The people of Bihar have finally woken up and given Laloo Prasad Yadav the drubbing he deserves. I often used to wonder how they tolerated him and for such a long time. Granted, he was the master of caste politics and, until now, had managed to successfully potray himself as the protector of the backward castes and minorities. But on any scale of development he had dragged Bihar into the pits. From a resonably governed state it became the worst governed state in India. No rule of the law, private armies, caste wars, rampant kidnapping, breakdown of infrastructure, everything pointed to a government that did not care for the people and was only concerned with staying in power.

I’m no suppporter of the BJP and I wish they were not part of the coalition as this might again lead to the communal clashes that were common before Laloo Yadav came to power and (to his credit) put an end to such violence. But Nitish Kumar seems a much better alternative than Laloo and it is nice to see that at last someone else has been given the chance to govern Bihar. I hope he does not waste this golden opportunity. He won the elections mainly on the lack of development agenda. If he can deliver on that and improve the law and order situation at the same time he will mark the beginning of a new era for the people of Bihar.

I was not very happy with the original photo so tried to do something a bit different with it today. I used an action which stimulates the effect given by a lensbaby. First time I’m trying this so the result is not perfect. You tell me if this looks interesting or not.

On another note regulars here might have noticed some changes with the layout. Yes, I basically reported the blog. It now runs on Pixelpost as I was unhappy with the lack of new functionality in Folderblog, the previous software on which this blog ran. Pixelpost is very nice, perhaps a bit slow, but importantly with the kind of functionality I had always wanted and failed to find in Folderblog. Most of the work is done. Took me the whole day actually! Pretty tedious work to manually reupload each photo and set the appropriate dates but good that it is done now. There is still some minor stuff to be tweaked and added which I’ll finish over the next few days.

Some strands of anti-globalisation, especially cultural globalisation, like to think of American popular culture as a rampaging juggernaut greedily gobbling up local cultures in its quest for worldwide hegemony. This reading makes out American pop culture to be monolithic. And especially in these times of militant protests against the ‘McDonaldisation’ of the world – think of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 or French farmer Jose Bove’s vandalism of American food outlets – a greater understanding of the monster called American culture is needed.

John Leland’s book ‘Hip: The History’ is a must read for supporters and opponents of American pop culture. The book traces the evolution of American culture right from the arrival of the first white settlers and African slaves in the early 17th century to the late 20th century. Leland’s central argument is that it was the fertile and dynamic socio-political set-up of the new world that enabled the culture of the African slaves to interact with the culture of the white slave owners to produce a unique culture, neither fully African or European. This is the beginning of American popular culture. Leland even gives a name to this cultural mongrel: Hip.

The author calls the minstrel shows and the blues music of the 19th century the ‘two roots of hip,’ and says that all other forms of pop culture were improvisations of these. The ‘Blackface Minstrel Shows’ were a parody of black culture in crude, stereotypical ways. These shows were enacted by whites dressed as blacks and were a way of letting whites participate in a world they at once abhorred and found fascinating. It also set the stage for a recurring theme in the history of American culture, that of blacks inventing a form of expression outside the mainstream, which would be appropriated by whites and then gained popular appeal as something that was ‘cool’ or ‘hip’. The Blues began as a form of expression by Black-Americans in response to the hardships they faced. At this stage it was scorned as the ‘devils music.’ When whites got interested in the blues, it began its upward movement towards mainstream respectability. Think of Elvis Presley shaking his pelvis to ‘Jailhouse Rock’ in front of thousands of screaming fans or Eminem, one of the most popular rappers. The phrase, ‘the white man who stole the blues’ sums it up.

But can the vastly diverse forms of American pop culture be reduced to being described by a single three-letter word called hip? The author defines hip as something that is invented by a small group of people as a form of counter culture that, as more and more people adopt it, gets diluted as it radiates outwards. By the time it has achieved mass appeal, the original group has invented a new form of expression. This is broadly the story of pop culture in America. I don’t think that the term hip captures all the contours of American pop culture.

In the nineteenth century writers like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau sought to break with conformism. Their writing celebrated the individual spirit and rejected materialism. Thoreau in fact rejected society and lived in the woods for two years, which forms the content of his book ‘Walden Pond’. The inheritors of this intellectual legacy in the twentieth century were the ‘beats’. They also rejected white collar and suburban family life, the two strands of American consumer culture. Jack Kerouac, one of the more famous beatniks, laid out the philosophy in his book ‘On The Road.’

The basic premise of the book is that the core of American pop culture is a result of the intermixing of black and white cultures and each would be incomplete without the other. But in some passages of the book it seems as if the author glosses over black contributions and emphasizes the role of the white. At times the author sounds a little condescending towards Afro-Americans. And what would the writing style of a book whose subject is hip be? You guessed it, hip. The language is hyperbolic at places. Maybe it’s just an American style of writing. But some of the idioms and phrases would be unfamiliar to Indians.

On the whole this book is highly entertaining, especially to readers who have spent countless hours listening to the blues or jazz or any other form of American pop culture. And for people unfamiliar with these, the book offers a glimpse into the forces that shaped American pop culture and gave Americans a sense of identity.

Seems to echo the state of my mind these days.

I love colors such as these. They have a dream-like quality, soft, ethereal and smooth! For the curious ones, this is a shot of the inside of the heating unit, which heats my house, where the gas is burnt as seen through a tiny port-hole.

Just trying to cheer myself up.

Furthur explorations in the world of macro. The object in the image should be pretty easy to guess, right? If you look closely you might just make out my tripod and me! And I love the bokeh of this lens. For those who do not know, bokeh (from Japanese, pronounced ‘boh-keh’) is the rendering of out of focus areas in a photo by the lens. For example, in this photo it is the stuff behind the object. This is a simplistic way of putting things but the smoother the bokeh the better the photo looks. Someone in a review for this lens had commented that the bokeh it gave was like melted cheese…I concur!

I’m not a poet
I’m not even a writer
I’m just another word-dreamer

Q. Can you tell me something about your batch at FTII?
A. I was in the 1963-66 batch. Kumar Shahni was my batch mate, John Abraham was junior while Adoor Gopalakrishnan was a year senior to me. We lived in a very different era. The 1960s was a decade of great ferment and unrest. The environment at FTII was very loosely structured, perhaps it was something to do with the times. At the institute we all believed that we could make films expressing our individual vision. John worked with me on my first film Uski Roti.

Q. What was the narrative style of your first few films?
A. One of my major influences was the French film maker Robert Bresson. Bresson’s films reflected a particular strand of Christian belief called Jansenism which manifests itself in the way leading characters are acted upon and simply surrender themselves to their fate. I believe that cinema is not so much visual as it is temporal. But most film makers concentrate on the spatio-visual aspect. This has led to certain problems. What time reflects is more contemporary than the arrangement of a set of visuals. I do not want to focus on this visual aspect in my films, but want to make the temporal aspect primary.

Q. Did you use music in your films?
A. Film expresses itself through images and sound and to that extent I don’t believe that music is that important to the narrative. I have made a few movies that incorporate Indian classical music. I am inspired by the form of Indian classical music and have used this form in my films. Hindustani music is spontaneous and has highs and lows and climaxes. I like to elaborate on the narrative, just like music.

Q. Did you want to convey a certain message to your audience?
A. No. I made films because I wanted to make films. I didn’t do it with the intention of giving the audience a message. The act of making a film is a social act.

Q. You were part of the new-wave movement of films in India. What were the concerns of the movement and how far did the message penetrate the audience?
A. The new wave movement was a parallel movement to the mainstream cinema in India. We wanted to find a form that corresponded to contemporary reality. Usually, the mainstream films used a medieval idiom. So obviously there was a discrepancy. We tried to create something new.

Q. Were you disappointed that your films didn’t achieve mass appeal?
A. No, not at all. I was well aware that my films would have a limited audience. We were up against a distribution system that manufactured an audience by feeding them the same mainstream formulae. Though my films didn’t get released commercially, there were a number of film screenings.

Q. But there was a lot of debate about your films in the media.
A. Yes, at that time there were a lot of write-ups in the media about them. Journalists felt that it was important to let readers know about the parallel film movement, even though most people wouldn’t get to see my films commercially. Times are very different now. There is absolutely no debate or discussion about what kind of a world we are living in, no attempt to understand it. I was in America at the start of the Iraq war and I couldn’t find a single T.V. or radio station that spoke out in clear unambiguous terms against the war. The entire media toed the line of the American administration.

Q. Why did you stop making films?
A. For the last five years I’ve been teaching music, especially the dhrupad style, and exploring its form. I am thinking of getting back to film making now.

Q. You have also made documentaries. What difference do you see between your films and documentaries?
A. The dividing line between my films and documentaries is thin. Some of my films, like Siddheshwari, are like poetic documentaries. Another documentary, Arrival, is about labour migrating to cities.

Q. What do you have to say about Paheli?
A. The very meaning of a Paheli is that it can be solved whereas a Duvidha can’t be. In my film, the woman couldn’t choose between the material and the spiritual husband. So in that sense, for me the problem still continues. In Paheli, the woman makes a choice. I guess that’s why the film makers called it Paheli.

I had decided to enter this week’s Dyxum Photo C)and looking to enter another photo I played around with the original color photo of this. I liked the end result so much that I decided to post it here as well as enter it into the contest!