Skip to main content

Scenes From A Movie

I watched Buddhadev Dasgupta's Kalpurush recently and was underwhelmed. That said, a few recurring images in the movie made a strong impression.

The lead character, Sumanta (played by Rahul Bose) is this man who is not anyone's idea of a success and most definitely not his wife's.His lack of self-worth and confidence continually diminishes the "man" in him. It is to the point where he accepts the loss of conjugal rights and his wife's blatant unfaithfulness with the same equanimity as he does his life's other failures.

While Bose "plays" this character with complex emotions sincerely he never quite "becomes" Sumanta as he must to do it justice. Even so, with his listless shuffle and tendency to talk too much, he creates a believable image of Sumanta - we have seen men like Sumanta in real life.

Then there are the couple of scenes in the old-fashioned College Street bookstores that are priceless. Sumanta walks in and asks the proprietor for books about America and the man rattles off the titles of a dozen new arrivals to his helper squatted in the loft above. The books come dropping down one after the other like a powerful hailstorm. The complete authenticity of the scene is a delight and is one that warmed my desi heart immediately.

This is exactly how, I had bought books too back in the day and the only way I ever knew to. So when I first walked into a Borders in America, the resulting culture shock almost registered on the Ritcher scale. The closest I had come to a browsing experience until then, had been at bookstores like Gangarams and Higginbothams in Bangalore. Clearly, that had not quite prepared me for the real deal.

As I watched Kalpurush, I missed College Street and a long forgotten way of buying books. After a few years of the all you can eat buffet, I guess I am ready for the small sampling platter once again - strange are the ways of nostalgia.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques