I mean for 20 years by and large I have been doing it. Every time I turn on the radio/fm to listen to music. There was one channel called MTV which means Music Television. It started with the song Video killed the radio star. What did MTV kill? Music to start with….
I mean it would have started well- in India that is. It talked about promoting clear music and all. Had some great VJs then. People who knew music. But then they wanted TRPs…
So eat shit… keep eating shit… keep watching the self glorifying sleaze and bitching show called roadies. If you like that then graduate to porn magazine called splitsvilla. You will see dumb-as-horse’s-ass guys jerking off on pornstar wannabes…equally dumbassed…
Then you have a TV where two ugly females (literally looking like female dogs on the street) with brains missed out by almighty, giving their smartassed comments on anyone in the universe. The tragedy is not the shows. The tragedy is the fact that this is what get TRPs and not the songs…And they want us to believe that…
Yeah, sure. That’s why DevD sold thousands albums, Rabbi Singh became a phenomenon, Rock On became a hit. Because all of us wanted to watch live bitching and dumb-assed reality shows. Eat shit fellows!! That’s what the Chef ordered….
There is a lot of talk of we being responsible for the deals we get. All the Vote-For –India campaigns talk of it. And I think they are right. All the smarties of the society become doctors, engineers and MBAs. The leftovers move to television…. And they produce shit. So eat shit. Dumb elephants can only shit. When you put dumb elephants for producing TV shows and radio shows you should not expect anything else.
Music Television. Whats Music Television in India? Bollywood Television. Yes, all the great Bollywood jackasses will serve their exquisite dish on the platter for you every Friday and 24X7 the same will be played on and on till the next drug is released. And then they will proclaim a super hit. This is the perfect monopoly. Air some shit forcefully a zillion times and then go about saying that the people are loving it. Great strategy. No wonder a big banner soundtrack is always a hit. One such big banner released Rabbi’s new album and gave a perfect demonstration of rape. One needed to see the title video. I mean the whole video was about promoting a half naked girl. Rabbi Shergill was incidental. Where was the song in the whole bargain? Someone forgot about it in the video…. And of course the real gems of the album- Pagri Samhal Jatta, Bandra etc were ignored blissfully. I am sure, a paan chewing joker would have made all the decisions in the big-daddy banner office… sitting in their cocooned ivory towers, the jokers who run the banner would not even know who Rabbi Shergill is or what he has achieved. Wonder why Rabbi needed to knock their doors of all places…
Some of the best talents in the country never get their albums made while petty thieves like Pritam Chatterjee bask in glory of multi-hits. That’s all because the former is indi and the latter is Bollywood… These days Mr. Chatterjee even judges music reality shows. He is supposed to be a music connoisseur!!! Will someone be kind enough to shoot me in the head? No, go shoot the Music Label bosses in the head.
Whatever happened to indi-pop? I mean I agree that 90% of that used to make one puke. With those dumb girls and dumber guys trying to be singers. But one also heard Euphoria, Silk Route etc.. good quality music. They gave legitimate hits, didn’t they?
But then our record company bosses decided Bollywood was the only place where money was. Look at West. Imagine what would have happened if such bosses were to exist there? There would be no Dylan- pop music and country music was the only hit thing back then. No Beatles, no rock and Roll…. Closer home- No GNR, no grunge no Nirvana…. Chuck all that- Rap would have remained underground….. Till now we would have been listening to Sinatra and his descendants…
But then that is US and this is India where all the rejects in the world become industry bosses in the entertainment industry. That’s why as time will go on our music will become more and more uni-dimensional. And we will keep eating shit and be happy about it. And we will have those all-knowing dumb-fucks who go by the name DJs who will tell us what to like and what not to…
Channels like Colours give hope though…. Hope!!!
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
what a film really means for the viewer
Ok. Split the hairs if you want. Does not matter. It will be fine. Even trash and smash it if you do not have the stomach to digest it. I know your stomach and what it can take. Every Friday faeces creep out of the amoebic corners of Bollywood. We have all smashed popcorn with our bare teeth in frustration and come out happy and satiated. From our pop corn eating, not the movie. Whoever was watching the bladder bursting treacle of RDB; or for that matter the utter rape of sensibilities which were thrown in by Akshay Kumar and his goons? We were eating pop corn and drinking coke and inflating our already inflated bodies in hope of an early end.
Digest and keep taking in shit if you want. Who is complaining? Whoever complained when for 15 years the demonic daughter of jeetendra in her sadistic glory kept pushing the slime of a thousand swamps in the name of the saas-bahu serials down everyone's lubricated throats? We all digested that and were happy and ran in front of our TV sets punctually at 9 every evening.
When a movie like Gulaal comes after a lull of 3 decades (since the demise of parallel cinema and the sucking in of everything by the johars and the chopras) you all are free to react any which way you want. Who cares?
You can talk about edgy characterization; I will agree and even talk further about the half baked teacher by Jessy Randhawa. You can talk about excess violence and I will agree that it should be made mandatory that all Indian movies should only have Switzerland songs and chiffon clad navels and violence in style of Dev Anand of 60s. You can talk about no good songs and I will desperately miss the tunes which likes of Pritam Chatterjee shamelessly robs from wherever he can get them.
I will agree with you on everything you talk about not liking or negative in Gulaal. I will not even talk about the brilliance of the body hanging on the chowk and “jab seher hamara sota hain” playing ominously in the background. Or the gripping violence of the climax and the final journey of the main protagonist bleeding his way to his shack and his death. But in your split-hair analysis and over-analysis of the movie (something u cannot do with the big banners as your newspaper takes money from them) you will miss out something which will make you the loser.
You will miss out the heart of the movie. The anger of the maker, the heart wrenching agony of the lyricist. The sheer agony which flows out of the pen and into our ears in the startling retake of Sahir’s “Yeh DUniya Agar mil Bhi Jaye to Kya Hai”. Rising above all the rough edges of a movie made in 7 years is the soul of the movie. The soul of the everyday men who get turned into the werewolves under the moon of the greater cause; of the society; of twisted and trampled sense of power. Power lost power regained and lost again. The cycle which has been going on since man started becoming a social animal.
The power of the rogue students over the lady teacher, the power of lust of the lady over the hapless man, the power of the man of the house to debauch or kill people at will. And then the ultimate manifestation of power. The one which converts the brother-sister duo into the monsters they have become- the power that they derive from rejection. It is the power of Hate. That is the ultimate power. Hate. It takes over all souls who fall for it. It makes a brother shoot another point blank and hang him in the main market. It makes a normal girl become a whore to get a position of power. It is what hate does to you. Rejection and hate. This is another cycle which keeps turning on. The crusades, the world wars, the Napoleons and the Mongols, the Talibans and Bin-Ladens of today. It starts with rejection and then hate and then the ultimate struggle to overcome.
Gulaal in itself speaks of this very cycle. And it does so, so brilliantly. For all the loudness and the gore, this very theme of the movie is so subtle that it is silent. At the fag end, after the poet has lamented on the world and that even if the world is served on a platter, nothing changes. It is only half a minute. Announcement of the untouchable as the Senapati of the revolution- the ultimate recognition. And a silent stare between the brother and the sister. A trickle of a tear drop from the hardened eyes. Telling one another- we have done it. And then the poet asks again the futility of it all- yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai?
The ultimate power game speaks to us and wonders at the futility of it all. We hold our breath for a few minutes. We forget to munch our pop-corns. And then it ends. We go out of the theatre. We walk our into the next Mcdonald store and start our hair-splitting and or show of stupidity.
Long live johars, chopras and the nerve gases which help us to stop thinking…
Digest and keep taking in shit if you want. Who is complaining? Whoever complained when for 15 years the demonic daughter of jeetendra in her sadistic glory kept pushing the slime of a thousand swamps in the name of the saas-bahu serials down everyone's lubricated throats? We all digested that and were happy and ran in front of our TV sets punctually at 9 every evening.
When a movie like Gulaal comes after a lull of 3 decades (since the demise of parallel cinema and the sucking in of everything by the johars and the chopras) you all are free to react any which way you want. Who cares?
You can talk about edgy characterization; I will agree and even talk further about the half baked teacher by Jessy Randhawa. You can talk about excess violence and I will agree that it should be made mandatory that all Indian movies should only have Switzerland songs and chiffon clad navels and violence in style of Dev Anand of 60s. You can talk about no good songs and I will desperately miss the tunes which likes of Pritam Chatterjee shamelessly robs from wherever he can get them.
I will agree with you on everything you talk about not liking or negative in Gulaal. I will not even talk about the brilliance of the body hanging on the chowk and “jab seher hamara sota hain” playing ominously in the background. Or the gripping violence of the climax and the final journey of the main protagonist bleeding his way to his shack and his death. But in your split-hair analysis and over-analysis of the movie (something u cannot do with the big banners as your newspaper takes money from them) you will miss out something which will make you the loser.
You will miss out the heart of the movie. The anger of the maker, the heart wrenching agony of the lyricist. The sheer agony which flows out of the pen and into our ears in the startling retake of Sahir’s “Yeh DUniya Agar mil Bhi Jaye to Kya Hai”. Rising above all the rough edges of a movie made in 7 years is the soul of the movie. The soul of the everyday men who get turned into the werewolves under the moon of the greater cause; of the society; of twisted and trampled sense of power. Power lost power regained and lost again. The cycle which has been going on since man started becoming a social animal.
The power of the rogue students over the lady teacher, the power of lust of the lady over the hapless man, the power of the man of the house to debauch or kill people at will. And then the ultimate manifestation of power. The one which converts the brother-sister duo into the monsters they have become- the power that they derive from rejection. It is the power of Hate. That is the ultimate power. Hate. It takes over all souls who fall for it. It makes a brother shoot another point blank and hang him in the main market. It makes a normal girl become a whore to get a position of power. It is what hate does to you. Rejection and hate. This is another cycle which keeps turning on. The crusades, the world wars, the Napoleons and the Mongols, the Talibans and Bin-Ladens of today. It starts with rejection and then hate and then the ultimate struggle to overcome.
Gulaal in itself speaks of this very cycle. And it does so, so brilliantly. For all the loudness and the gore, this very theme of the movie is so subtle that it is silent. At the fag end, after the poet has lamented on the world and that even if the world is served on a platter, nothing changes. It is only half a minute. Announcement of the untouchable as the Senapati of the revolution- the ultimate recognition. And a silent stare between the brother and the sister. A trickle of a tear drop from the hardened eyes. Telling one another- we have done it. And then the poet asks again the futility of it all- yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai?
The ultimate power game speaks to us and wonders at the futility of it all. We hold our breath for a few minutes. We forget to munch our pop-corns. And then it ends. We go out of the theatre. We walk our into the next Mcdonald store and start our hair-splitting and or show of stupidity.
Long live johars, chopras and the nerve gases which help us to stop thinking…
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