At The Edge

From year 1979.  From year 1982. -0- At least , we could have picked a more interesting topic. How does NCERT deal with this topic? Maybe in another decade of so we will have public discussions on the issue. Of course, triggered by a controversy. Cartoon caricaturing Ambedkar's decision to resign from the Law Ministry over the failure to implement the Hindu Code Bill. Shankar's Weekly, October 7, 1951. From the book 'The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India' by Anupama Rao. Update: Funniest thing. I just realized that the caption 'Note the use of Hindu themes to represent what was, in fact, Ambedkar's challenge to Hindu hegemony.' is essentially wrong and it miss appropriates symbols. The obvious reference that Shankar was making in the cartoon was to an important scene in the story of Buddha, his renunciation....

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Indira Gandhi with Soniya, Maneka, Rajeev, Sanjay, Rahul and Priyanka. The famous shoot by Jitendra Arya. 1979. Came across it in December 1979 issue of Debonair. -0- Zeenat Aman and Shobha De. 1975. Came across it in docu-film 'Key-Fill-Cut' (2010) on the work of Jitendra Arya [ watch it here ]

"Of course. We in this society produced Sanjay, nurtured him, and then, when the society's tolerance limits were crossed, destroyed him. We destroyed him the way we have traditionally destroyed our enemies - by overtly giving in and doing nothing. Sanjay's rootlessness, his simple-minded solutions to the nation's problems, his ruthless interventions when these solutions were resisted, his faith in pure politics, his ideology of a hard state, all these were derived from the political culture of India's Westernized middle classes and the middle class intelligentsia. And when things went wrong they turned against Sanjay the way we always turn most bitterly against a part of ourselves which we want to disown." The Sanjay Obituary by Ashis Nandy, 1982. Nandy had an imaginary dialogue with Indira Gandhi in June 1982 issue of Debonair.  Download the complete article [here] . -0-

You can say lot of things about him, but only thing you could surely say about him is that he had a wicked sense of humor .  December 1971 issue of Baburao Patel's Mother India.

Back in November of 2009, I heard from a young filmmaker who planned to make a short film set in Emergency era of Indira Gandhi. From what he told me, it seemed a very interesting plot. For an independent film, it was certainly brave and ambition. While researching for his film he came across my blog and wrote in to ask if I could  help out. What followed was conversations spread over next couple of months. I posted interesting snippets of these conversations here:  Indira's Emergency and India's film . As days went by I almost forgot about it, thinking maybe the film never got made, after all it's not easy to make films in India. A couple of days back I heard back from Vinay Shukla. Despite various problem, he had finally managed to finish his film. He was gracious enough to send me a DVD of his short film called Raag Sarkari/Bureaucracy Sonata. The film walks us through four days in the life of a Jailor in charge of a school-t...

Love and Horror, 'Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche' Evil wife: ' Kaha le ja rahe hai app inhe. ' Husband's doctor friend: ' Hospital. ' Evil wife: ' Yeh kya zulm kar rahe ho aap. Main nahi lejanay doongi.' Husband's doctor friend: ' Aagar inhe sahi treatment nahi mila toh inkay pair hamesha ke liye kharaab ho jayengay. ' Evil wife: ' Wahan jayengay toh ilaaj nahi ho sakayga. Main janti hu waha kya hota hai . Opration karkay inki zindigi kharab kar denga.' A scene from Ramsay Brothers' trend-setting cult classic horror film 'Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche' (1972). It takes place after the husband accidentally poisons himself while researching on death defying abilities of people of 'Zombie Kabila ' (Ramsay were always good at researching a topic before making a film on it). The scene provides an oblique reference to Indira Gandhi's infamous family planing program. Under the program Doctors were given incentives for...

Indira Gandhi returns from electioneering in Orissa in 1967. A stone thrown at her split her lip and broke her nose. Found this PTI photograph in the book ' Indira Gandhi' (1980) by Dom Moraes. Would have made a nice byline last year to the newstory in which a stone tried to find its mark in Rahul Gandhi while he was traveling in a train.

Societies prefer to learn from their failures rather than from successes. As the rise and fall of Indira Gandhi recedes into India's past, the true lessons of her rule are apt to be forgotten and people are likely to discover in her the various aspects of their own rejected selves, thus mythologizing the entire experience of her rule as the battle between the good and the evil, the progressive and the regressive, and the hard and the soft. - Ashis Nandy in his book 'At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture' (1980) starting off the essay 'Indira Gandhi and the culture of Indian Politics' Nobody is more into the business of mythologizing in India than its film Industry. And yet. If we think about Films, Emergency years and Indira Politics, name of films like Gulzar's Aandhi (1975) and Sudhir Misra's Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005) come to mind. Most often, that's about it. And both these films in pure terms are not actually about p...