Apu’s World

The DVD of Love, Sex aur Dhokha has been lying around at home for some time, but it was only over this weekend that I got around to watching it. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (of Khosla ka Ghosla fame), LSD is actually three stories in one, with peripheral links to each other.

The first one is a mushy love story, the second an MMS sex scandal and the third, about the media’s voracious appetite for ’stings’. It is the second and third stories that really hold your attention; the first one is slow to heat up and I almost forwarded a little of the first 10-15 minutes. Yet, my mind keeps going back to it. (This post isn’t a movie review though.)

*Spoilers here, beware!*

When the love story of Rahul, aspiring director at a film institute and Shruti, the “Simran” of his film begins, it is hard not to think of this love story as more a paean to DDLJ than anything else. Cheesy like the film they are making, it is hard to imagine that Rahul and Shruti really love anything beyond the feeling of being in love.

And yet, given the conservative family Shruti comes from, there is no possibility of their dating or getting to know each other. Love must lead to an elopement and marriage almost immediately. Rahul’s blithe confidence that after marriage, the family will “come around”, is almost revolting to watch in its stupidity. The end, when it comes, is gruesome, even though nothing of this honour killing is really shown.

Just yesterday, the Supreme Court has issued a notice asking the Central Government (and a few states), why they are doing nothing to combat the recent spate of honour killings.

The thing about us Indians is that we pride ourselves on our superior ‘Indian values’; we lose no chance to deride Western societies for their (alleged) lack of affection, ‘family values’ and morality. Nowhere is this more evident than in our smug attitude to the upbringing of children. It is so common to hear people talking as though Indians are the only people that know how to bring up children well - everywhere else, children are neglected, spoilt, abused and grow up to have no love for their parents.

And yet, this is the country where a good chunk of people are all too ready to sacrifice their children in the name of honour, society, family name and blah blah. Honour killing is one extreme end of the spectrum, but the unwillingness to accept children’s choices and their happiness as a primary consideration exists in many other forms, ranging from emotional blackmail to being ‘cast out of the family’.

Gajar-ka-halwa aside, we need to stop kidding ourselves. I suppose we have good and bad parents like everywhere else, but no magic beans that qualify us as the best parents on earth.

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It’s very, very early yet, but have received pretty encouraging responses to Women’s Web. We’ve also managed to solve the problem with registration that some users had, so those of you who faced initial problems, please do try again now.

We have two new features up, on Financial Lessons from the 2008-09 recession and on Writing your resume after a break. Plus, there is an interview with Bhavna Chauhan, debutant author of ‘Where Girls Dare’, a novel around women in the Indian army. The first of our bloggers (apart from me), chimed in with a post on mother-daughter bonding.

I’m trying to set up a feeds link here so that it automatically gets updated, but right now, there seems to be some problem with feeds. I’m also trying to figure out how best to use social media to get the site to a larger audience. Women’s Web is on twitter, and that is being regularly updated, but I haven’t done much beyond that. Suggestions from savvy folks are welcome!

Update: We have a Facebook group for Women’s Web now. Sign up!

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All I knew was that this non-profit group called MARAA was organising some sort of performance on gender and sexuality. A friend told me about it and even offered to pick me up. Work lay unfinished on my table, but what the hell, I decided, I could always catch up later. And that’s how we found ourselves at Jagaa, which calls itself “a community space created to serve the arts, technology and social change communities in Bangalore.” We climbed up two flights of metal staircases to find a fairly large group of people, sitting, standing, leaning on the banisters – and listening attentively to the performers – a group of people variously called hijras, transvestites, transgenders or Aravanis (The Indian concept of third gender is somewhat different from Western conceptualizations – read here).

The rest, over at Ultraviolet… please read, for an account of an interesting and thought provoking performance.

Update: I forgot this link by Bombay Dosti, which I had meant to add - on the shaming of a sex worker in Bangalore, by a TV channel engaging in a so-called sting operation. Outrageous and ridiculous, besides showing up just how objective our media is.

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Do parents always have the best interests of their children at heart? What then, of the horror stories one hears of child abuse (sexual abuse, violence, neglect etc) at home? Is this always the result of pure evil or can the desire to do good itself play out in twisted ways when it is backed up by fanatical or other screwed up ideologies?

‘The Apple’ (’Sib’ in the original Farsi) is an Iranian movie based on the real life story of two young girls who were locked up by their parents and never allowed to venture out of the house at all. In the movie, the girls are 12 by the time concerned neighbours complain and a social worker arrives to help the children, who are found filthy and uneducated, unaware of how to interact with anyone.

One of the things about movies with children in them is that regardless of the movie itself, the children are often a pleasure to watch. I’m not talking about the cutesy, precocious children of most Indian movies until recently; even in movies where the children’s world is shown as far from an idyllic one (as in ‘Taare Zameen Par’) - the children are very likeable. And this is one of the hardest things about ‘The Apple.’ It refuses to allow us to feel good somehow by showing the two girls as little birds soaring in the sun as soon as their cage is opened.

Instead, the movie is uncompromising. Even as the girls enjoy their new found freedom, there is no question that they have been deeply damaged by their incarceration. They run awkwardly, like a two year old child out on the road. They don’t know what a friend is. When two other girls on the road invite them to play and teach them hopskotch, they enjoy playing with them and yet, think nothing of hitting them with apples. It is not so much that they have become antisocial. They are simply unable to understand what being sociable entails. They cannot understand that things they want need to be paid for. At the most basic level, they cannot even talk in any manner that is understandable to others.

On watching these girls, the heart and mind are pulled in two directions. One knows that these are the victims of horrific abuse and as such, deserve every kind feeling. Yet, it is not easy to like them. If anything, they are highly irritating and the director (Samira Makhmalbaf, who made the movie when she was 18) makes no effort to make them likeable. There is happiness, but there is no sense that this is a problem easily resolved.

On the other side is a blind mother (who is curiously uninvolved most of the time) and the father who claims to love the children very much (and is indeed somewhat demonstrative) but justifies the incarceration on the grounds that the mother is blind and therefore he needs to shield the girls from harm that could occur if they were to go out. So entrenched is this belief that in his mind, it is the neighbours who are villainous and destroying his ‘family honour’. While agreeing with the social worker that imprisoning the children is bad for them, he simultaneously justifies it and it is evident to the audience that deep down, he is absolutely convinced of his rightness.

The film doesn’t make any explicit judgements, and in fact, constantly keeps the viewer’s sympathies shifting, unlike most movies where we would be led to cheer unreservedly for the underdog. It is deeply thought provoking and worth a watch simply to understand how abuse can arise not just from evil, but even from ordinary human beings with notions of good, gone awry.

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