January 2008 update of ‘Cinema of Malayalam’ just uploaded with some original reviews:

The Indian Marxists’ Confusion:

‘The Hindu’ on 06.01.2008 reports that:

Veteran Marxist leader Jyoti Basu said here (Kolkata) that he had no objection to capitalism, which had its own role. “We want infusion of capital, both foreign and domestic [for the state’s development]. But we have to take care of each other’s interests and also safeguard worker’s interests”.

When journalists sought his reaction on getting private capital for the State and whether he had any objections to it, Mr.Basu said: “What objection? – I don’t understand”.  

As expected, the repercussions of this statement were very severe and also interesting, especially amongst our Comrades of Kerala, who believe that Kerala is a land where revolution is imminent. The official machinery of the CPM stated that Mr. Basu’s statement was misinterpreted. Yesterday I saw a leader in the television stating that such matters are beyond the understanding of common man! But none of them accepted the confused situation through which Marxists of the post-globalisation India is going through, especially when they are the major force behind the ruling coalition, who is aggressively taking forward the globalisation agenda.

Even Marx was Confused:

From an interesting reading of an article on the Marxist dilemma:

During the last decade of Karl Marx’s lifetime, he was forced to reconsider some of his findings he had made during his prime time. New findings, which came out during that period, had extended the pre-history of humanity by tens of thousands of years. Archaeology, anthropology and ethnography had brought ancient human societies into the range of historical study. Karl Marx spent his last decade or so in intense study. The fruits of this led him to revise and even contradict his earlier writings, including some aspects of ‘Das Kapital’.

Marx stipulates certain stages through which a society has to undergo to reach the near perfect condition of Communism:

Primitive Communism, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism.

At the time the Russian revolutionaries were vexed by the question as to whether their Country must pass through all these stages or whether it was possible to skip stages in certain circumstances. A group of Russian Marxists, ‘the Emancipation of Labour Group’ (who believed that the success of Socialism in Russia necessitated a Capitalist stage before it could move towards Communism) wrote to Karl Marx on this issue and asked for his advise to come out of this confusion.

It is said that Marx took three weeks to produce four drafts of his reply, totalling 25 book pages in all. In his final version, Marx stressed that the analysis contained in ‘Capital’ applied only to the countries of Western Europe, who had already undergone or in the process of undergoing the transformation to capitalism. Considering the Russian condition, they could skip stages to reach the stage of Communism. He wrote “I have come to the conclusion that if Russia continues the path it has followed since 1861, it will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a people and undergo all the fateful vicissitudes of the capitalist regime”.

Thus, may be due to the old man’s wish to see his own theories come into practice in his own lifetime, Marx himself denounced the core concept of Marxism.

 

The Marxist’s of Kerala

‘A huge lunatic asylum’, that was how the Kerala which Swami Vivekananda saw looked like. Such was the orgy of castism he witnessed in this southernmost tip of India. The reformist movement led by Sree Narayana Guru was born as a reaction to this social illness. It aimed at the very root of the cause of this degradation. May be due to this social awakening, when elsewhere in India the Nationalist struggle aimed the political freedom of India, the anti-castist movement and social reformism overshadowed the struggle for political freedom in Kerala, and the Socialist-Marxist-Communist movements that sprouted in Kerala was a natural outcome of this. Even though English education opened up the youth of Kerala to the Marxian writings of the West, which produced numerous leaders who were well versed in Marxian theories, it would be absurd to believe that the common man of Kerala had welcomed Marxism out of the understanding of Marxian class theories. But it would be logical to think that they could have easily related the idea of a classless society put forth by Marxism and the castless society put forth by Sree Narayana Guru. Hence, something which was never heard in history, a democratically elected Communist Government came to power under the leadership of E.M.Shankaran Namboodirippadu (E.M.S) in 1957. Hence, the Marxists tried to settle comfortably under a bourgeois constitution, even while retaining its basic aim of paving the path for the imminent revolution. Then came the real shocker. Different communal forces of Kerala, the Christians, the Muslims and the Hindus, all joint hands and [truly, a very rare incidence] started an agitation, normally branded as the ‘vimochana samaram’ (Liberation Struggle). The immediate effect of this agitation, driven by narrow communal objectives, was the dismissal of the Communist Government in 1959. Thereafter the history of Communist Party in Kerala is that of compromises, merely to grab the lost power back and to sustain the power thus obtained. Whether it is Communism or Capitalism, power corrupts. Intellectual snobbery and elitism on one hand and pure goondaism on the other hand, all helped reducing the Marxists of Kerala into just ordinary corrupt politicians. And the people of Kerala kept voting for the Left and the Right every alternate terms, just for the sake of change.

It would be an overstatement if it is argued that the fractionalism we witness in the Kerala chapter of the Marxist Party is due to ideological issues [the Marxism-Socialism-Capitalism issue]. It would be more realistic to describe it as a class struggle within the Marxist Party itself. Between the new age politicians who never values for the ethics and truth in public life, who considers their ‘public work’ as the most profitable profession and the other class who value for these ethics to a certain level.         

Tags: communism, marxism

An interesting incidence heard during my last Kerala visit:

My relatives, an aged couple, both in their eighties, live alone in their huge ‘tharavadu’, their three children being at three parts of the world. A young boy of their neighbourhood is their only help.

The boy was moving out of our village for a week’s time and the couple would be all alone during the period. That night a rat got trapped in the rat-trap the boy had set up. They wanted to get rid of the screeching rat, but were afraid to open the trap.

Finding the rat still alive the next day, the old lady started feeding the rat. May be, out of compassion to the helpless creature, or just to keep the rat quiet till the boy returns and kills the rat.

A strange relation between a small rat in a small rat-trap and the big rats in their big rat-traps!

Reading V.K.N’s collection of short stories ‘Payyan Kathakal’. Truly a classic work of literature. The way V.K.N handles anything under the sun, with his innate sense of humour is really amazing.  

Payyan on himself:

പയ്യന്‍ സംസ്കൃതം കലര്‍ത്തി സ്വയം പറഞ്ഞു. എന്നിട്ട്‌ പ്രമാണപദ്യം ചൊല്ലി:

കുംഭകോണേ കൃതം പാപം
കുംഭകോണേ വിനശ്യതി

ഒരു കംപ്യൂട്ടര്‍ യന്ത്രത്തിന്റെ ചെവിയില്‍ ചൊല്ലിക്കൊടുത്തമാതിരിയാണു പദ്യത്തിന്റെ പരിഭാഷ തലയില്‍ മിന്നിയത്‌:

കുംഭകോണത്തു ചെയ്‌തോരു പാപങ്ങള്‍
കുംഭകോണത്തു നാശമടയുന്നു.

എടേയ്‌! പയ്യന്‍ സ്വയം പറഞ്ഞു. കൊള്ളാമല്ലോ. നീ കുഞ്ഞിക്കുട്ടന്‍തമ്പുരാന്‍ രണ്ടാമന്‍ തന്നെ! പക്ഷെ, ശൂദ്രനായി പിറന്നു എന്നുമാത്രം. തമ്പുരാന്‍കുലത്തില്‍ നീ ജാതനായിരുന്നെങ്കില്‍ വൃത്താനുവൃത്തമായേനേ പരിഭാഷ. വിഷാദിക്കേണ്ട. ഈ ജന്‍മത്തില്‍ ബാക്കി ഭാഗമെങ്കിലും ഒന്നിനു പിന്നില്‍ മറ്റൊന്നായി സല്‍ക്കര്‍മ്മങ്ങള്‍ ചെയ്ത്‌ അടുത്ത ജന്മത്തില്‍ ഉന്നതകുലത്തില്‍ ചെന്നു പിറ.

“And why we watch the animals in their choice of being? In their grace and ferociousness? A thought becomes more and more clear that it is not so much of looking at wild nature, as it is inside at ourselves, our nature.”

Poets and armchair intellectuals romancing the wilderness of Mother Nature is something which is commonly seen. But through his documentary ‘Grizzly Man’ master filmmaker Werner Herzog makes a dissenting note.

The film is about Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers in Katmai National Park, amongst the deadly Grizzly bears, ignoring warnings by the park authorities. In 2003, at the end of his thirteenth visit, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were attacked, killed and eaten by a bear. The film uses sequences extracted from over 100 hours of video footage shot by Treadwell and also conducts interviews with Tradwell’s family and friends. Herzog is also the narrator of the film.

In his commentary Herzog says: “he (Treadwell) seemed to ignore the fact that they are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony. But chaos, hostility and murder.”

Disagreeing with Treadwell’s romanticism on the wilderness of the nature, Herzog says: “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and its blank stare speaks only of a half-boiled interest in food.”

  

Amidst the prophesies about the death of cinema, here is yet another film that reiterates that the art of cinema is here to stay.

Through his ‘Golden Palm’ winner film ‘Eternity and a Day’ Theo Angelopoulos proves to be a poet of the screen, probing deeply the fundamental questions of life.

Alexander, a celebrated writer, has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. As he makes preparations prior to entering the hospital, he travels in an out of his past and in and out of fantasy, seeking to make peace with a lifetime reaching its end. He meets his mother, living out her days in a nursing home and also at her prime ages in the past, his wife who died at her young age, his daughter and many other friends and relatives of the present and past.

The major character in the present whom Alexander meets is an Albanian refuge, a street boy, whom Alexander helps at many instances. The boy, who has an entire life ahead of him, even though uncertain due to his refugee status and Alexander who is at the fag end of his life develops an emotional attachment. Alexander finds the hope of future in the refugee boy.

The film, rich with poetic imagery, perhaps comparable with the films of Tarkovsky and Bergman, truly creates a screen magic.

It was around 30 films that I could watch during a span of one week at the IFFK 2006. If one has to remember the details and the feel of a particular film amongst these 30 films, definitely it should be something outstanding. No doubt, ‘Elippathayam’, ‘Mukhamukham’ and ‘Anantaram’, shown as part of the Adoor Retrospective in the festival, were such outstanding films, for both their content and form.

Also, I remember the bewilderment ‘Nizhalkkuthu’ could create in me, for its deceptive simplicity it had on its exterior, but a sure feeling that the film is all about much more than I had understood on my first impression.

It is very much disappointing to watch Adoor’s ‘Naalu Pennungal’, a film which could hardly evoke any of these feelings. The film could merely document a social condition of a particular region of Kerala at a particular time. Considering Adoor’s other films, without any doubt I consider ‘Naalu Pennungal’ his weakest film.

Indian filmmakers believe that cinema is all about telling stories, in an ‘engrossing’ manner. They also firmly believe that they should be able to convey some ‘message’ to the viewer through their films. In this process they settle on a story filled with drama, sentiments, humor, romance and other such ‘essential’ elements of Indian cinema. Today, at this ‘post-parallel’ era of Indian cinema, the difference between ‘good’ and ‘commercial’ cinema is merely the proportion in which these ingredients are mixed.

‘Paradesi’ is one good example for how a good theme, which could have been translated to a very good film, has been wasted for the sake of creating a film ‘watchable by the common man’ (as told by the director himself in more than one interviews). Who are these filmmakers to define what people want? Why are they under-estimating the common man? Why don’t they try making films which they themselves like?

Onaaghosham

It was a very long queue. May be for an Onam release film? But I have never seen such an obedient queue in front of any cinema halls. At last I found out the origin of the queue, the ‘Supplyco’ stall selling the ‘original’ Kerala Government branded liquor.

Vazhi…vazhi…

Amidst the huge rush inside the Guruvayoor temple, I curiously turned my attention to a sound “Vazhi..vazhi…” [give way…give way…]. It was an ‘addyan’ Namboodiri walking towards me from a time centuries behind along with his two body guards finding him way in the huge crowd of ‘untouchables’..!!