Rib-tickler

“They say Eve was made from Adam’s rib, and now Australia’s Mike Hussey may get a chance in the national team…(significant pause)…thanks to a rib.”

-- from an NDTV report about Hussey replacing Justin Langer, who has a rib injury.

(And viewer has sudden, horrific vision of Mike and Justin on the Eden Gardens pitch, clad only in fig leaves.)

Bougainvillea House - review

My review of the Kalpana Swaminathan book; appeared in today’s Indian Express, though I haven’t seen the print version yet (website link here). I was disappointed with the book and briefly wondered if that was because I was too keen on comparing it to her previous novel, Ambrosia for Afters, which I’d enjoyed immensely (review here). But on the whole I think I’ve judged this one on its own terms.

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Sixty one-year-old Clarice Aranxa is dying of motor neuron disease and has returned to an old family house on the Baga promontory – whether to recuperate or to spend her last days in peace, no one really knows. It’s probably not a great idea either way, for this was the scene of a double crime 36 years earlier -- of her husband Clive’s infidelity and his subsequent, mysterious death. Understandably, Clarice is soon haunted by visitations from the past, though at least one of them takes an unsettling corporeal form as well: a young man who she realises is her husband’s illegitimate son from that affair.

Clarice’s daughter Marion and longtime housekeeper Pauline try to help her, but she sinks ever deeper into the torment of her memories and (perhaps) delusions. Meanwhile, as more deaths occur and Clarice turns catatonic, her doctor, Liaquat Ali Khan, finds himself playing detective.

The first half of Kalpana Swaminathan’s Bougainvillea House gives us most of the meat of this story, through four tapes in Clarice’s voice (we learn a little later when and why these tapes were recorded). The tone is a sharp, distinctive one, carrying all the force of the Puritanism by which she has lived her life: her loathing of sex, the insistence on her grown-up daughters maintaining their “purity”, a dislike of “the natives” and hints of evangelism, even her revulsion at the idea of being buried with her husband’s family (“I have no intention of letting Uncle Bosco’s skeletal hand creep up my skirt”) – these are details that manage to be amusing and creepy at the same time.

But once Clarice’s narrative ends and Dr Khan’s investigations come to the centrestage, the book’s structure starts to fall apart. Halfway through, the chapters start dwindling in size, peripheral characters come and go, and there is much ponderous talk about the need to understand Clarice. (“Everything locked inside heart,” goes Pauline in her Konkani English, “everything locked and key thrown away. Now she wants to look inside. Can’t open!”) The problem is, the woman in question probably doesn’t deserve such laboured analysis – she’s a straightforward nutcase, a close cousin of the psychotic mother from the Stephen King thriller Carrie. Also, despite the one red herring that the author slips in, the climactic revelation can be seen from some way off; and eventually, what promised to be a compelling psychological mystery ends with a denouement uncomfortably close to that of a B-grade suspense film.

This is a pity, for Swaminathan has a considerable talent for leading the reader into twilight zones by blurring the line between fantasy and real life. Her previous novel Ambrosia for Afters was a marvelously atmospheric contemporary spin on the Red Riding Hood story, a book that drew us steadily deeper into a lush, possibly dangerous fairy-tale landscape. In Bougainvillea House, however, she misfires, investing too much in an ending that can’t carry the weight of what’s gone before. With its lopsided structure, the book itself seems to be aware of this disproportion.

Bougainvillea House is still very effective in some of its smaller moments: in a description, for instance, of a group of people discovering a dead body (“how ancient it was, this ring of male backs stilled into unity, frozen in one long moment of shock…”); a tennis court seen at dawn through the eyes of a weary, bewildered man (“the floodlit concrete was horrific…like a cinematic frame of Auschwitz or Belsen”); even a throwaway line about stray dogs bounding up happily when they smell “the sweet scent of blood” on someone’s shoes. But as a whole it’s dissatisfying. Reading it, I could empathise with Dr Khan’s feeling of mounting dread: I felt the dismay that comes as you wait eagerly for the moment when a book will explode into life, and it never happens.

Online Journalism Review on the IIPM fracas

You may already have seen this story (more popular bloggers have linked to it), but just in case you haven’t please do read one of the most comprehensive summaries of the IIPM controversy: Business school flap a 'breakout moment' for Indian blogosphere.

It was done by Mark Glaser for the Online Journalism Review a couple of days ago. There’s more information here than there was in most of the stories done in the Indian media, and it’s certainly much more balanced than the shockingly blinkered piece that appeared in Outlook last week.

The link again.

The new Chetan Bhagat, and thoughts on 'entertainment'

(A tense moment as the jabberwock contemplates this big announcement he is about to make - an announcement that might easily drive half his readers away for good.)

Oh what the heck, it’s not like this is a paid site. So here goes: I thought Chetan Bhagat’s new book was pretty good. There, I’ve said it. I have nothing to fear anymore.

No, I won’t go on about how it isn’t great literature etc, because that should be evident to anyone (even though it’s rarely evident what "great literature" is exactly). It’s something the author himself makes a point of saying in his every interview (to the extent that he’s almost too defensive now about the fact that his work doesn’t have any literary pretensions - even his narrators say things like "if you’re expecting something posh and highbrow, you won’t get that here").

I won’t talk about the book’s plot either - in the unlikely event that you don’t already know about it, read about it here. In any case, if there’s one book that doesn’t need any more publicity, it’s this one - it’s going to sell hundreds of thousands of copies regardless of what any critic or blogger says about it (that’s largely thanks to Rupa’s smart, and brave, marketing strategy of pricing it at Rs 95, something that worked phenomenally well for Five Point Someone). It’ll far, far outsell many vastly better-written books, and so maybe I should feel guilty about writing a post about it.

But there are a couple of points I want to make about Bhagat’s writing:

- I think CB is a good storyteller, more gifted in that respect than many people who are, technically speaking, "better writers". And this can be as vital to good writing as erudition or command over the language. Though his writing is conversation- rather than description-oriented, he has a definite gift for characterisation; his little observations about people and relationships are the mark of a perceptive mind.

- Importantly, I think one night at the call centre is a slight improvement on its predecessor, and that’s always a good sign. The writing is tighter on the whole and the funny, seemingless effortless one-liners (which Bhagat has a knack for) work better here. Also, it required more research than the first book, for which Bhagat had drawn on his own experiences at IIT in the mid-1990s.

(Note: the "God" section of the book didn’t work for me - it wasn’t as syrupy as it might have been but it was still too preachy for my liking. Nor was I too sold on the parts about "saving the call centre by working on American fear".)

Many authors use the "I’m not literary" defence - it’s often a way of shirking responsibility, of keeping people’s expectations of you as low as possible so they won’t be disappointed. But very few of those authors are as readable as CB is, and in the final analysis readability does count. This is the second book of his that I finished in a single sitting despite being pressed for time. That’s not something I usually experience with pulp/non-literary fiction, regardless of the authors’ claims that their aim is to provide a fast, easy read.

P.S. Indirectly related to this post. When I met Bhagat yesterday, he went through the "I write to entertain" routine as well. While I understand why people feel the need to make the "serious v entertainment" distinction, I don’t relate to that kind of talk. It’s very annoying, for instance, if you’re discussing Bergman or Godard with a friend and someone pipes up with a, "Oh, I only watch movies for entertainment." That’s insulting – it’s based on a pre-judgement of what "entertainment" must be, and an assumption that some of us are forcing ourselves to watch "boring" films for some lofty purpose only we know about. But my foremost criterion for judging any film/book is that it should provide me enjoyment. For instance, my ever-shifting list of 20 favourite films usually includes both Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and George Lucas’s Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back, and both films entertain me.

The most concession I can make is that different films/books entertain us in different ways: that on some occasions more than others the fun quotient is increased by the knowledge that you’re being intellectually stimulated as well. But that’s about it. I’d feel very sorry for someone who forced themselves to plough through a book they didn’t like just because they thought it would improve their mind. For heaven’s sake, we’ve all been through enough of that forced crap in our school and college days.

(Conversely, I don’t think there’s a law on earth that says you have to be entertained by an Adam Sandler or David Dhawan film. I’ve been bored stiff on many occasions.)

Am late on this but...

...yesterday was Blog Quake Day. Check out this comprehensive post at DesiPundit for info on where you can make contributions or what you can do to help with relief efforts.

Books are the new snobbery?

Well, that’s what John Ezard reports in this Guardian article: ‘More than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book "solely to look intelligent", the YouGov survey says.’

The story includes the quote, “We seem to have lost sight of the fact that reading a book should be a personal, enjoyable and relaxing experience…” So true - that’s something those of us who read for a living often lose sight of too.

Also: ‘Some consumers hedge their bets by keeping two titles on the go - one an impressive book to show other people, the other an escapist work to enjoy.’ Can relate to that as well. Now I’m off to finish Chetan Bhagat's one night at the call center, though if anyone pops into my room I’ll hide it behind Joe Sacco’s Palestine.

But hey – Palestine is a comic. I can’t win.

Another milestone...

…in the history of this humble blog. Courtesy BlogPatrol, I discovered that sometime last night the phrase “suhaag raat experience” overtook “Matrubhoomi review” to become the second most widely Googled term to lure visitors to my blog. (The most widely googled term is still “Jabberwock”, by a big margin.)

Other phrases in the top ten:

- Rahul Dravid biography

- Suhaag raat how was it

- Asa Nisi Masa

- Tasteless costumes

- Is Rahul Dravid Marathi?

- Suhaag raat how is it

- Funniest song ever

A quick tip...

…for Delhi- and Bangalore-based movie enthusiasts who grumble about the lack of non-mainstream film screenings in the big theatres. Anup Kurian’s 2004 film Manasarovar (which won the best film award at the International Film Festival of Mumbai earlier this year) is being shown at Cinema Europa, Gurgaon and at PVR Bangalore this week, its first commercial release in these cities, so do try to catch it if you're interested. (For details about timings etc you’ll have to call the theatres up because the newspapers haven’t listed it, for reasons best known to them.)

For more on the film, here’s the official site and a couple of other links.

Note: I haven’t seen it myself though I hope to be able to hotfoot it to Gurgaon sometime in the middle of a very busy week. But I’m glad low-budget, low-profile movies are finally making it to the PVRs, though it’s still happening on a very small scale and they’re still given stepsisterly treatment. (Which, incidentally, is also the subject of my next film column for Business Standard.)

Bapsi Sidhwa, and a Lahore anthology

(Caution: long, nonspecific post, partly author profile, partly book review; will use an edited version of this for a story later so thought I’d put the whole thing here first.)

Waiting at the India International Centre to meet Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa, I had formed a mental picture of her by adding a decade to the photos I’d seen on various websites - figuring that those were of older stock. So it was a considerable surprise to see the lady herself. It’s difficult to believe Sidhwa is 67 - it isn’t just that she looks younger, it’s the agility: the keenness of her gaze, the way she sharply and precisely corrects me when I get a detail in one of her stories wrong. Or how she bristles when I remark that she’s written only four novels in 26 years: "That isn’t so meagre," she says, "especially when you consider that two of them are acknowledged classics."

It’s a bit worrying to hear an author refer to her own work as an "acknowledged classic" - but then maybe it’s also hypocritical to expect all writers to abide by the self-effacing stereotype. (Especially when one knows that deep down, most of them really aren’t!) Sidhwa is forthright about herself and her work, and in her defence The Crow Eaters and Ice-Candy Man (presumably the two novels she is referring to) really are solid books, providing fine sketches of a certain time and place and the people who inhabited them.

Ice-Candy Man (alternatively titled Cracking India, "because the term ‘ice-candy man’ had drug associations in the US") looked at Partition through the experiences of a young Parsi girl, Lenny (around the same age Sidhwa was at the time, and similarly polio-afflicted), whose own family isn’t directly affected by the riots but who has an emotional compact with some of the people who are -- like her beloved Ayah, and the local ice-candy man. I read the book around 1999 (when Deepa Mehta’s film version Earth was released) and was impressed by the way it glided, almost imperceptibly, from the commonplace to the horrific: from the quotidian details of Lenny’s family life to the spectre of Partition violence and the emotional betrayal at the book’s core.

Ice-Candy Man had quite a few light moments as well, but nothing in it quite prepared me for the next Sidhwa book I read - The Crow-Eaters, a piquantly funny story about the life of a Parsee family in the early 20th century, and the often-hilarious power struggle between Freddy Junglewalla and his cantankerous mother-in-law. Sidhwa’s first novel, this was seen as something of a milestone in Pakistani writing in English. It was difficult for her to find publishers, and the book reached a wide market only when Jonathan Cape in the UK took it on. This was followed by a brouhaha in the Parsee community, some members of whom objected to the way they had been depicted, and even to the book’s title. "There had been almost no fiction dealing specifically with Parsee life before this," says Sidhwa, "they weren’t used to see ing themselves and their little idiosyncracies portrayed in a book, and so they missed the fact that it was really a very affectionate look at the community."

"Lahore, Lahore hai"

But Lahore has to be the main topic of discussion at this interview, because Sidhwa has just helped edit a new anthology of writings on the city - City of Sin and Splendour. It’s as eclectic a collection as one could wish for in 360 pages. "I’ve tried to cover as many aspects of Lahore as possible," says Sidhwa, "from the historical perspective to aspects of the modern city." Nostalgia is definitely the byword though: there are reminiscences by Khushwant Singh and Sara Suleri Goodyear among others; Ved Mehta's account of returning to his old family home to find that everything, right down to the toilet system, has changed; Minoo Bhandara’s recollection of sitting next to the movie star Ava Gardner in the Regal Cinema "box" as a youngster. Other pieces in the collection include Saadat Hasan Manto’s acerbic "Toba Tek Singh", about a post-Pa rtition exchange of lunatics between Pakistan and India, and Irfan Husain’s "The Way of All Flesh", about Lahori food; the latter might give you dyspepsia just reading it (and, how to say this, I mean that in a good way).

Sidhwa has spent most of her life in Lahore and loves the city (incidentally the book’s dedication is to her daughter Parizad, "the quintessential Lahori"). She believes the age-old greeting "Lahore Lahore hai" ("Lahore is Lahore", implying there’s no place else quite like it) holds as true today as it ever did. "Despite the globalisation, the McDonalds and so on, the place hasn’t changed in its essence. Every year one sees more and more gardens – the government is still very particular about this. The Walled City is more beautiful and neater than its equivalent in Delhi. And poetry is still so alive in the city."

Most of the pieces in this collection reflect this affection for the city. My favourite among the ones I’ve read so far is Ismat Chughtai's delightful account of her visit to Lahore in 1944 on a court summons. Chughtai had been charged with obscenity in her story "Lihaaf", which hinted at a lesbian relationship between a lady and her maid. Given that threatening background, it’s remarkable how high-spirited this piece is. Chughtai might as well be describing a picnic; she isn’t nervous about the trial so much as thrilled about the opportunity it gives her to visit Lahore:

"...words of praise issued forth spontaneously from my heart for the King of Britain, because he had brought a case against us and thus afforded us the golden opportunity of having a festive time in Lahore."

Some of the stories present two different perspectives on an aspect of the city. Pran Neville’s "The Splendours of Hira Mandi or Tibbi", for instance, is an idealised tribute to one of Lahore’s most famous institutions, and mentions the nose-ring ceremony held to mark marked the deflowering of singing or dancing girl. However, the next piece, "Kanjari", presents another aspect of the "diamond market" - the exploitation of young girls. Sidhwa’s own view is that the two aspects coexist. "There is a sordid side but these are the same people who keep classical song and dance alive in Lahore."

Our conversation keeps going off on a tangent (mea culpa): in fragments, we talk about Ved Mehta (who asked her not to mention his blindness in the Contributor’s Notes for the anthology), Sidhwa’s novelisation of Deepa Mehta’s next film Water, and women’s writing in Pakistan ("People are actually very happy when a woman spends her time writing," she quips, "because then she’s shut up in a room by herself"). But Sidhwa is a little behind schedule and the interview must be cut short. Leaving, she’s back to being the publicity-savvy professional. "I hope the story is printed around the time of the book launch," she says, "It’s good for sales."

His sexy innards

What supermodel-turned-actor Upen Patel has to say in today’s HT City, in response to a new survey that rates India the second-sexiest nation (after Brazil):

"In fact, India is not the second-sexiest but the sexiest nation. Indians are not only beautiful to look at from the outside but they are also beautiful on the inside, and that’s what makes us so desirable."

P.S. In the same story, "glamgirl Shamita Shetty" adds, "Believe me, people all over the world are crazy about us."

P.P.S. Delhi Times has a similar story on its front page, with the memorable (if incomprehensible) sentence: "It is no surprise India is considered a sexy country, given its tradition of tolerance towards desire (sic) and, of course, the constant focus on love in its movies."

Spellwreck

There’s been too much gravitas in the blogosphere lately, so here’s a two-bit attempt at lightening the mood (though of course there’s always the danger that this will make it worse). Many summers ago, while editing a film piece for Britannica, I discovered that Microsoft Word’s Spellcheck proffered the suggestion “Urinal sin” for the name of the revered director Mrinal Sen. (This was around the time George Michael was arrested for doing unnamable things in a public toilet.) Shaken, I made it my mission to track other such dastardly forced conversions, some of which I now present you:

Mallika Sherawat - Manlike shrew

Rani Mukherji - Rank moocher

Preity Zinta - Peaty zinc

Ajay Devgan - Ahoy, deviant

Sanjay Dutt - Sandy dust

Hrithik Roshan - Heretic Russian (also Rhythmic Russian, but that just feels wrong)

Sanjay Leela Bhansali - Sunday lilac, banal

Vidhu Vinod Chopra - Idaho vendor choir (now there’s a concert I’d never attend). Also, Vishnu vine chops

Karan Johar - Koran Jihad

Sachin Tendulkar - Sacking tenderly

Ritwik Ghatak - Rethink Ghana. Also, Ratfink gate and Nitwit grated

Mithun Chakraborty - Methane chalkboard (sorry, Great Bong)

(Strategically placed commas mine)

P.S. "Arindam Chaudhuri" becomes "Grandma Claudia" or "Random chihuahua", take your pick.

Ambrosia for Afters - review

(Did this review for Business Standard a couple of years ago; am back-dating and posting it here for linking purposes.)

The coming-of-age tale holds special appeal for writers, enabling the revisitation of the defining moments in their own lives that propelled them towards the scary, uncertain world of adulthood. Done badly, the genre can be self-indulgent and formulaic. Done well, it can be something like Kalpana Swaminathan’s new book, an often bizarre yet completely enthralling story of a young girl living two lives.

The girl is Tenral ("say it with a soft t, a short e, a barely whispered d between the middle consonants and with a short uh for the last vowel -- or don’t say it at all," she tells us) and the tale is set during her last months of school at St Agnel’s Convent. Tenral has family but we never get to know them (we never really care to anyway), which is fitting since she’s so much the wild child -- a creature more of her own imagination than of anything else. She’s precocious, individualistic and opinionated ("Enid must’ve forgotten how 14 feels by the time she got around to writing the Girls at St Clare’s books" she blasphemes).

Tenral also has the ability to shade prosaic real-world events with colours that come from a landscape her mind inhabits. Soon enough, her imagination is sparked by her English teacher -- real name Fleur D’Cruz but known to us as Mrs Alfie, because Tenral only thinks of her in terms of the teacher’s long-dead lover whose name finds its way into various poetry readings.

As the book progresses, Tenral weaves her own stories about Mrs Alfie’s tragic past; but inevitably she -- and we -- must deal with the truth. Tenral’s fantasy world soon reveals its function as a defensive device, a way of coping with the horrors of a world where Big Bad Wolves can turn out to be kindred spirits but human beings aren’t to be trusted. These strands of fantasy and reality come together in the heartrending penultimate chapter where Tenral pieces together her teacher’s story with a revisionist take on Little Red Riding Hood.

Ambrosia for Afters is a magical, lyrical story, at it’s best when depicting a world where Euclid uses geometry to help Archimedes solve matters of the heart, and ugly princesses learn Braille so they can marry sightless suitors. There are delightful reworkings of popular children’s stories, at least one of which -- "The Frog Who Would A-Wooing Go", about a frog’s attempts at wooing a fish and then a cat -- is worth the cover price.

A taster: "Don’t get me wrong, you’re only a frong, as amphi as they bian. But I’m a cat and you know that, a mammal positively feline"
"Yes, you’re a cat, I do know that, a sweet domestic mouser. That’s the reason, all this season, I was warned by every grouser: Love her and leave her but don’t espouser!"

A minor reservation, albeit one that might not be easily dissociated from the author’s intent, is that the story drags a little when we’re presented things as they actually happen, as opposed to when they’re filtered through Tenral’s imagination. Take away the skilful writing from these passages, and you’re left with a straightforward text about disillusionment and heartbreak that could have come from a dozen other books in the genre.

The other thing that isn’t completely convincing is the device of the Song -- Tenral’s chosen term for "what we look for every moment of our lives". There is no time, no number inside the Song, she tells us, only a rush of all the colours and smells and textures of the world. And later: "Having known it once, you could eat the rest, the bitter, stinking, leathery stuff of life, because you told yourself there would always be ambrosia for afters." In a book where subtlety is the essence, and where the reader is generally trusted to make the right connections, these portions are a touch forced and over-explanatory.

But these slight flaws are more than made up for by the whole. Swaminathan, who’s written books for children before, acknowledges the influence of the Brothers Grimm on her life and work. "The storyteller’s world is unaccountable," she says. "It is the world of human yearning, in which all of us belong." Her story, like the best grim fairytales (however you spell it), shines through with truth and beauty.

The stench of old second-hands

As a self-confessed biblio-dork, one of the things I can’t relate to is the fascination most others of my tribe have for Old Books – specifically, buying festering second-hands from pavement vendors. I’ve struggled with this for years. Inevitably, at any get-together that includes a book-discussion, someone or the other will raise the topic – usually starting with how they love the smell of an old book, or the associations that each yellowing page brings with it, or how wonderful it is to imagine what the book might have meant to the person who once owned it.

The gathering comes alive. There are collective oohs and ahs, everyone relates their favourite Old Book stories: that magic moment at the end of a day of futile searching when, all set to give up and go home, they caught a glimpse of just what they were looking for (and a last copy too!); or what an enigmatic dedication on a book might possibly mean. Then someone notices that I’m keeping quiet, smiling (grimacing) politely. I get hostile stares. Occasionally, emboldened by a drink, I stammer out that I’m not especially enamoured of yellowing pages that once belonged to someone else – I prefer buying new books and watching them get old over the years, in my own bookshelf. A lady friend mutters darkly that such an attitude is no less contemptible than the typical Indian male’s insistence on a virgin bride, and that Freud might find me an interesting case for study. I shut up. A black cloud descends on the party.

Walking around the Sunday bazaar at Daryaganj earlier today, I was reminded of my little mental block. Now the place is undoubtedly charming, I do enjoy looking at the stock from a safe distance, and I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up something that there’s absolutely no chance of finding in a first-hand store (an old and rare book on cinema, for instance) – though you can be sure I’ll handle it gingerly, lest a silverfish should leap out at me. But on the whole, I just can’t muster as much enthusiasm for second-hands as my browsing companion Nikhil did today, and as most of my friends manage to.

Now if someone elects to buy books second-hand for monetary reasons, I can understand that completely. No objections if it’s a practical decision. But the romanticising of old books is a source of much puzzlement to me. Well, sure they have memories attached to them, but they’re other people’s memories, and exactly what kinds of people are these anyway who regularly dispose of their old books? If it’s some philanthropy thing – once we’re finished reading, let’s share it with the world – I still don’t get that. I couldn’t imagine giving my own books away to anyone.

And about the much-vaunted smell: more likely than not it’s the residual stink of an ancient dinner consumed by someone you don’t even know anything about (beyond the fact that they were heartless enough to abandon their preciouses to the flea market). I shudder to think about some of the hands these old books might have passed through over the decades, and the rich varieties of germs they would have collected. Or the provenance of the stains you see on every second page.

Of course it’s entirely different when it comes to my own old books. Most of them – the Noddys, Ladybirds, Amar Chitra Kathas – are still within arm’s length reach of my desk, and I revisit them often. It’s amazing how memories that have been inactive for years suddenly come alive when I turn the pages; the other day, rereading Five Go to Kirrin Island, I had what must regretfully be called a Titanic moment. I felt I could remember exactly what the book looked like when it was shiny and new; it was like one of those facile seamless shots from James Cameron’s epic film, where the mouldy hull of the sunken ship is transformed by computer effects into what it looked like 80 years earlier. (Interesting how we define important things in our lives by reference points supplied by the sentimental pop films that are so easy to dismiss. Or is that just me?)

To my delight, I found I could recall not just plot specifics but also exactly where I had been when I first read about George and Timmy entering an underground tunnel on the island: I was in Andheri for the summer holidays, a tin of Bourbon biscuits by my side (caution: entering Proust territory now), and that in turn spawned other memories. Best of all, like all my other books from that time, the first page has my name on it, scrawled untidily with a sketch pen (by myself, aged 6/7).

Now those are the kinds of old books I like.

P.S. In the interest of - urgh! - fairness, here's a view from the other side.

Sikandar Chowk Park - review

My review; appeared in today’s Hindustan Times. The printed version has only a few sentences missing, which I can live with. (Much better than the injudicious cutting on a story I recently wrote for another publication, where the introductory reference to an interviewee was deleted – and the first quote from him popped up later in the piece with only his surname mentioned. That’s one thing that stings about freelancing - not being able to look at your story on the page before it goes off to press, something I’ve always been paranoid about. Ah well - it’s all about Letting Go, I guess…)

Back to Neelum Saran Gour’s book. Reading for work, and also trying desperately to read for pleasure every now and again, I often have a pre-decided list of the books I’ll tackle in a given month. So it’s a pleasant diversion when I’m assigned a book I would otherwise never have gotten around to, and it turns out to be better than expected. That’s pretty much what how I felt with Sikandar Chowk Park (another factor being that I feel guilty about not reading enough by Indian authors apart from the Big Names). Here’s the review:

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It’s a depressingly familiar sight for any newspaper reader - the headline "Bomb blast in..." followed by the number of dead and injured: the reduction of human lives to cold numbers. Or as Siddhanta, the narrator of Neelum Saran Gour’s new book, puts it, "History’s ciphers...unchronicled potential history-fodder".

Siddhanta is a journalist covering a bomb blast that has killed 57 people in Sikandar Chowk Park, Allahabad. But this isn’t an investigative story, or not in the usual sense of the word. What he’s interested in is the minutiae of these lives that were abruptly cut off. He looks at 11 of the people whose bodies were so badly mutilated that immediate identification was impossible. Who were they? What combination of circumstances led them to this macabre appointment with death? What were they doing in the months leading up to the incident? And then, "out of the random mashed mess there sprang personalities, lives, stories of pain and love and betrayed trust and fantasies and forgiveness and fresh resolves".

We meet the victims to be, among them a woman whose husband is slowly dying of cirhossis; a gentle professor who "lived trying to understand history and would die inadvertently enacting it"; two people who begin a relationship on a tenuous link (the discovery of uncashed cheques exchanged between their relatives 60 years earlier); an aging Vakil Sahib who jokes about wanting to be “the first millennium corpse”.

The politics of religion that presumably led to the blast are never explicitly discussed. Instead, Gaur shows us how a steady accumulation of events can add up to something horrifying. A conversation between an old Muslim landlady and the young vagrants playing cricket outside her house begins as cheerful banter but slowly, insidiously, comes around to the question of whether she supports India or Pakistan in cricket. Another edgy discussion pits one God against another (“Allah and Jesus are responsible folk, yaar. They look after their own. But imagine going to Lord Krishna and saying: Sir, I have a stomach ache. He’ll ask you with a smile: What is this stomach and what is this body? What are you?”) The precariousness of even an old family friendship is revealed after a Muslim child takes the Hindu boy to see a goat being slaughtered. When it comes to religion, we are reminded, the smallest differences becomes unbreachable chasms, even between families who have lived in harmony for years. Ordinary people living ordinary lives in a small bustee can be moved to perpetuate a riot of savage proportions. And yet, in the midst of all this, there are also glimpses of humanity and selflessness - like the aging music teacher’s love for his stray dogs - that transcend all divisions.

Though Siddhanta’s voice is overly portentous (at times he sounds almost like he’s morbidly enjoying himself in this sutradhar role), Sikandar Chowk Park is an engrossing novel. The narrative structure is an intrinsically compelling one: the foreknowledge that these people’s lives are to end with such cruel suddenness gives their tales an edge - it adds a poignant new perspective, for instance, to the urgency of a woman’s hunt for her husband’s mistress of 35 years ago.

Inevitably, some of the stories are more interesting than others. There are, possibly, a couple of characters too many, and it’s difficult to do them all justice in the space allowed by a 280-page book. But in a sense that’s the point too - these lives, and the lives they affect, are destined to be unresolved. These have to be fragmented tales, not whole ones, and Gour spaces them out as adeptly as can be expected. The technique of speeding the narrative up as the climax nears (the equivalent of reducing the duration of each successive shot in a film) is effective too.

And the ending is abrupt, but then how could it not be?

All in the family

Presenting the Jabberwock’s evil cousin, Chapatiwocky:

“Twas Balti and the Saag Aloo
Did Murgh Makhani Rhogan Josh
All Methi were the Vindaloos
And the Madras Tok Gosht.”

Full poem here. (Thanks for the link, Uma.)

And other parodies here.

Horror films: a list and an essay

Another film list: Total Film magazine presents its 50 Greatest Horror Movies of All Time. Very interesting selection - whatever you might say about the futility of lists in general, you have to give some credit to one that includes such titles as Romero’s Martin, Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Lynch’s Eraserhead. Many of my favourite films are on the list (including some that aren’t horror films in the most conventional sense - Psycho, Peeping Tom, Carrie, Bride of Frankenstein, Don’t Look Now, for instance).

While on the subject, here’s a wonderful essay (think I linked to it on this blog once before, a long time ago): "The critics were horrified", written by Jim Emerson, editor of the Rogerebert.com site. Emerson starts by reminding us how vulnerable this most cinematic of genres is to critical disdain. He writes:

Critics can be particularly rough on horror pictures. It's so easy - too easy, sometimes - to make these spook-shows sound risible and preposterous in synopsis, especially once you remove them from the darkness of the theater and examine them in the harsh light of black and white newsprint (or monitor pixels).

He goes on to talk about four underrated horror films that he thinks deserve re-evaluation. It’s a lovely piece, full of the protectiveness so often felt by die-hard fans of the genre (and incongruously tender, given that it discusses films like Cronenberg’s The Brood). Read the whole thing here.

P.S. Have been trying for some time to put together a comprehensive essay on my own experiences with horror films over the years. Been working on it for some time but (much like the body parts in early Cronenberg films) it just isn't coming together right. Soon.

P.P.S. Here are two related posts: on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Robert Bloch, Lon Chaney and The Legacy.

New Yorker update, and more on reviewing

Have procured the Complete New Yorker set. Thought I’d be calloo-callaying all over the place but in truth, having opened the thing and seen the enormity of what I’m now faced with, I’m worried. Have done some math and figured that at my current reading speed, and allowing for:

a) three hours of honest work each day,

b) one social call every four days,

c) three phone conversations a day, none to exceed 10 minutes,

d) evening walk, between 45 minutes and 1 hour long,

e) one short blog post every two days,

(all in addition to meals of course),

it should take me somewhere between 172 and 175 years to get through the whole thing. Now this is clearly impossible, but I figure if I eat healthy I might live long enough to finish nearly three of the eight DVDs. Will start effective today so stop calling/emailing me please.

Update: having accepted the futility of reading the New Yorkers in an ordered way, I’ve been browsing the old film reviews across the discs. Fun to see how some movies universally considered masterpieces today were roundly dissed by the Critics back when they were released. My favourite example so far is Russell Maloney’s trashing of The Wizard of Oz in 1939 (arguably the greatest year in Hollywood history). Maloney writes:

“I sat cringing before MGM’s Technicolor The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity…It’s a stinkeroo…The vulgarity of which I was conscious all through the film is difficult to analyse.”

It’s a fun mini-review, Maloney allowing his personal prejudices to show, waspishly protesting a scene where the Wicked Witch says “You keep out of this!” on the grounds that witches don’t talk like that, period.

Then there’s good old John McCarten who, in a composite write-up in June 1960 (another good year for Hollywood), brushes off two of the most powerful, enduring films ever made, Hitchcock’s Psycho and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Of Psycho he says:

“Hitchcock does several spooky scenes with his usual éclat, and works diligently to make things as horrible as possible, but it’s all rather heavy-handed…”

This isn’t really shocking, for Psycho was trashed by almost everyone when it was first released. But The Apartment was one of the most well received films of its time, loved by audiences and critics alike, winner of the major Oscars for 1960. McCarten’s sniffs at it; it’s “not particularly stimulating”, he says.

Must look through some of the other reviews. But on a more serious note this reminds me of a discussion I was having with a friend a few days ago. Both of us are avid reviewers but we were mulling over how misleading even the most honest, dedicated reviews can be; we both had examples where we’d written something about a book or film in all sincerity and then, just a couple of weeks later, found we’d completely changed our minds. Meanwhile, of course, the review had neatly been printed with our bylines, a permanent, official record of what we thought; a summary judgement, by us and on us.

Another problem is that even when a review is favourable on the whole, the few criticisms in it stand out; readers tend to remember them, especially if the reviewer has succumbed to the temptation of being over-clever. More than once I’ve had the experience of writing about something I’ve really enjoyed, and then having the editor coming up to me and saying “Oh, so not such a good film, huh?”

I’m not saying Messrs McCarten and Maloney ever revised their thoughts, or that they should have, but it’s a little scary that so often a whimsical, fleeting opinion gets set in stone as one person’s final word on a subject. It’s almost never that simple.

Blog wars: spreading the word

This is to help spread awareness about certain reprehensible developments that have followed the publication of a story on Arindam Chaudhuri’s IIPM by JAM magazine a couple of months ago. Rashmi Bansal, the magazine’s editor, and Gaurav Sabnis, one of the most widely read Indian bloggers, have recently been victimised, on and off the blogosphere, by a bunch of hoodlums; the latest is that Gaurav has quit his job at IBM following apparent threats by IIPM students that they would burn Thinkpads in protest (?!).

Amit Varma has summarised the story so I’ll just link to this post by him. Please read it and look at the links he’s provided as well. In particular, check this clarifying post by Rashmi and the abusive comments on it. DesiPundit is also tracking the story.

If you’re concerned about this development (and its ramifications for bloggers), please link to it on your blogs, or do what you can to publicise the story.

The Compleat New Yorker

When Hurree Babu informed me that The Complete New Yorker (on 8 DVD-ROMs) is now available at The Book Shop, Khan Market, I bunked my two major assignments for the day, drove over and spent 45 minutes in the shop, turning the sealed box over in my hands repeatedly while the owners looked at me askance. It’s hard to believe. Eighty years of one of the world’s great magazines, available in a box no bigger than a breakfast cereal packet.

This from the Amazon page: “Every article, every cartoon, every illustration, every advertisement, exactly as it appeared on the printed page, in full colour. Flip through full spreads of the magazine to browse headlines, art work, ads, and cartoons, or zoom in on a single page, for closer viewing. Print any pages or covers you choose, or bookmark pages with your own notes.”

The user comments on Amazon make for interesting reading. Predictably almost everyone is gushing, but some of them have pointed out that swapping between DVDs is inconvenient (apparently the data can’t be transferred to your hard drive). As one user says, “Using the DVDs is not quite as smooth as using the Web. I guess we’ve been spoilt.” True enough; I remember how avidly I used to browse my “Cinemania” and “Great Books” CDs in the days before I got an Internet connection. But once I’d gotten online (even though it was a slow dial-up connection) the CDs were put away for good and forgotten.

Doubt that’ll happen with the New Yorker set though. I’ll probably pick it up this weekend; the whole thing’s available for just 78.5 dollars, or around Rs 3,600. Meanwhile, mini-reviews would be very welcome from anyone who's already tried the thing out. And Hurree has promised to put up a comprehensive post sometime, keep a look out for it.

(Also, via PrufrockTwo, here’s a related piece by Christopher Borrelli)

Earth googling

Okay so I know I’ve got in on this really late, but just in case there’s anyone still left to recommend this to: Google Earth is superb! Had been looking at it perfunctorily on others’ comps in office, but yesterday for the first time I sat myself down for an indepth session, tracing aerial views of roads and landmarks in Delhi.

Though I did a lot of route-tracking (especially around the Panchshila-Saket region, which is where I’ve lived for most of my life), my points of reference were open-air swimming pools, which are quite clearly visible even without zooming in too close. The one in the Panchshila club, where I learnt swimming as a child; the one in my school (St Columba’s), the large one at the Saket Sports Complex (where I’ve been going the past few years) – and most memorably, the one at the Saket Cultural Club, which is just across the road from the PVR complex. (Most memorably because this one is more distinct in appearance than the others: there’s a small circular shallow pool for kids just a little way off from the main, rectangle-shaped one, and I could see both very clearly.)

I’ve blogged before about how new technology (or even a signpost of urban development, like a major new flyover that completely alters a landscape) sometimes puts up a wall between me and my childhood memories; making me feel like a stranger to my former selves, making the city feel unfamiliar too. This is one of the few times it had the opposite effect. To start with, there’s something comforting about viewing familiar roads from the perspective provided by Google Earth. Seen from this angle, you can’t make out that much has changed (except for the odd detour or two). The city hasn’t really shifted - notwithstanding all those flyovers and the metro construction, the fundamentals are still in place. It’s a whimsical way of looking at things, but I’ll take it.

The best part (and I’m sure everyone has done this too) is homing in on your house and then clicking on ‘zoom out’: watching as the view gets smaller and smaller, progressing from individual lanes to apartment blocks to colonies until it encompasses the whole city, then the entire NCR region, then the country…and so on until you have the globe hurtling through black space. Giddying experience, puts a lot in perspective.

Frustratingly, my Net connection at home is still slow, but I’ve downloaded the application anyway. Much exploring ahead. If you haven’t tried it yet, do.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.

Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.

In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.

The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:

“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”

Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.

“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”

And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:

“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”

If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.

“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”

Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.

As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”

In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.

Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?

And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.

We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”

Bachchanalia

(This is an extended version of a column I wrote in today’s Business Standard Weekend. Had to find a peg for the official piece so worked with the “Amitabh is everywhere” angle. But hope to expand this sometime into a more general piece on my memories of growing up with AB’s films.)
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“And now,” my friend said glumly, as we sat about chewing on tangri kababs and discussing our favourite old Bachchan movies, “there’s something called Dil Jo Bhi Kahey, a film I hadn’t even heard of before it released last week. The grapevine says He’s in it only because a friend directed it. How long has it been since his last release anyway, two weeks? Three?”

For old fans like us, the Ubiquity of Amitabh is difficult to come to terms with. It could be because we became sentient movie-watchers around 1982-83, a time when Bachchan, at the height of his superstardom, had just started rationing his film appearances out -- partly because of the accident on the sets of Coolie, partly because of his nascent political career. I did, of course, see all his earlier films on video, but a new Bachchan movie was something to be savoured, all the more so because it came after weeks of waiting. And in the pre-cable era, when cine magazines were the only access one had to information about a forthcoming film.
Today, with the benefit of hindsight, I know that most of his mid-to-late 1980s films were the most appalling nonsense: heavy-handed political statements like Inquilaab, where he single-handedly purged a corrupt system by gunning down a roomful of ministers; shoddy revenge dramas like Aakhree Raasta. Looking back at them today, it’s also easy to see that he was past his prime. He was well into his 40s and looked it: heavyset jowls, pouches under the eyes, nowhere near as lithe as in his early days. (In fact, the trajectory of AB’s career is often forgotten. Remember, he became a superstar when he was already in his mid-30s. Today we marvel at what an active 63-year-old he is, but the transition from the late 30s to the 40s wasn’t an easy one for him. In even his better films from the early 1980s - Silsila and Shakti for instance - he was, and looked, significantly older than the character he played. It was possible for Shashi Kapoor, many years his senior, to come off as a credible younger brother/sidekick.)

Back then, though, we couldn’t care less. We were the first generation of video junkies and I still have a tangible memory of the goose pimples that appeared on my arm when a long-awaited Friday finally rolled over and I caught my first glimpse of the shiny cassette of a new Bachchan film in the video library. Rental rates for these were at least twice those of regular videotapes. The one time I ever saw a flash of annoyance in the eyes of the kindly uncle who manned the neighborhood comics-and-videos library was when he realised that my mother’s friend had watched Shahenshah (a double-cassette!) at our house, thereby depriving him of a customer.

And I remember vividly the hullabaloo when Toofan and Jaadugar (two of AB’s vilest films, though both have cult potential) were released within a week of each other (or was it the same week?) – on one level it amounted to twice the excitement, and even more frenzied scrabbling for videocassettes; but on another level it felt like a betrayal. Two films in one week! How could he cheapen himself so?

But today, he’s everywhere. On KBC, three (four?) times a week. In advertisements, his stentorian voice gracing lines that range from the ponderous (“Dard shvet hai...”) to the silly (“Pappu paas ho gaya?”). Doing 13 films a year, from full-fledged roles to supposed “friendly” appearances that eventually extend to half the length of the film. He does a stark human drama with Rani Mukherjee that’s hailed as “the role of his lifetime”, but then two months later he’s in another role of a lifetime, in Ram Gopal Verma’s take on The Godfather. Then he’s playing an “ordinary middle-class man” in what must surely be the worst case of miscasting in film history. His face peers out at you from every poster you see on the roads. And in the muddled world of present-day Bollywood, where everyone guest-stars in or does item numbers in everyone else’s films, if AB himself isn’t in a movie you can be sure he’ll be doing a voiceover for it.

Sure God is meant to be omnipresent etc. But I much preferred it when he did three films a year, well-spaced out.