Cold beauty

Last weekend, as we sped through the road from Chirag Dilli to Panchsheel, leaves were coming off the trees in a torrent. The road shimmered with bright golden yellow leaves, noon sun lighting them up like fluorescent bulbs lined up to welcome us. With a cold breeze washing up my face and wiping off some of the pain and tiredness that I had felt all through the week, I grew into a marvellous and delicate mood.

This mood was subsequently destroyed quite abruptly when I read the news about the battering to death of an auto rickshaw driver by couple of drunken youth in the early hours of the morning. All because the driver scraped past their Innova, which they had parked alongside the petrol pump, besides which one of them was puking off the excess liquor. So, they stopped the driver, got him out, and then battered his head with bricks to make sure he dies. I felt anger and disgust in equal measure.

These feelings of ecstatic happiness and unmitigated hatred are not uncommon to the denizens of Delhi. In Mumbai, in my limited experience, these feelings are usually muted and absorbed by the sheer madness of the city. You would see fights in the local, even women tearing each other apart, but the inhumanly fights and rages are not seen. It makes Mumbai, without doubt, a more civil, real city, but does it make it happier as well? Where are the spaces to relax or places to see without hounded by a persistent stream of noise? Or, even time outside commuting between home and office, to search for them?

Mumbai provides a living to a lot of Indians, but takes life out from their lives. Delhi is chaotic, cold, violent, almost a strange modern village, but also provides far more moments of sheer joy and ecstasy to those who seek them.

Everywoman: Alice (Woody Allen)

Alice has a gnawing emptiness inside. A yearning for something she knows not what. A feeling that she has not lived the life that she had thought she would lead.

But we look at her life and wonder what does she have to complain about?

She is rich, with a large house, full of servants at her beck and call. Chauffeur driven cars. A fine marriage with a dutiful, faithful, loving husband. Growing children. A rich, social life, full of parties and banquets and gatherings.

What is eating Alice Tate? After all, starting off from a middle class background in a small, provincial, American town, she could have hardly hoped to do better than where she was? Why is then happiness so elusive for her? Why do her compromises and longings seem so familiar to us?

She finds and goes to meet a Tibetan 'medicine man' in his quaint little clinic, who helps Alice to unravel her whole life, bit by bit. How he helps her recover the self that was long buried inside her, and corrects the lies that made up her persona, forms the meat of the movie.

And we watch enthralled as to how our deepest emotions are laid bare with such deft lightness of touch. Woody Allen lends his magical words and lens to the tale of this everywoman with great empathy and humour, and renders a fantastic, comic, movie.