The Brothers Grim

When I crossed the first level of the latest Contra (Hard Corps: Uprising) I did what any self respecting gamer would do. I put down my controller, cracked my knuckles and yawned smugly. Had I been on a stage, I would have also said “Meh, this was almost too easy, not worthy of a champ like me.” As the machine serpent Boss dropped onto the sand, my character walked over to the end of the sand pit and hopped onto a waiting motorcycle. I leaned back, patting myself on the back, and expected to see a screen detailing my stats and the intro to the next level.

The scene, however, switched back to the carcass of the serpent, and I watched in sheer horror as a portion of the machine broke off and flew after me in pursuit. The fucking level wasn’t over! The serpent was a mini-boss! Screaming expletives, I grabbed the controller again as this new Boss activated a huge drill and punched my character into the ground. That was the moment it finally sunk in that I was playing a Contra game. Not just any other run-and-gun shoot-‘em-up, but a proper so-hard-it-will-make-you-cry-tears-of-blood Contra game. I know this game is hard, and I know I will win against the Commonwealth (the current Big Bad), but I wish I could have done it in two player mode along with the red soldier.

My first introduction to video games was an old dog-fighter from the 486 era, and the first proper console game I played was Mario (this was around 1994, just FYI). I played it on my elder cousin’s NES system (the one with the huge chunky cartridges with only one game each) and I was hooked by the bright colours and the cheerful soundtrack, and the Italian plumber’s journey to get to the princess was a large part of my early gaming experience. I loved the exploration, I loved the powers and I loved the sense of achievement I felt every time I discovered a new secret. Then, it got boring.

It might have had something to do with the fact that I could not, for the life of me, cross 1-4. For days, I tried every single trick I could think of. I would reach 1-4 with the fire weapon and a huge number of lives (I can’t recall how many, but definitely more than four, maybe) and then I would proceed to lose every single one of said lives to the evil green minion of Bowser. Rational thought and logic dictated only one course of action, and I quit the damm game. To take my mind off everything, I finally relented and allowed my younger brother to play the game. (There was only one controller, and there was no way in hell I was giving the little spider the controls, even for a second)

As I watched, his childlike squeals of joy (in all fairness, he was still a child then. I on the other hand, was born with the intellect and wit of a man who has lived the lives of both James Bond and Han Solo) as he crossed a level, discovered a secret and got his first 1-up by collecting one hundred coins, turned into tears of frustration. He too, met the evil green minion of Bowser on 1-4, and he too, was found wanting. For days, this situation continued and I watched my brother turn into a husk of a man. All joy was gone from his eyes, to be replaced by a hunger. Often, he would look pleadingly at me, asking me in unspoken words if I could help him somehow, help him overcome that evil green minion of Bowser, and all I could do was shrug helplessly. The evil green minion of Bowser was our Kobayashi Maru, and we were destined to face defeat at his hands again and again for all eternity (or rather, until we discovered the first warp gates the next week, but that’s a story for another time).

We’d almost sworn off gaming altogether, when suddenly, something wonderful happened. We were introduced to the joys of the second controller, shortly followed by the joys of a brand new game that featured Men With Guns And Explosions In The Background. The loading screen was dark and minimalistic, a black background with the name of the game written in a stylized techno-industrial font hanging above an image of the heroes and the menu options (which in those days usually consisted of a choice between single player and two player). Used as we were to the cheerfully happy synth sounds of Mario’s menu screen, the crunching opening riffs of Contra’s menu screen actually made our hair stand on end. So shocked were we by the sheer awesome of the few seconds it had taken for the menu screen to load, that neither of us touched a button, and that was when we got the happiest surprise of that week. The game demo started, and we found that both the players could play simultaneously. Clearly, this wasn’t Mario.

He looked at me, and I could see the gears moving in his head. “Finally!” his manic smile seemed to say, “Finally we can both wreak havoc on these unsuspecting pixels. Finally we won’t be at the mercy of overpowered Bosses! Finally, with you on my side, together, The Brothers Grim can lay to waste whatever the villains of this awesome game that I haven’t even played yet, throw at us.” I gave him a manic, crazed smile of my own as I high-fived him, thinking “Finally! The little monkey will prove useful!”

We got our digitized asses handed to us less than three minutes into our first game. We got them handed to us again, less than five minutes later, and again, and again, and again and again… Clearly, we lacked teamwork and clearly, it was all his fault. I explained to him again and again, and screamed instructions to him as he haplessly flailed around, trying to watch my back AND shoot the afimchis (Hindi for junkie/drug peddler, we had assumed that the guys carrying sacks were drug peddlers since all major Bollywood villains around those times were usually drug lords) heading for him. Things would get more and more complicated when it came to the weapons. It made more sense for me to take the Spreader (that’s what we called the scatter-shot gun), and for him to take the Rapider (ditto for the rapid-fire) since I was awesome. However, exactly why would he need to take F (we couldn’t come up with a name for that one) which to our inexperienced minds was the second most useless gun in the game, was something I was at a momentary loss to explain. (Interestingly, as I became a better player, my weapons of choice shifted to R and F, because an extremely skilled player can do an obscene amount of damage with them. In later games, I would take R as often as I could and leave the S to him. There is a Zen lesson in there somewhere.)

On our umpteenth try, we did manage to break down the wall and proceed to Basi 1 (the letters and the resolution of the game was such that the 1 looked like an I, and so, in our confused minds, Base 1 became Basi, which in hindi means rotten. On our discovery of Base 2, which became Basi-2, we changed the name of Base 1 to Basi 1). Our first reaction was sheer exhilarating joy, which only became brighter as the realization dawned that we had done it together. We cheerfully hollered and scampered around like little monkeys, high-fiving each other as we recounted our wondrous exploits of marksmanship and awesomness on a level that takes less than seven minutes to cross on a good run. Then, as the next level opened, we scrambled to our controllers and started shouting at each other, exhorting the other to simply kill, kill, kill.

We died several times in that level, and we tried again. We crossed that level and we reached Waterfall, home to arguably the worst two-player mechanic ever. We killed each other countless times, jumping and falling stupidly, and I had to reprimand him several times for jumping unwisely (resulting in my death), and jumping too late (resulting in his death). Finally, we reached the top and defeated the Dragon, and jumped through the wound in his chest to reach Basi-2. (In our later runs, he would take the power of invincibility and run across the flaming bridge while I jumped behind him. He’d take the harder route up so it made sense for him to have it. He’d also take the S before the final jumps and set up the M for me, it was one of the few levels I was content to be the side-kick)

Basi-2 is one of my least favourite levels of all times. Its not so much the game mechanic, its mostly the music and the colours. That and the fact that its also one of the least interesting levels in the game for me. We did finally take it down as well, although the bubbles in the Boss battle (you know what I’m talking about) did cause a lot of discomfort. Thankfully, by this time, our teamwork had progressed to a point that we didn’t even have to watch out for each other, we knew that the other was taking care of the enemy just as hard as we were.

I could go on and on about each and every level, but it is literally more of the same. The Brothers Grim face a challenge and beat it down together, whether by force of arms (Snow Field, Alien’s Lair) or by heroic sacrifice (he would have to die in Energy Zone for us to continue, it was impossible to time the damm jumps to avoid the lasers) and subsequent rebirth (he’d take one of my lives in Hangar. The more we played, the more we killed and blew up, the better we became at it. From a couple of squabbling little kids, we became The Brothers Grim, and that is why playing Contra with my brother is one of my happiest memories of all times. Playing Contra with him was one of the first times I was playing something with him, not against him. All questions of sibling rivalry, ranging from the mundane (whose favourite cartoon do we play) to the ones that were truly important (who gets the bigger portions of Maggi) were forgotten as we hunkered down to defeat the evil forces of Red Falcon, and the glory of victory and anguish of defeat was shared equally. This was the beginning of The Brother Grim, and those were some of my happiest memories of my childhood.

As I fall to the sheer number of troops the Commonwealth has mustered, as I fall to the machine serpent and that weird thing on wheels, and as I scream and rage at the screen in Singapore as my bullets tear apart the waves of enemy soldiers, I sorely miss the red soldier in Delhi. I know I will defeat the Commonwealth (the current Big Bad) and win this game, but I only wish I could do it in two player mode, as part of The Brother Grim.

Delhi Belly - From Anger to Infatuation - Dwitiya Adhyaya

(This is the 2nd part of my post of Delhi Belly and how my initial WTF turned into excitement about the movie. Etc. If this post doesn't make sense, it probably is because you haven't read the first part. For maximum enjoyment, please read the first part first. Etc.)

To me, the singer is a voice of the disenchanted youth of our nation, a man whose dreams and aspirations could not survive contact with the harsh reality of the fast paced rat race our urban life is. He is beset by disillusionment and despair after his realization that the three things in life most important to him (roti, kapda & ladki), the three cornerstones of his world as he had envisioned it, all three are out of his reach, and its going to take both hard work and sheer dumb luck to get them. Our singer has realized this, and it has sunk in that this is a world he was not prepared for.

The disdain of his seniors, his mistaking of an abyss for a small, harmless pot, the constant tension he faces in what was supposed to be his paradise (paradise actually means garden in one language or the other), all of this, all of his misery, it is simply because he is a product of the society, of his seniors and their morals and conventions, and that is where he has decided to place all blame. He has taken all of his frustration and anger, and has decided to channel it against the society, and DK Bose is just a metaphor for that society. Whether the protagonist’s anger is justified or not, whether, his shortcomings are his own fault or the fault of the world at large are merely academic discussions. What is important is that the singer is hunting down Mr. Bose, he is asking DK Bose to run, for the protagonist knows that a storm is coming after him.

And what of the storm? This question is perhaps the easiest to answer. The storm represents the turbulence that comes with great social change. The protagonist is using his anger, his issues, his frustration, and he is expressing them via his rage, a rage that takes the form of a storm and sweeps over the society, uprooting deeply held traditions and outdated modes of thinking which are holding the protagonist back. What is interesting is that the protagonist’s elders have also lived through something similar. Their generation had Amitabh, the angry young man who inspired them, who was an outlet for their frustrations, in whose onscreen wrath could they find the release needed to deal with their misery. And yet, this same generation whose struggles are forever immortalized in the saga of the Angry Young Man, this same generation created a world that in turn created our protagonist. Therefore, the lyrics of this song are also a deeper commentary on the cyclical nature of things, and signal that perhaps, one day the protagonist himself would take on the role of DK Bose while his progeny rages against him.

Anyway, suffice to say that I was hooked onto this song, but even though Bhaag DK Bose had exorcised most of the ghosts of Delhi Belly’s first promos, I still had small tendrils of doubt in the back of my head, trains of thought that kept sending me back to the Farting Man. What if this fine offering, this song that perfectly captures the zeitgeist, the sense of frustration and anger that consumes today’s youth, and is issued as a warning to the society in general that a storm is coming; what if this gem of a song was a fluke. What if the entire movie was based around Farting Man and his adventures, and the song, this microcosm of the young urban Indian experience crystallized into music and words, what if this song was just a lure, a bait to get us, the unsuspecting audiences into the theaters so that we would have to experience The Adventures of Farting Man instead.

Rest assured, these thoughts were most assuredly laid to rest (repetition beeches!) by the second song that I heard, Nakkadwaale Disco…

Interestingly, for me, this song isn’t so much about the lyrics, as it is about the video. Before I saw the video, I wasn’t sure of the intentions of the producers. I wasn’t sure if Bhaag DK Bose was a one off thing, a Sheela ki Jawani for a lackluster Tees Maar Khan, or was it really an indication of how funny, goofy and irreverent the movie was planning to be. See, that’s the thing about the special promo songs, at times, they promise you things that the final movie just doesn’t have. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Dum Maaro Dum, but that’s a whole other argument.

So, coming back to Nakkadwaale Disco… the opening shots sealed the deal for me. The three characters sitting on the stage with their instruments and dresses, the gaudy banner hanging behind them, the flowers, the stage and the microphones… who amongst us hasn’t been to one of these gigs? You know what I am talking about, the low production local gigs with a few local artists doing cover songs. As a kid, I dreaded those outings, since these events were Cultural, and therefore, if I was bored to tears, I should suck it up and take it as a man. Yes, it was styled after one of those gigs and when I saw the three guys doing soundchecks, I nearly fell off my chair laughing. It wasn’t just the setting, it wasn’t just the music, it wasn’t just the lyrics, it was the serious, dead pan, intense and earnest expression that the characters had as they sang the song.

The sheer absurdity of the entire situation was overbearing. At one point Imran Khan went into a vocal solo and he absolutely nailed it. Not the solo itself, but the actions and the expressions as he acknowledged a job well done. The video is hilarious and I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the smaller touches that you only noticed for a fleeting second, but nevertheless they completed the picture. For instance, you see Imran Khan’s golden watch and rings for maybe all of fifteen seconds in the entire video, but they were exactly the kind of flashy jewelry you expected those performers to wear. And it wasn’t just limited to dresses or props, but even the mannerisms of the characters made the whole thing pop. The seriousness with which the singer starts, how he becomes more relaxed as the song goes on, the sheer earnestness in his eyes… it was like a mountain of absurdities piled upon a plateau of awesomeness dumped upon a… well, it was bloody funny is what I’, trying to say. And like I said, it wasn’t just the set design or the lyrics; it was little things like those that helped ground this video into reality and made it so much more fun. It is this attention to even the smallest details that makes these kind of movies (I Am, Peepli Live, Dhobi Ghat, Dev D etc) so much fun to watch, for it’s a sign of commitment, a covenant that the makers have signed that they will pay attention to all the little details as well, that they will make even the small things count and tell a story. It is this kind of an attitude I expected from Amir Khan productions, the cutting edge, irreverent, refreshing and balls out insane approach to cinema and storytelling, and they hadn’t disappointed in both the songs from Delhi Belly. Perhaps I was wrong, and perhaps I should give Delhi Belly a chance. It was then that the thought struck me. What if I had been wrong about the Farting Man as well?

See, I had judged the Farting Man without any context. What if he had had an excellent reason for the amount of noise he was making. Maybe he was providing another character with an alibi! Maybe he had just been dosed with enough laxatives to make an elephant cry out in anguish! Maybe it was a very crude attempt at chemical warfare! Maybe he was trying to gross out the goon so that he would leave! Maybe he just had an actual case of Delhi Belly! The possible interpretations were endless!

Anyway, so the point is, Bhaag DK Bose could have been a bone thrown to the target audience, saying look, I am edgy and creative, I push the envelope and break the mould, so won’t you please love me? But when its two songs doing the same thing, and it seems like the magic of Bhaag DK Bose was not a happy coincidence, that the makers do have a plan to cover this thing in awesome, that there exists a vision for the movie and that all the small parts are logical extensions of this vision, well then, movie-makers, I will take a risk on you. When I saw the Farting Man for the first time, I was surprised, confused and slightly disgusted, but when I saw Bhaag DK Bose and Nakkadwaale Disco… I knew Delhi Belly would be a fun movie, and that in hindsight, the Farting Man was bloody hilarious!

(Well, that's all folks! I hope this post taught you a valuable lesson, ie: never judge a book by its cover, or a man by his first fart. And now, I swear a solemn promise, no more fart jokes on this blog, ever!)

Delhi Belly - From Anger to Infatuation - Pratham Adhyaya

(Edit: Given that this is a long post, I have decided to break it down into two parts. The parts are continuous and meant to be read one after the other, its just that at about 2900 words, this post was pushing the limits of long posts. Also, if something in this post doesn't seem right or seems to go against the laws of obviousness, it is probably because I am being sarcastic)

My first proper encounter with Delhi Belly was… less than ideal. It happened a few months ago, and it almost made me swear off the damn thing. I was sitting with my buddies in the Jade, the place to be in Singapore if you want to catch a Hindi movie on the big screen, and we were waiting for the intermission to end (can’t remember which movie we’d gone to see that day, but clearly, it was good enough for us not to have made a mid movie dash for freedom). While we whiled away our time (alliteration beeches!) making small talk and poking fun at Basantani, the promos for upcoming movies started playing, and while most of them were the standard ho-hum bollywood teasers, one particular promo caught my eye. It started off in a very grandiose fashion; the theme from Lagaan started as the moving pictures and somber voice over declared that the makers of Lagaan, Jaane tu ya jaane naa, Taare zameen par and Dhobi Ghat were preparing to blow our minds again. I gripped my seat in anticipation, for I had recently seen Dhobi Ghat, and had been spellbound by its subdued, at times silent and visceral portrayal of four interconnected stories in Mumbai. Mr. Khan and family had blown my mind with Dhobi Ghat, and I was ready and willing to have my mind blown by them again. As the promo reached its climax, I frantically went through every single news item and Wikipedia entry I could remember, trying to recall the name of Amir Khan’s next home production.

An overly long fart broke my reverie. No, it didn’t just break my reverie; it smashed my reverie with a hammer, jumped up and down on it wearing spiked boots, and then covered the pieces in liquid methane and set them on fire. Instead of the glorious vistas of Delhi that I had imagined, the screen showed a dimly lit toilet with a man expelling gas. I couldn’t take in any more details as my eyes had glazed over and my brain was literally blown. I remained in that state of catatonia for the next few minutes as my homunculus scrambled to hotwire my neural network and get my brain running again. When I finally regained my senses, I was filled with feelings of despair, disappointment and something not unlike WTF!

I am not, nor have I ever been a pseud. Yes I have at times entertained dreams of living like Chris Noth’s character from Sex and the City, a suave, sophisticated man whose every pore oozed refined taste, but those were never more than idle fantasies, dammit! I have prided myself on my kuntry/desi tastes. I have laughed hysterically at the bucolic and puerile jokes in Ishqiya and Omkara, and at the unintended humour and awesomeness of Gunda and Mohra. Hell, Dabangg is a part of my vocabulary now, and I have a tendency to describe myself as a jatil person. I am not someone who is above toilet humour, and yet, the promo for Delhi Belly left me shaken to the core. The poignant images Munna’s daily life from Dhobi Ghat, the humorous yet scathing scene from Peepli Live where the journalists reported on Natha’s excrement and the heartwarming finale of Taare Zameen Par, all of them were replaced by the Farting Man. The Farting Man!

Here’s the thing. I wasn’t disturbed by the image of a man in a dirty toilet farting as if his life depended on it, but from Amir Khan’s production house, I was expecting something with a little more… finesse. These are the same people who gave us the meticulously planned and detailed Lagaan, the low-fi and perfectly executed Taare Zameen Par and the slow, deliberate yet tight pacing of Dhobi Ghat. The same people who had created brilliant movies out of scenarios that others would have dismissed as boring, clichéd or too quirky to work, those very same people had put a Farting Man on the screen to advertise their next movie! The mind reeled!

With my faith in humanity shaken, I decided to not fanboy over the movie. There would be no daily visits to the Wikipedia page, no religious refreshing of Rediff’s Movies tab, no sitting awake till three in the morning, waiting for a tweet with a loose, offhand update on its status, nothing that I would normally do for an upcoming movie/video game/album that I was interested in. Instead, I decided to lock the specter of the Farting Man in the deepest recesses of my memory, the part that remains blocked forever, the part that even my subconscious dreads. And I forgot all about this movie.

Fast forward a few months later, and I was sitting… well, no, that won’t do at all. I can’t even remember when and how I made second contact with Delhi Belly, but it was that contact that turned me from an indignant “you are trying to sell what to me?” to a more docile “ooo I want more!!!” See, I can’t remember how and when I heard the song, and that is ok, but what is important is that I did listen to the song, and it was good! Someone made me watch the video on Youtube, and by the time the first chorus hit, I was hooked. Easily hummable and with a hilarious video and lyrics to boot, that song got me hooked to Delhi Belly again. That song, of course, is Bhaag DK Bose.

That song worked for me on so many different levels. And while the music is catchy and the video is funny, what really worked for me were Amitabh Bhattacharya’s lyrics. The angsty, funny and downright insane verses are matched only by the earnestness of the chorus where the singer warns DK Bose, the central character of the song, to start running, since a storm is brewing. The fact that the lyrics aren’t suggestive, that there isn’t even a hint of double meanings is also a very welcome plus in this day and age standards are dropping every second. Also, like all works of art, this song is very open to interpretations and analysis. To me, the song operates on two different levels, namely the main protagonist, who is the singer, and a secondary character called DK Bose, who is a false protagonist, a red herring who is mentioned again and again just to throw us off the track, to hide the true meaning in a much more nuanced and interpretation. The verses describe the thoughts and emotions of a young man in urban India, a dejected man who has been pushed to the edge by the burden of his father’s (symbolizing the older generation) disappointment, accusations of lacking substance (a reference to the oft repeated motto old is gold and new things suck, perhaps?) and the sheer helplessness of being a free bird, yet having to use a broken, decrepit scooter (sacrificing one’s dreams and ambitions to survive in a world that is clearly sub-optimal and functionally broken). These angry, complex thoughts are interspersed with a simple, catchy chorus, a warning to DK Bose that he should start running, for there is a storm coming.

While I had earlier thought that DK Bose is being warned by a well wisher who doesn’t want to see him come to harm, later hearings have altered my interpretations of this somewhat. It is my belief now that the tone of the warnings is more… aggressive. The singer isn’t asking DK Bose to preserve himself by running; the warning isn’t being issued in good faith. No, this is the warning a hunter issues to his prey. This is a warning tinged with menace and a clear attempt at intimidation. Clearly, the singer has a bone to pick with DK Bose, and is giving him a head start before the rampage begins. Whether this warning was a well intentioned, honourable way of giving Mr. Bose a fighting chance, or whether its purpose was to strike terror in his mind, to make the hunt more enjoyable to the hunter, that point is moot. What is important is that the DK Bose is in trouble, the singer is pursuing him, carrying a grudge and a heavy stick, and that a storm is coming. Given this perspective, re-reading the lyrics offers a slightly different interpretation.