead,” says Cleo. For her, such a moment of quiet nothingness is exceptionally rare, and Cuaron marks that fact –without emphasis. There is no emphasis laid, either, on another moment that reveals the strangely mixed circumstances produced by domestic labour. The whole family is on a sofa watching TV. Cleo hovers on the edges, serving, adjusting, half-watching. She is drawn into the circle by one of the children stretching an affectionate arm around her, but even as she seats herself tentatively on a floor cushion beside the sofa, the moment of pause is immediately interrupted by the mistress asking the maid to bring the master a tea. But the mistress can also hug her departing husband with terrifying desperation in front of the maid; Cleo is to her as much of a harmless intimate as her own watching child. This is not a film that makes the mistake of treating people as good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Cleo must work non-stop, and she has little choice about anything —but as Cuaron shows consummately, this is simply the nature of things. The stratification is assumed, but it does not preclude affection.

Roma joins a growing body of films about the complexity of the relationship between domestic workers and bourgeois employers, especially children. Played with exceptional grace and gravity by Yalitza Aparicio, a non- professional actor whose own mother has worked in domestic service, the character of Cleo is based on Cuaron’s own childhood nanny Libo (to whom the film is dedicated).

Watching the scenes where Cleo lovingly wakes up each child individually reminded me of another great filmmaker’s recreation of his childhood— Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, in which the maid Maj tells the child Alexander that he can’t sleep in her bed tonight, “but you know you’re my sweetheart”. The effervescent Maj is, like Cleo, a mother-surrogate, as is Regina Case’s older, slightly frumpier Val in Anna Muylaert’s Sao Paulo-set The Second Mother (2015), Deanie Ip’s Ah-Tao in Ann Hui’s Hong Kong-set A Simple Life (2012), or Angeli Bayani’s Filipino nanny Teresa in Anthony Chen’s Singapore-based drama Ilo Ilo (2013).

All these films depict the hapless worker who enables the smooth functioning of her employer’s household, while spending years of her life forcibly away from her own. The nanny/housekeeper/cook is often beloved within the bourgeois household – but that home will never be really hers. And outside these homes, too, these women’s status is forever compromised. Across the world, the irreplaceable work they do seems tragically to make them ineligible for their own private lives. In Ann Hui’s superb film, the only time Ah Tao loses her equanimity is when an occupant of her old-age home says snarkily on being introduced to her, “That sounds like a servant’s name”. And in one of Roma’s most distressing scenes, Cleo’s feckless martial-arts-practicing boyfriend responds to her tentatively voiced claims on him by hurling at her the worst insult he can apparently imagine: “Fucking servant!”

Cuaron’s empathy does not stop with Cleo. We weep with the children’s grandmother as she nears a nervous breakdown in trying to get Cleo to hospital on a day of street riots. We feel the shared bond between Cleo and her mistress, both abandoned by cowardly men (this has shades of the ’80s Hindi films like Kamla and Arth).

But the film ends on a note of absolute clarity. The staircase Cleo must climb at the end of the film, at the end of each day, takes her very far away from the home she supposedly inhabits. It is a bridge to nowhere.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Dec 2018.

Machines director Rahul Jain on his acclaimed film: 'In India, inequality stares back at you'

Rahul Jain's debut Machines is a compelling, deceptively simple cinematic essay on the dehumanising effects of labour, set in a cloth factory in Gujarat. Having won awards and acclaim at film festivals from Zurich and Thessaloniki to Sundance and Mumbai, the documentary was screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival last weekend. 

We caught up with the 26-year-old debut filmmaker at his family home in Delhi just after Diwali, to talk about privilege and inequality, shielding ourselves from our environment, capitalism and the creative process.

You grew up in Delhi. 

Yes, till the age of 15. In Pitampura. By the time I left India, we were in GK II. And then while I was gone, my family moved to Geetanjali Enclave. And then a few years ago, we moved here [to the South Extension house].

Do you have plans of moving back here?

I have actually moved back. Though I'm travelling a lot, and it has been difficult to be here and meditate for my next film. I went out today for a few hours, and it was very depressing. But I guess that's what I'm looking for. [laughs]

Yes, I read that your new project is about environmental pollution. Is this also a fieldwork trip – given that Diwali now inaugurates the pollution season in Delhi?

It is, kind of. But very privileged and protected. I think the suffusion of politics and art is a relatively recent thing, maybe 100-150 years. Since the Renaissance artists have had this problem of how to represent anything an invisible force: the greatest of those would be God. To look at a poison does not suggest what that poison can do.

So why does the visual representation matter then?

This is something I struggle with. But this is where the human comes in. It is life that interprets matter around it. Otherwise matter is just matter. If I can somehow manage to excavate and provoke certain kinds of reactions from a wide intersection of the population of the city... I don't experience the city the way an average person here would, by needing to walk around. When I went to school in a non-AC school bus, maybe I did. But now, with air conditioning, for example, the more you  avoid the genie outside, the more the genie outside keeps growing. It's a Catch-22, something that I'm really confused and scared about — as much as one can be with a level of comfort that allows you to ignore your surroundings.

It's more and more possible to shield yourself from the environment. Once you begin, there seems no end.

Yes, the thickness of the barriers between you and the world keep growing, the more you avoid the world outside. I don't really know how to communicate that fear to people for whom that fear is not up to their necks at the moment. I don't know if this blindness is a socio-economic problem. This is going to affect all of us. Maybe the richest will dig into mountains and hide themselves inside, but that won't really be life, would it?

But even people not in that position seem not to see what it is doing to them, and worse — what they're doing to it. In my very middle-middle class Delhi neighbourhood, families hoarded fireworks and lit them after midnight. That — not relief — was the response to the Supreme Court ban on firework sales. It seems like everyone wants to assume the role of victim.

Every single book that I've read about climate change or global warming, the first chapter talks about denial. Of course there's pollution outside, but the real pollution is inside our heads, which is causing us to not perceive the magnitude of the behemoth we are facing, we are causing. Carbon is a solid but we have managed to transmute it into a gas.

The other thing is slow violence. As a five-year-old, there was something fascinating about explicit, extreme contrasts — if the punch doesn't have the dishoom-dishoom sound, we might experience it less. It's easy to kill creatures in a video game. Like that virtual violence, the pollutants we are generating remain virtual or fictional — till they hit us. Maybe an animal feels more when they see a chrysanthemum growing in January instead of April. How do you generate that foreboding, the terror of what that means? To depict that is a big representational challenge.

What you just said about denial and our comforts making us deny our role reminded me of one of the strongest scenes in Machines: where the factory owner says he keeps the labourers' salaries low because they would spend the extra money on bidis or alcohol. That is class blindness and denial. The other thing I remember is that in an interview you gave, you mentioned that you wanted to capture the stench of ammonia in the factory — which takes us back to depicting the invisible.

I'm just a very olfactory person. I am very moved by smell. I even choose my partners by it. I am wary of it, but I use it in my art as well. But films are nonetheless a two-dimensional medium. You get sound and image, you have to make do with that, but I try to generate a kind of synaesthesia.

I believe that you first visited the factory in Machines when you were a small child. What stayed with you from then?

Sense perceptions. A child doesn't have the language to articulate the world, they can only feel. I was three feet tall and there were all these sweaty people, very big. And the machines were very big. It was one of my foundational experiences to have seen that, even though I was only a tertiary participant. As a child, I was a ghost there. My whole life it was brewing, I think. Then three things happened. First I was given a warning that I would get kicked out [of film school] if I didn't make something. But I didn't identify or relate with anything in my immediate environment.

Where was that?

In Valencia, which is 40 miles from Los Angeles. Very white and very dull. Then I was googling for inspiration and googled '25 Greatest Photographers Ever' and came across Sebastian Salgado's book called Workers. I was hypnotised. It literally took me back to my exaggerated perspective, that of a child. Also around the same time in 2013, the Rana Plaza incident in Bangladesh happened, where a garment factory collapsed and over a thousand people passed away. This was also one of the catalysts that brought this into the zeitgeist.

I could have made this film in a bread factory or a Pepsi factory. I mean, the whole world is built on slavery of some kind or another. But the earliest rhetorics of working class conditions and anthropology of workers was articulated for some reason in textile mills.

Yes, true. So did you work out why the cloth matters? I mean, there is an obvious visual contrast between these reams of fabric and the often meagrely-clothed men working to create them...

Yes. Which some of the girls in my school in California found really hot. Though I wasn't at all eroticising them in that way.

How old were you when you started shooting?

Twenty-two. It took me three years to finish the film. I'm 26 now. That time I had, when I was studying other things, was helpful. I didn't have a producer for the longest time. It wasn't very expensive at first: I had my own equipment, my best friend from film school, Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva, agreed to be my cinematographer, and we have a synergy. I'm somebody who worries a lot, but he didn't give a f**k about important deadlines. I learnt patience from him. It's the most basic fact of meditation: to calm down and not be tremored (sic) by twenty different ideas. When we lose our anally-retentive postmodern sense of control, that's when we can let go. I do believe that creativity needs a kind of looseness — your mind needs to free itself of the tautness of deadlines, and be relaxed enough to make wild juxtapositions in your head.

You don't ever appear in the film.

In films, just like in life, what you don't see is as important as what you see. Of course the film is brought to the audience from my perspective. But my presence would be a barrier, or filter. It would take away the urgency of the words spoken. I wanted viewers to feel they were being directly addressed.

There is one scene towards the end, where the crowd of labourers outside ask you what you've come to do, whether you actually want to help, or will you also just go away like politicians do. What did you say?

I didn't really have any answers. But I told the workers what I was doing.

And what was the response?

They thanked me. Some of them said, that's really kind of you, that you're trying to understand what we're going through. Some of the others were just happy that someone had pointed a camera at them for the first time in their lives. These people come from a place of thinking nobody cares about them. So for anybody to be curious about their situation, about their being, is almost a phenomenon. But we're humans and we respond to empathy. Also I communicated with them the kind of privilege I come from, and the fact that I've never earned a single penny in my life, and that I'm studying.

That's a difficult thing to do.

Absolutely. You really have to be vulnerable. Sometimes a worker would ask me, yeh camera kitne ka hai, and I could not bring myself name a figure that would equal 20 years of his salary in that factory. So I would just say, it's very expensive.

That is also the basic question that drove me to make this film: not knowing why there is this inequality. In many places the illusion of equality is much more present. Here in India it stares back at you.

So are you back in India for good?

Well, at least as long as I'm working on my next project, the documentary on pollution. It's depressingly inside my head still. I need to put pen to paper.

Did you write a script for Machines?

[Shakes his head to indicate no].

But you want to write a script for this film?

No, I just want to see my thought process tangibilised [sic]. Writing things down helps. I mean my father still takes notes, and he's one of the most successful men I know. And he went to school till Class Eight.

You started out going to engineering school in the US. How long did you last?

Six months.

But the science that you studied, seems to survive in your concerns, and in your metaphors.

I came to art very late. Until the age of 20, I had never met an artist. But I had met scientists. And businessmen and lawyers and doctors.

You're just back from the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. Any thoughts on current cinema in India? Do you watch Indian films?

I'm going to watch a Bollywood film with my family tonight, and I know that every part of my brain will be screaming 'I want to get out of here'. We are a film-watching country, but it can't be about the numbers. It's about what sorts of film we're watching; what films it is assumed we want to see. The formula [of producing commercial cinema] works on the same principle as Amazon or Netflix, which is to say that the machine is supposed to be able to predict what you would like. But it is a machine making that decision, and a machine can only create based on what has been made before. How then will anything new ever get created?

Published in Firstpost, 5 Nov 2017.