I saw two things this weekend which prompted me to write this blog...
The first one was the movie, A Wednesday. If any of you want to see the movie, let me warn you that I may give away the story line. So proceed at your own risk!
Starring Naseeruddin Shah, Anupam Kher and Jimmy Shergill, the movie was extremely well scripted with a very powerful plot and the actors did a great job in drving home the point. Artistically speaking, the movie didn't offer much (cinematography, music wasn't particularly great). But the theme connects with the minds of the majority and the powerful portrayal by the veteran actors added to its success.
The whole episode occurs on one Wednesday evening and has no record of it anywhere except the narrator's(Anupam Kher) mind. The story is set in Bombay and the several bomb blasts that have occurred in the past is the central theme of the story. Naseeruddin Shah plays the role of this guy who has planted bombs all around the city (one of the places being a Police Station opposite the Commissioner's office!) and then calls up the Commissioner(Anupam Kher) with a set of demands. I won't go into the details as to how Naseeruddin Shah's call was untraceable, which was technically convincing. Anyways, the main demand of Naseeruddin Shah is the release of four captured terrorists belonging to various terrorist organizations. The cops have no choice but to yield to his demands. He asks the commisioner to send the four guys, accompanied only by two officers, to a new private airstrip. Naseeruddin Shah instructs the officers to just leave the four people on a bench near the airstrip and to go away without looking back. But one of the officers, Arif Khan (Jimmy Shergill), feels that something is wrong and in the last minute decides to leave only 3 people on the bench and takes the other one away with him. The bench then explodes killing the three terrorists and everyone is taken by surprise!
This is when Naseeruddin Shah tells the motive behind the entire operation. He calls himself the common man and says that he is just cleaning is house(Bombay) killing pests like cockroaches. He says that he is doing all this because he is sick of being afraid to travel in trains, in buses, going to public places. The government, police and all the intelligence are not able to do anything to stop the terrorist activities. Even if they do catch some of the terrorists, it is not long before someone else comes and creates havoc and demands the release of the captured terrorists as ransom. The common man is aggrieved by all these and is pissed with the fact that someone else is deciding when he should die. So his solution to the problem is to simply wipe out the terrorists once they are captured. So the police agree to his point of view, kills the fourth guy too and the case is never goes on file. The Commissioner doesn't even tell the name of that common man, because his name would reveal his religion and the whole thing would be misconstrued (Nice touch there!)
This movie raises the major question, Is the Common Man (capitals to denote the character portrayed by Naseeruddin Shah) justified in his actions? The Common Man's line of reasoning goes like this - "if I, a common man, could get 6 kgs of RDX and place the bomb right opposite the Commissioner's office in a police station, how much more will an organization be able to do? Why should I believe in the efficiency of the police? You have caught these four terrorists and they are in your custody, but you could do nothing but yield to my demands to release them. You have so much evidence but you still can't punish them in court. (There is a scene in which the terrorists, themselves, say with pride that they were involved in 1993, 2006 and so on). When there was nothing you could do when thousands of people were dying, why should you feel bad when I try to kill these four people?"
Forgive my writing skills - when Naseeruddin Shah said these on screen he was a lot more convincing than I was in the previous paragraph! :-) I do not personally agree with his line of reasoning or killing the terrorists the way he did, but the way the Common Man was portrayed, his anger was entirely justified. In fact, that is what I felt at the end of the movie - anger!
Right after watching this movie, I saw the Big Fight hosted on NDTV . The topic of the debate was "Does Indian culture need moral policing?" and there were many questions about whether pub culture is acceptable in India. I was pained by the fact that an organisation (which shared my name!) thought it was its duty to stop women from going to pubs. So how do they go about doing it? - Simple! Walk into a pub, pull out all the girls by their hair, slap them and molest them! That is probably the most decent thing to do, I guess!
Days earlier, I was shocked when I heard this news and was wondering who the hell these people were to think it was their duty to uphold the Indian culture. By the way, what is Indian culture? If women going to pubs is against Indian culture, then why weren't any of the men in pub abused? Does this mean, Indian culture allows men to go to pubs while women can't?? I thought that was a logic simple enough for even those pea-brained activists to come up with!
But in the Big Fight episode, there was this guy from Sri Ram Sena, who was trying to justify the actions of the group, by saying the whole idea of pubs, which disrupts the Indian culture, also proves to be a danger to the society. He was talking about how an alcoholic affects the society (driving under influence and stuff like that). But that has got nothing to do with pubs! Consumption of liquor in India, did not start 10 or 20 years ago. It has been there for ages! He also says, pubs didn't exist a hundred years before - so it is not a part of Indian culture and therefore we should eliminate it!
I would like to see him to counter this argument of mine. Drunk driving has caused a lot of deaths in our country and poses a huge threat to community safety. Alcoholic drinks have always been there in our country, but over the past few years we have been using too many powered vehicles. 100 years back, India did not have powered vehicles on the road, so cars are not part of our culture. So we should eliminate all motor vehicles for public safety and to uphold our cultural values.
In India, all pubs have age restrictions - "people under the age of 21 years are not allowed inside". I guess 21 years is old enough for a person to decide what he/she wants to do. I do not understand why people always think that young people do not have enough responsibilty and they should always be policed!
Nenju porukkudhillaiye indha nilai ketta manidharai ninaindhuvittaal
This is what I felt at the end of the Big Fight episode - anger and pain!
(I was boiling with rage when I first started writing this, but couldn't finish writing this on that day. So it might have come out less angry than I felt that day :-) )
