As you inch your way forward in traffic, how many times do you grit your teeth, or feel a surge of anger against someone who decides to zoom in on your path from the left? If you are an average motorist in an average metro, the chances are many times a day. “Its my firm belief that a man turns into a monster as soon as you put him behind the wheel of a car,” says Fowzia, an attractive public relations executive whose mild-mannered husband shows very different traits while driving. “We just have to leave home, all made up and smelling and looking our best, and by the first traffic light Sohrab is already frothing at the mouth at some two-wheeler’s rider. He will curse and mutter under his breath. Once he followed a car two traffic signals after the man had cut in and almost brushed him. Then he put his window down and shouted stuff that I didn’t even know he knew to say!”

Continue reading ‘Road Rage: The New Killer’

Madhur Bhandarkar’s collage style of film making has been expressed another time in his latest film ‘Traffic Signal’. This film, an account of the people who are so much urban debris for busy office goers and householders in the metro cities, brought many things alive for me in an interesting way.

A painstaking disclaimer at the beginning of the film, posted by Madhur, declares that the film is not an attempt to ridicule or belittle the people on the streets. Good thing, he did that, because in the first few minutes, as the film establishes all the hundred ways in which poor people con city dwellers to part with their money, you begin to wonder whether it is a middle class diatribe against beggars.

Continue reading ‘Lessons from ‘Traffic Signal’’