Fish

The hotel in Zurich is very nice (personally, I’m just grateful for being in the same place for five straight days, instead of having to lug everything around every day). One of the best things about it is this little artificial lake in the lobby where resides a giant, corpulent turtle who never stirs but occasionally blinks to show he’s alive. There are also the most remarkable, most personable fish I’ve ever seen, huge creatures that swim at the surface of the water, half their bodies out, and come right up to you fearlessly, opening their mouths for food. At one point I could easily have reached out and patted one.

Instead I went to the nearby restaurant for a filling of sushi and sashimi.

Basel...

...is a pretty little town with lots of trams scurrying about (and cars, coolly moving in the same road space, darting out of their way just in time). Many friendly pigeons in the town square too. But suspiciously Indian-looking, not fat and furry like you’d expect pigeons in rich countries to be.

NO ONE speaks English here. And more surprisingly, we received blank looks when we said “BaselWorld Fair” to people at the station. Everywhere else in the country, it’s the number one subject of discussion.

You can get sick of anything. In England last year, it got so that each time I saw another castle I would pray for Huns to materialise and tear it down. In Switzerland, the grass is irritatingly green. One can only take so much of greenery.

Tact

Marketing colleague to Rolex lady: “Let me be perfectly honest, I’m only here (at the Basel fair) because of you.”

Rolex lady turns to me, asks: “He says that to everyone, doesn’t he?”

Caught between discomfort at the directness and pleasure at the opportunity to humiliate, I stutter “No, you’re the first.”

She persists: “Is that because I'm the first person he’s met at the fair so far?”

I decide to be nice and say no.

But when colleague asks me to take a picture of the two of them with his handycam, I’m emboldened enough to say: “That he does with everyone.”

Tonight, I dine alone.

Switzer so far...

- Didn’t sleep a wink on the night flight – squashed between a flatulent Greek and a corporate upstart who went on for hours about how Lufthansa’s services couldn’t compare with Cathay Pacific’s (no, none of these was my marketing colleague, who had found himself a better seat elsewhere). My own increasing nervousness about planes, which I’ll blog about at great length when I’m ready for it, didn’t help. After 12-odd hours of travel, by the time we’d finally finished the airport formalities, I had the worst head/brain-ache I can remember. But then we had to up and go to Basel (by train from Zurich), a day before the fair officially began, for preliminary investigations.

- four hours of travel every day (one and a half hours by train plus half an hour by tram each way), which means getting up at 6 and returning to the hotel around 8.30 PM (assuming there isn’t a late night cocktail party we have to show our faces at). Before leaving, I told friends I wouldn’t have any time to look around so please annoy me not with questions about Switzerland. Now it turns out I probably won’t even have the time to pick up the chocolates I promised some of them.

- so how did I find time for this blog? Well, wrote it out on paper while sitting in the so-called Asian restaurant in the hotel and then blindly typed it out in 3 minutes in the media room the next day. That’s how dedicated I am (to blogging). That’s how lucky you are.

A plug for Pundits

After reams of dull match report-style writing and scorecard collations, the cricket book we’ve been waiting for is finally here and I’m feeling so grateful that I had to immediately write a recommendation post. Rahul Bhattacharya’s delightful Pundits From Pakistan has to be savoured and savoured again, even if you’re not particularly interested in the sport; this is the kind of thoughtful, observant, passionate writing that reinforces that old aphorism ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ It’s already one of the best books of the year as far as I’m concerned.

Unfortunately, much as I’d like to, I can’t quote any passages from it right now since I don’t have it with me (am writing this from the Financial Times office in Lausanne during my work time!). Was reading the book during the Zurich-Lausanne train ride a few hours ago (the only spare time I’ve had on my trip so far) and was blown away. If people like Harsha Bhogle, Sharda Ugra and Rahul's colleagues at Wisden Asia get onto the bandwagon, the future of Indian cricket writing is very bright.

Will review it at length once I’m back. Meanwhile, here’s a review by a friend, and an excerpt from the book.

Leaving...

...for the land of Switzer, with its creamy chocolates, cuddly cows, buxom milkmaids and dashing CEOs of watch companies. Yum yum. Will try to blog from the media centre at the exhibitions if there’s time, but be forewarned the posts will probably run along the following lines:

Every element of this timepiece is facinating ... the crown protection and bezel with its slanting ventilation shafts are inspired by braking discs. Wire loop lugs are soldered to the caseband, a screw case back and a winding crown sealed in the same way. The hand-wound movement is 16 lignes (equivalent to a little over 36 mm), a diameter typical of calibres produced for pocket-watches... the case of this watch is specially formed in the latest material, high in carbon fiber content, to ensure a combination of lightness and solidity. The dial is characterised by exceptional luminosity, achieved by marking the numerals and hands with a special mixture consisting of zinc sulphate, radium bromide and mesothorium.

Thinking of renaming this blog Jabberwatch for a couple of weeks.
Ta da for the next few days.

If you like romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan...

...you should be strapped to a chair, have your eyelids prised open with painful, serrated steel claws and forced to watch Secretary, which I recently saw on DVD. Very charming mixture of mushy "meet cute" romantic comedy with S&M (the kinkiness mainly involves spanking and earthworms). Disturbing in places naturally, so I was pleasantly surprised that the ultra-conservative Hollywood censor board (what’s it called, the MPAA?) let it get away with an "R" rating as opposed to an "NC-17". Not that there was much explicit nudity, violence or even profanity - there wasn’t - but the subject matter (about the life-affirming sado-masochistic relationship that develops between a secretary and her lawyer boss) was, let’s say, eyebrow-raising. And politically incorrect too from a conventional feminist perspective, though in its own twisted way the film is really about women’s empowerment.

Love James Spader, who played the lawyer and who doesn’t seem to have progressed much (save for a few extra wrinkles) since playing a callow, expressionless young man in Sex, Lies and Videotape 15 years ago; here, he plays a callow, expressionless middle-aged man. (Spader’s filmography also includes David Cronenberg’s great film Crash, based on J G Ballard’s story about people who get turned on by car accidents, which makes him one of the most interesting actors I know in terms of project choices.)

Secretary reviews here and here.

Kunzang Choden interview

Visa hassles (namely, getting the damn thing from the Swiss Embassy, which we realised at the last minute was going to be closed on Friday and Monday) screwed up an appointment I’d been looking forward to, an interview with Bhutanese author Kunzang Choden; I couldn’t make it at the slotted time and finally managed to obtain 15 minutes in between a couple of her other interviews for the day. I was stressed out, sweating and panting by the time I made it to the Zubaan Books office in Hauz Khas and all things considered the interview wasn’t as comprehensive as it should’ve been. (I spent the first five minutes gulping down glasses of water while she spoke.)

Kunzang didn’t give the impression of being an author on a promotional blitz, waiting eagerly to discuss her book of the moment. She was in Delhi for the launch of her novel The Circle of Karma -- billed as "the first novel by a woman to come out of the Himalayan Kingdom" -- but she was every bit as enthusiastic about another story she’d recently written, about the hard lessons learnt by a scruffy street dog named Dawa who rises through the ranks to become a Leader of Howling(!) "A friend mentioned it must be difficult to write a narrative through another person’s eyes," Kunzang chuckled softly, "but I retorted that it’s at least easier than having an animal as your protagonist."

Even when discussing her cherished debut novel, she was laidback, happier to hear out a reader’s views (mine) on the book than to express her own. [At risk of consigning myself to Boaster’s Purgatory, I must add her to the list of scribes who have looked at me with moist-eyed gratitude on learning that I’ve actually bothered to read the book before coming to meet them. I was honest enough to tell her I had to rush through the last 100 pages.]

The Circle of Karma, one of two novels by south Asian women to be jointly published by Zubaan Books and Penguin India (Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife is the other), is the story of Tsomo, a feisty young girl compelled by her own restless spirit - and later by circumstance - to leave her family and go on a series of endless travels. Hope and tragedy mark her path in equal measure as her story provides a microcosm of Bhutanese society. While fulfilling its narrative demands, the book still manages to be very informative throughout about customs and rituals in Bhutan. Was that deliberate, I asked. Did Kunzang write her story with a global audience in mind? "In the first draft, I wrote exactly as I felt," she said, "but once I had the skeleton of the story in place, I re-examined it and asked myself: is it reader-friendly enough? Revisions followed accordingly."

Like her protagonist Tsomo, there’s something of the itinerant in Kunzang. In 1962, aged just nine, she travelled for 12 days, by foot and on horseback ("there were no proper roads then"), to reach India, where she did her schooling in Kalimpong and Darjeeling. "Around that time, Bhutan had started progressing from an illiterate, isolated society to one that was willing to send its children to study in India," she said, "and I was among the first few to benefit." After graduating from Delhi University, she went back and taught in Bhutan for a few years, then stayed in the US for four years with her husband. "Some of my experiences have worked their way into Tsomo’s life," she told me.

"Where can a girl travel to?" Tsomo’s mother asks rhetorically near the beginning of the story. It’s a question that resonates throughout the book. And it’s especially telling that a novel written by an educated, much-travelled Bhutanese woman should deal prominently with the fact that women in her country have not traditionally been encouraged to read, write or study the scriptures. This is an incongruity given that Bhutan is a largely matriarchal society, one where inheritance still passes to the woman in most rural areas. "It is something to think about," admitted Kunzang, "because, you see, Bhutan is that rare country in south Asia where women are not discriminated against. The arrival of a girl child is cause for celebration, women do the same work as men and widows are even encouraged to marry again. So yes, I suppose there’s something dichotomous about women not being encouraged to study the scriptures."

Next on Kunzang’s platter, so to speak, is a book titled Chilli and Cheese: Food and Society in Bhutan. She’s also enthusiastic about a catalogue she’s working on for a museum in Bumthang in central Bhutan. "The reason I feel so strongly about the project," she said, "is that the museum is located in my ancestral home!" Like Tsomo, who finds her life has come full circle at the end of the story, it seems home is where the heart is for her creator too.

Tendulkar biography review

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m the wrong person to review a Sachin Tendulkar biography. I can’t be objective about the guy and when I try I invariably bend over backwards - so that after I’d once written something that was intended to be in his defence, people came up to me and asked why I was being so hard on him. You can’t win, not if you’re the Last Tendulkar Supporter left on the planet.

Still, here’s my review of Vaibhav Purandare’s biography of SRT. I’m not happy with it (the review) - it’s too determinedly, self-consciously BALANCED - but I want to eventually post all my book/film reviews up here under appropriate headings, so here goes:

--------------

Watching the mixed reactions to Sachin Tendulkar’s 34th Test century and 10,000th Test run -- and the way he appears to have polarised people around the country in the past couple of years -- it might be surmised that a topical biography of the little big man would have to study him as a sociological phenomenon. It’s a book waiting to be written. The effect Tendulkar has had on people’s minds seems so much more relevant at this stage than the numbers and achievements that have made him a statistician’s wet dream. (Those have been recorded often enough anyway, and in the same mundane language time and again.) The things said about him, both bad (the norm these days) and good, reveal more about the people saying them than they do about Tendulkar. “For many people, his achievements have become a substitute for their own shortcomings,” said Ramachandra Guha once. It follows that when he was perceived as not having measured up, the reactions were vehement beyond reason.

Realistically speaking, the “definitive” SRT biography will only be possible a few years after his retirement, when time and distance have dissipated the intensity of the reactions the man evokes. In the meantime, we have this new book by Vaibhav Purandare, which is undoubtedly an above-average effort and one that starts particularly well but which doesn’t quite clamber out of the snare that entraps most cricketing biographies published in India: the submerging of provocative information in a sea of cliched soundbytes, dull match reporting and compartmentalisation.

Puranadare’s book is most interesting in its first 75 or so pages -- before Tendulkar’s selection for the national team -- partly because these deal with the years of his life that weren’t lived in the public gaze. Though some of the stories have been told elsewhere, the author has a fresh take on them. It’s interesting how he links 10-year-old Sachin’s first meeting with his coach Ramakant Achrekar to an India-West Indies match the youngster had watched a few months earlier: a match where Viv Richards’ carefree batting provided Sachin “an endorsement of his own natural attitude towards cricket”. What’s interesting is that the conflict persists to this day, and remains among the most debated topics in modern Indian cricket: there was a little boy who wanted to bat like Richards but who also had to carry forward the legacy of the conservative Bombay school of batting. So does he trust his instincts, play the master-blaster game indiscriminately -- and risk being criticised for irresponsibility? Or does he put his head down, eliminate some of the most beautiful shots from his game, play long, solid innings - and risk the criticism that he isn’t playing his natural game? It’s a question Tendulkar has lived with for more than half his life, and millions of people ponder the answer as if their own lives depend on it.

In the initial chapters, Purandare places the Tendulkar story in the context of the gradual development of a cricketing tradition among Marathi-speaking people: “Billionaire Sachin Tendulkar has the historical background of a Solkar struggling to get two square meals a day, a Madhav Mantri studying in the light of streetlamps...” He moves on to record the signposts of Tendulkar’s early life: the young John McEnroe fan who managed to assimilate his idol’s competitive aggression while leaving out the undesirable qualities; the unorthodox grip that Achrekar was unable to correct; the huge scores in the Kanga League (the author’s school was at the receiving end when Tendulkar and Kambli put up that record 664-run partnership).

Then, after Tendulkar’s selection for the national team, the book enters the public domain, so to speak, and loses some of its bite. What follows is a series-by-series examination of his career highs and lows, the extremes of adulation and criticism, and it all starts to read like an amalgamation of everything that has ever been said or written about SRT.

But even through this descent into reportage-like writing, one of the better things about Purandare’s book, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, is the author’s boldness in making his own voice heard; he speaks in the first person on many occasions, says things like “as I reread the previous sentence, it is evident to me how a cold, accurate description of cricket can be misleading”. Not only does this lend a personal touch to the writing, it’s also specially relevant to the Tendulkar phenomenon -- for good or for bad, SRT has been appropriated by everyone, and everyone has a passionate opinion to express.

But given all that’s good in Purandare’s book -- especially the way he attempts to bring SRT the mortal into clear focus -- it’s deeply disappointing that he wraps up with a statement to the effect that Tendulkar’s place in cricket history has been “securely established: he is next best to Sir Donald Bradman”. Securely established by who, one wonders. Going by current public opinion, he might not, in the final analysis, even be reckoned as the best Indian batsman of his generation; just the other day the country’s leading newspaper featured a picture of Rahul Dravid on its front page, with the caption “The Best Since Bradman”. This reviewer is a huge Tendulkar fan and has spent countless hours defending him in acrimonious cricket discussions but a true appreciation of the man’s achievements demands that he be freed from convenient labels. There’s much more to Tendulkar than that duststorm innings in Sharjah, or Bradman’s famous remark that their batting styles were alike -- two things that are brought up ad infinitum by his defenders and just as easily dismissed by his detractors. If this is the only ammunition Tendulkar supporters have, their position is weaker than they know.

Towards the end of his book, Purandare uses a personal yardstick (“how did Tendulkar respond to challenges?”) to rate his subject. As a reviewer, I put this book through a personal test of my own: how does it deal with some of the man’s most heart-lifting innings (Edgbaston 1996, Cape Town 1997, Bloemfontein 2001)? Rereading the relevant portions, my answer was: with more insight and wit than you’d get in most match analyses, but with less passion than the subject deserves. That’s the book in a nutshell. Is it definitive? No, but it’ll do for now.

Sachin Tendulkar: A Definitive Biography
by Vaibhav Purandare
Roli Books

DVDs, VCDs: not the same!

Just bought two of Ingmar Bergman’s lesser-known works - Shame and Hour of the Wolf - both made in 1967-68, both starring Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, two of the director’s (and my) favourite actors. But if I succeed in watching either of these films before the year is out, it will be an achievement; as ever, DVD hoarding continues while viewing is non-existent. (Damn you, Literature!!)

While I’m this close to the subject, let me express long-cherished annoyances towards:

A) People who don’t know or care about the vast, vast difference between a DVD and a VCD.
DVDs, you cretins, are to VCDs what Groucho Marx is to Adam Sandler. There are some people I know who won’t comprehend this analogy, so I’ll make it easier: DVDs are far superior things. The quality is better (it might have something to do with pixellation which I won’t get into here, mainly because I don’t know anything about it), they last much longer and there are numerous add-ons (see point B).
VCDs, so popular still in India for whatever reason, have been filtered out of the system in most of the civilised world. (I cringed horribly when a friend I’d taken along to the British Council Library cheerfully asked them if they kept VCDs as well.)

B) People who have somehow managed to watch DVDs over several months without being aware of things like special features, audio commentary and even - shudder shudder - scene selection!

I know this happens because a friend who regularly borrows DVDs from the French Embassy complained recently that some of the films don’t have subtitles on them. I’m going to keep this short because it hurts my brain to think about it, but essentially what she’s been doing is pressing the “Play” button on the remote as soon as the DVD has been loaded - so the film starts immediately and she simply watches it through to the end; which means she’s never even seen the “Main Menu” page that allows you to choose your audio track, subtitles, switch between scenes and access the special features if you want to see any.

Now I understand there are people who might be interested only in watching the actual movie - but they should at least know about all the options available. Personally, I’m so fascinated by audio commentary tracks (the good ones can be as useful as a film-study course) that I sometimes watch movies even for the first time with the commentary track on instead of the regular soundtrack. (Yes, I know that’s taking it to extremes.)

P.S. Do VCD enthusiasts actually manage to watch every film all the way through from beginning to end without taking a single break? Every single time? Because if they stop for any length of time midway - or if there’s a power outage - they have to tediously fast-forward the disc to the same point on re-starting. Sounds like such fun, no? (Incidentally, one of my VCD-adoring buddies visits the loo an average of 16 times each day, so I’m wondering how this works.)

P.P.S. My only support on this subject comes from Kamlesh K Singh, former colleague and editor/ideator par excellence, who writes a sporadic column with DVD reviews and technical information for Today. I’ve known the man to weep when people use the terms “DVD” and “VCD” interchangeably. He occasionally writes DVD-related things on his very quirky blog too, this post for instance. Might invite him here to add to my limited knowledge.

Gang’s Politburo and the once-Big Four

Interesting stuff here on Amit Varma’s India Uncut about the clique of journalists with unhindered access to Sourav Ganguly, and how they target V V S Laxman to deflect attention off Ganguly’s failures. If this is true, it makes for another interesting insight into how sports media works. During my chat with Amit last week, he suggested that Ganguly’s time was up and that Dravid-as-captain would bear watching. I’m not too sure about that, having long been a fan of Ganguly’s assertiveness as a leader (along with Mark Taylor, he’s the only captain I’ve ever really noticed as a captain). But Amit’s case is that Dada’s batting has declined to the point where the underconfidence might now be affecting his captaincy (an interesting inversion of captaincy affecting batting, which is the traditional malaise).

About Dravid: it’s a matter of record that his performance as a batsman in the Tests he’s captained has been very poor (5 matches, 138 runs, average 17.25 with a top score of 33 - despite the fact that all these matches have been in his "golden form" period of the past three years). But guess one can only know for sure when he’s been given a long stint in the job.

P.S. Isn’t it strange how quickly things change? Just a couple of years ago we were hearing all sorts of things about India’s Big Four and how they would form the nucleus of the middle order for several years to come. Now, on current form, Ganguly and Laxman are completely out of things (though the latter is always capable of coming good in spectacular fashion). Sehwag has become, and this was completely unforeseen, India’s second-best Test batsman (behind Dravid). Tendulkar - for all the ridiculous amounts of vitriol poured on him - is still easily the third-best, even when struggling with injuries/mental uncertainty. And then - to use a gloriously certain cricketing cliche - there’s daylight. To paraphrase David Mitchell, "What wouldn’t Indian cricket supporters give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable?"

Some more spleen

I’m most unrelentingly sociopathic at those times when, sitting at my computer, I become suddenly aware of sensations on the hairs along the back of my neck, and then realise that the person sitting behind me has swivelled his/her chair around and is gazing vacantly into my computer screen. There are some people who elect to do this when they have no work, or when they need a break. The intent isn’t voyeuristic - that would require a far greater sense of purpose than these people have - it comes from pure uselessness. These are the same people who look at you astonished if you happen to mention that a day should have 36 hours in it because there just isn’t enough time to do everything. They can’t relate to that at all. They have more hours in their lives than they know what to do with. Hours and days pass them by as they gaze vacantly. They don’t need to worry about all the books out there waiting to be read, the films waiting to be watched, the thoughts waiting to be thought. (And don’t even get me started on the people who sleep 10-11 hours each day. You’d be surprised how many of these I know. Working people.)

These are also, incidentally, the same people who’ll look at you indulgently if they find out you blog: the "how can you waste your time like that" look. So I’m hoping they don’t read blogs either.

Counterpoint on Modi and patriotism

Vir Sanghvi’s piece in this Sunday’s HT on Narendra Modi being denied a visa by the US is one of the more interesting things I’ve read in a newspaper in a long time, mainly because it goes so completely against the grain of the typical weekly column by a renowned editor; it openly expresses self-doubt and an inability to be comfortable with one’s own mindset. I can’t link to the piece here, it needs registration, but here’s the gist: Sanghvi points out that he’s been one of Modi’s strongest critics in the mainstream media, but says he was still cheesed off by the visa denial, and then tries to work out why. After sifting through various rational reasons and rejecting them, he concludes that his indignation stems from illogical "jingoism and crude patriotism". "My position is this: Modi may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murderer…logic and patriotism don’t always go hand in hand."

The above is a good example of why Sanghvi's "Counterpoint" is always such a provocative column: the author doesn’t allow personal asides to be subjugated by sweeping generalisations. This is, of course, the very reason some people don’t like Sanghvi’s writings: "Too self-indulgent and precious," I was told by a colleague the other day, "and have you seen how, in ‘Rude Food’, he always goes on about how, as a young lad of 12, he visited the Chateau d’so-and-so in Paris for what is still the best meal of his life?"

Anticipating ass-licking charges, let me clarify that I don’t actually agree with much of what Sanghvi writes in the column. Starting with the patriotism thing: I’m not a patriot myself and I think it’s a horribly overrated quality – no nobler in any sense than casteism or regionalism. And I find it repulsive how many people seem to take more pride in being Indian than in being human. But this is material for another blog (or maybe it isn’t, because I’m not too comfortable discussing it at great length). I also have a big problem with the headline given to the edit: “Give This Man a Visa”. I think it should be supplemented by “...and Hang, Draw and Quarter Him While You’re at It”. But the point is, our newspapers need a lot more "self-indulgent", self-questioning writing of the sort found in Counterpoint - assuming of course it’s done by good writers with opinions to express - and less of the This is Gospel Truth brand of editorial that talks down to the reader.

P.S. Incidentally, it’s wrong to assume that Sanghvi’s perceived self-importance comes from his status as a celebrity journalist; go back to the profiles – on Raj Kapoor, Parveen Babi, Amitabh Bachchan etc – that he did as a young reporter for India Today in the late 1970s (I read some of them in the library archives when I was with Today) and you’ll see the same confident individualistic streak, the writer’s voice rather than clinical, supposedly "objective" reportage.

Bony, NOT cuddly

Learned friend Amrita sends a stern SMS admonishing me for suggesting in a post that Swiss cows are amply proportioned:

"As a matter of fact, the Schleswig and Holstein breeds are milch cattle, not grown for meat. They are bony creatures with huge udders and surly tempers."

Just passing this on for the edification of anyone who might be consorting with these beasts sometime soon and wants to be well-prepared. Incidentally Amrita and I go back a long way – right back to when I was copy-editing pieces for Britannica and she sent in a 3,000-worder about a "small cow" species, I forget the name, that abounds somewhere in south India, I forget where. (Yes, she does have other interests.)

P.S. I just realised that if you say "surly temper" out loud several times in succession you eventually get "Shirley Temple". I know that’s irrelevant but so is this post.

I want a pet gluck...

...because I’ve just finished Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and the vicious little things sound like they might be useful to have around at home, to turn loose on visiting relatives (Pomeranians have bark but no bite). I also wouldn’t mind the predatory but forlorn Martian jackal-creature that asks its victims telepathically, "May I eat you?"

Apart from introducing us to these strange beasts, P.K.D. discusses how to attain God-ness in this fabulous book, which got a little too abstruse for me near the end but which is still topline science fiction. If you want to Dick-delve, this is a good starting point.

Swiss interlude

Just an update. Am leaving for Switzerland on the 29th, will be away for a couple of weeks (back on April 12, I think). I’ve known about the trip for some time but have just got confirmation of the dates. It’s a junket, I’m going to cover two international watch fairs - one in Basel (March 31-Apr 5) and the other in Geneva (Apr 5-10) - for a special issue of our niche magazine How to Spend It. I should add here I know nothing at all about the watch industry or about timepieces (which fact I’ve been happily disclosing to horrified PR people who have been calling to fix appointments for me with their international clients).

The people who’ve seen my lukewarm reaction to the news so far have accused me of being either 1) a natural-born grouch/cynic, or 2) someone who’s so emotionally constipated that he’s incapable of admitting to happiness. I like to think there’s a bit of truth in both charges generally speaking, but in this particular case allow me to list my reservations:

- I’m NOT going to be gamboling about the beautiful Swiss countryside (if in fact there is such a thing. I believe it’s a myth). “Ooh, that country has beautiful mountains and plains and very large and cuddly cows,” I’ve already been told by the envious. But me, I’m going to spend all day, every single day, in crowded trade fairs looking at luxury watches, trudging wearily from stall to stall, with an average of 10 appointments a day.

- “You’ll have watches coming out of your ears by the second day itself,” the senior editor who has gone for this assignment the past three years told me cheerfully. That’s a not-nice thought, considering it was uncomfortable enough just tying them to my wrist for the few months back in 1988 that I experimented (have never worn one otherwise).

- I’m already getting dozens of mails from watch companies to fix half-hour time slots for appointments. Also got one from an independent engraver, who movingly wrote, “I won’t be exposing at either of the events but could you visit my website...” (I suspect a language translator might have been involved, hence “displaying” being converted into “exposing”)

- On a more serious note, a couple of personal situations make a two-week trip out of Delhi a bit problematic at this time. I was initially told it would be a 5-6 day trip and that was cool but two weeks is in the slight-discomfort zone.

Don’t know how Net-connected I’m going to be out there (between me and the marketing chap who’s going along, there should be at least one laptop but one never knows). But will try to keep posting - will need to take lots of notes every day anyhow, so might as well do it on the comp if possible.


“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

(from Harry Lime’s speech in The Third Man)

What, no baby?

It’s one of the fascinating paradoxes of Indian society that on the one hand people are so prudish about sex but on the other, after a girl is married, elderly relatives she barely knows have absolutely no compunctions about coming up to her, gleam in eye, and asking when “baby is coming”. This line of questioning, if not immediately discouraged with a sharp glance or retort, will be accompanied by advice on seduction and the like. Female friends have told me stories about 60-year-old aunties propagating the virtues of badaam-milk and sensuous massages. One of them actually had to hear “don’t let your husband go anywhere, keep him tied to the bed until you get pregnant”. (Naturally, there is the unspoken assumption that the girl is a virgin, and so must be given explicit instructions. I’m glad to report that at least one of my friends managed to clear the air on that point, nearly causing heart attacks by announcing that she already knew many more tricks than the old fogeys would have learnt over their several years of mundane procreative sex.)

This subject’s been close to my heart for a long time - mainly because it crops up so wearisomely often in discussions with friends, and I never cease to be surprised by some of the anecdotes I hear - and that’s probably one reason I haven’t blogged about it. It just seems so obvious, so ubiquitous. The reason I’m talking about it now is because a very close friend just called up and she was quivering, literally shaking with rage, because she had just returned from a wedding function where complete strangers (or maybe people she had met once or twice before, at other like functions) came up to her and said things like, “So when are you going to wrap up that PhD of yours so you can start a family?” This is an enormously intelligent, ambitious woman who has other priorities in life (and she and her husband are in agreement on that point) and who doesn’t subscribe to that timeworn view that an Indian woman can be considered “successful” only when she’s started a family.

One tends to think of all this as just another irritating element of the Indian societal framework. Some of us might even subconsciously think of it as “sweet” because of the association with babies - especially when the couple on the receiving end are planning to start a family anyway, and there’s no conflict involved. But the offensiveness and intrusiveness came into clearest focus for me a few weeks ago when a friend, Ajitha, cut right to the heart of the matter in her measured, soft-spoken way: “What these people are really asking you,” she said sweetly, “is, when are you and your husband going to start having unprotected sex.” It appears the all-important matter of perpetuating the family line gives even the most conservative people full sanction to inveigle their way into the most private affairs of a couple.

Tarun Tejpal book launch

It was (were?) the Ides of March and the evidence of multiple stabbings at the British High Commission last evening were the perforations on the smoked salmon, meatballs, prawns and chicken chunks that were served to hundreds of greedy lit-P3Ps. It was Tarun Tejpal’s book launch and everyone was there. Literally, or literarily, everyone. Except Samit Basu and Putu the Cat. We attacked the meats with fancy plastic things trying to be toothpicks. And earlier in the evening, a horde of photographers had descended, flashlights popping, on Sir V S Naipaul (certainly a senile Caesar of our time), so the Ides of M theme was generally well adhered to.

Despite the unbelievably large crowd, it was one of the more enjoyable events of its kind I’ve been to. Nice mix of unintended humour, genuine camaraderie (with friends/fellow bloggers) and white wine. Highlights:

Inside

- For the first time in my life, someone actually looked deep into my eyes and said, “Jai, you were absolutely right to insist we be there half an hour early. Your obsession with punctuality is a God-bequeathed gift and I’m glad to know you.” (Ok, I misquote slightly.) Reached at 6.30 for an event slated for 7, to find hundreds of people already jostling for space in the lobby. When we finally made it into the auditorium, things got so bad that individual steps in the aisles were being reserved for people! And that’s not even counting the fact that dozens of luminaries didn’t even make it into the hall.

- There were guest speakers. Living Media’s Aroon Purie drawled about a young Tarun Tejpal walking into the India Today office for an interview back in the 1980s and “making it obvious, even back then, that what he really wanted to do was write a book, and that he considered journalism a hack job”. Purie also raised a few titters when he mentioned TT leaving IT to join “another new magazine, the name of which I can’t recall now”. (Outlook editor Vinod Mehta was nowhere to be seen, which was a surprise considering how many editors/senior journos were present.)

- Tejpal was his usual shotgun self, speaking at the rate of five words a second, but the book discussion with Vir Sanghvi was disappointingly muted. Inevitably, less was said about the book and more about Tehelka and integrity in journalism. The best moment came when, replying to a young journo’s question about lack of good leadership in Indian journalism, Tejpal said “I still believe great journalism always has to come from the youth -- youngsters like you have the purity of purpose that people like Vir and Aroon and I can’t possibly have. You don’t attend cocktail parties, make all sorts of contacts, enter relationships of convenience.” Idealistic but true in a sense, though I couldn’t help musing that in a few moments everyone in the room, senior and junior journos alike, would be molesting cocktail-carrying waiters with equal felicity.

- Sir Vidiiaa, as mentioned, was present, despite being “terribly unwell”. “Think he’s dying?” hissed the litterateur sitting next to me hopefully. One mustn’t be too mean about once-great writers, but I was scarcely the only one to be put off by the blatant puff-blurb given by the great man to Tejpal’s book: “At last, a new and brilliantly original novel from India.” Exactly the kind of thing that makes you not want to read it.

Outside

- Rushing for the alcohol, I ran into the most erudite human being I personally know, Devangshu Datta, whose only character flaw is that he disapproves of blogging. He gave me a delightful dissertation on the feuding sardars of the Ranbaxy family (until I pointed out that I hail from a feuding sardar family myself, albeit one that doesn’t have as much at stake). Devangshu also mentioned that his one conversation with Sir Vidia involved the sartorial trends in post-Revolution Iran. Must catch full story later.

(DD, start blogging now: we will flock to your site like moths to a myth, promise.)

- Met the Compulsive Confessor who confessed brazenly that she’s now vegetarian on weekdays (how could you, eM?)

- Hurree Babu introduced me to someone else I’ve hitherto known only in the blogosphere, Annie Zaidi (though Babu, you must start referring to us by our real names now. Passersby look askance when they hear things like “Jabberwock, meet Known Turf”).

- I flushed and stuttered hopelessly when a senior editor whose writings I’ve followed for several years told me he reads my blog. See, that’s the sort of thing that gets me all self-conscious and wanting to avoid writing self-indulgent blogs like this one. But I do it anyway.

Got to go now, more later.

Deciphering 15.10 at PVR

Some truths of life, though present in one’s subconscious, still have the power to shock when one is confronted with them up close. For instance, I’m constantly surprised by the reminder that there are people – in fact the vast majority of people – who don’t really think much about the movies they watch. I’m not talking critic-style overanalysis but even just taking a moment or so to mull over a recently seen film, maybe form an opinion or two? But that seems beyond most people. It takes me back to school days and the common refrain when we were making a plan to see a film: "Who cares what movie it is, dude? We’re going mainly for the outing." Well, I cared.

Now I know there’s no reason why everyone should be expected to be a film buff to even half the extent I am (or most of my current friends are). I know many intelligent people who just aren’t that much into movies, and fair enough. But the people I’m talking about are the large throngs who classify as frequent movie-watchers, queue up regularly at the PVR ticket windows and say things like "No yaar, not Million Dollar Baby, it is a boxing film". Or listen to Johnny Depp’s accent in Finding Neverland and go, "Hee hee, he sounds like a Chinese." These are true stories.

(Having said which, how fair is it to blame PVR throngers when even a leading "film critic" doesn’t think about what she wants to say before writing a review but merely vomits out a sequence of words that means nothing?)

But the point is that the scatterbrained approach of these people to movie-watching is indicative of a larger malaise - the inability to think deeply about anything at all. They drift through life, these zombies, with no real clue about anything that’s going on around them.

I don’t know how relevant this example is, but I was at the PVR ticket-window listening to many comments in the same league as the Million Dollar Baby one, and the people in front of me had just bought two tickets.

Boy, gaping fearfully at the tickets as if they’re going to paper-cut him to death, turns to girl, says "It is the 15:10 show."
Girl goes "Ummm, 15:10 is what?" and – oh yes – starts writing "12, 13, 14, 15" in sequence on a little piece of paper she has with her.

Now you tell me there’s no correlation between the 15:10 cluelessness and the comments these people are going to make about the movie they’ll watch. They are, therefore they don’t think?

The pandit, the lighter and the cellphone

Was at a puja on Saturday evening. Now these are not things I’m usually at, but I had no idea there was going to be one. Thought it was going to be a regular get-together with a couple of friends, but it turned out to be a puja for their seven-month-old daughter. As I entered the vestibule I spied a panditji, a havan and scattered garlands in the room ahead, but before I could turn around to leave the door was bolted shut behind me.

So there I was feeling very skittish, wearing an FCUK shirt with a condom reference on it, at a sacred ceremony being held to celebrate the miracle of birth. But as the evening proceeded in its torporific way and I registered the goings-on, I noticed that the panditji was very mod. Apart from throwing in bits of English as footnotes to the sacred chants, which was fine, he interspersed a few phonetic jokes here and there, eg equating the term "hast-bandh" with "husband" to make a point about women being the dominant partners in modern marriages.

At one point, as panditji was chanting (and this is supposed to be an uninterrupted process), his cellphone rang; he took it out of his pocket, accepted the call and – I still can’t work out how exactly he managed this – asked the caller to "call back in a couple of hours, I’m at a puja" even as he kept the chant going. All done in the same cadence and tone. Remarkable.

And later, when a few diyas had to be lit and a matchbox couldn’t be found, he produced a lighter from somewhere and did the job.

What I found interesting was that no one among the family or guests, not even the older people present, seemed to mind any of this; there were indulgent smiles, a few giggles even, and then everyone put their solemn expressions back on and continued nodding their heads from side to side the way you’re supposed to do at pujas. Now those of you who are regulars at these events might have seen this sort of thing before, but it was completely new to me, and quite an eye-opener.

If your pujas are this entertaining, start inviting me to them, people.

‘America’s paedophilic childhood’

So terrified am I by what’s happened to Mediaah.blogspot that I’ve decided henceforth to avoid mentioning names when I bitch about Big Media. So I’ll say only that a certain well-known film critic in a certain leading daily has, after a certain plagiarism expose, taken to writing her own original thoughts on movies – which has only made things much worse. In her Million Dollar Baby review, for instance, she referred to Clint Eastwood’s previous film Mystic River as "a trip through America’s traumatic, paedophilic childhood".

During our bloggers’ meet at the Park, Amit Varma and I pored carefully over this sentence and concluded that it meant the founding fathers of the US of A were child molesters. Visions of a leering Thomas Jefferson, an innocent cherub perched atop his lap, leapt into our collective minds. Of course, if America’s great early statesmen were in fact paedophiles, it would (warning: kneejerk anti-Americanism coming up) explain a lot about the state of affairs in that country today. So was that line in the review really insightful social commentary masquerading as terrible film writing? No one knows, not even the reviewer herself.

Meeting a star blogger

Another instalment in the "Bloggers meet in the real world" series. But these things can work in scary ways. After a very nice couple of hours spent chatting with Amit Varma (of India Uncut, The Middle Stage and 23 Yards) at the Park hotel’s coffee shop, I dropped him to the railway station where he had to catch the train for Kolkata (to cover the 2nd India-Pak Test), returned home, logged onto the Net, and found that he’d already put up a short post on our meeting – and this just a little over an hour after I saw him off. Now of course I know he’s a travelling journalist, has a laptop etc etc but it was still unsettling. (Somewhere inside me still lives that wide-eyed boy from 1996 who gasped in astonishment when told that an e-mail sent on Hotmail or Yahoo would be delivered almost instantly.)

Amit was in Delhi for just a few hours, between trains from Chandigarh and to Kolkata. He’s covering the Ind-Pak series for The Guardian and simultaneously putting up informal posts about the series on India Uncut. He’s a prolific (and widely felicitated) blogger, but I had first seen his byline accompanying some excellent cricket writing in Wisden Asia magazine (and the Cricinfo website). I also had memories of a couple of pieces he’d written for that wonderful magazine Gentleman, whose demise many of us, starved for good reading in Indian newspapers and magazines, still lament. (In fact, one of the first things I mentioned to Amit was the extremely high writing standards set by a group of his friends/colleagues in Mumbai – Chandrahas Choudhury, Dileep Premachandran, Rahul Bhattacharya, Leslie Mathew, all of whom have worked for Wisden, though I also recall the superb pieces Mathew wrote on music for Gentleman. Amit mentioned that Sambit Bal, former editor Gentleman and current editor Wisden Asia "is a magnet for good writers and knows how to encourage them". I’m thinking of heading Mumbai-wards now.)

Anyway, sitting in the reinvented Park coffeeshop (which used to be the simple Portico, but is now the self-consciously classy, and very blue, Mist), we discussed an array of things, including one of the hottest current topics: bloggers vs MSM (Mainstream Media). Amit doesn’t believe it’s a battle that bloggers should imagine they can win anytime soon if ever, and he reiterated his theory that blogging will eventually be complementary to mainstream media rather than an alternative to it.

There was inevitably plenty of cricket talk. How the Pakistani pacers seem to have found a way to bowl to Sehwag, something that might well decide the current series. The changes captaincy have wrought on Inzamam’s personality, turning him from a bumbler and an object of derision into a mature, avuncular figure. Is the Ganguly era heading for a close? And has anti-Tendulkarism become as widespread (and as lazy and kneejerk) as anti-Americanism? And oh yes, cricketing clichés. The inglorious certainty of a glorious uncertainty in every match report you read. But Amit conceded sadly that it may be impossible to avoid getting into clichéd descriptions if you write about cricket over a long period. It’s so jading, he said, and I couldn’t help relating that, with some trepidation, to the business of doing book reviews. And about how reading too much has its own pitfalls - it makes one cynical and over-smart.

Have quite a few friends in Mumbai now and am seriously thinking of a visit soon.

P.S. to Amit: Dude, you were off the mark about Bob Dylan. Listen to Malcolm Gladwell. Blink. Don’t trust your grown-up feelings, trust instinct; you were right on target when you were a college kid. Go with your back pages. There, I’ve said it.

Big Media strikes again...

...and Pradyuman Maheshwari's Mediaah is the victim this time. Rohit Gupta, Peter Griffin and Chien(ne)s Sans Frontieres (formerly DesiMediaBitch) have taken up the issue, and it's one that should concern most bloggers. Read about it here.

P.S. More here from Kitabkhana, and check this link too.

Cricket Uncut

Forget Cricinfo, if you want some really entertaining updates on the India-Pak match, keep checking Amit Varma’s India Uncut. Amit is filing match reports for The Guardian and simultaneously blogging on his laptop, which likes to hang like an ape exercising its triceps. There’s plenty of enjoyable, pithy writing here that shows what a refreshing alternative blogging provides to conventional-media reporting. I particularly enjoy his elucidation on cricket’s hoariest cliches, eg “fiery spell” and “glued to the crease”. And also have a personal fondness for the glorious uncertainties post because I once wrote a whole column (okay so it wasn’t a long column - just 350 words) on just that vile phrase.

Go ahead, read.

Million Dollar Baby

Watched Million Dollar Baby last night and - surprise surprise - liked it. Really liked it. Surprise surprise because I was almost certain it would turn out to be one of those self-consciously gloomy films Eastwood-as-director sometimes turns out (the most obvious example being last year’s highly overrated Mystic River, which all but drowned the viewer in an imitation River Styx).

I knew beforehand about the abrupt shift in tone that occurs around two-thirds of the way through Million Dollar Baby, and was dreading how ol’ Clint would handle it. But no major complaints. He let the situation speak for itself, didn’t make it too heavy-handed and refreshingly the film managed to retain its snappiness even in the dark final moments. The worst thing about it - and in my opinion the only serious flaw - was the over-the-top portrayal of Maggie’s self-serving family. But there was nothing else that jarred badly.

Incidentally, I was watching it sitting next to Shougat, whose idea of high praise for any film is "That wasn’t as hideously terrible as one might have feared". That he restricted himself to only two or three snide comments through the 2 hour-10 minute running time said a lot.

A couple of obligatory observations:

Hilary Swank: excellent. After years, a best actress Oscar given for pure performance, not for wearing a fake nose or for symbolising Emancipated Black Womanhood. (Ok, so that’s unfair to Charlize Theron, who was superb in Monster last year, but I couldn’t resist the pokes at Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry.) Shougat, even as he mused whether she deserved it over Imelda Staunton, pointed out that some of the most impressive things about Swank’s performance were things that wouldn’t be immediately obvious to casual viewers - like her painstaking preparation for a boxer’s role and her completely professional moves in the ring.

But I was - dare one say this? - equally impressed by Eastwood the actor. Incredibly understated performance by a man about who Pauline Kael once wrote "He isn’t really doing anything at all, so one can’t exactly call it bad acting." Given how he began his career and the roles that brought him stardom, it’s creditable that he’s so willing to show a vulnerable side.

There’s been a lot written about this film on the Roger Ebert website, mainly because Ebert and his editor took up cudgels against critic-evangelist Michael Medved, who had denounced the film for being pro-euthanasia (Medved also revealed the film’s plot secrets in what Ebert believed was a deliberate attempt to sabotage its box-office performance). But what I recommend you read (preferably after seeing the movie) is this article by Jim Emerson, the editor of RogerEbert.com. I don’t quite agree with his view (I think he’s too hard on the film) but it’s an intelligent and very comprehensive write-up.

My trip to monasteryland

Here’s the first draft of the travel story I’ve done on my visit to Bir. Was too lazy to write a separate, informal version for the blog so am just putting this up instead. There’ll be some revisions and additions in the final published article.

(P.S. Veddy veddy sorry about use of present tense.)

Me and the mountains

In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, the effect of the "corrective" Ludovico Treatment on the delinquent Alex is to make him violently sick whenever he tries to do the things that most appeal to him. At times I can empathise with the young thug. I love the mountains. Travelling on them makes me very ill. And my heart rises and sinks with dangerous simultaneity at the thought of a two-day sojourn to the hills, where a day and a half will perforce be spent on the move.

The good thing about this condition though is that it makes a few decisions easier. For anyone who’s on a timebound trip to the mountains, there’s a natural conflict. You can choose to get to know one place really well - make it your base, stay put, explore the immediate vicinity at leisure. The other option is to do a lot in limited time, drive greedily about in an attempt to hold on to the memory of numerous beautiful vistas -- like the monkey with his fist in the sweet jar - and risk not remembering any of them well enough. But if, as in my case, motion sickness is a factor, you’re best advised to stick with the first option.

Bir, a small hill town near Palampur in Himachal Pradesh, is my principal destination for a story on a recently inaugurated monastic university. From Delhi, one can take an overnight train to Pathankot (the nearest railway station) followed by a four-hour cab drive to Bir, or else a 12-hour bus directly to Palampur. Wanting to keep road travel to a minimum, I choose the former option.

"Buddha ka mandir"

The cab drive is a haze since I’m focusing intently on the latest updates from my digestive system, but I do register a few things: the almost-instant change in scenery as we cross the border from plained Punjab into hilled Himachal; the graceful Shiv mandir cut into the side of a mountain in Trilokpuri; the distant tea-estates near Palampur; the famous temples in Baijnath, including one reputedly built in a day by the Pandava brothers, or so the cab driver tells me; and soon enough the mountains of the beautiful Dhauladhar range, snow cladding their upper reaches (as I contemplate that ceiling fans have already been pressed into service back where I come from).

It’s 12 PM when we reach Bir. The Chokling monastery in the town’s Tibetan colony is where I have to be, but the colony isn’t easy to find since it’s some way off from the rest of the town; when we ask for directions, the word "monastery" produces uncomprehending looks and replies of "ministri?" Eventually I gather that the best way to describe what I’m looking for is to say "Buddhist mandir", and then we’re on the right track.

Saamne yeh monk aaye

My contact person, the ever-affable Pema Wangchuk - who allows himself to be described only as a "servant of the monastery" when I foolishly ask for designation details -- meets me at the Chokling guesthouse, where I’m to stay. "You’re very lucky," he assures me, "Until just yesterday, the weather in these parts was miserable - raining continuously." I’m quite surprised myself at how pleasant and sunny it is - though I’m fated to pay for this round of good fortune later at night, when the mountains will shed their benignity and send icy winds down into the room I’m sleeping in. But that’s still a few hours away.

Pema introduces me to some of the senior monks and watching them interact with each other I’m reminded that Buddhism - or what little I’ve seen of it - has almost none of the external trappings of piety. You sense the halo’s presence but never once see the monks adjusting it around their heads. They shout boisterously across to each other, even joke in a manner that suggests locker-room talk (I didn’t understand the language so can’t confirm), eat meat with relish, play football, carry cellphones with "Saamne Yeh Kaun Aaya" ringtones, ride motorbikes that whiz dangerously along the winding mountain lanes. But the gentleness is there all right, completely unforced. It comes through in the unsuccessful attempt at sternness by one of the monks when he tries to shush the barking monastery dog ("He’s from Delhi, and very aggressive," I’m told without irony). And it’s there in the calm, unfazed way they answer the questions I ceaselessly hurl at them.

School for scripture

Though Lama Sonam Phuntsho - one of the few monks here who’s fluent in English - gives me background information about the Chokyi Llodro monastic university, I get a real sense of the place only when Pema takes me across for a visit. We clatter along in a jalopy straight out of those Ealing Studio comedies from the 1950s, turn a corner and there it is: a sprawling campus with accommodation quarters for nearly 1,000 monks. It’s hard to believe an institution this impressive could be tucked away in what seems a tiny corner of the hills.

This is the new campus for a school with a history that goes back to a monastic shedra first established in eastern Tibet in the late 19th century. The campus gets more breathtaking the more one explores it; the Lama takes me to the accommodation building’s terrace, which affords a stunning view of the breadth of the 10-acre university: the Ashoka pillar in the centre of the lawns flanked by the accommodation quarters; the kitchen block to the left; the library block and VIP quarters to the right; solar water heaters visible on a distant terrace; and of course the main monastery - containing the classrooms and a 4,000-capacity assembly hall - directly in front. Work is currently underway on a health clinic as well as on recreational facilities including a football field, a volleyball court, and even a cricket pitch. "Many of the students here are cricket-crazy," says Lama Phuntsho ruefully; he's no bails-and-willow fan himself.

It’s examination time at the college, but exams were never like this in the school I went to. Rowsof student monks sit in the enormous courtyard outside the monastery scribbling away, casting each other surreptitious glances, while invigilators take rounds. A smiling attendant serves generous helpings of Tibetan butter milk and biscuits and keeps up a regular supply of boiled sweets and dried fruit for the invigilators. The serenity of the setting is almost beyond description.

Prayer room shuffle

Throw in the austere peaks of the Dhauladhar maintaining their own vigil in the background and it makes me never want to leave, but a few cups of tea and many sighs of contentment later we’re back in Bir. In the evening I explore the vicinity of the Chokling monastery with its beautiful sacred stones, a recently built stupa around which worshippers perambulate in the mornings, offering prayers, and the "Labrang" (Tibetan for "house"), where the senior monks reside. One of the Lamas takes me inside the small assembly hall adjoining the Labrang. "You don’t have to take off your shoes," he tells me; there are small rectangular "foot mats" on which one can glide about the room. It’s a strange feeling shuffling about a prayer room with a monk, like an amateur ice skater.

Dinner is a delectable mixed thenthup, with everything in it -- flour, egg, meats, vegetables. After watching a puja involving a mask dance and haunting drum-based music in the monastery courtyard, I retire early to my room and discover that U2 was right. Sleep comes like a drug in God’s country - despite the biting cold that sets in around 9 PM.

McLeodganj

Morning, and with the solar heaters not yet working, I carry a bucket of boiling water from the canteen kitchen up to my room. Which is good, the exercise helps warm me up.

My work in Bir done, and with the evening train to catch at Pathankot, I decide I have just enough time for a two-hour trip to McLeodganj, which isn’t far out of the way. Waving goodbye to Pema and the monks, and promising them (and myself) I’ll be back soon, I set off by cab again. For some reason, the drive is more relaxed this time. But as we pass Dharamsala and begin the climb to McLeodganj, where the Dalai Lama has lived for over 40 years, the road gets much steeper than any I’ve yet encountered. Worse, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a traffic jam that would have done rush-hour Delhi proud. The cause for the rush, it transpires, is a puja taking place in a monastery very near the Dalai Lama’s residence.

To save time, I get out of the cab and arrange to meet the driver later. Walking along the marketplace, squeezing my way through rows of honking cars and over-enthusiastic shoppers, I reflect on the irony that this serene religion should have such a noisy, bustling place as its spiritual centre. After the calm of Bir and the Chokling monastery, it’s a little disenchanting and I even begin to wonder whether it was a good idea to come to this tourist-and-worshipper-saturated place.

However, the feeling doesn’t last long. After strolling around the market centre, looking at the shops with prayer bowls, wheels and other artefacts on sale, I step into a cafe a little way off the main road. Two monks are sitting at a nearby table, murmuring softly to each other over bowls of soup and suddenly, I’m transported. The traffic outside hasn’t abated, hawkers and tourists are still arguing furiously over prices, and I know I’ll be back at Pathankot station in just a couple of hours. But for now, listening to the sound of these gentle voices, all of that seems irrelevant.

What’s the Catch, Anurag?

Anurag Mathur was featured this week in the Sunday Asian Age's always-(unintentionally) enjoyable "Bibliofile" Q&A. Here’s a sample of the questions and answers:

Q. Who is your favourite Indian writer?
Ans. Myself.

Q. Which are the most underrated books?
Ans. Three of my own books, apart from The Inscrutable Americans: Making the Minister Smile, Scenes from an Executive Life and Department of Denial.

Q. Which books have changed your life?
Ans. Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and J D Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Q. Which books would you make compulsory reading?
Ans Catch 22 and Catcher in the Rye

And best of all, given the previous two answers:

Q. Which classic do you want to read?
Ans. Catch-22.

The Inscrutable Mr Mathur...

Never Let Me Go: first thoughts

Have finished Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Immediate reaction was one of slight disappointment, mainly with the "let’s sit down and explain things" climax, which really doesn’t suit this author’s style. (One of the online reviews I read likened it to a James Bond villain explaining his devious plot, but that’s going way too far.) But already, less than 24 hours after finishing it, I find my appreciation for it growing. I’ve experienced this feeling with Ishiguro before, especially with his more oblique narratives. His two most direct, linear novels were An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, both of which I appreciated almost immediately; when I reached the end of those books, I closed them, turned them over in my hands for a few seconds (as I always do when I finish a book) and said to myself "Now that was a good, satisfying read." But it wasn’t the same with Ishiguro’s more surreal work - A Pale View of Hills, The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans. I was dissatisfied to varying degrees when I finished reading those, but then, over the course of the next few days something strange happened: I found I couldn’t get them out of my head. Little fragments would keep coming back to haunt me, I’d get a disjointed, kaleidoscopic sense of the themes the author had been hinting at through his often-frustrating narrative structure. And eventually I developed a much deeper relationship with those books than with the straightforward ones.

Having said which, I’m unsure how exactly to categorise the narrative structure of this strange new novel. Here’s the problem: on the one hand, it’s set in a world that isn’t recognisably ours - it’s England in the 1990s all right, but what we have is an alternate, possibly dystopian, society. (I won’t go into more detail here, even though the central plot revelation is made around page 70; so it isn’t strictly speaking a secret). But on the other hand, once you’re given and accept the rules of this alternate world, the narrative itself is a completely straightforward one - in the Remains of the Day/Artist of the Floating World category. So how does one classify it? It feels like a completely different level of surrealism from that we encountered in The Unconsoled and A Pale View. An ostensibly realistic narrative, but one that serves the function of allegory.

Having decided not to disclose the premise of the story in this blog (though I think I’ll have to when I write the review), I find myself a little constrained when discussing "what it’s about". Of course, any Ishiguro novel is about many different things and it’s up to you as a reader to pick your theme. That ponytailed polymath Shamya Dasgupta - now a TV celebrity on Headlines Today - postulates here that The Unconsoled is "about a man's time that is constantly, constantly, unfailingly, tampered with. It's all about a man's mind - his body clock and his physiology - being beaten to pulp with a hammer". It’s probably relevant somewhere that Shamya was very recently doing physiology-numbing graveyard shifts in his new job.

Likewise, I have topics that have special relevance to me, and accordingly one of the things I think Never Let Me Go is about is how our lives are pre-designed for us, how the paths we take are predetermined by a number of factors, even when there’s the illusion of free will. It’s also very particularly about formal education and the role educational institutions play in inuring us to the horrors, the unpredictabilities of life. About how, going to school every day as children, we never get an actual sense of how whimsical, random, even pointless, life might turn out to be.

Of course, there’s much more to it than that. But I have a 1500-word review to do on this book, so I’ll stop here for now. Meanwhile, here’s a key passage from the final section, the words of a former schoolteacher:

"Sometimes we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we even fooled you. I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods...Look at you both now! I’m so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you?"

Reelly, Ravs!

Agony Aunt/Uncle columns in newspapers and magazines are hilariously deluded at most times, even when the aunt/uncle in question is professionally qualified to advise on the subject. But these columns can be downright pernicious when established for no better purpose than to cash in on the name of a celebrity who’s completely cut off from the real world. The Sunday HT’s magazine Brunch has an "Ask Raveena" column where for several weeks now actress Raveena Tandon has been giving vapid counsel to the lovelorn ("I always feel that communication is the most important thing in a relationship. So I’ll advise you to do that." And suchlike.)

Of course, examples like the above can do no real harm; they’re a waste of space at worst. But this week one of the questions was:

I am a 25-year-old Hindu boy in love with a Muslim girl. Her family is against it. What should I do?

Raveena’s answer:
"If you love each other truly and you both are adults, there’s really nothing to stop you…I find it silly that in this day and age people talk about caste and religious differences…There are so many instances of successful Muslim-Hindu marriages, look at Shah Rukh Khan and Gauri and countless others - they’re so happy together. Love is the most important thing in any relationship."

In the rose-and-reel-tinted world this columnist lives in, it’s probably futile to point out that if you’re gazing Shah Rukh-and-Gauri-wards you might also take the trouble to cast at least a brief glance at cases like this and this.

Now I’m not suggesting Raveena should have told this poor guy something like "Kill yourself now, before her brothers do it for you." Columnists must be kind. But surely a tiny dose of practicality might have been in order, instead of the outright "love will necessarily triumph" spiel, lifted straight from a Bollywood script.

Small Island review

It’s been a while since I’ve had such conflicting feelings about a novel. Andrea Levy’s Small Island holds the attention for almost the full duration of its 500-plus pages. It’s bright and conversational, sometimes very funny, and finds a way to handle serious issues with a lightness of touch that heightens its impact. Besides, it sheds light on a period of crucial social change - Jamaican emigrants settling in post-WWII Britain; the problems faced by both newcomers and original settlers - that many of us in India wouldn’t know much about but which does hold interest for us too.

And yet, somewhere along the line this book loses fizz and focus. Towards the end, its characters turn into caricatures - more symbols than believable people - and the climactic "twist" could have hopped in from a Barbara Cartland novel. Also, of the four narrative voices Levy uses to tell her tale, at least one - though interesting in its own way - never seems relevant enough to the main story. These flaws aren’t enough to override all the book’s pluses, but they are disappointing all the same.

"Small Island was written with enormous charm and was a clear choice for our Book of the Year," said Whitbread Book judge Trevor McDonald recently. Enormous charm is something it certainly has, especially when written in the voice of the uncouth but likeable Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican who fights in the RAF and then takes up lodging in London. The Gilbert narratives provide some of the book’s richest material - from the slapstick humour that accompanies his attempts to placate his bride Hortense (freshly arrived in England with stars in her eyes) to the poignancy of his likening the Mother Country to a beloved distant relative who turns out, when seen up close, to be a hostile, "stinking hag". But even Gilbert’s disillusionment with his new surroundings pales in comparison to Hortense’s utter shock. Unlike him she’s educated, having trained to be a schoolteacher in Jamaica, speaks in sentences like "No one would think to enchain someone such as I" and has rosy notions about how the English speak and behave. In short: she’s nicely set up for a fall.

The author was born in England and has lived there all her life but is Jamaican by origin, making her a distant cousin of our own "dislocated" writers like Jhumpa Lahiri. Levy’s previous novels have explored the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants. However, here she captures very well not just the emigrant’s problems but also the outraged British reaction to seeing "darkies" in their midst. The best insights come from the account of the third in her pantheon of narrators - Queenie Bligh, who, to the horror of her neighbours, takes in coloured people as lodgers. Queenie’s narrative provides a view of the cheerfully unashamed (and ignorant) racism prevalent in London - a city we know as so cosmopolitan today - just a few decades ago; of otherwise well-meaning Brits shocked to their core at the very thought of having to step off a pavement to allow two coloured people to pass by.

Queenie’s interaction with Hortense is also intriguing, because one gets a sense of the indefinable workings of spoken language. In conventional terms the Jamaican Hortense’s English is probably better than the English-born Queenie’s, but that counts for little here. Hortense is destined to remain the outsider not just because of her accent and pronunciation but because of her self-consciousness, her over-formality; the implication is that the language isn’t hers, and no amount of education will amend that.

Two-thirds of the way through, Levy introduces her fourth speaker, Queenie’s husband Bernard, and it’s here that the book starts to lose focus. This isn’t quite Bernard’s fault. He has an engrossing enough tale of his own to relate (though the author perhaps overdoes his staccato style), it’s just that his narrative seems to belong to a different book from the one containing Gilbert, Hortense and Queenie’s stories. We learn about Bernard’s misadventures in India - where he was posted during the war - and the reasons for his delay in returning to his wife. But even given the racism in Bernard’s revulsion at the idea of India being left to rule itself ("How do those constantly squabbling Hindus and Muslims even tell each other apart" he wonders), there’s little here that’s connected with the central thread of the story, which we’d left far behind in England. And when Bernard finally does make it home, things get all too predictable.

Small Island has a lot going for it and this review is by no means a decisive thumbs-down, just a personal disappointment with the way it eventually turned out. There’s much that’s praiseworthy in the earlier sections of the book. I especially enjoyed the way Levy’s friendly style briefly changes to throw up unsettling imagery: in, for instance, a description of segregation in a movie hall, the usherette’s torch exposing black people sitting together like "a horde of writhing cockroaches". Or Gilbert espying what seems like a beautiful green brooch on the ground but is revealed to be a cluster of flies caught by the light.

Part of the reason for the overall disappointment may have been the hype, for this is a richly awarded novel, having won both the Whitbread Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction (if you follow these things, you’ll know it’s rare for any book, however acclaimed, to get more than one major literary prize). Personally, I think the judges read only the first two-thirds of the book before making their decision; the final 150 pages are a letdown.

Eeesh...

...says Mithun da. And “Ishh!” shout back I. Have just received an advance copy - and SO WHAT if it’s an uncorrected proof - of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest, Never Let Me Go. At least two weeks before it would have been available in any bookshop here. Ah, power! Will put everything else aside now to read it. And review it. And then read it again.

(To Ajitha - mwahahahahahaha!)

Well read

More and more I find myself fearing that I might be reading too much and too fast, and not reading well enough.

Have just finished reviewing Andrea Levy’s Small Island for our paper (will put it up here once it’s been published). Considering how highly it’s been regarded in most quarters, mine is a not-too-favourable review - I had a few reservations about the book - but then, yesterday, while flipping through its pages again, I chanced upon a striking (and thematically important) passage that had somehow just not registered with me earlier. That was scary, because it suggested I hadn’t been reading (at least some portions) with full concentration. Personally speaking, that’s a depressing thought because of what books have meant to me for most of my life. And professionally it’s distressing because if I haven’t read it well enough, what right do I have to write even a partly negative assessment, to throw in even a few dismissive sentences in a 1000-word review? (That won’t stop me, of course!)

I marvel at how some of the professional reviewers/dedicated lit journos I know manage. A few weeks ago I nearly fell off my chair when I heard one of them rattle off the names and complex relationships of some of the more marginal characters in one of Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books. (I loved that series myself but off the cuff I can only recall Lord Emsworth, Rupert Baxter and good old Galahad. Oh oh, and Beach the butler.) Wodehouse just happened to come up in conversation, and I know that the friend in question, a polymath, reads hundreds of books each year on every subject imaginable - I seriously doubt he would have just happened to pick up a Blandings Castle book in the recent past. So is this just a case of vastly superior memory, or concentration, or what is it? How does one balance reading a lot with reading well?

I’m not sure who it was that said it was better to know one book intimately than to know a thousand books sketchily, but Frank Capra once proclaimed that you can’t call yourself poor if you have one really good friend: “Three of them, and you’re a millionaire.” The comparison makes sense I think; of the hundreds of books in my room, there are some that I once knew so intimately but which seem like strangers when I approach them now - like lost schoolfriends.

Back in 1989-90, which was when I read almost all the Agatha Christies in a space of 7-8 months, I was astonished by my mother’s admission that she had read them all in her youth but didn’t remember most of them anymore. “That’s never going to happen with me,” I vowed, and to ensure it wouldn’t I solemnly repeated the murderer’s name and modus operandi to myself each time I reached the end of a Christie. Today, as I scan the titles on their shelf, I recall the denouement of only 9 or 10 of the books - and even among these, a couple of the memories have been kept alive by filmed versions I later saw. (Of course, every once in a while there’s a happy incident, like when Yazad Jal started talking about Ordeal By Innocence at our bloggers’ meet and the plot suddenly came back to me.)

Actually, Agatha Christie isn’t even the best example, because unexpected endings/revelations tend to stick with you - thereby creating the illusion that you remember the book better than you really do. So what of other books that I knew really intimately at various stages of my reading life? To name a few: Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (which I was so proud about reading when I was just 12 that I re-read it almost immediately). Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, most of the essays in Step Across This Line. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Steinbeck’s East of Eden. (Okay, it might not be a great book but I loved it and was sure I would never forget the plot, and now I completely have.) Catch 22 and Something Happened, Joseph Heller. More recently, Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, Tolkien’s The Silmarilion. Best of all, Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books.

That’s a decent list up there, though of course it’s only a small selection. But I can’t claim to know most of these books very well anymore. And one has so little time to revisit them, let alone reread them from beginning to end. There’s so much new stuff demanding to be read, reviewed on deadlines. Sometimes I wish I could create a vacuum in time for myself, crawl into it, reread all the books of my past, and then reemerge to tackle all the new stuff.

Game, set and match to...

(no, this ain't about Sania Mirza beating the world number 7)

The first annual Tournament of Books has a winner. The final was between David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Click here to discover who won.

And (nudge nudge) you can read your hosting blogger's views on both books, here and here.