How many sausages will I have to eat to
drive out the red gods hiding under my black skin? When will I straighten out
my limbs to fit into the white man's suit...? What will be me when I hang
upside down with roots high up in the air? Will my children be proud of me
then? Will they say I have made it? If so I will do it. I will learn the new rhythm, obey the
instructions and dance to the new music. Let the white mans suit crush my bones
and suffocate the red gods to death. For I cannot lose my children. What is
life without my children....Forefathers, please forgive me... I have left you
and my land. This foreign land claims my son. Our bloodline stops here. Day by
day he is turning white. Whatever is left of us in him makes me feel guilty of
my dark skin.
Parakayapravesham (To Take Another Human
Form) is a short film on immigrant angst in dark comedy. The 14 minute long short shows how an Indian
immigrant’s (in Europe) loneliness, seclusion and stuck-in-a-rut marginalised
life style without any social events contributes to the frustration and disgust
he feels about his nominal existence in the western world. To top it off he
finds all his sacrifices going down the drain as he notices his children
growing up into non-caring, self possessed strangers, distant and cold, who
find him odd and out of place. In a desperate attempt to live up to them he is
trying to change, trying to leave himself behind and become another.
The first half concentrates on the slow
rhythm of eastern lifestyle. The protagonist, a symbol of male chauvinism and
the old world order, aloof from the world outside fights pressure from his
children to change and become modern. He
refuses to eat with cutlery or wear a blazer.
On his only son’s birthday he tries to
present his 5 year old son with a rubber-waste ball he himself had grown up
playing with back in India. Due to his poor English, communication fails
between them. Desperate to connect to his son he decides to obey the
instructions he received from his daughter in order to change into the modern
gentleman: ‘stand straight, walk straight, and speak straight forward’
The state of being uprooted has a desperation,
anger and instability about it. The only consolation of the eastern immigrant
is the family bond, the feeling that all his sacrifices will find fruit in his
children. But his sacrifices silently demand his children be grateful in
return. Independency is not a character he loves in his children.
Children growing up to the realisation of
their parents pathetic existence makes them not sympathetic but contemptuous;
and they usually gives vent to their own tensions living in the foreign and usually-not-so-friendly
world by treating their parents as inferior and to be ashamed of. For somebody
who left his country after the age of 35, who had been living the typical
patriarchal father’s life with full authority and control over his family, who
was respected as the head and breadwinner, this state of being jobless,
neglected and voiceless in decisions is very painful.
In an impulse to act out on the
instructions, he puts on the blazer and walks up to an acquaintance’s house to
reveal to him that he had seen his wife with another man many times. It
backfires and he is beaten up. Defeated
and derailed he retreats indoors and walks up and down the room in anger giving
vent to his frustration by throwing the blazer away and in a long shriek at the
camera (Camera represents the pressure from his family and society to change)
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