Parable about madness and love

Yogaraj Bhat's latest film Manasaare (Heartfelt) echoes Foucault's idea that reason-obsessed societies push intuitive, unconventional minds into the asylum



Even if you don’t know any Kannada, I recommend you catch the film Manasaare (Heartfelt), now running in cinemas across Bangalore. It debates madness and sanity, couching it all in a light-hearted love story. Made by Yogaraj Bhat, director of the biggest Kannada hit of all time (Mungaaru Male), Manasaare takes you through terrain that is definitely exciting by current Indian movie standards.

Manohar, played by the dimpled Diganth, is considered a basket case because he has no interest in becoming a doctor or engineer. He is compared unfavourably with his more studious cousin who scores high marks and is all set to go abroad. Manohar just can’t earn any appreciation in his middle class world. With his blithe, irreverent talk, he loses the love of the pretty girl next door, and the warm companionship of his less educated cable operator-friend.

After a disastrous experiment where he tries to show how electricity can be produced from the mechanical energy generated by vehicles cruising on public roads (disastrous because a police van trips on his device and the policemen lock him up), a dejected Manohar is sauntering along the highway when he is mistaken for a rehab patient and picked up. At the fort-like rehab centre, he meets several interesting people, including the wise and funny Shankarappa (played by Raju Talikote), and Dollar, the US-returned inventor branded insane because his gadget, an electronic device to clean kids’s bottoms, leaves a boy with a burnt backside. Manohar’s protests that he is perfectly fine take him nowhere because the doctor just won’t listen to anything the patients say.

But just when it looks like he can escape, Manohar sets his eyes on Devika (the fresh-faced Aindrita Rai), an inmate in the women’s section. Their love progresses as they talk through a hole in the wall (in scenes echoing Adoor’s Malayalam classic Mathilukal). The smitten Manohar, dressed as an ambulance driver, smuggles her out into exhilaratingly shot landscapes (Sathya Hegde) that contrast with the claustrophobic world of the asylum. Predictably, her very real trauma is healed by Manohar’s love, but life isn’t easy when they step out into the ‘sane’ world.

Director Bhat pits the pragmatic, competitive, and unimaginative outside world against the creative, human, and often irrational world of the ‘insane’, and echoes Foucault’s thesis that a reason-obsessed civilisation pushes intuitive, unconventional minds into cruel asylums. Like the French philosopher, Bhat acknowledges there is much that can be questioned about psychiatry, but it isn't a discipline you can do away with.

My father’s younger brother was ‘mad’, and we lived with him for more than 30 years. He could be funny and witty with words and songs, but we dreaded the days he turned violent and smashed framed pictures and whatever fragile stuff he could lay his hands on. Sometimes, he just stepped out and kept walking wherever the road took him, not returning for days and weeks.

I loved Manasaare, and could relate to Bhat’s neatly told parable about madness, sanity, and love. We all grapple with our mad inner worlds, I don’t know if I have it in me to willingly live with someone like my uncle again.

Twitter in India

At first look, Twitter seems like one of those useless, 'timepass' applications. It allows you 140 characters, and expects you to answer the question, “What are you doing now?” Hard to believe that the world would be curious to know what you are doing hour on hour, but what do you know!





Look at Shashi Tharoor, our Minister of State for External Affairs, whose “cattle class” message made him India’s most notorious tweeter. He manages to tweet several times a day, even when he is touring abroad, and meeting kings, sheikhs, and presidents. He is right now in Dubai, and he tweeted about how the same clothes expand when he has to pack for a return flight. He also made a ministerly statement about the attack on the Indian embassy in Afghanistan: “India will not be intimidated by these criminal killers. We will take all steps necessary to protect Indian lives & installations in Afghstn.” Lofty proclamations find a place alongside the mundane on Twitter.

I read last week that women outnumber men 57 to 43 when it comes to using social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. A woman columnist in the online magazine Salon said this might not just mean that women blabber more than men (who, she believes, may be spending the same time surfing for porn). She surmises mothers are out there using those networks to keep an eye on their children, and working women are developing contacts even as they bond with friends.



To each his own. Tharoor crossed the three-lakh followers mark yesterday, but he follows just 12 tweeters. For him, Twitter is a medium to broadcast his glories to the world. He is not interested in any comparable degree to what his compatriots may be doing with their lives.

Not all are taking Twitter’s ‘What are you doing now?’ as seriously as Tharoor. Kim Karadarshian, for instance, is using the service to plug products, the latest being for a brand of perfume. You could safely assume she is getting paid for her endorsements. Personal-tech writer David Pogue uses Twitter to talk about his columns, share anagrams, and solicit support for his campaigns. Barkha Dutt and Sagarika Ghose use it to invite questions and comments for their TV shows. Media sites as diverse as The New Yorker, MiD DAY, and Churumuri use it to send out links to their stories.

Job sites push information about vacancies into Twitter accounts. Cartoonists Satish Acharya and Sudhir Tailang tweet about their daily work. Writers as diverse as Ben Okri, Aravind Adiga, and Thomas Friedman use Twitter to bounce ideas. And you can catch MiD DAY’s Ayyo Rama funnies on Twitter too.


Looks like everyone loves brevity, even writers of epic novels, like the honourable Mr Tharoor.

The story of true fakes

If you’ve been on the Malaysia-Indonesia tourist circuit, you will surely have come across those unbelievably well-produced fake watches at their little wayside shops. They call them replicas, and you can buy replicas of expensive brands, such as Tag Heuer or Police, for as little as Rs 300. If you are the sort with a taste for expensive stuff but no income to match (and most of us are that sort!), you might be tempted to pick up one of those, and flaunt it on your wrist.

In India we call them ‘duplicates’. The ‘duplicate’ business is big, and every few days, we hear about the police busting a gang producing counterfeit products. It happens everywhere. An electrician I know has astounding stories to tell about ‘authorised dealers’ for big electrical brands in Bangalore’s Chickpet-Balepet area. Some of the less scrupulous sorts, he tells me, are so good at counterfeiting that they stock originals and fakes on the same shelf, and even representatives of the company can’t tell the difference. The counterfeiters of an earlier generation were easier to catch out. In Mumbai, for instance, everyone knew what ‘Made in USA’ meant: ‘Made in Ulhasnagar Sindhi Association’.

This run-up is for a curious story from the world of music. A classical musician in Bangalore has been going around with an injured look ever since he sang a song for a film, and his guru was credited for it. Now, it is perfectly possible that a song sung by one can be credited to another, but then, whose fault is it if you fake a Tag Heuer and people actually mistake it for a Tag Heuer? Was it their fault that they took you at face value and believed you? Or should they have ripped open the case and found that it was something else?

In art, the imitators do pretty well, but then they often compare themselves to someone original and successful, and feel indignant. Kumar Sanu got himself a significant number of songs by imitating Kishore Kumar, but he didn’t last very long. For a couple of years, we also heard of a Rafi imitator called Shabbir Kumar. He similarly faded away.

In Bangalore, as in other cities, you will find good imitators at the ‘orchestras’ that entertain the crowds at wedding receptions and such other events. They earn a bit, but they aren’t in the same league as the original singers when it comes to fame or money. Which, if you ask me, is as it should be.

Coming back to where we began, I don’t know if you can impress the opposite sex by flaunting fake luxury watches and stuff. Perhaps you can. But I have a niggling suspicion with fakes. The watches will in most cases work well and tell the time. And even if I made a dazzling impression on the brand-crazy sorts, I’d still know I was wearing a fake. And I'd despise such a pretender!