Just to let readers know that I’m a bit swamped with work at the moment and therefore, blogging has taken a backseat. One of the perils of being a self-employed professional is that when it rains, it often pours! I am at the moment, inundated with projects and will be until say, the first week of June. See you all then!
Once upon a time, when Earth was very young, (almost a toddler, you could say), Moon was a lot closer than he is to her today. For you see, Earth and Moon were actually siblings who had been separated from each other when they went to the large fair of the Universe in its heyday. In the early days, they could still remember the time when they had been together, and Moon began a slow revolution around Earth so that he could always see his sister, as she moved around their mother, the Sun.Â
But time went by, and the memory of the early days grew faint. As Moon looked out at the vastness of the Universe, billions of light-years in every enticing direction, he resented his ties to his sister and even pretended to himself that the bond had been of her making. As the Sun’s shadow moved every hour of the day, and slivers of darkness covered one longitude at a time, he brooded over his insignificance in the larger scheme of things and wondered why he couldn’t be a planet himself. It was the resentment of all younger children, who know that however bright and beautiful they may be, they can never truly be first.Â
With every movement around his sister, he took a step further away, until, many years later, when Earth had grown up (and so had he), he was many millions of miles away from her. Over that unbridgeable gulf, he looked at her one day, and for no reason at all, the memories of his childhood came to him uninvited. The ties that he had snapped now seemed worthy and desirable, and his heart cried out in sorrow. By now, Earth’s heart had hardened and she would not hear his cries, but her children, the young oceans heard a kindred voice and could not help responding.Â
Every day they heard the desolate Moon’s call and answered with their tides, but the Earth hushed them up and ordered them to shut their ears. And that is why, to this day, the tides rise and fall every day, but Moon goes farther and farther away.Â
Last year, when I read Lotus’ review of The Road of Lost Innocence, just the review was enough to send shivers down my spine. I doubt I have the stomach for the entire book. The Road of Lost Innocence is a survivor’s account, the memoir of Somaly Mam who survived the brutality of the Cambodian sex industry and lived to help other girls caught in that hell. Closer home, it is common knowledge that many, many Nepali and Bangladeshi (as well as Indian) women find themselves sold into sexual slavery. What kind of world do we live in where girls as young as 10 are viewed as commodities to be used for a man’s pleasure?Â
Yesterday, I chanced upon a Polish/English movie, ‘Your Name is Justine’ that explores this subject using a focuslight on one young Polish woman’s ordeal as she is betrayed by her boyfriend and sold to a ruthless and brutal pimping gang in Germany. Mariola is held in captivity while her captors tell her that she is now “a piece”, and try to break her resistance through rape, beating and starvation.Â
I confess I didn’t actually watch the entire movie. I couldn’t. Our Bollywood movies typically present rape scenes almost as a parody of the real act, but here, the physical and mental pain was visible and terrifying. I switched back and forth between channels every two minutes, unable to bear continuous viewing. One can only imagine the unbearable nature of an experience, where even its shadow is so vile.Â
Mariola is now given a new name, Justine. She can no longer speak her own language but must now negotiate in English and German. The rest of the movie is about the compromises she must make and the desperate attempts to retain her sanity and her sense of self. As if in a dream, she reminds herself that her name is Mariola and that she comes from Poland.Â
The movie ends unsatisfyingly, without the theatrical revenge or justice that a Hindi movie would have offered; yet, it is probably closer to reality. What was shocking was how many clients refuse to help her, even when they clearly realise that she is not a prostitute of her own volition. I had no idea that such prostitution rings were even present in first world countries. One must credit the film-makers for exploring such a subject and doing it without any gratuitous violence or nudity for the sake of titillation. Anna Ciesiak, a first-time actor gives a fine performance as Mariola - while at times, she appears as if on auto-pilot, the brutality of the experience is one which could numb the senses of the victim - and she succeeds in giving us the impression of a woman whose identity itself is in danger of vanishing. Â
In the Indian context, clearly everyone is aware of the elephant in the room but the authorities are not willing to do anything about it, or atleast not do enough. While we have enough goons around to ‘keep women in line’ and get us to adhere to their version of Indianness, I wonder why such self-proclaimed defenders of Indian culture do not mind that there are hundreds of such women, being violated body and soul. Would prostitution flourish without the demand for it, fuelled by a culture of tacit acceptance, that ‘boys will be boys’?
More proof needed that education in this country isn’t really making a difference to antiquated mentalities that consider women as objects to be enjoyed? A 21 year old techie, obviously a highly educated person, has been awarded a novel punishment for harassing 2 girls in Hyderabad.Â
The court has sentenced him to sweep the premises of a government hospital everyday for a month. While his attendance there will be marked, I’m not sure if anyone will have the time to ensure that he actually does the work!
While I’m all for awarding lesser punishments to young people under the legal age (to reform rather than punish), I wonder if an adult should be let off so easily. Should he not face a stronger punishment? For those who think it is a ‘minor’ crime, it may be worthwhile recalling an incident that happened in Chennai many years ago - where a girl died when some goons on a motorcycle pulled her dupatta and tried to drag her. I’m not sure how that case ended.Â
One good thing is that atleast he is being taken to task, compared to the majority of harassment cases which get dropped even before they reach this stage. Certainly there will be a lot of shame attached to it, including at his workplace. The fear of having to face ridicule among one’s peers may cause some such roadside romeos to rethink their faux macho posturing, if more courts take swift action.Â
When I watch an Iranian movie (or atleast an Iranian movie of a certain kind, say one directed by Jafar Panahi or Majid Majidi), my heart is in my mouth. Not that these gently ruminative films are in the least scary, but I cannot help but fear that something very bad is about to happen. Even in a movie like the Children of Heaven, which is all innocence and centres around children, there is the shadow of sorrow lurking around. In a movie like The Circle, where things already begin on a sombre note, you know that something even worse is in store. Â
Which is why, when I began watching The Song of Sparrows, (Avaze gonjeshk-ha in the original), I found it hard to let go of my trepidation. Even though the movie is set in the beautiful rural surroundings of Iran and the camera captures it lovingly. The Song of Sparrows turned out to be a very interesting experience for the reason that although ‘bad things’ do happen in the course of the movie, the focus is not on them as transforming events. Instead, it dwells on, very subtly, on the changes that a person’s mind can go through and the effects on everyone around him or her.Â
Broadly, the plot is about Karim, a rural worker on an ostrich farm, who is fired and goes looking for work in Teheran instead. When the movie begins, his mind is set on earning enough to find a hearing-aid replacement for his daughter, Haniyeh. A resourceful and hard-working man, Karim soon finds success in Teheran and begins to earn more than what he’d ever expected. Not just money, he also gains access to many discarded items such as old doors, windows, frames and other odds and ends which he starts bringing back home.Â
As Karim’s storage dump grows larger and larger, Haniyeh’s hearing-aid seems to grow further and further away in his mind. I’m not going to give away the rest of the plot here, but one scene which I thought was amazing, both for the beauty with which it was shot and for the way it really captures the entire movie in that one shot -
Karim has acquired a blue door which his wife gives away to a neighbour. He rushes to the neighbour’s house and takes the door back. As he carries the door on his back across the fields, from above, the camera focuses on the door. Soon, all we can see is that rectangle of blue dwarfing the man beneath. While the man appears to be hauling the door, he is really bound to it, powerless under its bulk. Against the backdrop of the fields, the blue is more vital than him. And that tells us something about the kind of man Karim is becoming.Â
That is a perfect example of a scene which almost makes the rest of the movie superflous.Â
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