The great Indian 'Son-In-Law' syndrome !

This post is not about the contemptible jerks who physically, verbally or mentally abuse their wife, or in-laws. That's a cringe worthy social epidemic but this article is about an average Indian married man who caters to his family and appears to be gentle and well-cultured. Sometimes he masquerades as a torchbearer of equality too but deep inside he would be suffering from "Great Indian Son-In-Law Syndrome".

One of the earliest advices I got from my well-wisher ahead of marriage was to enjoy 'son-in-law' status post wedding and not let in-laws gain control of me ! I was too naive to even understand what he meant because I never saw my father or brother-in-law behave in any condescending manner or 'enjoy' their son-in-law title.

People change with changing times, education, awareness and exposure. But if there is something that could not be rattled with all the change in the world, its the mindset of the average Indian son-in-law, the patronizing, supercilious member of the family who believes in exercising the right he's supposedly entitled to.

To all my fellow married men, run through this checklist:

1. Do you get offended when your parents-in-law address you as nuvvu (tum) instead of meeru (aap) ?
2. Do you expect in-laws to call and wish you on all festivals ?
3. Do you sulk if your in-laws don't consult you for any major decisions they take ?
4. Do you expect in-laws to offer you clothes and gifts on all festivities or family events ?
5. Do you expect your wife to convince you before meeting her own parents and siblings ?
6. Do you believe you've done a favor to their family by accepting to marry their girl ?
7. Did you discuss or influence your wife to change her last name to yours ? or ever claimed that you "allowed" your wife to retain her maiden last name ?
8. Did you ever feel you "helped your wife" by doing household chores ?
9. Do you dread that your friends and extended family could call you "jhoru ka ghulaam" hence try to dominate your in-laws and wife ?
10. Did you believe your wedding expenses (or gifts) were the responsibility of your in-laws ?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you suffer from son-in-law syndrome. Not that it's criminal but you must refrain from claiming to be a modern thinking man regardless of your education, knowledge, wisdom, social status or ideology.

Patriarchy is deeply ingrained in Indian minds since generations. Sexism, rampant discrimination were earlier considered normal and largely acceptable. Since centuries, its interpreted that son-in-law was responsible for their daughter's wellness and more respected and appeased he was, better would be their daughter's life. That's because historically women were largely confined to four walls of the house and had to live inferior lives. The respect or sometimes fear of son-in-law is the direct consequence of the same patriarchal hangover even to date. Generations of such appeasement and mollification got so entrenched into DNA of the society that men feel offended if they weren't treated like demigods.

Adding up everything, it's a fact that sons-in-law were not respected for the people they were but out of the fear that they could harm their wives. And it's not a surprising fact that the men encourage and entertain such entitlement to this day with active encouragement from their families. Isn't that a tacit blackmail or threat ? How shameful could that get ?

Dear men, you marry a girl because you (like her) need a lifetime companion for physical, emotional, social and mental needs; a person who promises to live rest of her life with you and who builds along with you a strong bond of love, mutual trust and inter-dependency. In the equation, if she doesn't expect your parents to respect her in a certain way, why would you ? Why are you, as a male, more important ? Just because you have a dick ? Does that grant you the privilege ?

It's a puzzle how a man who respects random senior people on the street fail to treat his parents-in-law who are seniors too, with similar respect. Being a man is not about bludgeoning somebody because the weak and elderly are intimidated of the possibility of you harassing their loved one. Being a man is not about exploiting them to appease you to show off how dominant or alpha male you are. Being a male is not demanding or begging for honor, it's about earning respect for the person you are.

Man is not the 'head of the family" as been taught to us in our primary school. You wouldn't be a 'jhoru ka ghulaam' if you get rid of your male chauvinism. Every species in the universe would born either male or female and you just happened to be a male due to the chromosome game. Being a male is not something you earned, there's nothing to be so proud to be one.

Machismo lies in being chivalrous, gentlemanly, gracious and charming with everybody in general and those who respect you in particular. Without these qualities, you will just be a dick...which you may take helluva pride in.

PS: For those who try to connect dots about my wife's last name; we never ever discussed about that and she uses my last name only on the social media for her own reasons and she's proud to retain her maiden name elsewhere, like my mother or my sister.

Tamasoma Post-Mortem & CutMirchi Future

It's been a week since we released Tamasoma to YouTube audience and since then it has been a roller-coaster ride with mixed feelings. I find this phase very entertaining, enlightening and worth sharing. Here's my account.

When I embarked on this journey, I had 3 story points to turn into films and took the most simple and straightforward script for Tamasoma because I knew the first attempt would be a learning curve. Hence the story had only 4-5 characters, limited locations and duration. I didn't intend to create any ripples nor submit my work to sundance film festival. I basically wanted to learn how to present an idea in a cinematic way in the most engaging way possible without boring the audience.

The Good

I read many books and watched videos about film making where gurus advised not to introduce the major plot incident right in the first scene because that would require a director to engage the audience continuously thereafter without tiring them. But with Tamasoma,  I deliberately defied that rule and tested myself if I could deliver a 40 minute saga without losing audience's interest despite a major incident right in the opening scene.

I heard many accounts of feedback - both positive and negative from people I know and others too. The criticism was majorly around bad dubbing and audio quality or screenplay of the last 10 minutes but almost everybody agreed that the story, concept engaged them and they enjoyed the unpredictable twists. Everybody unanimously agreed that I could hook them up for 40 minutes without distraction. THAT'S MY SUCCESS.

After I took up this journey, at least 50 people told me that they always wanted to make short films, skits or feature films but they could never begin due to whatever reasons they had. I had my own reasons too, but I broke through the barriers, wrote, narrated, directed, produced and promoted a product which was born out of my mind. THAT'S MY SUCCESS.

We are glad that we could stand up to our first marketing slogan that this was the story never been told in world cinema and we are proud of it.

The Bad

When I saw the aggressive tirade by makers of  "ee nagaraniki emaindi", "veera bhoga vasantha rayalu" against reviewers, I was amused. If a person delivered a creative product for public consumption in a public domain, they should be ready to accept any criticism. Hence I was more than willing to listen to constructive criticism about my first attempt.

Also I don't understand filmmakers who get annoyed by criticism and reviews by those who never held a camera nor shot a home video. Talking of analogies, when we go to a restaurant we would review the taste of food even if we can't cook. Same logic applies here. Those who critique films don't need to be knowledgeable about film making. For me, criticism is not bad. Actually that's more important than praises because that's how I can think from audience's perspective and learn what not to repeat in the future.

But yeah, those critics can't make even a fraction of what film makers do is a different afterthought though. Nevertheless there are always few negative people who want to humiliate and slander and I refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Bad Dubbing:

The unanimously raised point was the bad audio quality and poor dubbing. I totally agree with everybody. Here is what happened: We initially thought sync sound would be too difficult logistically and went ahead with an idea of ADR (dubbing). Since it was a 40 minute movie and we had only a handful of characters, we borrowed a radio station for 4 hours thinking we could finish the dubbing off. But for our surprise, it took around 4-5 hours for each actor. That was harrowing. The studio team would have agreed if it was a couple of more hours but 30 hours against 4 hours of earlier approved time was way out of line and I didn't want to trouble them because the inconvenience was evident.

The biggest mistake at that point was not to hire a professional studio for the remainder of dubbing because I thought we could do the rest at home with a microphone and a voice recording software set. Then I started traveling to all actors' houses to get their dubbing done. While the actors did their best, I was a novice in sound management and didn't realize that microphone also captured AC, furnace motor and other unwanted ambiance sounds as well and the end audio had a disturbing hush along with their voices. I asked my BGM director to remove the hush and he warned me about implications. I insisted and he did something and in the process lost some voice textures too, in addition to losing BGM effects as well. It was 40 hours of recording, traveling, post production sound design (more than shooting time) which went into a monumental waste. I was dejected but could do very less because it was too late to re-dub and I didn't want to trouble actors who already worked for free. Then there was a huge issue of lip sync and getting the right emotions while dubbing.

The final nail on the coffin was that iDream guys compressed the 41 minute movie to 39 minute video including their own animations thus compressing the entire audio and video quality making the negative feedback inevitable.

Bad Screenplay:

While many lauded our product and were lenient because it was my first attempt, few correctly pointed at the incoherent screenplay and fast flowing scenes especially towards climax. I identified that in rushes and hence posted a poll on my FB if I should release or not. I was in two minds but then released it because the output involved hard work of other people involved.

I earlier wrote my story and dialogues and started filming some scenes with just those dialogues without proper screenplay. Towards the end, I learnt screenplay techniques and reshot many scenes and hence you might find few scenes came out well while few others came and went in a flicker before you could register what's going on. That's a notebook case study for bad screenplay.

Behind every 1 minute of film you watch on screen, there were 2 hours of shooting and 2 more hours of pre-production and post production. Unfortunately, thanks to my inexperience, I could realize mistakes committed during shooting only at the editing stage when my editor asked if I had some important extra footage and b-roll...and I didn't have any. So the editor had to mix and match the available footage and deliver the product. Earlier I edited music video reprisals but working with him taught me many intricacies of editing.

Performances:

Debutante actors performed better than their best and got overwhelming appreciation from all corners. If there was any such scene where the audience felt actors could have performed differently, the onus lies upon me because I should have asked them for a retake if I was not satisfied. They performed as many times and in as many variations as I requested from them.

Others:

Few friends advised me to employ multi camera setup, dolly movements, drone sequences in the movie. The camera angles and techniques employed during Tamasoma were deliberate. If you notice, I used all the aforementioned techniques in my other music video reprisals and also tried here but felt not suitable for the screenplay and dialogue narrative. Yet, your feedback is valued and will make sure you will enjoy my next output.

The Future

I took up camera and film making as an active hobby and a borderline passion and not as a career. I would continue to make more movies, videos as long as I get ideas that blow my mind, as long as my wife and friends who share my passion are willing to collaborate and as long as my parents and family join me through the process.

Few well wishers warned me that film industry is not known to "give chances" to outsiders and I should make more love stories or comedy to get more chances. I seldom ask for chances from anybody and I would only collaborate with those who want to join aboard my vision. I don't find love stories and boy meets girl kind of sagas interesting and don't intend to be a drop in the flood of short films and movies that pass us everyday. I would initiate something only when the plot blows my mind. And I found two such plots.

While I would want to reserve the best plot I devised for a theatrical release feature film sometime in the near future, there is another interesting plot which I'll roll-out soon as my second short film. The story will have more characters, longer duration, more action visuals, less conversations and I promise to overcome blunders I committed in Tamasoma. The title would be "Asatoma" and is not related to "Tamasoma" in any way.

Those who watched Tamasoma would know that I left all characters as open ended and nobody was shown as dead (may be except one). All the loose ends would be connected in a more unthinkable way in Tamasoma-2 which will be a limited and private release to those who enjoyed Tamasoma-1.

In addition, we are planning to roll-out three different weekly talk shows about three completely unrelated topics. My wife will helm two of those and I would take up the third one. Will begin those too as limited releases to gauge the reaction before releasing it on YouTube. Interested people can join our private audience list.

The Conclusion

I wholeheartedly thank everybody who took time to watch Tamasoma and acknowledge the beginning of my new journey. Thanks and love to those who liked it and to those who had all kind words for me and the team. Thanks a ton to everybody in cast and crew who believed in my vision. Thanks to everybody in and beyond the team who have been promoting the movie to help me expand my horizons. Thank you so much to all those who gave me honest reviews and areas of improvement. You took time to analyze and tell me those points proving that you care.

To those who haven't caught up with the movie, you are welcome to check it out on my facebook timeline or search for tamasoma+cutmirchi on youtube. Those who ignored it, I'll try harder next time to gain your attention. And to all those who don't intend to watch (or pretending not to) - wishing you peace !

Shalom until 'Asatoma' !