Movie Review and Petition: Please Sign! Parzania and Craziness

I'm really glad this movie has been getting rave reviews because its a film that Ive wanted to see since I heard about it in 2003, and because its a story that deserves to be told, a side of humanity and politics in our own country that deserves to be witness firsthand by us, the very people who put such excuses for human beings in power.

Parzania is based on a true story about a Parsi boy Azhar from Ahmedabad who has been missing since the Godhra Riots in early 2002. NRI gujarati Rahul Dholakia directs this film starring Naseeruddin Shah, Sarika, Parzan Dastur, Pearl Barsiwala and Corin Nemec, the first four playing the loving and devout lower-middle class Parsi family living in a chawl type enclosed area, where everyone is like family and Hindus Muslims and Sikhs alike share an easy camaraderie, and the latter a disillusioned and somewhat dysfunctional Protestant dysfunctional American who is writing his college thesis on Gandhi and simultaneously trying to find himself. He persists in acquiring bootlegged liquor despite the statewide ban on it (as we all know). Parzan is a loving boy, a cricket fan, very close to his sister, and has created a land for himself named Parzania where the teachers are talking donkeys and the walls are made of chocolate and the mountains of ice cream and you can eat them, except for 5 minutes before it rains, with elaborate rituals for getting there and making wishes come true.

Their world comes to an end when the Hindu fundamentalists unleash their devilish wrath on the innocent masses post-Godhra. It shows that the atacks were planned, in complicity with the police force and the media and the heads of state, that the media published Muslim business names and addresses, that that day, the police stood by and laughed while people pleaded with them for help, houses burned, women were raped and men and children slaughtered. Right after curfew is declared and the police move away, thousands of men show up at their chawl, demanding the addresses of the Muslims. The Parsi family is persecuted for being non-Hindu, and Shehnaz and her children Parzan and Dilshad try to escape with the saffronists giving chase. In the chaos that ensues, Shehnaz is forced to jump from the balcony as Parzan gets lost. For days Cyrus Pithawala roams from staton to station, being forced to bribe policemen, his complaint ignored, till in desperation he attempts to fast for 9 days and nights to please Ahura Mazda and get teh answers he needs. In the meantime, the Muslims start planning a counter attack. Shehnaz is compelled to sign a testimony stating that the political party that is attempting to help her had the situation under control. After much ado, the National Human Rights Commission steps in and attempts to get witness accounts of the happenings that day, and many lie, intimidated by the police and extremists. The Pithawalas do too, safe as they are, staying with Nemec at his place, who meanwhile, sees 'secular' India for what it really has become - a fucking mess.

Some may call the movie biased. I call it a fairly objective, albeit sympathetic account of the feelings and experiences of the bemused civilians who have lost their loved ones and everything they have in this war against only the warmongers know what. The people who create warfare, those with no hearts or consciences, who after killing thousands can go about sticking posters of a bugger whose words are laced with the arsenic of double meaning, for whom violence and the spreaidng of hatred is just business as usual... how can you even call them humans? People with so much passion that it consumes everything around them - what would they do if their own families were killed? How can you hate someone blindly, someone you dont know? How can you hate anyone at all, unless they are beyond redemption? And such fundamentalist, unreasonable, violent actions only succeed in creating hate for those that condone and perpetuate such dastardly means of power. I feel as though ths paragraph is redundant because I already vented in teh earlier review, but violence at home is too lcose for comfort, and to think that someone somewhere could harbour feelings of hatred for the people I hold dear, whatever caste, religion, sex they may be, is very discomfiting indeed. What did this carnage accomplish? A newfound fear and caution towards the sate of Gujarat and its people? A people who destroyed the lovely Hussain ki Gufaein because they refused to understand his M. F. Husain's paintings in the light that he had painted them in? People who do not delve deeper than the surface, to see things for what they really are? People for whom a name, a pronunciation, an address, brings forth illogical stereotypes?

And the police... almost worse than these bastard party workers (oh misdirected Nazi types, may they rot in a hell far worse than any they could possibly make - though Im not excusing them from any blame, OH NO). Party workers are uneducated, idiotic, greedy small minded people. The police are supposed to be committed to the upholding of the values established in our constitution, one made with so much care and attention to detail, derived from some of the most developed nations of the world, even holding the debatable merit of being the longest constitution in the world - that of its establishment as a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic". Secular seems to have been forgotten, democratic ignored, and republic taken entirely too seriously. Parties think they can get away with whatever they want, as long as they and the police make accountability a near impossibility. And we people, we who seem to only have the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea during election time - perhaps we too are to blame for allowing such parties to be in power, on the basis of a rhetoric, that though may see pleasing and patriotic enough to our ears, has quite terrible implications to our population should the means be implemented for achieving such a spurious end.

When law and order itself fall apart at will, what security do we as a nation have? Yes, political parties are ignorant, yes, they have pretty dubious means of achieving their ends, but when a police force cannot keep the situation and protests under control so as to ensure that civilians and daily economic and social life arent harmed, then what are we to expect? The compelling acting of all the characters in the movie amply demonstrates that.

Only when greed and corrupion are weeded from the very dredges of our society, will we flourish as a nation that can be called true to its pledges.

Oh, yes, the Government of Gujarat (well, the Bajrang Dal) has in typical fashion in 'co-operation' with cinema owners (yeah right) banned the release of the film in Gujarat, the one state that really needs to be shown this movie, and the mockery its citizens have made of this massacre and Gandhi. Please sign at this link.