Dipping a toe into Marathi

After two years here, I will grudgingly admit my Hindi is quite up to par. I remember the exact moment I realised this - when I told a friend "tumhari marzi" - probably not a thing a tentative newbie would say. Apologies to anyone hoping to see me in a "Hindi theriyaadhu poda" t-shirt.

Luckily, the blog URL also works in Marathi. So that is my new project!

As someone already interested in languages, this is turning out to be a fun endeavour. It is handy to be able to peg new words/concepts to already known ones in other languages, while also being an intellectual exercise. In some respects it is more like Tamil (having an inclusive and exclusive "we"!) but in most, it is similar to Hindi and Sanskrit (most vocabulary words and unfortunately, gendered inanimate objects.) 

Learning Sanskrit has drawn my attention to things which native speakers probably don't even do consciously - for instance, systematically listing noun and pronoun cases (vibhaktis), and adjectives agreeing with the noun they are describing in gender and number. 

Knowing Hindi/Sanskrit should not give one a sense of complacency, however - there are differences just in the script. There is of course the delightful ळ which is new. There is also an "overloading" of च and झ - apart from the usual sounds they also sometimes denote tsa and zha (not to be confused with the Tamil ழ, a completely different sound) and it is not immediately clear which to use. (Sometimes it's different pronunciations in different forms of the same word, eg आमचा/आमची are aamtsa/aamchi!) These contribute to the quite distinct sound of Marathi, which I really enjoy.

Currently I am learning from an old-worldly little book to learn Marathi through English, and from YouTube videos - mainly Bharatiya Digital Party and its sister channels (helpfully subtitled). This is still mostly consumption, not creation - which is well suited to the intellectual exercise and my fear of making mistakes. However I will soon have to let go of that and just speak, and also learn to accept why some things are the way they are without a "good" reason. There may not always be a straight line from Proto-Indo-European to Sanskrit to Marathi. Languages are living entities with their idiosyncrasies and that is precisely the charm.

If any of you have learnt a language as an adult, and have tips to share, please do so!

Mumbai on Screen #3 - Bombay (1995, Tamil)

Well, I had to do this one eventually. This self-styled definitive Bombay movie was on every recommendations list sent to me! It is the story of a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, who elope from their hostile families to Bombay, only to be caught in the crossfire of communal riots.

I don't know why I expected the romance half of the movie to be less problematic than it was. Sekar, Arvind Swamy's character, pursues a visibly uncomfortable Shaila Banu (Manisha Koirala), even dressing up as a burqa-clad woman to get close to her (in a weird inversion of offensive men-dressing-as-women tropes, this time he is the good guy doing it for love). Slightly later in the film he slices her arm with a blade to prove a point. Ultimately they do fall in love, though, and decide to get married. 

Sekar approaches Shaila's father, a very 0-to-100 man who reaches for his sword immediately. Only afterwards does Sekar even tell his own parents. Both fathers have it out in a vicious verbal argument that threatened to no longer remain verbal (Sekar's father is unarmed; but Shaila's father, as we know, carries a sword). The irony is very clear - the fathers are in a way on the same side: neither wants the couple to marry, and yet their anger is equally directed at each other as at their errant children.

The couple elope, in a bit of a staggered fashion, and get married in Bombay. There are the obligatory VT and Marine Drive shots. The city at this point represents freedom and a liberal attitude, the opposite of what they had fled - this wouldn't last long. Don't worry about how they both subsist on a proofreader's salary (minus Sekar's ongoing journalism degree fees). More uncomfortable non-consensual PDA later, they have a set of twin boys. Personally with Sekar's overbearing nature and Shaila's lack of personality and overall zero chemistry, I was mainly rooting for the little kids in the strife-ridden second half of the movie.

Then come some of this country's worst moments - Babri Masjid is demolished and violence breaks out in Bombay. The boys (named Kamal Basheer and Kabir Narayanan) are nearly killed when they are unable to answer a mob about what their religion is. The couple's parents come to stay with them, out of concern, ending a long gap in communication. The fathers initially argue but eventually thaw after Shaila's father saves the other from a gang. Eventually the violence manages to separate the family. The grandparents are killed in an explosion, and the children are lost and found after an agonising search. The film culminates in Sekar and others successfully appealing for peace, and everyone holding hands.

The philosophical core of this movie is a sort of both-sides-ism, condemning all forms of extremism, which was certainly a welcome message for its time. Years later, when we have had more riots and many years of a majoritarian government, it bears some rethinking. Within the film itself, when the arguments of Hindus and Muslims are compared, it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. The extremist Hindus want to assert themselves by constructing the Ayodhya temple, showing Muslims that they're second-class citizens and eventually driving them out. The Muslims, barring those who retaliated for the demolition by starting violence in Mumbai, just want to exist. Their very existence is seen as political, because the film doesn't examine its own associations of Islam with violence. (Indeed, think back to Shaila's sword-toting father.) When Sekar's two friends fight, the Muslim is outraged at his community's houses and shops being destroyed, and the Hindu says something about minority "privileges" and appeasement. Are these two equivalent?

(Even the insults the fathers hurl at each other are laughably imbalanced if you think about them for more than a moment. The Muslim calls the Hindus weak vegetarians, and the Hindu says his blood is pure unlike the Muslim's.)

One thing the movie does nail is powerful forces stoking this violence for their own gain. The Hindu extremist leader fans the flames with his speeches and then drives though the devastated areas, silently observing. (The Muslim leader meets the affected families and sheds tears.) The police are also shown to participate in the violence and disproportionately kill Muslims. The film also rightly emphasises the horror of children and innocent people being hurt and killed in this clash. 

"What is a Hindu and what is a Muslim?" asks one of the boys, to a transgender woman sheltering him. 

"Hinduism and Islam are both ways to reach God." 

"Then why are they fighting?" 

While the socio-political realities are very important to keep in mind when looking for a solution, perhaps the spirit we should embrace is the childlike view. We are all mere mortals, following different guidelines in our spiritual quests, and we shouldn't resort to violence to solve what isn't even a problem - the fact that we are diverse. Maybe the Kamal Basheers and Kabir Narayanans will save this country.

Socially Distanced SciComm

One important (and honestly fun) duty of the science community is to keep the general public in the loop about what they are up to. It fosters scientific literacy among adults, in a time when anti-intellectual spirit abounds. And it gets kids interested in the reality of what we do, which is often nothing like the science or maths they are taught in school! After all, this field, like any other, has to sustain itself and bring in new people.

Some large organisations like NASA have excellent PR/outreach teams, putting out enough content to satisfy thousands of space nerds worldwide. (Did anyone else watch Perseverance landing on Mars?) Universities and teams of researchers carry out their own outreach programs - TIFR, for its part, has two open days a year apart from the fortnightly Chai and Why? talks.

One of these, National Science Day, was last Sunday! Last year's NSD seems like a geological age ago, but I do remember some of it - a college student asked for a selfie with me, and later when I visited a different department's exhibit, I was asked which class I was in.

This year it was fully online, and as a result could reach viewers who could not normally visit TIFR. That of course brought a fresh set of logistical challenges. There was a last-minute change of venue owing to a power shutdown. The anchor, demonstrators and speakers were all in different places. Someone had to repeatedly appeal to viewers not to spam the chat with larger and larger numbers, discussions of the time taken to cook rice, teachers taking attendance, or worst of all, people cursing at the first half being in Marathi and not Hindi.

Most viewers were probably watching on their phone screens, so we had to be super-clear and also mildly theatrical in order to hold their attention. Those demonstrating experiments with colourful acids, liquid nitrogen and superconductors had no problem keeping it visually engaging; we theorists had to work a little harder! Luckily people responded to our questions for the audience and seemed to overall enjoy our presentation.

Ultimately the event passed successfully in a whirl of Zoom spotlights and co-host handovers. It was an exciting new medium. But I look forward to hearing teenagers' wild lateral thinking suggestions in person once again.

You can watch the full thing here on YouTube. Some rough timestamps:

1:40:00 - Experiments (Duration ~20 mins)

2:03:00 - Mj Mahan's talk on "Hyperbolic Geometry in Nature" (Duration ~35 mins)

2:41:00 - My department's presentation, featuring me as main speaker and an untrustworthy postmaster (Duration ~20 mins)

 

Post-posting posting

The nation is coming to terms with the internet maxim "If you aren't paying, you are the product" becoming true of WhatsApp, which will start sharing (more of) our metadata (explainer here) come February. People are migrating en masse to more secure apps. Personally though, I am becoming inclined towards a less secure, less reliable and paid network. Why? For the romance of it.

I am of course referring to good old snail mail. Is it convenient? Mumbai has postboxes generously and irregularly scattered around. Are they well used? Well, there is a tea-shop set up in front of the one next to Colaba Post Office, so draw your conclusions from that. All the more reason to support it.

Of course, it takes a while to reach, but I think for longer and more honest messages it's worth being free from the shackles of blue ticks and last seens. Little hand-drawn figures communicate a bit more than emojis, and I like taking a moment to decide which person will like which postcard best. And as someone who stresses out over how to word an email, take my word that this is somehow more natural! Stream-of-consciousness writing and signing off with "Love" are allowed and encouraged.

All this is to say if you want me to round the tea-shop and send you something, drop me your address! (I'm not sure if I'm even getting incoming post, so I'll let you know about that). Or just take a walk and buy some stamps of different denominations. It's a nice feeling.

Mumbai on Screen #2 - Wake Up Sid (2009, Hindi)

Siddharth is lazy and hedonistic. He lives off his father's successful business, but is not at all suited to the job of taking over after him. Enter Aisha, new to Mumbai, set on independence and her goal of becoming a writer. What can they learn from each other? 

Everything about the film is strikingly 2000s - of course the clothes and songs, but also the fact that the leads initially correspond over email and they never kiss. Plus, Sid is an Arsenal fan.

Sid's initial lifestyle is what happens when you are stationary in a city that's always on the move. His friends pass their final college exam, one even moves a little too fast in the romance business. But he stays put amidst piles of pizza boxes and unwashed clothes.

He meets Aisha at a party and the two quickly become friends. He helps her decorate her apartment (which is pretty decent-sized with a sea view, for an assistant's starting salary). She is very clear that he is childish and not her type. That said, I don't think she and Sid are opposites. Her character is, in one sense, an illustration of the difference between childish and childlike. She roams the city with wide-eyed wonder; he is familiar with it, but looks out with a photographer's eye. 

The rest of the story is not the twistiest in Bollywood history. Sid has a showdown with his parents; he moves in with Aisha; he slowly learns to cook and do chores and gets a job at the same magazine Aisha got a job at. (By the way, if anyone knows about English-language magazines about Mumbai like the one in the film, let me know!) Soon he is ready to move out, but Aisha isn't ready to let go. She writes about him as her first magazine piece, saying he was the city's gift to her, her first friend. They embrace on Marine Drive in the first shower of the monsoon, which he had told her was the best thing to see in Mumbai.

Aisha has a clear goal and takes steps in that direction. While I suppose this disqualifies her from being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she doesn't really have much of a story arc apart from embracing her preference for old Hindi songs and later her feelings for Sid. There's an interesting moment where her boss, a jazz lover, calls her music tastes childish - this time she is at the receiving end of this jibe. Getting your act together is one thing, but there will always be people you aren't "adult" enough for. That's okay, and you have to stay true to your passions. 

Mumbai works as a backdrop for this kind of story because of the wide variety of ways you can engage with such a vibrant place. There is partying every night, and then there is choosing to document the streets and people as your day job. (Even the parties can either just be getting mindlessly drunk, or they can be where you meet your new best friend or make up with an old one.) And sometimes, your inner child does need to run out in the first rain of the monsoon.

Mumbai on Screen #1 - Nayakan (1987, Tamil)

I am scheduled to return to Mumbai on November 18. Since time is incomprehensible now and that seems a lifetime away, I'm doing a series on Mumbai through films. Send in your suggestions! 

-- 

[Spoilers ahead. Also, warning for brief mentions of sexual assault.]

Nayakan is a fictionalised version of the story of Varadaraja Mudaliar, an underworld don. In the film, he is known as Velu Nayakan. (Nayakan also means "chief".) 

Most of the events take place in Dharavi; some others with Gateway of India and Jehangir library as backdrop. It's the ideal setting for the themes of systemic inequality and capitalist liberalism. But it also poses questions that are relevant everywhere today as wealth gaps increase and as we all reckon with questions about the police's role.

What the film is really about is violence. Velu's origin story is forged by violence: he flees to Bombay from Thoothukudi after avenging the death of his father, a union leader, at the hands of police. He grows up in the slums doing petty smuggling. We are told he is a good person... because he hires a child prostitute but lets her study instead of sleeping with her. (The bar is low for crime dons. Also, he marries her later.) His place as a leader is cemented, again on the back of revenge, when the community protects him when he is wanted for killing the policeman who killed his adoptive father. Being a good person, he financially supports the slain policeman's family and later hires his mentally ill son as an assistant.

That the slum land and people are disposable pawns in the government-business-police game is stated in no uncertain terms. The house of the Seth who plans to build a factory over the slum is obviously in stark contrast to the slum houses, and the slum-dwellers' rightful anger is taken out on it. However, when Velu builds something of a mansion of his own, with his smuggling gains, it doesn't go down badly with the others as he continues to act as an intermediary between them and the cruel law enforcement. He pays for their medical expenses and mingles with them in festivals. 

The spiral of violence continues. He embarrasses some other dons; they kill his wife; his men kill them. Velu is not unaware of this - he discourages his son from following in his steps. His unheeding son ultimately dies in a suicide mission to kill a witness. 

A pivotal scene features a moral conundrum, versions of which we have to deal with even today. A police superintendent, having lost faith in the justice system, approaches Velu to take revenge on the powerful men who raped his daughter. Velu's men do so, as Velu's horrified daughter looks on. A relatively sheltered young woman, she still believes in the courts' monopoly over the right to administer justice. In a scene mirroring Velu playfully chasing his children earlier, he and his right-hand man have a showdown with his daughter, culminating in him hitting her. He explains that sometimes killing is necessary to keep others alive, while she contends that all violence is wrong, and who is he to dispense justice. She clearly personifies a liberal outlook, and eventually marries a policeman to "atone for her sins".

It is a question we still have to grapple with as a society: when violence is built into the system, isn't violence justified in combating it - when peaceful methods fail? Can we equate violence coming from different directions? Crime is a social construct - some murder is sanctioned, some is not. Some murder takes the form of slow impoverishment and this will continue to exist even if police brutality (for example) in its current form ceases, or if there are no outright casteists/classists/etc in the system. That said, this girl did not ask to be in the middle of this, and lose her mother and later her brother (apart from her father slapping her).

Additionally, it is still very much the case that when it comes to the vast majority of sexual violence cases, the justice system is of little help at best and capable of further traumatising violence at worst.

Eventually, the very police officer who tore down Velu's extralegal ambulances and other efforts to help his people, seeks his help in maintaining peace when Velu is sentenced. "Our aims are the same; the only difference is that I wear a uniform and you don't.", he says without a hint of irony. The film portrays this as a sort of reconciliation between the lifelong enemies, Nayakan and the state, but it is quite unsatisfactory to the viewer. Ultimately, Nayakan is released but immediately killed by the earlier-mentioned son of the policeman. He is finally on the other end of the filial thirst for revenge.

"Are you a good person or a bad person?" asks his grandson before the sentencing. He is unable to answer. The film also doesn't take a side. There is clearly an ethical problem with the system we live in. While quietly complying with it can't be morally right, Velu was made an enemy of the state as a mere child. (மான்போல வந்தவனை யார் அடித்தாரோ - Who could have hurt this innocent boy, asks the musical refrain.) Fighting the system was the natural route for him, but it thrust his loved ones into the cycle and took them away, one by one. Was this fair on them? 

The film doesn't provide easy answers as there aren't actually any, at least at an individual level. Really, the only thing to do is to rethink these systems altogether. Over in America, defunding the police has quickly become a less fringe political position. Everywhere, millennials and generation Z are disillusioned with capitalism. Maybe the cycles of violence can indeed be broken in our lifetime. 

Thousands of words

I'm mainly doing this to remember what outside feels like. Also to post the cache of photos I have of places or things that don't merit a full article.

I didn't know until recently that Holi celebrations involved bonfires!

Sunset over Vashi lake.

The lake is surrounded by a path where people walk and jog. In general, as you would imagine, Navi Mumbai is more spacious and less crowded.

Spire of Afghan Church, a stone's throw from TIFR.

The "Afghan" in Afghan Church refers to the fact that it was built to commemorate the British soldiers killed in the Afghan War.

At a Durga Puja Pandal. The atmosphere was a new level of charged and festive.

A random wall in Bandra.

My friend showed me a magic trick in Bandra: a hideaway from which the bustling sounds of traffic are almost inaudible, even though it is between major roads.

Boats!

An art installation in a park near Churchgate station.

The High Court, where I visited the museum. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed inside.

From a foot overbridge near Grant Road station.

Inside IIT Bombay - brought pleasant recollections of KFI.

The view from the CS department at IITB. How they get work done is beyond me.

TIFR held its annual Science Day celebration on February 23. It seems like ever so long ago, when schoolchildren and science-loving adults descended upon TIFR from all over Mumbai.

The next few photos are from an exhibition by Khaki Tours, where they tried to recreate pictures painted by James Wales in the 1790s. The exhibition was in a small room (South Bombay things!) with lots of people, so I didn't get great photos. 

Malabar Hill.

Sion Fort.

Elsewhere in Sion Fort.

Belmont.

I hope all of you are staying safe, following doctors' guidelines and finding ways to keep yourselves occupied and upbeat during our time indoors. And again, I hope I can get back to posting newly taken photos sooner than later!