The peaks and troughs of existence

I had read the Oscar buzz, heard the interviews, the near-undiluted praise from critics so when Slumdog finally came to my small town arthouse theater I was lined up for tickets!  The movie began with Jamal being questioned by the police and rapidly went into a back and forth narration of the events in his life that “equipped” him for this show.  In fact it is safe to say that Rab ne bana di life, KBC ke liye!  My impression of the film can best be summed up when I tell you that within the first half hour I was ready to get up and leave the theater (one in our party who was more squeamish, did leave), but being the type who will read And Quiet Flows the Don to the last page no matter what, I persisted – and I was rewarded.

One need not look far for what the Bollywood influences on Danny Boyle were – the main influence was that he knew how to carry the audience along through cringe and horror inducing segments of squalor and brutality bound to make the affluent audience run home and sign up for “Feed a Child for pennies a day” in India, and squeeze tears out of the most cynical eyes.  The beginning segments of slums and squalor and drudge and cruelty, peppered with poignant moments of humanity and some humor were a rapid zoom in and out of Mumbai a few years ago.  A brief synopsis – Jamal and his brother Salim are orphaned in anti-Muslim violence, another waif Latika latches on to them thanks to Jamal’s inherent goodness winning over Salim’s inherent thuggishness.  Many huge ups and downs later, Jamal is on KBC (he wants to find out where Latika is – this is her favorite TV show), and about to become a millionaire!  It is childhood love you see, the forever kind.  Danny Boyle makes this implausible story of Jamal plausible by showing us the chronology of the quiz show questions matching up with the chronology of Jamal’s existence.  Yes, we believe!  Fairy tales can indeed come true – NOT!  But within all this implausibility, it is hard to not be engaged in the story, and as a humanist to believe that Jamal’s life could be a summation of the few positive things that could happen to each and every child living in the hellish slums of Mumbai.  So cynics beware – you will hate much here.  And naives/romantics – rejoice, as you will be uplifted by this tale.

Damaged Neurons!

You know neurons will figure big in the film when the opening credits unfold to a stylized neural network much like Paycheck meets Fountain (with a bit of the Fantastic Voyage thrown in). The film starts with a professor is lecturing Jiah and a cohort of medical students on how important the brain is for us (!) and then the patient Sanjay Singhania is introduced – he has anterograde amnesia. Now this is very crucial to the film, and memory loss by clockwork is in essence the movie. BUT did no one figure out what that kind of amnesia really is? And missing out on that very key point is in the end the downfall of the film.

Sanjay Singhania (Aamir Khan) has short-term memory loss due to a traumatic head injury and in true Memento style he keeps his important short-term memories as notes, photographs and tattoos. Forget the bus chases and mysterious disappearance from a moving bus, and the 3-foot pipe that came from a wash-basin and ended up in a goon’s belly, the story of Sanjay’s life is revealed as a policeman chases him down, whacks him hard with a bat and starts to read his diaries (kept in Hindi for some mysterious reason). Thus we are introduced to Sanjay the Cell Phone business tycoon who went to school in the US – I could swear I heard Howard, but all this happened pre-Obama! We are introduced to Kalpana (Asin) – a Mother Teresa + Maria of Sound of Music. Then in a Sajan like twist she makes up a story of romance with the tycoon. It makes big news, but while the tycoon is interviewed on CNN and the romance written about, strangely enough no one has seen this man. And I thought they only blanked out the faces of criminals and victims on TV. Even when he writes a check for 5 lacs for charity, Kalpana continues to believe he is a struggling out of work actor. In a most weirdly written scene she takes a night to decide that “Why not, let us love!” She even sells her car to give him money for his “Ma ka Ilaaj”, saves more children from prostitution and forcible kidney donations and this seals her fate. The goons come for her and since this is a potboiler revenge saga, they get her with yet another piece out of a hardware store as she whispers “Ghajni” in his ear. Her death scene is poignant, but also long drawn out to soulful music, so we really feel Sanjay’s pain as he watches helplessly after having taken his share of bashes from same piece of hardware. Ok – with that head trauma now accounted for, the revenge is on. He no doubt recalls Ghajini – it is anterograde amnesia – i.e. memories from before the trauma stay. The rest of the film he tracks Ghajni and his henchmen and kills them until he is discovered and his memories are erased – a Paycheck moment when the tattoos are blanked out and the pictures burnt! Jiah then acts as the instrument that will help him recreate these memories and eventually destroy Ghajini. We end in a Mohabbatein like moment with Sanjay holding the hands of an imagines Kalpana!

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