A day in Mumbai

"These are the new trains," the middle aged passenger opposite to me said. "They say its like an airbus...we will never have the fortune of boarding an airplane, but this is good enough."

I got down in Dadar. Walked past the flower market and took a cab to go see the mills in lower Parel. I stepped into a lane off the main street and time moved back 80 years. Old buildings, black and grey, paint in disrepair, a colorful patchwork of clothing hanging from the iron grilles. Some were dated 1922. It was hard to imagine that someone still lived there.

A bunch of kids playing cricket on the street surrounded me on seeing my camera. I have to take a picture of them batting. Finally, the whole team posed. Somebody hurriedly scribbled and address for me in Hindi when I said I could post the pictures. A kid pointed to a run down room on the ground floor. "That's my house.Send it there."

Later I found my way out from another street, lined with slums on both sides. Radios were playing, phones ringing. This was a city within a city.

Kaagaz ke Phool and Pyaasa

Over the past few months, I've been reading up a lot on Guru Dutt's life. Its a phase I go through- a fixation with something. At one point it was the gypsies and their history, at another time, the 1857 Indian Mutiny. When this happens I read all I can find on a subject.
What stands out in these films is their originality. The opening shot of Kaagaz ke phool, with the protagonist picturized below from the feet of a statue, reminded me of Ozymandias :
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,
....
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The half shrunken visage in this case is the once famous Suresh Sinha, who is visiting the studio where he once used to work. It is not told to us if this is something he does often...to watch the crew at work below, while he sits far above and reminiscences of past glory, but it seems plausible.

The rest of the film is a flashback of his successes and eventual downfall. As Sinha climbs the stairs of the studio to where the light boys work, he looks down at the sets and perhaps for the first time realizes the set to be a world of make believe, removed from outside reality,profit being the only connection between the two.

In the 'waqt ne kiya' sequence, a beam of light lights up an empty studio as Sinha and Shanti show up for work early. Amitaba Bagchi in a nicely written review of the film, calls this beam 'the space for transgressive desire'. But the beam also stands for the limelight of the film world, which comes in between their relationship.

The film apart from depicting downfall of an icon, also mirrors the rigid social mindsets of the time. Sinha is a man trapped between doing what society considers immoral, and by his own so called 'Khuddari' (self respect) which prevents him from bowing down to anyone for help. One can either be a stoic figure, suffering in silence, or a labelled womanizer like Rocky, but not the 'half gentleman' that Sinha declares himself to be when he first meets Shanti.

This is a more ambitious story than Pyaasa, but in the latter the execution is smoother and consistent throughout. Paper Flowers starts breaking up a bit predictabily towards the end.

I can't believe that this film was a flop.

Sahir Ludhianvi's work is here:
http://www.urdupoetry.com/sahir04.html

VK Murthy, the cinematographer, talks of his beginnings and work with Guru Dutt here