PLAYING THE MARKET

A flourishing society also requires more than just freedom of speech; it requires security, stability, a just legal system and a vibrant economy.

the mentor and the protegee together. Saif and the very fine and confident debutant Rohan Mehra just don’t have enough scenes together. In fact Rohan builds a better bond with Saif’s screenwife Chitrangda Singh in just one scene where the teary-eyed protegee tells his mentor’s wife that sometimes you just need to give the one you love a tight slap. The written word seldom gets to be conveyed with such unvarnished directness in commercial Hindi cinema where everyone either talks florid or over-casual.

That is why freedom of speech is not absolute. In this country, it is criminal to disclose secrets which risk the lives of Australian soldiers. It is likewise a crime for a corporate executive to disclose market sensitive information to his mates. The law protects us from slander and protects privileged comments made to our lawyers.

Baazaar

DIRECTOR: Gauravv K. Chawla

STARRING: Saif Ali Khan, Rohan Mehra, Radhika Apte, Chitrangda Singh HHHHH

I can’t recall a single notable (or even non-notable) Indian film based on the plunging dips and giddying highs of the stock market. Do you remember Harshad Mehta? How could you forget the podgy stockbroker who made thousands of Indians rich overnight and then it all ended in a financial mess in no time at all?

“Hindus who tied rakhis on the wrists of their Muslim brothers, and Muslims who brought laddoos to their Hindu friends to celebrate Diwali. Friends and strangers who transcended hatred to commit acts of kindness and humanity during the worst of times.It cannot just be the stories of hate and violence which are passed down. Even though every story told to me was shattering, I felt hopeful. Hopeful that people wanted these stories of compassion to be recognised, and that the visceral pull of the place of your birth, and that of your ancestors, the love of your land remains strong. Hopeful that these are the stories that will survive too,” Puri writes in Partition Voices London-based journalist Poonam Joshi, in her book Arms to Fight, Arms to Protest: Women Speak Out about Conflict, quotes her mother Nirmal, who fled her home in Punjab and ended up in England,“Partition can be summarised in great detail or in one sentence. But I still feel great distress that what happened shouldn’t have happened. I think we should talk. We should talk about it very openly, we should know what happened at that time. And there is no distress in talking about it. It did not happen to one or two people. It happened on a large scale... it became a

Saif Ali Khan’s Shakun Kothari’s destiny run on the same lines. Except that Saif as the wily ruthless

“Gurbaksh’s home was in a picturesque village amid the fertile plains of the Punjab. It was a harmonious and tight-knit community. Religious difference was barely thought about. They never imagined one day they would be separated from each other,” Puri writes.

“Just before Partition, Gurbaksh noticed posters going up around the village inciting bloodshed against the Muslims his family had lived alongside for decades. They said that anyone demanding India should be split to create Pakistan, would ‘get kabristan’.” him - a very dangerous ambition to have. And who knows this better than Rizwan’s wife Chitrangda Singh, who in a role severely conscripted by the plot’s bristling sinewiness, manages to find her redemptive moment in the grand finale.

And then the mayhem started, and he too fled, to land up in England in 1958.

Machiavellian stockbroker is everything that Harshad Mehta would have wanted to be. This is Saif’s most gloriously written and performed part, meaty witty and wicked. He chews into it exposing a sacred hunger that I didn’t notice in his last over-hyped outing.

Saif as Shakun is a true-blue Gujju who won’t let neo-affluence corrupt his cultural integrity. He slips into Gujjufications with the unrehearsed cuteness of tycoon, who has long ceased to be cute to everyone, including his own wife and children.

“But this story is not one Gurbaksh has ever talked of. It is too painful to recount. His children never asked. And anyway, he did not want to expose them to things he had witnessed.He is still angry at the way and manner of the British withdrawal. Gurbaksh calls himself an agnostic Sikh. He feels his faith in humanity has been shaken, that human beings are fragile. How little it takes to turn them into beasts,” Puri writes.

However, the treatment of the Aboriginal peoples in this country stands as a chilling reminder that tolerance has not always been embraced. The Cronulla riots similarly reminds us how quickly what we have achieved can be put at risk.

The proposed amendments to Racial Discrimination Act were put forward on the basis that the current wording of Section 18C inappropriately constrains our freedom of speech.

But then, it’s not only the migrants who feel the pain. There is, for instance, the reverend Canon Michael Roden from Hitchin (now Canon Chancellor of Bristol Cathedral).

When debutant Rohan Mehra enters the plot as Rizwan there is no Shakun Kothari around. We know Rizwan idolizes Shakun and wants to be like

“In his church, by the pews...stands a modest memorial. It shows a map of British India with a red line marking the 1947 division. A single A4 typed sheet of paper on a music stand explains

In Baazaar the emotions are tightly reined-in as caustic vitriolic conversations are let loose with not a care about who’s eavesdropping.

My favourite line, and the one that says it all about Shakun Kothari, is the one in the run-down Gujarati bhojanalaiya. “You think I come here because I love the food? No, the food is terrible! But it helps me never forget where I came from.” that, in the absence of a national memorial, this makeshift one, in his fourteenth-century church, will act as a surrogate to commemorate the millions who died and were displaced. Around the sign, candles are lit in remembrance,” Puri writes. Towards the end, the sentence reads, “We have screened the most beautiful part of this church to symbolize terrible loss of life, loss of mutual trust and loss of access to holy sites at the time of Partition.”

There is no redemption for Shakun. He is showman a ball of fire hurling down an abyss, and enjoying every moment of it. The film takes great pride in being clued into the inside workings of the stock market. Yet it never lets the tone of know-all self-congratulation come in the way of telling us the story of ‘When Shakun Met Rohan’.

That section makes it unlawful to do an act in public which “is reasonably likely… to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people” if “the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person”.

As a society, we recognise that these restrictions do not hurt our democracy or way of life. Indeed, we understand that they are necessary to maintain it. And laws against hate speech are no less necessary, because racism and bigotry tear at the heart of our social fabric.

The brilliance of the line is never forgotten in a morality tale that never pushes its righteousness into our face. In fact I suspect the very assured debutant director Gauravv K. Chawla actually enjoys his grey protagonist’s amorality.

Saif’s blustering warmth keeps Shakun Kothari from falling apart even when the stakes are heavily weighed against him.

Puri concludes on an uplifting note, “The Partition generation remembers a time which was not always perfect, but when people lived alongside one another, celebrated each other’s festivals, were part of one another’s happiness and sorrows. They shared culture, food, language and traditions. A time before division, borders, Partition. That is what they choose to remember too, after seventy long years.”

Racism and bigotry leave people feeling exiled in their own home. They do not improve the quality of public debate nor do they assist the wise completion of a ballot paper. They are insidious because they attack a person because of their identity; their heritage. They imply that a person is inferior because of who they are. They are hurtful, divisive and can lead to individuals and entire communities feeling unwanted, unvalued and second-class.

While some of the other supporting performances just don’t match upthe ever-brilliant Manish Choudhary struggles in an underwritten role; Radhika Apte as Rizwan’s go-getting colleague makes space for herself. In a way she tokenizes the film’s morality. In today’s times you have to push your way into attention.

Vishnu Makhijani

My quibble with the rivetting script (Nikhil Advani, Parvez Sheikh, Aseem Arora) is that it takes its time in bringing

There is no doubt that freedom of speech is important but it is important because of the role it plays in our democracy. Freedom of speech ensures that when you or I go to the ballot box we can make an informed decision about who to vote for.