A bridge too far...

A friend, who's hoping to run regularly soon (its public now :-), asked me on the 10th of Jan if I would blog about my run in the Mumbai Marathon. I wasn't sure then, but once I ran, I decided I would. Mumbai always gives me something to think about, but there was a ton of work waiting at the office when I returned to Delhi, so I finally got around to it today...

Going in from foggy, cold Delhi, even as I got off the aircraft, it was like stepping into a lovely, warm toaster. When I lived in the Mumbai, I hated the muggy weather most days; visiting from Delhi this time, I was able to appreciate how nice it can be, especially for a change :-)

On the drive from the airport to our lodgings in Colaba, I was impressed by the orderly driving habits of Mumbaikars, especially the lane driving. In Delhi, cars waiting to turn right at a traffic light line up next to each other, never behind each other. So it was a curious sight for me. How could they resist all the open space on the left? It was like watching a group of 20 Japs line up one behind the other at a 5-star hotel once, each with exactly the same amount of Yen to change into rupees!

I ran the half marathon (21 kilometres). I know many who ran the full distance. Everyone had the same grouse: the addition of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link to the route. We half-marathoners did not find it too hard, since we started from Bandra and had to negotiate the bridge early in the run. The marathoners, on the other hand, began from uptown and came upon the Sea Link at Km 26, with the sun beating down, turning it into a cauldron of heat. The organisers, for some reason, had decided to test the runners further, by having no water for the five and a half km stretch. Many runners aiming for good finish times were done in by the Link this year. (The Africans of course, seem to be immune to everything, so we must consider having a separate sub-species race category for them :-)

Even on my drive into town on the day of my arrival, I could not see understand why Mumbaikars wax eloquent about the Sea Link (purely as a spectacle). Having seen the Howrah bridge growing up, the Bidyasagar Sethu later, and in the last five-odd years, the many freeway stretches and flyovers of the NCR (Delhi's suburbs), I was a little disappointed. Maybe there's something trickier about building a bridge on the sea that I don't get (ask Rama and his simians :-), but just qua looks, especially as you run on it, it's a bit of a let down.

It's been said before and I will take a couple of lines to say it again: the crowds that line up by the street sides to cheer runners in Mumbai are of a much better quality than what you get in Delhi. There is a genuine spirit of participation and most folks egg you on vociferously. In Delhi, if a group of pretty women stood by the side of the road and shouted encouragement, the rest of the crowd would be ogling them and giggling like idiots.

The number of people running in the half marathon this time touched a new record: 11,000 folks decided to give it a go. While this is obviously a good thing in principle, I get the feeling that most are under-prepared. Yes, 21 kms is obviously much easier than the marathon (more than half-easier:-), but it you don't want to walk most of the way, you may want to train a little. (It's called a 'race', for Ramssake!). It's annoying enough to have those who run in the "Dream Run" (6 kms) accost you months after the race to tell you they also "ran the Marathon". But when they decide to upgrade and run longer distances, you run into them in the middle of the road - literally - where they walk slowly, chatting with each other! If you must sign up and walk, please walk on one side. (I know marathoners look down at half-marathoners like me in a similar fashion. But despite being at the wrong end of that totem pole, I still feel race etiquette is important; most trained half-marathoners keep to the unwritten rules of the road and give faster runners wide berth)

I ran my 21 k with no stops. I did pause thrice, for 5-10 seconds each time, to tip electral into water at the water stations, but other than that, I find that the no-stops technique works best for me, at least over this distance. I don't finish fast enough to boast, but I enjoy running at my own pace and I love the non-stop rhythm. There are of course a myriad other walk-run-stop-sit combos that different runners use, each as vaild as the rest.

Last, and my most important learning over this race, comes in the from of a one-liner I'm going to stake claim to as my kitschy own: "Smile - it increases you race value."

My general distance running philosophy is borrowed from Japanese author Murakami's book, 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. It goes: "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." During my 21k in Mumbai this time, I realised that I need to add "Smiling is mandatory" to the saying. I don't know if it's bio-feedback or just a placebo effect, but smiling through the race helped me finish with no cramps or pains this year. It also made for nicer race photos :-)

Cheatie Pospie...

As i was writing about '3 Idiots', I was reminded of another recent film - one that illustrates what can happen if film makers break their Sacred Covenant with the ticket buying movie-goer, aka Me.

Let me begin by explaining the covenant.

I, as a movie-goer, buy a ticket and sit in a hall, where as the lights are gradually dimmed, I surrender my immediate reality to the creator of the shadow play I am about to witness.

My expectations from the film are coloured by a myriad of factors that I have been exposed to before I enter the hall.

The biggest one is earlier film/s by the same Director / Writer.

If it's a David Dhawan film, I'm ready for loud/camp costumes, the huge leaps of faith in screenplay, the slapstick comedy sequences, the silly scat / double-meaning comic dialogues, etc. But in return, I do want at least a few genuinely comic situations, very good timing on the delivery of comic dialogues, catchy songs and beautiful leading ladies. And I certainly don't want to be preached to, or given a large dose of 'reality'.

Those are the broad contours of the unspoken generic covenant between David and me, a member of his paying audience.

Shyam Benegal has his own with me, even when he pushes himself to do "commercial" cinema like Welcome to Sajjanpur. So does every other well-known director.

S/he can break it, if s/he so chooses. It's risky, but as an average audience member who is always open to being entertained "differently", I don't mind, but they must remember that before the film begins, the next, all-important part of the covenant comes into operation.

This one's the real deal.

It's what I assume is in play when I go to watch a film made by someone I've never heard of.

"Thou shalt, through the whole duration that I surrender my reality to yours, keep that reality consistent."

So, if David Dhawan wants to swap places with Shyam Benegal, and makes a film in the latter's genre, I would be amused during the first five minutes of the film, but if he keeps it consistent through the whole film, I will likely forget who made it, and go along with the film, at least till the lights come back on.

After its all over, if i had actually gone to watch a mindless film, for pure 'entertainment', and ended up having to watch a 'serious' one, I may still complain, but that complaint will be directed at David, not at his film.

Let me now return to Rocket Singh.

Why did I decide to go and watch it? The Writer-Director team of Jaideep Sahni and Shimit Amin had earlier entertained me with Chak De India.

I have a huge dislike for Shahrukh Khan, but despite that, I thought the film was paisa wasool (I experienced the mandatory surges of joy and lumps in my throat at the right places. It was a smooth flight with Captain Buffalo :-)

Other than this, both chaps had earlier good films to their credit, in their respective roles. Shimit Amin had the quasi-realistic Ab Tak Chappan and Jaideep Sahni had Khosla ka Ghosla. (Jaideep also had lemons like Aaja Nachle and half lemons like Bunty aur Babli, but hey, he's prolific and sometimes, you have to go with "best of...")

Anyway, that's why I went to watch Rocket Singh.

I expected that two guys who seemed to understand the middle class milieu would do a good job with a "commercial" Hero like Ranbir Kapoor as the leading man; after all, he was getting pretty good at playing the 'young man out of college confused about what to do with his life' (Wake up Sid & Ajab Prem ki Gajab Kahani)

And yet, things went horribly wrong.

The film ran too long, and though it was quite interesting in parts, it failed mainly on one front - the climax. No bad acting, mind you, and they had quite a few "moments" through the film - the magic ingredient that make audiences forgive filmmakers huge boo-boos.

What was unforgivable was how the Hero behaved in the fourth act, the denouement, where the Writer-Director broke their Covenant with me.

Many people have written about how the Hero of the film comes out looking like a wimp at the end, and have cited that as the reason for its failure. They're right, of course. But that's only half the story.

For those who may have missed the film, the climax is set up when the Hero, who has been consistently ill-treated by his evil, corrupt boss, has had his dream company, his Rocket Sales Corporation taken away from him by this very man. Rocket Singh finds himself back on the retail shop floor, a store salesman. Despite this, the Boss is unable to capitalise on his forceful acquisition of Rocket Sales and comes back to return the company to our Hero.

Once he gets to the shop where our Rocket is working, the Boss again goads our Hero, literally pushing him to butt heads. So what does Rocket Singh do? Does he whip the Boss man's behind? No, no, not our Rocket. He instead whines about not being given a fair chance and finally shakes hands with the Boss, offering to "see you in the field" for the next round of the marketing fight. Chee...its an obvious let-down, a bad ending. So yes, the weak Hero was to blame, but once again, its not really that simple.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen a 'reality' (even of a 'filmy' variety) inspired ending in a film. And I would have happily swallowed it, had the rest of the film been as 'real', with a weak mortal as its leading man.

Instead, till that point in the film, the Writer-Director had asked me for several 'commercial' liberties, which I had gladly let them take. There was the peon/coffee boy who could apparently assemble PCs "with his eyes shut", there was the whole bunch of traitors from the parent company moonlighting with Rocket Sales for a longish period with just a yawn or two to show for it during the day, Rocket Singh himself could do no wrong in his night avataar, and so on...

So, having given them a long line of "commercial" credit, as per my Covenant with them, I was happily expecting the film makers to give me a full-blown, 'commercial', happy ending. But they gave me reality instead.

It was like watching a David Dhawan film and finally, in the climax, being left with a "think-about-what-that-says-about-us-as-a-society" kind of Shyam Benegal ending.

When I was growing up, the anglo-Indian boys in our Jesuit school used the phrase "Cheaters never prosper" quite often.

The poorer, more vernacular boys used to ape this as best as they could, and would scream "Cheatie Pospie" every time someone tried to get away with a cheap one, but got what they deserved instead.

I'm told Rocket Singh is a flop at the box office.

I don't know if its true, but sorry da. "Cheatie Pospie!"

Buffaloes & Boeings

There is a modern saying in Tamil, quite likely born in one of the hundreds of engineering colleges that dot the southern landscape like poisonous mushrooms. It goes "kekkaravan keynaiya irunda eruma madu kooda aeroplane ottun da..."

A transliteration, after providing for syntax, would come up to "If the one listening (to a story) is a gullible idiot, even a buffalo can pilot a Boeing"

As you would expect, the beauty of the colloquial rhyme and alliteration in the Tamil has been lost in my less-than-adequate translation, though I've made a token effort, exchanging the generic 'Aeroplane' in the original for a 'Boeing' in English, to make it share at least a first alphabet with 'Bufflalo' :-)

But you get the idea. It's something that one friend would say, in response to something incredulous said by another... long-hand for "yeah, right! "

Commercial cinema - Hollywood, Bollywood or any other timber - often asks us to believe things that would fall in the 'buffalo-boeing' kind of space.

Whether its a blonde girl who takes on a whole boardroom of lawyers in Legally Blonde with the premise that 'exercise makes endorphins, endorphins make you happy and happy people don't go around killing other people!" or the kind-hearted gangster Munna, who pulls a long suffering patient out of his coma with the power of plain old goodness in Munnabhai MBBS, these 'moments' are a test.

They test our willingness, as an audience, to surrender to the emotion being invoked by the filmmaker and ignore the incredulity of what we are being asked to go along with.

If the film succeeds at these crucial points, and we, the audience, buy into the tale, in the darkness of the movie hall, the film maker has done his/her job.

Rajkumar Hirani (Director) and Abhijat Joshi (Writer) did this to me with "Three Idiots."

I could give you a full review of the film, but there are enough of those out there, and I am no film critic.

So I thought I would describe my eruma madu (buffalo) and Boeing moment in the film for you instead.

We are well into the second half of the film by the time it comes. I will only describe this one scene, to avoid spoiling the fun for those who may still not have seen the film.

Rancho (Aamir Khan), and his two friends have been rusticated from the Imperial College of Engineering for a prank they've played on the Dean. They've packed their bags and are leaving the campus on a night when the skies are pouring rain, which then floods all the streets of Delhi, till everyone is wading in waist-deep water (hey what's that on the corner of the screen? Is that a bovine tail?)

Now the Dean's elder daughter is about to deliver a baby. (For those into Freud, it is symbolic that on this wet, wet, night, her water has just broken :-) The younger daughter (Kareena Kapoor), who is studying to be a doctor, is away at the hospital and cannot be brought back to campus through the flooded streets to help. With no other option, it is decided that Rancho and friends will deliver the baby, on the table tennis table in campus common room, with Kareena guiding them by webcam. (buffalo horns coming into vision...)

I now fast forward through some of the details, as the whole buffalo gradually reveals itself: the pregnant woman can't push, she's too tired, they need to use a suction cup-like device to pull the baby out, which Rancho, ever the handyman, fashions out of vaccum cleaners and lens blowers (there's the whole buffalo head now...), there's Kareena giving directions via webcam, there's a power failure, and voila, an inverter our Hero's been working on is conveniently put into service (here come the big black trunk and forelegs,) and a few more rapid, well placed, neatly tied-up screenplay devices later, the baby is delivered, umbilical cord cut, paper clip clamps in place. (By now, the buffalo is fully visible, head to tail)

But wait: something is wrong, the baby is not crying. Change music , disappointment, grief, sudden sadness all around, on and off screen. Aha, a screenplay inversion - again, very good use of a classic device.

Till this point, its just the poor buffalo standing, ownsome-lonesome, chewing his cud, having tested us in little bits, and survived. No Boeing in sight yet.

Then comes the kicker - literally.

Our Hero now says the magic mantra, "All is well", which has been set up earlier in the film as capable of doing amazing things. And lo and behold, the baby (btw, a very realistic animatronic newborn) kicks Rancho in the face. Cut to Incredulous Surprise on our Hero's face, almost like he's mimicking our sentiments, the audience, our mouths half-open. Silence. Then the penny drops. Our Hero says the mantra again "All is well" and receives a second kick. "What the...?"

Our buffalo has reached for his Ray Ban Aviator. Suddenly from nowhere, appears the 747. One part of my brain is ready to offer a curse word and the wisdom of the Tamil engineering students to the Director and Screenwriter.

But I don't. Even as our Hero makes everyone else repeat "All is well", and the baby begins to cry, the Director cuts to good actors, acting really well. They emote the huge emotional implications of the moment: the mother's joy, the Dean's catharsis, the Hero's own relief and happiness, the friends who realise they will not be rusticated now....they all do what they're supposed to, what they get paid large sums of money to do.

I feel an involuntary lump in my throat. Captain Buffalo smiles knowingly at me, knowing he has me exactly where he wants me.

He has clearance from air-traffic control. I know I will let him take me along for the rest of the ride.

I was entertained, moved, and came back satisfied.

To me, that is the real test of any film, especially a "commercial" film.

After the two Munnabhai films, Abhijat Joshi & Raju Hirani have delivered yet again.

I'm going to buy tickets for Hirani's fourth outing without waiting for the reviews.

Moo.

Making a Killing...

A close friend lost his father to cancer recently.

It had been detected in a late stage and his demise was rapid, within a few months.

From the day of the diagnosis, my friend left no stone unturned, trying to find a possible cure. Well meaning friends, relatives and even acquaintances provided information of all sorts of treatments they had heard of - often half-facts and anecdotes, each of which my friend tried diligently to track down.

Homeopathy provided some relief from the pain and restlessness initially, but that repreive too was limited.

When his father finally passed on and I called my friend to commiserate, he only said, "We could not do much for him..."

I felt for him, at our helplessness in the face of this disease and wondered... how far had we had gotten in the global 'fight against cancer'?

In a world of uncanny coincidences (or, if you prefer, the amazing ability of the conscious mind to suddenly spot whatever the subconscious might be occupied with,) I opened The Hindu a few mornings back to find this article.

The article is short, well written and makes a simple, first-person case for a more humane approach - not just to cancer patients, but to cancer itself. Please read it.

It highlights how, by using terminology like "fight" and "battle" and "war", pharma companies (and the politicians who are bankrolled by them) hijack cancer research to suit their ends.

The article resonated with me, echoing of something else I had read a long time back. I could only recall that the fragment of memory I was trying ferret out also had to do with chemicals.

Thanks to the world wide web of memory, a zillion times more powerful than mine, I was able to track down what I was looking for - environmental scientist Dr.Vandana Shiva's views on the subject of how seed and pesticide giants word wide go about peddling their wares.

I have cut-pasted a couple of paragraphs for you below from the relevant article:

"The issue of violence is important because the entire technology paradigm as it’s emerging and the economics paradigm of globalization are based on warfare. You begin to genetically engineer a seed. Where does that begin? It begins with gene guns. You make genetically manipulated organisms by shooting genes with a gene gun. All the language in genetic engineering is a language of warfare. Cargill uses the language of warfare to talk about preventing bees from usurping the pollen. It’s a war against the pollinators.

Monsanto uses the language of creating herbicide-resistant crops to prevent weeds, which in our view is diversity and biodiversity essential to our health, our food, to vitamin A sources, they call it “stealing the sunshine.” It’s a war against the weeds. It’s a war for sunlight, which you can never have restricted. It’s in such abundant quantities. The entire WTO regime is based on one single concept of trade wars, turning trade from being a mutual, cooperative arrangement of selling and buying what you really need into a coercive arrangement of being forced to buy what you don’t need and being forced to sell what you should be using domestically. India is being forced to sell millions of tons of grain."

Clearly, for the human race (or at least the for the uglier half of us), the martial metaphor still evokes something primal we find hard to resist.

Mark Marqusee has made a compelling case for what he believes would be a more holistic approach to cancer research and treatment.

For a similar non-violent, holistic, approach to agriculture, and I believe, pretty much all of life, find and read this little treasure from a real Master.

It's called "One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka. What really moved me when I read it first, and still does, every time I pick it up, is its quiet reliance of first-hand experience over anything else.

You can read more about Fukuoka's philosophy & work here

In India, you can order the book online here

Amazon stocks it too.

I look forward to your thoughts.