2008 FIRST FRAM

THE DEVIL8230;
LOOK INTO HIS EYES
PRASOON JOSHI
The ad guru8212;Joshi is creative director, McCann-Erickson8212;has penned some of Bollywood8217;s best lyrics, including that of RangDe Basanti, Fanaa, Black, Hum Tum and now, Taare Zameen Par.
Some say he wants us to lust after every drop of life, that he urges us to be more virile, makes us wish8212;ill of someone8212;whilst looking at a falling star, that he suggests the unthinkable, that he compels, that he even has a workshop8212;our mind and that too, when it8217;s empty. It8217;s the Devil in all of us that I8217;m talking about. And I think in the coming year, we need to search for him.
Not an easy task for I think Devil8217;s favourite guise is that of innocence. At a friend8217;s place recently, I observed his little son up to something. While their pet dog sat chewing on something in the balcony, this little fella went up, took out a stone from the rockery and put it on the dog8217;s tail.
The dog yelped, whimpering a bit and managed to free its tail.nbsp;It was not a big stone so couldn8217;t have hurt him much but I8217;m sure it was a nasty surprise. The little gentleman watched the dog8217;s discomfort coolly. After which, this generally cuddly child, who seemed anything but one at that moment, came waddling towards me looking curiously at my iPod. I asked him why he did it8212;maybe the dog had yapped at him or chewed his favourite toy. His answer: 8220;Aise hi Just like that.8221;
I was reminded of a famous international award- wining campaign for a brand of Toys. What a fantastic one it is. Shows the close up of an insect, its feet broken. The headline says, 8220;Why should he have six legs when I have two?8221; The base line: 8220;Makes sense to kids8221;.
Kids have their own logic. Call it devilish if you want. They feel it and they do it because they are unselfconscious. Innocent. And the higher your innocence the more comfortable your Devil will be. A child is uninhibited8212;the Devil part of him is very natural. The more 8216;civilised8217; we get, the more self conscious our Devil becomes.
Go close to nature and watch the uninhibited people8212;you will find the Devil co-existing, fluid, so entwined with their being that it is impossible to separate the two. The tribals flaunt their sexuality. In a civilised society this will be seen as immoral, trying to tempt, seduce, doing the bad thing, the wrong thing. There is innocence in the child and there is innocence in the tribals. And so is there the Devil. But Innocence cannot be acquired. It has to be your natural state. You have to understand the rhythm of your being, to dance to the tunes of your true nature. Because, the truth is, that Devil is there8230;in all of us.
When we come into this world, we are very comfortable with our Daitya Devil and our Dev god. We don8217;t know how to separate the two. But slowly Man is taught to deny our Devil. We are conditioned, made to look for the Devil consciously and avoid it.
And because we are made to feel conscious of good and bad, right and wrong, God and Devil, we define a limit. We tell ourselves: beyond this limit, it8217;s wrong, it8217;s evil.
Heterosexual is good, any other form deviant; having two-three drinks is okay, drinking more is inviting the Devil. We mark the territory of the Devil. Beyond a certain limit, it8217;s the 8216;space of the Devil8217;.
What we end up doing is making our own Devil larger. The best food for the Devil is ostracism. The moment you separate it, shun him, it becomes more pronounced, more potent. Why do we attempt to disguise our Devil? The Devil is there. It8217;s a counterforce. It8217;s natural. A dark side is there in all of us and in those whom we look up to.
Reminds me of an incident in the Ramayan. While trying to cross the ocean, Ram does a stuti of Varun, the god of the water. What he was doing was to request Varun to come out and help. When he doesn8217;t, Ram is furious and takes out his bow and arrow. So Tulsidas writes 8220;Bhaye bina hoye na preeti.8221; Isn8217;t it strange that we talk about love and fear in the same breath? Take Shiv, known as 8216;Bhole8217; baba8212;one who innocently grants wishes. He has a dark side to him. A seemingly small incident made him chop off his son Ganesha8217;s head!
That8217;s the beauty of our eastern and oriental mythology. It is not linear like the West where things are often uni-dimensional8212;civilized vs primitive, sacred vs profane, good vs evil, God vs Devil. If one is good, the other has to be bad.
In Hindu mythology, however, there is no single power like 8216;the8217; Devil. The demons8212;rakshas, asuras, and prets are not radically bad and cannot be regarded as absolute Devil in the sense of the Christian Satan. Ravan has always been referred to as a 8216;maha pandit8217;. Interestingly, nor are Gods in Hindu mythology a representation of pure goodness. Not only do our Gods assume forms that can be diabolical but the same deities who are powers of life are, in other aspects, demons of destruction.
Take the Chinese Yin and Yang8212;male and female, light and dark, positive and negative8212;the pair is seen as equally essential to harmony, balance. So apt. Positive itself becomes negative if not correctly in balance.
I read somewhere that the origin of the word 8216;Devil8217; is traced to the Sanskrit word Deva which we all know means a celestial being in a positive sense. So in the coming year, let us resolve to befriend our Devil. Let8217;s not desert him. For then, he will come back more forcefully in order to prove that he is a part of us. As long as one acknowledges him, we can control him.
The more we deny his existence in us, the more potent, larger than life, we make him. When we accept him, we embrace spontaneity, innocence, a natural state of being.
So let8217;s not deny our Devil. Maybe we have abandoned our Devil. Let us go looking for him. Sitting at the bar counter8230;alone in a parking lot8230;at the traffic signal8230;on the writing table8230;he is waiting8230;for me8230;for you.

MAYBE WE WILL WIN THE MARS OLYMPICS
ANURAG BASU
His Life in a Metro, in which he got Irfan Khan to deliver another power-packed performance, was among the few successful films this year. The Oscar library has apparently asked for Basu8217;s Metro screenplay to be kept as reference material
As I sat down with a TV remote in my hand, my wife said, 8220;So what about a dish antenna? This stupid cable operator does not show at least 10 new channels.8221; What8217;s the point, I thought, media cloning makes all channels look the same these days. All news is 8216;breaking8217; news and the same story does the round of all channels claiming to be 8216;exclusive8217;. And to think of 10 new channels in this circus. I sincerely pity those journos working in these news channels. They have to stretch a meagre hour8217;s worth news into 24 long hours.
Today8217;s 8216;breaking news8217; is that the Indian team is leaving for the Beijing Olympics tomorrow. Well, they go every time, don8217;t they? They go, they see, they lose and they come back. How about taking me along this time? I am a responsible Indian citizen, I would go along, participate in the Olympics as they do and come back as they do. It8217;s better to be defeated in the Olympics than have my films flop! Anyway, winning and losing is not important, it8217;s important that you participate, right? And that, is what is India8217;s significant contribution in the Olympics arena today. Its not the sports, it8217;s the attitude; it8217;s not the medal, it8217;s the spirit; it8217;s not about winning, it8217;s about being a part. So on and so forth8230;
And anyway it8217;s written in the holy Geeta, that we should not lust for gold and other material stuff and we should not waste any energy in acquiring such things. So, you see, medals and such worldly stuffs are just illusions of winning. Winning is actually about letting others win. Can we really stoop so low as China and the United States that we run for a piece of gold ahead of every body else? Come on8230; Actually it was a humongous blunder on Rathod8217;s part that he hit the bull8217;s eye in the last Olympics. He, like a true Indian citizen, tried very hard to miss it and he would have, had it not been for the fateful direction of the wind at that moment. This year, I sincerely hope he will keep our flag of the setting sun fly high and carry our tradition and culture ahead.
Like every time, the speculations about the Olympic Games are at a peek. Some times I wish the sportsmen in our country had the zeal and persistence of our speculators. The players and participants are saying an insipid 8216;We will try8217; on TV. Well8230;keep trying blokes, may be some other time some other place, may be in the Mars Olympic8230; You never know. Hope is what we survive with.

FRAMING HATRED
SIBI MALAYIL
He directed some of the finest Mayalam movies. His Kireedam, Thaniyavarthanam, His Highness Abdulla and Bhartham defined the way Malayalam movies were made and made Mohanlal the star that he is.

My frame for a 2008 film would revolve around the spectre of fundamentalist militancy, even terrorism. The film8217;s protagonists would be a family that is a microcosm of the increasingly turbulent Kerala milieu, connecting to the state8217;s emerging realities of insecurity, anxieties and the fear of the unknown growing wild. It8217;s a nucleus that I carry around with me, and it needs a lot of threshing and sifting before it can settle into a filmable format.
Kerala has never seen a war, never known terrorist strikes of the kind other parts of the country have been through. But there is no wishing away that God8217;s Own Country may be hurtling along to even worse. The communal schisms run a whole lot deeper in Kerala than it did a decade ago. And the insecurity and prejudices of communities are being capitalised on like never before, taking it all the way to militancy, even terrorism.
There have already been eruptions8212;like the communal carnage at Marad a few years ago that many Kerala filmmakers tried to assimilate into their renderings, mostly ineffectually. I, too, had tried a sensitive dissection of the state8217;s growing communal warts in my movie Kanakinavukal a few years ago, with the story of a childless couple belonging to one community rearing the orphaned kids of a friend belonging to another, and tragically giving in later to the societal pressures that don8217;t give any leeway to human bonds and relationships.
But, as I said, communalism is rapidly transcending the basic realms of neighbourliness or human relationships to mindless militancy and worse. That is where I would love to pitch my camera in 2008.

WEIRDLY WIRED IN
G.VASANTABALAN
Vasantabalan8217;S. Veyil was the first Tamil film to be screened at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in the Cinemas of the World Section. The film was also nominated for the Asian New Talent Award at the Shanghai Film Festival this year
My three-year-old nephew wants a cellphone for himself this New Year. He picks his mother8217;s phone, jabs at the keys and calls me to tell me that. The reach of technology. That got me thinking. If I thought Veyil was as realistic as it could get, I was wrong. For a generation that found technology surreal, 2008 is probably the time to wake up. That8217;s IT! Mobiles and the new India. That might just end up being my big frame for 2008. Snatches from my imaginary story board:
A crowd waiting at mobile shops to get new model handsets; marvellous and monstrous advertisements selling phones; crazy ringtones; educational institutions cracking down on the use of mobiles; a tele-marketing professional at the wrong end of an abusive call; people being penalised by the traffic police for talking and driving; a college girl who meets with an accident while talking on her phone; and young men getting into trouble for sending and receiving indecent messages. Bizarre and loosely strung? But technology, to me, has never looked high strung or any less bizarre.