:: Kishwar Desai

Mad, sad and bad in Dilli

Kishwar Desai

July.04 : Landing in Delhi in the middle of a heatwave with savage powercuts makes one admire the enormous patience of Dilliwalas. A few bits of rioting is all they indulged in while the real fat cats — the politicians and the bureaucrats — had no clue how the rest of us were suffering. Compare this to the no-holds barred reportage in the UK over the MPs’ expenses — I can guarantee that if this happened in London, the media, in a coordinated fashion, would have flooded the airwaves with damaging information: the number of airconditioners each minister has, or their annual electricity bills. They would have filmed them at five-star hotels and air-cooled conferences, offices and cars, hounding them to a well-deserved apology.

After all, the MPs and MLAs have shown little sympathy for the electorate which has patiently voted this government back. Remember when the governor of West Bengal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, shared the woes of the aam aadmi and actually ordered a voluntary powercut at Raj Bhavan (much to the frustration of the Left Front government)? It was a terrific gesture, dil se. Someone should calculate how much electricity would be available to the general long-suffering janata if Lutyen’s Delhi just for one day were to be frugal and dim their lights. No, the truth is, we have elevated our MPs to the level of demigods who have to be protected from the cruel heat by everyone, including a tame media. Why? We are all Kalavatis now, waiting for someone to pity us. Ever since I arrived, I have not been able to write a single page, nor have I been able to send an email at one go. I write in the morning and then wait for the electricity to come back and, like an eager Dilli ki Billi, pounce on the mouse and send it off. Is this the sign of a healthy country? I can’t open the shutters of the house because huge generators are spewing black smoke all around. I wish I could transform this shambolic environmental disaster into cool and sunny middle-class London where everything works, and I get tap water for 24 hours without murdering my neighbour. Wow! A media channel questioned why so many ministers were in London recently. My suggestion is that they should all live there permanently while we use their bijli and pani.

Am I angry? Yes, but am I in the minority?

And will this tirade be taken seriously by those who matter? Forget it. They will simply say why doesn’t she live in London then, and stop ranting about us?

On the face of it, of course, everyone will pretend to rectify the damage. And next year it will be time to celebrate the annual powercuts festival again. In an extremely moving gesture, some leaders sent a written message (no doubt in triplicate, forewarned by the met department) to propitiate various saints, requesting them to deliver the monsoon at once. And, of course, quite miraculously, the petitioned saint read the note and immediately complied with the request.

I don’t know which bhagwan dispenses with normal supplies of bijli and pani, but how about appeasing them too? Therefore a Brit-Asian film I had just seen before leaving London, Mad, Sad and Bad, seems to have the right title for the Dilli drama, though the film itself has a vastly different theme. It deals, for a change, not with Punjabi weddings (a welcome relief) but with diasporic angst, examining, with humour, the "normal" life of the ordinary dysfunctional Punjabi family. Mad, Sad and Bad is an important addition to the Brit-Asian cinema lineup, where quirky characters and strange situations collide to expose another unknown facet of Brit-Asians. Written by a practising psychiatrist and talented filmmaker Avie Luthra, the film is essentially inward-looking, quite contrary to the dikhawa-drawn Punjabi community.

Luthra has in the past directed a short film Lucky, which was nominated for the Baftas and shortlisted for the Oscars. He typifies the Brit-Asian filmmaker who is no longer worried about trying to make a "cross-over" film by ticking all the right boxes of ethnicity and diversity.

Mad, Sad and Bad is about three siblings with a dominating mother, and their very different trajectories, just as the title indicates. This is a slice-of-Asian-life recounted with dark humour.

Meera Syal (i.e. the "sad" one) tops the cast in a very different role as a middle-aged spinster harangued by her mother into relationships she does not want. This is an unusual part for Meera who has always been a brilliant comic — both in her writing and in her acting. Therefore, as she admits, it was a brave decision to enact the singleton Rashmi who is dressed down, dowdy and depressed all the time. Meera says she "avoided looking in mirrors for the whole of the shoot". Luthra, ever the observant psychiatrist, says she is based on a lot of single Asian women he meets at parties… Oh dear!

As for the other roles, Luthra deliberately wrote them with specific Brit-Asian actors in mind, and this is perhaps the weakest part of the film. Pointing to the paucity of good Brit-Asian actors, Luthra says, "As an Asian writer, I think you would be silly to write Asian parts for actors that don’t exist". Casting white actors, he says, presents no problems since there are more of them around. The question arises why in this era of globalisation, Luthra did not consider Mumbai which is full of talented Asian actors who could make that leap across the continents. Whilst Brit-Asians are flooding the Mumbai streets looking for work, it seems there is still a great reluctance to accommodate "Asian" talent in British films. If Slumdog Millionaire could get away with it, why not more such films?

So we have a "mad" psychiatrist played by Zubin Varla and a "bad" scriptwriter played by Nitin Ganatra who has been recently seen in the painfully slapstick television series Mumbai Calling. The film will be screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It’s definitely a film with an intriguing subject — but I was also left wondering why the only sane characters in the film are white. Perhaps as a psychiatrist, Avie Luthra would be the best person to tell us!

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com