Ikiru (To Live)

Friend Kartik Iyer passed on Ikiru (To Live), a film by Akira Kurosawa. Ikiru lives, Kanji Watanabe (played by Takashi Shimura) lives, me lives, ordinarily. For 30 years Kanji Watanabe, a lowly bureaucrat, does nothing, like our IAS-IFS-IPS brigade; then one day some women demand a park; Watanabe hobbles past files and filed humans, gets a park done; dies; there is a shot of Watanabe playing the swings with a song -- perhaps the moment in Ikiru; a framed pix of Watanabe as friends argue him, a cinematic technique of Kurosawa, and Watanabe is many-angled. In between, Watanabe takes a young girl around the city he lives, buys a new hat which is reborn when a police inspector hands it over.... Kurosawa is a few jumps ahead of Adoor Gopalakrishnan... and Watanabe brings me to many bureaucrats. Perhaps, the first was Cotton Advisor, C. Sridharan in the Textile Commissioner Office, Churchgate and the few Textile Commissioners, all IAS. There were also bankers. In the last many, many years there has been not a bureaucrat of Front Pages; Dr. Raghuram Govind Rajan, in three years, became the Maharaja of Front Pages and Breaking News. Surely, most disliked the affection. Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express asks: Too big for his boots? ... writes: So the Indian economy has survived the imminent exit of the Governor of the RBI. For months it felt as if the departure of Raghuram Rajan would signal not just the collapse of the Indian economy, but of India ...Lastly, can we hope that the next RBI governor reverts to playing the silent and dignified role that governors best played?' Me do not agree with Dr. Rajan, me is not upset over his US trip, yet Mint Street will miss him, me also. He like Watanabe tried to stand up in his shoes, not sit in his chair; grazed away from files; made sense on the intolerance debate in an ever intolerant, mean India today. Long ago, an RBI governor, Dr. R.N. Malhotra, openly disagreed with the government over farm loan waiver of some Rs.10,000 crore. But the government kept him. Watanabe puts up a park when government servants, his friends, well.. turn and twist and gossip. And why should not a bureaucrat talk up when it is fair to put the bureaucrat down publicly? Is it fair? Poet Yevtushenko poets, 'Gentleness is a posthumous honour,' and in a second song, Talk:

You're a brave man they tell me.
I'm not.
Courage has never been my quality. ...
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.

Sayanora, Watanabe and Dr. Rajan.