The Dirty Picture

She is unapologetic, unabashed through and through and she does things as she wishes to and just laces it with clever one or two liners and you chuckle, giggle and Silk moves on with her next move. She rips apart all the layers of systematic Indian hypocrisy and quite mercilessly so. And why not, she has learned her lessons very early of this hypocrisy and its vacuousness that Indians proudly swear by. She has learned watching through that key hole that a man can manage to move on from one woman to another quickly and duplicity comes to him naturally. She knows, if she followed the same behavior, she will be labeled loose, lewd and lustful. Guess what, she doesn't care or at least that is what she projects.

The Indian system which puts such a premium on a girl to be 'morally good' one who cares for her modesty and fall in the system's expectation, one of marriage followed by babies or else she falls short of some God forsaken womanhood. And, so even in her rebellious avatar, Silk, ends her life in bridal clothes. One she desired or society desired of her is hard to say.

Movie is pacy, replete with clever one liners and it does not dwell on nuances for too long and there isn't anything to whine about. Nothing at all. A montage, accolades worthy.

On a lighter note, will ooh la la be as perky or "bombatt" without Bappi Lahiri's voice? Think about it.

On Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

... despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

…change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.

Excerpts from an interview on Better Angels of Our Nature and Why Violence Has Declined