See you at the movies!

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 06 Mar 2010 12:20:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 06 Mar 2010 12:46:17 AM IST

On Monday morning (our time), the Americans will present awards to their movie industry. However, since we are immersed in Advaita Vedanta, to us the world is like a movie. Or rather, the world is like several movies, some of which overlap, some of which are out of focus and some of which are missing a few reels. In which case, it makes sense to give out our own Oscars. So without much further ado, here are my winners for the Academy Awards.

Best Actor — Pakistan Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Suddenly the guy acts as if his balls have turned into cannonballs. “We’re India-centric,” he says. Kashmir will be settled on his terms. India has to vacate Afghanistan. He wants, as magician P C Sorcar used to call it, Water-of-India. And he privately refers to our Army Chief as Disco Kapoor. Somebody please remind him that his Army has never won a war in 60+ years; that the only time it had an upper hand was when it attacked its own citizens in East Bengal (which promptly became an independent country); that the Kashmiris did not rally around his Army in 1965, and when the Kashmiris were waiting for it to come in 1990 and help liberate them, the Army let them down; and that the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s was because of the pesky mujahideen, and the ISI played only a logistical role. Now they talk as if they’ll wipe out the Taliban (the Pakistan one, not the strategically important Afghan one). The Americans should look at the Pakistan Army’s track-record before being lulled into believing their troops will be on their way home in 2011. General Kayani must think that US stands for You Suckers.

Best Actress — Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao. You were probably expecting someone like Congress president Sonia Gandhi, but frankly she appears to be making the right moves at the moment; if the Women’s Reservation Bill goes through as looks likely, it will be a singular achievement that will awe the rest of the planet. Women opposition politicians have been keeping a low profile. Railways minister Mamata Banerjee almost took this award when, during her interminably long and incomprehensible speech in Parliament she shrieked: “I cannot satisfy all of you! Do you want accident?” I would have nominated Tamil Nadu Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi, but that would be like Hollywood awarding someone from the San Fernando Valley. So it has to be Nirupama, who has undertaken a Herculean effort of keeping the bilateral dialogue going even if everyone is playing for time, knowing nothing substantive will happen. This means suffering one high-level meeting after another, repudiating shoot-from-the-hip statements by the ventriloquist’s dummy also known as her Pakistani counterpart, and generally smiling throughout. Her acting prowess is tested most when in the company of her predecessor (and now national security advisor) Shiv Shankar Menon.

Best Special Effects — Sachin Tendulkar hitting the first ever ODI double century. There were contenders like Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar who made food-grain stocks disappear and reappear, causing terrible food inflation and making life difficult for Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee; Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray who made cine mega-star Shah Rukh Khan disappear and reappear just before his film released; a Politician-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named who made votes appear out of thin air, enabling Union home minister P Chidambaram to win his Lok Sabha election (and then berate intellectuals for seeing all sides of the Maoist issue); and Chidambaram himself, for destroying the Congress in Andhra Pradesh with his initial shoot-from-the-hip comments about Telangana, which has pushed the issue beyond the point-of-no-return. But the award must go to Sachin. He’s been maligned as playing only for personal records, but all that was silenced when Sachin did what he did when he scored 200 not out: he attained the sublime. It was like going to Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. It wasn’t the first time Sachin astounded us and I suspect it won’t be the last.

Best Screenplay by the Chinese Communist Party, for their step-by-step ascent to world supremacy. Yes, the screenplay is a bit weak in parts: their economic story will soon hit severe speed-breakers with the real estate bubble about to burst soon (and that will be Dubai-times-1,000, say economists) and an over-capacity in manufacturing with no place to allocate investment in an economy which has grown mostly due to investment. Yet even if a Chinese economic downturn causes a world economic jolt or downturn, you have to suspect that China is still well-placed vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Maybe their military spending is way, way behind the US; maybe their technical and scientific prowess is more than way, way behind America’s. But still, give the Chinese credit: they plan for the long term and that’s where you need a screenplay. It may not be a great screenplay, but over the next few decades, it will do.

Best Film — The Mossad hit in Dubai on Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. This assassination of the senior Hamas military commander by Israeli spies was to my mind reminiscent of the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds (which, of course, I loved). It’s a film-lover’s film, QT’s revenge on Sergio Leone et al, who brought Europe to the Western (Basterds brought the Western to Europe); it’s a guy film, filled with the fetishism of Nazi Germany and blade-wielding American sadists; it’s a post-modernist critic’s film, in which the audience is killed off at the end (burnt alive, shot, and stampeded, no less). The Mossad hit was admittedly a bit less geeky: a 20-man team of cold professionals which used succinylcholine (which not only induces cardiac arrest but also degenerates fast, leaving almost no trace). The assassins immediately fled Dubai, leaving for the Dubai police nothing more than a bunch of Western passports. It was as if the assassins were thumbing their noses at the Europeans: a very Quentin Tarantino touch. This kind of operation obviously does nothing to advance peace, though media reports said that Israeli enrolment in its security services skyrocketed after the assassination became public knowledge. And this kind of operation makes Indian intelligence agencies look, well, like lazy traffic cops; imagine the political support in this country were the government to do a “snatch” on Pakistan-based Hafiz Saeed. The RAW would become more popular than Infosys. We’d have our own Inglourious Basterds.

As you can tell from the list, it hasn’t really been a hot year for films. My feeling is that once the Bihar elections take place, and the parties start preparing for polls in West Bengal and TN, we’ll have a lot more action, drama, suspense and post-poll romance to choose from. See you at the movies!.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai