Lions and Tigers and Bears....oh my!

A previous neglected post from over a year ago that I just posted:

The first time I took a friend from North America and took her to the subcontinent, it was a revelation. The country that I visited with fear and longing, with belonging and alienation----suddenly opened up, with details I merely took for granted: the paintings on the trucks, the inane grammar of "HORN OK PLEASE", the proliferation of public peeing, the busy roads with the trees growing in the middle, and of course---the animals. Linking Rd is a busy carpet of maneuvering, honking cars, yet in this bustle, not too long ago, it was not uncommon to find a cow in the road lazing around, while the cars and autorickshaws, without any hesitation, would swerve around it. My friend pointed out monkeys hanging around the ridge of building or climbing dangling wires, dogs going on about their business. It was this urban cohabitation with the Jungle Book that struck her and most tourists the most, when coming to India.

Today, I went to a lecture that addressed this phenomenon; it was given by Dr. Salman Akhtar, a renowned psychoanalyist and poet, an enviable achievement in my world view, especially as both come from a certain cultivation of mind and soul that is not easy to accomplish. What also struck me about Dr. Akhtar was a similarity he shared with my mother: they both have a Hindi Film Industry connection, coming from a family that boasts of an artistic tradition. They both left India and had more strictly academic ambitions than their siblings, who embraced the glamour of films. That said, I also think they both have an extreme fondness for their culture, for the lives that they left behind, and it is the personal anecdotes that peppers Dr. Akhtar's lecture that added the real masala to his already brilliant series of observations.

Dr. Akhtar spoke about Hinduism's perception of animals, in reference to Hanuman and Ganesh, and how the use of animals explains important life lessons that permeate the culture of the motherland to such an extent that it explains why it allows the cows to laze in the middle of busy intersection. I will not go into so much what he said, in case it eventually manifests itself into a book ( he already has a ridiculous number under his name), but his rhetoric was so fluid, so precise, both anecdotal but systemetic in its analysis---it demonstrates his ability to embrace the literal and the figurative, his background in science and art. He put it so beautifully when he explained Hinduism. "It is a religion of poetry." Ultimately, what Dr. Akhtar really brought to the table was a psychoanalytical take on how the stories in Hinduism convey a world view, that is really not specific to any religion. Just life, really.

A Coda:

After the lecture, he went to the Tivoli theatres to show and talk about the amazing movie the Pool. I did not attend the film as I was not feeling well and had seen the movie before, but my mother went. She claimed to have seen the movie before and wasn't very impressed by it, but when she returned from the film, she was gushing "What an outstanding film!" As it turns out, she had not seen the film.

The film, by an American Chris Smith, was one of those cinematic gems that gets lost in the hype machine (Other example: Me Without You, the New World). It came out the same time as Slum Dog Millionaire, which also dealt with street kids looking for a better life, but this film did it without the pulp, without the grandeur but within the quiet realm of a house and the pool, the boy-man who longs for its beauty, the secret tragedy that the pool embodies, and the family that resides in the house by the pool. The film was made with mostly non-actors, except for the outstanding Nana Patekar. It also showcases the mangled natural charm of Goa without a swell of orchestras or sweeping cinematography. The beauty speaks for itself.