Aakkaatti : The Red-Wattled Lapwing

The experience of waking up in the middle of the night to the strange call of an unknown bird is chimerical. More so if one is fast asleep under the open sky, drenched by the carressing rays of the Moon. An eerie followed by a nameless longing, almost bordering on melancholy, will fill one's heart.

It happened long ago. During one of the summer vacations in my school days. I patted my grandfather who was fast asleep on the other coir cot beside and asked him what it was. He said it is the 'Aakkaatti bird' and went back to sleep. The incessant chirping of the crickets continued. And i remained wide awake. After a short while, it again echoed from the dark blue sky : the yonder cry of the Aakkaatti. I searched for the bird in the sky. I could see only the twinkling stars and the silent Moon looking at me. There was no bird anywhere.

The cry of the Aakkaatti became a metaphor of my lonely nights as my life turned more nocturnal. Everytime i visited my maternal grandfather's village, the nights will be filled with mythological stories narrated under the falling stars and the displacing constellations, the gazing Moon and the chirping crickets. The croaking frogs replaced the crickets during rainy season. Everything else remained the same. And the cry of the Aakkaatti will wake me up in the middle of my dreams again to be found nowhere.

Since i could never see an Aakkaatti in the night blue sky, not even the shadows of anything flying, the bird assumed panoramic shapes with varied faces in my heart. As i drifted away from my small town and the periodic visits to the village, it travelled along with me to distant cities. Milan Kundera says that life is a constant struggle between memory and forgetting. The memories of the sounds and the smells are as deeply etched as that of the images and the emotions. Even if Time - the Mahaakaal - has taken away my grandfather from me, the smell of the Earth can make me sense his body odour and his physical presence, everytime it rains. I can even hug him then. The sound of the Aakkaatti brings back to life so many starry nights which are deeply entrenched somewhere in the cosmos. The only solace of inhabiting the cityscape is that it does not rain on the Earth and there is no Aakkaatti around. So that we can continue with our masked lives without getting much perturbed.

It was in 1998 when that incident occured. Dhruv and me were suantering through the jungles of JNU when he suddenly stopped me. He pointed out at quite a large bird, with long slender yellowish legs, brownish wings and blackish head with a white patch running from the neck to the underbelly till the tail. I saw the shining red wattle around the eyes extending towards the beak. The bird was standing on one leg on the surface of the land and was looking at me. Dhruv, my birdwatcher friend from Assam, said it is called the Red-Wattled Lapwing famous for its calls in the nights. When he mentioned about the calls it makes in the nights, my heart skipped a beat. I looked at the bird again and told Dhruv that there is a bird called Aakkaatti in my village which also makes crying calls in the nights. Though the bird which we saw was beautiful, i could not compare it anywhere near to the Aakkaatti which lives in my mind's nest. I told him that this bird which we were seeing cannot belong to the same species as that of my Aakkaatti. As my Aakkaatti wont be standing on the ground for it always inhabits the skies.

After returning to the hostel, Dhruv checked up from the voluminous Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan by Salim Ali and S.Dillon Ripley and confirmed that it is called as Aakkaatti in Tamil. The characteristic sound is rendered as "Did-he-do-it" or "Pity-to-do-it"! Only after hearing an interesting mythology associated with this bird, i could get completely convinced that both my Aakkaatti and the Red-Wattled lapwing are one and the same.

And the mythology is : this wonderful bird surveys the night sky to make sure that every living creature is fast asleep and then it gets back to its home, to sleep on its back with its legs up in the sky, holding the heavens!

Road Movie : A Poetic Attempt

Are you a wanderlust?

Have you ever travelled in a bus buying a ticket upto the last destination, got down in between, had a cup of tea in a tavern, roamed in a village fare, got to know that the winter of your life is going to end very shortly from a parakeet-astrologer, returned home safely and slept inside your quilt with a vague smile on your lips?

If so, you would love this movie.

Dev Benegal, the nephew of Shyam Benegal, brought in a whiff of fresh air in the mid-90s with his path-breaking experimental cinema English August, based on Upamanyu Chatterjee's Kafkaesque take on Indian bureaucracy. It steered a different kind of experimental cinema by independant film makers starting from the late 90s and carrying it forward into this decade, resulting in brilliant films like Hyderabad Blues, Rockford, Fire, Life In a Metro, Bend It Like Beckham, Being Cyrus, Namesake, A Wednesday, Dev-D, Firaaq, et al. This is much more pragmatic than the parallel cinema movement which began with beautiful notes during the mid-1950s and ended way far too pretentiously during the late 1980s.

Dev Benegal's Road Movie is a creative blend of cinema reflecting upon aimless wandering on one side and a nostalgic hankering on the era of touring talkies on the other. It is an Indianised version of a dreamy fusion between two of the remarkably greatest films of 20th Century : Paris Texas by Wim Wenders (1984) and Nuovo Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore (1988). Does Dev succeed in this venture?

The long, never-ending roads of the bleak and deserted Texan landscape is as important a character in the film Paris Texas as that of Travis, who personifies the predicament of rootlessness of contemporary man, trying to comprehend the meaning of his relationship with his wife and his kid. It is an eternally haunting movie of Wim Wenders. In Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, the magic of friendship cutting across ages between the projectionist Alfredo and the young Salvatore both of whom passionately adore the world of cinema in a small Sicilian village, the sustained pursuit of one's dreams during childhood and youth and the mesmerising beauty of cinema itself are the recurring themes. They were enchantingly captured in the classic of Giuseppe Tornatore.

In Road Movie, the young protagonist Vishnu is disillusioned with his father's business of selling hair oil and gets a chance to travel to a distant unknown town in a 1940-s model Chevrolet truck. The god forsaken truck also has a dilapidated film projector along with rolls of old films. While travelling in the deserts of Jaisalmer and Kutch, he encounters a dhaba boy who is on the run for a better life, an interesting old mechanic who is in the eternal look out for a mela and a dusky gypsy girl in search of water - all of whom happen to travel together in the truck for sometime in their lives. The desert landscape, the search for water, the rustic cop, the ruffian chance upon their travel in their own ways. The fellow-travellers depart from each other and the memories of the journey lingers in the mind of Vishnu as he gets back home.

Abhay is my all time favourite apart from Rahul Bose and Irrfan Khan. In this movie, he has done pretty well in his role as Vishnu - as casual and as usual as he always does. But the performance of Satish Kaushik as the ageing mechanic who is in search of a mela is splendid. One great find is Tannishtha Chatterjee. With her dusky face and speaking eyes, Tannishtha has the calibre to become another Nandita Das. Watch out! The most beautiful moment of the movie is the dreamy surreal village mela that suddenly blooms in the middle of the desert with wandering gypsies, villagers, dwarfs, masks, tel maalish, Charlie Chaplin and Guru Dutt - a phantasmagoria of cinematic excellence. Kudos and hats off to the director and cinematographer for that aesthetically elevating sequence.

Overall, it is not a masterpiece. But it is definitely a bold and poetic attempt with flashes of brillance scattered all across, found wanting for a more cohesive and powerful script. Hope much better Indian Road Movies will be directed in the future.

Movie Rating : 7 out of 10.

Equus : A Play On Life, Passion & Psychiatry

One of the fascinating things about living in Oshiwara, Andheri West, Mumbai, even if it entails a long 4 hour arduous travel on a daily basis to my place of work in South Mumbai is, being in the vicinity to Prithvi. It has been a gap of almost 2 months since i could get to see a play there. Otherwise, on an average i could watch atleast a couple of plays every month. This time i went with Ananthan, in his Harley Davidson bike legendary for its punctuality, to watch the play Equus written by Peter Shaffer. It was directed by Daniel D'Souza and performed by his experimental theatre group called Jester Productions which comprises of guys and gals in the age group of 20s. The protagonists of the play are a young boy named Alan Strang, performed by Daniel D'Souza himself and a child psychiatrist Dr.Martin Dysart, performed by Eamonn Ennis.

Alan is a post-adolescent boy who gets attracted to horses sexually and spiritually. During his growing up years, his devout mother who is a school teacher narrates him stories from the Bible. Alan gets obsessed with one particular horse story which his mother had read out to him and starts creating a personal theology in his mind with worshipful horses and its supreme god Equus. Alan's mother also teaches him that sexual act is dirty and that only through true devotion one can attain salvation. Alan's father is an atheist and he does not like Alan getting influenced by the Biblical stories of his wife. Getting upset with this, one day Alan's father destroys a picture of Crucifixion which Alan had hung in his bedroom. Alan replaces it with another picture of a horse with huge staring eyes. The conflicting views on life, religion and sex starts from his parents and Alan grows up to discover them in his own way. Alan was also influenced by his grandfather's interest in horses and riding. But Alan has a strange fear to ride the horses because of an experience of a fall from a horse back during childhood in the sea shore.

Alan gets acquainted with a young girl Jill who gets Alan a job in the stables. Here in the stables, the job of Alan is to clean and groom the horses. Using a currycomb, he grooms the horses from the ears, working towards the tail, right through the coat. The harder he does it the more the horse loves it! Out of the few horses, Alan becomes erotically fixated to a horse called Nugget. Alan starts visitng the stables secretly in the night and takes Nugget for an imaginary ride by sitting naked on the back of the horse. Nugget does not gallop but dances to his movements of an imaginary ride. Alan fantasises himself as a king sitting on the godhead Equus, both him and his horse waging a war against all the forces of evil in an imaginary battlefield. The fantasy game culminates in Alan reaching an orgasm and this becomes his secret routine in the nights of his adolescence.

As Alan grows close with that young girl Jill, on one evening, Jill convinces Alan to take him to a cinema hall where a pornographic film is being screened. In the theatre, Alan sees his father who had come stealthily to watch the same pornography. On seeing Alan, his father gets embarassed and tries to give some false excuse. But this incident makes Alan realise that sex is a natural thing for everyone, which includes his father as well. Alan refuses to go home with his father and goes to drop Jill in her home. While going home, Jill cajoles Alan to go to the stables with her. They reach the same stables where Alan frequents secretly in the nights and play out his fantasy.

In the stables, Jill undresses and seduces Alan to have sex with her. Alan asks her to close the door and windows tight as he does not want Nugget, the supreme godhead Equus, to watch them having sex. The very thought of Nugget staring at him with its large eyes, while having sex with Jill, unnerves him. Jill closes them tight and they start making love. Suddenly, Alan hears the tapping of the hooves of the horses from outside. He withdraws out from Jill and when Jill tries to reason out with Alan that such initial clumsiness in sex is just normal, Alan shouts at her and madly screams and drives her away. Then Alan asks for forgiveness from the horses, especially from Nugget and cries for mercy. There is silence pervading all around and the horses keep simply nodding their heads to his frenzied talk. In a fit of rage, he takes a hoofpick and blinds all the horses as he thinks they have stared inside his naked soul completely and there is no escape from his shame and guilt.

It seems a similar incident happened in real somewhere near London during the middle of the 20th Century. A 17-year old boy had blinded half-a-dozen horses and was treated in a psychiatry ward. That incident became the inspiration for Peter Shaffer to write this play. But the most interesting aspect of the play is the role of the psychiatrist Dr.Martin. It is the characterisation of Dr.Martin which turns the play upside down and makes the whole narrative so engrossing.

Dr.Martin, the psychiatrist, will be working in a psychiatric clinic and he is dissatisfied with his profession. Though he had taken up his profession by choice, he very often keeps wondering that the kind of work he does is not at all what he wanted out of life. He feels a deep sense of alienation with his vocation and his personal life. Many youths come to him as his patients. And Dr.Martin is not sure whether in the name of psychiatric cure, he is only pushing the troubled youth to get back to a normalised dull routine without any beauty or passion in their lives.


The play begins with the soliloquy of Dr.Martin thinking aloud about his personal and professional life and about the outlines of the case history of Alan who has been recently admitted in the hospital. And the narrative moves back and forth as both Dr.Martin and Alan interact with each other during various counselling sessions. Dr.Martin also hypnotises Alan to bring out the hidden aspects in the life of Alan when the whole story till the night of his first attempt of sexual intercourse with Jill and the subsequent blinding of the horses at the stables gets unfolded.

After narrating his story in a state of frenzied interrogation by Dr.Martin during hypnosis, Alan goes off to sleep falling on the floor of the psychiatric clinic. Dr.Martin looks at the sleeping Alan and asks himself whether what he is doing to Alan in the name of psychiatric treatment is fundamentally right, whether he is going to rob Alan off his intense passion for the horses, whether he is actually envious of Alan deep down inside as his own life has become shorn of any passion and whether he is standing in the dark with a blade in his hand striking at heads.

Dr.Martin says to the sleeping Alan as the play ends ~

Passion, you see,can be destroyed by a doctor.

It cannot be created.

You won't gallop anymore, Alan.

Horses will be quite safe.

You'll save your money every week...

change that scooter for a car...

and spend glorious weekends...

grooming that.

You'll pop round to the betting shop

and put the odd pence on the nags...

quite forgetting they ever meant

anything more to you than...

bearers of little profits and little losses.

At one point of time during the counselling sessions with Dr.Martin, Alan suddenly turns the table against his Doctor. That is one of the most poignant moments of the play. Let me reproduce the dialogue between Alan & Dr.Martin and the subsequent soliloquy of Dr.Martin ~

Alan : Now it's my turn. You tell me, answer me.

Dr.Martin : We're not playing that game now.

Alan : We're playing what l say.

Dr. Martin : All right. What do you want to know?
Alan : Do you have dates?
Dr.Martin : I told you, I’m married.
Alan : I know. Her name's Margaret, she's a dentist.
You see? l found out.
What made you go with her, then?
Did you use to bite her hands when she did you in the chair?
Dr.Martin : That's not very funny.
Alan : No.
Dr.Martin : Then what?
Alan : Do you fuck her?
Dr.Martin : All right.
Alan : Come on, tell me, tell me.
Dr.Martin : That's enough now.
Alan : I bet you don't.
I bet you never touch her.
Is that because you don't fuck?
Dr.Martin : Go to your room. Quick march. Alan.
Give me those cigarettes.
Give them to me!
Now go.

After this very disturbing converstaion, Dr.Martin thinks aloud to himself ~

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
The boy's on the run, so he turns defensive.What am I, then?
Wicked little bastard. He knew exactly what questions to try.
Not that there's anything awful about that.
Advanced neurotics can be dazzling at that.
They aim unswervingly at your area of maximum vulnerability...
which is, I suppose, as good a way as any of describing Margaret.

My wife doesn't understand me, Your Honor.
Do you understand her?
No.
Obviously, l never did.
I’m sorry.
I never like to ask.
But l always imagined you weren't exactly compatible.
We were. It actually worked for a bit.
I mean, for both of us.
She, for me, through a kind of...
briskness...
a clear, redheaded, inaccessible briskness that kept me keyed up for months.
Mind you, if you're kinky for northern hygiene which l am...
you can hardly find anything more compelling than a Scottish lady dentist.
it’s you who are wicked, you know.
Not at all.
She got exactly the same from me. Antiseptic proficiency.
I was like that in those days.
I see us in our wedding photograph...
Dr. and Dr. MacBrisk.
were brisk in our wooing, brisk in our wedding, brisk in our disappointment.
We turned from each other briskly into our separate surgeries.
And now, there's a nice, brisk nothing.

Mentally, we're in different parts of the world.
She's forever in some drizzly chapel of her own inheriting...
and I'm in some Doric temple, clouds tearing through the pillars...
eagles bearing prophesies out of the sky.

I wish...
there was somebody in this life I could show...
one...
instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person
that I could take to Greece...
and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say:
"Look...
"life is only comprehensible through a thousand...
"local gods.
I'd say to them:
"Worship...
"all you can see...
"and more will appear."

The play is brilliantly staged and amazingly performed by actors in their early 20s. The entire cast, including the 4 actors playing as horses, the parents of Alan, the magistrate friend of Dr.Martin, the nurse, the owner of the stables are all seated on the sides along with the audience and they watch the entire play along with us. The lighting is done meticulously by Daniel D'Souza, who directs and acts as Alan. He has done remarkably well in his role as Alan and as director of the play. In the seduction and subsequent love making scene of Jill and Alan, both the actors get semi-naked which does not add much charm to the play except as a mildly titillating shocker. That apart, the play has been staged beautifully well and it deserves a thunderous applause.

The play Equus by Peter Shaffer raises the fundamental question of what Friedrich Nietzsche in his work The Birth Of Tragedy has philosophically posed : the complex interplay between the Appollonian and the Dionysian dichotomy of life. In the Greek mythology, both Appollo and Dionysus are the sons of the Zeus, the King of Gods. Appollo is the Sun God representing thinking, logic and rationality, while Dionysus is the God of Wine representing passion, feelings and intoxication. In Equus, the Dionysian Alan is fuelled by his passion for the horses and intoxicated in his personal theology of worship and love. But he fails to reign in his passion and is unable to come to terms with himself. And the Appollonian Dr.Martin is rational and logical in his approach towards life. But he miserably falters in his very purpose of existence and is becoming a shallow void. How can they both reconcile?

The play does not give any answers to this fundamental question of life. But it sinks the question deep inside you which makes it ever haunting. It is so hard to make a choice. The 'normal' which is the shining good in a child's eyes and the 'normal' which is also in the dead stare of a million adults. How 'normal' do you want to become?

Swami Nithyananda : Perversity Of The Public Gaze

I have not read anything of Swami Nithyananda nor have i attended any of his lectures or meditation classes. Though i don't like any of these 21st century spiritual guys, i always admire their management skills. I used to like the youthful boyish image of Nithyananda : there was a latent gayish charm which disappeared, much to my dismay, as the vagaries of time made Nithyananda grow old! A couple of years ago, one of my colleague, Hari, who is an ardent disciple of Nithyananda told me on a sunny afternoon at Bangalore, while i was sipping Smirnoff, that Nithyananda likes to wear sarees on certain Full Moon nights in order to rediscover the female counterpart of his Self - the Shakti in Siva. I just whistled. I was delighted to get a fantastic new angle of transvestism which i thought is brilliant, as the third gender can now identify themselves with a spiritual guru for their salvation. Everything is fine as long as salvation is out there.

Yesterday's expose of some TV Channel on the alleged sex affair of Swami Nithyananda at his ashram in Thiruvannamalai has put an end to all my speculation : that Nithyananda is predominantly heterosexual! It seems some zealots are crying foul that the Swamiji has insulted the Hindu Paarampariya by this very act of having sex. Some others are planning to take the Swamiji to court while the others are crying hoarse to arrest the Swamiji. How ridiculous! As long as the lady and the Swamiji had consensual sex and as long as there is no exploitation and misuse, this should not be the concern of anyone. Swami Nithyananda cannot be equated with other rotten scoundrels who exploited women and misused many. Afterall he was just having sex with his lover. How moronic it is to project this as an act of crime! In fact, legal action, if any, should be taken against all the TV Channels for repeatedly telecasting the private moments in the lives of two individuals and perversely infringing their privacy.

The very act of having consensual sex among any consenting adults is not just legal but also divine! Why is there such a hypocrisy when the issue of sex crops up in India and the US? why can't we live and let live like the French? Why should we make such a hue and cry when a Chief Minister has more than one wife, when a lady ex-Chief Minister gets intimate with her female companion, when a 83 year old Governor sleeps with young girls? There is no substance in all these chest-beatings. It all stems from simple and pure envy! One cannot rule out the involvement of other spiritual business houses in tarnishing the image of Swami Nithyananda as the market competition in this sector is quite high these days. Adding to it is the ever hungry perverse media guys who cater to the perversity of the public gaze.

These guys in this spiritual business domain should learn much more from one of the three most interesting Banias of 20th Century India - Osho Rajneesh. The other two interesting Banias of 20th century were - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Dhirubhai Ambani. Osho Rajneesh did not get into all these clownish nonsense of celibate puritanism. He was open in his approach towards sex. The only solution for Swami Nithyananda is to go the Osho way candidly and with renewed vigour. He should make his views clear on sex and be done with all the moralising claptrap. Let us respect the love of Swami Nithyananda and the lady and leave them in peace. Long live their love for each other!

Mukul Shivputra : Whither Art Thou...?

It might have been in the winter of 1996, a couple of years before i had left Delhi, that i had heard the mesmerising voice of Mukul Shivputra for the first time. It was with Jaya Shankar that i went to attend the SPIC-MACAY live concert at Teflas in JNU and was sitting on the floor in the first row. It was quite unusual to see Jaya Shankar getting so excited about Mukul. The bearded and dreamy looking Mukul came a little late, in disheveled kurta and unkempt hair, his eyes red with sleeplessness and intoxication due to dope or alcohol. Mukul should have been in his early 40s then. He was not even bothered to sit straight facing the audience. And i found the air of rebelliousness and the streak of irreverence adding charm to the mystique of Mukul. After a few interjections, the master of Khayal took off and the ambience became sublime. I was stunned beyond belief as i had never imagined that a human voice could transport you to another world to this extent and leave you afloat in a state of blissful trance. It was a cathartic experience. Its too difficult to get grounded and continue to live on a mundane plane therafter.

If it is so agonising for a layman like me to get grounded into the mundane and continue to survive with all its mediocrity, i cannot possibly imagine how painful it would be to sustain for a more delicate soul like that of Mukul's, who would be longing to get eternally drenched in the celestial music of the cosmos. Beneath the facade of respectability, how thick-skinned, how insensitive, how ruthless, how cunning and how snobbishly arrogant have we become! How can a vulnerable soul like Mukul put up with an audience like us and still manage to contain the unending love to give a rendition of breathtaking exuberance? Don't you think, in this whole process, the soul of an artist of the order of Mukul will have to get bruised badly and the heart left bleeding in the deafening loneliness of the Universe?

A few months ago, when Ponraj visited Mumbai and when we were having a rare sitting with Ananthan, he told that he had read it in the newspapers that Mukul was found begging in front of a temple in Bhopal for money to buy drinks and that he had disappeared after hospitalisation and that the government of Madhya Pradesh is searching for him. It came as a rude shock. Since then, i've been regularly googling to find more about Mukul's health and his whereabouts, about which there is not much news available till date. What nefarious designs of the Cosmos had pushed the son of the legendary Kumar Gandharva and the student of all time maestro MD Ramanathan to such despair? Is it just an issue of substance abuse and addiction to alcohol? Or is it yet another tragic saga of the self-destructive tendency latent in all geniuses running riot and wrecking havoc in the life of Mukul?

During the beginning of May 2009, Mukul was found at the gates of Shirdi Sai Baba Mandir at Bhopal, with the company of other beggars, begging for money to buy his next drink. Thousands of beggars are available in all the Temples, Mosques, Churches (interestingly, you wont find any in the Synagogues!) and all across the roads of cities and towns in India. Beggary in India has a rich tradition behind it. It can be neither looked down upon nor be romanticised to absurdity. Some great saints have lived their entire lives begging as it is considered to be a sign of complete renunciation of all material needs. But that is a rare and complex phenomena. Sai Baba Himself lived His entire life in Shirdi that way only.

All beggars cannot be saints. Extreme poverty, migration and exploitation have forced human beings into beggary. Those who dare to stay put in their villages and in their forests are getting seduced by the ideologies of Marxism-Leninism & Maoism and are turning to armed rebellion. The State machinery is getting consolidated to curb the Naxal menace from the thousands of Naxal infested villages all across India. Some of them turn to non-ideological crime : thefts and burglary. Redistribution of wealth and circulation of money is the most amusing leela in this world of maya. The theatre of cruelty vis-a-vis the theatre of absurdity!

In such a wierd scenario, when our dear dear Mukul goes begging, it becomes difficult to comprehend. There may be myriad reasons which can be ascribed : the death of his mother, the sudden death of his wife, the pressure to prove as his father's worthy son or pure neuroligical disorder. Who knows what can be the reason for such tragedies that keep happening to the few genius of mankind? I consider it as a tragedy because Mukul is no saint who would love to beg and i feel that he should find ways to mitigate his inner angst and suffering and thereby continue to enjoy his art and his life in whichever way he feels like, without falling back into the blind old alleys of the demons.

After the rehabilitation and medical treatment at the Gandhi Bhavan in Bhopal last year, Mukul Shivputra inaugurated the Khayal Kendra and came on the stage to give a fascinating lecture on the history of Khayal and also to render two beautiful bandishes (melodic compositions), one in Raag Savani from the Tansen era and another in Raag Darbari, an Amir Khusro composition in honour of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya..

Much more are yet be heard from him. The Gods and the Gurus should conitnue to smile. Pray that the Grace continues to shower..