Trailing Mumbai laughter clubs to Bhutto battles

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A model presents an ensemble by designer Hassan Sheheryar Yasin during a fashion show in Lahore late on Tuesday.

WITH A line up of over 70 films, a smattering of Bollywood mini-celebrities and several regional and foreign film crews, the first two days at the International Film Festival of India (Iffi) have been busy and thrilling. I began my Iffi journey, appropriately, I think, with Mira Nair’s 1999 documentary, The Laughing Club of India. This 28-minute gem, part of the Mira Nair Retrospective, travels through the noisy, busy streets of Mumbai to one-bedroom houses and locality parks to trace the beginning and success of Laughter Clubs. Dr Madan Kataria, who was recently profiled in the New Yorker, had more hair then, and a humble beginning. He began his morning therapy sessions by telling jokes to a handful of people. Once those ran out, he devised a schedule for the converted — ho, ho, ha, ha, ha, followed by monkey, joker and bird laughter.
Nair’s documentary pursues two questions — why and how. Those who laugh and swear by the laughter, give their own example to illustrate, while Dr Kataria provides hard proof by introducing us to a young engineer who was paralysed in an accident and is beginning to show some improvement just by laughing out loud. There are a few sceptics, but as Nair and her camera travel from one happy house to another, talking to veteran laughing members, cracks begin to show. Most live lonely lives with framed, garlanded photographs and have little to laugh about, while others live with unrequited dreams.
Next was Leaving Home, Jaideep Varma’s 115-minute non-feature film on the music band Indian Ocean. The film about the four-instrument, four-member band follows the chronology of their discography, from their first album Indian Ocean to Jhini, pays homage to the band. The film, shot in 2008, talks to band members — Susmit Sen, Rahul Ram, Amit Kilam and Aseem Chakravaty (who passed away in December 2009) — and their families and traces Indian Ocean’s beginnings in a 100-year-old bungalow in Delhi’s Karol Bagh in the 1990s, which has not just cradled their talent but has also been their refuge from a world which neither listened to their music nor invested in it for several years.
But Varma’s film is a fan and it pauses to listen to Indian Ocean’s signature, meditative songs, often starting with how the inspiration for the particular song came and how it developed from there.
As band members talk and jam, each one’s role emerges in creating songs on Narmada, communal riots and Kashmir. What also emerges is that apart from their music, the four members of this lead-less band have little in common. While one is very political, another is a militant atheist, while one is the son of professors, another grew up with an alcoholic father.
Funny and inspiring and in love, Leaving Home, for most part behaves as if Indian Ocean weren’t a music band, but an activist movement for good, clean music that says something.
I was mildly intrigued by Mr India, a 47-minute Manipuri film about Khundrakpam Pradip Kumar Singh who was in his teens in 2000 when he discovered he was HIV positive. But this film was clashing with Tim Albone’s Out Of the Ashes, which follows the determined journey of a dozen-odd Afghanistanis in salwars-kameezes to qualify as a team for the cricket World Cup. This was Kabul’s Lagaan — too exciting to resist.
Haoban Paban Kumar’s Mr India is a mediocre film, but the inspiring story it tells obscure all its flaws. Pradip was never a drug addict, but because it was fashionable in Manipur, he too tried drugs and then an infected syringe. Friends turned away, and those who came covered their faces. All alone in his house, Pradip sensed that everyone was waiting for him to die. That’s when he got of bed and walked to the nearby Eagle Guide Gym and began pumping iron. He entered body-building competitions and seven years later was crowned Mr Manipur and, a year later, Mr India. It is a moving story of one mistake with severe consequences.
One film that is a must see is Duane Baughman’s Bhutto. A fast-paced and rather dramatic biopic that begins in October 2007 with Benazir Bhutto preparing to return to Karachi after being in exile for over eight years, she tells BBC that she is all set for a fierce battle — for Pakistan, its people and democracy. Another term as Pakistan’s Prime Minister would be nice too, thank you. The film then cuts to the past, beginning with Partition and the formation of Pakistan — here the story is told through brief radio and television dispatches. Benazir’s voice-over then begins her story with her birth.