स्नानासोबत लघुशंका...Just A Bad Film, Even Twenty Years Later: HAHK

Twenty years ago, on 5 August 1994, Hindi feature film 'Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!' (HAHK) was released at Liberty Cinema, Mumbai...It went on to become one of the most commercially successful Hindi films...

John Gray:

"Talk of giving up consumerism is reminiscent of Stephen Emmott's favourite example of a fashionable pseudo-solution for environmental problems: peeing while you're in the shower. "

Aldous Huxley, 'Brave New World', 1931: 

"...in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning."

Ostap Karmodi: 

"Do you feel we’re living in an age of consumerism or is that just a media concept that doesn’t have any real meaning?"

Roger Ebert:

“When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them."

A G Noorani, review of the book on the year 1939, Frontline, 2008:

“…Nepotism was rife. None other than Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to the Prime Minister of Central Provinces N.B. Khare on August 21, 1939, recommending the case of Ratanchand Hirachand of Indian Hume Pipe Co. for a contract. Sarojini Naidu wrote to Khare recommending Walter Dutt for a High Court judgeship. It was at this time that many bad precedents were set which affect us to the present day. Congressmen in office were intoxicated with power...”

Oliver Farry:

“From Robin Williams’s death to the Arab Spring, we have to resist the urge to impose simple storylines on complex events.” (New Statesman, August 15 2014)

Will Self, August 15 2014, BBC News Magazine:

"...As our avid chatter increases in volume red spots begin to appear on our pale cheeks. And as we cough and splutter the news of our latest acquisitions, so it occurs to me that unless we can find a cure for this malady soon it will have eaten us all up, just as we will have consumed all of Mother Earth's bountiful resources. All that will be left is a gigantic stomach, floating in space, its visceral manifold gleaming weirdly in the cold, indifferent light of the stars - stars that are quite unable to feel any sadness for our demise, because they're too busy consuming themselves. The great French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine entitled one of his novels Mort a credit. This is sometimes translated into English as Death on the Instalment Plan, but a better rendition might be simply Consumption."

 

Since its release, I have never watched HAHK in its entirety. (By the way, I have still not watched a single  film in entirety of either Madhuri Dixit or Salman Khan, leading stars  of HAHK.)

My brother and I went to a Pune cinema (Mangala) to watch HAHK c1994. We left the hall at the interval when Pooja came rolling down the stair case. 

We were so bored almost from the start that we were looking for an excuse to leave the hall, we found it in that tragic accident.

I can't stand the film or any part of it even today. However,  I do NOT agree with arguments of Mr. Atul Deulgaonkar (अतुल देऊळगावक), henceforth AD for this post, on the film in Loksatta dated August 10 2014.

In a round about manner, AD blames the film for some of the major ills he sees in Indian society today!

"२० वर्षांपूर्वी 'हम आपके है कौन?' या चित्रपटाने हिंदी चित्रपटांचा फॉम्र्युलाच केवळ बदलला नाही, तर अवघे भारतीय जनमानसही त्याने कवेत घेतले. श्रीमंतीचे उथळ प्रदर्शन, 'संस्कृती'च्या नावाखाली थिल्लर गोष्टींचा अतिरेक, दाखवेगिरीचा प्रचंड सोस आणि सामाजिकतेला सोडचिठ्ठी ही सगळी या चित्रपटाचीच देन आहे. याचदरम्यान भारतीय समाजात आणि त्याच्या मानसिकतेत जे बदल घडले, त्याची सुरुवात या चित्रपटाने करून दिली..."

(twenty years ago HAHK not just changed the formula of Hindi films but embraced the entire Indian psyche. Shallow display of wealth, extremism of silly things under the name of culture, huge thirst for exhibitionism and riddance of sociality are all gifts of this film only. Meanwhile the changes that took place in Indian society and psyche were triggered by this film...)


Brendan O’Neill has said: "...Today it is those who pose as pro-science who are most likely to treat natural events as being caused by individuals’ behaviour, and who are most likely to argue that catastrophes can be predicted and potentially offset through a secular form of eco-penance. They even claim that earthquakes are caused by climate change, as evidenced in recent headlines such as ‘Climate change will shake the earth’. They would probably have blamed the Lisbon quake on consumerism, just as religious folk blamed it on sin..."

When AD blames a 'silly' film for major ills in our society, he reminds me of such 'folks'.  I am not disputing either the ills or their monstrous nature but just arguing that HAHK was NOT a harbinger of  consumerism in India. The film is not that significant. The ills AD describes are real but  defy simple reasoning.

Just about everything that AD faults in this raging article happened or was happening or would have happened with or without HAHK. HAHK did little, at best marginal, difference to the course of history of consumerism in India.

Consumerism predates HAHK by many decades, indeed centuries.

Joshua M. Zeitz claims in The New York Times, December 27 2003: "...Finally, the ever-rising influence of consumerism and advertising after 1900 chipped away at the Victorian-era culture of asceticism and self-denial, in effect legitimating the pursuit of pleasure..."

Peter N. Stearns claims: "...We now know that, while there was new surge around 1900, modern consumerism predates the industrial revolution..." ('Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire', 2006)

'Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit' (1620-05) 

Artist: Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585-1627)    courtesy: The Guardian

Is consumerism all bad?

With the help of the painting above, Alain De Botton  and John Armstrong attempt an answer in their book 'Art as Therapy', 2013:

"The idea of consumerism as evil is a scourge with which to beat the modern world. Yet at its best consumerism is founded on love of the fruits of the earth, delight in human ingenuity and due appreciation of the vast achievements of organised effort and trade. This painting takes us to a time when abundance was new and not to be taken for granted.

We are so afraid of greed that we forget how honourable the love of material things can be. In 1620, homage could be paid to the nobility of work and commerce, something that boredom and guilt make less accessible to us today. Perhaps we can learn from this picture. A good response to consumerism might not be to live without melons and grapes, but to appreciate what really needs to go into providing them.”

For me, HAHK is a bad, gaudy film that I probably will never watch but it was just holding a cracked mirror to our society. It tried to entertain like most Hindi films do. Nothing more, nothing less. 

I don't think it either makes any comment on consumerism, the way Sir Bacon's picture above does or promotes consumerism. I did not like it but hey, millions others DID. 

Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, April 4 1959

 Arno's fat cat never watched HAHK

What Happens If She Turns Around...Ms. Vilma Kaplan in Stone

In October 2013, I saw the following image on FB. I also read a few 'male' responses in appreciation of her beauty.

Location - Somewhere in India, Artist: Anon

courtesy Kathie Brobeck and Facebook

I thought what if she turned around...

...and then I thought of  Mel Brooks's 'Silent Movie' 1976.

 

If you have not seen the film, notice that the conference table is lifted off the ground in response to the question!

"Now You Lead Me," He Said, Taking Her Hand...: Friendship Day

Today August 3 2014 is International Friendship Day

 

Artist: Jessie Wilcox Smith (1863-1935) for George MacDonald's 'At the Back of the North Wind', 1871


courtesy: Google (from a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world’s books discoverable online.)

शंभर पावसाळे आले गेले...The Day Savage Industrial Slaughter Began...

100 years ago, today July 28 2014, World War I started

गोविंदराव टेंबे (1881-1955):
"…पण  तसे पाहिले असता, गेल्या पाच  सहा वर्षापूर्वीचे सर्वच जीवन पुसून गेलेले आहे; मग हस्तलिखित पुसून गेल्याचा विषाद कशाला वाटायचा? भावना, श्रद्धा, संस्कृती, भीती, कला, धर्म इत्यादी, समाजाला स्थिरता व मधुरता देणारी तत्वे नामशेष झाली आहेत..." ('माझा जीवनविहार')

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942):
" When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability . . . In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, of revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason."

Erich Maria Remarque, "All Quiet on the Western Front", 1929:  “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

B S Mardhekar (बा सी मर्ढेकर):
"पावसाळे आले गेले;
दोन युद्धे जमा झाली;"

Daljit Nagra, 'The last post: letters home to India during the first world war', The Guardian, February 21 2014:

"...Soldiers refer to their own classic books where good is pitted against evil: "Having seen this war, all that has been written in Mahabharat and in the Ramayan is altogether true." The German aeroplanes are compared to Vishnu's mighty eagle, the Garuda, who features in the Ramayana. Soldiers refer to demons, "The name of Germany is breathed throughout the world like the name of Harankash", or to Indian heroes, "The mud is up to a man's knees, and the trenches are full of water up to a depth of about 2 feet. As in the history of Ala [a great Sikh warrior]"..."


Niall Ferguson on the British empire's response to the  full-scale insurgency in Mesopotamia in 1920:
"How did the British address the manpower problem in 1920? By bringing in soldiers from India who accounted for more than 87 percent of troops in the counter-insurgency campaign. Perhaps, then, the greatest problem faced by the Anglophone empire of our own time is very simple: the United Kingdom had the Indian Army; the United States does not. Indeed, by a rich irony, the only significant auxiliary forces available to the Pentagon today are none other than ... the British Army. But those troops are far too few to be analogous to the Sikhs, Mahrattas and Baluchis who fought so effectively in 1920."

Seumas Milne, The Guardian, January 8 2014:

"...Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.

It's not just that most men and all women in Britain were still denied the vote in 1914 – unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage – or that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.

Every single one of the main warring states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials enforced the export of food in British-ruled India, slaughtered resisters in their tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.

Britain was supposed to have gone to war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" – which had itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is now Namibia in the same period..."

Santanu Das, The Guardian, July 22 2014:
 "...Today, one of the main stumbling blocks to a truly global and non-Eurocentric archive of the war is that many of these 1 million Indians, or 140,000 Chinese, or 166,000 West Africans, did not leave behind diaries and memoirs. In India, Senegal or Vietnam there is nothing like the Imperial War Museum; when a returned soldier or village headman died, a whole library vanished..."


Markus Meckel, German War Graves Commission, FT, August 3 2014:

 "We have no national memory about the first world war."

Historian John Keay in his 'India A History', 2000/2010 writes of the start of the First World War:

"...News of war had been greeted in India with a demonstration. For once it was not of dissent but of enthusiastic support. British hearts warmed at the protestations of loyalty and the offers of support which poured in not only from the predictably sycophantic princely states but also from the Muslim League and Congress. With recruitment exceeding all expectations, Indian troops were soon sailing for novel destinations like Flanders, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. Over two million Indian combatants and support staff would eventually serve overseas, dwarfing all other imperial contributions to the war effort..."
  
Many of those two million were Marathi speaking.

Despite that, the war does not figure big in Marathi (मराठी) literature, probably because the participants came mainly from the middle peasantry belonging to non-Brahmin castes. 

(The other two big misses of Marathi literature are Second World War except Vishram Bedekar's 'Ranangan' (विश्राम बेडेकर, रणांगण) and the Partition of India.)

As quoted above Marathi poet B S Mardhekar writes: 

"पावसाळे आले गेले; दोन युद्धे जमा झाली;" (Monsoons came and went; two wars were done with;)

Critic D K Bedekar (दि के बेडेकर) writes with some indignation: 

"...'दोन युद्धे जमा झाली' या चार शब्दांत कोट्यावधी भारतीयांच्या, नव्हे सर्व मानवजातीच्याच वेदनांचे व मृत्यूचे ब्रह्मांड सामावलेले आहे. पण मर्ढेकर परमहंसगतीला पोहोचलेले असल्यासारखे आहेत ! त्यांच्या कालप्रवाहाला मनुष्यांच्या सुखदुःखांचे मोजमाप लागत नाही. नुसते पावसाळे येतात नि जातात हीच कालगणना !..."

 ('साहित्य : निर्मिती व समीक्षा', 1954 / 2008)

['...Two wars were done with'...these four words contain the whole universe of pain and death of millions of Indians, indeed the entire human race. But Mardhekar is like having attained the enlightenment ! His passage of time is not measured in man's happiness and pain. Monsoons simply come and go is the only time measurement !..." 

('Sahitya: Nirmiti va samiksha')]

Not everyone, alive during the war, could afford the luxury of nirvana (परमहंसगती). 

Certainly not those Marathi speaking combatants who were trapped in Siege of Kut (7 December 1915 – 29 April 1916). 

As the food became almost impossible to come by during the siege,  Indian soldiers were offered horse meat. Maratha soldiers thought it was heretical and refused to eat it with a rider, conveyed to the their commanders,  that if 'their deity' Rajarshi Shahu (राजर्षी छत्रपती शाहू महाराज) ordered it, they would eat it. 

In a most moving letter dated March 23 1916, Shahu-maharaj pleaded with the Maratha soldiers to eat the meat, survive and press on. He wished he could join them in their struggle.

['Rajrishi Shahumaharajanchi Bhashane' (राजर्षी श्रीशाहूमहाराजांची भाषणे), editor-aggregator Bhagvanrao Bapusaheb Jadhav (संपादक-संकलन भगवानराव बापूसाहेब जाधव),  2001/2009, page 177-180]

'He probably spoke Marathi'

Indian army soldier after the siege of Kut  (courtesy: Wikipedia and  Wikimedia Commons)

Despite this, Wikipedia informs,  "around 13,000 Allied soldiers survived to be made prisoners. 70% of the British and 50% of the Indian troops died of disease or at the hands of their Ottoman guards during captivity."

Cover of the box used to collect the installments of  Chinese version of "All Quiet on the Western Front" 1929, 1930

courtesy: Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College and  Slate.com
 

   

 
Artist:  Benjamin Schwartz , The New Yorker, January 2014