I've been feeling a lot, these days, like Thomas, the protagonist in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 cult classic film Blow Up.
He (played by David Hemmings) is a hot fashion photographer in London of the swinging mid-1960s. One day, bored with his routine, he decides to stroll in a nearby park and shoot random pictures, some of which are of two lovers he finds there.
He makes nothing of this until, later that day, one of them, the young and beautiful woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave) unexpectedly shows up at his apartment. She wants the negative of his film back and even offers to have sex with him in return for it.
He quickly develops the film to see what makes her want it so badly. Then he notices odd things in it. In one picture she is staring into the distance with a horrified look. When he follows her eye line, and blows up the photo, it reveals, first, a man with a gun hiding in the bushes.
When he blows up the photo even more he sees a body. That's when he realises that he has unwittingly captured on film a murder being committed. He rushes back to the park and sees that the body is there. Unfortunately, he has not brought his camera with him.
By the time he hurries back with his camera, the body has disappeared. Did somebody remove the body? Had there really been a murder or was it just his imagination? He tries to get his friends to join him in checking things out, but they are too occupied with other things to bother.
It was early last year that I first felt that my reality too was getting muddled, like Thomas's.
At that time I noticed that many small-time politicians in Alibagh, across the harbour in Bombay, where we have our week-end home, were gleefully paying token advances and signing up all the land they could lay their hands on. There were no media reports about this and whoever I asked did not think there was anything in the acts of these politicians other than an attempt to make a little money on rising land values.
Like Thomas I repeatedly try to enlarge, and blow up the shadowy elements of what these people were up to but to no avail. Like Thomas I was left wondering whether it was all in my imagination.
Then the government announced the SEZ scheme as the great hope of moving India's slow-growth agricultural areas into high-growth industrial zones. Mamata Banerjee's fast and Nandigram followed and that made the government halt and revise the SEZ schemes. And I was left wondering like Thomas as to which of these realities was true: SEZs as the saviour of our stagnating rural areas or SEZs as the greatest land scam since the Permanent Settlement.
Two weeks ago, I again felt like Thomas.
The Mint, the new financial newspaper, ran a report which said: "DLF Ltd, which had booked 75% of its recent profit before tax by selling buildings to an entity promoted by key shareholders, has not been paid more than Rs 2,200 crore (Rs 22 billion), or the bulk of the sales proceeds, by that promoter-owned company DLF Assets Private Ltd, according to a revised filing with the market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) . . . in the filing, however, DLF said it has received only Rs 51 crore (Rs 510 million) from such sales . . ."
This seemed to me something major, and so I checked with friends and journalists I knew, but no one else had noticed this. Had I really read this or was it an illusion? Just as Thomas had run back to the park to check for the body, I went back to The Mint: the news item was there, it was not my imagination. But like Thomas' friends, none of my friends seems to be worried, either.
What worries me about these kinds of events is that if many more of them happen, my sense of reality may get altered by the make-believe reality that organisers of SEZs and real estate IPOs present.
At the end of Blow Up, Thomas chances upon a group of people in the park playing a tennis match but it is being mimed. The players are going through the motions of the strokes with non-existed racquets and an invisible ball. A small audience watches this make-believe match following the invisible ball go from one side to the other.
They earnestly applaud good shots by bringing their hands together in silent claps. Suddenly they all turn around and look at Thomas expectantly as if the invisible ball has been hit out of the court and is now lying on the grass, where he is standing. They are obviously expecting him to pick it up and throw it back to the players.
After a moment's hesitation he picks up the invisible ball and throws it back. The "match" resumes and as he keeps watching; we do not see the match any longer but we hear the sound of the ball being played back and forth. The reality that the mime tennis players and the crowd watching them constructed becomes Thomas' reality as well.
Ajit Balakrishnan is the founder and chief executive officer, rediff.com.
Comments welcome at ajitb.rediffiland.com
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