Mindscapes of sexuality

"Why don't you make a film on the issue of disability and sexuality?", I had asked Arun while we were out on a walk. After so many years, Arun has finally answered my question with his new film - "Mindscapes of love and longing".

I had done my thesis on this subject and felt really passionate about it. I think that disability is a tabù area, something to be hidden and forgotten, pretending that it is not there. Sexuality is another tabù area. Though it is one of the most fundamental part of our lives, we hardly ever talk about it. Joining together the two tabù issues, disability and sexuality, means even greater tabù. Some thing to be hidden behind closed doors and closed minds. Acting as if the issue does not exist.

While Arun was making it, I knew that he was working on a film about disability and sexuality, but I had no other information about it. Thus when I finally had the opportunity to watch the film, I was not sure about what to expect.

After seeing it, I think that it is beautiful film and should be seen widely. That is because I feel that the film is not just about issues related to persons with disabilities. It also has so much for all of us, as human beings, as men, as women, as mothers and fathers, as siblings and as friends, to think about and to reflect upon.

The film - Mindscapes of love and longing

The film has five stories, starting with that of an adolescent girl Trisha. Like all adolescents, Trisha has crushes, she has started to dream of intimacy and become grown-up. She likes dressing up and giggling with her friends. Her mother Sangeeta Khandelwal can see her daughter growing up and like all mothers, tries to find a balance between her own desire to protect her daughter and yet support her in her growing up.

The second story is about a young man Alok Sikka. Alok also has his crushes and dreams. He would like a girl friend and a loving wife. And like all young men, he tries to weigh the pros and cons of getting married. "Can I really look after a wife? What would it mean for me and my life to have this responsibility?" And what about the desires he feels in his body?

The third story is of Sujata Goenka. She would like you to think that she has resolved her dilemmas. "I never wanted marriage", she says. Even if she grew up in a traditional family, she has fought for her own spaces. I can party, I can drink and I have had sex, she says defiantly. Intimacy? Companionship? Some questions are left unanswered.

The fourth story is of Sam and Meenu. Their's is an inter-religious marriage. She was his junior in school and it was love at first sight for him. It took him some time to convince her that they could think of love and marriage. They are not sure if they can have a child, but they would like to try.

The last story is of Vipul, Sangeeta, their son and their dog. It is like any other family with its share of ups and downs. "I liked his honesty, he didn't try to hide anything", she says. "In school and in college, I tried not to show but inside me, I knew that I was different and with time it would have become worse", he says.

The five stories are connected by a dance by Jyoti Gupta. She dances to the words of a poem that expresses the desire of love and longing. All the five stories are also connected by the different disabilities and the different barriers, inside themselves and outside in the world surrounding them, that all of them must grapple with constantly as part of their daily lives.

Comments

I liked the rich details of everyday ordinary events of people's lives in the film. There are no "experts" trying to explain anything. I think that our sexuality is not just about having sex, it is about relationships - our relationship with our own bodies, with our families, with our friends and with those whom we love. The film touches all those different parts of our sexuality.

Thus, I appreciated that the film does not try to categorize or explain anything, rather it gently touches on the complexities of all these relationships, weaving a tapestery of emotions that are not always easy to express in words.

I felt that this film is like a storm, where we experience different emotions briefly and at the end, we may not really understand all those emotions. Yet they can set a deeper process of reflection in our minds, not just about sexuality in the lives of persons shown in the film, but also in our own lives, about our own fears and insecurities, about our own desires and needs, about our fragility and complexity as human beings.

Some of the issues that I was thinking about after watching the film were:

(1) How much of our lives are linked to and influenced by different media - magazines, films and TV: Almost all stories have some references to films and TV. Trisha had a crush on Vivek Oberoi, Alok had a crush on Amisha Patel, all of them watch the mushy dramas on the TV. Watching these scenes, I was asking myself, what kind of images and desires, these films and TV provoke in us?

During my research on disability and sexuality in Italy, many of the persons had said that TV and films present ideals of beauty and perfection, that make us feel ugly, inadequate and unattractive.

I think that this area of relationship between our real lives and the stories of the lives projected in films and TV, is an interesting and complex area of research. Except for a rare "Guzarish" or "Koshish", films do not talk about persons with disabilities, and even less frequently as heroes and heroines.

(2) Issues of intimacy and privacy: Even though issues of intimacy and privacy have their own challenges in traditional joint families, yet most of us now associate love and sexuality as a relationship between two persons. What would it mean if you need a third or fourth person to assist you during your intimacy?

Watching the two couples, I felt complex and confused emotions about this issue. Like when Sam, one of the guys in the film, talks about his honeymoon in Mumbai, where they were always accompanied by their two assistants and there was no privacy.

(3) Setting of the film: The film is about urban India, about persons who can afford to have personal assistants and access to services. In this sense, the film is more universal, it touches on issues that other persons in US or Europe or another part of the world face in similar ways.

After watching the film I was thinking if persons with disabilities living in a poor area or a rural area of India, with uneducated or less educated parents, would face these issues differently and in which ways?

(4) Model of sexuality: The film is only about heterosexual relationships and does not touch on more complex areas of alternate sexualities. That can be another big area of research and reflection.

Conclusions

I think that it is brave film that touches on uncharted areas in a sensitive way. It is true that the film is about a subject about which I am passionate, and thus my opinion is biased. However, I do hope that the full film can be subtitled so that it is accessible to deaf persons and to persons from other countries.

I also hope that it can be subtitled in other Indian languages and used for promoting reflection among organisations and federations of persons with disabilities. Government of India has signed the international convention on rights of persons with disabilities and is working on a new national law on disability. Thus it would be worthwhile for many more persons to watch this film, since sexuality is an integral part of human rights.

I would like to conclude with a few lines of the poem that Jyoti Gupta expresses with her dance in the film:

I wish, I could
slide down the eyelashes
and turning into a drop dwell
in your eyes
or through your eyes
to your aching heart I go
in its recesses, as relief to reside
I wish
that you, as you shiver in the winter
of your solitary life
like a warm quilt, drape me over yourself
and, in giving your body my warmth, I melt.

***

Credits: Director: Arun Chadha, Script: Vineeta Deepak, Poems: Anshu Gupta and Manglesh Dabral, Translation: Ranjana Srivastava and Shobha Menon, Production assistant: Ankit Sharma and Ramesh Ram, Editing assistant: Ganesh Prasad, Camera: Joshua Prabhu, Sound: Sunder, Anurag Gupta and Shiv Das, Editing K. Manish, Music: Arvinder Singh, Producer: Rajiv Mehrotra, Executive producer: Tulika Srivastava and Ridhima Mehra, Subject consultant: Dr Anita Ghai; A Cine Pulse production, PSBT presentation supported by Films Division of India.

The film is available from PSBT (India).

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Chocolate Passion

Do you like chocolates? I love chocolates, though I try to control myself because once I start eating them, I find it very hard to stop!

Our city Bologna has an annual chocolate fair. It is not for those who produce chocolate at industrial levels but it is for small businesses and shops who are passionate about chocolate and make special varieties of chocolate.

Every year, for the chocolate fair, each chocolatier tries to come up with something novel. A couple of years ago, a chocolatier had created sensation by presenting chocolates in the shape of penis and adolescent boys and girls had loved getting themselves clicked doing all kind of things to those chocolates. In the end the lady owner of the shop was asked to remove those chocolates from her stall as they were considered unsuitable for children visiting the fair.

This year the chocolate fair started on Thursday and will be on till tomorrow. Today morning I went to the fair. Here are some of the strange chocolate creations from the fair for you.

I really liked the chocolates made like instruments used by mechannics and carpenters - nails, hammers, screw-drivers, scissors, etc. They looked so real.

Making cups and saucers of chocolate is nothing new but still I liked the special care that had gone into making the cup with white chocolate.

Chocolate sandals, shoes and purses were nice. They gave a completely new meaning to the phrase "joota khaoge?"

Making animals and birds out of chocolate is also common. Still I liked the chocolate owls and tapirs of this stall. Also their chocolate moca (used in Italy for making filter coffee at home) was nice, it looked real with a metallic sheen.

I thought that this chocolate guy was cute with his nice big red tongue and blue eyes.

The chocolate buggy is accompanied by a chocolate parchment saying "Once upon a time there was ..", so you can guess for whom they have made it.

This was another chocolate moca, used for the Italian coffee making, that I liked because of its wonderful rusted, broken and old look.

There were persons selling all kind of fruit jams and honeys mixed with chocolate.

This shop had chocolate shirts, belts, shoes, etc. apart from the more "normal" varieties of chocolates mixed with nuts and fruits.

And finally, the chocolates that I liked most. The chocolate Nikon cameras were fantastic, they looked so real with leathery texture and the opaque glass kind of lenses.

I didn't buy lot of chocolate, just a few things. I have bought some extra bitter chocolate, that I like very much. However, I tasted a lot of different varieties and by the time I reached home, I was feeling full and happy.

So which of these chocolates do you like most?

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Zen of Photography

I think that for some persons, photography can be a way to come in contact with deeper part of themselves. It can be similar to what other persons try to achieve with deep meditation. At least on me photography has that effect.

Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neuroscientist has this wonderful TED video talk that she made in March 2008, where she told about her stroke experience ten years earlier and how it made her understand the complementary and yet different ways in which the two sides of the human brain work.

Jill had a cerebro-vascular problem - a blood clot on the left side of her brain. It happened slowly over a period of a few hours. While that was occuring, there was some moments when she was conscious and could think coherently, and there were other moments, when she knew that she was not in control and her brain was working in a different way. From that experience she came to think certain ideas about how the left and right parts of our brains work.

Our brains are made of two similar looking halves, that are joined together by an area called corpus collosum where millions of neurons connect between the two sides. These similar looking halves of the brain work in very different ways.

Jills says that the left side of our brain functions with words, voices, thoughts and logic. It makes plans, thinks of the past and the future, it studies and understands the world, rationally and logically. It is also the part of the brain that looks at "I" and the "rest of the world", it is about our egos, our needs, and makes us the individual human beings that we are.

The right side of our brain, according to Jill, thinks in images, emotions and intuitions. It does not care about rational thoughts, plans, past or future. It has emotions and it connects us to every thing else in the world, living and non-living. It does not separate between "I" and the "rest of the world". For the right side of our brain, it is all "one world".

Normally, left side of brain dominates in most of us. It is this part of brain that keeps on "thinking and talking" in our heads all the time. It is very difficult to stop it from "making the thoughts noise". And it covers and hides the input from the right side of our brain, it does not allow us to feel the world from the right side.

Thus, talking about her experience, as the blood clot formed in the left side of Jill's brain, there were moments when the control of the mind from the left brain was interrupted and she could feel the world from the right side of her brain. In those moments she felt her thoughts become silent. There were no more continuous thoughts filling her head. Instead, she felt filled with bliss. The boundaries between her body and the rest of the world, like the walls of her bathroom, disappeared, so that "she could not see where was her arm and where was the wall of the bathroom. It was all one, a continuous one."

When I heard Jill explain it, I thought that this experience sounded very similar to some experiences of meditation that I had heard and read about.

I had tried meditation many times.

I see myself in this description of Jill, as a person very strongly controlled by my left brain. Always planning, thinking about all kinds of things, with a voice going on talking all the time inside my head.

And, I think that with age, this left-brain domination, the desire to plan and be rational, has become stronger. I think that as a child, when I had greater interest in paintings and designing, I was less obsessed with details and plans. Then probably my studies in medical college and my profession pushed me deeper into the rational logical world of the left brain.

A couple of decades ago, I went to a meditation class for the first time. A priest had come to Italy from Varanasi and was conducting meditation classes. He explained to me about meditation techniques by focusing the mind on my breathing or on a central point in my forehead or on the image of a god.

"You have to become silent, stop the incessant thoughts in your head", he had said.

I tried but I never really managed to stop the voices in my head. I could never feel meditation, in the sense of "stopping my thoughts and focusing them on nothingness". Often, when I tried to meditate, I ended up feeling frustrated. Once I decided that I couldn't do meditation sitting up and I had to lie down to meditate. After that every time, I tried to meditate, I drifted off to sleep. Finally I had concluded that I was destined to never really experience the feelings of meditation.

And then 5-6 years ago I discovered photography.

I bought my first digital camera in 2005. The 1 Gigabyte memory card freed me from worrying about number of pictures I could click. I clicked pictures all the time and every where. It was a kodak camera with a preview screen, so I held the camera in front of me and clicked images all the time.

When this kodak camera was stolen in Ecuador in August 2005, it was not the financial loss that mattered to me, but the enormous emptiness of not clicking pictures. I immediately bought another kodak digital camera.

In 2009, I bought my first SLR camera with a 4 Giga memory card, suddenly the whole expereince changed. It was a low end SLR (Nikon D 40) in which there was no preview  of the images on the screen and I had to put my eye in the viewfinder to see what I wanted to photograph.

Listening to Jill made me understand something about the joy I feel when click pictures. I feel that when I am taking pictures, the voices in my brain stop and the right side of my brain takes over. The images speak directly to the right side of my brain, strengthen it, make it more powerful, and make me feel connected to the world.

As I start taking pictures, slowly I can see my brain changing gears. I start focusing on small things.

Textures, colours and details that are normally a blur, that hardly register in my head normally, they all come into focus. I can see the rough bark of the trees, the intricate patterns on its surface and the subtle variations in the colours. The insects buzzing over the flowers, the shades of green in the grass, the different shapes of flowers, the angles of people's smiles, the way light skids off their faces, the wrinkles on the corners of their eyes. As I click pictures, life rushing past, slows down.

And when I stop clicking for some time, the life continues to flow slowly.

***

Does it make any sense to you? Or do you think that I have gone bonkers? Actually I don't think it matters. It makes sense to me and that is all that really matters. I can understand that once again I am trying to make a logical sense of my feelings about photography.

It is my left brain that wants to understand why I feel the way I do about taking pictures. Understanding it is important for me, because it makes me understand its value to me.

BTW, if you have not seen Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on TED, watch it now, it is truely wonderful.

 To celebrate, here are a few images I took yesterday evening at Durga Puja and today morning at a canal near our home.

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Fighting corruption

I am reading and following the debates around the Anna Hazare's initiative for the Lokpal bill. I liked reading the post by Aativas about her visit to Ram Leela grounds where Anna Hazare is fasting.

It reminded me of my visit to those same grounds more than 30 years ago, perhaps it was in 1976, when I had gone there to listen to Jai Prakash Narayan. J.P. was talking of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) for changing India through grassroots democracy.

Those were such heady days and for some time, I had dreamed that a different India was possible. India did change but not in the way JP had been saying. Looking back at the history shows that things hardly ever go any where in a straight line according to the plans, but they often go off on a tangent. So I wonder where the Anna Hazare movement will take us.

I have also liked reading the report by Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) that points out a key facts:

(1) After liberalization, the number and scale of corruption has increased but the number of CBI investigations into cases of corruption have decreased. In 1991, CBI had 1,181 cases of corruption investigations, in 2010, there 731 cases.

(2) Central vigilance Commission (CVC) is India's main body for investigating cases of corruption among Government workers.However whenever, it receives information about corruption, it needs a sanction from Government to proceed with investigations. However, Government denies sanction for investigation to more than 98% of all cases reported to CVC. Out of the 77,925 cases of corruption among government persons, the government gave permission to proceed in only 1,348 cases (1.7% of all cases).

I hope that Anna Hazare and his team will read the ACHR report and include appropriate suggestions in the Lokpal Bill.

Yesterday there was a tweet from Shashi Tharoor that corruption is not only 2G or CWG, but every time a woman has to pay bribe to get her pension, India's democracy is diminished. I agree completely. As we fight the big corruption by those in power, we must ask for a change so that the all pervasive daily corruption also goes.

Coincidences

When suddenly you start noticing coincidences, does it mean something?

Let me give you three examples of recent coincidences linked to my photoblog called Chayachitrakar and the TV over the past 3-4 days.

The first example of coincidences is about my blog. A few days ago, while searching for a picture in my image archive, I saw a picture of red tulips, that reminded me of other pictures of tulips of other colours that I had taken during my travels. So I spent some time searching for them and the next morning, chose three of those images of tulips for my photoblog.

For me, chosing images for the photoblog, is closely linked to small but significant thoughts that can be provoked by those images. Sometimes, I am struck by specific things in the images that I had not noticed before. Some times, the images provoke thoughts that are not related directly but touch something deeper inside me.

The images of the tulips made me think about the well known Amitabh Bacchan and Rekha from the Yash Chopra film "Silsila". Thus, after uploading my blogpost about tulips, I spent some time on internet to search for the Silsila song and watch it

The next day, a professor friend from India, who is visiting Bologna university for a few months, came to our home for dinner. While talking to him, suddenly he started talking about "Silsila".

Initially I thought that he had been to my photoblog and had seen my post about tulips where I had also mentioned "Silsila". However, after talking with him I realized that it was only a coincidence and he had not seen my blog.

The second example is again related to my photoblog. Yesterday morning, looking at the pictures I had clicked last month in the northern city of Trieste, I selected three images of James Joyce for my blog.

I hardly knew anything about James Joyce except that he was considered an important figure in the world of English literature. So I checked about James Joyce on Wikipedia and read about his life and how he was forced to live in Trieste.

Yesterday afternoon, while waiting to go out, I had switched on the TV and tried different channels. While channel hopping, I suddenly found a journalist talking about James Joyce in Trieste. For a second I was surprised and said to myself, "Wow, what a coincidence. I read about it today and wrote about it, and now this guy is talking about the same thing." Any way I soon forgot about it.

Now the third example - Yesterday afternoon while channel hopping, I also saw a brief scene from a TV film on "Importance of being earnest" by Oscar Wilde, on a channel, and then I changed the channel.

Today morning, at the website of Caravan, I opened an article with the review of Amitav Ghosh's new book, it started with the three lines that I had seen in the scene yesterday on the TV:

MISS PRISM: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.

CECILY: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily?…

MISS PRISM: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. (The Importance of Being Earnest)

Reading the dialogue between Miss Prism and Cecily seemed to me so strange, after having seen it by chance only yesterday.

By itself, each of these coincidences is something small and insignificant. However, this third coincidence made me think of this strange feeling over the past 3-4 days. So, I am starting to wonder - is there something more to these coincidences? is somebody trying to give me some message? if yes, what kind of message?

What do you think is happening? Am I making a mountain out of an ant hill?

***

Playing dead in a cemetery

I was a little taken aback when Virginia had asked me if I wanted to be part of her special art installation in the antique Certosa cemetery of Bologna (Italy).

I was only needed to play dead in a special picture and then to share my ideas about "what do you think happens when we die?".

I love Certosa (the initial "C" is pronounced like the "ch" in church) cemetery. It has been a burying place for the dead for more than two thousand years. First it was an Etruscan cemetery, and then a Roman cemetery, and then over the past fifteen hundred years, as Bologna changed from a settlement and assumed the form of a city, Certosa has slowly grown bigger.

In the medieval period (1300-1500 DC), people started making there monumental graves with sculptures. Therefore, many areas of Certosa are like an open air museum, with hundreds of statues. The most common theme in this museum, as you can guess, is bereavement, with statues evoking feelings of loss, sadness and crying. However, there are many statues on the tombs of big and famous persons, that are more about power, wealth and vanity.

Surrounded by verdant hills, some parts of the cemetery have lovely views. Over the last two decades, cremation rather than putting the dead persons in graves, has also become more common. They even have an open grassland, where those who do not wish for a grave or an urn, can scatter the ashes.

In today's culture, where emphasis is on enjoying life, normally people do not want to talk or think about death. It was not always like this. For example think of the huge tombs built by Egyptian kings for their own burial, because they were worried about their afterlife, and wanted to make sure that they could continue to live as kings after their death.

Most of us have difficulties in talking about death and bereavement. Amitav Ghosh in a beautiful article about the death of his friend Agha Shahid had written in 2001:

Although Shahid and I had talked a great deal over the last many
weeks, I had never before heard him touch on the subject of death. I did
not know how to respond: his voice was completely at odds with the content
of what he had just said, light to the point of jocularity. I mumbled
something innocuous: “No Shahid—of course not. You’ll be fine.” He
cut me short. In a tone of voice that was at once quizzical and direct, he
said: “When it happens I hope you’ll write something about me.”
I was shocked into silence and a long moment passed before I could
bring myself to say the things that people say on such occasions: “Shahid
you’ll be fine; you have to be strong …”

Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh and it was then
that I realized that he was dead serious. I understood that he was
entrusting me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember
him not through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship, but
through the written word. Shahid knew all too well that for those writers
for whom things become real only in the process of writing, there is an
inbuilt resistance to dealing with loss and bereavement. He knew that my
instincts would have led me to search for reasons to avoid writing about
his death: I would have told myself that I was not a poet; that our friendship
was of recent date; that there were many others who knew him much
better and would be writing from greater understanding and knowledge.
All this Shahid had guessed and he had decided to shut off those routes
while there was still time.

“You must write about me.”

We have an old dog and often I am worried that one day he will be gone. Also, when you cross fifty, I think that consciously or unconsciously, you begin to ask yourself, how many years you still have to live. So I think about death off and on for some time now.

I had visited Certosa many times and had already expressed my thoughts to my wife that when I die, I would like to be cremated and I would like my ashes to be scattered in the Certosa open grassland area. Therefore when Virginia asked me to be part of her art installation on death, I didn't think twice and immediately agreed. However, some of my friends were not so sure if it was a good idea.

"Won't it be inauspicious to have your picture there while living? It is only dead persons' pictures that are put there?", they worried.

I looked at it differently. "How many of us get a chance to see our pictures as dead? How many of us get to see our pictures displayed in a cemetery? No one. So if I have this opportunity, I don't want to miss it."

Virginia had a special technique for taking pictures, so that it looked as if the person was coming out of darkness. She took pictures both with persons' eyes open and with eyes closed. "I won't take off my glasses", was my only condition. I know that dead don't need eye glasses, but what fun is to play dead, when no one recognises your picture because you are without your glasses?

I also spoke to Virginia about my views about death, influenced mainly by Hinduism, though not in the sense of paradise or hell:

I like the way death is described in Kenopanishad and Kathopanishad. I think that everything in the universe is pervaded by the same consciousness, and when we die, our individual consciousness goes back to all pervading consciousness, like a river goes in to the ocean. That all mountains, plants, animals and humans are inter-connected through this consciousness.

I think that everything in this physical universe is made of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles and these particles are exactly the same in every thing. Thus, all persons, animals, birds, plants, rocks are made of same building blocks, but our level of consciousness energy is different.

I like the understanding coming from quantum physics that at sub-atomic level, a particle can be in many places at the same time and that between the particles there are huge spaces, so much that relatively, the distances between the constantly dancing sub-atomic particles inside each atom that compose us, are like the distances between the planets. Therefore, each particle of our bodies, is like a solar system. I think that this describes the concept of Maya that Upanishads talk about.

Virginia recorded my views in Hindi also.

The art installation was set up an underground hall from 14th century. Along the 700 hundred year old tombs, there were our images on the walls. We were 12 persons representing 12 different religions and cultures. We all spoke our views about death in our languages. People could also read our views.

It was a wonderful sensorial experience. And, there was enormous diversity in our views about death. Virginia says that this multi-media art work was very inspiring for her. Now she is planning to involve even more persons and one day come out with a book about it.

Are you comfortable talking about death? What do you think happens when we die? Do you believe in reincarnation? Would you accept to be part of an exhibition, where you are shown as dead?

***

Revenge

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 22; the twenty-second edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

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Which books or stories or films related to revenge have left a strong impression on me?

It is not that there are no real-life examples of revenge these days. The bomb attacks a few days ago in Mumbai and then yesterday in Oslo, are a gruesome reminder of way revenge is enacted for real or perceived injustices, hurts or insults by the terrorists. This way of revenge targets general populations.

However, I don't want to talk about those kinds of real-life things. I would rather focus on imaginary revenges, that is, revenges dreamed up by their writers as part of their stories in literature and in cinema.

Revenge is a common enough theme in cinema and literature, where it is planned for avenging some wrong-doing or injustices, especially killing or rape of siblings or parents. Think of films like Yadon ki Baarat or Sholay or Don, and you will understand what I mean.

So I decided to think of books, stories and films related to revenge, that have left a strong impression on me.

The dentist and the handsome guy: There was a Hindi story I had read around 40 years ago, that still remains vivid in my mind. It was published in a magazine called Sarika, that was probably shut down in early nineteen nineties.

The story was about a handsome guy who goes to a dentist. He had been chewing paan (betel) and had not rinsed his mouth properly. So the dentist, who is not very good looking and also a haughty-looking woman, tells him curtly that he is ill mannered and to go and rinse the mouth.

The man, used to women falling at him, feels very hurt by the curt manner of the dentist and decides to take his revenge. He follows the dentist and keeps on bumping in to her, first saying sorry, and then slowly praising her and flirting with her. Slowly over a period of time, the dentist falls in love with him. At the end, when dentist wants to kiss him, he tells her that she is ugly and unattractive to him, pushes her away and leaves.

I still remember my shock when I had read this story. I do not remember who had written it or the names of the two characters, but I think that it was an example of really cruel revenge, for something very petty.

Favourite films on the theme of revenge: I can think of an old Hindi film, that had the element of revenge, that I had liked very much. It was called Bandini (Prisoner, 1960) and was directed by Bimal Roy. The film was about a gentle and kind woman named Kalyani (a wonderful performance by Nutan), who comes to the city to look for her would-be husband and discovers that he has married someone else. She starts to work as a servant in that house, where the woman married to her would-be husband is a rich and ill tempered lady. One day Kalyani gets the news that her father is dead. When Kalyani is still numb with shock, the rich lady shouts abuses at her. Suddenly unhinged with anger, Kalyani takes out rat poison and mixes it in the coffee of the rich lady, killing her.

That film showed that sometimes circumstances can be such that even the gentle and kind person can become a killer.

However, there is another more recent film about revenge that I had enjoyed very much. It was called "Khosla ka Ghosla" (The nest of Khosla, 2006, director Dibakar Banerjee). It was the story of the middle class Khosla family living in Delhi that puts all its savings to buy a piece of land where they want to build their dream house. However a cunning builder occupies their land, and wants lots of money to vacate their land. The young son of Khosla, planning to immigrate to USA, asks his friends in a drama company to help him and hatches out a perfect plan to trap the cunning builder.

In our real lives, the corrupt and the crooked, hardly ever get punished. Rather, they seem to get awards and keep on accumulating wealth. Thus, a film like "Khosla ka Ghosla" that has a perfect plan for teaching a good lesson to the corrupt, is mentally satisfying. At least in our imaginations, we can get our revenge, not by fights and might, but just by the intelligence.

And you, do you have a favourite revenge story or film?

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