Old symbols for the first citizen

By B. N. Goswamy
WITH so much centring upon and emanating from Rashtrapati Bhavan these days, my thoughts turn somehow to the symbols that surround our President in his stately residence.

Images leading to self
By Raja Jaikrishan
Having seen Vijay Ozo’s images, if you spot him around his place of work i.e. Capitol Complex or in the Sector 17 Piazza and walk up to him in strides and say " Good Morning!"

Good subject, bad handling
By Himmat Singh Gill
A PRIVATELY owned TV channel recently aired a serial based on the life and times of late Lieut Col Adi Tarapore of Poona Horse.

The ‘loin’ among villains

By Devinder Bir Kaur

SARA shahar mujhe Loin ke naam se jaanta hai. The Lion (pronounced as Loin) is no more. This one-liner from Subhash Ghai’s "Kalicharan" was Ajit’s favourite description of himself.

Ajit joined the Hindi film industry more than 50 years ago under his own name, Hamid Ali Khan. "Shahe Misar" was his first film as a leading man, but it was "Beqasur" that helped him get noticed. He played a police inspector opposite Madhubala and got the image of a hero.

Ajit’s first golden jubilee hit was I.S. Johar’s "Nastik" opposite Nalini Jaywant. The famous song, Dekh tere sansar ki haalat kya ho gayee bhagwan, kitna badal gaya insaan..., was from this film. Even if he didn’t speak a word, his face showed all that the man had lost.

He also did two films on the theme of Partition, namely "Bada Bhai"and "Milan". He did the role so convincingly that at an outdoor shooting a Sardarji cabbie asked him if he was a refugee from Pakistan.

In another film "Shikari" he played the hero opposite Ragini. The film had some very popular songs: Tum ko piya, dil diya, itne naaz se..., Chaman ke phool bhi tujkho gulab kehte hain...etc.

In "Durgesh Nandini," Ajit played his first negative character. Though his performance was highly appreciated, the film was a miserable flop.

"Mughal-e-Azam" and "Naya Daur," in which Ajit starred with his off-screen friend Dilip Kumar, were easily two of his best films in his long career. In both he played the hero’s buddy, and got a lot of praise, especially for "Naya Daur" in which he precipitates a crisis in his village, due to a misunderstanding with his buddy.

One also remembers him for his role in "Heeralal Pannalal" with Shashi Kapoor and Randhir Kapoor. Ajit played a baker who smuggles gold in the bread loaves.

But the film that came as a turning point was the one that made him a "real villain". This was "Sooraj," starring Rajendra Kumar and Vyjayanthimala. It was a costume film with sword-fighting and all that.

Ajit’s second phase of his career was with films like "Zanjeer" and "Yaadon ki Baraat." Everybody remembers these films, but not the other equally successful films like "Dharma" and "Mr Natwarlal" in which he did positive roles.

And when Ajit returned to Bombay from his self-imposed exile of seven years to his farm in Hyderabad, he was again offered a villain’s role in Salim’s "Jagir" starring Ajay Devgan and Karisma Kapoor. He also did Salim’s "Police Officer", "Aadmi"and earlier "Choron ki Baraat," Dev Anand’s "Gangster" and K.C. Bokadia’s "Shaktiman".

Ajit was back to playing the villainous boss. Given a few gunmen, a gang moll and a couple of smart one-liners, he was in his element. In fact, his one-liners became a cult: "Lily, don’t be silly," "Mona daarling..." and of course, "Sara shahar mujhe Loin ke naam se jaanta hai...".

One does not know how Ajit jokes really originated. One presumes with the Punjab problem at its peak, Sardarji jokes were totally out. People needed a subject to make jokes about and they found Ajit.

Soon, the fad became a cottage industry with everyone concocting an Ajit-style one-liner. Cassettes and ads followed, like the one to sell a ketchup: "Yes, Bass!"

Ajit jokes were a rage in America. Like this one: "After leaving crime, Ajit gets interested in cricket. He is the opening batsman in a match and Imran Khan bowls him out in the first ball. Ajit tells the umpire to declare a ‘no ball.’ When the umpire argues, he points to the stand where Ajit’s henchman Robert holds his family hostage. The umpire declares a ‘no ball’ ".

But the one Ajit himself liked was about liquid oxygen. "Robert, isko liquid oxygen mein daal do; liquid isko jeene nahin dega aur oxygen isko marne nahin dega." He felt it originated from his film "Warrant"in which he had an acid tank in his den. "Mona darling" was of course from "Zanjeer".

Ajit said he was lucky to get so much love and respect in his lifetime. Otherwise, people got fame only after they were dead. In deed, Ajit was a legend in his own lifetime.

Old symbols for the first citizen
By B. N. Goswamy

WITH so much centring upon and emanating from Rashtrapati Bhavan these days, my thoughts turn somehow to the symbols that surround our President in his stately residence. This, because they have a life of their own, extending far beyond the ephemera that one has to contend with most of the time.

Edward Lutyens, when he began building what is now Rashtrapti Bhavan and was then designed to be the seal of imperial authority, had very little use for symbols, Indian symbols at any rate. He looked wearily at nearly all of Indian architecture in fact. Old Hindu and Buddhist monuments made him nervous, terrified him, as he used to say, with all their complexities, their "lace patterns".

He was equally dismissive of Mughal architecture which he found to be a matter of "rectangular-cum-octagonal planes", capped by "three turnips in concrete".

There was seemingly nothing racist about Lutyens’ views for, if anything, he was even more acerbic in his comments on the villas and offices in Simla, built by and for the British. "If one was told that monkeys had built it all", he wrote," one would have said what wonderful monkeys! They should be shot in case they do it again."

But slowly, things caught up with Lutyens, it seems. There was no escaping influences, and so many things, ideas, that he went on to incorporate in the grand structure which he was engaged in building came ultimately out of the matrix of Indian thought.

Getting used to the idea of employing Indian stone for his building was not difficult for him, for the material — the pink sandstone of Agra, the buff of Dholpur — had a logic of its own. "The colour of a building", he conceded readily, "has both a chromatic and a sculptural sense. You cannot go wrong in building colours if you use local materials..... Climate is the architect’s colour."

It was in the matter of design that he had major problems adjusting to the Indian heritage. The great dome that tops Rashtrapti Bhavan he was inclined to model upon European domes but, as it turned out, it has even more of an affinity with the noble stupa at Sanchi, symbol of the Buddha and, through him, of equanimity, among other things.

What reinforces thoughts about the drum of the Sanchi stupa having been in his mind is the fact of his surrounding it with a tall stone railing, with its "wicker trellis" pattern, of the kind that runs around the stupa.

One recalls happily, in this connection — as Sharada Prasad does while writing on Rashtrapati Bhavan — that Lutyens’ wife, Emily, had great respect for Indian religions, and had become a theosophist herself.

But, to get back to symbols. Lutyens brought in elephants in the sculptural programme of the building everywhere. In his private life, he had come to love the animal, but what this noble creature stands for in Indian thought could not possibly have been far from his awareness, either. The mere mention of an elephant sends sacred images coursing through the Indian mind — the dream of queen Maya, the great six-tusked elephant that the Buddha was in a former birth, Indra’s Airavata, the Gajendra delivered by Vishnu’s discus — and one thinks of the animal’s wisdom, his sagacity, the ability to combine bodily strength with sensitivity of feeling. One cannot imagine that the animal figured only as a decorative motif in the architect’s scheme of things.

Again, the sun recurs as an image in Rashtrapati Bhavan, giver of light, prime sustainer of things. But so does the lotus, classical Indian symbol, signifying detachment, purity.

When the imposing "Jaipur column" was built by Lutyens in the front court, he placed at its very top, supporting the massive pointed star, a great lotus, elegant petals still in the process of opening to the light of the sun.

The sight is moving, and when one sees the drawings for it made by the architect, one cannot escape the feeling that the lotus was, for him, more than a mere pretty flower.

I am sure the President looks at these things sometimes, and meditates upon their meaning. Especially upon the meaning of the lotus, in these troubled and partisan times. Or upon the great bull from Rampurwa, taken from an Ashokan pillar, which now stands at the very entrance to the main hall.

It is a noble sculpture, constant reminder of the fact that the best of men was compared to a vrishabha in our thought: patient and gentle, dharma-like in his ability to sustain.

Lutyens & bureaucracy

Accounts of Lutyens’ life and career filled with the troubles he had with the bureaucracy all the time that he was engaged in building the great mouments in Delhi.

The highest of authorities, the Viceroys included, he could manage, but babudom got him down, with its "rules" and "procedures" and the sacred cow called "precedent". "If Government had built birds", he wrote once in a letter, "They would have mud beaks and corrugated iron feathers with a noisy machine that smelt of oil."

He would undoubtedly have been interested in knowing that birds with mud beaks continue to be built, and the noisy machines of sarkar still smell of oil.

Images leading to self
By Raja Jaikrishan

Having seen Vijay Ozo’s images, if you spot him around his place of work i.e. Capitol Complex or in the Sector 17 Piazza and walk up to him in strides and say " Good Morning!", he might continue looking through his round-rimmed glasses at an innocuous corner with a thumb-high dust heap, or, at the half-filled coffee cup over a graffiti-filled table. If he finds you reluctant in returning to the seat, he might put down your sophistry by posing a question: "What is good about the morning?"

He seems to be saying in Nissim Ezekiel’s voice: "There is a place to which I often go/Not by planning to, but by a flow/Away from all existence, to a cold/Lucidity..."

The reason that compels one to discuss his work is neither his around 30 years of experience in photography nor his number of national and international awards, but its unalloyed avant-garde nature. Be it his friend’s profile mirrored in the glass partition; a sculpture in the compound of the Government Museum and Art Gallery complex blurred by its own shadows along with a use-me can; or, a cup of tea on a graffiti-full table, the impact of each image is holistic.

If one spares the images of intellectual dissection and allows the mind to trigger off many more images, never mind if all of them are not tranquil, a dialectical interface among them, can take you into the recesses of your private world.

Images on a tiny corner of a concrete wall, or a patch of the road don’t transcend their facticity. They dissuade the viewer from distinguishing between what is invented and what is real.

A poster on Nehru’s vision of India with a pigeon flying off into space has been framed with the skyline showing a flight of pigeons. One is not sure whether the image is politically critical or symbolic. Such images in his body of work are few and far between. The final image is the result of coalescing of many images in moments of solitude, which he finds even amidst the wails of mothers who lost their children to the suicide epidemic in the wake of the Mandal Commission report implementation.

Rich with time, Ozo bides it in "The Castle"-like office, around it in the city piazza, over cups of tea or coffee. Sometimes all by himself puffing one cigarette after another; sometimes looking at the world through the viewfinder. His images, to use Rilke’s words, "make us fall into the bottom, and in the deepest and most important recesses, we are unutterably alone." In a way we are like seeds left on blazing rocks uncared, unloved, destined to die without fulfilling either dreams or desires. This is the dominant feeling of his images.

He captures gusts of the wind that blows the dust and grime of centuries from places and people. It is a Kafkaesque world where human relations are relegated to margins. The visages of security forces in his images seem to be stooping under the oppressive load of state coercion.

His work is not a ringside view of human drama, but markings on the dial of time. He doesn’t state his important concerns. There is neither social conversation nor spiritual anguish in the Dostoevskian sense. Silence is the condition from where the images grow. Like all art of significance, Ozo’s works surpass the conjured-up reality in the frame and express reality of his being, not in a direct way, but by means of projected shadows.

He avoids discussion on his work "I meant, what I showed," Ozo seems to be saying. On a rare occasion, in his outrageous elements he debunks the documentary approach of popular names in the medium.

Good subject, bad handling
By Himmat Singh Gill

A PRIVATELY owned TV channel recently aired a serial based on the life and times of late Lieut Col Adi Tarapore of Poona Horse. He was an officer who, many would recollect, was the recipient of the nation’s highest gallantry award, the Paramveer Chakra, in the 1965 India-Pakistan war.

Produced and directed in collaboration with the Ministry of Defence and a retired Brigadier of the Indian Army, the serial depicts the heroism of the Commadant of this old and battle-hardened tank regiment in the Shakargarh sector, and is one of the string of episodes highlighting the contribution of the country’s soldiery in post-Independence India.

Regrettably, one is constrained to say, that this excellent segment of the Army’s war history, could not have been handled worse. Nearly everything depicted is rank amateurish, with no eye for detail, and the less said the better, so far as the military knowledge of the movie maker is concerned.

We have young Tarapore joining the regiment as a Subaltern, and being familiarised with some regimental history by the commanding officer, whom we see wearing a Brigadier’s rank. For those not conversant with the Army, the rank appropriate for such a command those days was only a Lieut Colonel.

We then have 1973-74 squadron service-inducted Vijayanta tanks passing off as British Centurions on the home side, and as if this was not enough, the erstwhile Soviet block produced "T" Series of tanks, masquerading their way into the Pakistani armour as Tank Destroyers, Chinese T-59s or God only knows what.

A Sikh Squadron Commander struts about attired in a most ungainly "patka" when every Armyman knows that this monstrosity of a headgear only made its way into the armoured corps many years later, and that too by default, when the custom-built headsets provided in the Russian tanks could not be easily fitted over the turbans compelling the Sikh tank crew to replace their turbans with "patkas" in this category of tanks, in battle and peace-time too. And incidentally, making it a first-time departure in the dress and kitting regulations of the country’s mechanised corps.

The war scenes have to be seen to be believed. Tanks move in a single file, blundering about one behind the other, waiting to be picked up one by one, by even a dumb enemy gunner. The doe-eyed actor playing Lieut Colonel Tarapore keeps blurting out sounds like. "Hullo Alfa, I am coming", and the only favour he does us is not to repeat the, "Over and out", so profusely used in our film industry in Bollywood. We have Tarapore dismounting from in front of his tank, right in full view of the enemy, with all the steel flying about, and heading for another tank.

We have the serial AIR singling out Tarapore in death, "Hamen afsos se kehna parta hai" style, when even the real AIR has had the sense never to single out any one brave soldier by name, for the very obvious reason that there are many other brave soldiers out there, fighting the same war.

Someone, I think, owes us an explanation for all this. An excellent subject such as this has been kiddishly ruined by boys and girls literally choking up on their dialogue khaki-clad "Pakistani" tankmen "plotting" to knock out Tarapore’s lone tank so that the Indian tanks then would leave the battle field and run away (!!), and tanks knocked out in enemy action looking as polished the dustless as if parading on the Rajpath on the Republic Day.