Revisiting 'Garam Hawa'

I lived through the 'Garam Hawa' era as an adolescent. Saw it in the final year of school. Learnt that it had been filmed in Agra at an area where a grand uncle was the top cop, so we got to hear a few of the 'war stories' of the making of the movie.
There was all the noise about it getting banned, then cleared by 'higher ups'. I seem to remember it doing reasonably at the box office, though I was an adolescent in North India, so I could be wrong on this.
The movie itself was good, it engrossed you in ways that the 'commercial cinema' regulars didn't.
By a pure fluke I located a digital file of the movie with a friend who runs a video library. I took it to my filmmaking class in Meerut, and we planned a screening.
Seeing the movie now was a revelation. The subject and the storyline were as interesting as ever, the performances mostly pretty good. The sound, especially the dialogues recorded by RK veteran Allauddin Khan, is especially noteworthy. Ishan Arya's 16mm-blown-up-to-35mm camerawork is outstanding. But the movie's basic premise and the ending seemed totally at odds with the rest of the movie, purely dramatically.
Younger audiences, who have grown up in the liberalised, highly 'capitalist' worlds of mobile n malls, and mostly have no clue that alternative ideologies exist, just couldn't relate to the movie. The young people aren't dumb kids but like most ordinary people, fairly centrist in their views, so the dreamy left-wing ideas at the end of the movie were just out of place.
Of course with Garam Hawa being a movie put together by the people from the Indian People's Theatre Association, (IPTA of Mumbai, an old Communist Party of India outreach program), a left wing slant to storyline was almost inevitable. But all the wonderful humanist ideas and situations that the characters portrayed were just wiped out by the almost imposed nature of the movie's ending.
The contrast with the Ray classics that we had seen earlier were stark. The Rays looked 'modern' as their storylines contained human truths that are eternal, the stylistics were wonderfully self contained and self referenced, so the movies don't 'age'.
'Garam Hawa' fell apart on all these counts. Its visuals are poor in terms of their cinematic value. Often the angles miss the important part of the action. Sometimes the key story element is missing from the visuals- certain points you can understand as lack of budget but others are just glaring mistakes.
One has to only see the other 'New Wave'/ FFC financed films- Mani Kaul or Kumar Shahani or Adoor Gopalakrishnan's work provides examples. You may not agree with the movies, but you cannot help appreciating them. With 'Garam Hawa' its the opposite- you love the movie but its faults are glaring.
To me, 'Garam Hawa' has always been the best example of a North Indian regional cinema. it still remains that- being far better than 'Tessri Kasam' or the newer Mumbai filmmakers-shooting-in-exotic-location feel of 'Mashaan'.
But one can why M.S. Sathyu's work collapses after 'Garam Hawa', the discipline and finesse of a filmmaker are just not there. Don't get me wrong on this, I like M.S.Sathyu as a person, but his filmmaking just collapsed and now I can see why.

Introducing Satyajit Ray

I have written earlier about my fears of introducing my students at Meerut to Satyajit Ray.
As it turned out, the first viewing of a Ray film happened with one of personal favourite films; Aranyer Diner Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest).
In a motif of the times we live in, a student downloaded the movie onto his phone, and then we saw it on a laptop.
A film made in 1968, in Black and White and Bengali. For its times, it was a multi-starrer, but to modern day kids, Soumitra Chatterjee or Simi Grewal or Sharmila Tagore mean very little. So for me, the movie started with the fear, how are these kids going to react to it?
I need not have worried at all, as the movie was a hit with the audience. The kids loved it.
Of course I knew it was a superb piece of cinema, each nuance beautifully worked out by a master filmmaker. But to see it look fresh and wonderful after all these years, ahhh, that's a wonderful moment. I can only compare it to my emotions when my son watched 81/2 and loved Marcello Mastronioni. You feel you have passed on a part of your heritage to another generation.
The real magic came in re-discovering Ray for myself, how wonderfully a great filmmaker works. The simplicity, the sheer elegance of the narrative moments, in the business of living one forgets what a great filmmaker does to his audience.
If this is classical filmmaking, why on earth does one need to go against these classical rules?
I guess at a certain level you feel relief that the classics are still valid, have a value.
As it turned out, the next day we saw Satyajit Ray's Charulata, to me one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever made.
What a pleasure to see the students loving it, and saying how does Ray make the movies so close to our lives. This in 2016 is a testimony to Ray's greatness as a filmmaker.