Category: Culture

A Conversation on World Cinema

 

 

 

 

“It was not the best of times , it was the worst of times , it was not the season of light , it was the season of darkness , it was not the spring of hope , it was the winter of despair ”  I am talking about the 2020-2021 period when the world was battling Covid.. Like the rest of the world I too was stuck in my house , hearing bad news after other and trying to put on a brave face .  Cricket briefly for a few months , the great India tour of Australia ending with the great heist at Gabba gave us moments of great joy but such events were few and far in between.

It was in this background that , for my motley set of  old classmates and fellow “Cricket Tragics” as we called ourselves had a blast , thanks  to  Bansi ( Ajay Bansiwal)  one of our founding members  , who took us through a masterclass of World Cinema. He is a movie buff , one of the lucky few whose day job also involves movies and he has a treasure trove of great world movies – that were non English and Non Indian Language and gave us a sampling of great movies across various languages – Korean , Scandinavian , European and such.  These were not “High Brow” art movies , in the situation that we were with near and dear and friend and colleagues all suffering , all of us needed some escapist fantasy without compromising on our aesthetics. So the movies Bansi recommended were not sad or serious movies even though they took upon real and serious issues but always in a entertaining “masala” way or as a black comedy. These are all as Desi or Indian as movies can be only in languages and cultures that are vastly different from us. Sort of gives us the reaffirmation that human emotions are rather universal  !

In this podcast , Bansi and I talk about 15-20 such movies in no particular order of priority – the only common theme being , we enjoyed watching all of these possibly the most. These range from hard core violent Revenge movies to Slow Burn Crime Thrillers set in Argentina to absurdist black comedies and some picture perfect French work of art movies ! We have tried not to share spoilers in most cases and hope to hook you enough to make you search for these movies and have as much fun seeing them and discussing them as we had .  These prove that a good yarn well narrated is always engrossing whatever language it be in or the culture or country it is based in !

The Movies discussed are

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance –  Korean
Oldboy –  Korean
Lady Vengeance – Korean
Memories of murder – Korean
Barking dogs never bite  – Korean
I saw the devil – Korean
Welcome to Dongmakdol –  Korean
Secretly Greatly – Korean
In China they eat dogs – Danish
Adam’s apples  – Danish
Department Q series -Danish
The Alzheimer case  – Dutch  – Belgian Movie
Micmacs –  French
Welcome to the Sticks –  French
The band’s visit  – Arabic/Hebrew –  Israeli Movie
Marshland  – Spanish
Nine Queens –  Spanish – Argentinean Movie
Killing Cabos  – Spanish  Mexican Movie
Two rabbits  – Portuguese – Brazilian Movie
The man who copied  – Portuguese –  Brazilian Movie

 

The Caped Crusader

TW: This post contains descriptions of suicide.

Guru Dutt’s 1957 classic Pyaasa is about a disillusioned poet who is aghast at how people treat fellow humans in their pursuit of wealth, lust and power. In the iconic ending monologue, Dutt clarifies that he has no complaints against his friends, brothers and all the others who ill-treated him. His problem is with the structure of society, which peels away the humanity from humans.

19-year-old Abraham Biggs from Florida, USA was a regular on messaging board BodyBuilding.com. Apart from threads dedicated to diet, exercise, powerlifting, etc., there was a miscellaneous section on the site for random discussions not particularly related to bodybuilding. Predictably, this became the light-hearted section of the site- memes, jokes and banter flowed freely.

At 2:35 AM on November 19, 2008, Biggs posted a thread- he was going to commit suicide while livestreaming on Justin.tv, a streaming site and a precursor to Twitch. This was not the first time Biggs was talking about his mental health – he had started another thread in December 2007 about feeling down and how he had attempted to take his life earlier.

Biggs had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had been taking prescription medication for it. His plan was to overdose on the meds.

Disgustingly, the comments on his stream were goading him on, or calling the whole thing a hoax.

A 17-year-old regular of the site (username: “Bulker”) chanced upon the thread, and clicked through to the livestream. Bulker was alarmed to see what was happening. He had interacted with Abraham on the site before, and felt compelled to act. The problem was, he was at the other end of the world- in India. He did some quick online sleuthing and found Abraham’s name, number, approximate address and pictures. He posted these details, and even updated Miami police contact details on the thread, begging US folks to do something. But no one did.

This was the bystander effect at play. Like people gawk at traffic accidents but don’t do anything about it if there are other people around. They just assume that someone from the crowd must’ve already taken action, like alerting the authorities. This effect was first identified in the murder of Kitty Genovese.

Bulker realised no one was going to act. He tried emailing Miami police but the mail bounced.  He snuck into his parents’ bedroom and accessed his mother’s phone. After activating the exorbitantly expensive international calling plan, he called Miami police and tried to explain the situation. He kept getting transferred around and he had to explain over and over again. The clock was ticking, his calling minutes were running out and he couldn’t make any headway, except to locate Abraham’s exact jurisdiction and which sheriff to contact. He posted this information too on the forum. Someone finally realised the seriousness of the matter, and called the sheriff. Minutes later, Bulker too got in touch with him- he had now activated international minutes on his father’s phone. The sheriff reassured him that they had already received multiple calls and help was on the way.

Police arrived at the scene about 15 minutes later. It was 3 PM in Florida and 1:30 AM in India. On the livestream, they were first seen throwing something towards Abraham, and when he didn’t respond, they entered the room, checked his body and then covered the camera. Abraham Biggs had already passed.

This incident affected Bulker deeply. He got involved in social work, first in Gujarat and then Bengaluru, where he moved to in 2016. He volunteered during the COVID pandemic, and was able to get acquainted with the city police commissioner, who encouraged him to get more involved in public issues and act as an interface with authorities.

And thus we arrive at December 11, 2021. Bulker, whose real name is Dushyant Dubey, started a new thread on the r/bangalore subreddit:

Bangaluru is a city in flux, with a large number of young people moving here to work at the IT companies and startups that make it India’s Silicon Valley. Many of these kids are away from home for the first time, and do not have a local “contact” that protects their interests from landlords, PG owners, cops, rowdies (slang for street thugs), MLA’s, <insert goon group here>. An immigrant himself, Dubey understood these problems intimately.

He offered to be of help, to anyone and for anything. The requests started coming in, small and big, with many users tagging him in relevant threads using his delightfully named handle – u/St_Broseph.

Someone needed help filing a police complaint. Another user needed therapy but couldn’t afford it. Broseph happily paid out of his own pocket. One young woman had been sexually harassed by a policeman, and broseph helped escalate the issue and make sure the complaint was registered and acted upon. He even maintains a safehouse for people in distressed situations.

Between representing common folks in disputes with politicians, and (I kid you not) rescuing kittens, broseph has done it all. Following the suicide of Aditya Prabhu, he organised a protest to spur the investigation and formed a student support group. The r/bangalore community loves him- many people volunteer time and money towards his efforts. They call themselves the St.Broseph Army, and have a HQ and everything.

What’s next for broseph? In his own words:

Here’s a toast to Bengaluru’s Batman: not the hero we deserve, but definitely the one we need right now.

I’ll end with a quote by Mr. Rogers:

Note: This post originally appeared on Internet Stuff.

A Kerala entrepreneur’s jackfruit startup that’s fighting India’s diabetes ‘pandemic’

Come summer, Indians engage in a unique mango one-upmanship: Alponso or Langda; Ratnagiri or Devgarh Alphonso; Gujarati Kesar or Banarsi Chausa. If you ask me, this kind of mango tribalism is trite. The mango season is short. Eat whatever you can find.

But this is also the season of jackfruit, a fruit far more complex in flavour, and a veritable super food that Indians in its native land love to despise. Jackfruit of course has an exalted status in traditional Tamil literature, alongside banana and mango. Jackfruit can grow prolifically anywhere in peninsular India and the mid-to-lower Gangetic belt, pretty much.

I’ll share a couple of The Plate’s jackfruit stories here.

The first is about James Joseph, an ex-Microsoft executive who found a way to get healthy jackfruit into everyday Indian diet inspired by former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam’s one-line brief to him.

Follow ThePlate.in to understand India from farm to plate!

X: https://twitter.com/thePlateIndia

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theplateindia/

 

 

 

 

Storage and Transport systems of the Great Indian middle class :A “Case“study

Probably during my grandmom’s times the vessels and dabbas were made of stainless steel and the middle class could afford only a few. So the first thing that families did was get their name and date engraved on the dabba/vessel. This also protected the dabba as it was used to identify when found in someone else’s household. During the later years, some of the restaurants also followed the engraving “Stolen from ..”, in the hope that the thief would be ashamed to steal, in vain. The families mostly being joint had only large containers used for storing all staples like dals, flour, and also snacks/sweets made during festivals perhaps

Advent of the tiffin carrier

As time progressed the families became smaller. Also, people started working away from their homes and traveled larger distances each morning making it unviable to get back home for lunch. This was the start of the carry your food to work when you didn’t work in a factory. Most factories served their workers a huge lunch at a very small price. A lot of them made the most of it (more about it sometime else ). So the ones that needed to carry food probably made good with the engraved dabbas either bought or gifted by someone. The gifted dabbas had names of who gifted it to whom and on which date and occasion.Some of the families even had a multi-layer tiffin carrier which helped with the food not getting all mixed up in a single container. The next improvement in this area was the Indian need to eat food hot, while Bombay had the dabbawalas the rest of the country had to procure the “hot case”.The hot case was a show-off in the office and was somehow mistaken to keep food fresh as well.

The just in case dabbas
Indian middle-class households never throw two things, the newspapers, and the dabbas. These dabbas are the ones that have been sent by a restaurant for their food delivery. The dabbas are carefully cleaned, wiped, and stored for a rainy day. When indeed a rainy day happens ,these dabbas are used for packing giveaways of extra food the caterer made to the relatives OR that cake to be packed for children who didn’t turn up.That’s when everyone who wanted to giveaway these lovelies is confronted with the “See I told you”. Builders, and carpenters please take note and build an extra storage space for these temporarily preowned loved ones.The capacity of the storage can be determined based on Swiggy/Zomato order history. I would put the empty glass bottles from Nestle,Nescafe,Nandini etc in the same category though some of them may be actually used to store stuff.

The Russian doll dabbas
Some companies make these dabbas which attract the Indian householder as much as the Russian doll did in the past. A dabba in a dabba in a dabba and more, you get the idea. The purpose apparently is to store stuff to be used in long term in the largest dabba, to the smallest one for immediate daily use and everything in-between left to the owner’s imagination. While the world was recommending Think BIG, the moms were busy thinking how small and cute can these fellas get and kept shopping endlessly .The trouble began when the number of dabbas become too many and one didn’t know which dabba had what. Then came the post-it notes inside the larger dabbas , the cute little fellas were just that ,cute and useless.

The king of dabbas
Last known ,the king of dabbas was released into the world as a panacea for all issues known to mankind. Lasts forever, guaranteed for life , if broken you can get them replaced for new ones so on and so forth. The marketing was the best India has seen perhaps .Every household worth its salt had started to hoard these for every purpose ranging from storage to transportation to tiffin carriers. Some even took household franchises as agents .
Yes, I am talking about Tupperware and the success of the product was so huge that the imitations hit the market immediately with every possible term ending with a ‘ware.. These products were so protected that many children and husbands have gone back to school/work to retrieve the forgotten dabba before they head back home. They would rather lose a limb than the king.

After all this I have stopped thinking of “Dabba nan maga” as an insult .. Proud to be treated as a loved one …Don’t even get me started on the dabbas in the fridge, that needs separate “ treatment “ .

Hurry up! Don’t miss out! Quick!

The world is at a frenzied pace in most aspects of our lives! Are we in a sense losing out ( FOMO) if we enjoy doing some things slow and at an enjoyable pace?

We do it to our children :
Hurry up! We are getting late for the bus.
Hurry up! eat your snack soon and start doing your homework
What is 234567 multiplied by 3456? Quick
We have been brainwashing children that they have to be quick at everything they do be it getting ready, displaying a life skill say eating well, or even for that matter all our entrance exams for education/jobs mostly is a race against time

We display it in public places :
The plane has landed, let’s get off fast before it takes off again
The signal will turn red in 2 seconds, let’s cross it anyway, even if we put someone else at risk
Jump queues, I am more important than the others, my time is precious

Based on what we were told when we were children we still want to be First ( faster than the rest) to get to something. While there would be situations that are an emergency, are we wired so strongly that we want to be ahead of others irrespective of our situation or theirs?

We are doing it to our banking system:
My google pay is down, can you please check yours
Don’t have google pay, can you pay from Phone pay
I paid, can you please check now !!!

There was a time when cheques were issued across banks and the clearing cycle could even run into weeks. We got that to a couple of hours and now we have instant payments. The challenge is not that we have instant payments, but are we ready to manage things when the “Instant” is down for an instant?

We are doing to our food/grocery/things delivery
I can see your location, What is taking you so long
Just 1 km from my house, for idli. vade why 30 min to deliver?
Why not 10 minute delivery of groceries and food?

We walked across to the groceries stores to fetch stuff we needed and planned, We hated parcels unless it was an emergency. The fresh food and extra chutney /sambar at the restaurant ending with a strong filter coffee was a delight.

We seem to be in a hurry in every aspect of our lives, from everyday tasks, food, etc to buying a car, a home in our early 20s.

Not at all against the fast-paced life and changes that are evolving with it, Just some questions that arise

Are there some aspects/things that we want to still do well and slowly?

Most of us tend to slow down, observe things, chat leisurely while we wait for our drink/food, read, do nothing during our vacations, and are happy doing so, Is there a Malgudi* kind of city/town life possible in today’s world?

Are we and our next generation ready to wait if something doesn’t work OR when someone else is really in hurry?

The 10-minute food delivery from Zomato triggered this piece

Hurry H(om)e !!

               

The Laughing Buddha

                                                                 

Raju and Kamala man and wife, hailed from a brahmin priest family of Dakshina Kannada (South Canara, coastal region of Karnataka). They had moved to   Bangalore looking for better prospects. Bangalore had more people, and more temples, hence more ceremonies, and were seen as a multitude of opportunities.

Raju’s guru had given him a laughing Buddha -” Laugh and the world will laugh with you “. Raju believed in the concept and had even started a laughter club at the park close to his temple to beat the stress. He practiced the art of laughing every morning with the regulars. He would always carry the small Buddha as a good luck charm which got him enough business to lead a comfortable life.

After their son, Mahesha was born a favorite pastime was to sit on the ledge outside their house and dream of the younger ones’ future. Every time this conversation led to them giving up the city life and moving back to their ancestral village in Dakshina Kannada to run the family temple. After all, Dakshina Kannada was the best district when it came to results of Class X, both averages and the sheer number of rank holders. Rajus’ wanted to give their son the best possible education. It was also important to them that Mahesha learnt about the rich culture, and heritage of the land. As he grew to be 12 they started getting worried that he would fall into bad company in Bangalore. They bid goodbye to neighbors, the laughter club patrons, and temple regulars, They made the move.

Mahesha apart from helping around with work at home and the temple turned out to be a studious boy, making the Rajus’ proud. A few years later one happy morning they were all decked up to take a bus to Manipal university for Mahesha admissions. The whole trip was planned by Raju and Kamala the previous night. It would be a stopover at Udupi Sree Krishna Mutt to seek his blessings before finishing Manipal admissions. Celebrations would begin at Woodlands with Mangalore buns /Goli Baje* and end at Diana with a cutlet and a Gudbad*.

Mahesha stayed at the Manipal hostel and would make weekly visits to the village to spend time with his parents, get his clothes washed, eat home-cooked food, and meet his local friends. Rajus’ were feeling blessed with the move they made and the life they had set up around the village. Every evening they thanked God for this.

4 years later on Yugadi(Kannada new year’s day), Mahesha’s final results would be out. Kamala had woken up early to make the Bevu Bella* and also started preparations to make two kinds of Holige*. It was indeed a big day, they had dreamt of this all their lives.

Raju reached home early, finished his evening prayers picked his lucky charm and they waited for Mahesha to bring home that degree. They were filled with a sense of pride to have an engineer in the house, a first of the kind in the family.

Mahesha bowed down to God, then his parents, and gave his father the 2 documents. Raju saw the first and tears rolled down his eyes seeing the marks card. He moved slowly to the second document; a million thoughts now ran through his mind.

Why did God do this to them? What would he tell his relatives and friends back in Bangalore? Mahesha had married his classmate, Rashmi from a different caste.  The laughing Buddha slipped from his hand and shattered into a thousand pieces as Rashmi walked in to seek their blessings.

Is this the real meaning of the Ugadi bevu bella?

What about you, is your laughing buddha still intact?

Bevu bella– a traditional mixture of neem and jaggery — a bittersweet reminder that the year ahead will have its share of ups and downs too

                                         

Goli baje are crisp fried fritters made with flour, curd, spices and herbs

                               

Gadbud — Gadbad is a much loved Mangalorean ice cream dessert that’s made with more than one flavor of ice cream, nuts, chopped fruits, jelly, syrup & tutti Frutti. It’s served layered in a tall glass ,

Two different stories support the birth of this delicious Gadbad Ice cream.

“Gadibadi” the slang in Kannada for mayhem, chaos or confusion led to the name “Gadbad”.Gadbad Ice cream is believed to have originated in Diana Restaurant in Udupi, Mangalore, Karnataka

One day a customer became furious when he ordered an ice cream in the restaurant & was served with meagre amount.To calm him down the cook of the restaurant dumped various left over scoops of ice cream in a bowl & dressed it up with nuts, jelly, fruits & syrup. It was brought to him as a compensation.This accidental ice cream dessert was much loved by the angry customer & thus found a permanent place in the menu of Diana restaurant.

The second story claims that the founder of the Diana restaurant Mr. Mohandas Pai accidentally invented Gadbad Ice cream.

One fine day when he ran out of several flavors of ice cream he decided to give a group of customers what he had as a left over.He scooped out the left over ice creams in a bowl & threw some nuts, fruits, jelly & syrup to make it more appealing & than served them the dessert.The customers loved it so much that they came back for that lovely invention of Mr. Mohandas Pai.

                                         

Holige – Different varieties of Indian sweet flatbread are served in Karnataka during Ugadi specifically. The most common is the one prepared with yellow gram and sugar or jaggery. Holige is also prepared using coconut and jaggery as ingredients. Also called Puran poli in Maharastra

                               

Fear of a Bihari nation

I’ve fascinated by regions that border each other and have very different fertilities. For example, Saudi Arabia has a TFR of 2.2 and Yemen one of 4. Today it looks like Bihar has a fertility of around 3.0 and West Bengal 1.6. Bihar surpassed West Bengal in the late 1990’s, and is still more populous even without Jharkhand. But the data below suggest to me that West Bengal experienced a “windfall” population growth with the arrival of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh in the decades after partition, and we’re sort of reverting back to the mean…

Ertugrul is badass


I watched a few episodes of Ertugrul and it’s pretty good. I would prefer less of a Marvel-comics style character…Ertugrul and his alps basically are just killing machines who never get injured while taking down dozens of Christian knights. But it is good for what it intends to be, a dramatic rendering of the origins of the Ottoman mythology.

What’s the Indian equivalent? I assume a Shijavi TV series, but is there something with good production values?

Brown Pundits