‘It didn’t look like you were the type to see a Tamil film’

Having missed the screening of Ini Avan at the EU Film Festival last month, D and I were quite pleased to see that it was being screened at Savoy. So we set aside our Sunday (23rd) to catch the 1.30 screening at Savoy, Wellawatte. Responsibly, I checked the showtimes and D and I made it to the cinema at a respectable 1.15.

Upon requesting tickets from the counter (in Sinhala, so there was no question of this being a language-related misunderstanding), we are told that the film (Ini Avan- we specified a few times) has a special screening time of 3.00pm and that we would have to come back. I ask them in turn, why they can’t update the website to that effect and they say that the information conflicts with the other screening times- which, if of course untrue since each film/EAP theatre has a dedicated page. Fine we say, and ask to buy tickets now. They refuse to sell, saying that ticket sales only open at 2.00pm. Fine, we’ll be back before 3.00pm.

So after mulling around Colombo for an hour and a half, D and I return with A in tow. The three of us head to the counter inquiring for tickets and the same seller has the audacity to (very rudely) laugh at us and say ‘oh it’s actually at 4.15′.

Of course, I lose my cool. I explain to him that when I very clearly inquired (regarding the film and the website times) he insisted that the screening was at 3.00pm, when he could have easily just sold us tickets for the 1.30 that we originally asked for. There’s not paying attention and then there’s making a sheer mockery out of your customers- especially given that they refused to sell us tickets for the 3.00pm screening saying it was too early.

So I ask, do you really think people have nothing better to do than to keep coming back every couple of hours to the cinema according to the whimsy of the sales staff? Then they laugh at us and say,

‘Well I asked you to come back for the 3.0opm Hobbit screening since it didn’t look like you were the type to see a Tamil film’

Because, your appearance as a visibly ethnic stereotype matters when the cinema staff decide for you what film you should be seeing and what they sell you tickets for. Especially when you dare show up to see a Tamil film without making your best effort to highlight your ethnicity as a qualifier to watch a film in your mother tongue.

A sharply asserts in Tamil, that she is indeed Tamil and asks what he meant by that.

They find it acceptable to laugh at us in response, a sneering sort of laugh that has everything to do with the fact that we are women and they somehow are making a joke of us. They won’t event let us buy tickets for the 4.15- once again apparently, it is too early. The manager is apathetic and completely unhelpful, laughing along with his clever salespeople.

Then they say (and they are finding this hilarious) ‘Well you could always go to Concord (in Dehiwela) it will be 4.15 by the time you get there.’ Snigger.

They clearly don’t want us to 1. make a scene 2. see this film.

We leave to Concord and get there by 4.00. What do you know, they got that wrong too (or lied). The film started at 3.00.

That was 4 hours of our afternoon wasted, out of what I can only interpret as some form of bad joke, deliberate misinformation and absolute disrespect to customers coupled with some sort of negative twist of ethnic and gendered differentiation. I might be reading too much into this, but the unapologetic and snide attitudes of those employed at Savoy, doesn’t have me in a particularly forgiving mood.

—

Utterly appalling customer service by the Savoy staff aside (rest assured, I will never return to Savoy), Sunday’s incident highlights a greater quandary.

I would like to inquire how many of us make a conscious choice to dress Tamil or Sinhala everyday? Should A be embracing an ethnic stereotype of sari, pottu, flowers in her hair finery? Should I be highlighting my mixed-heritage with some form of indication to both to satisfy judgment on what film I am ethnically and linguistically qualified to see? If you don’t speak English/Sinhala, does that mean you will be redirected to seeing a film in your own language because you don’t look the type of person who can watch an English/Sinhala film? Would the situation have been different if we were three men who perhaps would not have taken the mockery lightly?

Nascent Tamil language cinema in this country is still at a fledgling stage and I encourage you all to support local film making, especially when artists are attempting to draw attention to extremely important social issues that require greater attention. The predicament of ex-combatants in Mullaitivu, which is addressed by Ini Avan is one of particular relevance to present day Sri Lanka, being at the stem of manifold social integration issues ranging from attempts at illegal migration to social exclusion and economic marginalisation.

Post 2009,  amidst all the problems and challenges that remain conveniently undiscussed, we can only hope to look forward and do our part in building a lasting foundation for reconciliation and integration.

However, when you go into a cinema and someone is still making a bluntly unfounded judgment call about your ethnicity and its relevance to what films you may want to see, one must really wonder if any progress has been made, and deliberate how much further we have left to go in changing people’s petty attitudes towards differences.

A Year In Film

Having previously posted my literary picks for 2012, it is necessary that my year is charted in film.  As I haven’t seen some of the big tickets for this year including Lincoln, The Hobbit and The Life of Pi, consider this a list of personal picks and likely not reflective of the general filmic landscape of 2012 or any measure of quality (save for personal recommendation) for that matter. Also some of these maybe from 2011, which I only got around to seeing this year.

1) The Dark Knight Rises - Pièce de résistance ending to Nolan’s masterful Batman trilogy. I don’t think I blinked once during the film, so need I say more really? Considering international waters were crossed to catch this on imax, consider it necessary viewing. A far better review here.

2) The Descendants - An unexpected and pleasant surprise. You start watching for George Clooney and you tumble into quite a sweet and thoughtful deliberation of family, heritage and infidelity. Wonderful.

3) The Perks of Being a Wallflower – So much love for this film and excellent, excellent soundtrack. Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller and Emma Watson (who is taking her post-Potter roles with panache and will no doubt have an exciting film future ahead) were equally brilliant. Very highly recommended.

4) My Week With Marilyn – Exceptional performance by Michelle Williams and Eddie Redmayne (swoon) in an evocative portrayal of the late great Marilyn Monroe, and her brief relationship with an eager young film student Colin Clark, during the making of The Prince and The Showgirl.

5) Skyfall - I don’t care what you think, I absolutely loved this. More Bond, Daniel Craig!

6) The Amazing Spiderman – This one’s for you Andrew Garfield.

7) The Iron Lady - Meryl Streep for Queen of the World! Despite her prickly reputation, this film is a sensitive biopic of Maggie Thatcher through the lens of memory, aging and her relationships to her family, as she dwells on her glory days as Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

8) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Eleven year old Oskar’s modern-day quest in search of a lock that fits a mysterious key, woven into loss, 9/11, World War II and the holocaust. Heart-rending.

9) Melancholia – An intriguing take on the end-times. Visually, spectacular.

10) Drive – Ryan Gosling. That will be all.

11) The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – This was another pleasant surprise. Unconventional and endearing premise, featuring a positively stellar cast of British greats. Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith- perhaps not so unexpected.

12) 50/50 – Another gem. Despite my irrational dislike for Seth Rogen, this was excellent. Also Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Yes.

13) The Artist – Can’t say anything about this nostalgic piece that hasn’t been said before- a must watch.

14) Dark Shadows- A fabulous, beautifully-rendered ode to cheesy 70s horror- absolute adoration. Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green and a smart-mouthed Chloe Moretz in a winning kitschtastic creepfest.

15) Midnight in Paris- So. much. love. Paris in the 1920s, the lives of its literary expatriates, time-travel, Woody Allen on form, the ever so beautiful Marion Cotillard. Magic.

16)  The Art of Getting By – Because everybody loves (read: I LOVE) an endearing coming of age story.

* Honourable mentions to The Hunger Games (because Jennifer Lawrence is beautiful and the film was a vast improvement on the book) and Looper (because I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Nations for Sale: How Much Is that Cheap Labour in the Window?

The North-South divide possesses powerful signification within labour structures, creating diminishing hierarchies and reshaping inequality on a tilted global scale.The factory fire in Bangladesh and its aftermath highlights a real predicament caused by the inequalities perpetuated by globalisation.

Cross over to The Platform Blog for my thoughts.

 

 

“I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay”

Having covered a dozen picks on my A Year in Books post earlier this week, a #13, my favourite book of the year, was promised.

Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil’s debut novel was magical, moving and provocative. and I can’t rave enough about how much I loved this novel.

“Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency? The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it. He receives its scent through his eyes. Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms. He enjoys flowers but he worships trees. He wants to be the banyan’s slave. He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth. He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves. When he’s hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango. His ambition is the opposite of ambition. Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time. He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live”

The story opens in the 1970s, in Rashid’s Opium House on Shuklaji Street Mumbai. It reads like a gritty yet languorous hallucination that charts a darkly exotic world suspended in a series of enthralling vignettes. Thayil delves into the existence of his cast of antagonists contemplating life in a grey underground of smokey opium dens and makeshift brothels in a transitioning Mumbai, as heroin and a serial killer begin to entice and haunt the city’s depraved.

The narrator Dom,  a returnee from New York traces his opium-addled poet’s fingers along Mumbai’s free fall into chaos and  his own, into a drug habit. Dimple, a beautiful and inquiring hijra, who readies the pipes. Grappling with her past, her addiction, the virtue and vice of her sex, life as a prostitute and her relationships to those who inhabit these worlds, Dimple is a graceful and contemplative presence. Rashid, the owner of the khana- a husband, father, and friend to his hijrasi mistress. Francis Xavier the devilish painter. Mr. Ching (whose interlude in the novel takes the reader on an intriguing adventure to Communist China), the owner of the magic pipes.

Thayil dexterously weaves together Mumbai, the lives, insights and addictions of this cast of miscreants. 

The artfully disjointed, lyrical narrative is truly literary juju.

Read this.

A Year in Books

I’ve been good about reading this year. Kicking off with perhaps a little too much ambition and a little bit of failing (not sure why I thought 100 books was a possibility alongside full-time employment), I settled on a little task of reading 60 books.

Rambles aside, I’ve picked 12 of the best- in no particular order (blurbs on Goodreads) which are well worth a read, no matter what your interests are.

1) The Lost Flamingos of Bombay by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

2) Home Boy by H.M. Naqvi

3) Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

4) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

5) Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

6) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

7) The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

8) The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

9) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

10) I Am An Executioner by Rajesh Parameshwaran

11) The Fall by Albert Camus

12) The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Happy reading.

Since I don’t like even numbers, await a post dedicated to lucky #13, my favourite book of the year.

Thuppaki (The Gun) : Why You Shouldn’t Mess with India

In an effort to be less predictable and acquire a bit of street cred, the name of social anthropology, I found myself in Cinecity, Maradana (call me a newbie and make what you will of this, but a cinema atmosphere unlike anything I’ve previously encountered. We’re talking whoops, whistles, claps and cheers after every and I mean every scene of arguable significance- including a close-up of the hero’s biceps- i.e. every few minutes).

I am a relative stranger to Tamil cinema, its gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides-dishoom-dishoom-aesthetic occupying an entirely ignored periphery of my cinematic interests.

Thuppaki (The Gun) is essentially an action flick centered on a terror plot to destroy Mumbai, with a sub-plot of modern Indian romance and marriage (aptly summarised in the most inventive lyrics I have encountered: ‘(Girl) are you an Apple product?’ and the sage advice: looks fade, so marry a guy who makes 200,000 a month, even if he looks like a toad).

A young Tamil, Indian army officer named Jagdish (emphasis on Indian Army in all it’s multi-coloured, multi-ethnic, multi-religious badass, song and dance glory) returns to his family in Mumbai on vacation, where his parents and sisters take him straight from the train station to the home of a potential bride, Nisha. Jagdish discards Nisha assuming that she is an old-fashioned girl (meaning demure, sari-clad and neck tattoo concealed by chaste braid). He later finds out that she’s a father-slapping, short skirt wearing, red-wine drinking experimental smoker who plays every sport imaginable aside from being a pro boxer, which inevitably ends up in an irrational and comedic arranged marriage  triangle (cue song: ‘Why does my heart slide on Antarctic ice? Are you a penguin? Are you a dolphin?’) and ultimately undying love, as is usually the case. Easy peasy.

The main storyline revolves around a terrorist plot, by an Islamist terrorist group (trendy) with vague (completely unexplained) motivations to blow things up and create chaos in Mumbai.

Fabulously outlandish plot. Gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides (More progressive song lyrics: ‘I ran a search on google and found no one crazier than him’)-dishoom-dishoom-with Matrix-style slow-mo fight scenes, expert assassinations and explosions at sea. A ‘cold-blooded murderer’ of a hero who ‘extensively tortures’ the baddies (chopped off fingers, forced suicides- the works) and can single-handedly take out an entire armed terrorist cell and rescue five girls (one of them on the knife’s edge of a Youtube execution) with the help of a retired police dog and one gun.

What’s not to like, right? Right.

Contrived Portrayal of Diversity:

Representing ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural diversity hand in hand with sexuality, stereotyping, typecasting are hot topics within the entertainment industry, where films and largely (American) television shows are being actively analysed and critiqued for their mono-everything casts.

I’m all for diversity, but Thuppaki is so consciously (and consequently unnaturally) diverse.

The Indian army, a central symbol of strongman virtue (including apparently a no-strings-attached license to torture and kill at the whimsy of individual operatives) is composed of all varieties of Indians imaginable, to the point of laboured. The last scene of the film, where the hero’s army train departs to Kashmir, the Muslims (identifiable by skullcaps, beards, covered heads- all typical expectations fulfilled) stand out on the platform (token, human white flags to all the Muslims they offended in the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of the film by saying, HEY the Indian Army adores Muslims, they are our loyal cold-blooded, torturing highly-trained assassins, and they are fighting for our consciously-portrayed-as-diverse-and-united-India against extremist Muslims with Jihadist tendencies. Yes.)  A major plot point in the film also revolves around a wardrobe revelation, the coat and tie attire typical to the Christian wedding (diversity for the win?) that helps the terrorists identify the Indian army assassins, who cannot be identified but the fact that they were in suits is common knowledge and where do people wear suits to? Naturally, Christian weddings- get me a list of all the Christian weddings in Mumbai (population a gazillion) so that I can identify and avenge with speedy success.

Extensive Torture? No big deal:

I may have been appalled by the casual and sometimes comedic tone the representation of torture was dealt with in Thuppaki. Jagdish apprehends Terrorist #1, beats him up, chops off his fingers, locks him up in his closet (yes, right behind those dress shirts) and shoots him?  Apparently this is completely unacceptable behaviour from a highly-trained Indian Army intelligence type, who will have to answer to no one about his public killing spree. This and the assassination of people in malls, cinemas, boats etc., more torture, using one’s sister as bait to annihilate terrorist cell, etc. You know, the usual.

It is true that films sometimes cast things in black and white, the existential questions and metaphysics puzzles of the grey an irksome inconvenience to the whooping-clapping-whistling masses. But how okay is such light-hearted portrayal of torture? Are we saying we will die and kill for our countries, the greater good of an artificial filmic celebration of diversity?

Perhaps it is a warning of geopolitical significance, You Shouldn’t Mess with New India. Especially not the Indian Army- they will shoot you right between the eyes, if they’re not locking you up in a closet and torturing you first.

Have you seen Thuppaaki? Thoughts?

The Malevolent Reincarnation of Buddhism

‘Social markers within neoliberal political economies, even those which demarcate spiritual commitments, cannot be ignored. Where religious and nationalist extremism lurks as a many-headed monster, is Buddhism’s militant reincarnation really unexpected?’

Wee bit late on updating this, but cross over to The Platform Blog for thoughts on ‘The Malevolent Reincarnation of Buddhism’