‘Will you exchange your window seat with my aisle one?’
I had settled down in my allocated seat in what-would-be a long flight from Bombay and had almost gone to sleep at 3am. Suddenly this curt request woke me up and I saw in front of me a young ‘Bandra-girl’ in an outlandish outfit.
Sorry, I thought to myself. I didn’t check-in my seat online two days ago to miss the thrill of descending onto Paris early in the morning, that too for a girl who carries a Sydney Sheldon paperback and has silly mehendi painted all over her arms. [If she was reading Borges or even Dostoevsky instead, it would have been a different matter.]
I decided to be rude and decline her request. She settled down in the seat beside me with a perceptibly mutual sense of antipathy bordering on repulsion.
Every time in a long-distance flight, I somehow presume that the empty seat beside me would be occupied by someone – preferably a woman - who would make the journey memorable (though that has happened only twice in my life). Now, I feel utterly betrayed. By way of diffusing the sense of mutual aversion, she initiates the inevitable conversation. I don’t even attempt to remember her name but her life-situation is interesting. This young woman is actually travelling to Milan through Paris to meet her Indian boyfriend who runs a taxi-service in Stockholm and he is driving down to Milan to pick her up. All these people travelling in a plane must be carrying with them so many unique stories. [As Alan de Botton says, every person is worthy of a biography.]
She asks me if I have been to Sweden and if I know anything about that world that she will be stepping into, as an immigrant. I refrain from talking but I wish I could tell her that though I have never been to Sweden, it is a country that is firmly ensconced in my imagination through its cinema, particularly by the great(est) master of the cinema – Ingmar Bergman – who has created such a deep mystique around Swedish women that much of my notion of feminine beauty and grace has been moulded by those images.
When she hears that I have something to do with films, she asks me if I am related to Mithun Chakravarty. Nobody till date has had the audacity to ask me this weird question. ‘I hate Bollywood’, she tells me, indirectly expressing her contempt for what she thinks is, my world.
‘It’s all trash!’
And then she browses the list of films available on the screen in front of her and wonders which to click. I strongly recommend her to watch Woody Allen’s Match Point as she wanted to steer clear of anything Bollywoodish. Instead, she clicks on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and the film starts. She keeps on giggling and as I stand up in the aisle, I notice something fascinating. ALL the Indians are watching ‘Bollywood’ films and ALL the non-Indians are watching Hollywood flicks. With no exception. This is the extent to which our choices are determined by habit and what merely surrounds us.
The late dinner arrives and I realise that the standard of Air France has gone down dramatically. Just as Air India epitomises the messiness of India, Air France symbolises the decline of a nation once seen as the epitome of elegance. I have my dinner with the clumsy vegetarian stranger beside me who asks me about the Eiffel Tower and wonders if she can see it in the 12 hour transit she has in Paris. By now, I know the Charles de Gaulle airport like the back of my hand and so I give her elaborate instructions about how to get to the Eiffel Tower from the airport but she is not the adventurous kind apart from belonging to the hideous variety of kitschy Indian tourists who think that seeing Paris is all about seeing the Eiffel Tower and London is all about Madame Tussaud’s silly wax museum where you can pose with Bollywood stars. However, even that cannot do violence to the fact that the Eiffel Tower is incorruptible in its intricately complex geometrical beauty.
As the plane descends on to Paris early in the morning, she tells me that this is her first trip outside India. I feel terribly guilty for not giving away my window seat to her.
I have been invited for a second time to my alma mater, this time as part of an evaluation committee that assesses the final diploma thesis projects (fiction/documentary film). This evaluation, thankfully, doesn’t entail giving grades to students (as the film school is avowedly anti-scholastic) but involves engendering a lively debate around the films. The evaluators are all ‘external’ people, not involved in the process of making any of these films so that they can maintain an unbiased view. The Committee comprises of twelve people from twelve countries and I feel utterly humbled by the people around me. More of that will come later in a separate blogpost.
One of my ‘colleagues’ in the Committee is Matthew Robbins, an American (or Gringo, as they call it here) .I am excited by what I gather about him from the accompanying brochure and wonder whether I will ever get to talk to such a Hollywood big-shot. The brochure says (in Spanish, here translated into English):
Matthew Robbins is a director, producer, scriptwriter and script consultant. He was part of the group of filmmakers who turned around American cinema from within in the 1970s along with George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Cohen Brothers, etc. Founder of the American Zoetrope Company along with Lucas and Coppola, he collaborated on Lucas’ first film THX 1138. He won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 1974 for The Sugarland Express directed by Spielberg. He later acted and wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wrote and directed the fantasy film Dragonslayer in 1981. In 1997, he started his collaboration with Guillermo del Toro for whom he wrote the script for Mimic, sci-fi horror film which marked the beginning of the brilliant Mexican filmmaker’s Hollywood career.
As we come out of the hall one day, he turns to me and asks, ‘Do you understand English’?
He suspects I amIndian but isn’t sure by the way I look.Physically, Latin Americans can often be confused with Indians (of India).
You are so much a part of American film history, I tell him as we sit down at the Cine Encanto Cafetaria.
Unfortunately, that’s true, he says.
I don’t really understand initially why he is so enthused about the fact that I am Indian and live in Bombay. I soon find out the reason. He has so many stories to tell and is almost dying to do so. Over the next hour and a half, I listen to all his close encounters of the Bollywood kind.
Nearly two years ago, he spent a long time (a total of 7 weeks) in Bombay and elsewhere and lived at the Sun n Sand Hotel on the Juhu beach. It is overwhelming to be in Havana and hear a blue-eyed American in an elegant hat talk about his experiences with Vishal Bharadwaj, Gulzar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgun, Sanjay Dutt, Ramgopal Varma, Ronnie Screwala and so many more. As a close friend of Mira Nair, he had attended the Maisha (!?) workshop in South Africa and that is where he met Vishal Bharadwaj.
He immensely admires Vishal and appreciates him both as a human being and as an artist. He was also instrumental in putting Vishal in touch with the DOP of Guillermo del Toro (which I saw him filming in Whistling Woods) and also functioned as second unit director forCoppola who was hugely impressed with Maqbool and Omkara. If it wasn’t for Vishal, he wouldn’t have anything to do with Indian films. He has been taken to many screenings in Bombay multiplexes where he said he was subjected to Shah Rukh Khan’s Om Shanti Om which he hated with a passion as much as he disliked No Smoking.He disliked practically everything he saw and wanted nothing to do with Bollywood but got embroiled with it when Vishal told him that he always wanted to make a war film and so he wrote for him a film which was on a huge scale (possibly the most expensive ever made in India) with UTV funding it. The script unfolded nicely and since Vishal wanted good opportunities for composing music (with lyrics by Gulzar), he had the idea of a singer who comes to entertain the troops during the Japanese invasion of the Indian northeast during World War II. He called it Julia and was happy with the screenplay which he wrote at an astonishing pace, according to his own statement. For building up the story, Matthew said he used the biographical material of ‘Fearless Nadia’/ Hunterwali (Mary Evans Wadia, born in Australia with an English-Greek descent) – the swashbuckling heroine of 1930s to 1950s Indian cinema. Everything was set up at breakneck speed and the music was ready and then just a week before the shoot, the main star Sanjay Dutt- “the guy who was caught with guns” -quit the film without any rhyme or reason andany prior notification. In fact they had signed up the internationally well-known actress Franca Potente (of Run Lola Run and Che fame) on a ‘pay or play’ basis for a million dollars (which meant the producer had to pay the actress even if the film was abandoned or postponed for whatever reason). So UTV was in deep trouble and Vishal was heartbroken.
The most fascinating aspect of the preproduction was when Sanjay Dutt’s parole officer was sent by the Indian government and was acting like a private secretary, rolling out the shooting schedule on a table and indicating the dates during which Sanjay may be allowed by the court to shoot. The project was abandoned at a huge cost and meanwhile Vishal finished Kaminey with UTV where he supposedly got the rights of Julia back in exchange for the film he made for them. Matthew still believes that the project would be resuscitated very soon and he would be back in Bombay, the crazy city, but this time he would bethere with his wife.
He was invited by Aamir Khan at his house in Panchgani. He had a new wife at that time and Aamir told him that a close friend of his wasshooting a film but it got so messed up that he had to take it over as director. He was hugely distracted and apologized profusely for not being able to give him more time. He was shooting Taare Zameen Par, the story of a dyslexicchild that would eventually become a huge commercial success and would also get considerable critical acclaim. Matthew didn’t know that and so he was very happy to know from me that Aamir pulled it off after all the distress he saw him going through.
He woke up one morning to find that Aamir Khan had left for the shoot while he was still living in his bunglow. He had his lonely breakfast in a huge dining table that reminded him of the dining table in Citizen Kane. The house was beautiful, overlooking the mountains and the furniture was all immaculate as well as the bathroom fittings, all of which dated back to mid of the 19th century. The bathroom, he said, was particularlyhuge. Aamir was quite a gentleman and was genuinely distracted and in deep trouble at that moment. Matthew was puzzled by the way the cooks and butlers treated him at Aamir Khan’s house. He was the maharaja to be accorded the highest treatment. He was never allowed to even open any car door. While he was at the Sun and Sand Hotel, Vishal sent over his car every evening so that he could have dinner at his place and not eat alone in the hotel. The cook was absolutely amazing and he enjoyed every bit of the Indian food he ate.
For location searching on Julia, he had travelled far and wide within India, particularly in West Bengal, Maharashtra and Moosourie. He was impressed how comfortable Indians were with technology and how Vishal continued to work on the music while still on the move.The roads in West Bengal were … well, they couldn’t be called roads. Once while travelling through a forest in Mussourie, his car stopped when they saw a beautiful small tiger cub smashed and killed in the middle of the road. His heart bled on seeing this. He wanted to go out and take a photo but the driver wouldn’t allow him as they thought that the mother tiger is certainly around and would attack anybody who would go out. Matthew’s family got the shock of their life when they saw the photo of the dead tiger which he also showed me from his laptop a few days later.
By this time as he was meeting more and more 'filmy' people in Bombay, many prominent filmmakers wanted him to write for them including Ramu (Ramgopal Varma) and even Bachchan. It was surprising that Bachchan wanted him to write King Lear with him in mind when in reality he must have just finished making The Last Lear with Rituparno Ghosh.
Strange, isn’t it, Matthew asked. Why did he want that?
May be, I said, he had read King Lear on the occasion of making that film (which revolved around the play) and was intrigued how much the character befitted him where he could hold centrestage without getting into plots of romantic stories with young girls as in Nishabd or Cheeni Kum.
During the shoot of Aag (or Ramu’s Sholay), he found it funny how Bachchan babbled for 3 minutes in front of the camera. The extremely noisy Arriflex started. He couldn’t imagine why they are doing this when a top star is talking.
The sound is only for reference, Ramu told him. You see all the noise around. Do you think it is possible to do direct sound on location shoots in India?
Rubbish, whispered Vishal Bharadwaj into his ears. Most young filmmakers these days prefer sync sound.
He was surprised that in the middle of the retake of the 3 minute dialogue, the reel snapped and the shot had to be cancelled. If you had a camera assistant like that in Hollywood who didn’t check how much reel wasinside, he would have been fired on the spot and would not get a job again in his life. He would have to move to the East Coast.(Now that was a sweet but nasty joke about what he thought about indie filmmaking in NYC.) However, in Bombay, it was normal and they just moved to the next take.
He had seen Bachchan’s pictures everywhere and one day saw him in the front page of Times of Indiain the clothes of a bandit. That very day, he was invited to Ramu’s set and found Bachchan sitting in exactly the same dress and same pose that he had seen in the papers that morning. He was utterly confused.
Later when he told AB that he was surprised that the 100 Rupees note didn’t carry his picture in it, Bachchan’s response was graceful.
‘He gave a very aristocraticsmile’.
I know, Bachchansaid.
‘This guy must be so used to adulation’.
When he saw the shoot of Ramu’s Aag, Matthewsaid he knew it was going to be the worst film ever. Later he was again invited to the set of Nishabd where Ramu wanted to show him about to commit suicide. The way the camera moved in that scene was utterly hideous. But Matthew had a brainwave. He called Vishal to his side and told him what if before he commits suicide, his hands travel to his pocket and there he finds a paper in which is written one of the poems that this Jiya girl wrote. Vishal said it’s a great idea and went ahead with how the whole scene could evolve. When they got very excited with it, they called Ramu andran it past him though they knew obviously it was too late and can’t be shot anymore.
Ramu kept saying, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand’.
And then when Vishal explained the entire scene to him at length in Hindi, Ramu suddenly said, ‘Great’.
Matthew was amazed how Ramu instantly called his assistant on his cell and asked them to arrange a shoot immediately on a terrace and he saw the scene being shot right away. He was very impressed with the dynamism.
Since I do not recall seeing any such shot in the film,Matthewconcluded that the scene must have been deleted later.
I told him about the furore over Ramu during the Mumbai Attacks and he had nothing but contempt for his sensationalism.
He had great admiration for Gulzar. He had been invited to the house of John Abraham and Bipasha Basu. He had little regard for the acting skills of either of them.
‘She is sexy and knows how to use it’.
He was amazed how they had a balcony, secluding themselves from any possible human being watching them.
While travelling by train with Vishal and Supratik Sen (a Bengali like you, he said,– how did he know that!) in a first class train, he found himself with two ‘middle class businessmen’ who didn’t recognize Vishal. With some trepidation, they asked him at some point where he was from. When he said he was from California, they asked him, are the other two men also from California? Matthew was hugely surprised by the oddity of the question and I provided him with the cultural decoding that the awe that these gentlemen evinced had perhaps less to do with race than economic status evoked by ‘California’ and further reinforced by their association with a white man.
A few days later at a beach-house party, Matthew narrated some other amusing incidents of his India experience that involved a jewellery shopping-spree at a private house guided by Vishal Bharadwaj’s wife (that made him extremely popular that Christmas) and her ‘strange’ behaviour at the dining table where she never ate with the guests but only served them. 'I want you to explain this to me', he said; 'Why did she do that'?
Some more cultural decoding followed from my end and he looked a bit demystified.
'But why did Sanjay Dutt do that to us? Why did he abandon the project at the last moment?'
Was this a matter of cultural decoding, I wondered. What do you think?
'I can only guess', he said. 'I think at some point Sanjay realised that the film was not exactly about him and that disappointed him.'
Didn't he read the script in the first place? Didn't he sign the contract?
'I don't know'.
I felt ashamed to tell Matthew that Indian stars (as against the actors) rarely read screenplays unless they have to, at the last moment. It all depends on the pitching and the narration. At the time of narration, the director narrates the story differently to get the star excited about his role and give his nod. Sanjay, who is particularly infamous for not reading screenplays, must have read it precisely a week before the shoot, under duress and with some degree of seriousness and that is when he may have felt that he was not the centre of the universe.
Will Julia ever be made?
Now that Kaminey has released today to rave reviews, let's hope that it is made now. And that would bring Matthew back to Bombay!
'This time I will definitely go with my wife', he said. 'She is particularly excited about the jewellery shopping spree'.
One of the many things that I find charming about Latin American social life is how people remember little details about you even when you have forgotten them. It never ceases to surprise me.
I often enjoy the company of kids far more than that of adults. So when this extremely sweet girl - with cheeks so red you would think they have been painted – slowed down her bicycle and started talking as I was walking from one building to another, I couldn’t help extending the casual conversation. What I didn’t know was that she would touch me in a special way!
Her name is Estafani (Latin version of the Anglican Stephanie), six years old. She told me about her mother who is in Mexico City and her dad who is in Italy and she lives with her grandma on the film school campus. She must be feeling terribly lonely here and I start feeling sad for her but she wasn’t sad at all. She strikes up conversations with students and teachers everywhere and all of them seem to love her. I was missing my own son very much and so spending time with her was a kind of emotional substitute as well as a way of refreshing myself with her beautiful innocence.
In the evening, I found her playing with her grandma close to my apartment and I realized that she is the granddaughter of someone I know for many years. The kid’s grandma, who is now in her late 70s, remembers clearly till this date that I had taken a photo of her ballerina daughter (Estafani’s mom) twenty years ago in the swimming pool and had sent it back to my family in Calcutta as a (biased) sample of how Cuban girls look like and everybody had gone gaga over it. So it was a pleasant surprise that this little girl is the daughter of someone I know. What does her mom do now?
The ballerina mother continues with her career in dance but as the trapeze dancer in a circus in Mexico. How time passes! The grandma is visibly proud of her daughter and granddaughter. “Her mom is as beautiful as she was 20 years ago and this kid is an image of her mom, isn’t she? She is so friendly that she can strike a conversation with anyone and so intelligent that she asked me, ‘Can you imagine what it feels like when the president of a nation is thrown out of his own country?’ ”
She was referring to the incidents following the military coup in Honduras which has shaken the whole of Latin America for the sheer barbarity of the act. The Miami news channels are playing hourly updates on it. But I am more interested in the story of the mother. How does a beautiful ballerina dancing to Bizet’s Carmen become a trapeze dancer in a circus? It confuses me because in my mind, ballet belongs to high culture and circus belongs to the other extreme in the hierarchy of cultural forms of entertainment. This can only happen in Latin America!
I also suddenly remember something and that fascinates me further. I had indeed seen a circus playing while in Monterrey in Mexico two years ago and someone said that the circus is of a very high standard, specially the dancers. I wanted to visit it though it was very expensive but my friends discouraged me firstly because there was no time that I could take out of the conference to go to a circus and more importantly, they all thought I must grow out of my childhood fantasies.
Estefani’s mom had married an Italian and migrated to some Italian city and the child was born out of that marriage. She subsequently divorced the guy and married a Mexican businessman and migrated to Mexico, travelling with the circus while leaving the daughter back in Havana with the grandma. The mom calls the kid every few days just as much as the dad calls from Italy.
Catching up with people after so many years is like following the characters of a novel and seeing in a few moments of storytelling, what Time does to people. Divorces and separations are rarely seen as tragedies in this part of the world. When women tell these stories, they sound more like stories of liberation and triumph. Many years ago I had seen this septagenerian grandma getting married on the campus for the fourth time in her life at the age of 50 or so. It was a hugely memorable event with Gabo (ie, Gabriel García Marquez) playing her godfather and Fernando Birri (the ‘pope’ of Latin American cinema) as the priest substitute. I overheard her boss, a woman, saying, ‘At last she has found the great love of her life’. As I followed the atheist rituals of the event with wide-eyed wonderment, it felt like a thrilling tragi-comic idea to find the great love of your life at the age of fifty.
So now I ask her what happened to that man. ‘I got rid of him’, she said. ‘He migrated’. No more men in your life after that? ‘No. Enough with men. Now I have my granddaughter. I live for her’.
I didn’t realise that the kid thought I was a native Indian from some part of Latin America. ‘But you don’t look like that. You dress differently.’
I explain to her about the silly mistake that Christopher Columbus made five hundred years ago, leaving all of us confused about ‘Indians’. He wanted to find us (India) but instead took the opposite direction and ended up finding you’ll (Latin America) and the guy didn’t even realise his mistake. He started calling them ‘Indians’ and that continues to this day!
‘Five hundred years ago?’, the girl murmured to herself in amazement.
Actually, more than that.
‘My friends also create so many confusions in class.’
She takes me to show something in the garden – the design of the shrubs. I am enjoying being with her but some people call me to a van which is waiting for me to get in. I have to tear myself away from her.
The next day, I go to the office of the director in search of some documents I need to sign and there was the grandma there who works as the director’s secretary even at her age. Suddenly the sweet little girl comes out of the door and hugs me intensely as if I am her father. I almost reciprocate the emotion but I have to hold myself back with a sense of adult guilt. It is not a good idea to develop emotional bonds with kids when you know you are going to leave within a few days/weeks. For me she is just a substitute for my own kid and for her, I am just a substitute for her father whom she must be missing deeply.
Adulthood has also taught me that loving anyone involves certain consequences, certain responsibilities that we must be ready to embrace, and embrace them with joy but what do we do when what we stand to lose is far more than what we gain?
On the final day of my stay in Cuba, I ask Estefani to speak to the camera while I record her standing at the landing of the staircase. She tells me, ‘Mom said yesterday she is coming to Havana in December and will stay here for the next two years. Why don’t you stay back till December? Then, you will get to see her’.
‘This guy is a rebel without a cause’, I overheard someone commenting about me to the chauffeur who had come to pick me up from the Havana airport. What did I do to provoke such a response? And yet I am fascinated by the cinematic allusion. I have been analysing Nicholas Ray’s film in class for many years now.
As the wheels of the aircraft touched Cuban soil, all the passengers burst into applause. This does not happen anywhere else! I wonder why. Is this a celebration of the relief of having survived another flight across the oceans – of the triumph of life over death - or is it the joy of arrival specifically to one place, ‘coming home’?
As I come out of the aircraft, I hardly have time to wonder if anyone had come to pick me up. Immediately after emerging out of the tunnel, I see a placard almost stuck in front of my nose that declares my name. I follow the woman as she insists that I must go straight to the VIP lounge. First I have to clear immigration. I see a long line of people and stand behind them but the lady in uniform who has been sent to escort me insists that I take the ‘VIP channel’ where there is no one. I feel utterly embarrassed, full of self-contempt as I wonder what have I done in life to merit such a treatment of jumping the queue in Cuba. Soon after, I insist that I pick up my luggage. She doesn’t give me an option but ushers me into a silly VIP lounge that I hate with a passion, the ultimate horrifying expression of which is the Bollywood salon I had seen at Bombay international airport: utterly ultra-kitsch. My usher’s duty involves offering me a drink which I decline as I am more concerned about my luggage going round and round in the conveyor belt without being picked up or worse, it may not have arrived from Madrid. She finds me strange and unfriendly since I have travelled all the way from India and must be tired. In fact I am not. I am coming merely from Madrid and slept well in the plane because there was no LCD screen behind the seats in the aircraft and Air Europa has some kind of a ridiculous rule that you have to buy the headphones from them. I totally refuse to give in to their pettiness even if it is in the name of recession. I have also learnt that the smartest way to avoid jetlag on long flights is to cheat your body into thinking that your sleeping time actually coincides with the sleeping time of the country of arrival. Anything to eat?, she asks me. No, thank you. I want to go and find my luggage. ‘This guy is really a rebel without a cause’, she tells Capote, the chauffeur.
As I get into the car, there is a student of the film school who wants a free ride. I am glad to oblige him but another girl follows and then there is a complicated situation. The car has the luggage of someone who cannot be found and that happens to be the girl’s boyfriend. She is a documentary filmmaker from Peru and when she learns that I am an Indian, she tells me that she was in Bangladesh over the past month making a film about the success of the micro-credit system and the Grameen Bank.
How was the experience, I ask her. She garners all her force and says, ‘Bastante brutalista’ (Very brutal). The poverty is pornographic but there is a lot of human warmth.
As I am fascinated and want to know more about her experience, she starts talking enthusiastically about her documentary which gets my chauffeur Capote very annoyed. It is late at night. He just wants to drop me and go home and this girl is making him (and me) wait for an elusive boyfriend to arrive. She senses the irritation and gets out of the car but assures me that she will tell me the whole story. ‘I can go on talking for hours about it’.
I was looking forward to hearing her story but I never saw her over the three weeks that I stayed in Havana. The boyfriend must have finally arrived.
For me, it has never been like this. I am used to getting phone calls in the middle of the night asking me if I can go over to Rio de Janeiro ‘in the coming week’. The ticket would arrive on the day of travel and I would make an international trip without insurance. That’s one of the scariest aspects considering my conviction that one day, sooner or later, I will die in a plane crash. In situations such as these, there is no room for anticipation because there is no time to nurture that emotion. Instead, there is a high anticipation of the trip being cancelled. And when travelling from India to countries such as Mexico, the visa nightmares leave place for neither romance nor anticipation, far less the anticipation of romance. The Mexican government somehow thinks that there are no honest travellers among Indians; all we want in life is to cross over to the US through the land border. My visa was sorted out at the last moment through some hobnobbing at the highest diplomatic level and once again, the passport had reached on the day of travel.
Not this time. Everything has been sorted out well ahead. The ticket reached two months prior to travel and even the last visa as well as the insurance were all done a fortnight ago. I even completed the purchase of 35 gift items for friends ten days before and even finished cataloging them (ie, which gift is for whom). For the first time in my life, I truly relish the romantic joy of the anticipation of a thrilling five-week travel schedule with all expenses paid except for my personal side-trips in Europe. All meetings, rendezvous, all lecture assignments, dinners, hotel reservations, encounters with old friends at airport lounges in cities-I-barely-know, all are fixed way ahead in time. It is as if I have scripted my own life with me as the protagonist, belligerently defying any potential unsettling uncertainty. I neatly print out the details of my itinerary, make multiple copies of it and distribute them among those who may have to contact me in case of emergency. And yet, two days before my travel, a Spanish friend informs that there is no way she can take the same flight with me from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela where we reserved a cheap ‘no-cancellation-allowed’ SpanAir ticket eight weeks ago. Even before I embark upon my journey, I see my eighty euros floating down the drain along with my misplaced enthusiasm. To what extent can real life be scripted? What’s the point in being so proactive! Isn’t it better to live impulsively and allow life to take you unawares!
Anuradha (my ex-wife) and Shagnik (my 8-year old son) come to drop me at the airport in the middle of the night. She had never seen me off at the airport during all the years we were married and yet she is here tonight. Neither she nor my son are visibly concerned about me going away but far more absorbed by the romantic atmosphere of the departure lounge of the international airport. I almost drift away, unnoticed. They are busy looking up at the itineraries of airlines as much as I am. There are no finer journeys than the ones provoked in the imagination.
When will you take me to Europe? My son asks me, by way of bidding farewell. When will you take me to Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona? - places he has heard being mentioned passionately at home and now sees some of these names in the itinerary chart glaring in front of him. He learns the names of some new destinations - Newark, Amsterdam, Johannesburg – words that evoke a sense of romance about adventures that await him. The travel bug his hit him too.
‘Study well and you will get to travel to these places and many more’, I tell him by way of consolation as well as inspiration like a middle-class educated Bong for whom giving lectures, attending conferences or film festivals, fellowships or scholarships are flimsy justifications for travelling around the world at someone else’s cost. At least, it is the easiest way to trot the globe.
There are several online lists of 'Top 50 / 100 Films of All Time' and the more I see them, the more I have felt impelled to come up with my own list because all of them are so hopelessly lopsided. Obviously, most of them originate from US and an overwhelming majority of films in the list (70-80%) tend to be from US. The choice of films obviously depends on the criteria of selection, conscious or unconscious. I know it is impossible for any human being to be totally unbiased but we are all capable of being fair and relatively unprejudiced to some degree. Though I will not elaborate on my criteria of selection (leaving it for others to find that out), a list such as this is actually useful for many people who want to know in all sincerity a basic list of film classics that they must see. It was not easy coming up with this list. I actually found it impossible to leave out at least 15 more films. So, very soon, I will publsih a follow-up 'Next 50 Films to See". If this list seems like an authentic reflection of the mind of the person making the list more than anything else, I wouldn't make apologies.
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick (US)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God by Werner Herzog (Germany)
Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) by Satyajit Ray (India)
Belle de Jour by Luis Bunuel (France)
Black God White Devil /God and Devil in the Land of the Sun, by Glauber Rocha (Brazil)
Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy)
Charulata by Satyajit Ray (India)
Children of Heaven by Majid Majidi (Iran)
Citizen Kane by Orson Welles (US)
City of God by Fernando Meirelles (Brazil)
Cries and Whispers by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
Eight and a Half by Federico Fellini (Italy)
Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola (US)
Heimat by Edgar Reitz (Germany)
Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais (France)
Knife in the Water by Roman Polanski (Poland)
L'Avventura (The Love Affair) by Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy)
La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini (Italy)
Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomas G Alea (Cuba)
Mephisto by Istvan Szabo (Hungary)
Metropolis by Fritz Lang (Germany)
Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia)
Modern Times by Charles Chaplin (US)
Osama by Siddiq Barmak (Afghanistan)
Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders (Germany)
Persona by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa (Japan)
Requiem by Zoltan Fabri (Hungary)
Sur by Fernando Solanas (Argentina)
Sweet Movie by Dusan Makavejev (Yugoslavia)
Taxidriver by Martin Scorsese (US)
Terra em Trance (The Earth Entranced) by Glauber Rocha (Brazil)
That Obscure Object of Desire by Luis Bunuel (France+Spain)
The Battle of Algiers by Gilles Pontecorvo (Algeria)
The Bicycle Thief by Vittorio de Sica (Italy)
The Decalogue by Kristoff Kieslowski (Poland)
The General by Buster Keaton (US)
The Great Dictator by Charles Chaplin (US)
The Jackal of Nahueltoro by Miguel Littin (Chile)
The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser by Werner Herzog (Germany)
The Pianist by Roman Polanski (Poland)
The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden)
To Live by Zhang Yimou (China)
Touch of Evil (restored version) by Orson Welles (US)
Twelve Angry Men by Sidney Lumet (US)
Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock (US)
Vidas Secas by Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil)
Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live) by Jean Luc Godard (France)
