Movie 18/50 Love Breakups Zindagi

Love Breakups Zindagi      fiftyfiftyme category: Major

My last post for the fiftyfiftyme challenge was a defence of  Agent Vinod, a movie widely panned as a feeble ripoff of Western action films. This post is about another film that gets trashed, mostly because of deeply held antipathy toward its leads. Defending two such films in a row makes me wonder whether I should rename my blog The Hunting of the Snark.

In her blog Shahrukh Is Love (if you’re not reading it, you really, really should be) my vastly more knowledgeable filmi fellow Kiwi used the phrase “marvellously mediocre” to sum up a film she watched recently. The phrase fits Love Breakups Zindagi so well I just had to steal it, thank you Vanessa!

This film is widely dismissed as awful, largely because of starring Zayed Khan, and those who don’t condemn the film for his presence write it off for having Diya Mirza in it. I don’t have the sort of visceral hatred of Zayed that seems to be almost universal among the filmi bloggers I follow, so I started watching Love Breakups Zindagi without any expectations, negative or positive. In the end, I was happy to have watched it.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this film for me was that it seems to suffer from the curse of the first half. Many Bollywood films start off strong, then disintegrate into amorphous messes after the interval. With this film, I felt that it only found its structure and purpose in the second half. The first half of the film seemed to have consisted of approximately ten minutes of dialogue scattered between more songs than I could be bothered to count. 

The film starts brightly, introducing the two main couples quite cleverly, during an opening song. Once the little mini twist in the opening setup is revealed, it becomes instantly clear who ends up with whom, the only question is how they get there. I struggled with the first half because it seemed that it was usings songs as exposition, and none were particularly memorable, but the 2nd half developed very nicely, and transformed my overall opinion of the film. I was impressed with the way they resolved the love triangle by humanising the loser, not demonising him.He bowed out in a low-key version of the classic filmi sacrifice that was still in keeping with his character and thus believable.

Zayed and Diya have setup a production company together, and perhaps it’s that familiarity that allows them to come across as likeable and believable couple on screen.  I certainly don’t get the amount of antipathy directed toward them as people, especially Zayed. 

Even though Zayed and Mirza were the lead “couple” in the film, the real strength of the film, and the element that raised it above merely mainstream mediocrity was the Govind and Sheila storyline. It was very refreshing to see a cookie-cutter Bollywood film include a mature romantic relationship between a twice-divorced man and an older woman, and I was impressed by both Cyrus and Tisca in their performances. I am very much looking forward to watching Firaaq again to see more of Tisca. 

The movie also had lyrics by Javed Akhtar, as in this song, my wife's favourite from the film

and a delightful cameo by his wife – my shocked amusement  at seeing Shabana-ji in such an ephemeral  film was profound. In fact, the cameos were a real highlight of the film. Boman Irani was excellent as the gun-toting Dad, Shah Rukh was entertaining as himself and the unfailingly excellent Farida Jalal endeared herself to me even more by speaking Panjabi in a manner that was (in my experience)  inauthentically slow and well-enunciated, enabling me to follow every word of it!

Every filmi fan develops their own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, my own  rants against Black, Baghban, Devdas and KANK  are good examples of this. That's why an outside perspective can be useful at times. My  sapnon ki rani doesn't watch many Indian films with me, but when she does, she often says things that make me smile. Like me, she found Love Breakups Zindagi a pleasant enough timepass, but it was her reaction to seeing Zayed that was most refreshing. She said, "Wasn't he in Main Hoon Na?? I like him."  That made me smile, reflecting on how very seldom anyone ever says that about him.

In summary, I would say that Love Breakups Zindagi really is marvellously mediocre. None of the performances are terrible, and none are histrionic genius. It is a good-natured film, one that seems grounded both in its depiction of the world in which it set and in its own perception of itself. Unless predisposed by personal antipathy toward the leads, there is nothing here to generate active dislike, and the film's makers deserve credit for the Govind and Sheila storyline in particular.The film knew it was filmi but it still felt quietly real. In an industry that cranks out hundreds of films a year, some films will be outstandingly good and some will be staggeringly bad. Many will be  mediocre, some marvellously so, and describing Love Breakups Zindagi as one of them is not a criticism. It would be very easy to do a lot worse, as I found out with the next film I watched. 

Book 03/50 A House Divided: The History of Hindi/Hindavi

A House Divided: The History of Hindi/Urdu  Amrit Rai       fiftyfiftyme category: Minor

The copy of this book I read was from its original 1985 publication, with "Hindavi" in the title, where the revised edition (pictured) has "Urdu". I've been told that, other than the title, not much was changed between the two editions.

Hindi/Urdu is possibly the most famous, and certainly the most widely used, digraphia in the world today. This book is an attempt to trace the language from its roots up to about the time of Partition, with a focus on when and how one language began to split into two forms that are increasingly presented as being separate entities. It's a challenging task, because the status of Hindi and Urdu is one that is fraught with issues of politics, nationalism and religion, and those factors make a purely linguistic assessment difficult. An example of this can be seen in Ostler's  The Empires of the World wherein he has a graph listing the 20 most spoken languages today and places Hindi 3rd with 498M speakers and Urdu 12th with 104M, then over the very next page says of them "Hindi and Urdu are in a dialect continuum if they are distinct at all."

That sort of uncertainty about how to define them is at the heart of Rai's book, and the external factors that have caused the confusion are very clearly evident throughout. In the end, they give this book two distinct tones, one of which I did not enjoy, although I could understand its rationale.

For me, this book is most enjoyable in the early chapters, establishing the steps in the process that led from Vedic and Sanskrit through various Prakrits to the New Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi-Urdu. Right from the outset, though, the author is focused on the issue of when, how and why Hindi and Urdu became separated from each other.

Rai documents all his claims with copious examples, and the linguistic scholarship seems sound enough. It was fascinating to see the the markers of linguistic change down through the centuries, and whenever the book is addressing solely linguistic issues, it is very enjoyable.

Of course, the very title of the book shows that the author's intent is to go beyond linguistics. The whole book addresses claims made about the history and origin of Urdu made by scholars of Urdu, and details the start of the divergence between Hindi and Urdu, and the reasons for that divergence, including the various campaigns deliberately aimed at fostering the separation. As linguistic history it is fascinating, even if the socio-political factors make for very  depressing reading.

Unfortunately, despite a generally even-handed tone, toward the very end, the book falters. The book makes no attempt to look at efforts to separate Hindi from Urdu, the drive for Sanskritisation and "shuddh" Hindi. Given the detailed analysis of the efforts to Persianise Urdu, this omission implies that the divergence is all the "fault" of one side, as it were.

That aside, there was a wealth of interesting reading in the book, especially many interesting quotes on the nature of languages and their inevitable evolution from scholars, poets and linguists down through the centuries.
It was naive of me to think that a book about this digraphia could be totally objective, I think. Overall, it is a good read for those interested in the history of Hindustani. To its credit it will, at least in places, likely annoy extremists on both sides of the argument. It is, though, a little disappointing that, driven by a desire to address errors and omissions in the propagandists' history of their language from the extreme Urdu end of the continuum, he falters at the very end and effectively gives a free pass to their counterparts at the opposite end.

I have no side in the political or nationalist debates that use the differences between Hindi and Urdu as ammunition. I really look forward to any comments, but I'm not getting into "it's their fault", "no it's theirs".  My interest in this is linguistic, fascination with the fact of a digraphia  which despite concerted, systematic efforts at differentiation by promoters on both sides of the divide remains mutually intelligible at street level. To me, this represents a triumph of language as an intrinsic part of human nature over the superficial and temporary overlays of politics, religion and national identity. Namaskaar, salaam alaikum.