Indian Writing

Via email from Paromita Vohra, a note about the screening of her film Q2P at the Tricontinental Film Festival, Mumbai on 4 February at 4:30 pm, at the NCPA, Nariman Point:

Q2P
Documentary, Digital Video, 54 min., English/Hindi

“Look at the toilet, see the city”

Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and finds…public toilets… not enough of them.

As this film observes who has to queue to pee, we begin to understand the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape and the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space. We meet whimsical people with novel ideas of social change, which thrive with mixed results. We learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together. In the Museum of Toilets, at a night concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet”, in a Bombay slum, we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions – about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

Rajmohan Gandhi on his grandfather:

“When I went to the Poona detention camp, where my grandmother lay dying, Gandhiji was there; again, there was that atmosphere, even though they were behind barbed wires. We needed a lot of police permission to be able to get inside the place, but then you instinctively felt that power resided inside those barbed wires, not outside them.”

Pete Seeger, 87 years old, sitting by the river singing a song.

“I went out west with Woody,” says Seeger. “He taught me how to sing in saloons, how to hitch-hike, how to ride freight trains. Then I went out on my own.” Guthrie, he says, taught him how to busk. “He’d say put the banjo on your back, go into a bar and buy a nickel beer and sip it as slow as you can. Sooner or later, someone will say, ‘Kid, can you play that thing?’ Don’t be too eager, just say, ‘Maybe, a little.’ Keep on sipping beer. Sooner or later, someone will say, ‘Kid, I’ve got a quarter for you if you pick us a tune.’ Then you play your best song.”

His influence among the young was so pervasive that it brought forth this thought: When you see a kid with Adam’s apple wildly bobbing and banjo held chest-high, you know that Pete Seeger, like Kilroy, was there…. Before we hoist one for Pete, let’s also remember that he’s one of the best choirmasters in the country. He may not have the technique of Robert Shaw, but the result is just as explosive. Imagine an audience of thousands as Pete sings, say, “Wimoweh.” As Pete waves his arms gently, the audience reacts as a professional choir might. I’ve seen a wizened little man, who obviously is somebody’s bookkeeper, at the command of Pete become a basso profundo, reaching two octaves lower than Chaliapin. This is the nature of Pete Seeger, who reaches out toward the further shores more effectively and more exhilaratedly than anyone I’ve ever run into.

Hail Pete, at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain’t no one like him.