A patriot party

Kamala Harris may be a heartbeat away from the White House, but a desi face is still relatively rare in the Anglophone comedy scene. 

There is Rajesh Koothrappali (played by Kunal Nayyar) in The Big Bang Theory (2007-19) — an astrophysicist and a part of a quartet of geeks who overcome their social awkwardness to find love and happiness. Then there is Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) of the Harold and Kumar movies (2004-11), another nerd who becomes a chilled-out stoner. 

These are stereotypical desi guys who grew up in the West in the past few decades. With older communities, Britain have had a few more stabs at laughing with (if not at) desis — BBC’s Goodness Gracious Me (1998-2001), for example. And the archetype of the funny desi is, of course, The Simpsons‘ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.

Moving from the “ethnic” comedy, Kal Penn has found success in mainstream shows such as How I Met Your Mother (Season 7, 2011). And “going mainstream,” in this context, is also being colour-blind or culture neutral. Take Aziz Ansari’s brilliant Master of None (2015-17) for example — life of a Millennial trying to make it in the late 2010s New York, the protagonist’s desi background is not particularly, if at all, relevant. 

Desi women are, of course, even rarer — sisters have it tougher everywhere, including on TV.

Now, comedy is hard. Unhappiness may be unique, pace Tolstoy, but tragedies can be empathised with across time and space. You don’t need to understand the intricacies of pre-modern Europe to appreciate King Lear. Humour — that is not so universal. For one thing, it’s not usually happiness that we laugh at, with, or about. 

Rather, it is the complications that require resolution on the way to the happy ending that we care about. It is tricky to make fun of the mishaps, misfortunes, misunderstanding, and misery — the risk of mishap is high indeed. And it’s a blurry line between comedy and bigotry, and a lot of what was funny in a bygone era has not aged well. 

Identity is central to comedy

So, it’s not at all surprising that a desi comedian embracing their identity to poke fun at the broader society would be rare. And that’s exactly what Hasan Minhaj does. 

All the presidents who were men

Four years ago this weekend at a Deshi dawat I confidently made two predictions — the one I got wrong, about the race to the White House, was met with a yawn, while the one about the Iron Throne: well, I did explain how it was a show about Bangladesh, but this is for another time.  With this year’s voting well under way, in another adda, a more fundamental question came up: why do we care?

We being the more than 95% of humanity that is not American, of course.  And the answer obviously reflects the fact that the United States remains, to use Madeline Albright’s words, the indispensable nation.  For good or evil, what is done there affects us all.  One doesn’t have to support hegemony to accept that reality.  Indeed, denying it would be to behave like an ostrich. 

After the end of the world

It’s exactly six months this weekend that the pandemic first hit me personally.  I was about to travel overseas for work.  I dropped the kid to a play date.  She called to say bye while I was at the pharmacy to buy malaria tablets, mosquito repellent, and hand sanitisers — standard fare for a visit to the tropics — when I received the text asking me to get in touch with my team leader immediately.  Before I could get to it, the team leader called — mission aborted, they are pulling everyone out from field, stay tuned for next steps.

Like most white collar workers in the western world, I have been working from home for the last six months.  My little town hasn’t had that bad an outbreak.  Schools opened back in July, and local Desi communities have already restarted dawats.  But the malls are still hauntingly empty even on Friday evenings, and people are still nervous.  No one expects anything remotely like normal anytime soon.

Still, the end of the world it quite ain’t here.  But there are evenings when it’s hard to ignore the fact that the world is not what it was.  And what better way to survive those evenings than to immerse yourself into a book or a movie about life after the end of the world?

Where to find 500 billion taka?

That the COVID-19 pandemic is as much an economic crisis as it is a health crisis is no longer news.  According to the 2020-21 Budget, economic growth for 2019-20 was expected to clock at 5.2%, a full 3 percentage points downward revision from what was expected in June 2019, and much slower than the 7.4% a year pace recorded in the five years to 2018-19.

There is, however, considerable difference of views about the timing, pace, and visually, the shape of the recovery.  The Budget forecasts a V-shaped recovery where the pandemic will have ended presently, and the economy will grow by over 8% in 2020-21 and 2021-22.  International organisations are less optimistic.  For example, the World Bank expects an L-shaped recovery where the economy not only slowed sharply in 2019-20, but the slowdown persists into the next couple of years.  Back in April, the multilateral development bank expected real GDP growth of around 3% in 2019-20 and 2020-21, still not reaching 4% in 2021-22.  Their latest forecasts are even more pessimistic.

With the global pandemic yet to show any sign of ending, and the science and logistics of a vaccine still uncertain, it is useful to do a simple scenario analysis — what would be the fiscal impacts if the recovery reflected the World Bank’s April guesses instead of the official Budget projections?  The table below sets out the scenario that was analysed couple of weeks ago.

Some back of the envelope calculations suggest that if the scenario were to materialise, the government might be facing a revenue shortfall to the tune of nearly Tk500 billion a year (Tk488 billion in 2020-21 and Tk495bn in 2021-22, to be precise).

How could the government make up for such a revenue shortfall?

Escape from Dhaka

When Rishi Kapoor passed away a day after Irrfan Khan, hardly anyone raised D-Day — the 2013 turkey they both starred in.  Uncharacteristically, Kapoor played the villain.  Named Goldman, the character is not inspired by any Bond flick, but the real life character Dawood Ibrahim — one of the top fugitives in the world with a $25 million bounty, and the subject as well as financier of many a Bollywood movie.  In the movie, Khan is a deep cover RAW agent who is sent to Pakistan to spy on the mob boss.  No, not a fancy, posh, big name hair stylist, but your neighbourhood barber.

Sounds ridiculous?  Not as ridiculous as the army officer turned mercenary who is sent by RAW to nab Goldman.  Played by Arjun Rampal, the first thing this Indian hero does in the Land of the Pure is to visit a lady of the night!  Perhaps he fancied the lure of the exotic other, or maybe he always wanted to visit Heera Mandi and had to make do with some Karachi girl– but surely this was supremely irresponsible: I mean, one would think someone with the surname Singh might have a certain anatomical feature that would be quite distinctive compared with the typical patron of most houses of ill repute in the Islamic Republic!

Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani

It was one of the first Bollywood movies to play in a mainstream theatre in our small town, and it seemed that the Desi communities — note the plurals — in its teeming multitudes had showed up, including the bunch I hung out with at the university.  This was over a decade before smart phones and ubiquitous social media.  We had the internet though, and MTV, so some of my friends knew the songs, and someone told me that I might like it, because it’s very political.

I don’t remember why, but I was a bit late and this had already started:

Trying to sit down in the dark, I heard one of the less-Hindi savvy guys ask — Ei ta ki Nazma Salma gaitese (What is this Nazma-Salma they are singing?).  Na bhaiya, Nazma-Salma na, naghma-kalma, you know, he is saying, she is my music and kalima — the girl-next-seat helpfully explained.  As for me, I kept wondering well into the intermission when the hot train dancer would reappear!

Dil Se is on Netflix and happened to be playing during a recent wine-filled late night adda.  I didn’t exactly watch it, hard to do so under the circumstances as you might understand, but it did make me think about how the movie has aged over the years, and yet perhaps is relevant than ever.  It all made me depressed.

The grand ending

Oh that ending was epic, right?

The nine-year-old exclaimed as we came out of the theatre one Saturday afternoon last antipodean autumn.  We had just finished watching what would eventually become the highest grossing film in history.

Couple of weeks ago, after watching the ending of another multi-movie (and in this case, multi-generational) saga, I asked him — Was that ending epic?

Yeah, I guess so.

The less than emphatic affirmation made me think — what makes an epic’s ending, well, epic?  Of course, I couldn’t but help throw in the biggest television series in history into the mix.

The Avengers, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones — three epics of our times — ended (well sort of, fine prints, see towards the end of the post) in 2019.  How do I judge these endings?  And here, let me stress that  I am particularly interested in the way the story ends, not necessarily on how the story is told (or shown).  That is, I am not going to get into arguments such as whether the Star Wars prequels were worse than the sequels (I change my mind on this all the time) or whether the last season was Game of Thrones poorer than the rest (yes, absolutely).

Now, we need some benchmark to judge these epics against, and what is better than the grandest epic of them all?

A Song of Chaos and Power 3

From Bollywood to Hogwarts, plot twists involving separated, long lost families, mistaken or concealed identities, new revelations, or much less satisfactorily, some deus ex machina are common.  Sometime they genuinely come as a shock, and profoundly alter our understanding of the story.  I don’t remember a time when I did not know Darth Vader’s true identity, and yet get goosebumps watching Luke Skywalker hearing I am your father.  Typically, these plot twists hone in on the key individuals, protagonists and antagonists of the tale, even if there are larger, macro consequences.  For example, rise, fall, and apotheosis of the Skywalkers may matter for the entire far, far away galaxy, but the fate of the galaxy is not our primary focus, is it?

Game of Thrones has plenty of plot twists, relying on all the common tropes, and more.  Things are not what they seem like.  Royal children turn out to be not so.  Men of honour turn out to be not so dissimilar to men without honour.  Even death might not be the finality in this story.  The interesting thing about this saga, both in the show and the books, is that not only is there a focus on the relevant characters — you had a knife through your heart, you died, and now you’re back — but that there is no shying away from the fact that these twists are integral to the fate of the entire Seven Kingdoms.

The wars for the Iron Throne are also, as is the case in Bangladeshi politics, history wars.

A Song of Chaos and Power 2

A friend quipped when I pointed out the parallels between Game of Thrones and Bangladesh — Wait, you telling me Hasina is Khaleesi and Khaleda is Cersei? Bhai ki deshe ferot jaben?

To anyone familiar with the show, the punchline of the ribbing is obvious.  But the joke is completely lost if one has never seen an episode.  Khaleesi is widely seen as the heroine of the show, and at least in the earlier seasons a veritable sex symbol.  Cersei, on the other hand, is the main antagonist, a bitter, manipulative woman with no regards for anyone other than herself.

You get the point my friend was making?  Good.  But — and as Ned Stark used to say, nothing before the word ‘but’ counts — this story is much more complicated than a fight between a good queen and a bad one, just as the battling begums is a sexist and inaccurate caricature of Bangladesh’s politics.  I will leave Bangladeshi politics for another time, and try to sketch out the story instead.

In the process, of course, there will be spoilers.  But to the uninitiated, this should not be a problem.  After all, we all know how the story of star-crossed lovers from feuding families end, but that does not stop us from enjoying adaptations set in Californian ganglands to the one starring Salman Shah.  I will, however, abstain from linking to the gazillion bytes of videos and blogs and discussion on the show and the books — do, or do not, indulge on your own.

A Song of Chaos and Power

Only a few more hours to go before the final season of Game of Thrones begins, and over the following six weeks life will be quite annoying for people who do not partake. A fellow Deshi political junkie friend who had never watched the show once asked me why I would recommend it — I know it’s got dragons and stuff. But that’s not my thing. Doubt you watch it for that. So, what’s the deal?

I replied that it’s a show about Bangladesh.

No really, I am not kidding. Think about it.

Once upon a time there was a legitimate, but inept, king whose misrule brought the realm to ruins. The king was killed by his own guard, and the rebels massacred most of his family. The usurper, however, proved just as unfit to rule, and before long he too was gone, triggering a vicious power struggle. Behind the scene, a shrewd, master strategist consolidated power, forging alliances of convenience. But he too was killed, along with most of the contenders for the throne. His capricious heir ascended to power, while a challenger emerged from beyond the border — the old king’s surviving daughter had assembled, in exile, a coalition of discontents and foreigners that was about to reclaim the throne.

Wait, you telling me Hasina is Khaleesi and Khaleda is Cersei? Bhai ki deshe ferot jaben?

What about he White Walkers?  They are the mullahs?

And who’s Jon Snow?

Questions followed from friends who clearly had watched the show.

Of course, I was being facetious.  But only just.  No, the show is not about Bangladesh, even though the parallels are quite uncanny.  More profound, however, is the fact that I couldn’t think of any Jon Snow, or Tyrion for that matter, parallel. None of this makes sense to anyone who hasn’t watched the show, or read the books.  Therefore, if I were to convince my friend to watch the show, or make any political points about Bangladesh, I would need to elaborate a bit more.

Ultimately, Game of Thrones, and the book series whence it’s based — A Song of Ice and Fire — is a meditation on political philosophy, political economy, and moral philosophy.  And there is sex, violence, and yes, dragons, and ice zombies.  Over the next few weeks, as winter comes to my town and the show ends, I plan to elaborate on these themes, posting here and in Facebook.

Oh, I will end the series well before the show is over.  How do I think it will end?  To quote one of the characters — If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.