Urumi - The plight of a postmodern narrative !
I went to see 'Urumi' the much hyped big budget Malayalam movie directed by Santosh Sivan and scripted by Shankar Ramakrishnan without much expectation as the initial comments from my friends were not that encouraging. And that helped me a lot to digest the embarrassing moments and to appreciate the glimpses of visual imagery at times. It gives me a consolation that the popular culture has not rotten much to get overwhelmed by these kind of big budget productions.
The movie as a whole is nothing new or path breaking in either film grammar or its aesthetic, political or historic or contents. To speak about the positioning and presentation of historic characters, it made me to think that the film crew conceived them as hallucinated, semi& lunatic or arrogant mortals.
The central character 'Kelu Kotthuval' is presented as arrogant,daring, and conscious of his destiny. There are excess melodrama in all these characterizations so that we will fail to translate the character to a historic lattice.
Almost all the characters are living in a state of fantasy or erotic hedonism. And that makes it lesser modern, not at all real, and for worse a semi- cooked postmodern narrative.
Post-modern narratives will aim to negate the basic building blocks of society such as economy, class contradictions, productive relations, natural dialectics and will amplify the superfluous, secondary, derived relations of the social fabric. Here the senseless depiction of sexual anarchy takes over the movie ad a whole and reduces the freedom struggle to a mere patriarchal revenge.
Here European invasion of Kerala is presented ad the historic pretext or prelude to the environmental exploitation of the multinational corporate driven - government auded collaboration to loot the natural resources. The NGO - civil society inspired, indigenously mobilized resistance wins their land rights at the end. So far so good, though I pity the rationale and cognizance of this point if view.
As usual in commercial cinema , the movie progresses without exposing any of the thematic elements. No worries, no compliant as I don't expect this much cerebral efforts from them.
May be we can forgive Prithviraj for his whims and fancies of s new actor turned producer. But I am sad to see this sort of an infantile film sense from Santosh Sivan again and again, an icon if Indian cinematography. And it reinforces my belief that technology is not a replacement for cerebral aesthetics. Film may be a power language but at the end what matters who speaks it out and what do we say.
Erasure
A tombstone
Awaiting its pearl
With its salt and saliva
Welcomes red wild roses
And wishes luck
to count down stars
Melting tones
Winter greens
Lush of lust
They were craving for depths
Smelling mud, a skull laughed
If it withers, can life become?
Road taken from calm rails
Unto this last ring of hope
All colours are a hue and tint
But a bliss of fire from far
Never heard of corridors
That lives beyond light
Yet darkness wore shades
Happiness hidden from colours
Sinking sorrow
With a drunken vessel
Still shores loved its senses
Beams so young
clouds so long
They could meet in vapours
Stirring rain
Striking gold
All in a day's harm
Smiling leaves
Embraced the roots
Heart and its wrinkles
Heaps of hopes in hollow
Hands had enough
Harness the mask
Dance to the dusk
Day longs thereafter
Stretches of skin
Marked its white
Fair faces drowned
And lived in nymphs
Loud old voices
Lean line of thought
Tone down mirrors
Open for stillness
Closed this erasure
Away from the seizure
None could erase the epitaph
Though fate was rewritten
In mirage and rage
Infinite stars and finite spans
They loved this soliloquy
Long long tentacles
Craving for memoirs
Made a mirror of seizure
And sleepy monster lied in charm
'Where there is an ill, there is a will'
Unfilled sky thus rained in still
Gokul B.Alex
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Destiny of a Decade
Stolen Spaces and Marching Ants !
Time is a tyrant! And a decade is a mere dust in the sands of history but it means much more in the life of a human being. In the mainstream media recap, we see a decade as a sequence of events and tale of newsmakers. Seldom does it lead to interpretation and introspections. In such an attempt, we can see that a decade means different for each strata of society. In the lives of upper class, technology and social media invaded personal experiences to the deepest. Simulations stimulated their desires and plenitude of choices pampered their lives. The working class had to confront tightening labour laws and insecure way of life. Labour increasingly became a mobile commodity integrated to the supply chains and global delivery models. The poor were encircled by spiralling prices and weakening welfare state schemes. Rather than growth, poverty trickled down to the downtrodden.
Under the pretext of globalization, world economy became an integrated financial market. World became flat in that sense. The poor were erased from the flash memories of the elite and the aspiring ones. On the other hand, because of digital divide and growing economic disparity, world became more and more opaque. Adding to the woes of the wretched, Mother Nature created havoc to the millions in the forms of thunderstorms, earth quakes, floods, Tsunami and cyclones. More than anything these calamities exposed the callousness of the governments and the micro-politic agenda of the donor agencies. India saw the massive earthquake in Gujarat (2001) which took more than 30,000 lives.
Indian polity saw the resurgence of coalition governments in Centre adding a new dimension to federalism. The Tehelka expose took the political bureaucracy by storm. The Gujarat riot will always remain as a blot of this decade. The failure of Agra summit put Indian diplomacy in no man’s land. Indo – US nuclear deal generated much acrimony and put an end to the love –hate relationship between UPA and left. Maoists aided by the inflow of weapons from Bangladesh and Myanmar became the serious threat to Indian internal security. The political economy of Kashmir improved marginally and gave way to democratic process.
The same decade saw the upsurge and retreat of globalization. The hype of Y2K puzzle disappeared in thin air. None bothered to count the millions lost in preparing precautionary steps. The alliance of Time Warner and America Online (2000) became the big hit of the millennium. The honeymoon of techies did not last longer. The Tech crunch (2001) and the dotcom bubble were the preludes for the recessions to come. In this sound and fury, all ignored that it was the collapse of minnows which led to the formation of monopolies in technology.
Silicon Valley emerged as the hub of information technology. IT revolution was nothing but the use of existing computer communication platforms for financial and international trade networks. The wave of globalization of labour and capital was accelerated by internet technologies. In Doha round of negotiations of World Trade Organization (2001), it was USA, European Union and Japan which stood for agricultural subsidies retreating from their previous support for neo-liberalism. Though it exposes the hypocrisy of imperialism, more evident is their losing faith in the free market principles. The changing tides of world economy favoured the labour capitals like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and ASEAN nations. The fundamental importance of productive forces in a political economy was amplified by this.
Corporate capitalism exposed its wilderness and chaos with the collapse of the American Energy sector giant ‘Enron’ in 2001. Sarbanes-Oxley laws tried to take grip on US corporate governance. The roller coaster ride of free market capitalism met an unexpected twist from the high heavens itself. American Hedge fund investment groups started collapsing. Mortgage giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bailed out their prestige. None could save the fate of sinking Lehman Brothers, 150 years old Investment Bank. Entire financial market in the developed economies felt the tremors. The recent market updates reveal that US economy hasn’t yet circumvented the recession despite the massive government bailout.
This decade witnessed the madness of American imperialism as they invaded fragile nation states using their military might. The aerial attacks on the twin towers of World Trade Centre in September 11, 2001 became the launch pad of American neo-colonial interests. Greed for Oil and urge to retain the dollar hegemony led them to cook up stories against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. When American Missiles bombarded the planning ministry in Iraq (2003), world conscience was a mute spectator. On the other hand, geopolitical interests in Central Asia and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden were the reasons for the Afghan invasions (2001).
Almost ten years on, the war on terror is on going. Taliban and Opium trade in Afghanistan is on rise again. Incapable to curb this, US-NATO army is busy murdering civilians in the Af-Pak border. Abu Gharib jail tortures exposed the savage side of American civilization. The controversial Guantanamo prison opened by USA to detain the war prisoners (2002) is on the verge of closing down.
Organized crime and terrorism were the perennial disturbances for the entire decade. Few realised these as the fruits of social anarchy spread by the proliferation of market economy world wide. The Somali young terrorist holding the American weapon exemplifies the dialectical relation between imperialism and terrorism. US shipped more than 40 tons of weapons into the ports of Somalia. The new decade will tell us who the recipients were. We saw terrorism getting the religious tint everywhere from Indonesia to Colombia. The state of affairs rekindles the memories of crusades in history.
The entire Islamic nations who were against the American oil greed were tainted as terrorists. Thus political Islam was equated with terrorism. By sabotaging the democratic governments in Islamic nation states Imperialism sowed the seeds of theocracy. Yet we failed to realize that terrorism was best exploited by Imperialism to fragment the opposing nation states. Baltic nations and South East Asia stands as the victim to these experiments. But world polity relishes in the convenience of forgetting.
The world continues to be hot and simmering for the Palestinians with Israel breaching all the limits of atrocity. Palestine lost their iconic leader Yasser Arafat in the middle of this decade. All throughout this decade this West Asian strip of land was stripped of all the human rights. Goldstone commission appointed by UN (2009) was a mild solace to their concerns.
The decade saw the transformation of culture industry from a mass media to hegemony over human capital. The decade began with the arrival of Survivor – the Reality show, first of its kind. It was an instant hit in USA. With ‘Idea Star Singer’ making waves all over Kerala just all in this decade we can sense the spread of a global mass culture. Social media became the second nature of netizens. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Orkut satisfied the tribal instinct of millions of people. Yet there are concerns of privacy and information security in these social networks. Identity of individual was lost somewhere in the networks. Wikipedia became the ultimate source of anything and everything on universe. The potentials of these sources take us also to the concerns on the authenticity and ideological intentions. The potentials of music were best explored by Apple Inc with their ‘iPod’.
One cannot ignore the winning strides of science in this decade. And we salute in the memory of seven space scientists who shed their life with the burning Colombia Space shuttle (2003). The Genome project (completed first stage in 2003) and the Chandrayan moon mission (began in 2008) were crowing achievements of the decade. SARS and bird flu consumed many lives world wide. It revealed the vulnerability of the healthcare systems world wide. Climate change concerns became a political issue in no time. Development politics and environmental politics locked horns in various international forums. Much hyped Copenhagen summit (2009) failed to deliver any progressive results though it created a coalition of developing nations.
In this decade, imperial states, non-state actors, NGOs and the donor agencies were the key players in the world polity. Identity politics and micropolitics were their weapons for fragmentation of democracies world wide. They scan even the smallest space of every individual. On one side, they weakened the democracies by instigating ideologies of decentralization of power through micropolitics. On the other end, they created political anarchy by funding identity politics and exporting political terrorism. At the end of this drama, as a saviour of democracy, US imperialism marches to foreign soils to liberate the people and deliver them to the world market. Confrontation between democratic nation states and market forces happened to be the major current of this eventful decade. A society wandering in stolen spaces; it is the gift of this decade.
Gokul B.Alex
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