Democracy's a mirage in Rajasthan -- by Rakesh Bedi

Rakesh wrote this in 2009 after three of us -- we two and Manoj Nair -- drove around in Rajasthan just before the elections. Meeting this raja was one of the highlights of the trip. I was so impressed with this piece that when I read it I was like, wow! I couldn't have said it so well in my entire life. So, please, don't deny yourself the pleasure :)

In parts of Rajasthan where blue blood is the lifeblood of politics, democracy exists like the scorching sun: outside, its searing heat is present everywhere; inside, in the cool and stolid confines of even a small village house, it's absent.

Almost completely in villages. Rajasthan is a huge state (Barmer, a district bordering Pakistan, is bigger than Kerala) and large parts of it are bereft of any habitation. Where it exists, it's wondrously colourful and, at times, suffocatingly crowded.

Along the state's superb highways is nothing but barren landscape sending its short messages of alienation in the ubiquitous mirages on the nicely metalled roads. An apt image for infrastructure and, of course, the crying lack of it. There's no water here; there are roads, wonderful in their make and lacquered in their length.

It was on these roads — 1,900 km in four days — ET went looking for democracy's delights and its denials. In one of our many stops across the state, we detoured to meet a former raja. Rajasthan is a princely state and along its roads are many hollowed-out forts, phantoms of a glorious past.

The raja, rather his father, ran his domain somewhere between Ajmer and Jodhpur. A small road — this too evenly laid but much shorter in spread — branches off the main highway. The road to the raja and his former kingdom. As we slowly turn and go a few metres, we stop to ask for directions to the raja's house. As the car window is rolled down, a handlebar-mustached man of 40 frames it. He's carrying a double-barrelled gun which he says he's been asked to deposit at the local police station because of impending elections.

We ask him about the raja and his face, all of a sudden, tenses up and he straightens himself, leaving just the twin barrel of the gun in the window frame. We ask him again. He bends, his serious face back in the window, and says: "Hukum, this is the right way."

ET decides to give him a lift till the police station and offers him some beer. The man refuses. It's not that he doesn't drink. He does but won't do it now for he fears the inspector, a Muslim from Jaipur, will smell it on his breath. Why does a man carrying a double-barrelled gun, an instrument to instill fear, feel afraid? The man quickly looks at the gun whose barrel nearly touches the roof lining of the car, takes a fast swig and says it's his grandfather's weapon. Past is a constant presence in the present.

A fearless past in a fearful present. His ancestors have hunted big game with the weapon; he cradles it with fear.

That he might be caught with beer on his breath. We drop him at the police station and he 'hukums' us off and off we go in search of the raja, following the man's maplike directions.

The raja's citadel (the Hindi word garh, however, has more heft) is on a small bluff and the narrow road to it winds through a stiflingly crowded bazaar and cheek-by-jowl houses. There's no sense of any freedom and intimacy is out taking a walk on the claustrophobic road. Only the raja is afforded privacy and his citadel overlooks the entire town. The facade is crumbling and the antique Rajasthan doors creak as they open. But in the whole town it's only outside the raja's 'garh' two cars can be parked.

Narrowness suddenly opens into a large space outside the raja's citadel. The sky's visible but in the foreground are the decaying walls of the 'garh' and just behind the exalted escarpment. The brilliant sky, like democracy, forms the background, splendoured yet with a faraway look in its inertness.

Inside the raja's living room to which a boy of 13 has guided us, we sit on musty sofas, its cloth worn down to a thin shimmery look. A general air of decadence prevails. The window overlooks the entire town: the raja's perch of impervious imperium. The influential powers have dissolved and stay, in their weakened form, within the deteriorating building. But past majesty stares hollowly at you from the lifesize portraits of the raja's ancestors.

The coloured incarnations adorning the walls have black-and-white company: King George V in all his regalia. Why does royalty hang only B&W photos on its walls? Is it a love for the rich past or does it look at democracy and its many hues with sepia-tinted glasses?

The raja takes some time to arrive but when he does, his almost bald pate bobbing, the air of decadence becomes all-pervasive. At 12 noon, the raja is plastered and through five minutes of mumbling keeps putting tobacco-spiked paan masala in his mouth. He chews his masala; he chews his words.

As ET requests him to say something on elections, the raja keeps fiddling with a back-scratcher and, at times, uses it to make a point. He just swats it through the air or points it at us, sometimes menacingly, sometimes merrily. But he stays mostly mum on democracy.

Soon, an air of boredom starts travelling through the large room and the raja, even in his sozzled state, discerns it. He gets up with alacrity and asks us to come on a tour of the town. His minions, three teenaged boys, scatter like carrom disks at the first strike. A boy goes down, two go out of the room. Down we go too, first to the toilet and then to the portico. One of the boys who went out of the room takes us to the back of the citadel and points to a flight of steps. Ascend and you almost descend to the ground.

These are old-fashioned toilets where, through the hastily attached PVC hole, one can see the load drop to the ground. This is for the hoi polloi: the raja's supreme standing in the town's hierarchy stays even when the body performs its most plebeian tasks.

Inside the raja's rundown jeep, one of us rides shotgun with the now-hatted raja. At the back sit his teenaged satellites and two of us. The jeep, a Mahindra, takes some time to come to life and each time the raja turns the key he smiles. On the third attempt, the key catches and the engine roars with a shudder. The raja and his jeep are of a piece. Both of them revel in slumber most of the time but when they come alive they do it with a convulsive tremble.

As the clangorous jeep takes the common ground with the raja, taking quick swigs of water, at the wheel, the masses start getting out of the way with a bow of their 'safa-ed' heads. The raja keeps honking to let people know that it's him and the startled crowds, on their cycles and motorbikes, stop in their tracks and turn their heads and bow. This supplication puffs him so much he doesn't even look back when his jeep hits a stray cow.

As the animal bawls in pain, the raja accelerates on the unpaved road and starts railing at 'tumhara Hindustan'. In fact, so narrow is the route, prickly plants overhanging it keep abrading our skin. The raja's wife, however, works for a party in Hindustan. She is campaigning for BJP's Kiran Maheshwari, who is pitted against Sachin Pilot in Ajmer.

Whenever he sees a group of people, he stops, gets down from the jeep and chats with the people, whose beefs run the entire gamut from domesticity to dyspepsia. The raja looks at them, then looks at us, adjusts his hat in the dry heat and preens and looks back at his people, his hands, in a small gesture of solidarity, now variously resting on their shoulders. His is an assurance they believe. He stops his peacocking and says: "This is what Hindustan has given them. You can see... this is what they have got. No one listens to them."

No one talks of democracy here. It's just the link, however tenuous, between the raja and his people that works at times. That's the machine that works here, not the electronic voting machine. Everyone complains. Some of callousness of clerks, some of lack of water and some of infected water.

"See," says the raja, "what they got from Hindustan... their lot was better under my father." The crowd, without understanding, bows in unison.

The raja takes a sip of the afeem-laced water that someone proffers and moves on, his retinue in Indian file.

Then there's the story of a stunning statue that was found when some digging was going in a small village, some 6km from the citadel.

The statue was taken away to be installed at a temple the raja built but the next day the water level of the village receded to almost zero. The statue was brought back to the village and put up in a temple that stays locked all day for fear of theft. Rajasthan is notorious for its smuggling in artifacts.

For the village it's the statue that has worked a miracle, not democracy. The raja shows ET two dilapidated baolis (stepwells) and trots out an old villager, who completely overlooks its devastation in narrating its history.

He takes us down some 200 steps to show how one of the two baolis contains in its capacious cavity 24 more baolis. All you see is nothing but ravages of time: broken steps, algaed water, spider webs, defaced walls and crushed bottles of plastic. The refuse of present in the haunting past.

The climb up all those stairs leaves us out of breath and in the air we quickly gulp there's no trace of democracy. There's just the harshness of survival — a brutal hand-to-mouth living that doesn't and won't understand the power of vote.

The road back from the raja's 'garh' is eerily empty in the evening. The air's a bit cooler and as we pass the yellow-fronted police station we steal a glance hoping to see the man with the double-barrelled gun. The vacant road gives more purchase to the car and as we whish past desiccated trees and bone-dry land they acquire a ghostly feel. Evanescent specters waiting for the phantom of democracy. There they'll wait till it comes to breathe life into them, to free them of their trouble, to rid them of their haunted past.

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First published in The Economic Times, May 1, 2009

a friend's review of bhaag milkha bhaag

Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. -----Tony Judt



Running is good for the body, but does it serve a body of history? Watching a super athlete at the height of his powers can be a magical sight, but can this powerfully bewitching experience be transplanted to the screen with the fluidity and ease which an athlete always displays running a competitive race. If you watch Bollywood's biopic of Milkha Singh's life, you would probably think not.

Milkha's an awe-inspiring story, of courage, grit and determination. A penniless, orphaned youth devastated by Partition building his life anew to become India's best athlete. Battling adverse circumstances, the athlete earned the sobriquet of Flying Sikh through dauntlessness that is beyond the wild imaginations of many of us.

Bollywood's Milkha, written by ad agency McCann-Erickson's India boss Prasoon Joshi, works more like a 3-hour-long ad film than a cinematic representation of the athlete's super-achiever life that will stay imprinted on your consciousness like Mikha's races or the Partition, the havoc this nation witnessed at Independence, have on ours.

Director Rakeysh Mehra's visuals of the Partition, with whinnying black horses and slow-motion, almost robotic decapitation of Sikhs, present a bizarre, consumerist version of a traumatic moment in nation's history. The brutal swiftness and colossal rages of the Partition are reduced to mere Dolbyfied clip-clops of horses ridden by draped-in-black killers who take an eternity to emerge into the foreground to behead Sikhs, at perhaps 16 frames a second like an ad film for a shiny car whose alloy wheels sink into your senses in slow motion.

Mehra and Joshi, perhaps grown on the flatness and inanition of ad films, diminish the ravages of Partition to slapdash visuals which seem to have jumped out from some Playstation game inspired by Hollywood films such as 300. And, mind you, this is the shocking, psychologically scarring blow that ultimately makes Milkha the man he becomes!

 Mouthing cliches, the fearless community of Sikhs in a Multan village goes down, hacked dramatically by horse riders who descend on this small bunch of foolhardy families from a magical parting in the waters. They kill wantonly and vanish, perhaps into the waters whence they emerged, leaving blood and gore and a heap of bodies being pelted with furious rain. Milkha, who has run away from the killers, returns to see his entire family slain. The rain hasn't let up. Milkha slips on blood and slush. The rain forms small rivulets of blood and loose mud, and Milkha cries.

The scene, a perfect picture-postcard rendering of the mayhem of Partition, doesn't reveal the emotionally unhinging moments that were the loci of Partition. In fact, the scene is apt to  run with a tagline: Partition Makes Athletes. Of course, the seriousness of it doesn't make you believe that it is an Happydent ad, but the flatness and vapidity of it reduces it to just that. A Happydent version of the Partition.

And then Joshi's jingle, Ab tu bhaag Milkha (now you run, Milkha), takes over, and Milkha runs over hills and dales with a body that is chiselled to perfection. Mehra's visuals stun with the celebration of the body, but not the man. You lock your senses and mindlessly follow the story, a hodgepodge of filtered flashbacks and Bollywood-style romantic love. Carrying buckets of water, Milkha falls in love. (Buckets are potent symbols of Milkha's sheer guts; he fills buckets with his sweat after running in the broiling heat.)

Together, Milkha and his beloved sit at the edge of the old, British-built bridge connecting the eastern parts to the old city of Delhi, where, as in ad for some fancy fan, the girl's red dupatta goes flying into the serene Yamuna. No one, not even a soul, is on the bridge. Any intrusion, human or otherwise, will only obfuscate the gospel of love Mehra is trying to spread. Strange. Considering the bridge was the only link between the old city and its derelict suburbs like Shahdara where distressed refugees went in search of work from their ramshackle tenements.

Probably Mehra and Joshi want nothing to come between the paradisaical love between Milkha and his inamorata who, strangely, smiles like a Colgate ad, the worries of displacement discarded into the holy river, just like her unfurled dupatta, that flows calmly beneath their amorous frolicking.

Mehra and Joshi should have studied some books on the carve-up of India such as Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence, a searing study on how women suffered and were affected badly by the emotional upset of a sundered India. Even Manto's superb and sagacious portraits of Partition would have helped. This story is of course Milkha's, but the woman who stood by him, his sister, plays a significant role in forging his steel. Again, Mehra and Joshi reduce his hapless sister to a caricature of a woman who, living in a tent with her family members and Milkha, has to go through the humiliation of her rowdy husband's demands for raucous sex.

After the tight slap of displacement, dehumanising sex and utter subjection of women were common (and still are) in the patriarchal, feudal set of refugees who came from the other side of the line and Mehra and Joshi do well to draw our attention to this gross unjustness.

But they, sadly, can't suppress their ad genes for long and make even the sex, with all its guttural sounds, so cliched and puerile and abject that one wonders if they know cinema, like all arts, is a subtle medium. A slight hint or even an allusion is enough to convey the message. Ads, of course, have to be direct, and don't work by implication; their message shouts hard and clear from the visuals. Just like Mehra and Joshi's does.

Loudness, of course, remains the bane of Bollywood, but a biopic on as inspiring personality as Milkha should have given the duo of Mehra and Joshi some pause. It was a great opportunity for both to dispense with the cliches of Bollywood and script and film an idiom that, like Milkha, could have broken some, if not all, boundaries.

Not only have they failed miserably, but they have minified filmmaking to a level of coarseness where the message comes screaming at us from the edge of the bridges, sculpted bodies, fake rivalries, and from jingly lyrics.

-- Rakesh Bedi

Journey To Femininity

Let's start with the F trip of my life – my journey to femininity. It was in 2001, perhaps early 2002, when I was still a bachelor, living alone in Delhi.

It started one fine morning when I heard my brother yelling: Hey, Rishi has become a female! Female? Me? I was in the bath, getting ready to leave for Kerala after spending a couple of days in Mumbai. I could hear everyone going hysterics. There were five of them, all my siblings. What's wrong with these guys?

I checked myself in the mirror. My everything's in place. I changed and rushed out, triggering a fresh burst of laughter. Still in splits, Rajan handed me my train ticket. It read: "Lokmanyatilak T to Quilon Jn S10 24 SU F 29". That's my ticket. Lalchechi, a journalist in Mumbai, had taken it. She made me one year younger, but...

Lalchechi tried her best to look apologetic: "Rishi, I am really sorry, hee hee, it was just, hee hee, you know, hee hee hee..." She couldn't hold her breath anymore. "Rishichetta, why don't you go for a clean shave? Then you can get away as a woman," said Navan, the youngest one. By now I too couldn't control it. Madam Rishi!

My train was leaving in a couple of hours. I had to reach Thane from Borivili to board it. There was hardly any time to brood over my just-found femininity. So we rushed through our 'for the rail' and 'for the female' toasts and set off to Thane. At the station, there was not enough time to get the ticket corrected. So I boarded the train, assuring everyone that I would manage it.

Any way, I had my I-card and other documents. Only I'd be looking like a fool in front of all those people, which, according to my see-offers, was nothing new. Hmmm. Its hugs and kisses time yet again, then the waving...first eye to eye, then at their hands, then the station, a couple of days of fun...I'll miss them.

But then, it's home, sweet home, waiting for me at the other end of the train, not Delhi and work. I was happy. The world was beautiful. I went  to my seat and checked my bags to see what all had I left behind in Mumbai. Oh no, the Picasso pen I bought for my father was missing. It was OK, they would mail it, or my brother would carry it the next time he went home.

Now the female problem came back to me. Let the ticket checker come. After all, it's a clerical mistake, I thought. I leaned back on my seat. It was a side seat. I always liked it, the side seat, facing the front of the train.

My mind went back to the last couple of days as I stared blankly into the endless procession of trees and buildings under the afternoon sun. We hardly had any sleep the previous night. It was a binge. And it was too good. The best was Lalchechi rushing to the door to check her own address while ordering dinner... I slowly slipped into a nap.

It must be the morning's booze on top of the sleepless night, or the afternoon sun, the sound and commotion that always accompany ticket checkers in long-distance trains failed to wake me. He shook me up. As usual,  a crowd of unconfirmed ticket holders followed him, making him look like a local political leader going around with his group of followers.

There was no scope for any privacy. I told him about the mistake in my ticket. He took the ticket from me, had a look and told me it was not valid. "C'mon, sir, I've got enough documents to prove that I'm Rishi," I said.

"But I cannot let a man travel with a female's ticket. TICKET, TICKET." He moved on, my ticket in his hand, the crowd after him, busy and unmindful, checking and ticking tickets. I followed, now wide awake but eyes still trailing the mind.

 "Sir, but it's not a female's ticket. It's Rishi's ticket. Female is a silly, clerical mistake. C'mon, sir, there can't be any woman in the name of Rishi. You know that," I told him that much, between several interventions, perhaps over 10 minutes. "I know it's a mistake. But I've to follow the rules. That's my job... Madam, aapki ticket?"

 My God, what's wrong with this man? It's ridiculous. He knows it's a mistake and he can't do a thing about it! And rules? They are for checking frauds, not silly mistakes. "Sir, please, you have to help me," I'd started losing my temper. "I told you I can't do anything. You have to get down with me at Panvel," he won't slow down.

What he needs is one tight slap, MTV-style. I knew it. My head was what earth was 20,000 years ago--a boiling planet. My mouth was full of abuses. The world is now what Gotham City would be without Batman: corrupt, unjust, full of conspirators with a single-point agenda of making my life hell.

I shouldn't have had rum in the morning, I thought. The smell must be there. Any aggressive move would be termed "drunken misbehaviour". "Sir, please, this is the 150th year of Indian Railways. (Yes, it was early 2002.) And your ads say customer service is your focus," I make a last plea. It was there in the newspaper. "I have to follow the rules, I told you," he was determined. I could feel that it was all about money. But I never mastered the art of bribing, so it was out of question unless he initiated it.

But I was tired of chasing this son of a rulebook. He was a thin, frail man and I could well picture myself beating him up. But of course that would be the end of my trip. I was making all kinds of calculations...

What to do? If I get down, at best they'll reimburse the ticket fare. Travelling all the way back to Borivili with the two sacks of bags! And even if I managed it, I won't get a confirmed ticket for at least the next couple of days. And I just didn't want to cut short my stay in Kerala; no way! All I had was just one more  week of leave. So?

What if I say I'm a woman? That I went to Mumbai for a sex-change operation. That the moustache and beard will go only after a couple of weeks. That I'll charge him with sexual harassment if he continued to harass me. After all, I am a feminist sympathiser. Come to think of it, I may even have more feminine characteristics than masculine. Or would I be able to sit back and think like this in a critical situation like this?...

I was thinking away to femininity when the ticket checker returned to me. He offered me a berth in the Tatkal coach. But I had to shell out the full charge with some fine for travelling without ticket.

By now, I was positively feminine, if you consider safety-first approach a feminine characteristic. I went for it.

In case you call it frailty, forget your gender, you're masculine. I too was not fully converted into femininity, not yet. I couldn't let that son of a rulebook get away with it so easily. I wanted revenge. I vowed to take it up with the railways or approach the consumer court.

I kept my original ticket, the tatkal ticket, challan for ticket-less travel, everything safe and secure. I even had started composing the letter to the authorities with a copy to the minister.

But on the third day of my landing in Kerala I met with an accident and broke my leg. When one can't pee without somebody's help, one looks for support, not vengeance. So the ticket collector went out of mind and, constantly encouraged by my mother and having no way to run away from her, I started considering marriage – for the first time since my college girlfriend's wedding years ago.

A naughty thought is creeping into your head, huh? Well, go ahead, break his leg, be it your son or your brother who refuses to talk about marriage. Success guaranteed. You have the guy pinned down for at least three weeks and he just can't walk out and hide behind his friends in a bar.

My F trip hardly ever came to my mind until one fine day  I went to book tickets for a trip with my wife and kid. There was this man who returned to the counter after collecting his ticket – it had F against his name. He had to cancel the ticket and take a new one. Poor thing, missed the train to femininity!