Bhaisahab ke photos: Louisa

LOUISA
Bangalore, 2004
[Click picture for full size]

RIP King of Pop

"If you enter this world knowing you are loved
and you leave this world knowing the same,
then everything that happens in between can be dealt with."

- Michael Jackson

Jackson fans set for 'King of Pop' final curtain

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — Hundreds of millions of fans were preparing to bid a poignant farewell to Michael Jackson, as Los Angeles went into lockdown ahead of a star-studded memorial service.

Nearly two weeks after the death of the tragic "King of Pop," America is expected to grind to a standstill as the tortured music superstar is finally laid to rest.

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Adios dude. You got a bum deal, even though you had everything.

What am I going to miss most about The Gloved One? The signature high pitched 'aaao!' in the middle of songs. Which is also the reason I rarely liked his music. But MJ was so much a part of Bhaisahab's boarding school cultural milieu, he deserves a fond goodbye.

Here's my favorite MJ song:

Give In To Me - Michael Jackson featuring Slash

Bhaisahab ke horror film reviews: Rogue

ROGUE (2007)

Written & Directed by Greg McLean

4/5


Opinion is divided on which is the meanest killing machine in the waters of the world - the Great White Shark, or the Salt Water Crocodile. Both are ancient hunters, perfecting their skills since the age of the dinosaurs, and both possess huge rows of serrated teeth set in a powerful jaw that can snap a man's head off just as easily as a man snaps a chicken leg into two.

Jaws introduced the Great White way back in the 70s, and what an introduction it was! It set such a high benchmark for the killer shark film, that few filmmakers have attempted further explorations of shark terror, and fewer still have expanded on the concept (Deep Blue Sea comes to mind because of it's innovative idea of genetically modified hyper-intelligent sharks).

Crocodiles and alligators, in contrast, have never really gotten their due. Even though title for title, I’m certain there are more alligator/croc films than shark films. Many a filmmaker has attempted to showcase the brute force of an alligator attack. Yet by and large, most of them have been B movies - shoddy animatronics, poor scripting, and an over reliance on gore to induce horror. (Lake Placid being a notable exception).

But Rogue, an Aussie film about a fiercely territorial 25 feet salt water crocodile hunting a group of tourists in Australia's verdant Northern Territory, could well be the benchmark for the croc film. The tourists are in the hands of Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell), captain of the boat Suzanne and a backwoods expert on salt water crocodiles. Among the tourists are a travel writer, a man with a mission to immerse his wife's ashes in the river, and a plumpy Irish chick (Celia Ireland, who absolutely rocks in the limited screen time she is given). Their day is going fine - with some great sightings of crocodiles - until they see distress flares coming from the direction of sacred tribal land. Kate, following protocol, plunges the boat into a forbidden gorge. And leads her tourists into a one ton nightmare.

Rogue’s signature, just as it was in Jaws, is tension. That’s the ticket in an underwater monster flick isn’t it? As long as you are in the boat, no matter how flimsy, you are safe. If you fall into the water, all bets are off. Every ripple is a threat. That’s tension.

You're stuck neck deep in a bottomless river, not knowing what is swimming beneath you, inching closer to your thrashing legs. Tension.

You’re caught in a small island in a tidal river, night is creeping up, and so is the tide. Soon the island will be under water, where lurks a huge crocodile, equipped by nature to hunt best at night. That’s tension and you better believe it.

McLean plays out the heart pounding tension so well, building it up so lovingly, it’s hard even for hardened monster flick buffs like Bhaisahab to stop from squirming. Full marks on that score. The film also scores high on death sequences, and its moody music that is able to create an ocular interpretation of the monster croc much before we see it, filling us with dread.

The croc itself has also been wonderfully rendered to life by an efficient crew of animatronics experts, sculptors, and FX supervisors. Compared to Jaws' Great White, Rogue's croc is scarier because crocs are easily the most terrifying of all predators. Their dragon like appearance, coldly calculating reptilian eyes, sinewy jagged tails, and muscular jaws disturbingly similar to a T-Rex’s all add to make them bad news for whoever is unlucky enough to encounter one. And when it’s also a 25-foot chewing machine as in Rogue, oh bother – it’s time to take a piss in your pants and say hasta la vista to the world.

The characters in the film are nicely etched, with a healthy dose of that peculiarly charming redneck Aussie humor. But McLean doesn’t go overboard with his characters. Just when you think there’s going to be a longish character exposition, McLean reintroduces the croc – the star of the film. Nice.

Finally, don’t miss the lush cinematography. The shots of the wild, unexplored Northern Territory, access to large parts of which is judiciously guarded by aboriginal tribes, are spectacular, to say the least. There's breathtaking canyons, deep green waters, miles upon miles of grassland, red, weathered rocky cliffs, and much more.

Scenery to die for. Just ask the folks in the Suzanne.

India's Most Stupid

The VHP. Now that's a fucking lunatic asylum if there ever was one.

And in the deepest bowels of the asylum lies the dungeon for the criminally insane - currenly occupied by the Bajrang Dal.

Tehelka journalist Tusha Mittal (note to self: not all Mittals are greedy soulless money making machines) went visiting a "camp" for kids organized by the dungeon loonies. Here's a longish extract from her astonished report.

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At first glance, one could mistake this for a boys’ summer camp. But a closer look, and something else emerges. There are lathi pyramids, hoops of fire, gunshots and lessons about the different stages of war. The boys must learn to jump through flames if their houses are set on fire by “terrorists, Muslims, illegal immigrants,” must know a gun intimately to use it for maximum impact. On their arms and foreheads are bright orange bands with red imprints. For Sandeep Yadav, 15, the son of a garment shop owner in Sarojni Nagar, the orange brings motivation and a sense of belonging. “It charges me up to fight,” he says.

For what? “To protect Bharat Mata.” From what? “Akraman” (Attack). By whom? He stammers. The English. The Australians. The Christians. The Muslims. Probe his newly acquired worldview further and this surfaces: “Hindu girls should not wear sleeveless clothes. That is what Bharatya sanskriti (Indian culture) teaches us. And if a Hindu girl marries a Muslim, her head should be chopped off and the Muslim man’s too.”

Welcome to the training camp of the Bajrang Dal, the youth sect of the rightwing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). It is a weeklong camp held annually to “instill courage within the Hindu youth and awaken them to their patriotic duties,” says Ashok Kapoor, Bajrang Dal Delhi convenor.


[SNIP]


Ask Vineet Kumar, 14, barely four feet tall, the son of a sports garments factory worker, what is the Bajrang Dal? With a voice not yet cracked, he answers in phrases – “Ram Setu, Ram Janambhoomi, Amarnath yatra, hartal, and chakka jam.” According to him, “Pakistani terrorists” were trying to shut down the Amarnath Yatra but the Bajrang Dal rallied every child in Jammu and Kashmir on the streets to protest. At the camp, Vineet learnt a new word he likes to thrust at every opportunity: Virodh (resist) — that is what he wants to do when he grows up. Ask what he will virodh against and his eyes wander, trying to distill the stew of textbook answers fed to him.

THERE WERE speeches: “Be weary of six M’s,” the boys were told from a booming microphone. “Muslims, Missionaries, Marxists, Lord Macaulay, foreign Media and Maino [UPA President Sonia Gandhi’s middle name].”

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Did I mention these guys are shit-for-brains morons, besides being pathologically insane? Yes sir. They're weary weary dumb.

Well, that's what you get when your party boss is a dude who looks like Spot Nana.


For Tusha Mittal's article and some interesting pictures of the "camp", click here.

Kabir: Morbid, True.

माटी कहे कुम्हार से, तू क्या रोंधे मोहे
इक दिन ऐसा आयेगा, मैं रोंधुंगी तोहे

Says the earth to the potter - you think you're crushing me?
Such a day shall come to pass, when I'll be crushing you.

An epiphany

That's Frances Bean Cobain, old Kurt's daughter. The last time I saw a picture of her, she was a chubby little baby, blissfully unaware that her dad had just blasted his brains out with a shotgun in the garage.

She's 17 years old now.

She's how old I was when I first heard her father's music.

.

.

.

.

As Martin Amiss wrote in Money:

"Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by....
It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving."

Bhaisahab says:

Bhaisahab ke horror film reviews: Zibahkhana

ZIBAHKHANA

2/5

Written by Omar Khan and Peter Toombs
Directed by Omar Khan

When Bhaisahab was little, he went to visit Delhi with his family. He was thrilled because he could finally see those sights he kept reading about in books - Red Fort, Appu Ghar, Purana Qila, Qutub Minar, Alai Minar.

Whoa! Alai Minar? Yeah. Alai Minar - The great Khilji Alauddin's attempt to build a minar taller than the Qutub, and true to the man's character, he ordered it constructed right in front of Qutub Minar.

Unfortunately, the emperor popped it before the cement had dried on the 24 metre first storey, pitifully short of the Qutub's 72 odd metres. But for some unexplained reason, Bhaisahab was more excited about checking out Alai Minar rather than the Qutub.

When the tour bus got there, it was a rude shock to find Alai Minar looking woefully inadequate in front of the stately, majestic, clean Qutub. It sulked in one corner of the Qutub complex, bird poop lining it's floor in a thick carpet, a stale bird smell suffocating the senses, lover’s declarations scratched on the walls, beer bottles and chips packets piled in the corners. A historic garbage dump.

It was, to put it gently, a huge fucking disappointment.

Zibahkhana arouses the same feeling of disappointment. Created by our friends across the border to the west, Zibahkhana had made waves internationally, marketing itself as Pakistan's first zombie horror film. A bloody B-Grade attack on the genteel idiosyncratic sensibility of Urdu aesthetics. So when I finally got my hands on the film, I could not wait to watch it. But it was all for nothing. The film's noble intentions have been stymied by a paper thin plot, a confused screenplay, cheesy dialogues, and terrible, terrible actors (even by horror film standards).

Writers Omar Khan and Peter Toombs (sepulchral name, that) packed in all the clichés - flesh eating, slow moving undead, vague insinuations of water pollution spreading the zombie virus, doltish, good looking, dope smoking teens on their way to a rock concert, a bizarre sideways shift to a burkha-clad psycho killer, and buckets and buckets of blood.

But as the pioneer of the zombie horror flick George Romero himself will testify, gore alone doth not a zombie flick make. In the end, like in any another genre, story matters, depth of character matters, originality of vision matters.

However, let's not withhold credit where it's due. Bad execution should not overwhelm good intentions. Omar Khan is obviously a huge fan of the horror genre. In the room of one of the characters, he's put up the chilling poster of Maniac, one of the scariest movie posters ever. I think I have it here somewhere....

Ah here it is.

To get back to Omar Khan, he's done a great job with the zombie scenes. The communal flesh eating scene is raw, ferocious, and brutal. Great stuff. The spiked ball on a chain used by the psycho (see poster) is another great spark, a truly innovative idea. Finally, the title track - an instrumental ditty - kicks ass. Ataullah Khan meets RD Burman. A most apt track for the cheesy, campy feel of the film.

When little Bhaisahab's Delhi trip was over, he'd returned home feeling kind of sad for poor Alauddin Khilji and his unfinished dream. Alai Minar has since then held a fond place in his heart. Zibahkhana likewise is floating down into that deep dark part of his heart where such things as imperfect ugliness and unfinished dreams are stored.

In fact, I'm already quite fond of the film.

Peculiar Secular Pickle Tickle

It’s a word that rhymes with peculiar and smells like politics when it appears in newspapers. In television debates, evoking the word immediately enables the audience to bracket the speaker in a particular category – the ‘good guy’ category or the ‘pseudo’ category – depending on your own political dispensation. The word of course is “Secular”, and it has by and large defined political debate in the country since the days of the Ayodhya kar sevas.

You have the defenders of secularism on one side of the debate, led ostensibly by groupings of polishitians calling themselves Congress, Samajwadi, Leftist etc, who argue that secularism is the only glue that holds India together. Never mind the simmering caste and class tensions. On the other side are the so-called Hinduism-defenders – polishitians in half-pants, who hold the view that secularism (or ‘pseudo-secularism’ if you please) is nothing but appeasement of minority religious groups for power and profit. Never mind that majority-appeasement is also about power and profit. In fact, politics itself is about power and profit, as much as religion is about faith and devotion.

Thankfully, in these glorious days of the early 21st century, secularism remains only in the bottomless pit of politics, so we can leave those honorable members of parliament to beat each other silly with the ifs and buts of it and go on with our lives. Because according to the preamble of our fastidious constitution:

"WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC....."

Personally speaking, they should amend the preamble (won't be the first time either) to just say this:

"When I do good, I feel good.
When I do bad, I feel bad.
And that is my religion."*

And in a freakish co-incidence, that's also the essence of secularism.

* attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

Bhaisahab ke horror film reviews: Child's Play

CHILD’S PLAY (1988)

Story by Don Mancini
Screenplay by Don Mancini, John Lafia, Tom Holland
Directed by Tom Holland

3/5

Child’s Play begins with serial killer Charles Ray cornered in a toy shop, shot and wounded by cops. Ray, knowing he is dying, wants revenge against the cop who shot him, and his partner who had ditched him. But how’s he to get it, lying as he is in a pool of blood in the dolls section of the toy store? Luckily for him, he knows some mean voodoo tricks. He invokes incantations and transfers his soul into a “Good Guy” brand doll.

A day later, single mother Karen disappoints her son Andy on his birthday. He had expected a talking Good Guy doll like the one he had seen on TV. But those dolls are expensive, and she’s only a salesgirl in a departmental shop. Help comes through her friend Maggie, who tells her a hobo in the back alley has a Good Guy doll to sell. She buys the doll and gets it home. Of course, it is the doll with Charles Ray’s soul in it.

And thus comes the darkness into her life.

Child’s Play is an out-an-out 80s horror flick – cheesy digital effects, loud synths, weird hairdos… you get the drift. But all of that hardly matters the moment Chucky comes alive.

The brilliant puppeteers who put together Chucky the killer doll deserve a blooming Oscar for the result of their hard work – a seriously frightening, obscenity mouthing, bad ass doll. Fact is, it’s those obscenities – ranging from ‘stupid bitch’ to ‘fuck you asshole’ – sprouting from the doll’s mouth that ratchets up the scare factor, partly because it’s so alien to hear dolls swear like lunatics.

In Chucky the talking doll, Child’s Play created one of the scariest (and coolest) icons of horror cinema, one that the audience kept demanding more of. This led to sequel after sequel, albeit each – as is wont with sequels – inferior to the one preceding it. In fact, by 1998’s Bride of Chucky, the series had degenerated into the awkward horror-comedy sub-genre. Sad.

But also as is wont with franchise films, the first one is the best (although not necessarily the scariest – my vote for that goes to Child’s Play II).

So if you want to experience a peculiar adult nightmare dressed as a child’s toy, check this cult hit out.

The Tank Man of Beijing

Who remembers the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? I do. State run Doordarshan gave some sketchy details, India Today published the horrible pictures, and then Prannoy Roy's fledgling NDTV show 'The World This Week' broadcast this jaw dropping video of one unarmed man's act of bravery.



According to Wiki, the man is/was Wang Wei Lin. Some say he was dragged away and executed, other accounts claim he is still alive and in hiding - either in China itself or in Taiwan.

There is another hero in this video. The unknown, unseen tank driver. He could have easily rolled over Wang. But he chose not to. He, like a true soldier, recognized and respected bravery when he saw it.

And for that, he in turn has Bhaisahab's deep respect.