Anindita Sengupta

I saw it last week and thought it was very good. Some loose notes (may contain spoilers):

- I like that there is very little gore in the movie. Riots have been done so often in movies that many of the images have come to be, awful as this may sound, hackneyed. The screaming mobs, the fire, the puddles of blood. Here, she makes a much stronger statement by staying away from that and tackling the aftermath. The quiet devastation wreaked in individual lives has a stronger impact. In the opening scene, the pile of bodies mechanically dumped by a truck (whose driver you can’t see) underlines the dehumanization that takes place during a riot.

- I also liked the scene in which Munira (Shahana Goswami) is gathering up burnt vessels from her kitchen and methodically throwing them out. Her house has been burned and what choice does she have but to clean up? But this simple act of cleaning up, familiar to so many women, now carries so much loss.

- In one scene, a character is killed just when you thought he would be safe. The act of killing is so deliberate and yet so casual, so happenstance in a way. The death almost seems like a grotesque mistake. You want him to step back a few paces, choose a different place to hide, be somewhere else. As if he is an ant and what one is looking at is the simple, un-meditated act of someone stepping on him in error. Except that this is not the case. Firstly, he is not an ant. He is a man who has been made into an ant, forced to fear the boot at every step. And secondly, the boot is actively looking for him. So his chances are nil in any case. He cannot run simply because there is no place to go.

- I think she’s explored well the issue of confinement or the sense of being trapped inside or outside of systems (or in anarchy) not of your making. Confinement takes many forms. Munira has to stay holed up in her friend’s room, unable to go home because the police are outside her home. People must stay indoors during curfew or risk being hunted down by the cops. But more subtly, Sameer (Sanjay Suri) must keep his mouth shut about his surname and hope his first name gets him through. A Hindu housewife (Deepti Naval) must suffer the guilt of letting a Muslim woman die because she couldn’t let her into her house. Mohsin, a Muslim child who’s been orphaned by the riots, must choose between the freedom to look for his parents and the rehab camp.

- The Hindu housewife is also caught between her own conscience which she assuages by burning herself with driblets of oil, and her crude husband’s violence. In multiple scenes, she is shown looking out of the grills of a window, her helplessness and her failure circumscribed by the bars.  When she meets Mohsin, he represents a chance at redemption. She gently brings him into the house, lingering at the threshold, easing him in. But he is frightened when he witnesses her husband’s violence and leaves. He would rather flee violence, and the fragile love that he receives is not enough to keep him. Besides, he wants his real parents. Not that easy to replace.

- I like that there was no neat, hopeful message. Mohsin walks into the rehab camp, walks through masses of people. Some children are playing with marbles. They invite him to join them. I cringed wondering if she was going to tie it up with a kitschy picture of kids playing. But he refuses. He walks to a corner and sits down by himself. He is still lost and grieving. And it will take more than a bunch of marbles to distract him. Yes, eventually he will probably move on. But not yet. Not just yet.

It’s still hanging over our heads: the neat hair argument. I remember when the hair-straightening craze started a few years back, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with my hair which is wavy and temperamental, the opposite of neat. (No silky waterfalls here.) It was all those adverts. Plus the nuns I grew up with had drummed into my head that hair must always look neat. It seemed like the adult world complied with such ridiculous notions.

I couldn’t bring myself to endure the unhealthy manipulation of permanent straightening. So I settled for using the hair-dryer and brush rather fiercely.

But it was tedious. And what a waste of time! And after one too many person had said, ‘oh your hair looks different all the time,’ I just chopped it off.

Now I’m growing it back, without interference. It is being given free run and every time I see it being its not curly-not straight, hyperactive self, I feel a little surge of pride like I’m bringing up someone particularly well.

Of course, I don’t have to go to places which demand strait-lacing of any kind so it’s easy. I wonder what I would do if I still had to attend client meetings, board meetings, weekly meetings and other such in some stuffy office. The pressure on women working in mainstream professions can be formidable. In a setting where you’re fighting to be ‘taken seriously’ most waking hours of your day, you’re unlikely to do anything that detracts from your cause. Add the public face element like in tv news or public relations or a host of others, and you’re even more screwed because they can actually demand you look a certain way. Between losing your job and losing your waves / curls, most women would choose the latter.

But there are enough women who don’t need to change their natural looks because of their profession but do it anyway. The urge to look like role models, the urge to fit in, the urge to belong — all hefty forces. But can we start fighting them, please?

Also, please read Nisha Susan’s story (in Tehelka again) on how we are creating an army of clones.

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Also, Jeanette Winterson reviews Alice Oswald’s new collection and talks about the role of nature in poetry, even today.

We can expect poetry to be relevant to our lives, but our lives include the inner and the mythic, the creative and the inventive. Our lives are lived on Earth, however much tarmac gets between us and the soil, and our lives are lived with the Moon and the stars above our heads, whatever the street lighting. Tarmac and street lighting are not more relevant than the estuary marsh or the Moon, only more pressing, which is a good reason for poetry to remind us of other truths.

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And this is what it looks like when the sea explodes.

Over at The Guardian, they’ve started a new series of collaborations between poets and photographers. Poems and photographs being among my favourite things, I was quite excited. But gah. I think the poem might work okay on its own but the photographs are so hopelessly literal, so dull, that they sucked all joy out of the thing. Here’s another poem by Sarah Maguire (the poet); it’s got the same attention to detail, the same sense of looking at small objects through a telephoto lens, and a similar sort of poofy ending.

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I prefer my poetry a little stronger, more bourbon than Bailey’s Irish Cream. Like this Sharon Olds reading of her poem ‘I Go Back to May, 1937′.

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Or Sonia Sanchez reading ‘Poem for Some Women’, startling and very, very sad.  (Incidentally, Sanchez just won the Robert Creely Award.)