Lagaan – culture, sport, cinema, passion, performance!!!

Being a nephew of movie makers, I have always drawn inspiration, joy and sometimes use watching movies as a family bonding activity as well. Indian movies in particular have been a big thing in our family and continues to be. Not a month goes by without my family watching at least a couple of movies. If nothing, we will all dance to the songs and videos of Bollywood songs.  It certainly has been a window to the traditions, cultures, landscape and colors of India to my kids.  In their own way, Pooja and Varoon have been living characters in different movies.  Hindi they might not have picked to make a full conversation, but songs, they sure know….most of them full.  The Kishore Kumar DNA in me I believe has made its way to Varoon.  Lo kallo baat…nikle the Lagaan dekhne…ghar ke baat me atak gaye….chal babua picture dikhate hain…

Many movies have stirred my passion in different subjects. Lagaan is one such. Being very close to the sport during my school and college days- albeit no great shakes in any particular field except maybe fielding 😉 unlike my twin who practically could destroy the opposition with his seam bowling and blitzkrieg batting.

Why blog about Lagaan – my dear friend Shyloo-didi reminded me of Lagaan as a good movie to write about for inspiration. That seeded a new category under movies – the Bollywood Classics. Lagaan is my first attempt in this direction. I know, I will miss a lot, maybe even not capture some of the aspects. My effort here is to try and get a snapshot of the story, the movie, the actors, the directors, the music – as much as I can. Tho ho jaye?

Champaner. A small village in Central India.

Like thousands of villages across the country, the farmers of Champaner depend on agriculture as the main source of livelihood. Hard working and fun loving, they have small dreams – rain for the crops and food for the families.

On the outskirts of the village stands a British cantonment, commanded by Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne), an arrogant and capricious man.

Last year, there was rain, but very little. And this year, two months of the monsoon season have gone by… but there are no rains yet. All eyes are skywards as the villagers wait tensely for the life-giving drops from the heavens. They know that if the monsoon Gods evade them this year, their children will starve.

And then comes a bolt from the blue. The Raja’s (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) emissaries thunder through the province announcing double tax – ‘dugna lagaan’.

A battle begins, which is fought without bloodshed. It is fought by a group of unlikely heroes led by Bhuvan (Aamir Khan). Helped by Elizabeth (Rachel Shelley), the beautiful English girl, and Gauri (Gracy Singh), the young and perky village girl.

Faith and courage come face to face with arrogance and ruthlessness.

It requires grit and determination to attempt a film of this magnitude. It requires guts to defy the norms and parameters of commercial cinema and devote the entire film to a cricket match. It also requires valour and money in abundance to recreate an era which none from the present generation have witnessed (the film is set in the year 1893).

The film exposes the games the Britishers played with the Indians when they set foot on Indian soil. To cite, two instances, when Captain Russell forces the Raja, a vegetarian, to eat meat or when Russell challenges Bhuvan for a game of cricket, keep the viewer awestruck.

Even the post-challenge sequences that show Aamir gradually making his team of eleven, have been handled proficiently. But the highlight of the film is, without doubt, the cricket match, which dominates the second half completely.

The filming of the cricket match is the most exhilarating part of the film, which keeps the viewer on tenterhooks right till the end. The highs and lows of the villagers and the emotions attached to the game are so true to life, which is why the cinegoer becomes a part of the crowd watching the game on screen.

But the film has its share of flaws as well.

* One, those who expect the film to be a war waged by Indians against the British will be disappointed to see a film that is devoted completely to a cricket match. This ‘battle’ is fought with a bat in the hand, not swords or guns.

* Two, the length of the film – 3.40 hours – tries the patience of the viewer. The pace drops at regular intervals in both the halves and trimming the film is a must to make the goings-on speedy. The song in the climax should be deleted since it hinders the storytelling at that stage of the film.

* Three, the language used by the villagers is Avadhi, which will restrict its prospects to the North belt (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar) mainly. Even the usage of English by the Britishers will be difficult to comprehend for the viewer based in small towns and villages of India.

The film is embellished with great cinematography (Anil Mehta), authentic sets (Nitin Desai), brilliant dialogues (K.P. Saxena), soulful music (A.R. Rahman) and fantastic performances.

As a director, Ashutosh Gowariker has given the film a grand look, captured intricate details minutely and handled the theme beautifully, but as one of the writers of the film, he could have curbed the length of the film, for what could have been conveyed in 3 hours has been stretched unreasonably.

Rahman’s music is inspiring and gels well with the mood of the film. At least three numbers from the film – ‘Ghanan Ghanan’, ‘Radha Kaise Na Jale’ and ‘Maine Pyar Tujhi Se Hain Kiya’ – have a mesmerising effect on the viewer and the placement of the songs is also perfect. Even the background score has the unmistakable stamp of the genius – Rahman.

K.P. Saxena’s dialogues elevate the sequences to a great extent. At places, the impact is clapworthy. Cinematography is awesome and can easily be compared with the best of international cinema.

Now to the performances! The film clearly belongs to Aamir Khan, who enacts his part marvellously. He gets ample scope to display histrionics when the cricket match begins and must say, the actor is in top form. This is without doubt his best work to date.

New-find Gracy Singh springs a surprise. Not only is she an amazing performer, but also a first-rate dancer. Her dance in the ‘Radha Kaise Na Jale’ is among the high points of the film.

Paul Blackthorne is efficient and manages to make a strong impact. Rachel Shelley is equally impressive. Amongst the character artistes, Suhasini Mulay (Aamir’s mother), Akhilendra Mishra and Yashpal Sharma (who plays ‘Lakha’, the sole negative character amongst villagers) stand out with polished performances.

Amitabh Bachchan’s commentary, interspersed throughout the film, is one of the assets.

On the whole, LAGAAN is an apt example of good cinema – different plot, popular music, breath-taking climax and excellent performances. One of the keenly anticipated films of the times, the film has taken a fabulous start everywhere. But the Avadhi language spoken by the villagers and the length of the enterprise will restrict its prospects to an extent.

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The Man Who Knew Infinity

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Born: 22 Dec 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu state, India
Died: 26 April 1920 in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu state, India

The Man Who Knew Infinity – By Robert Kanigel

I think it was 1994 that I was introduced to this book by a dear friend Amit Nagar. I lived in Michigan and was about to move to NJ. Amit himself was relocating to NC. Being an avid fan of Ramanujam and a Pujari of Mathematics, thanks to my Guru in math for about 6 years – Shri Vijay Kumar, who not only instilled in me a passion for the subject, but also about the subject.

If I were to recall this book, I believe it is best done by visualizing this entire book as a documentary movie about the genius. I have captured the essence of my visualization aptly captured by these lines I found on the net. Why re-invent when most of the content captures the sentiments. Here you go….

If I were to script the movie, the initial credits would be superimposed on a high shot looking down on the delta of the river Cauvery in southeast India of a century ago. We slowly zoom down to a town; the sound track comes up with riverside noises, and we move with the camera to the life of a river market town in an exotic country. Of course the picture is incomplete; the audience will have to image the incredibly rich aromas—the spices in the market, the cooking odors. We would scan over to the quiet of the gigantic Hindu temple, foreign to western eyes in its architecture and its meaning. As the credits fade away, we would move down the street from the temple to the house of a poor, extremely devout, Brahmin family. This family is unremarkable in every way except for the intellectual talent of the boy studying on the porch. For purposes of our drama, his talent is also foreign and strange. He can play exotic mathematics in his mind. Numbers, symbols, series, functions. This is a play he must play alone, for there is no one else in India who has the talent to play on his level, or even to judge his skill. So he keeps a notebook of his play, sometimes writing over pencil with red ink to conserve paper.

In time, the scene shifts to another exotic location, a bowling green on the grounds of Trinity College, Cambridge, and focuses on one the premier mathematicians of his day. A powerful mathematician, member of the Royal Society; he is one of the main forces pulling British mathematics from the 200-year isolation it had imposed on itself after Newton into the modern subject seen on the continent. Confidant of Lytton Strachley, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Stephen. The camera loves his face. A graceful writer, rabid cricket fan, classic English athiest. A studied eccentric, gifted and barbed conversationalist, sophisticated and yet cloistered.

The drama is set, and the whole audience knows how it will unfold. Their subject will bring the two together. The Indian will go to England. Together, the two will produce wondrous mathematics, but the a price must be paid. The cultural difference is too much to overcome, and the Indian’s fidelity to his own way leads to the inevitable tragic denouement.

But the book is not fiction, rather a biography, and the inevitability is there only in hindsight. Srinvasa Ramanujan (accent on the second syllable) was born in 1887 with a mathematical gift–he attributed it to his family’s goddess Namagiri. Inspired by a totally undistinguished book (one much like a synopsis of GRE questions), his talent took off. At the time, his part of India was a portion of the British Raj, and education was meant to produce clerks and minor functionaries. He did not do well in school, flunking out of several, because he wanted only to do his mathematics. He worked in a series of petty jobs, moving from patron to patron. He wrote to British mathematicians, sending them samples of his work. George Hardy responded. He contrived to bring Ramanujan to England (Ramanujan at first would not go because of religious proscriptions), and Ramanujan arrived in 1913. From 1913 to 1918, though the war years, the two worked together. Ramanujan’s mathematical talent was singular, an intuition based on years of solitary exploration. Even today, his insights contain mysteries for researchers. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society and other prestigious societies, thanks in large part to Hardy’s insistence (among other things, there was racial animosity). In 1918, he returned to India, after some years of treatment in England for tuberculosis. He returned in intellectual triumph, but religious dishonor, for having left the country. After some personally and medically unpleasant months, he died in 1920.

These outlines of Ramanujan’s story are well-known in the mathematical and scientific communities. In India, he is a national figure. His country issued a stamp in his honor in 1962. His life has been the subject of western television documentaries. Hardy himself has written about Ramanujan, saying his “association with him was the one romantic incident in my life.” Robert Kanigel, an award-winning scientific journalist at Johns Hopkins, has revisited Ramanujan’s life, both geographically and intellectually. He travelled to India and England and interviewed everybody he could, especially including people who had known Ramanujan and people who have made Ramanujan’s mathematics their vocations. Kanigel has written a distinguished and thorough biography. It is not a technical scientific biography; there is a bare minimum of mathematics. Rather it is a social biography, putting Ramanujan and Hardy in their cultures, exploring the life of this beguiling man whose intellect could not remain in the India of the time, but whose being could not belong to western science, and who became an icon to both.

Kanigel presents new perspectives on Ramanujan’s life. For example, Hardy, who probably didn’t know Ramanujan the person very well, believed him not to be religious, and this has come to be the accepted wisdom. Kanigel makes a convincing case, that, on the contrary, Ramanujan was fanatically devout. His life turned on his religion as much as it turned on his mathematics and indeed he may not have dissociated the two. Consider the following from the book:

All his life, for festivals, or devotions, or just to pass the time, with his family or by himself, Ramanujan came to the temple. He’d grown up virtually in its shadow. Stepping out of his little house, he had but to turn his head to see, at the head of the street, close enough that he could make out the larger figures, the great gopuram. Indeed, the very street on which he lived bore the temple’s name… Here, to the sheltered columned coolness, Ramanujan would come. Here, away from the family, protected from the high hot sun outside, he would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day, his notebook, with its pages of mathematical scrawl, tucked beneath his arm, the stone slabs of the floor around him blanketed with equations inscribed in chalk.

Kanigel discusses Ramanujan’s need for recognition in terms of fellowships and honors. He gives considerable detail about Ramanujan’s family life in India (he had none in England), in particular the role of his mother. Kanigel also presents a new perspective on Ramanujan’s death. He discusses the modern medical theory that vitamin D deficiency reduces a body’s resistance to tuberculosis, and asserts that Ramanujan, a strict vegetarian in war-rationed England, would have had such a deficiency. Indeed then, as the romantic movie script would have it, the cultural dissonance did lead to the final tragedy.

Library shelves contain many biographies of people in literature and the arts, but proportionally few of scientific figures. This is a comment more on biographers than biographees. It is my impression that there is now a cadre of scientifically literate, talented writers who are opening up the worlds of science and scientific personalities to the general public. Both science and the public will benefit

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Eh Maalik Tere Bande Hum…..

Eh maalik tere ba.nde hum

aise ho hamaare karam
nekii par chale.n
aur badii se Tale.n
taaki ha.nsate huye nikale dam

jab zulmo.n kaa ho saamanaa
tab tuu hii hame.n thaamanaa
vo buraaI kare.n
ham bhalaaI bhare.n
nahii.n badale kii ho kaamanaa
ba.Dh uThe pyaar kaa har kadam
aur miTe bair kaa ye bharam
nekii par chale.n

ye a.ndheraa ghanaa chhaa rahaa
teraa inasaan ghabaraa rahaa
ho rahaa bekhabar
kuchh na aataa nazar
sukh kaa suuraj chhipaa jaa rahaa
hai terii roshanii me.n vo dam
jo amaavas ko kar de puunam
nekii par chale.n

ba.Daa kamazor hai aadamii
abhii laakho.n hai.n isame.n kamii.n
par tuu jo kha.Daa
hai dayaaluu ba.Daa
terii kR^ipaa se dharatii thamii
diyaa tuune jo hamako janam
tuu hii jhelegaa ham sabake Gam
nekii par chale.n

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