I got to see Venus, the new film written by Hanif Kureishi last week, courtesy of the Writers’ Guild, and what a pleasure it was, to be sure. So much could go wrong with a touching and funny film about a lecherous old man who is dying, but it doesn’t. Between watching incredible actors perform, and a screenplay that never sinks into sentimentality, Venus was pleasurable in that old fashioned way that plays and movies are supposed to be when you read how this stuff is supposed to work according to Stanislavski.

However, the publicist for this movie should be fired. I would have never gone to the film after seeing the poster-with a scary looking Peter O’Toole, and tagline that says, ‘From the director of Notting Hilll,’ who would want to see something that aligns itself with a vile concoction of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant?

I finally saw Volver, the new Almadovar film, I loved it for the same reasons I love Almadovar’s films- the design, the melodrama, the female centered universe of the narrative. The man actually seems to like women. Volver, in particular ensconces it’s audience in the warm embrace of mother-daughter relationships, to the extent of bringing a mother back from the dead in order to right the wrong done to her daughter.

It makes an interesting comparison to Meghe Dhaka Tara, a similarly melodramatic film and cinematically over the top (in a different way than Almadovar), with a female character, Nita, in it’s center. However the relationships in Ghatak’s film are those of predation and annihilation. There is one particular scene that comes to mind. In this scene, Nita is with her suitor, and her mother, is looking at them unobserved. There is an anxiety and ruthlessness in that look which chills you to the bone, I have never forgotten it. Of course, the comparison of these two films goes only so far, given that the partition of India haunt’s Ghatak’s film, while I don’t really know that something similar informs Almadovar’s film.

I had blogged Lord Macauley’s birthday celebration a couple of days ago; An occasion where a portrait of Goddess English was unveiled. As a result of that post, the organizer, Chandrabhan Prasad very kindly e-mailed me an image of this fantastic portrait by Shant Swaroop Baudha.

In his e-mail Prasad said:

Will the future generations of Dalits/Adivasis fit into a world shaped by their own Goddess? The answer is a clear NO. The remedy for that NO is to accept the Goddess in Her entirety – and become English speaking at the earliest.

Goddess English is all about emancipation. Goddess English is a mass movement against the Caste Order, against linguistic evils such as Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telgu and Bangla for instance. Indian languages as more about prejudices, discrimination and hatred and less about expressions and communications.

I don’t know if I would characterize Hindi and Marathi as linguistic evils, but I couldn’t agree more about the importance of learning an international language.

Anything that will be a step towards stopping another Kherlanji from occurring again is welcome.

How can you tell you are back? well for one thing, the minute you get off the plane, the PA system announces, “Homeland Security has issued an Orange alert, all passengers must submit to security procedures, blah, blah,blah.” Posters at the Immigration desk mention “Our Great Nation” several times. After you are done feeling scared, and intimidated for being an immigrant, you stumble out of the airport and look for a taxi. Several limo drivers, all of them immigrants, are milling around, one of them asks you where do you want to go, you say, “Queens,” without batting an eyelid he says, “Forty five dollars,” you are suddenly indignant for being mistaken for a person who doesn’t know how much it would cost to go to Queens. Another limo driver yells out, “Thirty five,” your instincts kick in and you say, “I’ve never paid more that twenty five,” “Ok, thirty then.” Another driver, obviously Desi, interjects, “You should agree to that price, it pretty good you know,” he is just interested in the haggling, he doesn’t really want the job himself. A rather handsome driver says, “You have a nice haircut, you remind me of a Filipino friend of mine,” I wonder if he says that to every female passenger who gets out of the terminal. Again, he is not really interested in driving me, its all part of snatching a few moments of interaction in the middle of scrambling for a living. I finally get into a yellow cab, the Punjabi driver on learning I lived in Delhi, says that Delhi and Punjab is the same thing. I suppose you could add New York to that list. I am glad to be back.