The mystery surrounding Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who disappeared from the thick of Indian freedom struggle in mid-1940s, is now tantalizingly close to its unravelling. West Bengal government declassified 64 files related to Netaji. However, apart from revealing some unsavoury details such as police surveillance of Netaji's family, it no way answered the million dollar question that has rankled Indians for nearly 70 years. Where did Netaji spend his last days? and how did he actually die?
The answers to the above questions probably lie in the classified files being held by the various arms of Central Government - External Affairs Ministry, Prime Minister's office and Intelligence bureau. With the West Bengal government having declassified files in their possession, the Centre is now feeling the heat to unwrap the contents of the documents in its possession.
It is now open season for leaks in cyber space with documents of dubious authenticity, often airburshed with Photoshop, making rounds in social media and being widely being ‘liked’ and shared.
While studying History in school Netaji and other action heroes of freedom struggle like Chandrashekar Azad and Bhagat Singh always held great fascination for us, unlike moderates such as Mahatma Gandhi and his ilk. The picture of Bose in his military uniform, Azad perpetually twirling his moustache and Bhagat Singh, both with turban and clean shaven, had a pride of place in our text books. Though they mentioned how Azad and Bhagat Singh met their ends, the mystery of Bose lived on. And it goes without saying that all these years strong vested interests have been at work to keep the lid over the mystery tightly shut.
It was first believed that Netaji died on August 18 in 1945, after his plane crashed in Japanese-occupied Formosa (Taiwan). This theory was endorsed first by Shah Nawaz Committee in 1956 and later by G D Khosla Commission in 1970. But later in 2006, Justice Mukherjee Commission report suggested that Netaji had not died in the plane crash and that "the ashes at Renkoji temple are not his". After studying these reports for seven months, the Government rejected it. In fact the Mukherjee Commission had a rough ride and was forced to submit its unfinished work to the then Home Minister Shivraj Patil. The main reason for this is the non-cooperation shown by the home ministry.
The Mukherjee Commission had suggested that Netaji was in Soviet Russia and had spent time in a Siberian gulag. Though the commission went to Russia, but failed to secure any clinching papers to substantiate it. This theory acquired maximum currency with many Bose supporters believing that Congress leaders colluded with the British to keep Netaji out of the country. Since Netaji had reportedly met Hitler and Japanese leaders and sought their help to overthrow British rule, Stalin was more than willing to play ball.
There is also one theory of Gumnami baba, a sadhu who lived in Faizabad and died on September 16, 1985, was actually Netaji. It was floated by a Hindi daily Naye Log and that too after the death of the godman. It had its moments of fame and some takers, until it was categorically dismissed by the Justice Mukherjee Commission.
Now all eyes are on the Centre, whether it would help in closure of the Bose death mystery. So far it has more or less toed the line adopted by the previous Congress-led UPA government and rejected an RTI petition seeking records from the Prime Minister's office related to Netaji. But it remains to be seen how far it is going to hold on to this position.
Moreover it remains to be seen if the classified papers that is in possession of Centre have answers to the above crucial questions. Or is it in the secret archives in some foreign country.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
Real life has trumped reel, or fact has outwitted fiction in its own game. The Sheena Bora murder mystery is turning out to be far racier than the wildest imagination of Bollywood script writers and TV news channel owners are already feeling giddy and wet dreaming about record-breaking spikes in TRP.
The fact that the prime characters happen to be a high profile family and the arch villain Indrani Mukherjea, with no wealth or lineage, had reached this social upper crust by using her social climbing skills has added a dash of pizzazz to the tale.
However had some Bollywood film maker made a film based on a similar story line before this infamous incident unfolded on our TV screens, it would have been riddled with hurdles. First of all not many producers would have been intrepid enough to finance such a macabre script, with no heroes and easily more than fifty shades of villainy. In the next stage it would have run into trouble with censors, who would have advocated many cuts to make it Bharatiya sanskriti compliant.
After release the critics would have made a mincemeat out of it. Probably this is how Rajeev Masand would have reviewed the movie:
It would be gross understatement to say that the movie plot is too convoluted: A second wife of her third husband is charged along with her second husband of killing her daughter from her first husband who was having affair with her third husband's son from his first wife.
The plot is riddled with holes and leaves many things unexplained. The third husband has no idea whether the murdered girl is his wife's sister or her daughter. The girl goes missing for two years and everybody in the extended family has readily believed that she had gone to US.
The police also come across as bumbling idiots who do not pursue the case after stumbling across a body cut to pieces and packed in a suitcase. Surely the script writer has not done his homework and was way too lazy to tie up such loose ends.
A boring feast of gore and deceit. Watch it only at your peril. I would go with half out of five for this tedious mind numbing crime mystery marred by a brain dead script!!
But the recent events have proved that truth can be far spicier than fiction! And the harried middle class has found a new 'fix' to escape from their daily drudgery by gawking and tut-tutting at the permissiveness of the amoral rich on their 56-inch LCD screens.
To cash on this sentiment Bollywood scriptwriters may be busy pounding on their laptops, over numerous cups of 'cutting chai' or 'chhotta pegs', to churn out a blockbuster based on this 'true story'. Hopefully critics would take a more considerate view towards the bizarre twists and turns in the plot once these films are released.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
Recently a stationary plane on Chennai airport got hit by an aerobridge. The collision took place because the aerobridge operator was allegedly talking on the mobile phone while the aircraft was trying to align itself. Few years back a train accident happened in the US and the driver was allegedly busy sending text messages and missed out on a red signal.
The grip mobile phones currently have over our lives is quite bewildering, thanks to their usefulness and portability. Probably no other gadget in the entire human history had such an intrusive influence. And people multitask to any extent to stay 'connected', often with disastrous consequences.
Indian roads are a stark reminder of this obsession. To begin with they were anyway not meant for the faint hearted, as potholes, glaring violation of traffic rules and jaywalkers (both of human and cattle kind) heaped misery on motorists and pedestrians alike. The advent of cell phones have further endangered the lives of those venturing into these roads.
Motorists use them with impunity, with least care for others safety or laws of the land. Though occasional reports of police fining such erring drivers do appear in newspapers, this has little effect on the situation on the ground as conviction rates are too low to act as a deterrent.
It's a worrying sight to see those behind the wheels of cars and other four-wheelers using cell phones in one hand and steering on the other. Cab drivers indulge in this perilous exercise while trying to locate the customer's houses, often in narrow by-lanes.
But when it comes to flirting with danger, it is the bikers who take the cake. With handsets held between tilted helmet-less heads and lifted shoulders, they chat and negotiate the traffic putting their own and others lives at risk. It has nothing to do with lack of awareness. All this is done with a willing suspension of all common sense and smug belief that they won't be penalised. Even if that happens they will be let off lightly.
For the police catching these 'in your face' offenders is easy, but it is quite challenging to nab those who have placed their phones inside the helmets close to their ears, using hands-free devices or blue tooths as they cannot be easily detected. Bluetooth devices attached with speakers are also frequently used for talking while driving. Though these devices may free your hand to operate the steering wheel or gear stick, but the risk of getting mentally distracted remains.
There are enough studies to indicate that use of cell phone while driving impairs concentration and reflexes. Some even go to the extent to state that it is as dangerous as drunk driving. Stricter laws and more intense surveillance could deter motorists, but there is no substitute to restraining oneself at least while driving, both for the safety of oneself and others.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
With Emergency completing its fortieth anniversary, newspapers, blogosphere and social media were riddled with stories recalling those dark days when the country teetered close to becoming a permanent banana republic. The recent statement by BJP patriarch and Emergency survivor L K Advani that it could happen again spiced up the issue.
During those infamous nineteen months, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's son, Sanjay Gandhi, was running the country as extra-constitutional authority and all forms of dissent were ruthlessly suppressed. All governmental institutions such as police, judiciary began to act to his bidding and press too, barring few honourable exceptions, got into kowtow mode.
My memories of that period is quite vague as back then I was not even in high school and my newspaper reading had not graduated beyond comic strips and cricket scores. Moreover I never came across anyone personally who went to jail or even had to undergo the infamous forced sterilisation. My awareness of Emergency was mainly retrospective, something I gained through conversations with elders and by reading Decline and Fall of Indira Gandhi a book by D R Mankekar and Kamala Mankekar.
The only thing I remember of that era is that during our visits to cinema halls, we had to sit through those tedious news reels, produced by Films Division, which prominently featured Sanjay Gandhi, V.C. Shukla and Ambika Soni. Those news reels would make us believe that the country should be grateful for this fantastic trio, who are working tirelessly to make India a developed nation. I seriously think that those documentaries played a stellar role in eroding Congress party's goodwill and subsequent rout in 1977 elections.
Another instance was when the Jaiprakash Narayan's movement had started gathering steam, somebody broached about the newly formed Janata party in our Maths class. Our usually gentle Maths teacher (who used to patiently correct our glaring trespasses in Algebra and Geometry) got a little worked up. She was sceptical about the movement and said it would bode ill for the country. She observed that Congress was such an old party and has done so much for the country, whereas these people cannot be trusted. She cited the example of long standing ruler of China Mao Zedong, who died around that time, and how that country had entered into a period of turmoil.
However history did not pan out the way our Maths teacher would have liked. After the fall of Congress government a rash of reports on Emergency excesses such as illegal detention, police torture and deaths and forced strerilisations started coming out of woodwork. Our newspapers and magazines, which got unshackled from censors, began reporting them assiduously. To cut the long story short, in the intervening 40 years the country had some close calls with its unity and integrity, but the dreaded 'E' word was never evoked. Probably the shock defeat in 1977 acted as a deterrent; still any future adventurism cannot be ruled out.
Veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar, who valiantly took on the might of the government high-handedness through those dark days, recently said that Emergency cannot be imposed now as the Constitution was changed after 1977 and it is almost impossible to impose it. Though the Constitution may have been made Emergency-proof, other fault lines remain more or less untouched.
The police, bureaucracy, judiciary and the press remain as malleable (if not more) as they were during the Emergency and inspire little confidence. Post-Emergency, the numerous scams all these departments got embroiled in reveal that the rot has only become more deep and the erosion of credibility has been phenomenal.
Hence for a future ruler with dictatorial aspirations, it is a case of glass half-full. He or she only needs to work around by whipping up sentiments such as majoritarianism or militarism to bring about Emergency like situation, without its Constitutional trappings. The rest of the institutions will fall in line without much ado as they did in 1975. Hence the people of the country cannot afford to forget Emergency and let their guard down.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
The other day I happened to visit a well known college in the city to finish formalities regarding my daughter’s admission. There was a half an hour session to brief both the children and parents about the rules and regulations to be followed.
The lecturer was making a Power Point presentation with a large Educomp screen in the background. When it came to dos and don’ts regarding dresses, girls were instructed to avoid wearing tight fitting and short sleeved dresses; jeans and coloured hair too fell in the list of don’ts. "Remember this is a co-ed college and hence everyone has to stay within one’s limits," was the cautionary observation by the lecturer.
However what surprised and amused me was the next slide regarding the dress code for boys. The forbidden list was much longer than that of girls, reflecting the long strides accomplished by the male grooming industry since my college days in 1980s.
Like girls, boys too were prohibited from wearing jeans and cargos. But the forbidden list also included tattoos, piercings on the body, gel on hair, sporting a goatee ...
Probably if such a list of don’ts was created during my college days, it may have just included wearing jeans and long hair. Those were early days of TV and Bollywood was the ultimate style guru. And having hair long enough to cover the ears was in vogue, thanks to Amitabh Bachchan. As the superstar’s stranglehold over box office tightened, so did the popularity of this hairstyle.
Calendars with pictures of Big B adorned friendly neighbourhood barber shops and almost everyone wanted barbers to shape their hair accordingly.
Shampooed and blow dried hair was the norm. Hence even traces of coconut oil or any other hair oil was considered a major fashion infraction. Gel was totally unheard of. Though Brylcreem ad used to appear in some newspapers and magazines (TV commercials were in their infancy), it had positioned itself as a product that gives an ‘orderly’ look to scruffy hair, without being oily. Spiky hair was almost unheard of, sometimes sported by b-grade comedians to show their ‘dehati-ness’.
Goatee those days was sported by mullahs and orthodox Muslims and hence enjoyed a very low cool quotient. Apart from full beard, the only option those days was the French beard, popularized by some yesteryear cricketers.
Tattoos were again considered very downmarket and confined to religious symbols, and tattoo artists were holed up in small stalls housed in busy markets with instruments of dubious sterility. In movies it was used as prop, but never as a fashion statement.
In Deewar we had Amitabh Bachchan getting branded with infamous tattoo ‘mera baap chor hai’ in his childhood. In lost-and-found Bollywood potboilers of Manmohan Desai kind, tattoos and birthmarks played a vital role in reuniting estranged brothers in the final reel. Tattoos of snakes, mainly cobras, were sported by the villains such as Amrish Puri and Bob Christo on their brawny arms to look more menacing.
Piercings were totally unheard of in the 80s. In the 90s it did catch the fancy, but even then those who were intrepid enough to come within earshot of piercing gun, risked being branded as gays.
The interim decades witnessed tectonic shifts in fashion, thanks to satellite television, MTV and internet, which gave rise to concepts such as metrosexual men. Even Bollywood was forced to fall in line with Aamir Khan sporting a soul patch in Dil Chahta Hai and Salman Khan’s middle parting in Tere Naam.
One of the early casualties of this trend was the friendly neighbourhood tailor, as customer preference shifted towards readymade and branded clothes. He either had to shut shop or get subsumed as supplier to garment units.
The other casualty was the barber as he had to either diversify into a new age salon or shut shop as men’s grooming was now no longer confined to haircuts, shave and tel maalish. It quite literally deals with matters from head to toe - hair cuts to pedicures.
In fact male grooming has now become so elaborate that it has almost caught up with their female counterparts in terms of vanity, which since time immemorial had been a female preserve.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
Finished reading And Then One Day A Memoir, by Naseeruddin Shah. Like his incisive performances on screen and stage the book too has been written with uncanny frankness. It is a no holds barred take on his life and also on the film industry. He takes nothing seriously, including himself.
Probably the first film of Naseeruddin Shah I saw was Manthan and I was in high school. While watching the movie I totally missed Naseer and didn’t realise he was in it. The movie was one of those early offering from what came to be later known as ‘arthouse’ cinema.
I could make out Girish Karnad (having seen him Swami earlier and he was one of those few men wearing shirt and trousers in the film) and Smita Patil, as I had seen her photo in some film magazine, the rest of the cast I totally missed out. I thought they were real cowherds from Rajasthan or Gujarat and realized many days later through some film magazine that Naseer was one among them!
In his memoirs he mentions that during the shooting of Manthan he used to stay in cowherd’s costume for the whole day, sleep on the floor and learned to bathe and milk a buffalo!
As I was brought up on a regular diet of formulaic Hindi ‘masala’ films with larger than life heroes with drop dead looks and heroines with distinct hour glass figure and aadarsh Bharatiya naari character, to me Manthan looked staid, weirdly disturbing, incomprehensible and somewhat amusing. How could someone make a film on lowly cowherds? Their pronunciation of ‘society’ as sissotti evoked lots of classroom banter, especially during Civics classes, when this particular word used to frequently crop up.
It is not that mainstream cinema did not have working class heroes. In fact Bollywood has always celebrated the triumph of the underdog, but in case of actors assaying those roles their starry mannerisms often came in the way. An Amitabh Bachchan may be a dock worker in Deewar or coal miner in Kaala Patthar, but the swagger and halo of superstar remained. On the other hand guys like Naseer or Om Puri quite literally got into the skins of characters such as cowherds and rickshaw pullers, as if they have been living it all their lives.
……
Although Shah’s father was not prosperous, he was a dyed in wool brown sahib who never left home without his hat “even in a one-tractor town like Sardhana”. In order to ensure that his three sons got the best public school education, he sent all of them to St Joseph’s School in Nainital. Naseer later went there to shoot for the movie Masoom.
Though he was not a good student and hated school, he was lucky enough to get early exposure to best of Hollywood movies. He got to see the likes of Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy, at a time when his contemporaries elsewhere in India were getting hooked to the brain dead ‘two hanky family and social drama’ of Hindi films.
……
Naseer's own life reads like a script of Anurag Kashyap or Sudhir Mishra movie. He lost virginity at 15, got married at 19 to Purveen Morad, a Pakistanin woman nearly 15 years his senior. He met her while doing his graduation at Aligarh Muslim University. He smoked grass and was quite hooked on to it, wonder when he came out of it. He even survived a knife attack from his friend turned foe Jaspal. Shyam Benegal and his wife took care of him while he was in hospital.
His first marriage has some parallels to his role in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. He was busy building up his acting career and family life took a hit. Anyway at nineteen he was no way ready to start a family. The couple drifted apart and they had a daughter from that marriage.
More than a decade later in 1982 he got married to Ratna Pathak Shah. Before getting married the couple had to surmount lots of family obstacles as they happened to be from different faiths. Moreover Ratna's family was strict vegetarian. Thankfully terms like love jihad had not come into existence back then.
Ratna was a steadying influence in his life and after marriage managed his house and finances very well. Probably in the book she is the only person whom he treats with some reverence!
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion - Steven Weinberg
The above irreverent quote rings true in times like these when literalists rule the roost in every religion and every conceivable form of atrocity ranging from banning books, killing non-conformist bloggers, ethnic cleansing, car bomb explosions and beheadings gets done under the banner of religion.
But what this New Zealand based Sikh guy did came as a breath of fresh air. Have no idea as to how religious Harman Singh was, but from appearance he looked like a practising Sikh. And what he did left the social media awash with praise for his humanitarian gesture, though he self effacingly claimed anybody would have done that. He happened to see an injured child lying on the road after being hit by a car. He rushed to his rescue, took off his turban and wrapped it around the boy's head to stem the blood loss. This gesture saved the boy's life.
Newspapers in New Zealand and Australia were guarded while describing his gesture – in their online editions some said he 'set aside' religious protocol while helping a child, while Sydney Morning Herald even said 'Sikh man Harman Singh acts against religion, removing turban to help injured child'. As if saving a life is against religion! Probably they were expecting the poor chap may attract the Sikh equivalent of fatwa for this unusual act.
However the kind of praise Singh attracted from Indians in general and Sikh community in particular made them realise that though the turban is very dear to Sikhs (they may even fight long legal battles to uphold their right to wear it), it does not come in the way while carrying out humanitarian gestures. There is much more to Sikh religion than dress codes.
Because of their beard and turban, Sikhs often get mistaken for Muslims in most parts of the First World. Right from 9/11 to the most recent terror attack at Lindt cafe in Sydney many Sikhs became victims of hate crime out of mistaken identity. Hope the above gesture would go some way in enhancing their reputation in these countries, even after discounting the fact that public memory is woefully short on such positive news.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
