Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Pic & Quote Of The Month


"I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it"

~ Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993)


Audrey Hepburn is considered to be one of the greatest female actors of the 20th century, along with Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Marlyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. She considered her performance in William Wyler's Roman Holiday to be her dearest. Audrey Hepburn was regarded as a slender, elfin, and wistful beauty, alternately regal and child-like. This cute photograph of Audrey Hepburn was taken in 1955. Am reminded of Osho Rajneesh who, while talking about sharing and being in love, had said, Cast pearls on swine! Sometimes, asses are better than humanbeings. Don't you agree?

Monday, March 29, 2010

The Suicide Of A Dream : Comrade Kanu Sanyal


(Kanu Sanyal with background photos of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin & Mao)

The last of the trinity passed away by committing suicide. Comrade Kanu Sanyal hung himself with a nylon rope in the hut last week, where he was living in a village, in the vicinity of the historic Naxalbari village, which is near Siliguri in West Bengal. He was one of the three important founders of the Naxalite Movement in India. The other two were : Charu Mazumdar and Jangal Santhal. Charu Mazumdar died in police custody in 1972. Jangal Santhal had spent more than a decade in jail, became a chronic alcoholic after his release in 1979 and drunk himself to death in 1982. Kanu Sanyal was released from prison in 1977 and he started to live permanently in his beloved village, near Siliguri where he had chosen to have his last breath in the summer of March 2010.



A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India and the spark is going to cause priarie fire and a great storm of revolutionary armed struggle will eventually sweep across the length and breadth of India, was the oracular prophecy of People's Daily of China, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China after a peasant revolt broke out in Bengal during the summer of 1967. It happened in a small village called Naxalbari which is located near Siliguri in Darjeeling District of West Bengal during the last week of May 1967. A peasant youth got a judicial order in his favour to plough a piece of land under litigation. The local landlords ganged up and attacked the peasant. A socio-political unrest followed in that entire Terai region at the foothills of the Himalayas having many tea estates in between the forests. The peasants were organised by two grassroot level leaders namely Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. The ideological shape to the resistance was given by Charu Mazumdar, who termed it as a movement for the seizure of power through agrarian revolution. All the three of them belonged to the Communist Part of India (Marxist), which won the largest number of seats in the state elections during 1967, thus forming a United Front Government in West Bengal with other coalition partners. The three leaders revolted against their own party, namely the CPI(M), which was part of the ruling coalition at that time. They organised the peasants to retaliate against the local landlords and started capturing back some of the lands by violent means. And the ruling state government, with CPI(M) at the helm of affairs, treated it more as a law and order problem and the entire uprising was controlled from spreading by the state police force.


No incident actually took place at the legendary village of Naxalbari on May 25, 1967. A firing on rural poor took place in Prasadujot, another nearby small village in the Siliguri division. There were clashes and tensions in the area on the land question and a police official was killed. Next day a huge number of police fired on poor peasants, who were unarmed. Eight peasant women were killed, two children of about six months were killed in the women’s laps and one young man was also shot dead. The entire uprising came to a grinding halt in and around the Naxalbari village within a few months. Although defeated, it unleashed a flow of events which escalated over the years into various extreme left-wing political movements of different hues and colours with deeper ramifications in India's socio-political landscape. All such extreme left-wing political movements of India got their appellation as Naxalism, named after the village of Naxalbari.
Subsequently in 1969, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the CPI(ML), was formed under the leadership of their ideologue, Charu Mazumdar. They formulated their strategy as the elimination of the feudal order in the Indian countryside by freeing the poor from the clutches of the oppressive landlords and replace the old order with an alternative one that would implement land reforms. Accordingly, they devised their tactics to achieve it through violent guerilla warfare by the peasants to eliminate the landlords and build up resistance against the state's police force which, according to them, came to help the ruling class of the landlords. They then aimed to gradually set up 'liberated zones' in different parts of the country that would eventually coalesce into a territorial unit under Naxalite hegemony, ultimately leading to a classless, communist India, with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The fundamentals of all such adventurist extreme left-wing political enterprises are essentially flawed. Their philosophical understanding was inadequate and skewed-up as they did not completely comprehend the writings of the two Germans, namely, Karl Heinrich Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote interesting philosophical treatises in the 19th century, based on the conditions of the world as existed then. The extreme left-wing political movements of India took its inspiration from the disastrous experiments upon humanity conducted by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Stalin in USSR, Mao Tse-tung in China, Saloth Sar Pol Pot in Cambodia and many others in every possible nook and corner of the world. Such political experiments of historic philosophies had only contributed to make the history of 20th century to become one of the most brutal and most cruel centuries in the history of human civilisation. Together with Adolf Hitler's Nazism and the Benito Mussolini's Fascism, the communist dictatorships under Stalin, Mao and others should be condemned as totalitarian excesses which wrecked more havoc to humanity than any iota of good which they professed to usher in. By equating all the totalitarian dictatorships as crimes against humanity, one should not fall into the traps of either the laissez-faire capitalism with its dogmatic liberalism or right-wing fascism with its religious fanaticism of any kind. What requires to be comprehended is the insightful writings of the Younger Karl Marx which were published in German in 1932 and for which the English translations were available only after 1959. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm took inspiration from the writings of younger Marx and have given important theoretical inputs to understand the complexities of advanced capitalism and the commodification of life, which are the realities we face in the 21st century. The writings of a present-day philosopher like Slavoj Zizeck is more insightful than any of the pamphlets published and distributed by the Naxal theoreticians and political practitioners in India to understand post-modern life and the complexities we face in contemporary world.
Comrade Kanu Sanyal committed suicide not because he was old and ailing. But because he got totally disillusioned with the ways and means in which the current day extreme left-wing Maoists are spelling disasters to the livelihood of hundreds of poor marginalised tribals, peasants and agricultrual labourers across the country. In a way, it was a Frankenstein Monster which murdered his soul. In an interview before his suicide, he was asked to comment on the Maoist or Naxalite insurgency that have become active in many parts of the country. He said that they would vanish with time unless they strengthen their mass base immediately and trust in the parliamentary democracy of the country. The peasantry in the areas controlled by these Maoist insurgents prefers to approach the police camp, to save themselves from the Maoists and from the goons controlled by the landlords, said Kanu Sanyal.
Can there be any other horrifyingly tragic end to a magnificently grand dream?!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Angadi Theru (Tamil Movie) : A Non-Stop Torture

If your planetary position is not good, it screws up your Sunday. Not just badly. But miserably. I should have quietly gone to watch Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor which was screened today morning by the Enlighten Film Society. There would not have been any second thoughts if Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris or The Sheltering Sky or even Stealing Beauty were screened. I can watch all these three masterpieces of Bertolucci endlessly. Since I had already seen The Last Emperor more than twice earlier, I was reluctant to go, as there is not much to relish over and again in it, apart from the cinematographic finesse of Vittorio Storaro. Last evening, Mani, my new literary friend in Mumbai, told me about the release of a Tamil movie Angadi Theru by one of the upcoming and promising director Vasantabalan. Since it is being screened in a cinema hall nearby, my misfortune seduced me to watch it. And to undergo a non-stop torture for more than two and half hours. I could not exercise the choice of walking out of the hall due to various reasons and therefore I have to purge it out my system by writing this review. At the outset, let me caution you to not to read it any further and undergo the same suffering!




The plot of the film has two gruesome accidents as its turning points. The first accident happens at an unmanned railway cross resulting in a train crushing to death the hero's father along with a dozen of others travelling by a vehicle. The second accident happens in the city of Chennai where an over-speeding lorry crushes to death another set of more than two dozen pavement dwellers who were sleeping on the roadside in the night. In between the first and second accidents, the poor hero gets more than two hundred and fifty slaps from the manager of a super market continuously for more than 10 reels of film print. After the second accident, both the legs of the heroine gets mutilated. The hero finally marries the heroine and the films ends much to the relief of less than a dozen of unfortunate victims sitting as audience inside the hall.




There is a crippling psychological complex afflicting some of the upcoming directors like Bala, Ameer and Vasantabalan and upcoming writers like Jeyamohan and Ramakrishnan and agit-pop essayists like Charu Nivedita in Tamil society. It is called as megalomania. It is nothing but a mirror-image of the Dravidian cultural iconography getting reflected on the other side of the spectrum. These creative persons are reasonably young and energetic, promising and talented. Unfortunately, they have started falling into the self-delusional traps of grandeur and have started believing that they have grown beyond criticism. By touching a hilltop hither and thither, they have begun to assume that they have already scaled the greatest of all mountain peaks. The domain of cultural and literary criticism in Tamil Nadu is left with a harrowing void, where there is none to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. In such a philistine scenario, the prevailing theme seems to be you scratch my back and I scratch yours. As a result, one cannot expect the second movie of a young director like Vasantabalan to be creatively more mature than his maiden venture. It is also unfortunate to mention that the dialogues for this film penned by Jeyamohan, for whom I have my greatest personal love and regard, has nothing worth mentioning either. How can one prevent the recurrence of such tragedies in Tamil cultural space?




Movie Rating : 1 out of 10




Note : But for the 0.5 score for the female lead actor Anjali who shows flashes of brilliance and 0.5 score for one beautiful song (Aval Appadi Ondrum Azhagillai) cinematographed beautifully, the rating of the movie ought to be 0 out of 10.



Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Rama Navami : Remembering Yogi RamSuratKumar

It was a small old house. With corrugated clay-tiled roof. That was where Yogi Ramsuratkumar was living in those days. Located around the corner of a street near the colossal Gopura of the Temple of Thiruvannamalai. There were lots of drooped garlands with wilted flowers hanging on the iron grills of the verandah facing the road. They formed a translucent curtain obscuring the visibility of the passers-by. But it did not render the visual communication, between the Yogi who sat inside and any ardent seeker passing by the doorstep, completely opaque. One can still attempt an eyeball to eyeball game if one peeps through the right apertures. For the probing eyes of the Yogi was always on the look out.



The fag end of 1992 was a time zone in my life which was full of turbulence and turmoil. Uncertainties and anxieties. Lethal post-adolescent pangs. At around noon, myself and my classmate Rajagopal had reached the house of Yogi Ramsuratkumar at Thiruvannamalai. Travelling by bus all the way from Paiyyanur, where we were put up for a village stay program. Those were the final days of my under-graduation in the discipline of Agriculture. I had read about this man called Ramsuratkumar from the writings of Balakumaran and V.Rangarajan. And from what GeethaRavindran had narrated about her experience of meeting him. When we reached, the door of the house was locked from inside. We then enquired with a boy who was around. He said that he was the one who does part-time gate-keeping in the house of the Yogi in the mornings and evenings, which were the visiting hours earmarked for the devotees. Besides this, the boy was also preparing for his next attempt to give his tenth standard board exams in which he had failed. I felt an immediate incongruence in this. Why should the Yogi not bless his own poor gate-keeper boy to pass the Board Exam? Or possibly get rid of him from this monstrous schooling system and liberate the boy into a true seeker? Why should he be caught in between? While I was thus pontificating within my mind, that boy interrupted and said the Yogi will open the front gate by around 4.30pm or sometimes later as well. I was wondering what would the Yogi be doing inside the house at that time of the afternoon. I had always been very curious to know whether these Yogi guys would be using the loo!



Me and my friend went to have a stroll around the Temple. When we returned sharp at 4.30pm, there was already some bhajan going on inside the verandah. The Yogi was sitting on the floor with his famous palm leaf fan. A few of his devotees were singing some bhajans sitting in front of him. The gate-keeper boy, whom we had met a little earlier in the day, had resumed his duty, standing and holding the gate from inside the house. My friend said he was not interested to meet any Yogis at that stage of his life and said that he would visit the Temple and get back. The gate-keeper boy then told me that on that particular day, the Yogi had come out unusually at around 4pm itself to open the gate and he himself had reached there a little late. I said that was all fine and I asked him to open so that I can meet the old man. The boy simply refused stating that he had the permission to open the gate only after Ramsuratkumar gives him the nod to do so. That seemed to be the prevalent practice in that household. I told that boy to go and tell that old man sitting there that I had come in the morning itself and was waiting the whole day to meet him. My fury increased as it was getting late. I had to return to the camp the same night, which was at a four to five hour distance from there, depending upon the availability of the bus. The gatekeeper said he was sorry as he was not supposed to talk to his boss like that. This was going on in a hushed-up tone between me and the dwarapalaka in Tamil, as the Yogi was conversant in English and Hindi only. I then suddenly turned towards the side where Ramsuratkumar was sitting. He was looking into my eyes with a smile.



When his eyes met mine, I did not turn away. I looked straight into him. In a short while, Ramsuratkumar suddenly got up, opened the door from inside, came out and sat down on the front steps at the entrance of the house. I was standing just in front of him. Though this knee-jerk reaction of the old man had unsettled me, I upped the ante by staring straight into his eyes again. And he was sitting in front of me at a more intimate, hugging distance! He was continuously looking into me. I also took note of the fact that he was smiling at me all the time. And probing me all the while. I think I would have looked like a funny boy with an affected sternness on my face that evening. Which might have induced him to smile more. Whatever. There was silence. Neither him nor I spoke. After a while, without removing his glance, he broke the silence and asked, "So my young friend, tell me...!"



There are always certain defining moments in your life. Many a times, you don't get to know of it instantaneously. Sometimes you realise it much later. And sometimes you die without knowing a wee bit of it. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now say it with humility and conviction that, it was one such defining moment of my petty life. But I didn't think so at that point of time. And the amusing part of it is that, I was damn serious and too sincere in what I truly believed in then. Without taking my eyes from him, I asked what I thought was the most profound question haunting my life, "What solution do you have for the problems facing humanity?". He laughed and said, "My dear friend, I am not a philosopher. I am just a beggar!" At that juncture, something in me told me that I should stop yapping and ask him what I actually felt deep inside. "So, what do you think that I should do then?", I asked him. Pat came the reply, "Say RAM, my friend, say RAM RAM!". I could not believe that one can dare to offer me such a simplistic solution for a complex problematique posed by me. It prompted me to almost yell at him, "What??". He laughed again and said, "Just chant what I told you!". That, I thought, was my turn to laugh. I smiled condescendingly at him and asked, "That's all you have to say?". He simply replied, "Yes, my friend. That's all!". By then, some passer-by fell at his feet. He patted his devotee's head muttering, "Ram, Ram!". I felt ridiculous at the gimmicks of the old man. I told him that I would take leave. But he raised his hands and blessed me, "Ram, Ram! My Father blesses you, my friend!". I was flabbergasted. He remained smiling without getting irked at my irreverential demeanour. My arrogance did not permit me to fold my hands and salute him. Touching his feet was beyond question. My dignity and self-respect would not allow me to deign to such levels. I slightly bowed my head, rather tilted it a little in the front. That would be more appropriate to describe the gesticulation I had made then. As if to offer my feeble recognition to an old man, more for his age than for his wisdom. I still remember that he was smiling when I left the place without turning back. I did not visit the Temple and departed from Thiruvannamalai with utmost disappointment. I was a 21 year old rebel then. A rebel without a cause and without a pause, as my mentor Palanivel Rajan had aptly remarked long ago.




After this visit, I was convinced that my first trip to Thiruvannamalai was a sheer waste. An exercise in futility. What was the point of travelleing that far and meeting an old simpleton who was having nothing new to offer as a solution to the problems of humanity! And when I ask him what should I do, he simply smiles and asks me to chant Raama Naama. Is any kind of chanting not a self-hypnotic auto-suggestion, to delude myself from the harsh reality? Moreover, to keep humming Ram Ram during 1992, when Babri Masjid was demolished at Ayodhya by the Hindutva zealots, reeked of a sinister gameplan. My puerile fascination, during the early 90s, towards the Marxist-Leninist ideological spectrum simply rejected such a spiritual enterprise as a hogwash in the stream of false consciousness. Nothing but an Ideological State Apparatus to create the hegemony of super-structure. These were the predominant reasons which coerced me to abscond from the domain of spirituality and religion during those years. More crucial than all this was the fact that I was anxious to settle down into a financially and materially better standard of living. The domain of spirituality was a luxury I could not afford to indulge in during those testing times. That is the other side of the bitter truth.
Once you reasonably and logically settle down in life, your passionate heart can be cleverly liberated from your intelligent mind. A working dynamic can be established between the heart and the mind, with what Friedrich Hegel calls as the cunning of the reason. It is time to grow wings and attempt to fly in the sky, before the rot sets in. Else life becomes too boring and mundane. It gets cynical and nauseating. To hold the bleeding soul intact within your tight embrace, there is not much choice left other than to try and indulge in passions which are dear to your heart. And when you start experiencing your intimate passions, you inevitably land up facing the twin eternal dilemmas of living : love and death. A sense of wonder towards life and the Universe would increasingly engulf your being. Questions without answers would become more intense. It is imperative to revisit the epistemology of Immanuel Kant and his distinction between noumena and phenomena so that a more comprehensive understanding of religion is possible in this post-modern world we inhabit. Apart from his seminal work, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), yet another less talked about but very significant earlier work of Kant, namely, Observations On The Feeling Of The Beautiful And Sublime (1764) dwells on the concepts of Beauty and Truth. It attempts to conceptualise the themes of the heart. Of emotions and feelings. How will you conceptualise the finer aesthetics of your soul? How are you going to grapple with the abundance of life which keeps happening beyond the purview of logic and reason? Though one cannot fully decipher them, it becomes essential to create a subtle dialectic between mind and heart, between launguage and silence, between the temporal and the spiritual. All this and much more, seduces one to endeavour into the luxurious domain of spirituality and religion. Such noumena and phenomena would happen as you grow sober. Or, to put it more critically, as you become more and more senile!


Like Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, we have to discover our own inner truths. Not a single but multiple truths. Am a novice in this dazzling journey. Some of those questions which haunted me during the yester-years, appear to me as superficial and pedantic at this juncture of my life. They have almost vanished. New questions have arisen. And certain old questions have got more deeper. But questions continue. They have actually intensified. Now, I feel that you can chant Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Krishna, Rama or the name of any God or Goddess from the Little Traditions or Tribal religions of your own volition, whenever you feel like. All those names are divine and beautiful. It does not prevent you from registering your protest in any form you deem fit, whenever you think and feel you should react to any injustice in the society. They are all mutually complementary. As long as one tries to avoid chanting one's own name incessantly, one can fairly retain right proportions of sanity and insanity! And reasonable good health too.



Life has taught me the wonder and the beauty of Raama Naama, in its own unique ways. I cannot explain how. I do not want to. You have to discover it yourself, if you want to. Else do whatever you feel like doing. The perceptions about Yogi Ramsuratkumar has changed within me over time. Even now, I do not like the ways and means in which he has been idolized, which his latter-day followers have made him out to be. I keep far away from that. Such tragedies have always been happening to mankind. During the past few years of my life, I keep having occasional conversations with Yogi Ramsuratkumar. Where I just thank him and he merely smiles. Nothing mystical about it. Simple imagination. Just for the heck of it. It was He who first told me about Raama Naama and blessed me at a time and age when I was adamantly recalcitrant. Had I been Yogi Ramsuratkumar and had anyone come to meet me with such an immature question, believing it to be the most profound one on top of all that, what would I have done? How would I have responded? Would I have given him one tight slap? Or hugged him to dissolve his inner pain? I do not know. With me, neither of it would have worked. That is my personal predicament. What I admire in Yogi Ramsuratkumar is the sense of a higher, more evolved intelligence to discern the Other seeker and bless him according to his or her station in life. Or, is it the other way round? We get the Gurus according to what we deserve and what we are, at the core of our being. That is yet another Zen mystery. In any case, I am eternally grateful to Yogi Ramsuratkumar for he smiled and blessed me!




A few days ago, when visiting Thiruvannamalai, I visited that small old house. Where Yogi Ramsuratkumar blessed me in 1992. All of a sudden, before going to the Temple, Sundar said that we would go to that house. And so we went. The house remains almost the same. There was an man in his 50s who seemed to be maintaining it. It has been preserved as a small museum now. There are cupboards containing many letters which came to the Yogi, a simple mattress, few scribblings on the walls, an old photo of Lord Venkateshwara of Thirupathi, his unused cigarettes, and such other things of daily usage. There was also a sign board pointing towards the toilet located at the backyard of the house which was used by the Yogi! On seeing it, I got elated to get a vague answer to my almost 2-decade old puzzle. Actually, I just smiled.

Before entering the front-gate of that tiled old house, I touched the front steps where the Yogi sat and blessed me some 18 years ago. My eyes welled up. I offered my salutations to one of my first Gurus who gave me a cue to the Ultimate Guru of my life. And I felt the overflowing love and warmth of Yogi Ramsuratkumar and the smile which he bestowed upon me as the Blessings of His Father..




RAM..! RAM..!!




Sunday, March 21, 2010

Love, Sex Aur Dhoka : A Brilliant Experiment

The Gods became very annoyed. They were seething with anger and remorse. It went out of their bounds. They finally descended upon the Earth and held an emergency meeting at a secret cave in the Himalayas. After careful deliberations and detailed discussions about the human agenda on feminism and post-modernism in the 21st Century, they gave their final verdict : the 1975-born lass named Ekta Kapoor will be eternally condemned to hell for stereotyping Indian womanhood in all her third-rated Saas-Bahu soaps and such other mediocre television serials churned out of her production company, unless she redeems herself with one spectacular production before the end of the Maha Kumbh Mela by April 2010. This left Ekta Kapoor with no other choice but to perform a penance to wash away all her sins accumulated thus far and to take a radically unimaginable step of her life : to produce India's first experimental dogma cinema, having its roots in the counter-cultural film movement, namely, Love, Sex Aur Dhoka.


Dibakar Bannerjee, whose eccentric photo is inset above, has directed this brilliantly new endeavour on celluloid. Love, Sex Aur Dhoka is a film entirely shot with digital and spy cameras with a minimal budget. It deals with the complex subject-matter of voyeurism, sex and dubious morality prevailing in our contemporary society. The film does not have any of those model-turned-starlets who appear as blinking dolls and shake their bodies to titillate our senses, compensating their inability to deliver a simple dialogue or express a single emotion cinematically. And there are no hunk-turned-actors with their bleating voices and bloated egos around. But it has cast a wonderful team of talented new actors whose acting skills are extra-ordinary. The script and the art of story-telling are masterly and a class apart from the mainstream Bollywood flicks that we have been used to.




The film is composed of three different stories, each one taking a leaf out of the contemporary thematic of India : love in the times of continuing caste oppression, all-pervasive sexual voyeurism, media manipulation and in the whole game, the complicity and betrayal of each to everyone. Including you and me as its consumers. I do not want to get into the details of any of the three stories as the film is ought be relished from the beginning till the end without any prejudice. Each of the story has been shot with a distinct style and the cinematographic finesse of Nikos Andritsakis is stunningly powerful. Though the time and the space linkage between the three stories are tenuous, it has been deftly handled so as to consummate the experience of watching this film deeply provoking. There are certain portions of the film which I feel could have been handled with more subtlety like the climactic sequence in the first story Love. And there could have been a more nuanced narrative at certain junctures of the second story Sex and the third story Dhoka. But these are minor flaws which can be overlooked given the beauty of this daringly experimental film, being the first of its kind in Indian cinema.



The film Love, Sex aur Dhoka draws its inspiration from the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's poetic film Camera Buff (1979), from the American director Steven Soderbergh's disturbing movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and most importantly, from the rules formulated as The Vow of Chastity Manifesto of the Dogme-95 movement spearheaded by two the Danish directors ~ Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. The Dogme-95 is a counter-cultural cinematic movement which laid its emphasis on diegesis rather than mimesis. The fundamental precepts of Diegesis and Mimesis were enunciated by Plato in his Republic to distinguish the artistic expressions of the human mind. The essential attribute of Diegesis is narration or reporting while that of Mimesis is imitation or representation. The Danish Dogme-95 movement of cinema, which is more diegetic, is a radically new phase in the history of cinema and is different from the various interesting movements of cinema during the 20th century. Dibakar Banerjee has intelligently blended many significant elements from the Dogma film movement with the realities of contemporaty Indian ethos and has created a provocative movie, which has to be watched by everyone of us. Atleast once!

Movie Rating : 8 out of 10