{"id":3290,"date":"2010-08-25T09:24:55","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T03:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=3290"},"modified":"2021-01-16T12:35:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-16T07:05:06","slug":"collective-bargain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2010\/08\/25\/collective-bargain\/","title":{"rendered":"Collective bargain"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The way they speak about dinosaurs now, a few years later, that’s how they will talk about the mill workers”, says a character in City of Gold<\/a>, a Hindi film by Mahesh Manjrekar, adapted from a play by Jayant Pawar. Its based on the Great Bombay Textile Strike<\/a>. A decent movie, with some great performances and with its share of stark realty, though parts of the second half had a Bollywood melodrama hangover. I guess the response at the multiplexes (many of which are ironically what the mills gave way to) wasn’t really great either. But it was a story that had to be told.<\/p>\n

The subject has interested me earlier too. To be precise, in 2005, my last official trip to Mumbai. The office was at Peninsula Center, and when I looked out through the windows, I could see a few chimneys. I wondered enough to come back and read up a bit. I was curious because amidst the RGV underworld flicks and the contemporary images I had of Mumbai, this seemed to be a part of history that had never figured in conversations. A legacy that seemed to be buried in the collective consciousness.<\/p>\n

A single movie might not really be enough to cover the individual lives that were affected, though it does try to portray a microcosm. But as the line in Frost\/Nixon goes “You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.”<\/p>\n

Though it is said in a different setting, and context, the connect I sensed was legacy. How a person is perceived by a later generation. Artists have their paintings, actors\/directors\/crew have their movies, politicians, sportsmen\/women have their auto\/biography\/memoirs, authors have their books, musicians have their music, they have a better chance at being remembered by a larger number of people, long after they’re gone, a better chance than us, the commons. A\u00a0 collective’s legacy would be the place and time they lived in\u00a0 – the larger picture, their collective actions, the people who became popular, the events that shaped the future. What happens if a collective chooses not to remember, or chooses to remember only parts? Who does it matter to then?<\/p>\n

until next time, decadent chronicles<\/p>\n

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“The way they speak about dinosaurs now, a few years later, that’s how they will talk about the mill workers”, says a character in City of Gold, a Hindi film by Mahesh Manjrekar, adapted from a play by Jayant Pawar. Its based on the Great Bombay Textile Strike. A decent movie, with some great performances […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1479,412,6056,7],"tags":[554,1423,74,1422,416,1425,1424,813],"class_list":["post-3290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bollywood","category-thoughtstream","category-life","category-society-culture","category-yesterday","tag-bombay","tag-city-of-gold","tag-collective","tag-great-bombay-textile-strike","tag-history","tag-legacy","tag-mahesh-manjrekar","tag-movies"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3290"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15376,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290\/revisions\/15376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}