Never on a Wednesday

Speed is the essence of the movie. Speed determines pace, speed creates the plot and speed is what terror creates. The mystery of speed is that it is always a race against time. Terror, the movie indicates is time speeded up.

There is also a sociology of place which is as important. Standing on a small terrace framed for drama, the terrorist Shah often gets up and views the giant anonymity of the city. The city is not only the site of terror; the anonymity, the density of city as mass, the very nature of its architecture spawns terror. If the city implies civitas, terrorism threatens the very civics of the city. A terrorised city is a potential oxymoron as terrorism is a denial of the creative disorder of the city.

As time and the city frame the sociology of the drama, the protagonists set the terms of combat. Terrorism is an electronic cybernetic war where one man can immobilise the network called the city. Our terrorist spreads out his wares on a table, opens a flask, nibbles at a sandwich cut delectably by some caring wife.

The commissioner is an orchestrator who has to assemble a team to fight the odds. The ordinarily competent or the mundanely good won8217;t do. You need sadists who believe in interrogation, professionals who kill as a reflex. As he assembles the team, vignettes of the city get played out. One realises in a quietly underplayed way, the city; its wharfs, markets, crowded flats, bustling crowds is the real hero of the terror movie. The drama of its normalcy will eventually exhaust and encompass the melodrama of terror.

Meanwhile the other characters acquire a thickness of their own. There is a cop, a suspended misfit, who is a specialist in physical torture, played by Jimmy Shergill. There is the Chief Minister who is made to realise that fighting terrorism is a no holds barred affair. Media creeps in as a third term in the guise of a UTV correspondent, ever in the search for news. Media makes news but news makes the media and media is always seduced by terror as news. It is the ultimate melodrama. Shah phones a TV correspondent offering her the story of a life time. By then the commissioner has assembled the four terrorists Shah demands and two specially trained cops drive them to the airport. The message is subtle. Terrorism always shows that mere professionalism can8217;t combat terror. Terror eventually meets its match in the unorthodox individual.

The frenetic pace accelerates leaping from crescendo to crescendo till Shah performs an unexpected act. So far it has been quietly suggested that he belongs to some unnamed terror cell. While one of the cops keeps hold of a terrorist, Shah blows up the other three. The movie changes direction at this moment.

The portrait of the terrorists is pop sociology and page three narratives. It argues that terrorism has two sources: the violence of the streets and the alienation of the professional, both finding their Mecca in the propaganda from Pakistan. The portrait is too quick, too facile, too obvious about this transformation of the proletarian from the city and the professional techie, both desperate to teach the majority a lesson.

In the final moments, one realises that Shah is no disgruntled terrorist. He is a stranger species, the unhappy common man tired of his own passivity and tireder still of the inefficiency of those in power. The common man is tired of not being able to go to work and come back home without his wife thinking it might be his last act. Terror the rituals of everydayness that sustain the city. Terror, by creating suspicions around some forms of identity like dress, denies access to one8217;s own being. A Muslim can8217;t breathe as a Muslim because neighbouring eyes see only a terrorist. Terrorism creates an alienation which never leaves you alone.

Shah is the common man tired of the tiredness of a terror-stricken city. He has taken power into his own hands. The hacker tracks him down and then attempts to hide his location. The commissioner guesses this and goes out to meet the man as he plans his exit from the empty building. Shah runs back to pick the large bag of vegetables, the shopping, he promised his wife. The protagonists cross. As Shah stands in his bush shirt you suddenly expect him to blossom into Laxman8217;s 8220;common man8221;. They shake hands and move on. The Commissioner realises who his opponent is but lets him disappear namelessly, like terror, into the anonymity and everydayness of the city. The audience sits sipping the Commissioner8217;s approval, not quite sure whether they or Modi have grasped the message of Wednesday, realising it has the rest of the week to work it out.

The writer is an anthropologist and film buff