Rana's book launch

Note to Rana Dasgupta: dude if you ever get around to reading this, a thousand apologies for laughing so much during the book discussion at the BCL last evening. Needless to say, Samit and I weren’t laughing at you - you know who we were laughing at.

In fact, for much of the proceedings in the British Council where Tokyo Cancelled had its Delhi launch, Samit Basu and I were giggling away like wombats locked in a cupboard listening to the Bulla song. It had nothing to do with Rana Dasgupta, who read well and said interesting things, but with a Certain Lady Who Shall Remain Unnamed, who kept interspersing the discussion with what we agreed were sex sounds. It got so we began to see sexual innuedoes in everything that was said (it helps enormously when the discussion includes never-before-heard terms like “pragmatic probing”). I thank my lucky stars that Shougat and Samyukta weren’t sitting next to me too, because when we met up after the event was over we automatically doubled up with laughter. Four people chortling loudly in just the third row would’ve been very noticeable.

Rana’s reading was nice - he was visibly and charmingly nervous, though not enough for it to screw up his performance - even if it went on longer than we’d expected. He made the point one hears so often from writers, but which is always worth hearing again, about how real life can make even the most improbable-seeming fiction seem mundane. This was said in the context of the fantastical stories in Tokyo Cancelled that were alarmingly mirrored by real-life events subsequently. (“Real life sometimes provides not just more interesting material but better literature too,” said Rana dryly; when his story about a secret organisation that stores and edits people’s memories found a parallel in the real world, the name of the real company was “LifeLog”, as opposed to the less dramatic “Memory Mine” in Rana’s story.) About the book discussion and the question-and-answer session that followed I will speak naught more than I have already spoke, except to say that the “jerking off in public” analogy can never be overused for literary events.

At any rate, the last hour was spent productively doing what most of us had come to do - sipping wine (I gulped,a little) and accosting kebab-bearing waiters (Shougat’s photographer, the redoubtable Manpreet Romana, intelligently stationed us very near the kitchen door whence the waiters would emerge with their loaded trays). Leaving, I learnt from Samit that we’ve been invited to Ruchir Joshi’s budday party on Sunday. Not sure I can make it but will try.

Big prize for small island…

…Andrea Levy has won the Whitbread for Small Island. Nope, I haven't read it yet. Soon.

Crucifying Harry

Belatedly adding my three paise to the clamour about Prince Harry wearing the Nazi costume to that fancy-dress party. My initial reaction to the news - to seeing the young prince sporting the Hitler-appropriated swastika - was a shudder that had a lot to do with having recently read both Roth’s The Plot Against America and Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (Axis powers win WWII, America ruled jointly by Japan and Germany) – both books based on the point-of-divergence (POD) concept: how might history have turned out if one event had occurred differently.

I’m diverging from the original point myself. At first I was influenced by the tabloid-festered speculation about how Harry is part of a generation that’s inured to the horrors of Nazi Germany, and even finds an attraction in neo-Nazism: the skinheads angle. Now those are still very valid points. But let’s stick specifically to this incident. Of course Harry deserved a rap on the knuckles, deserved to be hauled up in public. Even giving him full benefit of doubt regarding his intentions, he comes across at the very least as a silly little prince (for numerous other, more substantial, reasons too). It may be true that no one would have thought twice about the incident if there wasn’t a high-profile figure involved, but like it or not public figures do need to be extra careful about their actions. Especially when - and I know this is hard to swallow - there are still people in this day and age who look up to the monarchy and get their cues from the actions of the Royals.

But the issue should have ended with the rap on the knuckles and the subsequent apology - it should never have been stretched and stretched by the media to the point where someone can blog about it weeks later and still feel like they’re writing about a burning topic of the day. The way the press has gone to town about the incident, the virulence of their reporting, the pornographic glee of it all …well, it’s the sort of fanaticism the Führer himself would’ve Heiled.

(P.S. Incidentally there was a misleading news report in one of the papers the other day, which said the theme of the party Harry went to was "tasteless costumes". That would probably have justified the prince’s indiscretion to an extent, though I doubt the media response would have been any different. But anyway, the report was wrong: it was actually a “colonial and native” theme.)

The stars are indispensable: from I Married a Communist

Now transcribing passages from stuff I happen to be reading and posting them on this blog is not something I want to make a habit of - it would take up far too much of my time and then I probably wouldn’t be able to read anymore. But couldn’t resist this once. I’ve just finished Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) - finished re-reading it actually, I had done it no justice the first time around – and thought I’d put up the last couple of paragraphs, which I was very struck by.

I Married a Communist is the mid-section of what is widely described as Roth’s “America trilogy”. It came just after American Pastoral (1997) and before The Human Stain (2000), and it’s probably marginally the least powerful of the three works – though given the author’s quality in the past decade, that would still make it one of the best books of its year. Narrated by Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman (though as Martin Amis suggested in a review, Zuckerman is more of an ipse ego - an author himself, exactly the same age as Roth), this is the story of Ira Ringold, an American Communist who is exposed and denounced during the years of the McCarthy Red-hunt in the early 1950s; a man who is undone as much by his own volcanic nature and the inconsistencies of his life as by his marriage to the hysterical Eve Frame, a former silent-movie star who “outs” him in a bestselling book.

What’s so interesting about the final passage, which I’m quoting here? Well, in his recent novels, Roth has shown a striking, apparently contradictory quality. First, in the most powerful, passionate prose you’ll find anywhere in contemporary literature, he gives us an array of unforgettable characters, examines what makes them what they are, shines the master novelist’s light on their strengths and fatal flaws; and then, at some point, he backs away from it all and becomes the detached observer, with a philosophy that might seem not all that dissimilar to “what the hell, it’s all just bunkum anyway”. It’s almost like he’s cutting himself away from his story. Nathan Zuckerman is the instrument for this approach; in American Pastoral he observes that life “is all about getting people wrong, and wrong, and then wrong again”. And here, at the end of a gut-wrenching story, after Zuckerman has finished a marathon conversation with his former English professor (and Ira’s brother) Murray, we get these closing lines, which I’m putting down here. Some of it contains references to elements in the story, the character names for instance, but you should get the gist even if you haven’t read the novel:

“On the night Murray left I recalled how, as a small child, I’d been told – as a
small child unable to sleep because his grandfather had died and he insisted on
understanding where the dead man had gone – that Grandpa had been turned into a star. My mother took me out of bed and down into the driveway beside the house
and together we looked straight up at the night sky while she explained that one
of those stars was my grandfather. Another was my grandmother, and so on. What
happens when people die, my mother explained, is that they go up to the sky and
live on forever as gleaming stars. I searched the sky and said “Is he that one?”
and she said yes, and we went back inside and I fell asleep.

That explanation made sense then and, of all things, it made sense again on the night when, wide awake from the stimulus of all that narrative engorgement, I lay out
of doors till dawn, thinking that Ira was dead, that Eve was dead, that all the
people with a role in Murray’s account of the Iron Man’s unmaking were now no
longer impaled on their moment but dead and free of the traps set for them by
their era. Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species
were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. There are no
longer mistakes for Eve or Ira to make. There is no betrayal. There is no
idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence.
There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers. There are no
actors. There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or
Jim Crow, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice.
There are no utopias. There are no shovels…There is just the furnace of Ira and
the furnace of Eve burning at twenty million degrees. There is the furnace of
novelist Katrina Van Tassel Grant, the furnace of Congressman Bryden Grant, the
furnace of taxidermist Horace Bixton, and of miner Tommy Minarek, and of flutist
Pamela Solomon, and of Estonian masseuse Helgi Parn, and of lab technician Doris
Ringold, and of Doris’s uncle-loving daughter, Lorraine. There is the furnace of
Karl Marx and of Joseph Stalin and of Leon Trotsky and of Paul Robeson and of
Johnny O’Day. There is the furnace of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. What you see from
this silent rostrum up on my mountain on a night as splendidly clear as that
night Murray left me for good – for the very best of loyal brothers, the ace of
English teachers, died in Phoenix two months later – is that universe into which
error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no
antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire
set by no human hand.

The stars are indispensable.”

National Book Critics Circle nominees

Awards time again. Later this evening (India time) the Oscar nominations will be announced but for now here are the nominees, across five categories, for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards. Dylan’s Chronicles Vol 1 is among the Biography/Autobiography finalists. Craig Seligman’s study of Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, which I have to borrow off Shougat, is in the Criticism category. In the Fiction list, I wouldn’t want to choose between Philip Roth and David Mitchell, but then I don’t have to, not being among the 600-odd book editors/critics who make the selections.

I'm Calvin's dad

Just learnt from Quizilla's "Which Calvin and Hobbes Character are You?" quiz that I’m Calvin’s Dad. Cool...he’s always been one of my favourite comic characters. We never learn that much about him, as Quizilla points out, but I’ve always thought of him as indispensable to the strip. It’s a fact not often acknowledged that Calvin and Hobbes derives much of its edge from the personalities of Calvin’s parents, from the fact that they’re both so utterly COOL in different ways. For all the brilliance of the Calvin creation, the comic strip would never had worked as well if his parents had been mere foils - vapid, doting picket-fence creations like, say, Dennis the Menace’s folks. (My standard image of Dennis's mom is with her hands perpetually on her cheeks in dismay.)

Calvin's parents complement their brat superbly. The mom is slightly less interesting - though I find her unalloyed bad-temperedness very funny. But the dad has a wicked sense of humour and manages to get the better of his precocious son so often - no mean task - that the reader gets a good sense of the genepool whence Calvin might have sprung.

Mind-bloggingly googled

Google works in frightening ways. BlogPatrol tells me that someone was directed to my site after doing a Google search with the words “photograph of overweight Parveen Babi”. Further investigation disclosed the reason: shortly before my Parveen Babi blog, I had posted one that included the words “getting fat” as part of a song lyric. And apparently “photograph” must’ve been in there somewhere too.

(Other terms that have got me precious hits: “Is Rahul Dravid Marathi?”, “Funny Mahabharat” and “Peesing”. And, ahem, "Jabberwock Arjun Singh".)

DePalma's way

Watching my DVD of Carlito’s Way, Brian DePalma’s 1993 film about a former druglord trying in vain to escape his sordid past, for the umpteenth time I found my nerves on edge during the climactic chase in the subway station as Carlito (Al Pacino) tries to elude his pursuers. This is a classic DePalma setpiece, with all his trademarks firmly in place: the fluid tracking camera, the sense the viewer gets of something moving invisibly beneath the surface of the film – a tension filling the empty spaces between the characters, so that one can almost reach out and touch it. (There are, of course, other DePalma trademarks – notably his brilliant use of the split-screen technique – that aren’t on display here.)

It’s rare to find a great performance in a purely cinematic sequence like this one – even the best actors tend to become tools to be passed between director, cinematographer and editor – but Pacino manages it here, perfectly conveying all of Carlito’s anxiety while also falling completely in line with the complicated camera movements. (Anyone who thinks Hollywood actors don’t have to contend with the demands of choreography, the way Hindi movie stars do in dance sequences, should watch this scene.)

But with all respect to Pacino, in any Brian DePalma movie top billing must go to the director himself. The man is one of the great visual artists, something that should be obvious to anyone who watches any of his films. (You don’t have to have a professional eye, though apparently it helps; DePalma is one of the directors most revered by fellow directors around the world, even as mainstream movie critics, especially in America, continue to sniff at the "sleaziness and shallowness" of his films. Most European film journals, notably the French ones, love his work; incidentally, Carlito’s Way was named best film of the 1990s by Cahiers du Cinema - the magazine founded by Truffaut, Chabrol etc in the 1950s, which was also responsible back then for first suggesting to idiot American and British critics that Alfred Hitchcock might actually be worth taking seriously.)

I’m heavily into the list-making thing these days, so here are some of my favourite DePalma setpieces:

-- The museum scene in Dressed to Kill: long, wordless sequence that plays like a symphony, with Angie Dickinson’s bored housewife involved in an inadvertent hide-and-seek game with a dark stranger. Brilliant example of another DePalma motif, the incompleteness of our perceptions. His movies abound with half-seen figures who are in fact very important to the plot. It’s especially unsettling when, in a scene that has so far shown us everything through the protagonist’s eyes, the camera fleetingly lets the viewer see something that character is unaware of.

-- The last five minutes of Raising Cain: where, almost without the viewer realising it, the camera glides into an alternate world, transforming a noisy, bustling New York park into something the Big Bad Wolf would be comfortable in. (Excellent article here from Senses of Cinema about this.)

-- The denouement in Body Double: this is one of the most difficult movies for DePalma’s supporters to defend, because its content (and execution) is so sleazy and gratuitously voyeuristic. (I remember when "morning show" was such a bad word, Body Double was one of the titles regularly playing at 9 AM at the Savitri/Uphaar halls in the early 1980s.) But the climactic scene provides a startling commentary on cinema-as-therapy, with the mediocre C-movie actor Jake being forced to "act" in two senses of the word.

Jake, who suffers from claustrophobia (this film references Hitchcock’s Vertigo), is being buried alive by the villain; as the background turns hazy and impressionistic, he drifts off into semi-consciousness and hears fragments of the bad guy’s taunting speech; words like "take", "action" and "cut" are accentuated. Then the setting shifts, Jake opens his eyes to find he’s shooting a scene, similar to the one with which the movie had opened: he’s playing a vampire enclosed in a coffin and has blacked out again, because of his claustrophobia. The director is palpably annoyed and Jake decides he has to conquer his fear; he gets back into the enclosed space purposefully, pulls the lid down… and opens his eyes to find himself back in his "reality", overcoming his malaise to take the villain on.

-- Sound recorder John Travolta analysing the sound of the car accident in Blow Out and realising it might have been an assassination attempt: DePalma’s detractors accuse him of cheapening the work of superior directors, notably Hitchcock, in his "tributes". But he invariably adds his own subtexts. Blow Out is inspired by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which a photographer analyses some negatives and begins to believe he might have captured a murder plot on film. DePalma’s film, which takes the theme of the unreliability of what we see and hear, and places it in the context of an American political thriller, is every bit as skilled as the original.

-- The idyllic locker-room bantering in Carrie which in no time metamorphoses into the horrific tampon-throwing scene, with the other girls mocking Carrie during her first period: has cruelty ever been better represented on film?

-- The nearly-20-minute-long tacking shot that opens Snake Eyes: DePalma showing off big-time, but it worked for me, so what if the rest of the film was a dud (only relatively speaking).

-- The newspaper’s journey in The Untouchables: the whimsical tracking shot that follows the route of the newspaper containing Eliot Ness’s photograph from the hotel door all the way to Al Capone’s bed. I think I preferred this to the movie’s far more famous setpiece, the climactic shoot-out on the stairway (a tribute to Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence) – because the latter scene is almost too clinical. The director is on autopilot here.

Also, the fact that The Untouchables is the last DePalma movie to be deemed a "respectable" by most mainstream critics prejudices me against it generally. Brian DePalma doesn’t need that kind of sanction.

Plagiarise this!

We bloggers have been so busy exposing plagiarists in the print media that we missed what was going on right here in the blogosphere. Amit Varma reports here about a creature who goes by the name Rohan Pinto (it could be his own, or maybe he just lifted it from someone else) and who’s been picking up posts/articles off the Net and passing them off as his own. With the alert having been sounded, fellow bloggers are doing what they can to expose this guy and others like him - as Amit points out, bloggers are most vulnerable to this kind of thing because they don’t have institutional backing.

Weigh in if you're interested.

P.S. A reminder here of that hilarious screw-up by the Asian Age when they picked up an April Fool article from Cricinfo and ran it as a serious story - complete with reporter's byline.

R.I.P. Parveen Babi

Tears mist my computer screen as I write this. (No wait, that’s the condensation from the coffee cup.) Parveen Babi, the first love of my life, is dead. Some of my earliest movie memories, mainly from Sunday evening Doordarshan telecasts and the occasional movie-hall visits, centre on her. (This was in the early 1980s, for anyone who was born late and doesn’t know that Doordarshan was once the only TV channel.)

It says heaps about PB’s personality that she managed to be cool, classy and always beautiful despite the often-terrible, flouncy outfits she wore in that sartorially execrable age. But she was also in my opinion one half of Hindi cinema’s best romantic couple ever, the only actress of her generation (and most other generations) who could stand up to Bachchan on screen -- by which I mean match his intelligence and sophistication, at a time when these were rare qualities in actors and actresses alike. Sure, Zeenat Aman’s screen persona may have been similar in some ways, but I thought – how to put this – that there was greater depth in Parveen B’s lambent eyes and far superior chemistry between her and AB. (It might have helped that she worked with him in some of his better/more seminal films, notably Deewaar and Amar Akbar Anthony.)

Consider Bachchan’s other leads. The supposed magic of the Rekha-AB pairing I’ll never get, except for the obvious vicarious thrill that audiences felt, with their knowledge of all the offscreen bonking. Okay, I’ll concede Silsila was interesting but otherwise she was never really in the same league as AB (and besides, the much-documented idol-worshipping actually showed in Rekha’s eyes when she acted opposite Him). Hema Malini … ha ha, let’s just say I didn’t think of her as being classy enough even for Dharamendra paaji (not joking; Dharam’s best pairing was with Meena Kumari in his young, sensitive days). Among the others, Smita Patil probably came closest in her two films with AB, especially Shakti, but the line between “commercial” and “parallel” cinema was so sharp at the time, it felt like she had walked in from another movie.

I’m not pretending Parveen B’s magic had to do with intelligence taking precedence over cool beauty or pure sexiness. After all, even Raakhee occasionally gave the impression of being intelligent (notwithstanding her demented Bengali “Ammeeeet!”). But Babi was, in addition to everything else, Va-Va-Voomish, and I knew that even at the age of four. Try beating that.

(Bloggers have their own deadlines. Had to finish this before Shamya – also a Parveen Babi-lover – got around to writing another obit, just because he’s sitting in the Headlines Today office with nothing to do.)

Wodehouse's topsy-turvy world

Excellent piece in the Washington Post on the alternate universe P G Wodehouse created, and how it contrasted with the author’s own life: There's an essential aspect of Wodehouse that may help explain his continuing appeal. The man did his best to pretend that the 20th century never happened

A blogger on blogging

My editor just told me he might want me to work on a story on blogging. Sounds good, for all the obvious reasons. The only thing is, the Indian media has already covered the topic a fair bit in the past few days, after waking up to the impact of the Tsunami Help blog. (Actually, come to think of it, most of the coverage has been by The Indian Express, with two big stories and of course the edit piece by Amit Varma a couple of days ago.) So I'll need to find a fresh angle, plus speak to people other than the ones who have already been profiled, like Rohit Gupta, Peter Griffin and the redoubtable Hurree Babu.

Meanwhile, if you're a blog virgin read this: A Blogger on Blogging, from the Maud Newton site - it might help you understand why we do what we do. If you're not a blog virgin, read it for affirmation that you're not alone in the universe (right, like you didn't know that already...)

Kitty litterateurs

Don’t want a cat/ Scratching its claws all over my Habitat/ Giving no love and getting fat/Ohhh, you can get lonely/And a cat’s no help with that.
– "I Want a Dog", Pet Shop Boys

Now I agree with the Pet Shop Boys on most counts (I maintain, at risk of being consigned to plebian hell, that their lyrics give me a better understanding of the gay-subculture in Thatcher’s Britain than Alan Hollinghurst’s 500-page Booker-winner this year did) but they got it dreadfully wrong this time. In fact, Cats Rule. The one highpoint of a terrible week was a Monday evening spent sipping rum, gorging on honeyed ribs and talking Book with a group of very interesting people in a room that had a distinct air of Catness.

This was the abode of none but the legendary Hurree Babu, Patron Saint to us lit-bloggers. There was Hurree, dashing as ever, and his Partner, who sat demurely in a corner of the room for much of the evening, occasionally emerging to say something brilliant. Putu the Cat, curled up on a sofa. Samit Basu, talented young author who thinks he’s cat-like and sometimes smiles Cheshirely to prove it. He and Putu spent much of the evening making eyes at each other (incidentally, has anyone noticed how cockeyed Samit is?)

Then there was the Jabberwock, who really IS cat-like. There were Hurree’s two (real) cats, one of whom reminded Putu of his/her dear old aunt. There was the cat-loving Peter Griffin, otherwise The Griff, whose work on the Tsunami Help blog has, apart from all its obvious virtues, brought Blogging to the edit pages of hitherto supercilious newspapers. Also present was the author Ruchir Joshi, who tolerates cats reasonably well. So much cat-love/tolerance in one room in Delhi you never saw before.

So there we all were, and those of us who could speak were being very catty about everyone in the literary fraternity who wasn’t present in the room. Obnoxious authors, hangers-on, pompous lit journalists…we took well-sharpened claws to them all. As Samit has already reported, Ruchir was the raconteur par excellence and had us in splits with his version of a lit conference in Neemrana that went horribly wrong; naturally, Sir Viddiiiyyaaa and his lackeys were at the centre of it all.

The Jabberwock, chastened by evidence of how little he knew of the inner workings of the literary world, was content to listen and learn. The Griff too spoke little but purposefully handed out charcoal tablets to those of us with iffy stomachs. Thus fortified, we feasted without compunction on the delectable selection of meats at paw’s reach.

In sum, a grand time was had by all. The Jabberwock was purring contentedly when he left.

Shakespeare on film

Latest prize acquisition: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. One of the best things about the DVD is that it has two subtitle options, one by Linda Hoaglund and the other by Donald Richie. Both are Japanese film experts – I have Richie’s comprehensive book on the director, The Films of Akira Kurosawa - and so either set of subtitles should be better than the terrible ones on the print I first saw around 10 years ago. Even better, there’s a very informative commentary track by another expert, Michael Jeck.

Throne of Blood is an undeniably great film but I’ve always been slightly perplexed by the irony-laden chorus about how a non-English movie is perhaps the best Shakespeare film ever. I wonder about that sometimes; it’s easy to see that Kurosawa’s epic captures the spirit of the Bard’s great tragedy but is it strictly speaking a Shakespeare film? Are the original words, the poetry of the original language, completely irrelevant? One of the reasons I’m ambivalent about this is because I grew up with the strict sense that you can’t claim to have read a classic if you’ve only read an abridged version of it. (I remember snootishly informing a schoolfriend who’d laboured his way through a Lamb version of a Shakespeare play that he mustn’t imagine he had read Shakespeare – "it isn’t enough to just know the story, the work is defined by the words the author originally used".)

Another reason is that I have a very special relationship with my favourite "conventional" Shakespeare movies: soliloquies that I couldn’t remember after merely reading the play somehow miraculously stuck in my mind after I heard Olivier, or Gielgud, or Branagh, or even Brando, declaim them. Pleasant way to learn. (Though the casting agent who put poor Brando in the position of repeatedly having to mumble the word "honourable" in Mark Antony’s funeral speech must have been one of Satan’s little helpers.)

I’m probably nitpicking about Throne of Blood; I’d have no problem at all if it was designated "best film based on a Shakespeare play". So I’ll just be tactful and say that it’s more Kurosawa’s triumph than it is Shakespeare’s. Meanwhile, here are some of my favourite films that do employ the Bard’s language:

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)
Great director puts his own distinct stamp on this tale of guilt and overvaulting ambition. One of Polanski’s most effective devices is to introduce an element of stream-of-consciousness by presenting soliloquies as half-spoken, half-in-voiceover (often alternating from one line to the next). Loved his final, typically macabre touch of showing Macbeth’s successor, the young prince, entering the witches’ coven for consultation. But far more morbid is the way art holds up a mirror to life in the scene where Macbeth is told that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”; Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, had been stabbed to death by Charles Manson and his gang a few years earlier.

Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996)
Branagh took on the task of making a four-hour version of Hamlet with the full text of the play, and somehow managed to make it cinematic. Great principle cast, Derek Jacobi superb as Claudius. Some of the many cameos – Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, Robin Williams as Osric – are distracting, but some – Charlton Heston as the Player King, Billy Crystal as the Gravedigger – work brilliantly.

Titus (Julie Taymor, 1999)
Shakespeare’s strangest, queasiest, most unwatchable play (assuming it was his at all) gets the post-modernist treatment in this visually fascinating movie that doesn’t shy away from any of the text’s horrors, and in fact even punks them up. Sir Anthony Hopkins, on a break from playing Hannibal Lecter, feeds Jessica Lange her sons’ cooked remains.

Julius Caesar (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1953)
With apologies. This is a star-spangled, slightly Hollywoodised production but it has a lot going for it. John Gielgud’s mellifluous, classical reading of Cassius makes for a fascinating contrast with Marlon Brando’s rough-hewn performance as Mark Antony; two completely different acting theories, separated by hundreds of years, but occupying the same frame here. And Edmond O’Brien in his brief role as Casca shows how Shakespeare’s lines can be spoken in a completely natural, non-theatrical way (and with a gruff American accent to boot) – and still be utterly convincing.

Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944)
Brilliant use of Shakespeare as a rallying call for an England that was in the thick of WWII. In his directorial debut, Olivier – until then always more of a stage performer/director - showed an unanticipated understanding of film technique.

Much Ado About Nothing (Branagh, 1993)
No consistently good but great fun throughout. Branagh at his most democratic, with roles for actors like Denzel Washington and even Keanu Reeves.

Othello (Orson Welles, 1952)
Brooding, impressionistic movie that Welles somehow managed to get made despite the inevitable financial problems. The cinematography is dazzling.

Richard III (Olivier, 1955)
No, it isn’t anywhere near as cinematic as Olivier’s other Shakespearean forays but his performance as the conniving hunchback king is enough to place this high on the list.

Bats in Sheila’s belfry

Went to meet Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit at her residence on Friday, an appointment that was fixed after many phone calls and follow-ups. It wasn’t all that special. Sheila D was the dear old lady you’d expect from her reputation, sweet and articulate at the same time, and she gamely put on a Delhi Metro helmet we’d taken along for the photograph. But we were on limited time and I only got some very basic quotes. Little chance for a searching interrogation (not that I’d gone there with a pen dipped in acid).

I have to do the Big Delhi Piece for the coming week, a gulp-inducing thought. But that’s another story. What really made the Jabberwock burble out loud while sitting, pad in hand, in the waiting room, was the spectre of dozens of enormous bats hanging upside down from the branches of a single tree in the chief minister’s garden. This sounds improbable even as I write it, but it’s true. Initially I thought my photographer was batty when she pointed them out; I couldn’t see the tree clearly from where I was seated, and it was only when I got up and strolled out onto the lawn that I saw them for myself. Then I felt like Tippi Hedren in The Birds - if there had been a cigarette in my mouth, it would have fallen out. There they were in rows, sunning themselves lazily, jostling for space, occasionally opening and closing their big cape-like wings. Huge, some easily as big as crows, all presumably asleep as good bats should be in mid-afternoon, which didn’t at all explain why shrieking sounds emanated from the tree at intervals. (Is that a form of snoring? Samit, do you know? What do your tantrically sexy marpusial wombats do?)

You wouldn’t think of large vampire bats as being cute, not unless you’re Mrs Bela Lugosi, but they have an undoubted charm so long as they stay in the far distance. Later I was tempted to ask Mrs Dikshit if perhaps she kept them as pets, but thought better of it. We do have a photograph, not a very clear one but it’ll serve the purpose if years from now someone needs proof that our sweet CM used black magic to get Delhi’s flyovers completed in double-quick time.

ICU and the graveyard

Working week after hazy week of graveyard shift for TheNewspaperToday.com (and that meant 2 AM to 9 AM, it being a 24-hour website) in late 2001, I lived in an otherworldly dimension. I would leave for office around 1.15 AM, drive stuporously through the desolate roads, my arms and legs going through the driving motions almost in reflex, until I saw the familiar bulk of Videocon Towers looming eerily from out of the winter fog; and then I knew I’d reached. Those in the evening shift (6 PM to 3 AM) would mentally start switching off as soon as they saw me walking in, by 2.45 they’d all be gone and I’d get down to the business of surviving long hours alone in a ghost world. At those times, even Net-surfing held little attraction (wasn’t blogging then). There was nothing to do but wait for the PTI ticker to flash the news that someone important had died. I’d change the front-page template once in a while, just to check that my faculties were still in working order. Or I’d take a 5-minute break to go to the Aaj Tak canteen two floors up, wake the scowling attendant, get something to chomp on. (This’ll sound dramatic, but to date Kurkuras make me shudder because they carry uncomfortable associations with those days.)

No one in the morning shift would come in before 9.30. Around 10 AM, if I was lucky, I’d commence driving back to south Delhi, the sun in my eyes (it hurt, seriously!), feeling like a vampire who’d misread the clock. I’ve never been as aware of time as a tangible presence, of silence as something that was living and breathing around me, as I was back then.

This has turned into a blog about my graveyard days when it was meant to be something else altogether. I brought it up because I’ve had occasion to think about the people who work similar shifts in hospital intensive care units, and for whom these problems are just one small aspect of a much bleaker job. I was at the ICU the other night, around 8.30, just as some nurses/medical staff were coming in to begin their shift. Watching their pallid, lined faces I thought: they live the same life I once did, a life that begins with the gloaming, but they also have to contend with the sights, the sounds, the smell of impending death all around them, every minute of their working life.

This ICU was a large, roughly circular chamber with 6-7 single-bed rooms lining its inner circumference, and a monitoring system with a desk at its centre. Whoever was sitting at the monitoring system could see into any of the rooms just by rotating their chair. Through the night, in the Grim Reaper’s waiting room, the staff take turns going from bed to bed, checking on heavily-tubed patients - groaning, inarticulate or just unconscious. They also have to contend with the endless questions of stricken, sometimes antagonistic relatives, often well beyond official visiting hours. (In comparison, about the most uncomfortable occupational hazard I had to face in my graveyard days was the knowledge that a watchman,or a senior copy editor, was beating off to porn at a comp somewhere in the back of the room.) I don’t know what kind of person one has to be to voluntarily take up a job working in such a place late at night, and to hold it for any length of time. I don’t think I want to know either.

21 Grams

The most striking thing about 21 Grams is how well it combines style with substance – a balance that’s so, so difficult to achieve - which, I suppose, is why it has won universal favour with friends who usually have very different tastes in movies. (Yusuf was sufficiently moved to send me an SMS saying, "Dudesy, they make these types of movies in your Hollywood? I thought they only made Pretty Woman.") The question I had to ask myself when I had done marvelling at the film, having come away with the certainty that I’d seen something very special, was: is the dense, seemingly gimmicky narrative structure a case of style for style’s sake - a flashy way of indicating that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill Hollywood drama? Or is it integral to the film’s emotional impact?

Some background here for the uninitiated (slight spoiler alert): 21 Grams has a unique structure in that it follows no chronology at all, not even the reverse chronology of movies like Irreversible and Memento (it’s another matter that the structures of both those films are in fact more complicated and ambiguous than a throwaway one-line summary can suggest). Yes, in the final 20-25 minutes 21 Grams does attain something resembling a linear narrative but even then there’s no definite pattern. And for the first half-hour at least, it bombards us with rapidly edited scenes and character connections that we have to piece together for ourselves.

The three people at the heart of this complex structure are a reformed ex-convict (Benicio Del Toro) who accidentally runs over a man and his two little daughters; the wife and mother (Naomi Watts) who is cruelly bereaved by this accident; and an ailing Maths professor (Sean Penn) who gets a new lease of life when the accident victim’s heart is transplanted into him. The shifting equations between these characters and – equally importantly – the personal struggles that make them act the way they do, are the movie’s main concerns.

Back to the original question then, and I’m undecided. To an extent, I agree with James Berardinelli who says here that the ususual structure adds to the film’s dramatic impact by "hypersensitizing us to everything that occurs, and so allowing us to absorb much more than we might otherwise". But what this theory implies is that it couldn’t have had the same impact if told in a linear style, and that’s a thought which irks me. It’s too close to suggesting that 21 Grams couldn’t have been Great Cinema if it hadn’t resorted to flashiness and post-mod gimmickry, that the story couldn’t have held up on its own; that told in a straightforward style it would have become just another Hollywood melodrama, a TV-movie disease-of-the-week weepie.

But that’s probably simplistic too. A film is much more than its story; even a formulaic plot can be redeemed immeasurably by a great script and great performances, and 21 Grams has these in more than ample measure. I thought Penn was better than in his Oscar-winning performance in Mystic River. Watts and Del Toro were superb, and the supporting performances (notably the popular French actress Charlotte Gainsborough) weren’t to be sneezed at either. In the end, debates aside, what matters is that the film’s showy narrative technique doesn’t seriously impede your understanding or enjoyment of it. It didn’t for me, but be warned that this movie mustn’t be seen in fits and starts. It demands the viewer’s concentration and intelligence.

Not just another lemon tree

A giant has been felled. The 160-year-old (at least) lime tree in the Kent County Cricket Ground is dead, and so a cricketing era passes. Here is the BBC’s moving tribute to a legendary 12th fielder who never moved. Don’t miss the comments at the bottom of the piece.

I’ve started watching films again...

...or at least buying DVDs again, which is never the same thing. But one may yet lead to the other. You lucky people who’ve been frequenting this blog will know that in the recent past my movie-viewing has taken a distant second place to reading. Well, this Saturday I finally took the advice of friends who’ve been impleading me to visit The Electronic Zone in Palika Bazaar, where a number of world cinema titles are available on DVD for Rs 200 each. I’d been sceptical for many reasons, not least because I was convinced the prints would be terrible copies, or that the special features/scene selection/subtitles wouldn’t work. But it turns out that isn’t the case, unless I’ve lucked out big time. What’s more, though the DVDs aren’t properly packaged when you’re going through the titles, once you’ve bought them you’re given the requisite number of plastic jackets. Which is a big factor; I don’t like loose packaging.

Despite the avid recommendations by B. Ray, Kamlesh, Shougat and others, I hadn’t held out much hope that I’d get around to starting a new collection from (sniff) a Palika shop. But I ended up buying Sleeper (Woody Allen), 21 Grams and this amazing (and amazingly untalked-about) film by Nick Cassavetes (son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands) called She’s So Lovely, starring Sean Penn, Robin Wright and John Travolta in one of his smoothest performances. I saw this movie four or five years ago at a film fest and never heard anything about it since.

Next on my list: Almodovars, Bergmans, Kurosawas and who knows, maybe even some lesbian shorts. Anyone in Delhi who hasn’t heard of this shop yet or is just being lazy or is still whining that DVDs are hideously expensive, get off of your butts now and visit it (this means you, Shamya and Mrs).

Alex Garland’s The Coma: dream-life, waking-life

"Everybody dreams. Everybody dreams, but nobody has ever managed to tell me what their dream was like. Not so that I really understood what they saw or felt. Every dream that anyone ever had is theirs alone and they never managed to share it. And they never managed to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and vocabularies aren’t up to the job…when you wake, you lose a narrative, and you never get it back."

How to describe Alex Garland’s strange little book The Coma, which I brushed off sleepiness to finish in under two hours last night? The plot, to whatever extent one can be sure of it at all, is something like this: a young man, on his way home after a late night in office, is badly beaten up by four thugs on an underground train. He recovers, goes back home, but soon – through a series of dislocating experiences – comes to the conclusion that he is in fact still in a coma and that he must grope his way back to consciousness by drawing on memories and sensations from his life prior to the assault. (The distorted perspective of his dream life is illustrated throughout the book with woodcuts done by Nicholas Garland, the author’s father and the Daily Telegraph's political cartoonist.) As the novella concludes, he may or may not be on the verge of waking up.

I haven’t given much away, this isn’t a book with a surprise ending and the reading experience counts for more than the resolution. But mesmerising though it was, I also found it unsatisfying in a way (not that that’s necessarily a criticism for a work of this kind). Strangely enough, I thought one problem with it was that it wasn’t vague enough; it’s almost too expository, the way the narrator understands and articulates his predicament. Or maybe there are more layers to the narrative structure and I haven’t gone deep enough into it.

What The Coma definitely is, is an addition to the canon of books and films (many recent) that blur the line between the conscious (our tangible experience of reality) and unconscious worlds. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (which I’ve blogged on before) is the definitive example for me so far – a book that comes disorientingly close to reading like a dream/nightmare; quite an achievement given it’s over 500 pages long. (Incidentally, Ishiguro said in an interview: "In a way I've started to care less and less about what's happening out there [indicating the world at large] in some kind of supposed real world. I've become more and more interested in what's happening inside somebody's head.")

In film, the tradition goes back at least to the collaboration between Bunuel and Dali, who made Un Chien Andalou by putting together half-remembered material from their dreams (Bunuel sees a sliver of cloud bisecting the moon, Dali sees a razor slashing an eyeball, so fine, juxtapose the two images and let film critics debate the meaning till the end of time). But one of the most ambitious (and most frustrating) movies of the last decade was David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, a film that cannot possibly be explained completely (sorry Ajitha) – or at least, cannot be explained completely with "waking life" logic, the way a movie like Memento or The Usual Suspects can.

Another such film I have a fondness for is Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, which was dismissed by many critics as an overblown, self-indulgent exercise by Tom Cruise (the producer and star) to come to terms with the fact of his turning forty. Or: How to Trash a Big-Budget Hollywood Production Just Because it has a Major Star in it, Without Taking the Time to Consider its Intrinsic Merits. The original Spanish film Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) was excellent, but I thought Vanilla Sky was much more than a Hollywood remake that diluted a superior foreign movie. It certainly wasn’t a thoughtless assembly-line copy: Crowe makes very interesting use of iconic images and motifs from American popular culture (the Bob Dylan album cover, the image of Gregory Peck as the noble, all-American Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird), suggesting how they work their ways into our sub/unconscious. (Given the way American pop culture has proliferated around the globe, this is relevant to all of us now, not just the Yanks.)

If you’re interested in the themes of conscious-unconscious/reality-dreamlife, try to get your hands on the new Alex Garland book. Only, don’t go confusing it with Robin Cook’s Coma please. And if anyone has recommendations of other books/films in this vein, please suggest. I’m very interested.

P.S. just found this link on The Guardian website, where Garland mentions The Unconsoled in the context of his own book.

World’s first SMS movie review...

...or so I think, but then who knows, given that the first SMS novel has already been done in China. My friend Amrita (whose SMSs give me hope that text messaging might yet coexist peaceably with traditional use of the English language) sent me the following appraisal of Alexander, spread over 3 multi-part messages:

"The visual glories were all in place, but the movie is catastrophically silly in many ways. The India bits, the constantly roaring phalanxes, the fashionable bathhouse gayness, Jolie as Russian Jew mama, the Band of Boys feel of the war scenes. I am sure Oliver Stone is an early Hindi film buff, seeing as how Alexander’s horse is mysteriously transmuted to a black Airavat in size and aerodynamic agility in the face-off with Porus, and how that whole battle scene has been shot through a cheap sindoor-tinted filter. And was his wife Roxanna Persian or Rosario Dawson? I mean, it’s one thing for Peter Brook to cast Japanese and Nigerian actors in something like The Mahabharat because it’s a story with a universal set of themes.. But here is Stone who doesn’t know not to mix up verisimilitude with kitsch PC.

But please leave my name off your blog or there will be a contract on me for antiSemitism, antiRussism, homophobia and colorism."

Alack, I didn’t.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and Kafka is funny!

Not that I’m any sort of expert on this topic, but I think Kafka-esque is an overused word, often applied to just about any noirish work of anxiety, and ignoring one of the most distinct elements of Franz K’s claustrophobic worlds: his very particular, absurdist black humour. Most of us don’t think of Kafka in especially funny terms. I think instinctively of a sallow-faced, sunken-cheeked man with a haunted expression, condemned to spend eternity in a drab office where nothing ever gets done. I think of Jeremy Irons (who played Kafka in Steven Soderbergh’s eponymous 1990 film; but I might have thought of Jeremy Irons even if that film had never been made). I think of the worried, tight-jawed Anthony Perkins (who had just come off playing Norman Bates when he starred in Orson Welles’ crepuscular The Trial in 1962).

But Kafka is also seriously funny. And Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is a novel more than worthy of being called Kafka-esque, capturing absurdism as well as it does tragedy. The protagonist, the poet Ka, is one of the genuinely unforgettable characters (another overused description) in recent fiction, a melancholy modern-day K wandering the streets of Kars in Turkey, caught in a crossfire between secular and fundamentalist Islamists.

Ka isn’t funny himself, but the events he’s embroiled in, and the people he encounters, are. The description of a meeting where extremists debate the contents of a televised message they want to send to the Western world is as brilliantly, morbidly comic as anything in The Trial. There is great beauty but also (intentional, I’m certain) great humour in the way poems keep coming to Ka during his time in Kars (he hasn’t written one for the four years previous), and how he often doesn’t even have the time or opportunity to note them down. And what about the timid, aging detective who is hired to follow Ka around the city. And the confused youngsters who start crying when they suspect that they might be atheists inside.

Snow is a book of great power. It’s beautiful in its imagery (especially in its use of snow, and the theatre) and profound in its observation of wasted lives and the ways in which people use religion as a crutch, continuing to cling to it past the point of belief simply because they have nothing else to cling to. But it’s somehow cuttingly funny about all these things too. It isn’t often you come across a book that manages to send up the absurdity of its characters’ actions while at the same time being gently empathetic towards them. This might seem to be a book about the shades of Islam (which is one reason it’s doing so well around the world) but it implicates all of us.

P.S. A few years ago, I saw a short film with the extraordinary title Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Richard E Grant as the harried writer seeking inspiration on a snowy Christmas night as, bedevilled by distractions, he tries to finish the first line of his new story: "Grigor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic... WHAT??" A banana? A kangaroo? It was a funny film. Franz K would have smiled. Even Jeremy Irons might have.

Blog recommendation: the enigma of arrival

Read this post, by Elck of The Vernacular Body, about his visit to India. I think it's extraordinary.

Old friends

These are hard times. Friends are leaving town. Rumman and Shrabonti are heading Bangalore-wards (not because I shouted when Shrabonti referred to Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as "that French film, the umbrella of Thing"). Geetika has already left for Mumbai (not because I accused her of being humourless).

Now two old friends from school, both now based in the US, are here for a few days, and meeting up with them has been, apart from the inevitable nostalgia exercise, an eye-opener. These are guys I’ve looked up to in many ways (though I know they’ve also looked up to me in others - blogging, you see, isn’t the only Mutual Admiration forum!) - partly because they always seemed much surer about career direction than I was. But it turns out things weren’t that simple. Somewhere down the line, Anubhav moved from what seemed a sureshot career in architecture (he’d graduated from the SPA before going to the States) to graphic designing, after numerous twists and turns. And while Rajat’s quitting his secure, high-paying job with Ernst & Young to do an MBA at Wharton wasn’t a drastic professional change, it still represented a big financial risk - plus the overcoming of many demons on the personal front.

It’s disorienting to learn about the hardships and insecurities of people you’ve always pegged as being very stable and well-balanced: stories about living and managing things alone in another country; about not having a friend to call up casually in the evening; cobbling together decent meals when you’re a vegetarian abroad; struggling with project deadlines all over again. These are guys who were popular, sociable types in our last years in school together. They mingled with others in the batch and participated in events while I brooded on the sidelines; so it’s unsettling when the mask slips even a little. I’m at risk of sounding patronising here but that’s not the intention; after all, I never myself got around to taking a Big Step comparable to Anubhav’s and Rajat’s (my own Big Step, such as it was, was considerably less dramatic and certainly didn’t entail spending years away from family and home comforts).

The other thing is that when one meets old schoolfriends who have been away for a long time, it becomes a pretext for discussing the countless ways in which Things Have Changed. So here we all are, at the grand old age of 27, going on like a retirement society. Look at the PVR Saket complex now, was it really all that long ago that the greasy Punj-Chinese food at the drab little Madhuban restaurant was the only eating option in the area? Oh, I went to school the other day, met Miss David, she gave me her cell number. Class teachers have mobile phones now?! That feels so bizarre, so wrong. When we were in school, remember how strange it used to feel to even use the office phone to call home if the schoolbus was late; kids these days probably just message their parents.

On that note:

We had joy, we had fun,
We had seasons in the sun.
But the stars we could reach
Were just starfish on the beach

- Terry Jacks, "Seasons in the Sun"

and

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears

- Simon and Garfunkel

Stories without borders: Rana Dasgupta interview

Met Rana Dasgupta at his Def Col flat, having finished his book Tokyo Cancelled in a marathon Sunday reading session. He looks younger than his 33 years and has a clipped accent that I somehow couldn’t place as being exactly British (which is what it should be; though he’s lived in France, the US and Malaysia, he grew up in Cambridge).

There’s something to be said about reading a book and then, very shortly afterwards, hearing the author’s thoughts on it: what he wanted to accomplish and whether he was satisfied by the final result. Of course, this can be a grey area for a professional reviewer - you don’t want to let your own impressions be diluted by any new insights the author has to offer. But when it’s an honest, open-ended exchange of views and ideas, it can be rewarding.

Must add that I probably would’ve avoided meeting Rana at all if I hadn’t been impressed by his debut novel (I made the profile suggestion to my editor only after I’d finished the book). But I was, on the whole, and I think a second, closer reading might be in order. The conversational flow is forced in places and I thought the linking device - the interplay between 13 people stranded at an airport, who tell each other stories to pass the time - was a bit patchy. But the stories themselves make for compelling reading. They move between degrees of strangeness -- a young businessman falls in love with a doll; a changeling tries to redeem himself by helping an old man find a word; two malcontents discover how to transubstantiate matter with the help of a packet of cookies -- all the while questioning our conventional notions of time and space. A cartographer works on a map of the world that is based on velocity - the speed at which things move across the globe - rather than on conventional geography. Another character visits Manhattan for the first time and is surprised by the verticality of its skyline: "his map had only shown it on the horizontal".

I told Rana he was in danger of being defined by that most eye-rollingly tedious of lit-club prophecies -- the Next Big Thing in Indian Writing -- and he, well, rolled his eyes. This isn’t because he belongs in that (equally romanticised) category of reclusive, non-worldly writers who don’t care whether their work sells. He’s marketing-savvy, on the ball with his publicity and launch dates and even freely distributes bright red "business cards" with review blurbs on them.

It’s just that compartmentalisation goes against the grain of everything his debut novel stands for. Tokyo Cancelled is a book that sets out to defy the universal tendency to romanticise foreign places and to put countries and cultures into little boxes. "Too much of contemporary writing," says its author disdainfully, "derives its frisson from the neatly packaged cultural differences between people and places." One of the striking things about Tokyo Cancelled is that there’s no attempt to exoticise a place -- be it Osaka, Buenos Aires, Paris or Delhi -- for the reader.

It was Rana's reading of medieval literature, especially Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, that created an interest in the idea of global space. "The events described by Chaucer may have occurred in far-flung places, but they were all centres of medieval Christendom," he said. "Consequently, even when his characters travelled far and wide, they were essentially moving within comfortable, homogenous spaces." That, he believes, is a reflection of what the world is like today, as the globe continues to shrink. "The Delhi elite is scarcely different from the New York elite in terms of their values, the houses they live in and their lifestyles. So it’s strange that people talk about other countries in exotic terms."

Apart from medieval literature, which he finds fasinating for its use of people as symbols ("the language is completely emptied of psychology"), Rana admits - almost apologetically, given his antipathy to stereotypes - to being a Rushdie fan: "He showed that contemporary writing didn’t have to be banal or unliterary." And folktales have always been an influence, as anyone who reads Tokyo Cancelled will see. "My friends and I used to write fairytales and gift them to each other," he says. "In fact, one of the stories in this book was originally written as a birthday present."

It’s clear that their author has the storyteller’s gift himself.

Delhi Story contd

Last year in London, I was a bit foxed that my cousin Neal thought it the most natural thing in the world to use the tube every day for travelling to his office in Canary Wharf – despite having his own car in town. I was thinking about that again during my conversation with Lalit Nirula, who I met last week for some insights into the changing face of Delhi, for that Big Story I’m terrifiedly working on. Mr Nirula, who’s lived in Delhi for all of his 62 years, agreed to the interview only after confirming several times that I wouldn’t be asking him personal questions ("personal" meaning related to his company; Nirula’s is famously media-shy).

He believes that once the Delhi Metro is completely functional – and of course that will take at least 10-12 more years – the travelling culture within the city will change. "The youngsters who will come of age in another decade-and-a-half," said Mr Nirula, "will grow up without this snobbish attitude to the metro that all of us have now. In another two decades, even youngsters from upper-middle class families won’t be averse to using the metro to travel to work, rather than contend with the stress of driving/finding parking space."

Chatting with Mr Nirula was a delight. He had the light of fond recollection in his eyes and his memories of what the city used to be were fascinating, especially to someone who’s lived 27-odd years in Delhi, never been away for more than 4 months at a stretch, and always been conditioned to believe that one can’t possibly have an unqualified love for this soulless city – that love if any must be tempered by words like "grudging" or "ambivalent".

He painted a charming picture of the Connaught Place of another age, when most of the shop-owners and office-goers in the vicinity knew each other by name, and a universally recognised churan-seller did rounds of the middle circle on his bicycle. He also recalled how, in the early 1960s, his father stopped the car by the side of the rough road they were travelling on, and picked up a head of cabbage from the adjacent field. "That cabbage field," said Mr Nirula, "was in what you now know as Hauz Khas." - a colony in mid-south Delhi which, as the city’s southward expansion continues, is now practically in the heart of the capital. It reminded me of my father’s stories about going hunting in the 1960s in the forestland that Saket, where I now live, used to be.

Am still not completely sold on this Delhi Development story I’m working on – one learns very quickly to be cynical about the claims made by authorities and their booklets - but who knows, it could turn out to have promise after all.

Simult. reading again, and bhagidari

On to something more serious (I know, I know, anything would be): I’m Stressed, again. Just when I thought I’d finally got around to Reading For Pleasure, I’ve had to put aside Pamuk’s Snow again; now have two new books to get through fast, because I’m meeting both authors for profiles. I’m around halfway through each book; some quick observations:

Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled: 13 stories, set in different places, and told by a group of passengers stranded at an airport. Absorbing, full of good ideas, very well written for the most part, but so far I find the linking device tenuous and forced (unless there’s some grand thematic connection that emerges at the end, this could, with much less fuss, have simply been a book of short stories). Let’s see how it turns out.

Swati Kaushal’s Piece of Cake: from the chick-lit genre (though I find that classification a bit lazy). Wasn’t expecting much but have been pleasantly surprised so far by the facility of the writing, and the jibes at the advertising world are very funny; there’s definite natural talent here.

So back in Simultaneous Reading Mode: there’s Snow, Piece of Cake, Tokyo Cancelled and, uh, Six Years of Changing Delhi: A Working Report by the Delhi Government. The last needs some explanation. I’m working on what threatens to be a larger-than-life story on the grand plans for turning Delhi into a Megapolis – roadworks and flyovers, increased gas and water supply, building schemes. Etc Etc. Hence this 70-page booklet with its diarrhoea of words like "consolidation", "development" and "bhagidari".

My immediate boss thinks this story should be right up my street (he was reading my blog around the time of the plagiarism flare-up, and maybe he saw some of my musings on the changing face of Delhi – flyovers and so on) but I haven’t been able to cobble together much enthusiasm so far. That’s partly because of a disgruntling visit to the New Secretariat the other day, where I was first chewed up by red tape and then unceremoniously disgorged, with only the aforementioned booklet to show for my pains.

Anyway, hope things improve. Will report on that, and on Rana D and Swati K, later.

What I did, and resolutions

Some of the things I did on Jan 1 (can’t reveal all):

- Got up at 6.30 AM, having slept at 11 the previous night. Considered making calls to annoy friends who would’ve been up till 3, either revelling outright or discussing the tsunami tragedy gloomily over many glasses of rum.

- Bought my 2005 diary. It’s usually a pain finding one, because I need separate pages for Sundays, which most of them don’t have.

- Drove many miles to meet Rajat, who’s in Delhi for a few days, having completed Wharton semester 1. Meeting him was, apart from everything else, a reminder of how much I’ve progressed with my blogging. Back in August or so, he was among those (the others being Rumman and Abhilasha) who encouraged me to get down to it. But in the months since he’s hardly posted anything himself, while I’ve toted up nearly 100,000 words.

Resolutions? None, or at least nothing I’ve defined by that term. A few weeks ago I decided that I needed to cut down on my tea and coffee consumption (since I haven’t succeeded in reducing the sugar quota per cup), and it’s been happening gradually. Very gradually. The office vending machine does what it can to help, by proffering ant carcasses (yes, plural) with the tea every now and again. Dead ant, dead ant, dead ant, as the trumpeters go.

Some things I definitely won't do this year:

- Turn vegetarian

- Read more than six books simultaneously

- Shoot an elephant*

Blogwise? Am thinking of dividing the right-hand links section of this blog into categories, so I can put up some of my previous book and film reviews. Don’t want to get into the hassle of starting three or four different blogs for different types of writing.


* "Last night I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I'll never know." -- Groucho Marx

A recommendation

If you're into personal year-end book and film lists, check out these marathon posts here, here and here, by Nakul Krishna. I used to accuse Samit Basu (who never stoops to making book lists, he's too busy writing books) of being just out of his diapers, but Nakul is just 18 - 18! I was putting away my Hardy Boys at that age (ok, mild exaggeration but you get the idea). Incidentally, further down on his blog you'll also find the very nicely done "Shiv Market by Vikram Seth" and "Hairy Rotunda by Arundhati Roy" - Nakul's takes on the Modern Humorist "What if writers wrote on titles that were anagrams of their own names?"

“2005”

First blog of the year, and I’ll start by obsessing about the number 2005 (many of my friends complain about my number/date-obsessing). "2005" looks better to my eyes than any of the last few years have. "2000" was Fake Millennium Year, hence to be scoffed at (besides, far too many zeroes). "2001" would’ve had promise except that it had already been appropriated by Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, and consequently the year had this shifty look to it, as if it knew it was doing something wrong by occurring at all. "2002"…I have a problem with palindromes, they’re diabolical. "2003": too prime number-ish; characterless. "2004" had something going for it but on dividing it by four I was startled to get 501, which is the number of a bus I fell off once. But 2005 has a neat, classy, coolly mysterious look to it, plus it suggests that we’re actually well into the 21st century at last.

(Of course, none of the above is any indication of how the year will turn out to be, it’s just number-obsessing)