Gautam Benegal: Profile
Born in 1965 inCalcutta, Gautam Benegal graduated fromJadavpurUniversitytaking his degree in Comparative Literature. From his early years he showed a marked aptitude for graphic arts. At age sixteen at the invitation of Satyajit Ray, renowned director and editor of the children’s magazine “Sandesh”, his illustrations and articles regularly appeared in Sandesh and subsequently other children’s magazines like Anandamela, Neelkamal Lalkamal and Scifun.
Leading newspapers such as the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group and the Economic Times published his drawings. At age 18, he joined an outreach program of the National Institute of Design and made a 2 minute film, Bhurigolla as his diploma course project under the guidance of Mr Raghunath Goswami, the acclaimed animator and puppeteer.
Benegal then animated a pre-school T.V., serial for the University Grants Commission called Tarramtoo directed by Dr Peggy Mohan and under the consultation of Professor Yashpal, director of the UGC. Thereafter, he relocated to Mumbai where he worked for two years with Ram Mohan, India’s leading animation expert, as animator on several ad films, notable among them the Kelvinator penguin (“It’s the coolest one”), Pumaply, Gems Bond, and Handyplast. With “Tupatup”, his first independant film for CFSI, he turned to independent animation film making. He made a second animation film for CFSI based on a Bengali folk tale which has the unusual title of “Gauraya ki Champi.” In 200 he has made “Kalkalam” a short animated film, based on Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Totakahini” for the Films Division. All his films have been selected in film festivals abroad in Teheran, Hiroshima, Belarus, Cairo and Annecy.
Benegal has made animation promos for Channel [V] and MTV as well as assisted in documentary films for Shyam Benegal Sahyadri Films on documentaries on Aids Awareness and for the Spastic Society of India. He has also directed a documentary film on Thalassaemia awareness for the pharmaceutical company Cipla and a documentary film on Noise Pollution.
In 1994, Benegal was invited by Zee TV as consultant for a year to train a group of 16 trainee animators to man its fledgling animation department which later went on to become ZICA.
Benegal is also a freelance painter, journalist and cartoonist associated with the DNA and Times Of India .
In 2010 he made the one hour animation film “The Prince and the Crown of Stone” which won two Rajatkamal National Awards. In 2011 he has written a book of short stories for teenagers called “1/7 Bondel Road which has received wide critical acclaim.
Forthcoming works include a novel set in Eighties Calcutta, and a 30 minutes short animation film called “Setu” on child labor.
At the moment Gautam Benegal’s main area of interest lies in developing original and indigenous IP’s and screenplays, storyboards and the creation of characters for emerging TV channels and other platforms that support children’s content.
Irani series (paintings) I (FOR MORE GRAPHICS, visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gautam-Benegal/223009191068108)
Loops in the system
We have taken India’s Commonwealth Games scandal in our stride. I sense a slow building up of pride and complacency in the media about India hosting the “biggest CWG games ever”.
Do we feel a sense of outrage at the revelations that pop up now and then about our netas’ bank balances and assets? Not really, not any more. There is the usual sage nodding of heads and a few wry and cynical remarks, but also an unspoken understanding that one is rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. That is, over and above what the average citizen pays as Caesar’s tribute such as dues to the IT dept. and sundry other expenses, ie. bribes to public officials, cops, etc. In return we get surreally bizarre town planning, potholed roads, no tax refunds, and the ultimate indignation of seeing semi-illiterate rooftop-shouters feted on Page 3.
From our naïve, (on hindsight comically ludicrous) Nehruvian days when exposure to the kind of ill-begotten riches our leaders make would have us frothing at the mouth with righteous indignation, to our present state of tacit acceptance, we have come a long way.
When Bangaru Laxman was shown taking money, we were introduced to a new kind of gimmick in the electronic media – The Loop. The constant repetition of the loop and its circular grammar is hypnotic. An subjection to a series of unvarying successive audiovisual images repeating themselves over and over have always worked well with propaganda machines the world over. It creates axioms – universal truths which we take for granted – where none need exist. Indeed, why would anyone enter the business of politics or running the government if there were no perks involved, we ask ourselves. It’s just another business in the laissez-faire economy where some people inevitably end up as collateral damage. It’s every man for himself and to the devil with the hindmost. The public apathy that is thus created leads to greater civic indiscipline, lack of awareness of political affairs, and eventually the kind of anarchy we are now witness to. There is no lack of political “entrepreneurs” to take advantage of this mess and thus a vicious cycle is perpetuated.
This is the irony of the Loop. A part of a whole, it illustrates the greater whole. The Loop is pornographic in its nature. It builds up ratings and brings profit to its creators, dishes out vicarious satisfaction without giving fulfillment and always holds out the promise of more without delivering anything beyond its brief. And of course there is the moment of anticipation and climax each time over and over again when the subject takes the money or says/does something indiscreet. The shaky grainy images are reminiscent of bad quality prints and creaking chairs and the surreptitious sweaty interiors of roadside video parlours.
And so we say, “So what? If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.” But there’s more. Beyond this point is the zone of sneaking respect for those who must surely be made of a different fibre, those who venture where most of us would not dare to tread, who have chosen not to lead the lives of clockwork mice and drudges, carrying heavily their loads of office routines and commutes, with only the cheerless sops of childhood moral science clichés to prop them up. Right and wrong becomes confused when you see a man making in a day what you would not be able to make in a lifetime. And when that person is feted in Page 3 parties (by the same media) and clicked grinning smugly with his arms around Bollywood starlets, the negative reinforcement is complete. Its all natak – drama. Why hold strong opinions? Why vote? Why complain to the local corporator about the potholed roads?
The relevance of hoarded wealth has gone further than the mundane questions of how and by what means. It was Lalu Yadav who famously said that when he, a Yadav, flew aboard a helicopter, he was setting an aspirational example to all Yadavs downtrodden for centuries. He was striking a blow for Yadav pride. He has since, continued to raise their “pride” to higher levels, whether he has been able to better their lot or not. Our leaders are weighed in silver and gold. We thus reaffirm one of the oldest ideas of kingship – “a king must appear to be a king” in order for his subjects to respect him. What is a leader’s worth after all if he cannot wear Armani suits and call a superstar his older brother? What else would be his barometer of success in an impoverished constituency? That one among us/our village/caste/tribe/ has amassed great wealth, vicariously elevates us too – so the logic goes. This was Bal Thackeray’s logic too when he urged all Marathis to take pride in the “achievements’ of a Pune stud farm owner of dubious repute.
But what of the common man, the so called man on the street, who accepts his tryst with destiny with the same kind of fatalism his ancestors passed down in the wisdom of hopelessness. Does he stand forever outside the privileged walls, hat in his hand, drenched and miserable and admiring at the same time? Perhaps he waits for the time when one of Them will fall to hubris and he can experience the pleasure of the Loop once again.
Until then Mr Kalmadi, rest easy.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
In Satyajit’s Ray’s film Hirok Rajar Deshe, the tyrannical king’s soldiers clear the city of beggars, vagrants and all unseemly sights and hide them behind curtains that festoon the streets when VIP’s come visiting. Ray was depicting how we whitewash reality and brush the dirt under the carpet when we receive dignitaries. Today, in the present climate of euphoria and self congratulatory paens of praise to our economy, it would be equally embarrassing to devote too much attention to serious issues that demand immediate redressal. Are those who lost their lands when the Sardar Sarovar dam was built been rehabilated? Who knows? Why do we have so many disaffected elements going by the generic name of Naxals and why are their numbers increasing if everything’s so peachy? Hey who cares? What are we doing about the stress toll in call center jobs and do they have proper union representation? And why do we have a media that’s reduced to dishing out popcorn entertainment on its front pages and during prime time? It’s the money, stupid! Revenues pour in if you are upbeat and bubbly.
But the most distressing trend in this festival of trivia seems to be the misrepresentation of facts that confuses and leads astray young people. It is perhaps the general mood prevalent in the country – or certain sections of it – that has generated so many success stories of “out of the box” entrepreneurship and maverickism. In a school in the suburbs, students of the 3rd grade recently received a worksheet in which several individuals figured – supposedly to inspire the young with their heroic achievements. Apart from the fact that two of them were American nationals and didn’t really belong on that list, what really took the cake was that one of them is a producer of regressive serials (that would have our 19th century social reformers turning in their graves). Moreover this particular role model was hailed as having started from scratch – which adds dimensions to the meaning of that word.
This is not an isolated incident. The media increasingly features intrepid souls who wiped off their grease paint (risking all, I presume) to start decorative candle businesses; models sashaying into the world of yoga and reiki and college dropouts raking in the millions after much soul searching. Throughout it all is the tacit suggestion that these wunderkind represent the new and emerging India.
Is the scion of an industrial empire representative of the new India and its fiery new generation because he started his career on the shop floor? Or is a film producer’s son a pioneer because he started as a fourth assistant on his father’s sets (like the others)? The claim of level playing ground is the biggest lie that the media propagates today. It does not take a genius to figure out that the scion and the son will inevitably reach their “rightful place.”
By creating the illusion of egalitarian parity, the media makes these icons of success seem much closer to hand, more accessible. “If he can do it, then why not I? After all we are both the same” is the question a young person might ask himself. He sees the lifestyle and aspires to it. What he/she does not see is the sad truth of parental inheritance, often going back generations that translates into capital, connections and much more that lies at the bottom of the tip of the iceberg. Instead of focusing on the real life struggles and the work ethos of the few who really struggled and came up from scratch, the media chooses to either glamourise their lives or splash the profiles of vapid socialites on pages and channels.
At the moment we have a vast majority of frustrated youngsters, some of whom who would not hesitate to abduct and murder one of their own, for something as mundane as a cellphone. We have children from SSC backgrounds with inadequate counseling, who, after leaving college, and faced with the reality of the quota system and paucity of money for fees, enroll in dubious computer academies, wasting their parent’s pension money. Many of them are sincere but misguided. It is a mockery and an insult to them to suggest that they have a choice of becoming dropout tycoons by dangling a desi Bill Gates in front of them – or asking them to think out of the box when they don’t even have a box to call their own.
Perhaps our brave new world will become a reality soon. But until then, it would be wise to do what certain advertisers did when young children started imitating the stunts in their ads and ended up very dead. Have a statutory warning under each of these “stories” that says, “Do not try this at home.”
The Heart of A City
We have a curious penchant for anthropomorphism in all things. Giving a human face or human emotions to neutral and indifferent entities comes naturally to us. Time and again, in the face of disasters like riots, bomb blasts, floods and road accidents, we ask ourselves, “Does this city have a heart?” We invoke hearts, souls and spirits in our helplessness at being unable to control events. In the recent spate of road accidents in N. Delhi and Mumbai, as lives have been smashed, chopped down, quartered and mowed down recklessly, these questions have popped up again. In Mumbai, as a young man lay writhing in his blood on the side of a busy road, a witless policeman stood by while people just continued on in their daily tumult. Even a police van didn’t bother to stop. The victim got his fifteen minutes of fame in the papers the next day but was too dead to appreciate it. So we all came to the conclusion that Mumbai lacked a heart until a few days later, when a similar situation was averted by a passer-by, who had the presence of mind to rush another such victim to the hospital in time. Apparently he, the rescuer, had read the news, and had felt acute embarrassment and shame at how low Mumbai had fallen. This was in his mind as he went about doing his good deed. He proved that Mumbai had a heart, after all. We felt collectively redeemed and sighed thankfully.
At the risk of sounding cynical, let me point out a few facts.
When any such situation on the ground occurs, on a busy highway, especially during rush hour (and nowadays it’s always rush hour) there are oncoming vehicles traveling at a reasonably high speed of 50 to 60 kmph. More often than not, it is practically impossible for them to stop as this would lead to a pile up. We also live in terribly stressed out times. There are too many immediacies that we have to juggle. It is really the job of a vigilant police force – trained in dealing with such emergencies–– to divert the traffic, provide first aid and send for an ambulance – which has professional paramedics. The government of a civilized nation does not – should not, leave disaster management of any scale to the vagaries of the local populace and the occasional kindly soul who might just happen by.
This sounds even worse but I will say it all the same. When bodies are pulled out of wreckages, blasted train compartments, and rubble, who comes to help? How many CEO’s and senior executives do you see on their hands and feet doing the actual job? It’s usually always the locals – bumbling and well intentioned, but with time on their hands. The vada-paowallah, the jobless (and clueless) local boys of the carrom club, auto drivers…salesmen… I could go on but I don’t really see a Suit among these people. The Suit doesn’t have so much time on his hands even though he may have a heart of gold and whip out his checkbook the next day to contribute to the community effort.
When we talk so loosely about the heart of a city or its spirit in these contexts, we are actually discussing the ability of a man on the street to rise to the occasion, shelving his immediate concerns and playing good Samaritan, for free. In other words we are cheerfully delegating him with a function that we actually pay taxes for, which should be carried out by various departments of the government. In sentimentalizing the issue, we are overlooking and glossing over the fact that our government bodies work in an ad hoc manner, that there is no planning for sudden emergencies and a civic structure in place that can withstand sudden calamity. At the end of the day, it’s probably some local jobless young man whom you may have normally curled your lips with contempt at, who will come to save your life with no knowledge whatsoever of first-aid if, god forbid, you get into one of these situations.
In the mid 80’s, Calcutta was dubbed the city of joy, where the people were expansive and where there were helping hands when you needed them during a sudden accident or a personal tragedy. There were always the ubiquitious para (neighborhood) boys ready to lend their shoulders to the cot headed for the crematorium. Or menacingly “talk” sense to the abusive drunken husband on behalf of the neighborhood “boudi” (sister-in-law). One misses those days, but one also realizes that they had the time, and therefore the inclination. Present day Kolkata has come out of the economic slump of the 80’s and those lovable, but unemployed young people have become far less in number.
As we become more prosperous and our economy thrives, our infrastructure has to keep pace with overcrowding and rapid development – in housing, education, basic civic needs – and on the roads. Our mindset has to change from knee-jerk reactions and hurried compromises to a more articulated and professional response during catastrophes.
Instead of searching for souls and hearts, I’d rather settle for a well regulated police force and trained paramedics any day.
Schoolteacher cartoon…
same old...same old...
Holistically speaking
Yesterday’s schooling which we took for granted is today’s premium schooling at a price. A Satyajit Ray could have come out of Ballygunge Govt. High School at minimum cost but today nothing less than an IB school will do. Alarmed at the lack of communication skills among teachers (and in some cases articulation) many horrified parents opt for alternative schools.
Concerns were raised a few months ago by a few parents during an orientation at a Juhu based alternative school, about whether their children would be able to cope with the ISCE curriculum after the alternate curriculum – and in the wider sense, the hurly burly of the real world… Apparently this school does not believe in imparting the 3R’s (in the conventional sense) to children until they are of a fairly advanced age. On being apprised of their fears, the principal reassured them, “We’ll dovetail into the System.”
The worrying fact is that each alternative school has its own view of what a holistic education should be – its own zeitgeist and version of natural laws that govern the growth of a child’s mind, much like the world’s interpretations of the universe, the Ptolemic view, the Inca view, the Copernican view, string theory and so on and so forth. Much like products on a shelf, schools too must stress their uniqueness. Vive le difference!
Understandably, parents are confused, with their attentions divided between competing players with all the persuasive marketing and PR arsenal at their command, promising premium education for their kids – at a price of course. The same compulsions that drive a consumer at the mall now drive both parents and teachers. Dinesh Shah got a TC from his son’s old English medium school in Goregaon(E), where the teachers were just bored housewives out to make a buck, and put the kid in a swanky new school with AC classrooms and a whopping fee structure, (thereby rising high in the biradari’s esteem.) Until one day little Nimesh Shah came home and broke the news that the maths teacher who terrified him in his earlier school and the earlier vice-principal had both joined this “alternate” school. Old wine in new bottles. Obviously, Dineshbhai hadn’t foreseen the attrition rate among schoolteachers when he was making his plans.
After all, teachers, like any other consumers are also subject to market forces.
One remembers as a child in Class 3, successfully parsing a sentence in English Grammar class. Or reading about Coriolanus and his gallant stand against the Etruscans , in Class 4. Or cutting one’s teeth on Civics at around the same time. The syllabus was government approved and there was no great issue of “dovetailing” into any “System.” Nor does one remember any neurotic children in class who were stressed out by the syllabus and the frequent exams (much tougher by today’s standards) and went into coma. And child counselors didn’t grow on every second tree.
The government has diluted the syllabus to such a degree, pressurized by parents of underachieving kids (making their perilous passage from the vernacular to the globalized world), that if little Nimesh Shah, can, in a baseline test, spell Czechoslovakia, the education ministry feels profoundly grateful.
The trustee of an English medium school in Goregaon (E), when quizzed about the lack of good teaching talent had this to say: “Every year we interview a hundred teachers. Hardly two or three out of all these teachers can speak a straight sentence in English – though they claim to be have 10 to 12 years of experience.”
And this is what one of those teachers had to say: “We are belonging to one of lowest paid professions. BMC sweeper ‘s starting salary is higher than part time teacher’s only.
Really qualified person won’t join this profession, no? Our salaries are not going up properly with inflation in last 20 years. ”
Finally it is not about boards or syllabuses or different brands of schools, “alternate” or otherwise. As in all endeavours and enterprises, blue chip companies or local institutions, the brochures may be glossy, the jargon impressive and the presentation tailormade for the Joneses, but it all comes down to the saamnewala; the buck stops with the final service provider.
One was lucky to have had good teachers. They were lucky they lived in a time when teaching paid the rent.
Gautam Benegal
Imagine the worst.
If anyone had ever thought that the Saas Bahu serials plumbed the lowest depths of what our TV channels could do in order to harvest ratings, then they should do a quick reality check. Newer depths of depravity have been discovered and the bar of regression has been raised by a channel, whose parent company we have always associated with respectable journalism, and is now exploiting newborn babies to grab the magpie eyes of an audience that can never have enough.
Pati, Patni aur Who, very thinly disguised as a parent orientation training project, is the desi version of Baby Borrowers where inexperienced couples look after babies who are biologically not theirs. The original serial was, according to some, inspired by the idea of looking after an egg for a full twenty four hours, on the successful completion of which, a couple would consider themselves qualified to go ahead have a baby. In Pati, Patni aur Woh our celebrity couples have to actually go through all the travails of a couple with newborn children. Exactly why this would turn on the average audience – or what the producers imagine to be the average audience is not clear – unless it is something like this: See how tough it is to bring up a kid? It’s happening to us today. Just have a little taste of what’s going to happen to you tomorrow. You are not going to look so glamorous after those dark circles under your eyes, like us ordinary folk…hmmm? Not so full of it now, are you then? The fact that the participating couples are media created celebrities, probably adds to this kind of resentful thinking. And the audience loves watching their favorite celebrities suffering on the small screen with a viciousness the TV channels recognize very well and obligingly know how provide for. Through it all the children cry, they are shaken, pinched in their cheeks, and made to undergo all kinds of trauma with their parents eagerly watching on CCTV, because their children are “coming on TV” while the larger audience watches ghoulishly.
But if the channels like to believe that people are just a lot of sadistic types insatiably waiting with their maws open for newer and newer outrages to be poured into them, here is a quote copied and pasted from U tube (with all the typos intact), among many others that express similar sentiments:
“othey just playing with kids like they toys…just imagine to win a kids heart then throw it away to hurt it..my Goddness..even babies have feelings like we grown up people….they win and kids win no love at the end…they play with there feelings….daam it..if there parents are behind camera but its hurting if i give my kids and its crying and crying and i cant do anything while they training..oh no waaaaaaay i would do to my kid.”
One prefers to believe that an audience is what you want to make of it. Not so long ago, we had film makers and TV producers who understood this and did their best to create an informed and mature audience with aesthetically made films and programs with a small fraction of today’s humungous budgets and very little technology. The extreme cynicism and contempt that our serial channels display towards the public is surely misplaced because, even now, Buniyaad, Malgudi Days, Wagle ki Duniya, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi and Astitva, are spoken of with a lot of respect and fondness.
The human mind is more easily influenced by the elements that would drag it down than by those that elevate it, that much is evident by the graph of regression that our media has plotted for itself. What next, one asks oneself, what fresh horrors are we to witness, now that even toddlers are not exempt?
In Rakhi Sawant’s “swayamvara” we saw the worst kind of prejudices and self-righteous sexist views being aired by her “prospective mothers-in-law chosen with scientific deliberation from the most backward areas of India. Currently, we have a dissipated looking Rahul Mahajan – a complete nonentity with a dubious background – giving cheesy smiles that turn our stomach – and asking girls to marry him. The “ugh” factor, this time? Perhaps. The channels would know best.
It is not enough to say that one can always switch off the channel if it bothers one too much – what impacts the society at large will eventually come back to impact us too in various ways, whether we personally watch them or not. It is time for us all to do something active about the profanity that is Indian television today, whether it is an article like this or that post on U-tube or that NGO in Delhi which protested against Pati, Patno or Woh.
