Meeting Kate Grenville and Tim Winton

Overdue blog on my meeting with the Australian authors Tim Winton and Kate Grenville last week. Have to write the profiles now so thought I’d blog on it first and then structure/formalise it for the magazine.

Winton and Grenville – along with a third author, Peter Goldsworthy - were in town as part of a literary tour; since we only had space for two profiles I had to choose, and Goldsworthy drew the short straw. The interviews were being held at the Imperial and my appointment was scheduled alongside that of at least three other journos (each with their own photographers) – which meant there was much chaos in the Imperial’s stately corridors. I went for the appo feeling sorry for myself -- much of the joy of reading vanishes when one has to speed-read books because of deadline constraints – but watching the three Aussies being shepherded hither and thither by hassled Penguin Books staff ("Tim! The HT reporter needs 15 minutes to ask you what it’s like to not live in Sydney, after which the Week photographer wants you beaming by the deckchairs." "Oilright, mate!"), I reflected that authors don’t exactly have it easy.

I spoke to Kate first. She was a pleasant, schoolteacherly sort (she does, in fact, teach creative writing) with a prim, birdlike expression -- very un-Australian, I thought. Her face lit up within three minutes of our chat when she realised that I actually knew something about her Orange Prize-winning novel The Idea of Perfection. "Such a relief to finally meet someone who’s actually read the book!" she exclaimed, while I tsk-tsked sympathetically. "You have no idea the kinds of questions I’ve been subjected to in the last two days."

We spoke mainly about her country’s ambivalent attitude to its past. "Perhaps because of our dodgy history and the continuing perceptions about our ‘convict ancestry’, we have this hunger to put our past behind us and focus on being modern and world-class," explained Kate. "But that’s an escapist attitude, and most leading Australian novelists caution their readers that we must come to terms with our history." Incidentally, Kate’s next book, already complete, is based on the true story of her own convict ancestor, who rose to the position of nobleman after coming from England to Australia. "I was intrigued by the nature of his relationship with the Aborigines, whose land he might have usurped, and I took up the story from there," she said.

Very interestingly, Kate mentioned a phenomenon known in Australia as the ‘cultural cringe’ – the attitude that anything that comes from overseas is good, anything homegrown not as worthy of appreciation. (She brought this up in the context of her Orange Prize win and the subsequent recognition she got in her own country.) Ring a bell? It seems such an Indian phenomenon and I couldn’t reconcile it with the brash, cocksure Australian image – but then brashness and braggadocio often conceal insecurity.

The conversation had just begun to flow when the Penguin girl blew the whistle and I had to scramble to Tim Winton’s side. He was surprisingly subdued, which probably had something to do with having to perform for the benefit of journalists. From Winton’s reputation as a maverick and from my cursory reading of his rude, rambunctious novel Cloudstreet -- a cult classic, written in chapterettes and full of earthy colloquialisms -- I had expected the archetypal swaggering Aussie. Here, instead, was a quiet, tired-looking author who, when I conversationally asked how much of Delhi he had seen on his first visit here, replied ruefully, "The inside of the Oberoi, Intercontinental and Imperial hotels, mate."

In an attempt at politeness, he hastened to add that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. "They are very different from New York hotels or London hotels; despite their best attempts at replicating the international experience, the Indianness does come across." Though he meant it as a compliment, I reflected that the Raj-worshipping Imperial management would probably not see it as such.

As we chatted on, Tim began to show his famed irreverence. He writes, he said, in a way intended to "evoke the sound of the people I come from. Western Australia and Tasmania are marginalised, no-account places that have a distinct voice of their own – we even have our own equivalent for your Hinglish." He joked about the sound of typical Aussie speech: "Indians, and the Irish, sing the English language – your dialect is very musical – but get a bunch of Aussies talking in a room together and it’ll sound like crows singing. Our speech mimics the harshness of the landscape."

"Much of Australian writing," he drawled, "including the kind I do myself, has an animus that comes from years of being condescended to." Tim clearly feels contempt for much of current-day British writing, which, he memorably says, "is the colour of tweed – it’s written as if everyone in that bugger-all country has been to either Oxford or Cambridge." It’s certainly true that there is such a thing as the anti-British novel in Australia, built on a style of writing that consciously tries to overturn the rules set down by the colonisers. Even a writer as cosmopolitan as Peter Carey wrote Jack Maggs, which took a revisionist look at the character of Magwitch, from Dickens’ Great Expectations. (Of course, that doesn’t apply only to literature: the attempt to subvert the propah British way of doing things can be seen even in, for instance, the Australian way of recording cricket scores -- 0 for 7 in place of 7 for no loss.)

About the acclaimed Cloudstreet -- which is a cult classic in Australia – Tim was reticent, except to say that he wanted to achieve the tone "of someone whispering in your ear". "Fun comes in short bursts, and music and poetry can be found in coarse speech," he said of the novel’s staccato style.

Cloudstreet ranked number one on a list of most popular Australian novels compiled by the Australian Society of Authors a few years ago. Tim’s response, as my photographer ordered him off the porch and to the poolside: "I’d like to know what those guys were drinking when they cast the votes."

Leaving, I overheard – I swear this is true – a young reporter ask Peter Goldsworthy "Sir, do you note various things around you before you begin a book?" Without waiting to hear his reply, or wail of anguish, I dashed right out.

Anagrammatic poets

Courtesy Kitabkhana, a link to some brilliantly conceived verses on the Modern Humorist website: these are samples of what the great poets might have written if they had fixated on subjects that are anagrams of their own names. Examples: "Toilets" by T.S. Eliot ("Let us go then, to the john, Where the toilet seat waits to be sat upon..."), "Is a sperm like a whale?" by William Shakespeare and "Likable Wilma" by William Blake.

Flyovers, and a shifting city

"The Dhaula Kuan flyover woke one morning from uneasy dreams to find itself transformed into a gigantic pretzel."
-- Jabberwock, paraphrasing Franz K

There was something in the papers about the Dhaula Kuan flyover (a ridiculously simple word for such a complicated structure) being, at long last, fully operational, or close enough (11 lanes functional instead of 12, who cares). Good. Now if the other 40-odd works in progress were miraculously completed we would have ourselves an actual city, not a network of roads punctuated at every second traffic light by elevated heaps of rubble. Understand that I’m not complaining about flyovers as a concept but about the hitch that they have to be built, and this takes time.

I often wonder if a time will come when we no longer have constructions, only completed flyovers – and if, when it happens, I’ll still be sprightly enough to drive a car, or to travel by one, or to care about travelling anywhere. (The Spirit of Optimism informs me that most of it has to be done by the Commonwealth Games 2010, so must live on that hope.)

As a Delhi-ite born and bred, and one who’s seen the city’s character and landscape change in remarkable ways in the past few years, I think of flyovers as significant markers of modern Delhi. The first time I thought consciously about them was as the result of an unsettling encounter; unsettling because it seemed to make nonsense of one of my earliest childhood memories. It was when I saw the Chiragh Dilli flyover for the first time.

The background is, when I was growing up in Panchshila Park, a well-heeled colony in south Delhi, we would sometimes travel along the Outer Ring Road to the Savitri cinema hall. It was barely a kilometre-and-a-half from our house and – most importantly – the route was, back then, one straight, flat road, from which one had to take a simple right turn at a traffic light to reach the hall. Which meant you could see the traffic lights and the right turn in the distance, from a good way off. It’s still probably my earliest memory of travelling in the city.

Anyway, time passed, we moved out and one way or another (though I still find this hard to believe) several years must have gone by before I went that side of town again. When I did, it was shortly after I had started driving myself and as I drove along the Ring Road an old childhood image clicked on in my head; I started picturing Savitri as it had been back then, almost visible in the distance from the Panchshila road. Imagine then my disorientation when I saw instead this elevated roadway that not only cut off the visibility but immutably demarcated the two colonies: Panchshila on this side of the bridge, Savitri on the other.

Of course, by now the Chiragh Dilli flyover is ancient; it’s at least 20 years old (not sure but I think it was constructed in the early 1980s as part of the renovation for the Asiad Games) and practically a historical monument compared to the elaborate flyways now rearing their concrete heads all over the city; the immediate Savitri region itself now has a much more complicated structure, one my childhood eyes would never have been able to make sense of. And across the city, things have reached a stage where every time one revisits a colony after a long time, one finds an unfamiliar panoply of roundabouts, detours and underpasses. Delhi is constantly shifting, it’s practically fluid. It’s unnerving for those of us who have fixed memories of its streets as they once used to be. And when those memories count among the earliest impressions of one’s childhood, it’s terrifying.

Often, passing by a construction site, my thoughts turn to the workers toiling night and day on these things. Perhaps, sometime in the distant future, the children or grandchildren of the luckier among them will move on to better things; maybe, 30-40 years from now, they’ll point to one of these superstructures and marvel that their parents/grandparents had a hand in building them.

And then I think: maybe the simple, flat roads that I have such strong memories of, maybe those were laid down decades ago by the ancestors of the workers now toiling on the flyovers. It’s natural enough for the future to be built on the bones of the past, but as we progress on it’s sad to think of all the people who put so much of their lives into creating roads, avenues and landscapes that today exist mainly in childhood memories.

Ranji, Maharajah of Connemara

Have just finished reviewing Anne Chambers’ Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara, a whimsical but interesting account of a lesser-known phase of K S Ranjitsinhji’s life - the time he spent in Ireland near the end of his life. Am putting it down here.

Sidenote: around a year and a half ago, I reviewed Mario Rodrigues’ Batting for the Empire, which analysed Ranji’s political life, complete with much bemoaning that he batted for the British Raj during India’s independence struggle. When I read Rodrigues’ book, I was unsatisfied with that argument, though I wasn’t confident enough then to articulate it in my review. It seemed to me presumptuous of the author to assume that Ranji - a prince in British India, who had been educated in England as a subject of the Raj - had some sort of natural patriot’s responsibility to the idea of a free India. It was too revisionist a view, I thought, also too grounded in the kind of patriotic sentimentality that is a way of life in India (the "Mera Bharat Mahan" bleat - which lasts until one’s religion or caste or state comes under threat!)

But, too-aware of my own unconventional take on these things, I thought it best not to mention any of this in that review. (Besides, I didn’t know enough about the political scenario in 1920s India and didn’t want to put foot in mouth.) Then, a week or so later, Ashok Malik reviewed the book for the Sunday Express and said many of the things I’d wanted to.

Anyway, have managed to incorporate some of that in the review I’ve just finished. Here it is:

Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara; by Anne Chambers

The name Ranji conjures up two images: the first, that of a lithe batsman who lit up England’s hallowed cricketing grounds in the early 20th century with a manner of play that suggested "Oriental mysticism" to many observers; the next, a somewhat portly maharajah who was firmly on the side of Empire at the height of India’s independence struggle. What the name doesn’t evoke -- unless you’re the great-grandchild of someone who lived in Ballynahinch Castle, Connemara circa 1925 -- is the picture of a supple-wristed Indian fishing for trout on the west coast of Ireland.

But that’s the side of the man Anne Chambers is interested in, and her new book is a refreshing change from the typical biography. Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara is, in the main, concerned with an unchronicled aspect of Prince Ranjitsinhji’s life: his acquisition of a castle in this Irish district, where he spent a large part of his final years.

This thread begins with Ranji’s enigmatic decision, in 1924, to acquire a home in Ireland. No entirely satisfactory explanation is given, though the prince joked that he was doing it to get away from acquaintances who "were eating him out of house and home." For her part, Chambers quotes a passage from Thackeray ("how would you rejoice but to have but an hour’s sport in Derryclare or Ballynahinch...") to help explain the attraction of the place for Ranji. She also indicates that he was enchanted by the easy familiarity of the Irish people -- they reminded him, he said (not entirely convincingly), "of the warmth of heart and generous hospitality of my own peasantry in my own country".

And there was the fishing. Ranji spent most of his time here angling for trout and salmon, relaxing in the company of close friends, touring the countryside (about which the author gets almost embarrassingly descriptive: "empty moorlands speckled with saffron gorse...the golden thatch of whitewashed cottages...the ribs of lazy potato beds") and presiding over local sports events. It was his retreat of choice when he wanted to escape the politics of his homeland.

Given the story’s focus, it must be said that the book takes a little too long to get to Connemara. For the first 70 pages or so, Chambers treads ground extensively covered elsewhere: Ranji’s early life (including the comically controversial circumstances of his adoption by Vibhaji, prince of Nawanagar), his cricket and his politics. But though this section of the book is superfluous, it isn’t completely without merit. There is, for instance, a certain charm in Chambers’ faltering attempts to describe the game -- a charm that would be missing from the writing of a more seasoned (and probably jaded) cricket writer.

I’m not sure if Dr W G Grace has ever been described with such guilelessness elsewhere: "He had a wide, flowing beard and a stern, though not unkind, face; he was light on his feet like many large men, and had the reputation of being a good dancer." And in her description of Ranji’s most famous stroke, Chambers doesn’t take the easy way out by using timeworn jargon; she actually describes the stroke, explaining in layman’s terms how it differs from textbook cricketing shots. One senses here an upfrontness in the writing that permeates to other sections of the story as well. This honesty makes up for the book’s flaws -- its uneven structure, the sometimes dull, distanced writing and the drawing of oversimplistic parallels and contrasts (between colonialism in India and in Ireland; between Ranji and M K Gandhi as young students in England).

One might, of course, ask: why care? Why is it such a big deal that K S Ranjitsinhji, the contours of whose life were defined by wristy flicks on cricket grounds and later by political intrigues in boardrooms, had a good time fishing and lazing along the Irish coast in the last years of his life? The answer: well, because the supposedly less significant aspects of a public figure’s life reveal much in their own ways. An intimate, less-heard story, unencumbered by larger socio-cultural resonances, is likely to provide glimpses of the real person behind the myth.

We already know, or think we know, the "important" things about Ranji. He was the first great cricketer of Indian origin, more relevantly one of the first players to take batting beyond the MCC coaching manuals. We know too of the supposed "irony" of his life: India’s major domestic cricket tournament is named for him despite the fact that he batted for the British Raj during India’s freedom struggle. (Mario Rodrigues’ Batting for the Empire, published last year, lamented that Ranji turned his back on his country during the independence struggle; but this is a spurious argument, built on the sentimental assumption that a man who had lived his life as a prince under colonial rule somehow had a natural patriot’s responsibility to the idea of an independent, republican India.)

Those, anyhow, are the legends, all well-documented. Chambers’ book steps outside them; she shows us a man who lived in the public glare but who found a measure of peace in a private arena, near the end of a conflicted life where he was expected to be too many different things to different people. This is an unusual, graceful book that casts a close eye over parts that most conventional biographies lightly graze. More such writing, on other famous personalities, would be welcome.

When I type my masterpiece...

Just espied this quote on Zigzackly; it puts blogging in perspective.

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually produce a masterpiece. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.- Eyler Coates

Philip Roth and The Plot Against America

Early October: After days of haunting Midland’s book store in the evenings, I finally get my hands on Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Have to shell out Rs 800 for it, but never mind. Reach home, open the book and a shiver passes up and down my spine as I read the first sentence: "Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear." Excellent opening line. Not polite and friendly in the "Call me Ishmael" vein but frisson-inducing, especially if you get the association of the word "presides" (in the book’s brilliantly imagined alternate world, the anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh becomes US president in 1940).

Pulse racing, I prepare to move to sentence two, when fellow Roth-ist Shougat appears. He is penurious. Needs Plot for a self-indulgent, special Roth page for his paper. Has a cocker spaniel expression, and so I pass the book over, knowing I won’t see it again for a month. (And that if he doesn’t leave it in an auto, which is what he does to cellphones.)

A month and a half later: have finished The Plot Against America and surprisingly, it took just a day to get through. Surprising because, much as I love Philip Roth, I generally take a very long time to finish his books. It isn’t that the writing is difficult, but there’s so much to absorb, each page brimming with so many thought-provoking ideas and arguments, all expressed in the most passionate, forceful prose and through the most complex characters. I get easily saturated by a Roth novel and have never been able to read two consecutively; in fact, I usually have to give myself a couple of months after finishing one and before moving on to another. This is especially true of his work of the past decade, his later books have been increasingly ambitious, and demand much of the reader.

But somehow, The Plot Against America was an easier read. This could be because Roth was writing from the perspective of a frightened young Jewish boy (himself, aged 7 to 9, in Lindbergh’s America) and so tried to be simpler, more direct in his writing; the book is certainly more conversation-driven than his other recent novels have been. It may also be because I was able to relate a little more to the historical elements of the story, knowing whatever I did about Lindbergh, Roosevelt, the Nazis and the Second World War.

Just before starting this book, I was discussing Roth with a friend who opined that "the man is incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence". Now this is the type of hyperbolic critspeak one usually takes with a pillar of salt, but it stuck in my mind this time, and so when I got around to reading the book I found myself actually examining each individual sentence in whole passages. My friend wasn't far off the mark.

More seriously, it’s utterly fascinating how Roth takes a genre that almost demands gimmickry from a writer, and bends it entirely to his own will; without any fuss, he uses the alternative history device as a mere framework for one of his most heartfelt, most honest stories. The stroke of genius here is to build the hypothesis around his own real childhood and his own real family, and to interweave (I assume) a few real events with the very different direction his and his family’s life might have taken if things had (even if very briefly) been otherwise. But at no point does Roth go overboard with the "what ifs" -- this is a realistic narrative, written as a particularly skilful autobiography. And his unparalleled empathy as a writer -- his ability to get beneath the skin of very different types of people -- is intact. (Empathy might seem a strange word to use for someone who memorably wrote, in American Pastoral, that "life isn’t about getting people right, it’s about getting them wrong, and then getting them wrong again, and then, after careful reconsideration, getting them wrong all over again." -- but then Philip Roth’s brand of empathy resides in precisely such observations.)

Philip’s father, his mother, his elder brother Sanford (who falls under the sway of the Lindbergh regime’s "Just Folks" programme, seemingly well-intentioned but really aimed at subsuming the Jewishness of American Jews), his embittered cousin Alvin and his own precocious child-self: these are the central characters of The Plot..., and they are all vivid and many-dimensional. But with the touch of a master Roth brings alive even his more peripheral creations. his aunt Evelyn and her fiance, the influential Rabbi Bengelsdorf, whose endorsement legitimises Lindbergh’s election campaign; Philip’s classmate, the pathetic, lonely Seldon, and his mother who once showed gentleness and patience to young Philip back when the worst thing that could ever befall him was being accidentally locked inside a bathroom; a giant of a new Italian neighbour who gives Mr Roth a gun and explains how to use it: "You pulla trig".

It’s remarkable how, even with the reader’s knowledge of what really happened, Roth manages to invoke dread: one feels afraid for Roosevelt, the boy’s childhood hero,.when it becomes obvious that he’s in danger of losing his bid for a third presidential term. And the arguments and counter-arguments are so complexly presented that, even with one’s historical knowledge of the Nazis’ heinous anti-Semiticism, it’s possible to briefly wonder if Philip’s father isn’t a little overwrought, even ‘ghettoised’, in the extremeness of his hatred for the Lindbergh regime. There is nothing simplistic about Roth’s approach to people and events, even when he tries his hand at what some people might deprecatingly call historical fantasy.

Roth is 71 years old now and - though I know I’ve blogged on this before -- the prolificity and quality of his output in the past decade has been staggering. Next year, he will become the third living American writer to have his work published in a definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes comprising this set will be published in 2013; Roth will turn 80 that year, but judging from his recent output, he won’t be making the archivists’ job easy.

Shakespeare on Dravid

That Will Shakespeare was one foresighted dude! Sensing that centuries hence I would need a couple of clever lines for my blog to describe Rahul Dravid’s dismissal on Day 5 of the Kanpur Test (after ensuring, painfully, that the match would be drawn), he skilfully wrote the following:

Wall: Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so;
And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.

-- from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 3

Cricket stats and false perceptions

Was looking in zombie-like fashion at the television screen inside which South Africa (my least-favourite cricket team) were batting, when a statistic flashed that I found very surprising: in Tests in calendar year 2004, England have scored at a better run-rate (3.56 per over) than even Australia (3.47). That might seem a trivial difference, but it’s actually quite substantial given the thousands of runs each team has scored over many hundreds of overs this year.

Some of this has to do with England’s great success rate (12 Tests, 11 wins, easily the best among all teams) this year but I’m sure it’s also because many of the pitches they played on were strokeplay-friendly (what bears this out is that West Indies - against who England played eight Tests this year – have the second best run-rate, 3.51, despite their terrible success record overall).

Though I’m happy to doff my non-existent hat to England’s Test showing this year, I’ve always felt certain that Australia would - and by some margin – top any list of run-rates in the past 10 years at least. Anyway, the point is, I was very surprised by the stat, and equally surprised about being taken unawares. My interest in numbers means that I’ve usually been a few steps ahead of most cricket-mad friends in these things, but guess this shows one can never really get a proper hold on cricket statistics. There’s often such a disparity between perception and reality (or at least the reality indicated by stats). Have discussed this with Shamya; we’ve often shaken our heads in disbelief, for instance, when calendar year statistics for a period when Tendulkar was supposed to be woefully out of form have shown him topping the batting averages. It’s very odd, almost as if some cricketing imp has inserted his own mischievous changes in Wisden’s backpages after the fact. I wonder...

Whorism in film writing

Probably shouldn’t be writing this blog at all (indiscreet + not very ethical, given that I’m a sometimes-professional film reviewer myself), but couldn’t let the topic pass without saying at least something. Entire chunks – whole sentences – of Nikhat Kazmi’s review of Shark Tale in yesterday’s Sunday Times of India are lifted from Roger Ebert’s review for the Chicago Suntimes. (Just one sample: "Strange, too, that the movie’s value system seems to come from The Godfather, a study in situational ethics that preferred good gangsters with old-fashioned family values to bad gangsters who sold drugs.")

And where an attempt is made to alter the original text in a small way, here’s what results -
Original: The mob is ruled by Don Lino (voice by Robert De Niro, channelling Marlon Brando)...
Copy: The mob is ruled by Don Lino (voice by Robert De Niro, AKA Marlon Brando)...

A distraught Shougat called early on Sunday morning to read bits of both reviews out to me; he’s reviewing the film himself, and says he’ll purge himself of the irritation by referencing the Ebert review (in quote marks) himself and then arguing against it. Don’t quite agree with that approach, but I understand how he feels about the subject.

I’ll clarify that I have no delusions about the quality of film criticism in most of our newspapers/magazines, or the competence of those behind it – but one can always be surprised in new and terrible ways. For years I’ve gritted my teeth at the stultifying levels of ignorance on view on the front pages of the supplements of the most widely read newspapers in the country. The triflingness, the superficiality. I’m not talking so much about reviews here – there’s nothing wrong with opinion pieces, if they are reasonably well-argued (and assuming they aren’t lifted from somewhere else in the first place). But the lack of respect for basic facts - even in the past few years, with the Internet mollycoddling all of us – is abysmal. (And don’t get me started on the laziness in the use of terminology. My oldest peeve – dating back to when I was maybe 12 – is the use of ‘Hollywood’ as a generic term for every non-Indian movie; example Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood being included in a list headed "Hollywood movies based on Macbeth" a few months ago – this was when Maqbool was released.)

The inside buzz is that many of the foreign-movie reviews in most of our n’papers are dedicatedly compiled by interns from various websites, and it shows. (Actually, with the half-baked, ignorant nonsense that emerges when some of these ‘writers’ do attempt to produce something out of their own heads, unaided, I thank heaven for whoever invented plagiarism.) But this is the first time I can recall something being so blatantly, so cynically lifted word for word from another piece. Does this mean our reviewers have become completely apathetic about their job, about whether their readers are interested at all? I’m not sure. Maybe we do get the film writing we deserve.

'Vegan insomnia'

Check this link. If all letters to the editor were this entertaining, who would need to read the rest of the magazine?

The Idea of Perfection - review

The one-hour-20-minute review I was boasting about yesterday:

The Idea of Perfection; by Kate Grenville

I was arm-twisted by my books editor into writing this review on a two-hour deadline, so it was just as well that only hours earlier I had met author Kate Grenville for a profile, during her literary tour to India. The interview provided nice insights into the genesis of this novel, which, against all expectations, won Britain’s Orange Prize in 2001.

The Idea of Perfection opens with a quote by Leonardo Da Vinci: "An arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength." Grenville came across this quote while researching bridges for a project she was working on; she was, in her own words, "struck by how well it applies to human relationships, where two people, each with his or her own flaws, come together in such a way that one’s weaknesses are absorbed by the other’s strengths." This idea provided Grenville with the seeds of a story that would have a real (timber) bridge at its centre but would also be about metaphorical bridges; about the ways in which relationships develop between the unlikeliest of people.

It’s to the author’s credit that she takes this premise -- which, in theory, is vaguely interesting but not, one might think, enough to build an entire novel on -- and executes it as well as she does. Characterisation is the great strength of her book, which gives us (at least) three completely believable people (and one very believable dog). There are, first, the ‘arches’, Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage, who come to the small town of Karakarook for conflicting reasons: he is an engineer, here to supervise the tearing down of an old bridge that has outworn its usefulness, she a museum curator who is advocating its value as a tourist attraction.

Douglas and Harley are natural adversaries but, as they discover to their surprise, there are ways in which they complement each other. They have unhappy pasts and are outcasts in different ways, misfits both in this setting as well as in the cities they have come from. Douglas can’t relate to other people ("he did not know how you got to be a Chook Henderson. He had known them in the schoolyard. It seemed to come naturally to them") while Harley spends most of the book in the company of a mongrel who she can’t shake off.

The third protagonist is Felicity Porcelline (Grenville has a proclivity for Dickensian tongue-in-cheek-ness when it comes to naming her characters) and her story is in some ways the most interesting of all, providing as it does a counterpoint to Douglas and Harley’s. Felicity is a banker’s wife with an idea of perfection that goes beyond mere fastidiousness: her floor is clean enough to eat off, she never forgets to moisturise before going to bed and, hilariously, when cleaning her kitchen, she remembers that "a cockroach can live on a grain of sugar for a whole month. That was how careful you had to be." And even when she transgresses propriety by having an affair with the local butcher, her first observation is: "it was an interesting fact that a naked person did not look untidy."

Grenville worked as a documentary film editor for a few years in the 1970s and claims that this had an effect on her writing: "I still write out individual scenes first and then draw a story out from them." This shows most clearly in the chapters involving Felicity, whose story at times seems removed from the central narrative but who in fact provides it with an important reference point. "If you have two things that are independently strong, they don’t need each other," says the author. But Felicity’s strength, her self-dependence, is also her crutch, and in a sense she is worse off than the "weak" Douglas and Harley.

The author’s grounding in film comes across at other times too, particularly in the way she shifts between her characters’ viewpoints, and her strikingly visual descriptions -- the image of footprints in damp sand near the bridge, for instance. There’s nothing dramatically or obviously Australian about her writing; the style is elegant and lucid (for comparison, the other Australian novel I was reading this week was her fellow literary tourist Tim Winton’s cult classic Cloudstreet, which is full of the earthiest colloquialisms). But in the novel’s concerns with the conflict between the past and the present, there is a strong sense of a country with an ambivalent attitude to its own chequered history -- of a land trying to get on with the business of being brisk and modern while at the same time struggling with the shadow of its past. This is nicely encapsulated in Douglas’s first reaction on seeing the old Bent Bridge: "Knocking down old timber bridges was not his favourite job. He liked them, the innocent clumsy structure of them, the way the wood developed personality in its old age, although as a professional he could see how inefficient and over-engineered their structure was."

Both Australia and India have a large body of writing that has attempted -- sometimes self-consciously, but often with success -- to shrug off the colonial legacy and find its own distinct voice. For that reason, among others, there is much in Oz literature that should be of interest to Indian readers, and hopefully the recent launch of high-profile Australian novels here will open the floodgates. Grenville’s gentle, perceptive book about people struggling with themselves and with their heritage is a very welcome entry point.

Shameless boast: speed-reviewing

Speed-reading a book because of deadline constraints is one thing, speed-writing a review quite another. Have just written a 920-word book review in a little over an hour, and that too 1) completely unprepared, 2) on a production day, with lots of other work (official work -- what I’m actually paid to do) pending, and 3) this I’m not proud about - having properly read only half the book and sped-read the rest.

Full story: had just returned to office after meeting the visiting Australian authors Kate Grenville and Tim Winton for a magazine profile. (Had a great time talking with them - more on that later.) Was settling down to ‘official’ work when books editor came up all flustered, asking if I had a review to give her - sudden drying up of backlog etc. Now, I could easily have said no but reviewers’ greed (combined with professional pride - I have a reputation in office for being ‘fast’, almost certainly a reference to my reviewing speed) got the better of me; so after making a few quick mental calculations I croaked a tentative, fearful y-e-e-s-s and got to work.

The general air of desperation meant I had the freedom to stretch reviewing norms and write about Grenville’s 2001 novel The Idea of Perfection. I had started this book last week, in preparation for today’s interview, and gotten halfway through it before time started running out (I also had to rush through Winton’s Cloudstreet). So had to do the speed-read thing (very, very, very annoying and unsatisfying). Still, what made me confident that I’d be able to write a half-decent review was my conversation with the author earlier in the day - had discussed the book with her at length. So wrote an atypical piece, interspersed with bits on the author, filed it - and a mere couple of hours later, here I am basking and blogging while my (official work) editor hollers that the pages aren’t getting done.

Will put the review here sometime soon, and maybe something on the author interviews.

Terrence Malick, and Badlands

Around halfway through Badlands, Terrence Malick’s beautifully filmed 1973 movie about two outlaws on the run across the plains of South Dakota and Montana, there’s a scene where the trigger-happy Kit (Martin Sheen) and his girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek) break into a large house and hold the wealthy owner and his maid hostage. The doorbell rings, Kit goes to answer it, his gun concealed behind his back, and at the door is an insurance agent (or someone of like vocation, someone who has an appointment with the house’s owner). Kit lies that the owner has the flu and can’t see anyone. The agent looks quizzically at this unfamiliar, denim-clad young man for a moment, seems about to say something but then thinks better of it; instead he asks Kit to give the man of the house a note from him and quickly scribbles one out. Kit takes it, they drawl g’day to each other in classic southerner style and the man leaves. End of scene.

I was blown away by the film when I watched it last week, but there was nothing about this scene that especially struck me. Then, a couple of days ago, I watched the 20-minute featurette that is one of the DVD add-ons, and learnt that the small role of the insurance agent was played by the film’s director, the reclusive Malick. Somehow, that changed things. Based on what little I know about Malick and my viewings of Badlands and his The Thin Red Line (1998), I suddenly saw his brief appearance in the movie as a microcosm of his approach to filmmaking: I think of him as a director who’s often bemused by what he sees and scribbles notes dedicatedly but remains on the whole content to observe rather than to judge or ask too many questions. Making strong, assertive statements isn’t what interests him.

Terrence Malick is regarded in some quarters as the J D Salinger of American film. What has prevented his being bracketed with the dynamic US directors who emerged in the early 1970s for an American New Wave – the "kids with beards", including Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma and Spielberg – is his reclusiveness and limited output: just three films in nearly 30 years (the third is 1978’s Days of Heaven). But then, in some cult/underground circles, his reputation is greater than any of those other, more prolific, more widely known directors. (Typically, Malick was unavailable for the DVD featurette, which includes interviews with the film’s stars, editor and art designer; they titled it "Absence of Malick"!)

His films are very difficult to categorise. (Many fans, I remember, were annoyed when The Thin Red Line was compared with Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. The two movies were released within a couple of months of each other and were both broadly war films -- but Thin Red Line was also concerned with conflicts at other levels: between individuals, families and other groups, and between man and his environment.) Malick is an auteur – monitoring and having the last say on every single aspect of the production process – and a genuine cinematic poet: to understand how, it’s best you watch one of his movies, experience firsthand what he does with editing rhythm, with the use of music and the interspersion of shots that don’t always seem to fit the context but which embellish his scenes, providing them with a beauty that’s all their own. Nature shots plays a big part in his movies.

Badlands art director Jack Fisk spoke in the featurette about a Malick trademark: cutting away at a key dramatic moment to a character who is part of the mise-en-scene but not directly concerned with the proceedings. "It’s his gentle way of saying that however important and engrossing this central story might seem, life goes on for other people," said Fisk. That detachment is in evidence in Badlands, which belongs to the genre of other landmark films from the late-1960s/early-1970s like Bonnie and Clyde and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us but differs markedly from them in treatment. The film doesn’t judge, defend or provide explanations for the behaviour of its youthful protagonists. It just watches them with quiet fascination; it chronicles the lives of two people who feel alienated from society and go off on a ride together, shooting a few people along the way. And it has a gentleness and grace about it that seems to be completely at odds with its subject matter. There are so many beautiful sequences it’s hard to keep track of them. My favourite: a 40-second montage of Holly’s house burning down as she and Kit run off together (after he’s killed her father), complete with a gentle, symphonic soundtrack. Fire has never looked so beautiful; the flames seem to be dancing to the music.

The closest thing there is to a moral commentary comes with the last two lines spoken in the film. Kit’s been arrested and sentenced to death. He’s being flown to the jailhouse and Holly (who’s been given six months) is with him in the plane. There’s some banter and the police officer sitting next to him says, "You’re quite an individual, Kit." Kit smirks and quips, "Think they’ll take that into consideration?" Cut to Holly, smiling slightly and looking out the plane windows; and we get a beautiful last shot of the clouds outside, as evocative and mysterious as the badlands Kit and Holly drove through during their escape.

Yup, that Terrence Malick is quite an individual himself.

(P.S. had written this and was about to post when I saw this piece on Malick in the Senses of Cinema Great Directors database. Well worth reading, but only if you’ve seen at least one of his films first.)

Left-arm drive, and wedding season

Left arm is swollen somewhat, an injury acquired when I slipped and fell in trying to kick my mother’s pomeranian on Diwali night. Bloody waxed floors. Thumb was purple for hours. On the whole though, it was just the kind of injury I like best – enough pain to make you feel like something of consequence has happened ("because when it hurts you, you feel al-l-i-i-v-e" crooned Bono with feeling) but not so much that you have to start contemplating doctors and x-rays and such.

Where it’s inconvenient is while driving, a throbbing left arm being a very undesirable thing in Delhi’s wretched stop-start traffic where you have to shift between gears around 40 times a minute. Driving will be unbearable for the next few days anyway. It’s Trade Fair time at Pragati Maidan, which is along the route I usually take to office. And now the wedding season commences: the evening streets will be thronged by cavalcades of elephants and horses and idiot Punjabi revellers (okay, so they’re not all Punjabis but traumatic childhood memories of forced wedding attendance have fixed the stereotype firmly in my mind). Delhi Times reported recently that 14,000 weddings will take place in the city on November 28, so I suppose it isn’t much of a coincidence that I know two people who’re getting married (not to each other) on that day.

Anyway, what it adds up to is that there’s a good case for staying in office very late to avoid the evening rush. Expect to see lots of blogs posted on the night of the 28th, while the other Punjus are doing the balle balle.

The chair as masseuse

Remember Enid Blyton’s magic flying chair, which grew little wings on the sides if you rubbed it with ointment, and then took you to the Land of Chocolates or Do as You Please? Well, that was nothing compared to the one I spent five blissful minutes in today - a massage chair imported from Singapore and belonging to the same family as the one that was designated an Invention of the Year by Time magazine in 2003. When this gentleman who I’d just finished interviewing (and whose company retails these things in India) showed me the chair and told me what it was, I looked at it condescendingly before agreeing to try it out. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t a customised spine rub that would put any flesh-and-blood masseuse to shame. This chair is incredible! It’s human! Much better than human! (It squeezed my calves in a friendly-yet-firm, familiar-yet-unintrusive way.) But it costs at least Rs 2 lakh which means I might have to sell all my books, except the Blytons.

When computers and robots(?) and things came in, there was much weeping that they would take jobs away from people. Now that chairs are threatening to do the same, I think even those of us who aren’t masseuses should quit our jobs and settle down for a good back rub.

Whitbread 2004

The shortlists for the 2004 Whitbread Book Awards have been announced. One of the interesting things about this year’s contenders is that, for the first time, the best novel category sees a face-off between the year’s Booker Prize and Orange Prize winners (Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Andrea Levy’s Small Island respectively). See this link for more.

Not sure about the best novel contenders but am rooting for Susanna Clarke in the best first novel category.

List of previous Whitbread winners here: probably shouldn’t admit this, but the only ones I’ve read are Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986) Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003).

Dinner with a cretin

Had a nice dinner with three friends on Saturday night, despite the presence of a Cretinous Fifth who spent the large part of the evening serving up anti-Pakistani statements garnished with backhanded compliments. Excerpts:

Cretin: I went to Pakistan for the Lahore match in March. Great fun, guys. So clean. The women are so beautiful. I came back feeling only 20 per cent anti-Paki.
Rest of Us: Er…vis-à-vis what?
Cre: Huh?
RoU: How much per cent were you anti-them when you went there?
Cre (proudly): Oh, 100 per cent. I hate them, maann!

******
Cre: You know, last day of my trip, I was so touched, I told this elderly Paki woman, I said to her, you know aunty, I’ve learnt that many Pakis are good people.
RoU: Not in exactly those words surely? It’s a pejorative term.
Cre: Pardon?

******
Cre: Nice trip. But one thing bad, you know, in the plane, we were travelling by PIA, and there was this very distinct Muslim smell. You guys know what I mean, right?
RoU: Hey, isn’t there something good on TV? Someone get the remote, quick!

The diversion wasn’t successful, for there was an India-Pak match on TV, and Pak were heading for a win, which elicited groans of anguish from the cretin. 35 to win off 32 balls with wickets in hand, and Inzamam strokes a beautiful cover drive for four. It was the sort of thing that cricket-lovers live for. In that split second, this clumsy, hulking bear of a man who all of us so love to make fun of, this slothful giant turned into an artist, giving us something that had the same effect as a glorious turn of phrase by one’s favourite author, or a few seconds of cinematic brilliance, or a musical crescendo.

What did the cretin say? "Fat bastard, now those fuckers are gonna win!"

And it wasn’t even a match of any consequence. It was nothing but an onanistic exercise by the BCCI (to celebrate its 75th anniversary or something) in front of an audience of millions. Then friends wonder why I’m so strident about some of India’s "cricket fans"…

My Diwali blog

The man was clutching a torn, faded imitation of a tweed coat around himself. That, and the fact that he had a moustache, is about the only clear memory I have of him. He was probably middle-aged but one never knows, poor people usually look much older than they are. (Besides, how do you define “middle aged” for people who live in makeshift slums or beneath flyovers, unsure if they’re going to survive the next 24 hours?)

For the rest, imagination has combined with idealism to fill in some details: he seemed a decent sort, my mind’s eye tells me; he had a scared look on his face; he shuffled guiltily two steps back each time someone turned his way, aware that he might be impinging on an intimate family celebration; he was shivering in the cold. I have no idea if any of this is exactly true, or if it’s just my mind playing tricks on me.

What I do know is that we were standing around that Diwali night (it was either 1988 or 1989, just a couple of years after we’d moved to Saket) and tracing outlines in the air with phooljadis (sparklers), just four of us – my mother, her friend, the friend’s son and myself. Diwali had never been a rambunctious affair for us, we’d never been into either bombs or rockets and I think I’d already more-or-less outgrown the other, flashier types of crackers – the chakras, for instance, those insane, whirring concentric circles of light, or the fountain-like anars. But we still enjoyed our brief phooljadi ritual.

That night I had dimly been aware – or is even this retrospective? – of this shadowy figure who wasn’t part of our group, somewhere on the periphery of our vision. It was no big deal – we were in a fairly public spot, just outside the house, and neighbours and their servants were walking about close by. But then my mother or her friend – I forget who – said something that stuck with me: “Poor man, he’s standing near us because he wants to warm his hands.” It was then that I noticed him for the first time, really looked at him.

Our colourful, ephemeral, inconsequential sparklers playing bonfire to a poor man trembling in the Delhi winter! The thought was so absurd I probably would’ve dismissed it outright if it hadn’t been said by a figure of authority. The effect that simple remark had on me was no different than if I’d been told that those Toblerone chocolates our relatives living abroad brought on their visits – in their instantly recognisable pyramidal packets, such a cherished treasure back in the pre-liberalisation days – that those chocolates might have been wolfed down by a poor man not for taste but for nourishment, because he had no other food.

In a way, this incident may not have been such a big deal. I would’ve grown out of Diwali eventually, probably within the next three or four years; and most of my friends today feel the same distaste for crackers (not just the noisy ones) as I do. But what happened that night certainly expedited things for me – it led to an almost-violent break with the festival and the celebrations. The next year I just didn’t feel like going down for the phooljadis – it was that simple.

In the years that followed, other factors came into play. Abhilasha, who’s into festivals a lot more than I am, mentioned recently that the one thing she hated about Diwali was the effect the noise had on her cats, and that immediately reminded me of how terrified Kittu would be on each of the eight Diwalis he was with us. I suppose back then, that contributed to my abjuring the festival. And then of course, with time, I gradually became distanced from the whole “beautiful Indian culture and tradition” thing. And from the idea of people getting together on a specified day, like so many automatons decked up in finery, conducting pujas, saying sweet things, wishing each other prosperity for the year ahead, and then getting back the next day to the more practical business of conniving, gossiping and backbiting their way through life.

But all these other factors notwithstanding, a lot of it does, I suppose, go back to that man in the torn coat all those years ago. I’ll never be sure how much, but if the incident is still stuck in my mind I suppose it must have had some effect.

Hitchcock’s fetishes, and Pauline Kael

Fascinating, and meticulously put together, photo study of Alfred Hitchcock’s fetishes - some of the visual motifs that recurred in his films - on the Bright Lights Film Journal website. Check all the links. There are some omissions - I was surprised by the exclusion, from the "Hands" section, of the image of Anthony Perkins briefly extending his palm out ("I wish I could curse her") towards Janet Leigh during the parlour conversation in Psycho - but this is one of the more interesting collection of Hitchcock images I’ve seen on the WWW.

Incidentally, I came across the link after reading another piece by the author, Alan Vanneman, on film critic Pauline Kael. Very opinionated, very interesting. Much of what Vanneman says is debatable (why shouldn’t a film critic be inconsistent in her opinions over a reviewing career?) but he rightly points out that people picked up on Pauline Kael’s energy and not her specifics. I remember when Quentin Tarantino interviewed Brian DePalma for the journal Projections, both men agreed that "you could go on disagreeing with Kael’s opinions, but you could never argue with the passion with which she wrote about movies".

Perils of being a film purist

Just some passing thoughts on what it means to be a purist when it comes to watching films, and to what extent that is even feasible living here. This topic has been sparked by the re-release of a computer-colorised Mughal-e-Azam. I posted a diatribe against colorisation a few weeks ago but discussing it with Shamya and Ajitha the other day I realised that I was in fact excited about the prospect of watching this film on the big screen - and if this is the only way to do it, well so be it.

Must clarify though that I don’t usually feel that way. My attitude has traditionally been hidebound: if you can’t watch the film as it was made and intended to be seen, don’t see it at all. I first realised how strongly I felt about the subject when Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful was released in halls in Delhi a few years ago, in dubbed form. Repeatedly, friends in Britannica exhorted me to accompany them for screenings and repeatedly I refused (my popularity ratings in the EB office were slipping at the time; I’d distributed sweets when Australia won the Mumbai Test in 2001). This wasn’t obduracy-for-show; I honestly felt no desire to watch a movie that had had its original soundtrack removed. [Note: most people in India are very scared of subtitles, and dubbing is sometimes the only way a foreign-language movie gets commercial release here.]

This is where my viewpoint diverges from that of S and A. They are more dedicated movie-watchers than I am (regular VCD renting, etc) these days and, excepting an irrational love for Adam Sandler films, they generally have good judgement. But on this subject there’s conflict: I consider it no great loss if one has to miss a "must-watch" movie on principle, there are always hundreds of other options.

Having said that, the idea of a 'principle' inevitably leads one into grey areas. How, for instance, does one reasonably define "watching a film as it was meant to be seen"? I think it was Leonard Maltin who said that watching something like Lawrence of Arabia on a small screen should be made a punishable offence. Well, I have the DVD of that film.

Anyway, like I said before, none of this applies to Mughal-e-Azam: it’s far too rare an event to be passed up. Incidentally the film is also getting the aural treatment. Like Shamya, I’m wondering what Dolby might do for Prithviraj Kapoor’s bellow...

Cloud Atlas review

Here’s my Cloud Atlas review as promised. Was tempted to include some smart self-deprecating commentary, but when you start reviewing your own reviews just a day or so after writing them, you know you’re firmly on the road to Unwellville. So here it is, minus any asides.

Cloud Atlas; by David Mitchell

More than once, it seems like David Mitchell’s Booker-shortlisted Cloud Atlas wants to defeat a reader’s attempts to crack it. Opening the novel, you find yourself reading the diaries of Adam Ewing, an American notary in the Chatham Islands circa 1850. The writing is in the turgid style characteristic of the period and difficult to wade through, especially if you’re unprepared for it. But gradually you overcome that and start to get involved with the tale, which concerns the subjugation of one island tribe by another and Ewing’s growing friendship with a doctor who may have sinister motives.

Then, forty pages on, the story is abruptly cut off -- midsentence, no less -- and the novel moves to a second, unrelated chapter, an epistolary narrative concerning a louche young composer’s exploits in a chateau near Bruges, Belgium in the 1930s. Another forty pages on, to a pulp-style thriller set in 1975, and so on, until what you have is six separate stories -- the final two science-fiction, the last set in an unspecified post-apocalypse future -- that follow a mirror-image pattern; after the last story ends, somewhere around the book’s middle, we get the missing second halves of the other narratives in backward chronology, so that Adam Ewing is Mitchell’s first man and his last.

This description should be enough to scare off anyone who’s looking for a casual read and yes, Cloud Atlas is very convoluted in parts. But it is also -- if you have the time, patience and energy for it -- a daringly ambitious work that is fascinating both for its construction and its narrative versatility. ("The devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost" says a character, referring ostensibly to a megalomaniacal world consuming itself, but equally to the structure of the book.)

The stories are all concerned, in different ways, with hegemony: with the circumstances that enable one set of people (race isn’t the only issue here) to exert dominance over another, and the resulting perpetuation of an unstoppable cycle of power and greed. Mitchell’s meticulous construction gives us pre-echoes, striking visual motifs (a rebel clone’s last testimony, with an image of her head preserved on an egg-shaped recording device before her execution, recalls the impaled organs of persecuted tribal folk in another of the stories) and repetitions in sentences and words. If you’re sufficiently involved with one of the narratives, this can be unnerving; you might occasionally stumble upon a phrase or an idea that reminds you of something similar you’ve read somewhere else, only to realise that it was from another section of the same book. Even when connections aren’t spelt out, there is a definite sense of these disparate stories calling out to each other across the centuries.

Though Mitchell is sometimes playful to the point of self-indulgence, he usually holds back enough to allow the reader to make inferences about the commonalties in the stories. And he’s clever enough to make his most explicit message-oriented statements in those parts of the book that are most difficult to read -- so that the language prevents it all from seeming too simplistic (example from the chapter "Sloosha’s crossing": "List’n, savages an’ Civilizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old’uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall").

Some bits don’t work. There are long, plodding passages and the stories don’t always tie into each other in the most convincing ways. (What’s with that comet-shaped birthmark?) Reduced to its ideas, this book isn’t all that remarkable. What’s much more interesting than Mitchell’s linking of his narratives so that they become part of an overriding theme is the way he switches between voices. At least two of the stories -- "Letters from Zedelghem" and "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" -- are perfectly realised comic novellas in their own right and "The Orison of Sonmi" is absorbing, challenging science-fiction. There is a seriously versatile writer at work here, and the fact that he knows it (the book is very show-offish in places) takes nothing away from his achievement.

This is the sort of novel that lends itself to inverse snobbery; it’s easy to make fun of it, to read bloated passages out to friends, to hold it up as an example of everything that’s wrong with Booker Prize contenders. But Cloud Atlas is something else too -- it’s an enormously ambitious work that isn’t afraid to risk overreaching itself; it often stumbles, recovers, falls again, picks itself up, brushes itself off and starts all over again; and in the midst of all this occasionally achieves things that would have been impossible if it hadn’t aimed so high.

Which, naturally, means this isn’t an unqualified endorsement. You need, first, to have a lot of time for intense, dedicated reading. And you’ll have to, at least temporarily, put aside any reservations you might have about ‘pretentious’ writing (yes, that’s subjective, but whatever your definition of the word it’ll apply to this book). You have to be willing to plough through bombast to get to the really good stuff. And even then, you might conclude that you admired it a lot more than you actually enjoyed reading it. Speaking for myself, having dealt with the whole behemoth, I’m going back to some of the individual stories. Reading them at one go might be more fun.

- November 2004

The monastery canteen

Visited the monastery canteen today, after a long, long time. This monastery is in Qutab Institutional Area, on a (roughly) crescent-shaped lane that runs behind the main road; lots of offices dot this lane, and a number of little dhabas too. I found out about the canteen when I was working in Britannica, a few buildings away, some years ago. Someone in office discovered it, raved about the walnut and chocolate cakes, and word spread; at least once every two weeks or so I’d saunter across during lunch hour for piping hot Maggi noodles with chunks of omelette, or maybe some thupka. After leaving EB I went there again a couple of times (it isn’t far from my house) but this evening was the first time in at least two years. I had an appointment in the vicinity, finished at 5.30 and had time to kill so thought I’d re-live a favourite old experience.

I started writing this aware that I was setting myself up for some platitudinal observations about the serenity, the feeling of well being in a place like this. But well, it really is like that, so what does one do. When you enter the main gate of the monastery, the guard sitting at the front desk just smiles benignly at you and looks bemused when you try to explain where you’re going: there’s no explanation required, walk right in. In the canteen itself, there’ll be people sitting around, in groups or individually, at various tables – but no one will look at you, subject you to the Gaze, none of the boorish intrusiveness that one is so accustomed to in public spaces. There are mostly foreign-exchange students (there was a blonde, Scandinavian-looking, poring over some notes at one table today), the kind who’ll occasionally look around timorously, happy to be left alone; but even those visitors who’ve just come in off Delhi’s mad streets, and who were likely swearing at fellow drivers a few minutes earlier, suddenly seem becalmed just because they are where they are.

There’s no artifice about the place and its people. The guard, the canteen-in-charge, the little boy who does the serving, the occasional monk whose eye you might catch - they all have gentle smiles on their faces, they all seem happy and content, and while that might sound frightfully vapid (it would to me if someone said it like that), you have to be there to know. It’s so unassuming, so matter-of-fact, so natural that one can’t ever be cynical about it. And Lucifer knows I try.

Have I said anything about how good the cakes (and the banana shake) are? Won’t. Last thing the place needs is a swoop of foodie journos ravaging it.

Telly tamasha: CID

All my friends look at me with astonished expressions when I tell them I don’t watch TV, but my stand has been vindicated. Stumbled upon something called CID on Sony TV last night and after watching 10 minutes of it decided that I must either end all my friendships or put my eyes out so I have a pretext for keeping the dubious tubious switched off.

CID was indescribable and so, in the best tradition of people who use that word, I’ll attempt now to describe it. It was set inside a palatial estate. Many murders had occurred (and kept occurring during the course of the show, which incidentally was in real time, a point accentuated by a digital clock in a corner of the screen). There were CID people including a shrill forensics woman who kept ordering the CID top dog around even as she repeatedly called him "Sirr, sirr..." There was a large family of hysterical, eye-rolling sorts who reacted to each fresh discovery of a body with "Oh my God, yeh kya ho raha hai??!" There were gunshots. There was a caterwauling son trying to stop the CID people from fingerprinting his bedridden father (the old man in turn rolled his eyes and moaned as if being fingerprinted ranked very high on the Physical Torture scale). There were CID small fry who shone their torches right into the eyes of a dying man as he tried to stutter out his last, crucial words. There was much, much else, too much for my weary mind to assimilate.

The USP of the show seemed to be that there was no cutting; it was filmed in one shot, with a tracking camera, like Hitchcock’s Rope or the Russian film Ark. (Without the brains.) But this makes it sound much more interesting than it was.

GSB, a writer-in-exile who still watches and commentates on television, tells me that this show has been around for nine years and is one of Sony’s most popular programmes. Ah well, what do I know of matters such. In sorrowful spite, I’m borrowing her column name for this blog.

My 9.55 AM top 10 list

Always interesting to look at the top ten lists on the Senses of Cinema website. These are submitted by film buffs/students/amateur filmmakers and provide insights into shifting trends in movie-viewing and criticism over the years. Unlike the Sight and Sound list published once every 10 years, this is updated with every issue and the site has a vote tally system; while Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Welles’ Citizen Kane have occupied positions one and two for at least three or four years now, I noticed on my last visit to the site that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has now moved into second place. Among other things, what this suggests is that people have stopped treating Kane as a sacred cow. (Though both Vertigo and 2001 are in danger of being over-sanctified now.)

It’s a spectacularly futile exercise preparing such lists, but it’s also such great fun. If I ever got around to it, I could never restrict myself to 10, and anyway the list might be wholly different from one day to the next (or from one minute to the next) So here’s my top 10 list as of November 8, 2004. Completely free-flowing, off the top of my head, with just one clause: no director included more than once (there would be at least four Hitchcocks otherwise).

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
Sholay (Ramesh Sippy)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)
The Empire Strikes Back (Irving Kershner/George Lucas)
Le Mepris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)
Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)
Carlito’s Way (Brian DePalma)

P.S. This is only the 9.55 AM list. Contact me again at 9.57.

P.P.S. I might try this more seriously sometime - maybe a top 100, with foreign-language/silent films in a separate category (because I believe they demand a completely different approach from the viewer). Let’s see.

Cousin Neal

Had dinner with my cousin last night; he’s here for a week, from London. We sort of discovered each other around this time last year – it might sound funny but that’s how it is – discovered each other as adults who got along well, independent of familial obligations. We had of course played and fought together as children, and during his previous visits we had met as (and surrounded by) family; but last December we went out for dinner a couple of days, just the two of us, and found ourselves talking a lot about general things, exchanging notes on parents’ idiosyncrasies and discovering we had much in common. Don’t know how it worked for him, but for me it was very pleasant largely because I spend as much of my time as possible avoiding family – I usualy keep away from visitors to the house, save for flashing grimaces that resemble polite smiles. So this was a nice, unlooked-for surprise, almost – how to say – heart-warming.

Neal’s a very well-balanced young man (shouldn’t be so avuncular, he’s only 10 months younger!), very cosmopolitan – he’s travelled widely, made friends of all shapes, sizes, colours and languages (as I discovered to my occasional befuddlement during my England visit earlier this year). And though he’s working, for reasons that have more to do with practicality than enthusiasm, in a bank, he has a strong creative side and spends a lot of his off-time with friends who are into films and film-making; he’s even acted in a couple of shorts, which he showed me when I stayed at his London flat. Had a good time on that trip.

Last night was fun too, but slightly different. For one, he had a friend with him, an enormous, burly – and very witty – Englishman. Secondly, we were at Olive, that elegant, expensive, refurbished-haveli restaurant and the food never completely took second place to the conversation. Still, we enjoyed ourselves poking fun at the place’s Moulin Rouge theme for Wednesday night. (Neal, on his fourth beer, to waiter: "So…that gentleman over there, with the Rod Stewart hairdo, is he meant to be Nicole Kidman?" Clueless waiter: "Sir, our staff are all wearing coloured wigs today, because it makes them look different.")

Neal and his friend had gone to Bangalore for a wedding earlier in the week, and they told me a hilarious story about their visit to "the least sleazy illegal underground joint ever – where bored (and fully dressed) schoolgirl-types just did some basic disco-style dancing, rather jigging, in front of potbellied men with lecherous expressions, and got rupee notes thrown at them." Uh-huh… missed that on my own B’lore visit last year. Anyway, he’s probably been to a lot more places in India than I have.

Won’t see him again for another year at least but, well, quality over quantity…

Writing contest, and Shanghvi’s drivel

Got this on email and had to share. Here’s the winning (?) entry of this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest (AKA Dark and Stormy Night Contest) run by the English Department of San Jose State University, wherein one writes only the first line of a bad novel.

"The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, 'You lied!’ "

What’s all the fuss about? I’d read that novel. Can’t be worse than Sidharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Last Song of Dusk (which was hailed as the Next Big Thing in Indian writing in English), which I reviewed earlier this year. Realise on rereading the review that I was probably trying to be too clever, but what the heck, having wasted so much of my time reading the wretched book I’m entitled to some self-indulgence. Hereunder is the review.

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The last sentence on page two of The Last Song of Dusk, the much-hyped debut novel by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, reads: "A weep gathered in her chest like the crest of a wave." This immediately set me thinking of Steve Martin’s delightful short story "Drivel", in which the narrator -- the publisher of the American Drivel Review -- trades in analogies of the sort "a tear marked her cheek, like a snail that has crept across white china".

"Drivel" was gloriously, deliberately cheesy. Dusk is, well, just drivel. It’s painfully obvious after a few pages that the funniest moments in this book weren’t intended to be so. (Still on the analogies, my personal favourite is "the air was bursting with tension, like the navel of a pregnant male sea horse".) The few actual attempts at humour, parody, or what you will, are laboured (e.g. the annoying anthropomorphising of the house Dariya Mahal, which "threw back its head and laughed…" and "would have slipped on its dancing shoes if it had had legs…"). But there’s some merriment to be found in the well-meant solemnity with which Shanghvi produces gems like: "Modesty trailed her as the most dignified of chaperones in her candlelight tryst with Destiny."

That Dusk is, at the very least, going to be derivative is obvious from an early moment where "several bees grow dizzy and promptly faint in mid-air" (because of the strong fragrance of the flowers worn by the heroine). Uh oh, you think, there’s the first nod to magic realism. Naturally, there’s more to follow. The lady in question is Anuradha Patwardhan, who, as the book opens, is leaving Udaipur for Bombay to marry Vardhmaan Gandharva, a doctor. Anuradha’s mother, who comes to see her off, is, we’re told, "a woman of altitude (sic)…slim but with pertinent parts of her biology eye-catchingly endowed and a certain gift of Song".

The capital S in Song commences a tradition that lasts the length of the book, where select words (which the author can presumably use to hint at Deeper Meaning) are subjected to the same treatment -- words like Joy, Desire, Death and, on one memorable occasion, even Quietness ("a puzzling Quietness had settled in him like a silverfish in a book").

To be unnecessarily kind, there is a point, early on, when despite all these stylistic irritants, one gets a sense of something readable -- of the kernel of what might turn into a promising story. Especially with the introduction of Anuradha and Vardhmaan’s precocious first child, Mohan, who demands a violin when he is two-and-a-half years old. There’s also a (very) briefly moving account of an Englishman who dies in Dariya Mahal while waiting for his lover, a Rajasthani prince -- thus relegating said mansion to haunted house status.

Unfortunately, none of the good parts lasts very long. The reader is assaulted, at all-too-regular intervals, by passages like: "She slides through the forest. Monkeys barking. His cantering paws crushing twigs. Blood on her neck. Gasping. Takes a right. Almost goes down a damned gorge. Out pours the moonlight she has bayed at and branches that whack her flat." Not to mention the repeated use of words like "clavicle" and "tumescent" (the latter used at one point to qualify the noun "teat"). And Dariya Mahal soon morphs into the book’s most annoying character, a house that is far too clever for its own good, or ours.

By the time the real protagonist, Nandini Hariharan, is introduced, ennui has thoroughly set in. Nandini is an orphaned cousin of Anuradha; the women in her family have a regrettable history of copulating with leopards ("Cat’s blood she had in her. Cats.") -- hence, one supposes, the sheepish-looking panther on the book jacket?

Nandini’s rise in art circles soon becomes the focus of the book, as the story gets increasingly confused and directionless, moving away from Anuradha and her estranged husband. Among her other achievements, Nandini tells M K Gandhi his loin cloth is "unbelievably sexy", smartly advises Virginia Woolf to "jump in the river or something" and attends parties frequented by the likes of "Stella Dimm, England’s first ever Tit Girl, who was shacking up at the Bella Vista with Sudipto Bhattacharya, author of the international bestseller The Mating Habits of the Hindoos, an updated version of the Kama Sutra, for which he had been awarded the prestigious Hooker Prize" (sic).

All this probably makes the book sound more interesting than it is. But there’s only so much fun that can be squeezed out of unintended humour, and I soon lost interest in these self-important characters and their lengthy discourses -- like the depressingly blah dialogues between Anuradha and her dying friend Pallavi that are so, so, obviously aimed at the western reader. ("Even love comes with its own season…and relationships with their own kismets. They start through us, Pallavi, and then love loves through us. Like the fruit that must fall from the bough if it is to carry its life into its next avatar.")

Since a review as dismissive as this one is open to charges of prejudice -- or at least to a blinkered view of what good writing should be like -- I’ve included as many passages from the actual novel as I could. My advice therefore is: take a quick look at those again, see if there’s something here you might fancy, and then decide for yourself whether you want to buy this book. If not, leave it to the silverfish.

-- May 2004

Nancy Drew's father

Very interesting piece from the New Yorker on Edward Stratemeyer, the man behind the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys syndicate. Hope the link works.
I still remember how shocked I was to discover that the first Hardy Boy campfire tales were written in the 1920s -- which in turn led to the understanding that the series wasn’t the product of one mind. (How could it be, when new casefiles were churned out every month even in the late 1980s.) Like most Hardy Boys addicts in school, I used to occasionally wonder how one author could be so prolific - before realising that the name ‘Franklin W Dixon’ (and ‘Carolyn Keene’ for Nancy Drew) was a front. (In a poll conducted for an issue of our school magazine, the putative Mr Dixon came in first by a huge majority in the "Favourite writer" category; I think Sidney Sheldon was second!)

PR, tolerable!

I’m pleased to report that I may have stumbled on the recipe for a Tolerable PR Person. I know I’ve already blogged obsessively about these creatures, but this is a view from the other end of the bridge – for I actually spent some decent time in the company of one today. This was, again, during a car drive along Gurgaon’s tortuous roads (which incidentally I’ve also blogged on before, meaning there might soon be nothing left for me to blog on). To my surprise, I didn’t have to reach for an oxygen mask once during this trip. So, based on above experience, here are some of the things PR people should do if they wish to become tolerable, at least to me:

Don’t genuflect; treat us as equals. ‘Us’ meaning journalists. Shake our hands, look us in the eye the way Doc Holliday might have regarded ol’ man Clanton at the OK Corral. Was it Churchill who said "Cats look down on us and dogs look up at us but pigs treat us as equals"? Well, I love cats, like pigs and just about tolerate dogs.

Don’t indulge a journo’s high-handedness (or what might appear to be high-handedness): while we were travelling, conversationally I expressed doubt about a claim the company had made in its press release. Now this sort of observation is usually the cue for PR people to throw themselves to their deaths from speeding vehicles, or at the least blubber senselessly about how they have poor families to support and so we should write a favourable story. This woman did neither: she just clucked her tongue, raised her eyebrows in exasperation, looked off-handedly out the window and remarked on what liars corporates are. Paradoxically, this had the effect of putting me at ease. I felt like I was talking to a real person.

Stop spamming needlessly. Even when you’re not interacting with them for a story, some PR people will send you messages on Mondays and Tuesdays saying "Hi! Hope you have a good week!", and then on Thursdays and Fridays saying "Hi! Hope you’ve had a good week, and have a good weekend!" Wednesdays are kind of lonesome. But it gets much worse when you are working with them. They’ll send you a message after the meeting, saying "Thanks for your valuable time. The client much appreciates" and if you don’t respond, they’ll call 10 minutes later asking if you got their message of thanks.

Be Bengali: this might sound facetious, but it’s a very effective trick. Unfortunately, Bongs are usually too intelligent to work in public relations – or, if not, at least intelligent enough to know that they shouldn’t work in public relations. My fellow traveller yesterday was an exception to the rule, and so it was a shubho trip.

Shake well, serve at room temperature.

Cloud Atlas revisited

Have finished David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, that occasionally-brilliant, often-frustrating/pretentious novel that just missed out on the Booker Prize this year. Now that I’m done, I can say that: one, I’m glad I saw it through, for it was quite an experience, and two, I can happily go several months, even years, without ploughing through another book like this. Life is too short, there are only a miserable 24 hours in each day etc etc.

This book’s reputation for being convoluted -- both structurally and in content -- is well deserved. But Cloud Atlas is also an enormously ambitious work that overreaches itself in places (a risk endemic to anything that’s enormously ambitious), falls on its face, recovers, falls again, picks itself up, brushes itself off and starts all over again; and in the midst of all this stumbling occasionally achieves things that would have been impossible if it hadn’t aimed so high in the first place. It’s very easy to be inversely snobbish about such books (I’ve often done it myself) but difficult to acknowledge and be graceful about the things they do accomplish. Cloud Atlas is the sort of novel it’s great fun to denigrate, and I did my share long before I had read a single page. The review blurbs put me off immediately (see here for samples); though it’s another matter that I had developed sympathy for the reviewers by the time I reached the end, for I’m no longer sure one can review this book using only simple words. (Of course, it’s wholly possible that Neel Mukherjee of the Times actually writes like that – but it’s equally possible that when he reached the last page of Cloud Atlas a part of him withered and died, to be replaced by another part that could trade only in words like "reverberations" and "assonances".)

Anyway, I’ll find out soon enough. Am planning to review the thing myself and if I succeed I’ll post it here when I’m done.

(P.S. As a reviewer, I took macabre delight in a passage where an enraged author tosses a critic -- who’s savaged his book -- off a 12th floor balcony and bellows: "SO WHO’S EXPIRED IN AN ENDING FLAT AND INANE QUITE BEYOND BELIEF NOW?" Naturally, those were the words the critic had used to describe the book’s ending!)

The Pamphlet Project

Himanshu Verma, the young director of the recently formed company Red Earth Creatives, is very interested in the historic link between coffee-houses and the development of literary forms. So there’s something apposite (and at the same time something very not) about our fixing on the Saket Barista as a meeting point to discuss Verma’s attempt to revive the pamphlet as a literary genre. Red Earth has just published the first issue in its Pamphlet Project series, a neat, elegantly produced 40-pager with metrosexuality as its subject.

Verma is the sole author for this one but he’s open to the idea of future issues having numerous contributors. "We’re not going to be rigid about the structure of our pamphlets," he tells me. "And while we don’t intend to compromise on content – as in, we won’t go ‘flip’ just to cater to popular demand – we are open to all kinds of writing styles." That’s evident enough from the issue I’m holding in my hand. The writing varies from didactic to comic as it discusses aspects of the metrosexual man ranging from the Beckham-centric definition popular in the West today to the thesis that androgyny was a key element of masculinity in traditional Indian culture. Even the terms coined by Verma vary from ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Gatsby’ to the ‘Gurgaon metrosexual’ and the ‘Patiala metrosexual’. But that the text is informed, intelligent and well researched is never in doubt.

It was as a student of English literature that Verma first became interested in pamphlets, or rather what they once used to be. "Right from the period of the Renaissance and through Elizabethan England, pamphlets and broadsides played the role of society’s watchdogs," he says. "Pamphleteers openly criticised state policy, moulded public opinion and even festered revolutions." We discuss the correlation between the pamphlet and the development of the novel, which started out in serialised form; some of the founding fathers of the novel, like Jonathan Swift, had been pamphleteers in an earlier avatar.

Is it entirely coincidental that the development of literary forms like the pamphlet and the periodical reached its peak in Europe around the same time coffee, that great stimulant, started coming in from Turkey? Verma is fascinated by the coffee-house culture prevalent on the Continent from around the 17th century, wherein men of letters would gather in a café to discuss and debate the important issues of the day. "Some of them even had their mail – including feedback on their articles and essays -- addressed to them at the café-house," he says. "There are stories of newspaper editors having makeshift offices inside cafes. Many of the great ideas of the time had their genesis in that setting."

At the table behind me I can hear two gigglers slurping at their Mochas whilst discussing the relative merits of Isha someone and Shruti something as item girls; this could be a form of post-modernist Irony. Any chance of a lit-coffee house culture of sorts developing in India, I ask, half-joking. Verma dubiously scans the Barista interiors. "Well, probably not in a commercial space like this one," he says, "but it’s amazing how much can be done when small but dedicated groups come together for a purpose. I think, though I’m not sure, that Mumbai has such a place, or a rough equivalent."

One step at a time, then. In fairness, it should be acknowledged that the many recent tie-ups between cafes and bookshops (Café Coffee Day-Teksons, Barista-The Corner Bookstore) and the encouragement of a "sip, loll and read" culture are welcome developments.