The guard outside the Gordon House Hotel in Colaba hated my face. I don’t think he’d even seen it. The way most of us casually black out the eyes of a beggar that knocks on our tinted car-windows, this guard had first looked away, then scowled, mumbled something for a bit, still ignoring the four of us entirely unworthy of even his inattention.

We were all men, single; so obviously, molesters and rapists; outside the main gate of his posh discotheque; dressed in our Saturday night best. It appeared we could afford his hospitality. He didn’t seem interested. Dogs and stags aren’t allowed. Suddenly, we were.

Galloping mindlessly across Mumbai’s tourist district, we’d left behind our only legitimate passports to status and nightlife: the four women friends with us. They caught up eventually. The guard welcomed us in this time. I don’t think he said sorry. He needn’t have. I didn’t blame him. Evenings are too precious to let egos get in the way.

The gent outside Tito’s, with eight people inside on a Monday night, in the dead monsoon season, turned out to be a whole lot ruder. I heard him whisper under his breath some terrible things about the anatomy of our mothers and sisters. Not the sorts to pick a brawl still, we suffered the humiliation, gently explained that we in fact did have women friends at the bar. And then we left. Quietly. This is common sufferance in Delhi. We were in Goa, for God’s sake.

Being a man, with other men, in India’s semi-urban nocturnal jungle is to remain a gross, sometimes disgraced, social outcaste, suffering from a strange tropical disease, single-itis, for lack of a better name. These Dalits of nightlife don’t deserve their dance, with their drink, even if they could pay twice for the same simple pleasures.

You know something’s warped when watering holes that serve loud hard rock for music, still no one’s idea of a romantic date, remain officially open to couples only. Save if you were a regular. So they let me into Mumbai’s good ol’ Ghetto the other night. I breathed a sigh of relief. We were five men, one woman. You can’t form political parties with right permutations each time you go out. The said ratio didn’t work at the next lounge, like it won’t at most clubs. Tough luck, I guess. And no, there isn’t such a thing as “gay couples”. So, smart try.

It’s the sort of sexual discrimination few would take seriously. Fewer still will care about. No one I know will fight for. Suspicions are hard to erase. Some terrorists give all men a bad name. This is true for the average, Indian non-molester type man.

He stopped hitting on Indian women at some point. She instantly assumed him to be sleazy anyway. He had reputation to protect. Given such poor practice with making conversations with the unknown of the opposite gender, his skills got considerably worse. When he does try his luck now, once in a while, the possible openers get odder still: “You smell really nice….” Creepy! She looks away. He goes back to his drink.

The times you must hang out with other men, just men, is when you’re at a quasi-gay joint celebrating old boys’ reunion of a frustrated boarding school. There are mostly men around at places, which allow men. The topic of conversation is the woman still. This is terrible.

Species single, male, and Indian could consider themselves getting officially quarantined. It would help their cause. Female companionship is a mirage. Male company gets boring. Most prefer to get married instead, whether they’d like to or not. Their parents help them hook up, finally. Someone should. It’s hard to hold out beyond the late 20s. Arranged marriage isn’t always a matter of conservatism or choice. It is often an urban necessity. Suddenly, being single gets even tougher when everyone else around is already married. And there, those platonic female passports to an acceptable nightlife are gone too.

It may be fair to suggest that you can be happily single, in much the same ways as you can be happily married, or happily dating: each being empirically impossible. The occasional woes of single men, to me, however seem diametrically opposite to those of the single women I meet. Except, when they discuss the opposite sex, which is when they talk the same language.

Both on separate tables insist that a man or woman who is straight, smart, attractive, intelligent, interesting, funny and yet “available” is an extinct specie fit to hang at museums. Maybe, because, the two tables have never merged with each other’s: they’ve never really met. After school and college, where will they: at work? That’s where many do, it appears -unless you’re the supposedly shy sort, who slimily stares at objects of desire, from over the cubicle, under the staircase, when not stalking on Facebook. New to sharing workspace with women, the traditional Indian man can barely get himself to open his hesitant mouth before a foaming, female form. What comes out, when he does part his lips, bears promise of a sexual harassment case. He’s better off tongue-tied, quietly fantasizing.

The less shady ones – fat, fugly, tall, talkative, short – get to demonstrate their actual worth at work. This is a level playing field. Women get attracted to the relatively smart. The guy has something to prove. Bosses should be glad. Late hours aren’t a problem. Attendance goes up. Company’s productivity rises.

Sure, an office intern can shake the whole White House. The hot dimwit secretary can make the male CEO dance on his knees. Attraction demands no prior appointment. This may be unfair on the nerdy, pimply man who must work harder to command the same attention from his male superior. But nature tends to balance this out in the long run.

That rookie biz-school grad, when he turns bald and old, and if he is on top of his boardroom game, will be considered sexually attractive still. While he’s younger, freer, funnier, he stands a fair chance as well. Call centres and movie industry merely get a bad name. All Indian offices with reasonable sex ratios, being 1:10, if you peer harder, I reckon, will look like rocking dating sites, spiced up with secret romances, rebounds, heartburns, and heartbreaks: pay closer attention to the HR department.

Upping the gender ratio could yet reflect favourably on corporate balance sheets. Mixing hormones with business may be a terrible idea, I know, but what to do, where else to go.

At a house party of drunks, where the inevitable penis blocking and fencing match is about to start between 20 single Indian men over the only woman who decided to stay back until late? Maybe not.

At a discotheque? Yes. That would be an ideal place for the lonely soul, seeking a happy ending: a night of casual, naughty nirvana. It’s a large, dimly lit psychedelic dome singularly structured around eyeing men and women, since there’s precious little they can see of each other, through their beer goggles, under a shiny disco-ball. Loud music takes away the awkward discomforts of acquaintanceship. Burden of conversation safely lies in the lyrics of the songs. Akon sings, “I wanna love you.” Snoop Dogg adds, “I wanna fuck you.” Bodies move to booty calls. Eyes meet. The point’s made. Nobody need ask, your place, or mine. Maybe that’s there in the song words as well. Deal’s struck. Booze is expensive. Night’s young. So are you.

But then if you’re single, male, and around others with the same affliction, you were just dreaming right now. They won’t allow you into a nightclub. It’s for couples only. Despite weightier measures of time, the two people entering have already met; so have already dated, drank, danced, and done all old-world things invented to break the ice since the Internet. Then perhaps, they’re not single anymore. Social segregation is a vicious circle. Having a girlfriend exponentially increases your chances at finding another than being single does.

I once co-ran an anonymous daily relationship column in a popular English newspaper in Mumbai. Besides jigsaw puzzles about cousins sleeping with their daughters, who were in turn making love to both the dad and the aunt, practically every genuine question I’d get from a lost male soul would go: “I like this girl. What do I do?” Become her friend, I’d advise. “How?” Get to know her friend. “How?” You know what? I don’t know.

A veteran tri-sexual acquaintance (the sort who serially tries for sex as his natural right) tells me he’s had it now. It is a hard life, unless you’re a rock-star or a Bollywood hero, I suppose. He says he’d rather start a political front for single men. There’d be enough to support his cause, he jokes. I don’t agree.

Nobody would openly join a group, unfairly or fairly, presumed to comprise a bunch of cash-strapped, unstable varieties who walk around being named single because, it is thought, they ought to be: no woman could stand the son of a gun anyway. Even women are attracted more towards men who’re already hitched. There’s mystique in the unattainable. Singles’ nights inevitably fail. “Deserters, all these people,” the fellow frowns to me. You’d be the first one looking to desert your own group, I tell him. He agrees.

The Game, a celebrated Bible for single men that scientifically tutors an ‘average frustrated chump’ to become a ‘pick-up artiste’ almost overnight, seducing strangers at bars, pubs and discotheques remains yet another American dream. You can tell why it could never work in India. Women have panned the bestseller in the west for its overt male chauvinism. The premise is entirely sexist, yes. But the book’s author Neil Strauss makes a significant point there that should please the average female reader – that there are no ugly women, only lazy ones.

Everybody loves the single woman. The world donates her affection, attention, drinks, dinner, coffee, couch, conversations, tags, hash-tags, friend-requests, re-tweets, roses on Rose Day, proposals on Propose Day, self-respect on Valentine’s Day… She gifts them hope. Nobody loves a single man; not even the single man himself; least of all, the bouncer outside the club.

Follow the writer on twitter@mayankw14.

Polemic is the sweet prerogative of youth. If you’re not a polemicist at 21, you probably don’t have a heart. If you’re not more casual, half cynical by 32, you probably don’t have a head. Practically every Indian male grows up in India with his own unique viewpoint on Kashmir, cricket and Katrina Kaif (okay, the last one merely suited the alliteration: it could be Madhubala, Madhuri or Priyanka Chopra, depending on when you were growing up).

The year was 2000. Kashmir was still by and large a settled issue in the minds of the urban middle-class young. It’s simple enough to solve world’s problems when the arena’s an air-conditioned seminar room and the audience a bunch of students, supposedly trying to get an education, given to idle chats in the evenings.

The time was right, the setting and audience, perfect. I began vomiting my thoughts, “There is more to a community than a commonly accepted illusion of who they consider God. ‘Two majority religions, hence two separate nations’ was the founding principle of Pakistan alone. There was more to a uniquely secular Kashmir, in its moderate vision of Islam, a multi-religious and cultural heritage, and its complex, nearly 500-year-old history of different colonisers, to term it an Islamic state — merely for its Muslim-majority population. In fact Kashmiri Muslims had died fighting against Pakistanis and their surrogates who wished to free them in a supposedly holy war after Partition,” yeah, I’d just started.

“Sheikh Abdullah, the state’s most popular pre- and post-independence leader, or the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, had mentioned many times over, ‘He had a religion in common with Jinnah, but a dream in common with Nehru,’” I went on.

“The princely state Kashmir’s independent status, until 1947, was itself a generous gift from the British to subservient Hindu rulers of Jammu. Dogra kings had paid a paltry Rs 75 lakh for the entire real estate and the setting sun in 1846. Was there a referendum even today, the choice before Kashmir would have to be between a democratic India, and a Pakistan, perennially in a state of emergency. Division of India had never left any scope for the freedom of princely states,” I blabbered more.

“Pakistan’s open support to militants in the Valley seemed neither philanthropy nor a response to Kashmiris’ demand for Azadi. The logic was existential: If ‘Muslim’ Kashmir could prosper in secular India, there could be no better argument left against the theory and creation of Pakistan itself…” I could have gone on. There was nothing factually incorrect about my argument. But a gentle nudge from the adjoining seat urged me to stop.

Healthy youth demands positive aggression: any ‘ism’ (in this case, secularism, more than patriotism), could gain from this fresh fountain of zeal. A natural glare from Yasin Malik’s cold eyes that evening had already heated up the college conference room. He’d been hearing me all right. He didn’t think the diatribe befitted a reply, much less a discussion. He kept his gaze, walked up to us, shook my hand, and left.

Yasin chaired the separatist Jammu And Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), armed, like the most of the movement, by Pakistan. I saw him last in Sanjay Kak’s Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Our Freedom), a daring documentary shot and edited between 2004 and 2006. In the film, Kak, the filmmaker, travels across Kashmir after the elections in the state, and before India celebrates its 60th year of independence. He debunks the claim of Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister then, that the Valley, through its massive turnout at the polls, had voted for an Indian Constitution. They evidently hadn’t.

I somewhat changed my own bookish opinion on Kashmir only a few months after that evening at the college seminar room. We were at a debating tournament in Glasgow, Scotland, miles away from both India and Pakistan. The two brightest ‘Indian’ students from a Malaysian university competing against us had chosen to register themselves as from the ‘Republic of Kashmir’: not India, not Pakistan. Rest didn’t matter. You sense the same in Kak’s film as he narrates the story of the domination of the Indian state. The problem before us isn’t Indo-Pak, or law-and-order. It’s personal.

Equally well known protagonists of Kashmir are ignored in Kak’s film: around 1.6 lakh Pandits who migrated in a religiously polarised J&K, or the fanatical forces at work from across the border. The omission is deliberate. Kak focuses instead on indigenous people, and their genuine, loud voices for freedom: 18,000 Indian soldiers who have perished, warring against an unknown enemy, and a popular sentiment; about a lakh martyrs, or terrorists, or militants, or freedom fighters (call them what you want, it will not change their deaths); youths lost in misfires misreported as cross-fires; and the psychological agony of locals, otherwise so used to the physical beauty of nature around them.

A closed-door discussion is at best academic claptrap, when public sentiment is already not with you. Indian government represents the Indian public. In a few decades, the ‘Partition generation’ will have gone: their wounds will matter less, history even lesser. For whatever nationalism’s worth, wouldn’t we rather buy a visa, than watch over a lakh people die? You think. A visa, that’s what a place or its nationality, means to most individuals (like me). ‘Domino theory’ be damned.

Azam Inquilabi, a 60-year-old ‘freedom fighter’ in Kak’s film who’s been imprisoned in both Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir says long stretches in jail (or torture) increase the resolve of an ideologue. If a man is harassed, he bows his head before Allah and fights a metaphysical war against the might of the enemy. This hardly suits a state that brags about its commitment to democracy and liberalism. If dissent is not accommodated within the system, the tussle can only lead to anarchy.

Arguments may be complex on all sides. I’m told Kashmir also has politically changed a lot since. Pakistan is in a further state of mess. The Valley should be the last of their concerns. Yet, you can have your own views, I can have mine. It’s scary that we’re not even allowed to debate.

Kak’s film screening was clamped down upon by an angry Mumbai police in 2007. This is when I first saw it. This week, Symbiosis College of Arts And Commerce in Pune had to cancel the show because ABVP, the collegiate wing of the Bhartiya Janata Party, wouldn’t like anyone to see the film. The police are quick with appeasing gangsters and aggressors on streets than protecting freedoms of speech in matters like these.

A complete blackout of their points of view in Pune is what we offer Kashmir in lieu of a democratic India. Good lord, their other option is Peshawar. This is the only reason we still think they’ll stick with us.

Download Jashn-e-Azadi here.

Follow the writer on twitter@mayankw14

International Gorilay (1990)
Director: Jan Mohamed
Actors: Javed Sheikh, Afzal Ahmad

Bottles of Chivas and champagne crack open as sinful drinks get poured into wine glasses, stirred with teaspoons. Everyone clinks their glasses. Light skinned, light eyed women join in.

Chief Batu Batu in a red trilby hat exults, “All the greatest crooks of the world have gathered here today to destroy Islam… If this doesn’t happen, all small Muslim states will merge into a superpower.” Pakistan is the fortress of this Islamic world. Commander JC is supposed to head this operation to destroy Pakistan. What the other portly Lahori men speaking in Punjabi at this long table are meant to do, we don’t know at this point. Neither are we sure what the mission is likely to be. How would we know?

So far we’ve been horsing around with the film’s two Robin Hood heroes, blood-brothers in cowboy hats – look-alikes of Feroz Khan and Anil Kapoor – who gate-crash into rich people’s parties, spray tear gas and raid on all the wealth. Their current target is one Mr Ganpat Gupta. Their third brother’s a cop, who finally brings them home. They promise to never mess with the law again. Our announcement will appear in the papers tomorrow, they mysteriously declare. The sister-in-law they admire the most is glad.

The film starts next morning. It’s February 14, 1989, quite obviously: a day of shared love in the western world. Newspaper reports scream: “A new Rajpal is born. Salman Rushdie calls Koranic verses, satanic verses. Ayatollah Khomeini issues fatwa.” A table globe spins with the headlines.

The sister-in-law, deeply offended, praying to God, demands the head of the offender of Mohammed. Her beloved brothers-in-law show her the kind of respect hardly reserved for other women in the film. The husband joins in too. A riot breaks out, or as the film suggests, gets orchestrated on the streets of Pakistan, where the police mercilessly attack the mobs. This is a supposed recreation of an actual riot that took place in Islamabad in protest of Satanic Verses. The family in the film loses lives.

The trio, Brothers Kalshnikov becomes, as they’d later call themselves, raising their guns over their heads, the “intaarnational gorilay” on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie. This should be easy as movie missions go. If only you knew who Salman Rushdie is: a Booker prize winning writer, naah. An international fighter? Yes.

Rushdie’s mansion is on a secluded private island in the Pacific.

Commandos protect his every move. Debauched Dubai sheikhs fraternise with this devil who proclaims, “I am that Satan who caused a storm in the Islamic world.” Rushdie could be Dr Dang from Subhash Ghai’s Karma (1986). In real life, he could’ve been picked for that villain’s role, if the great director Ghai had met the novelist before casting Anupam Kher: their body types and bald pates are similar; they wear rimmed glasses, and a beard that thickens at the goatee.

The Rushdie we finally see in this film looks nothing like the writer: actor Afzal Ahmad has full hair, wears slick double-breasted suits and designer loafers, talks in crisp Urdu-Punjabi, and generally loves spraying bullets from his machine gun, when he’s not slitting throats of the faithful. Censors have rarely been favorable to Rushdie. They skip his lines (at least on YouTube) even in a film that professes to kill him! The international gorilay infiltrate Rushdie’s den dressed as Arab sheikhs. This, they would’ve learnt from countless Hindi films, particularly from the ‘70s.

Pakistan’s film industry for long and especially after the late ‘70s, has lived under the wonderfully long shadow of the deliciously worst of Bollywood. This film I had picked up with greater hope. I had first read about it in the British Film Institute’s list of the 10 best Pakistani films, ever. International Gorilay ranks fourth on that list, its Indian equivalent, on the same spot in the Indian chart, being Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957). Pyaasa may be a dark, romantic masterpiece. The deathly violence of this film comes with fair dose of romance as well.

The international gorilay aren’t averse to love while they’re on their mission of hate. The doe-eyed beauty, a “yahudi” (Jewish) girl fancies the demented hero, quite suddenly, claims to be in love with him. Out of the blue, in a sequence that should put Saawan Kumar Tak to shame, she asks him to shoot her, since religion won’t allow their union. The hero (Javed Sheikh) picks up the pistol, starts firing at her, presumably missing his target each time as she keeps dancing to, “Chal gayi, ishq ki goli chal gayi (Fired, love’s bullets have been fired),” set to the opening riffs of the Madhuri Dixit song, “I love you Raja.” This is, I suppose, poetry for the proletariat. One of the advantages of being Afghanistan’s neighbour, I suppose, is the freely available quantities of fine drugs that can inspire great art.

I could do with some as well, as I take in, with horrendously long breaks, the picture in 13 equal parts on YouTube. The film’s essentially a series of climax sequences as boats race each other, squeaky bazookas fire away, and enough bombs go off to shut down an explosives factory in Peshawar. Surely there must be a sequence that stands out.

Hell, yeah, clearly the second most memorable moment from this movie (the first, as you an tell, is yet to come). Rushdie gets invited to inaugurate the “world’s biggest disco cum casino.” The event is highly publicised. Rushdie would like it that way. All the detractors know of the villain’s presence. The gambling den opens, item girls starts their performance, in walks Rushdie, joined by two other look-alikes. International gorillay finally know where to find him. There is but one way to ensure nobody knows they’re the gorilay after all.

The three of them turn up in Batman suit, cape and a machine gun; casually enter, instead of flying in, where Rushdie is, to realise, his look-alikes keep multiplying. None of the Rushdies is real. “If everyone in the world looked like you, we’d kill all of them,” says Batman. The trio had already killed one of the villain’s decoys at the interval. Magical realism is complete. So is the black comedy. Writer Rushdie or his fans may have enjoyed both, if it wasn’t so close to a farcical reality.

A similar scene plays out at the Jaipur Literary Festival, about 24 years after the publication of Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie, critically acclaimed essayist and novelist of Indian origin, free to express himself in his adopted country, writer of 15 books besides the Satanic Verses, isn’t allowed to step into a literary meet in India merely because some men don’t like his face. A mirror image of that face has to be streamed live on video instead.

Merely a dozen or so beardos land up at the lawns, where those gathered, thousands of them, are quietly listening to Tom Stoppard describing the art of playwriting. The beardos suggest they can’t have Rushdie come on video after. They have no weapons, no crowds supporting them, no constitution to back them, only a bunch of cameramen and reporters recording their serious statements. The video link is cancelled. Rushdie’s interviews plays on national television after. No one cares. A few bad men, or Bat Men, could silence the voice of a majority in a minute, with merely a glance, and a supposed threat. They had to be super-heroes.

However, Rushdie does get his final say in this film. The sister-in-law who’d sent off the international gorilay is captured. He orders for her a punishment worse than death: that she be made to listen to his book Satanic Verses all night! This is the ultimate sin, she cries, my prophet, make me deaf, or kill me, or send me a follower of Mohammed! You feel for her. It’s the sort of desperately delivered plea only actor Rakhee could match in Karan Arjun (1995): “Mere Karan Arjun aayenge. Dharti ka seena cheerkar ayenge!” Karan Arjun, the international gorilay, do return.

Instead of killing them all, Rushdie ties them up, sits on a chair, waiting to watch a miracle happen while they sing in praise of God, letters in Arabic flash in the cloudy sky. “Salman can reach America in a minute, talk to Israel in two minutes, when will God hear your voice?” Chief Batu Batu taunts them.

Finally, in a scene that movies are made for, multiple copies of the Koran fly in to surround Rushdie as lightning strikes. He can’t bear the noise, covers his ears, bullets pierce through the lightning to strike at his fingers and hands: Rushdie goes up in flames.

Producer Sajjad Gul told the New York Times he’d invested $500,000, huge Bollywood budget by ‘90s standards, to make this film. The picture, by some accounts a commercial success in Pakistan, was temporarily banned from the video circuit in Britain, fearing criminal libel issues arising out of the “inflammable” (pun unintended) material. The ban was overturned at the personal insistence of Rushdie himself.

The author had argued he was confident that viewers, non-Muslim as well as Muslim, would recognise the film ”for the distorted, incompetent piece of trash that it is.” He later reasoned, “If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everybody would’ve seen it.” Clearly Rushdie knew a thing or two about hot underground material. A third of his life has been centred on a fuss over a book that no one’s read. If they did, I suspect, they wouldn’t have got it either. He remains best known for it still, the world’s deadliest villain ever.

Watch International Gorilay here.

Follow the writer on twitter@mayankw14

Legitimacy of such homes has been contested in Indian courts for decades. No one can conclusively decide whether building a hut as and where you please constitutes, after all, the right to livelihood. Something the constitution fundamentally guarantees its citizens.

But for that quick jerk, I could have taken a life, and charged, as per law, with culpable (blameworthy) homicide (human killing). I was both lucky and sober. Though I immediately learnt, you’d neither be drunk nor rash to be the negligent driver possessed by gods of death on such streets. This was my fifth day of Mumbai’s driving lessons. I haven’t returned since.

One inebriated, hideous bloodsucker Alistair Perreira mowed down people while they were sleeping in their homes. He had rammed into a pavement on the night of November 12, 2006. In most modern cities, he would have damaged a concrete footpath or himself: gone to the police station, or to the hospital. But the pavement was wide enough to be a bedroom for 15. Seven of those people got killed. So should their murderer, but of course.

Perreira belonged to a rich family. This demographic fact reaps rich dividends, when spinning a story of Royal India running over hopes and aspirations of the Real one. The metaphor rings true. The conflict is easy to establish. The boy was 23, owned a Toyota Corolla, lived in the posh Carter Road, was driving drunk, returning from a party where he must have also splurged his papa’s money. The victims were poor labourers. Moralists must bay for this blue blood, caught red-handed, in the dead of the night. The city stood rightly outraged. Parreira got bail. Television stations went nuts. For the first time in the history of drunk driving in India, the Supreme Court booked him under the dreaded Section 304-II (“Dafa 304”), carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years. Everyone was satisfied.

None wronged the squatters’ rights. They were already dead, that would’ve been insensitive. Some others would have replaced those dead labourers on the same dangerous streets. Should anyone be sleeping there in the first place? That would be a politically incorrect question to ask. Nobody did. The issue with illegitimate villages springing up in the middle of supposedly modern cities, floating under flyovers, expanding into pavements, kissing the dividers, is that we’re still on cars, haven’t gone back to the bullock-cart yet. We must.

Slums, potholes, choked streets, city’s homeless, are civic concerns. Building shelters cost a lot of public money. Managing traffic is the police’s problem. All these issues, as it turns out, are unrelated, or so it seems. Somebody’s gotta be hurtin’ though. The earth must shake when the mighty fall. The cops, in an unabashed publicity stunt, right after the Perreira case in 2006, started putting up huge electronic boards across the city to display numbers of their glowing achievement. Scorecards started shimmering from one fine morning. “825 drunk drivers have been jailed; 790 licenses of drunk drivers have been suspended,” they said on the first week when you drove past prominent traffic junctions. Those numbers grew every day. It made the police look like they truly cared. Deterrence against drunkards behind wheels was in place.

The grand total of 825 read well, but didn’t really suggest any difference between “having consumed alcohol”, “being under influence”, or “intoxicated”. The three are not the same, but such subtleties are lost on all statistics. Subtlety isn’t one of those things the soldiers on streets are known for either. They make even less distinction between offenders if you make it inside the police lock-up. I have, and this is where democracy works at its best: the rapist is as good as the boy who got into a fight with his rickshaw guy.

Of all Indian metropolitan cities, it’s still the easiest in Mumbai to implement a rigorous, West-like zero-tolerance on ‘driving under influence’. Delhi, so far as my eyes go, has no cabs. Kolkata, evidently, has no roads. And Chennai, from what I could observe, has no drunks. Also, it helps the police to swiftly swell-up statistical figures when the said offenders are civil, white-collared fun-timers, the sorts you see pulled over most. Hardened criminals are harder to find, scare, jail and show-off. Those cases take ages to solve, if at all. Post-Perreiras are easy meat.

Until recently, the drill after the breath-analyzer test in Bandra, where Parreira was from, meant going to a sleepy resident doctor at a local hospital who examined your eyes with a torch and certified you “level 3 inebriated” (highest in the hierarchy of drunken states) over half a glass of beer. This has happened to me. Not much could have changed since. Neither did the numbers 825 or 790 distinguish between a ‘first-time’ and a ‘repeat’ offender. The two can’t be the same. All were jailed. So were three people for “over-speeding”, “cutting lanes” and carrying iron rods on top of their car.

Straight to the dreaded prison: never mind a warning, fine, or cab back home. If such simplicity be the suitable deterrence principle for a civilisation, there would be no need to upgrade ourselves from medieval laws. Those served the purposes just fine.

Don’t get me wrong still. We don’t trust people with our least precious stuff. There is no argument to entrust your life with someone, who’s seeing in twos and threes, as we speak. They should not be driving. Period.

Rules mean well. They always do. It’s the overnight targeting of law, which precludes warnings or worthy alternatives that should rattle up regular citizens almost everywhere. No one got rattled up in Mumbai. Supposed drunks were jailed. They deserved it, everyone said, credulously enough. Public euphoria over rising numbers of those severely punished for drunk driving began to unsettle me a bit.
What about the sober driver, nobody asked. Who needs a few Vodkas to mow down people when that bull, who’s charging towards you at top speed on a one-way street, honking and swinging at the same time, doesn’t drink. But he can’t drive either. There aren’t too many Indians I’ve met all my life – friends, acquaintances, relatives, distant cousins, mamajis, chachijis – who have passed a driving test and earned their license to kill. They’ve never taken a test. The plastic was couriered to them directly. I know no teetotaler who hasn’t paid off a cop, having broken a traffic rule either. Honking vehicles remains the background score of urban India.

The auto-rickshaw dude, half his bum on the driver’s seat, one hand on the handle bar, the other hand wherever else, snakes himself between a car and a bus that a baby would find hard to crawl past. Another one follows him. You avoid the masses walking on the same road, somehow steering clear of the cycle that’s also racing you down; finally take a safe turn into a building and reach the place you wanted to, which isn’t heaven or hell. My driver needs a break. He lights up and then stubs his cigarette on the road.

Two newly appointed “Clean Up Marshalls” from Mumbai’s municipal commission, holding a bundle of important receipts, pull him up; demand a fine for dirtying the street that’s already full of gunk. Clean Up Marshall’s a great move, I think. Where should he have stubbed the cigarette? I ask them. They look around; tell me, “I don’t know.” I pay the penalty. They leave. It’s so much harder to build trashcans.

If he’d played that part in Salaam Bombay, Slumdog Millionaire would’ve been his second film at the Academy Awards. Which is rare for an Indian actor, given it’s equally odd for films set in India to make it to LA’s red carpets. Both movies set in Mumbai’s grimy streets attempted to show, in their own engaging ways, a face to poverty that was more human than perennially unhappy. Uncles at the Oscars were understandably pleased. These were relatively fresher images for the West. The rich are more used to stock-pictures and statistics confirming merely misery and deprivation in the Third World.

While Irrfan was telling me about Salaam Bombay, something I never knew he had almost played the lead role in, he mentioned the unusual friends he’d found and made, working and hanging out with the carefree ‘Shafiq Syed’ and gang – the real Bombay street irregulars, who were finally picked for Nair’s celebrated picture (Whatever happened to them after). He used to train them in acting as well.

For Irrfan, who’s related to a royal family in Rajasthan, the fact that his new bunch of buddies lived each day without an expressed sense of home was an immediate revelation. These children never went back anywhere, he said. Anywhere. As sun came down and they felt tired, they found a corner in a street of their choice that had no cops around, and they just slept – here today, there tomorrow. If they chanced upon a running, tap, they squatted under it and considered themselves bathed. When they didn’t have money, they would burst a tube-light on their heads and make some….

Irrfan once graciously accepted an invitation to their regular mid-week party at a hotel once. The said shop – the venue of the soiree – baked the most number of cakes on Wednesdays, and recurrently chucked unshaped ones out the window. Sitting outside, the group had perfectly timed the throw, and the catch, before the cakes could hit the trashcan below the window sill: Thoda khao, thoda pheko. I could almost picture a giggly lot diving around corners like Mohammad Kaif, jumping in excitement to their moments of joy.

I don’t intend to romanticise poverty, or downplay the importance of basic economic well-being. It’s just an eye-opener sometimes to acknowledge that no one is full-time poor or rich, full-time handicapped, full-time powerful, terminally-ill, unemployed, lottery-winner, orphaned, widowed, dissatisfied at work or home, or whatever else, for happiness (or its lack thereof) to be a function of any of these particular measures alone. We could all be unhappy (or happy) with (or without) all those reasons.

We just introspect much less on the subject, I guess. Professional psychologists themselves began to take happiness as a serious subject of study much later in their field’s history. For years, most considered mental health as absence of mental illness, rallying towards bringing our mental states from negative to normal. What if we’re already at zero, or good, how can we get better? This became the astoundingly popular movement called positive psychology only in the late ‘90s. Inspiring happiness has of course been the primary purpose of popular entertainment forever.

Gabriele Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happyness remains for me the most moving meditation on the subject on the movie screen still: a story that compels you to contemplate how remarkably lazy or self-satisfied we get about life, which starts from everything being an accident of birth, which we continue to take for granted thereafter. We should be pleased Will Smith, a remarkably motivational public figure for his community himself, plays the main role.

At one moment, struggling to survive, make a living, along with his little son, he wonders aloud how, apart from right to life and liberty, Thomas Jefferson had included pursuit of happiness as the stated goal of the Declaration of (American) Independence: “How he knew to put the ‘pursuit’ in there, like no one can actually have happiness. We can only pursue it.” Perhaps pursuing short-term goals, or at least having one in the first place, helps. Or so is the thought I left with.

A research-paper popular in the intellectual circles for a short while severely concluded on the ultimate human mystery to suggest that “trying” to be happier was in fact as futile as trying to be taller. The psychologist ate his own words thereafter, discredited his own exaggerated theory.

Positive psychologists consider companionship or human company in general, acts of kindness, and writing down our strengths and virtues on a ‘gratitude journal’, to be definite “happiness boosters.” Though, as it turns out from a research, about 50 per cent of your satisfaction levels with life come from genetically transferred traits. You’re born with them.

This makes sense when I look at my little nephew and niece. The little girl would just laugh at the snap of a finger, right since she was born. At age two and half, she’s a bundle of joyous energy. The infant boy, her little brother on the other hand, though only six months old, is much quieter, stingier with his precious smiles, he gets crabbier with the slightest discomforts. I’ll have to wait for them to grow up to figure if one turns out to be the serious man, cometemplative and at peace with himself, and the other remains the perennially happy-go-lucky ballerina that she is now.

Aspects of income, marital status, religion and education, so high on most priority lists, the research says, contribute only about 8 per cent to the measure of happiness. The remaining (42 per cent) is a response to “life’s slings and arrows”: good days and bad days, both finding their way into a long tunnel of memory, some making it through, some not. We probably remember more the accomplishments and positive outcomes than the nitty gritty than went behind making them so. Past remains a pleasure to recall, nostalgia stays the insurmountable exaggeration.

If only statistics, surveys, indices could judge what’s after all to each their own. A monumental breakthrough still that befitted Claudia Wallis’ Time magazine cover story back in 2005, where I quote from, is a collective agreement among positive psychologists on the three sure-fire routes to happiness.

One’s “sensory pleasure”, which is obvious for what it signifies: food, sex, smell, tech, travel, everything that money can buy. The second is human “engagement”: our depth of involvement with family, work, romance and hobbies. The third is “meaning”: using personal strengths to serve some larger end; part of it being altruism, or the art of giving. Despite our relentless chase for the first, some scientists categorically conclude, it’s the latter two that truly keeps us most happy.

These are of course theories. There’s only way to test them. I don’t know if I am happy for having written this, or you for having read it. Would the lack of either have made us any happier still? Shut up! I hope not.

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As with all art, I suppose, there’s no such thing as a good or a bad film. There are films that affect you, others that don’t. Some can blow your mind. The ones below did mine. They deserve awards, except no one will care to roll out red carpets for them next year. We humbly oblige. Someone should. Presenting then the 10 films of 2011 that topped from the bottom, of our brains. These were movies so bad they turned out to be beyond good:

10. Ultimate Rajshri reproduction: Sachin Pilgaonkar’s Jaana Pehchana

About 75 per cent of the movie, in flashback, is a picture called Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se, a 1978 Bollywood version of Eric Segal’s Love Story. Rest is set in the present, where the hero meets another girl who looks the same as his dead girlfriend.

You begin to see in twos: actor Sachin at 21, in his frizzy curls; Sachin at 54 in, what looks like, a wig. Heroine Ranjeeta, with a hennaed fringe, scary eyelashes, in a saree; much younger Ranjeeta as Lily in shirts and skirts. Your grandmom and your girlfriend on either side in the theatre: One leaves humming the melodious bhajan type romantic number, ‘Ankhiyon ke jharokon se’; the other goes home with a worrying headache. This is classic mild. Smoke it.

9. Stranger than fiction: Tarique and Sahil Seth’s A Strange Love Story

The heroine’s a screechy nymphet. After her mom died, her dad ran away with a girl her age. This is why, she says, she smokes a lot of cigarettes! She is now being followed around by “jinnaat” (plural for genie). You see, the world is divided between humans and animals. And then there’s another specie called – “ek aur specie jinko kehte hain”— Jinnaat. You either believe her, or shudder in disbelief: effect’s the same.

So far we’ve met a Christian priest and a horny Hindu Godman “Jai Mahakaal”. Finally, we’re at a Muslim Baba Mustafa’s den. Devotees are in a state of trance. The usher plays football in a field where you can no see no other players. The ball gets passed around still, from one corner to another. The teams are invisible. A goal gets scored, because one of the unseen players, the goalkeeper, is apparently away…. That’s it. You need no more proof. This underground genie stuff is work of sheer genius. Try this at home, under medical supervision, of course.

8. Turd Reich: Rakesh Kumar’s Gandhi To Hitler

“Dr Goebbels ko bulao,” Adolf Hitler yells. “Bulao” (bring ‘em on), you say (in your head). Given ‘Mungeri Lal’ Raghuveer Yadav is Hitler in blue contact lenses, you wonder if ‘Dr Dang’ or ‘Gabbar’ will land up for Dr Goebbels. It’s an Andheri actor all right. Naseer (pedophile from movie Page 3) plays architect Albert Speer. He shakes his head when Hitler commands, “Yeh saare pull uda do (blow up all the bridges).” Uda do.

The stage’s set. This is a fabulous fancy dress show. What do the characters – Gandhi, Hitler, Aman Verma – have to do with each other? Doesn’t matter. The filmmakers find enough in this time-space continuum to break into an upbeat Holi song, a couple of good quality ghazals.

Hitler’s nervous. Towards the end, his body shakes like he’s getting epileptic fits. His partner, Eva Braun, that’s Neha Dhupia, says, “Some music, my Fuehrer? Main aapko aisa nahin dekh sakti (I can’t see you like this).” “Theek hai,” says Hitler. “Kuch acchha sa laga do! (Put on something interesting).” Put it on, the movie’s DVD. Right now.

7. Lovably lame: Abhinay Deo’s Game

Boman Irani is front-runner to the prime minister’s post in Thailand. Abhishek Bachchan is a casino owner in Istanbul. Jimmy Shergill is a Bollywood superstar. Anupam Kher is a billionaire with a private island, who calls all these assorted guys over, hosts them for a night, so they can murder him! Investigation starts. Kangana Ranaut is the world’s top-most detective, whose sleuths are connected with close circuit cameras and unde-cover cops everywhere, from streets of
Greece, Thailand to the pandu hawaldar in Andheri police station. Background score is an indoor concert. What more do you want? Let the game begin!

6. Dam and dumber: Sohan Roy’s Dam 999

Couple looks at a river embankment. “You remember this dam?” hero asks. “They’re holding pressure like us!” Audience laughs. The woman with a perpetually constipated expression on her face had been dating the hero since childhood. Their horoscopes didn’t match. Once they’d held hands, a family member passed away. Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles, imagine what would happen if they were to make out. So you know what happens next. This is a disaster movie. But nobody could have prepared you for Ayurvedic massages, astrology mumbo-jumbo, and a Brit gent who could be mayor in contemporary, communist, Godless Kerala.

You do look inwards, given the film’s Vedic philosophy, and finally wonder, “What’s this heavy helmet resting on the bridge of my nose? Is this a 3D movie?” Yup. Uncles at the Academy heard its soundtrack, nominated it for the Oscars. They should’ve seen the film. They would’ve loved it far more. You will too.

5. Going ding ding: Puneet Issar’s I Am Singh

Appalling Americans murder, beat the hell out of Sikhs after 9/11, confusing them for Afghans and Arabs. One after another, the movie provides us with Aaj Tak type television recreations of various hate crimes against Sikhs, from Arizona to California.

What does the hero do? To start with, he wakes up the sleeping Sikh patriot within him, imagines warriors holding up swords, marching to medieval battlefronts, fire lighting up the line of defense, as an angry bird casts its shadow on the troops. After this, he goes to fight his case in an American court!

White skinheads growl. Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) turn out to be terribly rude, racist, incompetent, and even worse actors. The film’s director, Puneet Issar, best known for injuring Amitabh Bachchan on the sets of Coolie (in 1982) walks on to the screen, chanting in his inimitably croaky voice, “I’ll be the victaar in the turban case.” This Sikh character was suspended from LAPD because of his turban. He should be commissioned again, right away, you plead. Send him back to the cops, please. Just lower the volume while you enjoy his flick though.

4. Salacious, hilarious: Sushen Bhatnagar’s Monica

We’re in New Delhi, the nation’s corrupt capital, where literally everyone’s in bed with the other, if not with Monica. Sex is no bar. Pamelaji, for instance, is a catty industrialist. Pammi aunty also strokes Monica’s bare back as they tuck themselves into a satin bed cover. Monica’s also sleeps with the telecom minister.

She used to cover universities for a local newspaper in Lucknow once. By now, she is a special correspondent, no less, from a “mamuli (ordinary) sub-reporter,” the filmmakers suggest. They probably mean a cub reporter, or a sub-editor. She can become associate editor if she listens to her boss, who has no control over what she publishes as front-page lead stories in the paper he edits!

Heroine’s on the run. Minister, editor have sent out goons to hunt her down. Filmies in Bombay find their lives misrepresented in the press. If this film is any indication of what journalism could be like, God save the news. You mustn’t deny yourself this precious education still; this tragicomedy comes strongly recommended.

3. Deliriously dumb maal: Indra Kumar’s Double Dhamaal

Javed Jaffery plays a UD (under-developed) man-child Manav here, as he did in Dhamaal. He ups the act further in this sequel, changing his costume, hamming it up as a moronic kid with Mickey Mouse hair, besides other mimicries.

The other three actors (Riteish Deshmukh, Ashish Chaudhary, Arshad Warsi), Manav’s buddies, double or quadruple up their parts, non-stop for over a couple of hours, impersonating everything from a fake gorilla making out with a real one; a black-polished Caribbean lover-boy in a huge Afro; a Gujarati businessman with weird teeth; Sikh security guard getting his Punjabi right; Spanish prostitute with massive cleavage…. When they’re in their own character, relatively normal selves, they’re supposed to sound like Shatrughan Sinha, Shah Rukh Khan, Sanjeev Kumar… What for, but? Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t think they asked either.

The sort of public embarrassment Indian actors endure for our entertainment’s sake; they should be entitled to a gallantry award. Come on, the least we can do is watch them.

2 ‘n’1. A star is corn: Tanveer Khan’s Miley Na Miley Hum / Prashant Chadha’s Azaan

Uncomfortable on screen, untrained performers off it, casually low on body movements, high on screen time; mostly given to monosyllables and mono-expressions. One (Chirag) is a blue-eyed boy of a Bihari politician (Ram Vilas Paswan); literally, unless those are blue contact lenses in his eyes. The other (Sunil Joshi) is the son of a major Gutka baron: cute, chubby faced hero, with a smart stubble, shaven chest, hairy back, he loves bazookas, car chases, mortal combat, rock-climbing, globe-trotting, Hollywood blockbusters, and a Playboy Playmate (Candice Boucher).

Both leading men have built their bodies, perhaps learnt a dance step or two. Crores have been spent to turn them into super-stars. Surely you can spend Rs 100 or two to watch such corny moments of movie history. What, you’re looking for stories instead? Go read a book.

GOLDEN TROPHIES, 2011

Salman Khan (Bodyguard, Ready) was the top performer in Bollywood of 2011. Let alone that terrible news. Here’s the good one: there’s a whole world within striking distance from where you can hear cash registers ringing incessantly, and the movie that’s killing it at the box-office is neither a Southern remake nor being panned by reviewers.

This was the year when critical acclaim, in a lot of cases, simultaneously spelt commercial success. In case you missed these films, you can watch them on DVD, many years later as well, which is what counts for more than a first weekend’s collections. Here’s my list of the top 10 of ‘11:

1. Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
Heartrending yet hilarious, expansive, still intimate, this is an urbane bromance that, like its predecessor Dil Chahta Hai, will pass the test of time. Easily the best ‘mainstream, commercial’ film of the year.

2. Abhinay Deo’s Delhi Belly
At once outrageous and outstanding, this picture proved that crass toilet humour, served with such no-holds-barred sense of purpose, can be loved and appreciated for its honesty still. Full respect.

3. Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat
Calm, lyrical, expressive, minimalist: all of it in about 90 minutes, paying tribute to a city where classes merge into a common river of sorrow, beauty and hope. We remain unaware of how each of us affects the other every day. If you’re conscious, this film’s subtlety will touch you for sure.

4. Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster
Punk chauffeur, scheming wife, credulous landlord, and a page-turner script set in Middle India that has a twist waiting for you at every corner. This Macbeth-like tragedy reminds you less of Guru Dutt’s Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam, more of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool. What better compliment to pay.

5. Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar
In a word, this movie displayed, beyond doubt, Bollywood has an altogether new rockstar now. In time-honoured tradition, if it’s not a Khan or Kumar, it’s a Kapoor!

6. Shoaib Mansoor’s Mansoor Bol
This Urdu gem’s poetic enough in its dialogue to make you feel like you’re at a mushaira. Screenplay is a literary tour de force, almost like an accomplished novel, set in contemporary, apolitical side of Pakistan. Performances, especially of the flawed old Hakeem (Manzar Sehbai), remain unmatched. Truly, super bol, this.

7. Krishna DK and Raj Nidimoru’s Shor In The City
Very Guy Ritchie in its goofiness, completely Mumbai in its chaos, this richly textured, inspiringly cast, stream of consciousness plays along with several stories meeting on Ganesh Chaturthi. I suspect if Suketu Mehta’s stupendous Maximum City was a film, it’d come close to this.

8. Rajkumar Gupta’s No One Killed Jessica / Milan Luthria’s The Dirty Picture / Anand Rai’s Tanu Weds Manu
Semi-realistic, hugely entertaining, smartly original: girl-power galore. I guess if the vane super-stars continue to play themselves on screen, it’s the ladies who must take the lead. Audiences thankfully approve.

9. Amole Gupte’s Stanley Ka Dabba / Sanjeevan Lal’s Bubble Gum / Nila Panda’s I Am Kalam
Child is clearly the father of (the leading) man, the mentioned movies showed this well: each of them truthful at heart, sorted in the head, deeply evocative, marvelously inspired.

10. Sudhir Mishra’s Yeh Saali Zindagi / Prawal Raman’s 404
Both thrillers: one, slightly Dickensian, the other, super-natural. Tension is at once withheld, and released, and withheld again. So is the suspense. As they say, on the whole (ah, I love, on the whole), neither disappoints!

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If someone can pull off a crumpled kurta, torn jeans, Hawaii flip-flops at a formal dinner, never unsure of himself, confident in his ways, delightful in a conversation, it’s style; for sure. If he looks around on the other hand, imagining the world’s gaze on his bum, feeling insecure, naked, surrounded by stuffy suits, it’s easy to tell, the fellow, like his clothes, is an absolute disaster.

The supposed fashion industry around 1000 people in India, lauded for its cyclical, cloned fashion weeks, may well be over-rated, given the size of its coverage in the mainstream press. Style, as a strong political, social tool, remains vaguely under-recognised still. The father of this nation took on the might of the British, wearing a loincloth around his waist. The sharp, nauseating contrast between the coloniser and the oppressed could never have been conveyed as well, without the Mahatma, a half-naked fakir, at the Round Table. Now: that’s a style statement. He could’ve worn a three-piece suit, or a half jacket. Those statements were Jinnah’s, and Nehru’s.

Mary Quant’s mini-skirt, similarly (okay, not so similarly!) perhaps left as much impact on the history of the common man as the birth-pill did: both being inventions of the swinging ‘60s. It has to come from a guy, at this point, that women have it all when it comes to style. If Levi Strauss hadn’t drilled in a few metal rivets to help out gold diggers in California about 160 years ago, I’m not sure what I would’ve done, waking up every morning, lost in thought, scratching my head, conjuring up my personal statement for the day. Most of us survive on a pair of jeans. Well, I do.

Some wear nothing over those jeans. They follow Salman Khan. He was at work in Madh island in the late ‘90s (for a film called Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya). A shirt and jacket he’d tried on months before for the shoot, wasn’t fitting him that day. He’d put on some bulk, having worked out heavily in the interim months. The crew would have to go back to Bandra to pick up a new shirt, jacket for the dance sequence. This would’ve delayed the shoot. Salman just shot the song with a bare chest. It became style, thereafter.

For an iconic scene in Deewar, Amitabh Bachchan remembers his blue dockyard shirt being too long. The fellow in charge of his costumes (I don’t think there were stylists then) just tied a knot in it. This became a fad in the ‘70s. Clark Gable appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night in 1934. Under-shirt business in America, it is said, went down.

That’s what style icons bring to the rack. Mumbai, you’d agree, a rather ugly city, with the most beautiful people in the sub-continent, is full of stylish people. Mumbai’s Most Stylish is our attempt to bring them to your notice, so we can have some fun, and you could even join us at the party. Each celebrity’s profile comes with a number-code that you could message us, if you’d like to pick one of them as Maximum city’s most stylish. This gives you a chance to hang out with them at the Most Stylish event on December 21.

Mumbai’s 20 Most Stylish have been chosen by our editorial team, in consultation with a fabulous jury that comprises professionals who follow style for a living: photographer Atul Kasbekar, socialite Queenie Dhody, designer Rocky S, make-up artiste Mickey Contractor, top fashion buyer Pradeep Hirani, HT Café’s style cop Rochelle Pinto. Look out for their picks in Mumbai’s edition of Hindustan Times, or on the HT website. Do vote from your phone. As Govinda might put it, that would be your ishtyle number, on mobile number!

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The first mistake would be to assume Chargesheet is a picture. Just a picture? That’s like saying Dev Anand was just an actor. He, like his films, at least since the ’90s, had turned into oddball phenomena of our troubled times.

Of the trio that ruled Hindi cinema in the 1950s, Dilip Kumar, ailing for years, had belatedly stopped playing the leading man sometime in the early ’80s. Raj Kapoor, long gone, had started playing the father’s role by 1971 (Kal Aaj Aur Kal).

Dev, in 2011, was still a competing star, producer, director, writer, and if need be, the audience for his films. His persona excited terrible clichés: dashing, debonair, evergreen. Genius of his later films defied description. But that’s because all imagination could not be limited to words. Neither could all ideas of the human brain be effectively translated to the cinema screen. Some worked on alternate levels. At least Dev’s mind and his movies did.

We see him in this film, first hiding behind a tree, shooting at gangsters. It’s a flashback sequence: He’s the commissioner of Delhi Police. He’s retired from the force now. Retired? That’s not possible.

Look at him: head tilted sideways as he recites his lines in that imitable drawl. The ageless young man favours the denim jacket, swigs brandy from a hip flask: “heart ke liye” (for the heart). Dev saab – as he was reverentially called – in reality, rarely, if ever, drank. Which is good. Someone so high on life would shame the silly intoxicant. The booze would get hammered in his company. He was 88 when we saw him last. I didn’t know a better brand ambassador for the AA.

But in this film, Dev has a problem. Or at least his character Gambhir Singh does. He’s up against major Goliaths. One of them is KK, short for Kanna Kauwa. This fellow is a Mafiosi, in half a pair of Aviator shades, fat cigarillo on his lips, a dozen piercings in his ears, gold chains around his neck. Heck. You wish to know more about him.

The director digs deeper instead, in his sensational effort to expose the underworld’s disturbing influence in Bollywood. There is a film shoot on. A fading heroine (Divya Dutta) who wishes to be part of that movie is shot dead. One of the accused is Dev’s Gambhir Singh himself, “gold-medallist” ex-police commissioner, who was staying in the same guesthouse as the movie’s cast. He once also used to head all investigating agencies in the country. Given his résumé, the home minister allows him to investigate the murder case where he’s himself a prime suspect!

All other accused are in jail. Politician Amar Singh plays that home minister’s part. He was actually charge-sheeted, shoved into prison for a cash-for-votes scandal in the Indian parliament, just few weeks before this film’s release. The casting’s ironic then, I suppose. But you should expect no less serendipity shining on an active mind that leaps, knowing that a net will always fall.

Things would happen to Dev because he simply willed them. Nature couldn’t resist. For years, audiences would wonder how the producer-director-actor could continue funding his films, keep Navketan, his legendary banner, alive and running, given their box-office results always remained suspect.

That zeal was infectious. Some of India’s top contemporary actors adorably indulged Dev Anand through his naughty ’90s: Aamir Khan played the leading part in his Awwal No 1 (1990), the one where Dev plays both a cop and a cricket selector, with peculiar fondness for coloured Sobranie cigarettes after dinner (We flaunted those cigarettes when we were picking up smoking in college years later. It’s hard to erase that character trait from memory even now!) Salman Khan made a special appearance in his Love At Times Square (2003). ‘Loin’ Ajit possibly took up his last acting assignment for him (Gangster, 1994).

Bollywood’s entire Lions club, on the other hand, pitched in, whenever their age permitted: Ashok Kumar, Dharmendra (Return Of The Jewel Thief; 1996), Shammi Kapoor, Hema Malini, Rekha (Censor; 2001). Much younger Jackie Shroff was his stock favourite in the cast. Boman Irani says he just got up from his chair when he first heard the voice of Dev Anand over the phone, asking him to perform in Mr Prime Minister (2005). There was no question of saying no.

I had a hand-written letter from Dev saab to attend that film’s premiere in Ahmedabad. I came. Had to. I saw. Was conquered. He called me over to discuss the politics of the film later. I chickened out. The sight of the uniquely octogenarian Prem Pujari, kissing his svelte, sexy wife in her twenties, was just too distracting an image to concentrate on something more serious. He gave us entertainment of another kind, never stopped being a super-star. Several non-resident Indians, mindful of their favourite hero’s still enduring romance with films, I’m told, would chip in to cover his movie’s budgets, just so they could stand next to him for a family picture. Such was the power of his charm. Amitabh Bachchan made it to Chargesheet’s premiere in Mumbai. Hollywood studio Warner Bros. co-produced the movie.

Naseeruddin Shah plays the villain. He’s don Sultan, the anti-hero on extra hormones, willing to tap anything that moves, single after eight weddings, he has 10 kids, is father to none. This Dubai Mafioso plans to make the biggest Bollywood film ever: Love Story Iss Waqt Ki. But there’s a condition: the gangster’s moll has to be the picture’s heroine, because she wants to. He loves her with the same intensity that Dev, the director, is passionate about life and the female breasts.

The don’s hired the director (Jackie Shroff). The hero’s somewhat autobiographical. “How many Oscars did Slumdog Millionaire get? Eight. We’ll beat,” he says of his film. The Oscars and American cinema had deeply inspired Dev’s works right from the ’50s when he crafted an urban image that matched the stylish Clark Gable, Cary Grant in the same period. He was one of the first in Indian cinema to produce and act in a film with a version strictly made for the US (Guide), with a Nobel laureate for a screenwriter (Pearl S Buck) and an American director (Tad Danielsky), back in 1965. Over three and half decades later, he imagines an Oscar for a film within his film: hope keeps us alive.

Besides the don’s tight-squeeze, and a dead heroine, there’s also a gypsy girl here, she’s actually the leading lady, a hot street urchin, who dances in her bras, micro-minis and pink guitar in hillocks, hoping to do the same in movies some day. This nymphet with a strong lisp is Dev’s equivalent of his ’70s protégés Zeenat Aman (Hare Rama Hare Krishna) and Tina Munim (Des Pardes). All his films had one, suitably clothed for the occasion. Chham Chham, that’s the girl’s name here, she charges Rs 100 to the public for touching her finger, Rs 200 for shaking her hands!

Like everyone else, she is hooked on to Bollywood, obsessed with showbiz. Who else will appreciate this narcotic of the big screen more than this film’s superstar-director. He gives her ample screen time.

Suddenly, over the final fifteen minutes, the cinema screen slips into a surrealist state. Mobs take up sten guns and hit the streets. Running cleavage bounces into the camera lens. Characters start getting shot one by one. A little child, who’s supposedly Dev’s daughter, runs behind him. A white woman appears from nowhere, and disappears in the same second. As do sculptures of god. This is the climax, Sir. The don is caught, charge-sheeted. Song starts: “Charajsheet, charajsheet, charajsheet…”

Which reminds me of how it had all begun: a Riya Sen number with Russian backup dancers, “Bollywood, yeah yeah…. Gita, Ramayan. Tehzeebon ki khan (repository of etiquette)… Bollywood, yeah yeah.”

Regular film on a DVD: Rs 150. Joie de vivre of Dev Anand’s swan song: Priceless.

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Wardat (1981)
Surakksha (1979)
Director: Ravikant Nagaich
Actors: Mithun Chokroborty, Iftikhar, Jagdeep

The sultry, dusky Kalpana Iyer drops her red skirt, throws her white shoes off, turns on the shower, starts humming a song of love. She comes out in an odd yellow cocktail dress, which is joined at its ends by black shoestrings; Kylie Minogue would’ve liked that dress. Kalpana fixes a Johnny Walker Black Label, places the glass on her forehead; Mithun drinks it from there. Mithun Da certainly likes to mix his drinks with his women. Both dance. It’s a neat sight.

But I suggest, at this moment, you turn away from the screen. Crank up the volume in your speakers instead. While Mithun swigs his whisky from a wine glass, I may as well introduce you to a unique drinking game that I’ve entertained friends with for a while now. Forget the two dancers on the screen. Just concentrate on the voices. There’s of course a male and a female voice. As the song progresses, place your bets, to guess, which one is which. Have a ball figuring!

Mithun’s gently effeminate singing part belongs to Bappi Lahiri. I once interviewed him on television calling him that. The interview got over; he ensured we couldn’t air the show until the honorific Da could be slipped in while referencing his name. He said his son Bappa wouldn’t have it any other way. So I won’t make that mistake again. It eej tha great Baappi Da. Ironically known for his knock-offs of English songs in the ’80s, he remains still India’s most genuine, original pop-cult creature.

The female crooner is the grainy-voiced Usha Uthup. The song, ‘Tu Mujhe Jaan Se Bhi Pyara Hai’ (look at me, I’m already moving) is by every means a masterpiece. The film’s called Wardat. It’s a sequel to Surakksha, which is where Bappi Da had incidentally made his mainstream singing debut with its opening credit’s track that went, “Mosam Hai Gaaneka. Yay Jeebon, Yay Duniya, Sopna Hay, Deewone Ka!”

History got made with that moment. What you saw was a young, 29-year-old Mithun being held by scores of women as he randomly jumped and struck karate poses for his audience. Bappi Da, from the background score, would occasionally introduce this character on the screen later, “Gaand Maashter G9, G9, G9. Doo baba papa, haa!”

He meant, of course, Gopi, the Gun Master, Gulab 9, “CBI ka keemti nagina (jewel of the Central Bureau of Investigations).” Crime Master Gogo in Andaaz Apna Apna (1994) was probably his wasted, distant cousin. Iftikhar plays his chief. Jagdeep plays Jagdeep, always the comic sidekick. This is much before the government agency they belong to began to face flak for being political stooges of the Indian Prime Minister’s Office: the Congress Bureau of Investigations, as it were. CBI could’ve used G9 to resurrect their low public image. They still can. It’s never too late.

There are only two words to aptly describe Gun Master Gulab 9. The film puts it well, “Khubsoorat. Khatarnak (Beautiful. Dangerous).” He’s someone gifted with razor sharp wit and intelligence, “Khubsoorat ladkyian jiski kamzori hain (Beautiful women are his only weakness).” Which is only fair, as G9 says, he’s a bachelor, hence boyfriend to all. It’s women who usually try to hook up with him anyway, even when they plan to kill him.

The Bengali superstar playing this role was born Gouranga Chakraborty. He couldn’t have adopted a better screen name than Mithun. It literally means sex in Hindi. Sex is what surrounds this troubled man, as he fights off famous baddies and female attention at the same time, in so many of his films, G9 series being no exception.

In Surakksha, the lady villain takes him home handcuffed, slips into a negligee, pushes him to bed, says she likes playing with her male preys, before she bumps them off. Fat girls guard this house. This is gross. In a post-gender world, raping a man would be rape still.

The hot woman in Wardat, on the other hand, latches on to G9, leaves the nightclub with him. He takes her home, explains to her that he’s married, has five kids (which is not true, of course). She says she’s not looking to marry him either. She just wants to learn the motorcycle. Learn the motorcycle? Ride him, she probably means!

These chickitas, I tell you. The one before us in particular – the buxom ‘Bond girl’ (Kajal Malhotra) – remains stuck with Gopi, the G9, through all his dangerous missions. Just as his girlfriend (Ranjeeta) did, in Surakksha. He was engaged to her in that film. She disappeared in the second part.

G9 remains married to his job still. Anybody with that many attacks on his life should be. After all, he has to save the world. Saving himself for one fertile woman would be simply futile, would hold him back.

In the first mission (Surakksha), G9 is in search of his missing colleague Jackson, or Jeksun, as he calls him, who has a map to some diamond mines, which becomes immaterial to this movie thereafter. It turns out Gun Master is up against an atomic generator that can produce a string of atoms, from a kitchen mixer-grinder. The power of each atom equals the destructive energy of 1 crore suns. Blokes guarding this generator are humanoids programmed to submission.

What’s the big deal? In certain countries, they’ve already created robots for such jobs. G9 asks this, not me. Its creator Dr Shiva justly clarifies: No one’s turned “Insaan (man)” into “Robert (robot).” True. And who might this Dr Shiva be? What’s the motive behind his organisation Shiv Shakti, in short SS, or actually SSO, unlike the Mumbai-based regionalist party Shiv Sena? What do they really want? Great question. Nobody knows. Until the climax scene, or despite it.

Their employees seem to be everywhere, as cabbies outside airports, passengers inside trains. We can see Jeevan, that fine ’70s anti-hero, with the same adorable drawl in his speech as Dev Anand’s, except eerily villainous. But he’s the organisation flunkey.

For fleeting seconds, the camera reveals a strange apparition for a human being: bulb-like eyes wide-open, shiny sky-blue glove covering half his swollen face. You don’t get to see the calculator on the back of his palm yet. “Toying,” goes the background gong. You know, that is Dr Shiva, “Duniya ka sabe bada scientist (world’s greatest scientist)”!

Between Mithun for G9, Dr Shiva who’s asinine, the filmmakers evidently struck gold in the summer of ‘79. Along with Dara Singh as Secret Agent 077 in Golden Eyes (1968), several actors have played their own versions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond in Bollywood’s boondocks. This film’s rollicking director Ravikant Nagaich, it can be said, was some sort of a patron saint of the secret service genre. Budgets could never mess with his dreams. His pet character, in fact, was Gopal, Agent 116. Jeetendra played that role for him in Farz (1967) and in Raksha (1981). Dharmendra did the same for him in Keemat (1973). Rajesh Khanna, at the peak of his fame agreed to become the CID sleuth Shyam in Nagaich’s hit movie The Train (1970). None quite managed to create a cult of the same caliber as Gun Master G9.

Gouranga, a chemistry graduate from Calcutta, had started out as a National Award winning art-house actor (with Mrigaya), after training at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). Once associated with communist activism in West Bengal, or the Naxalite movement, in later years, he became the prolific poster boy of a capitalist production line that Bollywood evolved into in the ’80s, and thereafter. Surakksha gave him the start. It was a hit. It made Mithun Da the solo-hero, single-screen, secret service, super-star.

Wardat was the film’s natural second part. Though in its opening sequence, you might be tempted to believe it’s the turd part. The screen opens to immense chaos: turd-like, cow dung material flying all over villages and farmlands. There is, we realise, a locust attack. A new Hindi word, some learn, is tiddiyan (for locusts): “Tiddiyan ki tabahi (annihilation by locusts).” Tiddiyan, tiddiyan, everywhere, are remote-controlled, they kill crops, can kill humans too.

But this is only one of the ways an underworld organisation wishes to finish off the human world. Creative destruction, being the economic principle, the makers and villains of this movie swear by.

Shakti Kapoor, playing literally, Shakti Kapoor (that being his character’s name, it helps with audience connect) makes a detailed presentation of the destructive products on display: Babies fitted to light bulbs that will ensure they grow up into mental slaves. Genetically modified crops that ensures physically handicapped future generations. A drop of acid that can turn you into a hypnotised super-human.

Shakti, again, is not the main villain. He’s merely the lackey. But his name goes well with a sequel of the Shiv Shakti Organisation in Surakksha. Dr Shiva was possibly named after the lord of destruction in the Hindu trinity. Operation Destroy is the code-name for Shakti’s group. I begin to see meaning and metaphor. Some movies can cause such drug-induced effects.

Bappi Da knows where this movie’s coming from. He introduces a strangely trippy song here, where the lyrics are a mix of gibberish and words stretched to suggest delirium: ‘Pyaaar Kyooon Kiyaaa….’ The hero-heroine are high on hemp. Screen keeps fading into green-yellow X-ray silhouettes.

A willing detachment earned from psychotropic drugs may be necessary for G9 to make sense of, survive and save this surreal world. He has otherwise smooth karate chops to rely on. Both Gun Master movies, you can tell, in some form or the other, were martial art films. This is around the time one Bruce Lee, an American born Chinese nationalist, had captured the globe’s imagination.

Indian kids had started signing up for kung fu, karate, taekwondo lessons in the evenings, after school. They’d wait until late in the night to catch the Doordarshan’s screening of Shaw Bros.’ 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Having rented a video cassette player for the weekend, we’d also sit mesmerised by the forearm blocks and moves of Gun Master G9.

He was for communist Bengal the ultimate Pada dada (neighbourhood stud): “Ayeeshh saala.” To the rest of the netherworld, he became known as Prabhujee (God).

Jambola, Wardat’s melting face villain in his Egyptian palace, with Utpal Dutt’s hair, nose squashed up, an eye gorged out, holding a pipe, says he is the Lord. This is blasphemy before Prabhujee himself. He in fact offers Prabhujee a job. Such nerve.

In both the parts, the villain puts together a climax to display all of Mithun Da’s antics and skills: qawali, kickboxing, karate, sword-fighting, tiger-fighting, dancing, fencing…

“Bray Vo. Bray Vo,” goes Jambola at some point. “Bray Vo,” chant Prabhujee’s bhakts.

Watch Surakksha: http://tinyurl.com/7yl8rr5

‘Tu Mujhe Jaan Se Bhi Pyara Hai’ from Wardat: http://tinyurl.com/7r6l8k7

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Tarzan (1985)
Director: B Subhash
Actors: Hemant Birje, Kimmy Katkar

Translucent white cloth over a young heroine’s body holds a special place in the contemporary history of the repressed Indian male hormone. A see-through saree, suitably wet, on a big screen, I suspect, must have given many young desi kids their first wet dream in the late 1970s.

The piece of flesh being nervously ogled at belonged to Zeenat Aman. Raj Kapoor held that desire up for public display. The film was called Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

He matched that moment right into the next decade. In hindsight, it seems, Kapoor, was in with India’s stuffy Censor Board. While those late ‘70s boys reluctantly gave way to the ‘80s generation, Kapoor gifted these kids Mandakini, bathing again in see-through white saree, under a gushing waterfall, singing a song of love. Lust was complete. The picture was called Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Raj Kapoor’s last.

Surely there was more to the expensive, expansive romantic film starring a Kapoor debutant Rajeev, than the heroine bathing under a waterfall. Children wouldn’t have been allowed into theatres. Half nude picture of Mandakini in the back-page of India Today was good enough. It still survives public memory.

We were in 1985. Scholars chronicling collectively neglected male desires may regard this as a landmark year for India. Few months later, some serious cinephiles discovered the gorgeous Kimmy Katkar: in semi-transparent white again; as close to skinny-dipping as Indians could ever hope to watch their heroines in a pond; wading through water, running across a jungle, over an elephant, under a waterfall of course, in a see-through dress.

Showman B Subhash from the “B Subhash Movie Unit”, of the Disco Dancer fame, the oddly ballistic badshah of Bollywood B-grade, was giving us a peek into these potentially fertile moments, his camera strategically capturing long and mid-shots of Kimmy Katkar, lens just wide enough to keep the bosom in the frame. A starlet was born.

Whatever you may say, B was an inspired man. Hot blonde Bo Derek had worn that same dress in a similar film and scene, merely four years before this. The heroine here, playing Ruby, a city babe in the woods, most Indians will admit, had pulled it off better that Bo, but we won’t get into that boring argument. Bitten by a snake, the girl’s saved by a supposed jungle man, who gives her a tour of the birds and the bees, and stock shots of snakes and other animals from National Geographic.

She’s now in love with this tall, dark, horse-like hero. But who is he? Some say he’s 100 feet tall, or maybe 200 feet. Some tribes worship him, some consider him villainous, yet others believe he is a wandering spirit, who returns to protect them occasionally, and then casually disappears. That’s what Ruby’s fat bald daddy (Om Shivpuri) tells her, before he, she, and several other perfectly normal urban people break into a dance in the jungle: “Jhile le. Jhile le. Ayo ayo. Jhile le….” Lovely.

Of course you’re familiar with this mysteriously clean-shaven jungle man in loincloth. American author Edgar Rice Burroughs created him back in 1912. He’s appeared in at least over a 100 feature films since. Olympian swimmer Johnny Weissmuller portrayed this pidgin speaking character in a dozen movies in the early years of the talkies, 1930s and ‘40s. Chariots Of Fire director Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke (1984), many believe, is possibly the most competent recent Tarzan movie.

Yeah, yeah, we know. Still, no one tracking this wild child over decades could have anticipated the arrival of Hemant Birje. He’s not just He Man. He is the man. You look at him. You know. Right away. He is Tarzan!

After he’s already protected his girl from a rubber crocodile, in a pivotal scene, he lunges on to the waist of a half-man, half-guerilla thrice his size, thrashing him, as a hypnotic score plays in the background. The deliriously surreal sequence lasts for around 5 minutes, it stays on your mind forever.

Ruby, his Jane, rightly calls him with an American twang, Tarzain. She imagines making dozens of babies with him at one go. He plays with all of them in her dreams. Sound of music carries on, “Doe a deer, a female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun…” God made man, she explains to him in the song, barber and tailor made gentleman. “Tum aadmi ho. Mein tumhe insaan banaoongi (you’re a human being, I’ll make you a civilised man)”, she tells Tarzan more seriously later. It’s the sort of distinction Burroughs had hoped to make with his series: that the civilized man is in fact more the beast.

Deadly DK, as in, not DK Bose, but Dalip Tahil, has been contracted by the legendary Apollo circus to bring Hemant Birje, as in Tarzan, back from the jungle. They could use him for animal tricks. Enough circus animals have already been employed in the film. This is before the animal activist Menaka Gandhi came into the political scene and banned animals from movies and circuses altogether. She had a peculiar problem with them becoming movie or marquee stars. She may have disapproved of Hemant Birje as well, but you never know.

He’s a more a man at one with nature, showing to his audiences a simplified way of living, an alternate world. You should still not wake a sleeping, gentle giant up like that. The mother of all movie climaxes is what you’re likely to get then. DK whips Tarzan to the amusement of his bored audience at the circus. He starts swinging over a ring of fire, jumping to a bed of nails… All clap.

Wild animals finally attack the city in search of their hero, they take over the circus, all of them: elephants, lions, tigers, stuffed toys. Tarzan goes berserk at the circus, beats the hell out of everyone. DK sells this as part of the show. Everyone claps again. This is a show. The greatest show on earth! It stopped playing in the ‘80s. You wish to know where He Man hero Birje disappeared after that. Anthropologists should’ve been sent out on that survey.

Last checked, in 2008, 23 years after, Birje was seen posing in blonde wig, loincloth, knife around his waist, next to a much younger Jane, announcing as director and leading man the Return Of Tarzan. That movie probably never got made. Which is unfair.

Supposedly modern civilizations have always been mercilessly cruel toward marginalized tribes, whether in Afghanistan, India’s Andhra Pradesh, North East, name it. It’s a serious problem. Hemant Birje, I reckon, could also become part of that displacement debate.

Actor Kimmy Katkar (beginning to spell her name rightly as Kimi later) moved to Melbourne, returned to live a quiet life in Pune, briefly featured as Bollywood star in Gregory David Roberts’ semi non-fiction bestseller Shantaram. In a prolific career spanning only 7 years, she’d starred as heroine in over 40 films; none, besides Mukul Anand’s Hum, that you’re likely to remember. But this one? Of course.

Girl emerging from a pond in a jungle is a recognised sub-genre of Indian C-grade films. But that special, entire 9-minute sequence of Kimi Katkar in white has had over 1 million hits on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ZFCdsmFJk&feature=related) as I write this.

The swinging Bappi Lahiri song, ‘Tarzan MyTarzan’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsrSSLbiuLQ&feature=related) with Katkar in a red bikini has already clocked over 8 million viewers in the same open barometer of public tastes.

Raj Kapoor had famously said of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, “Let people come to watch Zeenat’s tits, they will go out remembering the film.” Quite obviously, the reverse was true here.

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