How to name a day?

Poetics and Politics of Sunil Shetty

Tomorrow is election day for Bom bahias. mark karna banta hain, party. It is the last phase of polling for Maharashtra. I mean, call it whatever you want - make-or-break, critical mass calculator, decider, tie-breaker, bhavishya ka sawaal - the maharashtra sarkar is already cursing itself for having scheduled polling in Bombay on a monday. I feel a little stupid for not taking a cue from my friends in NGOs, corporate outfits etc. who have gone to hill stations in the South (Munnar etc.), or Alibag/Matheran/Madh Island for the weekend. No, wait. Long weekend. that oasis in the desert of modern chakure jiban. I am crossing my as-of-now unmarked fingers, hoping that they will come back in time to perform their constitutional duty.

To be fair, all of them will be back well in time. It is the older, (khandani) moneyed folk who are the traitors - the “apolitical” jaded ones, whose only interest in the electoral process is decided by the address to which they have to get the peti delivered. These people are more likely to go to Badrinath, or Haridwar, or Modi’s home constituency, Banaras. These nimcompoops are living in bhadralok or devlok. They think of their pilgrimages as “squirrel work” in the Ram Rajya. The ones from this group who have stayed back to vote, on the other hand, are most likely that ‘critical’ middle class mass who put all their energy into steadying the drowning vessel of the NDA.

It was the cab driver who drove me to CSMVS yesterday, who pointed out this reality of the long weekend to me. I was attending what turned out to be a lovely walkthrough of the brilliant exhibition “A Forest in the City”). Our conversation started with his observations about all the bandobast in the maidaan next to my house which was being transformed into the front verandah of a polling booth. A few seconds into the conversation, he revealed to me that he used to be a cutter BJP fellow, but abhi haalat kharaab hain. Sidenote: Most conversations with cab drivers in bombay are transformative experiences. More often than not, this is true for the rider, rather than the driver. It is amazing how solipsistic we become as we move up the ladders of social capital - from Mumbai Local to AC bus to kaalipeeli to Uber for eg. - is it not?

I think he will not mind, though, if I share some details about the conversation in this commentary. He slowed down for the last kilometre of the trip, as we entered the kala ghoda area, so that he could prolong the talk a little more, and finish the point he was making about why he didn’t believe in the BJP anymore. It turns out that story he was telling me at the beginning was an intelligent ploy. He was being cautious. He didn’t want me to place him as an anti-Mudi fellow. He was listening to UPSC training videos on youtube when he got my ride, he tells me. He kept himself well informed about current affairs. He enlightened me on many things I had no inkling off, about the current political economy, the media, and the hindi belt. We had a mutual admiration moment speaking about Lallantop and Saurabh Dwivedi. He ended the conversation with Aap se baat karke itni khushi hui naa sir… so yeah, while I didn’t get the chance to ask him if it was fine (I did not think, then, that he will feature in today’s Poetly commentary) I don’t think he’ll mind if I share some details of our interaction with you.

He is from Banaras, and he assured me that his entire family, except one chacha (who is extremely dhaarmik and still a cutter BJP fellow) has/will vote BJP out. Even this small pronouncement filled my heart up with a shining sun of hope in these dark gloomy days that portend worse things in the near future (confirmation bias, perhaps, but be quiet, let me hold on to this!). He told me about many conversations that he’d had in the last few weeks - mostly with rich sanghis or bhakts. These were difficult conversations, and he wasn’t sure if he brought them around to his point of view. But he was very proud to have shaken the foundations of their whatsapp meme-based fake news: Pehle main khud fact-check nahi karta tha… lekin ab….

He told me that after watching Money Heist he didn’t feel like watching other crime/action series. We also dissected a couple of songs from Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila, and he recommended that I watch Laapata Ladies. We bonded over the good old days when revolutionary poetry was actually that, and how today’s musicians and poets were all trash (nothing fortifies companionship like shared disdain :) ) I told him ki I hope he would be able to convert everybody who sits in the cab until polling day, to do the same.

But polling day is tomorrow. What about the day before - the day that included this conversation? or the day before that? What do we call that? My ‘day before’ is actually ending as I write this. It is a little after noon on Sunday, 19 May, and I write this commentary sitting in a cafe in Colaba after having attended a scintillating architectural walk lead by Nikhil Mahashur (I came to know of it through this Mumbai Paused post) that is part of the promotional activities for a lovely exhibition at gallery XXL that showcases thought provoking work by Sajid Wajid Shaikh and Jofre Oliveras. I don’t like the place where I have parked my tashreef, because it’s a cushionless, wooden, high chair - I detest sitting in places where my feet don’t touch the ground. But this is one of those tables in one corner of the room, that is specifically designed for people who come to cafes to write/work. The coffee is good, and I’m momentarily distracted by O’Riordan’s voice as she gilds the air like a headless fire-dragon running out of steam... think along, surely you know the song I’m referring to: ‘It's the same old theme, since 1916/ In your head, in your head, they're still fightin’/ With their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns. In your head, in your head, they are dyin'…… Sounds familiar? The old refrain returns for one final flaming reminder … “When the violence causes silence… We must be mistaken”.

This line hits home, today, like never before; and I pluck it out of the synaesthetic dome - a fragment of found text to line my nest of thoughts.

Forgive me, I cannot help myself from giving these thinly veiled personal details. Today’s reason is that the details help me frame a journey towards the central conceit of this commentary - How does one name a day?

As you know, Naming is one of my favourite past times. I enjoy imprisoning things that I love with the shackles of nomenclature. (again, Miyazaki has a gorgeous take on this idea in his masterpiece Spirited Away, watch it already!) Names are a way of marking place, or even, making place in this complex everyday. Etymologically speaking, a ‘noun’ is the name of a thing. Language, and more importantly, syntax, then, is the name we give to a palimpsest - a continuous rearrangement of names; a never-ending rewriting. Knowledge, Meaning, and Insight, follow, as logical extensions of the art of christening.

Naming is also about identity. Recently, Sandhya Gajjar, in her gorgeous newsletter asked the provocative question, Is Baroda a boy or a girl?. In that essay, she compellingly problematises notions of gender, sex, place, performance, and identity. My own concerns about identity and self-definition gather around the question of work. I have internalised the post-capitalist critique of productivity, but I cannot rid myself of the push to constantly perform, to justify my presence in most spaces. This is only partly my fault. Delhi, more than Bombay, has forced me to work hard to prepare an answer to the question - “what do you do?”. (Please note, I hate this question. If you are reading this newsletter, you have no business asking what I do). Vocation is perhaps the safest query to venture when you are meeting somebody for the first time in these high-adrenalin, politically sensitive days. When you want to hide what you truly believe in (god: truth is beauty, beauty, truth), what your religion is (art), your ethnicity (poetry) or your gender (orange Not saffron), job titles serve the purpose very well. So then what are the parameters that could decide what name we give a ‘day’ - a single unit of time?

I endeavour to bracket experience in an effort to arrive at character. I do this in the hope that it will give me some clues that will help grace the celebration of time pass with a festive name.

So… onwards.

This ‘day’ started for me yesterday morning when I stumbled upon the show “Super Dancer” (which is in its 4th season, I think?), that too a special “Shetty” episode. I immediately gave in to the shrill clarion call of my Bunt Pride, and was rewarded with this special edition of one of India’s most popular reality dance television shows featuring the legend Sunil Shetty.

Now, I have in the past had readers critique my occasional references to popular culture with their elitist maxims. I have had to justify my interest with scholarly literary and Marxist theories of popular culture often used in this vein by cultural theorists. But the truth, popular culture is everything. I found validation for what I considered a “guilty pleasure” in my younger days, through an answer Vikram Chandra gave me as he signed my copy of Red Earth and Pouring Rain in one of his JLF appearances. He had just finished showcasing his ideas on a particular stream of Sanskrit imagistic poetry which was heavily critiqued by the vidvaans of the time for its descent into cheap, concrete, and visual stylistic patterns. He explained to me why he was interested in things that a society deems “bad”. While this argument embraces a hierarchy of quality and aethetic judgement that doesn’t sit too comfortably with my view of the popular, I took it willingly - to use on some unsuspecting critic in the future. My face burst into a smile, that day, as he wrote an affectionate note in the book. Before leaving he asked me that dreaded question, with a slight welcome twist: “What do you write?” All of 25, and filled with unimpeachable conviction, I exclaimed: Poetry. It was his turn to smile, as he bid me farewell. The people behind me who were waiting to get their books signed were getting impatient. I quickly hurried off with my bounty, cursing myself for not having secured his “co-ordinates”, and the unsolicited opportunity to bombard him with my derivative poems. Either way, I came out of that meeting with fresh conviction, and a mission to turn every future frowned upon event of media consumption into an object of research.

“Shark Tank India”, for instance when analysed as a text of this kind, is a brilliant timestamp of contemporary “entrepreneurial” India. In terms of audience, political economy, celebrity jury members, and of course, the curation of those entrepreneurs or companies that win the lottery to make it to the big leagues of national television, the show is a compelling data point supporting popular two-nation cultural theories (India/Bharat, for eg.) frequently trotted out to magnify differences of caste, class, region (rural, urban), language (Hindi and rest of India) etc. There is a small element of education for Startup India and Make in India in that show, but not enough to keep me hooked.

Super Dancer’s shetty episode on the other hand is the gift that continues to give. I LOVE Sunil Shetty. He is the epitome of everything that is beautiful about the Shetty community. There is more, in my opinion, to hate about shettys than there is to love (two words: Rohit Shetty). But Sunil Shetty is that glowing example of perseverance, compassion, ada (style, mannerism) and excellent socialist business sense that makes up for all the boring shettys. Sudarshan Shetty, the artist, perhaps, is another example of the creative types. Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana and Kantara are loud instances of Mangalorean tuluva petist (pett’ literally translates to ‘whack’ (v) or ‘fight’ (n) ) energy dominating contemporary Kannada cinema. But these folks deserve entire writeups to themselves. Today’s commentary is a tribute to that paragon of action and comedy (the highest form of intelligence, mind you), Sunil Shetty.

After I finished watching the episode, all thoughts of going back to my writing work were forgotten, and I decided to embark on a Sunil Shetty film marathon. (This is a stupid idea - watching a Sunil Shetty film a day is a dangerously delicious prospect). I flipped through my sister’s Netflix history, and finalised an old favourite.

Main Hoon Na.

Farah Khan, I believe, is Bollywood’s (not Hindi Cinema’s) gift to this country (after Shah Rukh, of course <monkey hiding eyes emoji>). While writing about Pathaan and the stardom of Shah Rukh I had referenced my fascination with Om Shanti Om. Allow me to quote a few lines from that article. Perhaps it will summarise the point I’m trying to make here with some conciseness:

Filled with inside jokes (that include anybody who had been seeing films post-independence) and art direction that celebrated the excesses and sensorial phantasmagoria of the cinematic experience in urban India, Om Shanti Om never really got its due. Blurring the lines between reality and illusion, reel and real life, its hero represented, in his multiple avatars, both the fan, and the object of fandom, the dream world of the struggler, and the lived fantasy of the Bollywood Star. There is a beautiful set of dialogues in the film that references itself and also the character in the film, which is a superstar (a metaphor for Shah Rukh Khan, the persona, in the first place). As the absurd plot begins to split at the seams, surging like a hot air balloon into the ethereal space of make-believe, the film returns to familiar territory in an intense but ironic gesture:

“Main nahi believe karoongi Om? 50 maale ki building se jab tum jump maarke apne pairo pe khade ho jaateho main believe karti hoon! 100 gundo ko akele maarkeheroine ko bachate ho main vo bhi believe karti hoon! Hava mein udte ho, Pani mein daudthe ho, Ye sab Main Believe karti hoon!”

“I won’t believe you, Om? When you jump from a 50-story building and manage to stand on your feet, I believe you!  When you fight 100 goons alone and save the heroine, I believe you! You fly through the sky, run on water – I believe all that!”  

Belief. Yes this could be one contender for a good name. But Main Hoon Na brought more beautiful possibilities to my mind. A couple of minutes into the film, as I watched with fresh eyes, the opening scene, which I had seen several times before, my eyes became moist with emotion. Brigadier Shekhar Sharma (Naseerudin Shah), after having foiled Raghavan’s (Sunil Shetty) attempt to assassinate General Bakshi (Kabir Bedi), makes an aakhri khwaaish to his illegitimate son Major Ram (Shah Rukh Khan).

I hit pause.

Now there are many reasons to watch Main Hoon Na. (Did you know, for eg. that Tabu actually has a few seconds of uncredited screen time in the film?!) Every frame is filled with symbolic messaging, and tributes to historic and contemporary Bollywood tropes. Farah Khan’s films are fun. They always work within established cinematic and cultural stereotypes, gently dislocating them, using melodrama, allegory and parody uninhibitedly. Unlike Karan Johar’s work, the films rarely take themselves seriously, (uptill a point) and you would be hard pressed to find pedantic commentary. Main Hoon Na is a festivals; celebrating desire in an over-the-top modality that turns ordinary encounters and landscapes into mythic, surreal set pieces. I respect her attitude towards her collaborators (it is a great team which includes Abbas Tyrewala). Just have one look at her creative title and end sequences where almost every person on the set is framed within the celebratory design language of the film itself. Tell me one art director/filmmaker who can pull off a sequence in which each credit/name/title features in a different font, with a constantly changing mise-en-scene that involves the crew members. Khan is effortlessly self-reflexive, and before she mocks all her compatriots, she ensures that the first guffaw is on her film’s own premise.

After I finished watching the film - and my own preoccupations with the current political environment in the country, prompted this - I suddenly felt ki Everybody should watch Main Hoon Na before going to vote.

Cut to the moment when I hit pause.

In a structuralist gesture, let me briefly try and unravel the order of things in the movie’s mythology. Sunil Shetty’s Raghavan is the villain. Major Ram is on a mission to find his long-lost brother (surprise, surprise) Laxman Prasad Sharma. Raghavan is “derived from Raghu” or “descendant of Raghu” (Wikipedia). Essentially, Ravan and Ram, like the Dark Knight and the Joker, are two sides of the same coin. It is important to note that Raghavan is not your average gun-toting, ‘brainwashed’, violent, maniac that so many regressive hindi films like to portray as the “Bad Muslim”. His character is well formed, and while the backstory is somewhat simple in its political motivations, it is nevertheless convincing. Raghavan lost his son to some terrorists in Kashmir. Since then he has been on a “personal vendetta” that he couches in revolutionary rhetoric. His extreme ideology is lapped up by soldiers in his “personal army” - all except one, Murali Sharma’s Khan. Khan is the “Good Muslim” who, disillusioned with the army and the politicians, initially takes up arms as Raghavan’s second-in-command. But when Raghavan goes too far, when he holds the students, faculty and staff of an entire college ransom, Khan sees how bloodthirsty his boss actually is. Raghavan demands that the Indian state revoke the launch of its landmark prisoner exchange programme; a project engineered towards peace between the two countries, India and Pakistan - ‘Project Milaap’. He refuses to back down even when the Pakistanis state repays the gesture by pledging to releasing Indian prisoners from their jails. In fact, he orders Khan to “kill them all”. The prisoners, of course, are innocent unarmed villagers who have strayed unknowingly across the border. Khan, having seen Raghavan’s dark side, sabotages Raghavan’s ploy, and goes undercover to help Major Ram to foil his own master’s deadly conspiracy.

There are some swashbuckling pieces of dialogue, crafted by the fantastic Abbas Tyrewala. At one point, I was standing and cheering, thinking This is what we should all be screaming. This is what we should tell that ******* Mudi and his henchmen:

“Dil se bula rahe ho to Ram mil hi jaenge. Itna chilla kyu rahe ho Raghavan?”
(If you call from your heart, you’ll surely find Ram. Why scream so much?)

This felt like a direct message to the larger-than-life Ram Mandir campaign, and the prime minister’s frenzied, violent, polarising hatespeech. The thought must occur to some footsoldiers and kar sevaks - some who still can’t find jobs outside of the BJP’s troll cell - is this the promised Ram Rajya? I mean, Hindutva hi sahi, where are the overflowing coffers, the clean streets and nil unemployment? But, leave it….

After an epic battle synecdoched into an action-packed fight between Major Ram and terrorist Raghavan (Ravan), Ram appears to have lost. (Btw in the show, Super Dancer, one the participating dancers, a child, asks Sunil Shetty if he does his own stunts. Shetty answers in the affirmative, claiming that he had to do his own stunts to set himself apart from other (nepo) actors because he didn’t know how to do anything else).

As Ram turns his back on his nemesis, and starts to retreat with his tail between his legs, Ravan taunts him: “Afsos Major iss Ram Katha mein maut Ram ki hi hogi” (What a pity, Major! This RamKatha is going to end with the death of Ram). But Ram is not done. He still has one last trick up his sleeve. As he reveals the trigger for a grenade which is strapped to Raghavan’s chest, he delivers the clincher: “Afsos Raghavan ki tum apni Ramayan bhool gaye, Ramayan ka ant hamesha Ravan ki maut se hota hain” (What a pity, Raghavan, that you have forgotten your Ramayan. Ramayan always ends with the death of Ravan).

I couldn’t stop myself from whooping ecstatically at this point, Acha jawaab diya, nahi?

As Raghavan bursts into flames and Tom-Cruise-Shah-Rukh-Ram jumps from the collapsing building’s roof on to a helicopter where Laxman is holding out his hand - (Laxman gets to be his brother’s saviour and say ‘Main hoon na’), I found myself fantasising a landslide victory for the INDIA alliance. But I’m scared to even let myself imagine such a thing. Fantasy ko fantasy rehne do. Aisi cheeze picturo mein hote hain na mitro?

Still if we don’t have hope, we don’t have anything. no?

I will not go too deep into a scholarly analysis of the film. This post is already too long. But… permit me to call this penultimate day before polling day, very simply,
‘a day of hope’. Bas.

For those readers who will feel cheated for not getting the customary poem, and for this abrupt end, I share below a video of my favourite song in the film. The lyrics for this modern genre-bending qawwali (take a bow, Anu Malik - along with the evergreen Sonu Nigam, and the Sabri brothers) have been penned by Javed Akhtar. You will have to watch the song twice, if you haven’t seen it for a long time. It won’t be easy to remember the words, because of the sizzling chemistry between the wet, sexy, barely clad Shah Rukh and Sushmita Sen (swoon) - SitaRam, if you please.

The romantic number is a radical celebration of desire at so many levels. It comes somewhere in the middle of the film. The unfulfilled chain is only closed in the cinematic universe through the death of its rogue, vengeance-seeking arch-villain Raghavan. For good to prevail, evil must be sacrificed.

Sunil Shetty the bechara bali ka bakra humbly accepts his place, for the greater good, once again.

Anyway, as we say in Tulu, “Yedde Aavad” (Let Good happen)

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Thankyou for reading. I hope you are finding the space to dream, and to resist (and to vote).

If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’. (Foreign contributors please email poetly@pm.me, there is still some problem with accepting contributions from outside the country. I hope to solve these by the time I post next)