Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Cherry Blossoms

Cherry blossoms fall
down to earth with the

hailstones that melt soon away

Monday, September 24, 2007

Critiquing Critics

Critics, as I have realized, are a hated lot and yet appeased when the moment dictates so. I am not much of an ‘art’ or a ‘public’ kind of person, so, I have not faced many from this elevated lot and have largely been away from their caustic remarks and unfounded ire.

Filled with the ‘exuberance of youth’, a few of us decided to convert an article that we had done in the past about the music in the Darjeeling Hills into a documentary. The inaugural Darjeeling Carnival was on, and we were excited to hear about the performers of the yesteryears getting together on stage. We thought it was the perfect platform to put together our film.

Looking back, it was indeed the exuberance of youth that took us all the way to Darjeeling, manage about 15 mini DV tapes of footage and piles of fun together. Back in Kathmandu, the enormity of the task hit us on the face. First of all, we were amateurs, and sitting with some supposed-pros on the edit bench, our technical flaws were starkly exposed. It was just too late to make amends so we trudged ahead, and then we were hit with some technical snags – with the film almost done, the hard disk crashed and we were back to square one.

We were next hit by some human inconsistencies and failings. Money is an issue, and it became one that forced us to move on to another edit station. We started afresh and the going was OK, but then some in our group found the going too slow and our attitude too laid back. The work came to a standstill.

After much heartburn and soulache, we finally decided to shelve our differences, temporarily, and finish the film. Well, we did, but it did not come out as a documentary as originally planned, but more of a documentation of what the music scene was like in the past in the Darjeeling Hills through interviews of the past performers. Knowing the people, being acquainted with the lingo and having amply heard of their lore and tales, we thought and hoped we would find photographs, records and other memorabilia from the days past. But to our dismay, the people themselves and their accounts were the only witness to the past and their achievements. We did manage to recover an old song from someone’s archives, which incidentally, the performer himself did not have a copy of. Another high for us was scouring the archives of Time magazine and purchasing an article from April 1963 about the coronation of the King of Sikkim that had a reference to The Hillians as the Sikkimese Beatles, one of the bands we had featured. Anyway, the film was done – not a work of art as such, but a fitting tribute to the past and an end to our tribulations.

Now to cut short this ramble – we had a public viewing, and we got some coverage on the local media too. Admittedly, we had not produced a work of art and the general coverage was fair and square. We made it clear right in the beginning that our shortcoming was the lack of archived media – photos, recordings and footage from the past, which as we had found out was simply not available. People had just not bothered to archive anything – maybe the archival culture was, and sadly is not one of the stronger points of the Darjeeling Hills. We were mostly critiqued on the technical aspects of the film, which we accepted whole-heartedly, but one critic was especially caustic and spewed gall over lack of archived media.

We took the criticism then as deserving. Somehow, I happened to re-read the review today, and I realize that we do not deserve to be criticized so. We never intended to entertain – our sole purpose was to keep alive the memories of the past popular culture of the Darjeeling Hills, and in that I feel we have succeeded to a large extent. The memorabilia from those days are non-existent and soon those very voices that recount the glorious days of old will fall silent – we have at least managed to capture their recollections in film as witness of those times.

I am not cribbing because someone found our film boring – maybe, many from our own group found our efforts less than flattering and were bored. What I am not happy about is being penalized so severely for what was essentially not our shortcoming, but an inherent one among our people of not valuing objects and memorabilia from the past. Anyone can write a review; especially with the advent of the Internet, over half of any review is done even before you start – you can just pick lines from here and there. But it takes special skills to critique: a sound understanding of the background, attitudes, the culture…

It is very easy to be a harsh critic, but hard to be a fair one.

It is hard to acknowledge any initiative, but very easy to clip it at the bud.