(I wasn’t too keen to write this review. Not because the book wasn’t interesting – it was – but because I’d already read a few other reviews of it, and they seemed to have most bases covered. [When I know I’m going to be reviewing a particular book, I avoid reading other reviews until after I’m done with mine. But slipped up in this case.] Also, I figured out the twist early on – which slightly spoilt the reading experience.)
Gautam Malkani’s debut novel begins with a scene of visceral violence: four young British Asians are pummeling a white kid for calling them “Pakis” – a word that, like “nigga”, you’re allowed to use only if you’re on the inside (“Can’t be callin someone a Paki less you also call’d a Paki, innit”). The actual beating is being done by Hardjit, the brawny gangleader, but the others – Amit, Ravi and our narrator Jas (presumably short for Jaswinder) – are also participants in what is really an elaborate bit of role-playing. As it turns out, the white boy had never actually abused Hardjit and his gang, but that isn’t the point. The point is that our Asian “rudeboys” need a pretext to assert their identity and their machismo.
We follow Hardjit and the others as they cruise the streets of Hounslow, boast about their sexual prowess in such exaggerated terms that it seems almost deliberately farcical, deride “coconuts” (Asian kids who are brown on the surface but white inside, having integrated so completely with the British that no trace of their ethnicity remains) and make illegal money by unblocking stolen mobile phones for a client. They talk in a street lingo that mixes elements of gangsta rap with SMS shorthand – but just as vitally incorporates words like “khota”, “gandah” and “thapparh”, which they could only have learnt at home, from their first-generation NRI parents. (It’s incongruous, funny and tragic all at once when these gangsta kids turn into well-mannered Punjabi boys within the confines of their homes, but it also helps us understand their need for escapism, which manifests itself in these streetwise identities.)
Through all this, Jas is relatively subdued; he prefers to keep his mouth shut, for when he opens it he ends up saying something awkward and overwrought like “Yeh bredren, knock his fucking teeth out. Bruck his fucking face…well, you know…”. As the story progresses we get a better perspective on why he feels like a misfit, but for now it’s enough to know that he is a converted coconut himself – formerly a “desified, poncey khota”, now an aspiring member of Hardjit’s rudeboy gang.
Though Londonstani is largely a novel of vignettes, there are a few key plot-movers. The boys get involved with a sophisticated poncey named Sanjay who lectures them about “bling bling economics” and encourages them to take their illegal phone racket into the big league: the retail price index in the official economy has become outdated and irrelevant, he says, which means more and more people need to live outside the law. Once you’ve entered the world of consumerist aspiration, you can’t draw a line and say “okay, this is it”; you have to keep going.
Meanwhile, there is tension in Amit’s family over his brother’s engagement to a girl whose parents are not “showing enough respect” to the boy’s side. And Jas ill-advisedly acts on his infatuation for a Muslim girl.
If you’ve read about anything about Londonstani before this, you’ll know that one of the big talking points is the surprise ending. I’m going to be a considerate reviewer for once and resist the temptation to disclose it, but this makes it difficult to meaningfully discuss one of the most interesting things Malkani is trying to do in this book. I’ll say this much: as a concept the twist has potential, but its treatment is problematic. One sees glimpses of what Malkani has in mind – he’s commenting on the subtle workings of reverse-colonialisation and asking us to rethink some of the things we’ve taken for granted about the protagonists. But by planting the surprise in the book’s very last pages and by giving it the bated-breath treatment, he isolates it from the rest of the story. It becomes an end in itself, leaving us with just the fragment of an idea that is never seen all the way through, and the book seems gimmicky in retrospect.
But even if Londonstani doesn’t fulfil its author’s ambitions for it, I was content to enjoy it at a more superficial level: for the smartness of its writing, for a first-time novelist’s playfulness (e.g. the juxtaposing of two visits on consecutive nights by Jas to the same nightclub), for the observations about a constantly evolving subculture in modern Britain – and for the fun Malkani has with his protagonists’ speech. At its very best, the linguistic effect is comparable (though not in inventiveness and complexity) to the teen argot in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange – where after the initial bemusement, the reader realises that it’s possible to decipher what these lads are saying, and then slowly gets around to appreciating the rhythms and cadences of this new language. As in Burgess’s novel, the concentration required to constantly interpret what’s being said also provides a buffer from the unpleasantness of some of the content.
If you can get past the language barrier, you’re almost certain to have a lot of fun reading this book. Just try not to read too much about it beforehand. And don’t get influenced by the publicity machinery. If and when an Asian Ulysses does happen along, chances are it won’t be accompanied by pre-review blurbs saying “An Asian Ulysses!”
I don’t know whether it’s a sign of approaching senility or psychosis or both, but I’ve developed this habit of conjuring up improbable parallel scenarios while I’m watching a film (even one that I’m enjoying). Remember those campy scenes from old TV serials where a character’s drifting off into fantasy/dream would be accompanied by a spooky ululating sound and animated visuals of concentric circles? Well, I’m just like that in a movie theatre these days (minus the sound and the animated circles).
For instance, in the first half of Fanaa there was some very ordinary shayiri going on between the Aamir Khan and Kajol characters and it occurred to me that an excellent comedy could be made with the dialogue written entirely in Urdu verse. The poetry would have to be mediocre of course, but the characters would recite it with immense feeling and take themselves very seriously indeed. (After all, the film didn’t have to know that it was a comedy.) Lovers would speak in shayiri to each other all the time, even when saying prosaic things like “pass the cabbage please”. Evil terrorists would give their minions instructions over the radio in rhyme, and governments would use it to apprise each other of deteriorating political relations: things will get verse before they get better.
(Minor spoiler alert) In the second half of the film, when a wounded Aamir Khan escapes the Indian Army, crosses over the Kashmir border into Poland** and finds himself at the doorstep of the woman he deserted many years ago, I imagined a Death and the Maiden situation, where Kajol and her father (Rishi Kapoor) keep him tied up and torture him until he confesses to genocide. (I was also hoping for a dhishum dhishum fight at the end, with the portly Kapoor beating the crap out of Aamir and then sitting on him for good measure, thus proving the superiority of the early 1980s over the present day.)
Back to reality: I thought Fanaa was passable. The first half was quite dull but things tightened up after the intermission (though you have to be able to assimilate a major change in the film’s tone, along with the usual suspension of disbelief – and please, please don’t try to understand any of the characters’ motivations or get into conundrums of logic). There were a couple of idiotic scenes towards the end, but the second half also contained the film’s best vignettes (including the Antakshri one which Uma mentions here, and a few reminders that Aamir Khan, for all his posturing, is quite a good actor). It was more interesting, better acted and directed than the romantic slush early on.
Aamir and Kajol, as has been noted elsewhere, have no chemistry. I have a small theory about this: I think both of them are just too cerebral as actors. (Aamir has a well-honed reputation for perfectionism anyway, but this is just as true of Kajol – despite the pre-release publicity which hyped up the contrast between her and Aamir’s styles of working.) This doesn’t necessarily mean that they think harder about their roles than their contemporaries, but that the intelligence is always on display; like Sanjeev Kumar of yore, they have “I’m a Serious Actor and You Better Not Forget It” stamped on their foreheads. Put too much of that intensity together in one frame and it’s overkill. I think this is one reason why Kajol worked so well with Shah Rukh Khan, and why Aamir worked well with Juhi Chawla – those pairs complemented each other very nicely. (Watching Fanaa, I kept wishing Shah Rukh would bound in through the door and jump around on a piano for five minutes.)
Bottomline – I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend Fanaa to anyone (except my mother, who is the least discriminating movie-watcher alive), but it has its moments.
Quick notes:
Lots of in-film advertising, including a Radio Mirchi promotion (Aamir wears a plastic mirchi around his neck). When Kajol went to open the fridge in one scene, I was kind of hoping Ajay Devgan would pop out and sing the Kelvinator song.
Killing off Jaspal Bhatti is a definite no-no and should be made illegal.
Child actors should not be forced into unreasonable and unnatural acts like saying good things about Rahul Dravid.
“Fan-aa” is not, as I belatedly learnt, a version of “Fun comes”. Nor is “panah” the refreshing summer mango drink. (As the ToI food reviewer would say, pun comes.)
**where much of the film was shot
I’m gobsmacked by how often the word “obtuse” is misused, and misused with great flamboyance. “Obtuse”, people, means nothing more complicated or intense than “a lack of intelligence or sensitivity”. So stop referring to the work of your favourite writers or poets (or your own work for that matter) as obtuse. You’re probably thinking of something midway between “obscure” and “abstruse” (both of which are slightly more dashing words and indicate something that’s enigmatic or difficult to understand, which is the meaning you’re likely looking for).
When you preen and tell me that you are stimulated by “obtuse writing”, I begin to suspect that maybe you really are.
Also, “loath” and “loathe” are different words, with separate meanings. Look them up. One is an adjective, the other a verb. The correct phrase is “I am loath to do this”, not “I am loathe ...”. (It is of course possible that you really, really, really hate [i.e. “loathe”] doing something, but don’t say “I am loathe to do it” - it’s ungrammatical.)
Special note to the children working on the entertainment beats in Delhi Times, HT City, etc: Avoid using “prequel” if you don’t know what it means. Don’t use it interchangeably with “predecessor”. Like a sequel, a prequel is produced/published after a pre-existing work; the only difference is that it deals with events that occurred at an earlier time. Harry Potter 2 is a sequel to Harry Potter 1, but this does not mean Harry Potter 1 was the prequel to Harry Potter 2.
(For more on prequels, with examples, see this.)
And yes, all this comes from someone who promptly tossed his Wren & Martin into the fire the day his parents told him he was now old enough to destroy books. But I’m allowed to be pedantic once a year.
Hindi cinema has a long and noble tradition of homo-eroticism, going right back to the aged Aristotle leching at the luscious young Prithviraj Kapoor in Sikandar; but rarely has the theme been presented with such unselfconscious directness, such purity of purpose, most of all with such sweetness, as in the lovely early scenes of Manmohan Desai’s Dharam-Veer wherein Dharmendra (mini-skirted) and Jeetendra (in princely tights) gambol over hill and dale, looking deep into each other’s eyes, clasping hands and singing lyrics that swear undying love: “My life is naught without you” and suchlike. Just watching this song, Frodo and Samwise would have sprouted immense quantities of chest hair and then headed off to the nearest bar to pick up orc-women.
The love of Dharam and Veer for each other is startlingly progressive for 1977, though midway through the sequence the director (perhaps in a bid to throw the censor board folks off track), briefly introduces Zeenat Aman into the song – she plays a haughty princess in a carriage and one shot is cleverly edited to make it seem like Dharam is singing “I will never leave your side” to her rather than to Jeetu. But the illusion is never really convincing; as my observant friend Ajitha pointed out in an SMS, the two men are very mean to her throughout her brief appearance.
Dharam-Veer, one of the many films that defined my worldview as a child, was showing on Set-Max’s correctly titled “Super Cinema Series” last night. This is a great film with many larger-than-life human characters and some surprisingly puny animals. I’m thinking in particular of the small, fluttering hawk that we see on Pran’s shoulder in the early scenes of the film, and the equally diffident tiger that he later does battle with. (Incidentally, watch closely when Pran proposes marriage to his lady love at the beginning of the film. He’s gazing intently into the bird’s eyes throughout his speech. The men in this film really do have issues with women.)
The story In a palace in an unnamed medieval kingdom somewhere, the villainous Jeevan hears a prophecy stating that his eldest nephew will be responsible for his death. In the manner of all evil maamas since the time of Kamsa, he takes this news in bad spirit and quickly tosses his sister’s newborn baby off the terrace. But the hawk appears, picks up the infant in one swell swoop and deposits him in the house of a poor ironsmith and his wife. So child-lorn are this penurious couple that it never occurs to them to enquire about if someone may have misplaced or lost a baby; instead, with all the stoicism of someone who’s found a 5-rupee coin on an empty road, they accept the baby as their own, and their love ensures that it grows up to become Dharmendra in a mini-skirt (it being decreed in this kingdom that ironsmiths and their sons be so attired). Which does not in any way impede his relationship with the dashing prince Veer (Jeetu).
Meanwhile, Pran dodders bitterly about the countryside (in films of the 1970s and 1980s, no one doddered bitterly like Pran did) with his horse and his hawk, waiting for 20 years to quickly elapse so he can be reunited with his son. And in the palace the villains, led by Jeevan and Ranjeet, scheme to separate the two heroes and thus preserve the heterosexual tradition.
The women: There are two! In most big-budget multi-starrers made in Bollywood around this time, heroines were inconsequential anyway, but Dharam-Veer goes a step further. While the two heroes are perfunctorily teamed up with Zeenie and Neetu Singh, there’s nothing remotely resembling chemistry between these supposed romantic pairings. The women are so insignificant you can’t even call them foils. (At one point Jeetu teams up with Neetu to rescue Dharam but when the job is done the two men simply ride off together hand in hand, leaving the girl to her fate.) If Ingmar Bergman’s profoundest films, as we are so often told, are studies of the human face, the greatness of Dharam-Veer lies in the tenderness of the glances exchanged between its two leading men. The film comes alive when they are together. Even when they fight it’s like a lover’s spat, a prelude to the joys of making up.
But unbeknownst to them, they are really long-lost brothers (or cousins, I’m not sure – there were many babies in the early scenes and it got very confusing). This then is what allows the film to return to the path of conformity. Blood is thicker than gay love and clearly Dharam and Veer have no future together other than a platonic, brotherly one. And so they ride off into the sunset together, but this time with their respective heroines, who still look a little confused about their function in this film.
Note: movie trivia supplied by the TV channel tells us that in 1977 Manmohan Desai released four films – this one, Amar Akbar Anthony, Parvarish and Chacha Bhatija – all of which were golden jubilee hits. Moreover, each of these was based on the lost-and-found theme, a feat that is hopefully unique in film history. (Racking my brain for a comparable directorial achievement in such a short span of time, I can only think of John Ford who, over a 20-month period in 1939 and 1940, released five classics: Drums Along the Mohawk, Young Mr Lincoln, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home. Unfortunately not one of these movies had a lost-and-found theme, though I did catch an Indian chief grinning lasciviously at Henry Fonda in the first one.)
P.S. Do take a look at this brilliant collection of stills from the gay song (complete with subtitles) on Turbanhead. (Thanks to Brown Magic for the link. I had seen the post many months ago but couldn't find the link when I searched for it through Google.)
P.P.S. Dharam-Veer description from this site: Once Upon A Time In A Kingdom Lived Two Legendary Friends Whose Friendship Came To Be Known As The Eighth Wonder Of The World. This Is He Story Of These Two Friends, Their Loves, Romances, Antics, Bravery Ang Guts, Interwoven With The Intrigues Of State, Justice And Loyalty To There Brethren.
Several years ago, in one of my many horror-story anthologies, I came across a short story titled “An Interview with M Chakko”. It was in the form of a conversation and told of a strange island somewhere in the Indian Ocean where the protagonist, M Chakko, had once been shipwrecked. The women on this island only had half-bodies: the ones with only lower bodies were the “Ka” women while those with only upper bodies belonged to the “Lin” class. During the course of the story we learn of Chakko’s experiences living with a member of each class.
I won’t reveal anything about the ending except to say that it makes us question the veracity of M Chakko’s account, indeed his very sanity (though of course the more literalist readers would have been doing this from the outset!). The interviewer in the story appears to feel the same way, for he indulges in some pop psychology to try and understand this elaborate fantasy:
Interviewer: Perhaps you believed that women should always be imperfect and inferior. You didn’t like the idea of them being physically the same as men.
Chakko (after some thought): No, I don’t think it was that either.
Interviewer: What was the reason then?
Chakko: First I should admit that I’ve never given it much thought. But it seems to me that the half, the partial, gives something that the whole, or what appears whole, doesn’t.
Much of this talk has to do with the nature of the sexual arrangements on the island, and the story itself is built on Freud’s contention that “something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction”. But I also loved the delicate, poker-faced humour that ran through it – and the astonishing final act, which sneaks right up on the reader.
Much as I enjoyed the story, for some reason the author’s name never really registered in my mind; I persisted in thinking it was written by a Sri Lankan with a long and complicated name. Then, a few days ago, I sat down to read The Women in Cages, the collected stories of the bilingual (Marathi and English) writer Vilas Sarang, and discovered M Chakko’s strange tale afresh – along with a host of other delights.
Sarang’s short stories are simply written but very compelling and they cover a variety of themes and ideas, many of them with fantastical elements. "Barrel and Bombil" is about the mysterious communion between a whale-shark and a young deck-boy. In “The Odour of Immortality” a prostitute, with the help of a tantrik (and the blessings of Lord Indra), grows dozens of vaginas all over her body so she can service customers faster and make more money. (The connection between sex and worship is also made in another story where a man wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant phallus and is eventually mistaken by religious villagers to be the severed lingam of Lord Shiva.) In “A Revolt of the Gods”, clay statues of various deities come alive during a Ganesh festival and escape from their worshippers.
There are allusions to Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. Some of the stories have an indolent (or perhaps ailing) narrator who spends most of the day lying about in bed or reading. One such narrator hears the sound of airplanes roaring in the sky outside and wonders offhandedly if war has broken out, or if the sounds are in his own mind. Another maims flies on his bed with a folded newspaper and then reflects on the specifics of the act – when another fly lands next to a wounded one and circles it, what might be transpiring between the two creatures? Sarang takes unremarkable everyday scenarios like these and weaves gripping stories out of them.
But what I like best is the way he plays with the divide between the conscious and the sub-conscious, often moving indiscernibly from one to the other. In “An Evening at the Beach” for instance, there’s a passage where a character, Bajrang, joins a group of mourners at a woman's funeral pyre. Looking at the other people standing around, he starts to speculate that they might have killed the woman so they would have a bonfire to warm themselves with on this cold night. It’s the sort of morbid little fantasy that most of us (I hope – otherwise it’s just me!) have created in our minds at some solemn gathering or the other – especially when we are emotionally distanced from, and perhaps a little bored by, the proceedings. The difference is, Bajrang gets so involved with his little idea that he actually starts to play it out in his own actions: stretching his hands out in front of the fire, even turning around so he can warm his back. (Understandably, the other mourners are incensed.)
One reason why I enjoyed this aspect of Sarang’s stories is that they tell us a lot about the writing process, about the dual worlds that many writers simultaneously inhabit – the real world with its relatively mundane daily routines, and the embellished one, where the writer is constantly analysing the things that are happening around him, creating and fleshing out alternative scenarios. Some of Sarang’s characters are a little like that – like writers with ideas for the next novel perpetually floating around in their minds.
Guerilla prose
In his notes on writing, some of which are included in this collection, Sarang laments the repeated undervaluing of “the guerillas of prose fiction” (i.e. the great short-story writers) and also the lack of a sustained tradition of short-story writing in Indian fiction in English. “We do not have unitive collections which may serve as primers for budding writers – e.g. Borges’s Labyrinths and Nabokov’s Dozen,” he says. “Does Indian English literature hope to produce a War and Peace before it has attempted something like ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ or ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’?” He observes that at its best the short-story form is capable of achieving the purity and perfection of the finest poetry – which is something the novel, however great, cannot achieve. “The strength of the novel is length…But this precludes the kind of intensity and concentration – the ‘critical pressure’ – that most art forms strive for.”
Many of Sarang’s own short stories have the pure intensity he speaks of, and so The Women in Cages comes with the highest recommendation. (My favourite stories in this collection, apart from the ones I’ve mentioned above: “An Afternoon Among the Rocks”, “Testimony of an Indian Vulture” and “An Excursion”.)
Kunal Basu's Racists, a strange little book set roughly between 1855 and 1862, has an absorbing setup: two babies, a black boy and a white girl, are left to grow up together on a deserted island with only a mute nurse to provide them with food and shelter. The question being asked is: thus cut off from the lessons of civilisation, with no knowledge of the roles they are expected to inhabit, what will they grow up to become? And will one of the two eventually assert dominance over the other?
This is a private experiment arranged by two men of science in order to settle their differences. Professor Samuel Bates, a master craniologist with a large private skull collection representing dozens of races and tribes from around the world, believes that some races are demonstrably superior to others: the European stands at the top of the chain, the Negro at the bottom. His rival Jean-Louis Belavoix, a member of the Societé Ethnologique de Paris, retorts that the races are in fact different species: "Would you compare a horse with a zebra?" Belavoix, who is innately pessimistic about the past and future of the human species, maintains that the only thing the races share is the germ of hatred for each other – all races, he proclaims, are doomed to plunder and be plundered, to murder and die. His prediction for the isolated children is that they will grow up equal, but that one will eventually murder the other. (Naturally, Bates's prediction is that the white girl will leave the forest superior to the black boy.)
Racists is essentially the story of this clash of ideologies, but despite the intriguing premise the book doesn't hold together in the end. Basu teases us with some interesting ideas (notably that the real proof of racial superiority is "the skill, the power, the cunning to kill if necessary… the ability of the civilised, the most civilised of all, to show the highest savagery") but he doesn't see them through. To start with, we don't get enough time with the children as they grow up, primal little beasts, in this Garden of Eden-meets-Island of Dr Moreau. Then the scientists themselves go missing for a while and a considerable part of the book's mid-section is given over to a burgeoning romance between the nurse and Prof Bates's assistant Quartley. (In fact, the character of the nurse does have a lot of potential for exploration – imagine the predicament of a woman living essentially in solitude for years on end, looking after the children but not permitted to be a mother or teacher to them – but the relationship between her and the assistant is stilted and unconvincing.)
And finally, given that the early chapters are so languid and drawn-out, the book rushes to an untidy conclusion in the final 30 or so pages – the effect is as if Basu had initially been given the go-ahead to write an 80,000-word tome and then been asked to pare it down to 60,000 when he was halfway through.
Racists is still interesting enough in concept, and to an extent in execution, for me to want to endorse it in some way. One of the things I liked was its depiction of the loss of humanity in the pursuit of science (how could Bates care so much about variation in the human species and yet have so little concern for the humans he knew, Quartley wonders). The writing mostly has the same intelligence and restraint that was on view in Basu's last book The Miniaturist, an engrossing historical fiction about the artist Bihzad in Emperor Akbar's court. The quality of the research is solid too, the period detail believable, but Racists never quite takes off as the novel of ideas it aspires to be, which is a real pity.
P.S. One of the interesting things about this book outside of its merits and demerits is that it's a member of a rare species – a novel by an Indian author that doesn't have an Indian setting, an Indian character, or even an Indian reference (except for a minor allusion to the 1857 Mutiny). This is quite rare. I remember when Vikram Seth's An Equal Music was published in 1999, many of the reviews devoted much space to marveling about the fact that the book “had no Indian connection”.
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom has one of the great preludes of any film. It’s a night scene and we see a man approach a woman in long-shot. We don’t see his face but a close-up shows that he has a camera concealed inside his overcoat. The woman is a prostitute – “it’ll be two quid” she says, and starts walking towards her apartment block. The rest of the scene is from the point of view of the camera, as its owner follows the woman up the stairs and into her squalid flat, and watches as she starts to undress. We briefly see his hand appear on the left, with something out-of-focus in it, then a look of terror on the woman’s face as he – and the camera – moves closer to her. Finally, her screaming face in extreme close-up.
And then we see the whole sequence again, this time in black and white, projected on a private screen; we see the back of the man’s head as he watches the recording. As the film-within-the-film begins, the credits of the movie we are watching start to roll. The last shot of this prelude shows the video-camera hissing slowly to a stop, even as “Directed by Michael Powell” appears on the screen.
This is an apt enough beginning for a film about a man whose camera is practically an extension of his own personality – something that makes him not very different from any movie director obsessed with his craft. Peeping Tom is a deeply self-referential movie, “a film about filmmaking” as Martin Scorsese once called it – but it’s also a superb psychological horror film, and one that stands the test of time surprisingly well.
The central character is Mark Lewis, an awkward but charismatic young man who works as a focus-puller at a movie studio and has a part-time job taking smutty photographs for a newsagent who stocks pornography on the side. “Remember what I told you about which magazines sell the most copies?” the newsagent asks sternly when Mark is late for a shoot. “The ones with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls,” intones Mark obediently.
In the slightly accented voice of Carl Boehm, the part-Austrian actor who plays Mark, “girls” sounds like “gels”, with a soft G. The accent adds greatly to the character’s charm and, along with his air of diffidence, make us sympathetic towards him. This sympathy is vital to the film’s effect, for (as we have learnt in that opening shot) Mark is also a murderer. A tortured childhood, where he was made the subject of sadistic, voyeuristic experiments by his father, has led him to become obsessed with the nature of fear. To this end, he kills people at camera-point and films his victims in their final, terrified moments (and no, this isn’t a “spoiler”; we learn all this early on).
The plot-driver in Peeping Tom is Mark’s internal conflict, which becomes urgent when a young girl named Helena begins to take a genuine, friendly interest in him. He considers the possibility of overcoming his compulsions and starting a normal life, but surely it’s too late for that now – for a net of suspicion is closing in on him, and can he really trust himself anyway?
The Psycho connection
There’s a funny early scene in the newsagent’s shop where a customer, an old man, behaves like a youngster buying condoms for the first time. He picks up a copy of the Sunday Times, dilly-dallies, then surreptitiously asks the shop-owner if he has any “umm…you know, views”. He buys a few soft-porn photos, but when the owner asks if he would like to be added to their mailing list he recoils like a frightened rabbit. “Oh no, no,” he says, doubtless picturing his wife going through his mail at home, “I’ll drop by again.”
At this point the camera is facing Mark, also in the shop, and a quick look of amusement flits across his face – a knowing smile, as if at a private joke. I remembered seeing a similar smile before in a similar context, in another film that very often finds mention in discussions of Peeping Tom: Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s the slightly morbid smile that appears on Norman Bates’s face when he realises that a seemingly straight-and-narrow young lady has checked into his motel under a false name. (Marion Crane has signed in as “Marie Samuels” but she slips up and refers to herself by her real name while wishing Norman good-night after a long conversation in the parlour.) It’s the smile of a madman privately amused by the discovery that other people – normal people – have guilty little secrets too.
Peeping Tom and Psycho, released within a couple of months of each other, have a fascinating symbiotic relationship, and one that’s impossible to logically explain (Powell and Hitchcock certainly didn’t exchange notes during the making of these movies). The similarity of themes and characters in these films is startling. Both films are about shared guilt, about the thin line separating minor transgressions from big crimes. Watching and being watched are strong motifs – they emphasize prying eyes (or a prying camera lens – though in this respect Peeping Tom has even more in common with an earlier Hitchcock film, Rear Window) as well as eyes that cannot see (the stuffed birds and the corpse in the cellar in Psycho, Helena’s blind mother in Peeping Tom). Both feature domineering parents (Mark Lewis’s father, Norman Bates’s mother) whose actions mark their children for life. Even the houses in the two films resemble each other. Superficially, the desolate Bates Motel, cut off from the main road, is very different from Mark’s house, located in the middle of a residential colony in London. But both buildings are symbols of unhappiness, decay, stunted childhoods…and eventually, breeding grounds for madness.
Both have very charismatic leading men in the performances of their lives (Boehm as Mark, Anthony Perkins as Norman) and the impact of each film depends to a very large extent on the ambivalence we feel for these characters. Perkins’ Norman Bates has passed into movie legend by now, but Boehm is equally good, especially in his conveying of Mark’s childlike qualities and his deep-rooted attachment to his camera. And both plots involve the monster baring something of his soul to a solicitous young woman (Mark showing Helena his childhood videos, Norman discussing “private traps” with Marion) – which immediately puts the woman in danger.
The effect these movies had on their first audiences and reviewers was similar too. Both were savaged by critics on their initial release, with comments like “the sickest and filthiest film I can remember seeing” (the very extremeness of which indicates how deeply the reviewers had been affected by the works, whether or not they acknowledged it to themselves). Psycho was relatively lucky. It was a commercial success from the beginning and soon recovered from the critical drubbing as well – within a decade of its release it had acquired a cult following, thanks to the work done by critics like Robin Wood, and though much of the impact it had on its original audience has dissipated, it is acknowledged today as one of the great American films. Peeping Tom had to stay out in the woods for a little longer, though its reputation was eventually restored as well (Martin Scorsese was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of film-lovers).
I’ve been a Psycho devotee for a long time, but I have to concede that Peeping Tom has dated better overall (despite the grating, intensely annoying “propahness” of the Helena character, who speaks the Queen’s language in a manner that would make the Queen seem like a parlour-maid by comparison). This is partly because it’s a much less-known film and thus still has the potential to surprise a first-time viewer – whereas Psycho’s secrets have been so extensively revealed, analysed, even parodied, that it’s impossible for modern audiences to imagine what its effect must have been like in 1960. But even outside of this comparison, Peeping Tom has that rare ability to repel and fascinate a viewer simultaneously. During the first viewing you’re busy following the broad story, but if you see it more than once you’ll notice the little details that give it its richness: the incongruous childlikeness of the girls who pose for the dirty photos (which mirrors Mark’s own innocence); the way Mark reflexively reaches for his shoulder, where his camera would normally be, the one time Helena persuades him to leave home without it; the creepiness of some of the videos taken by his father. It’s a film that gets right under your skin and stays there
P.S. Check out this excellent review of Peeping Tom - though needless to say, I don't agree with the writer's relatively low opinion of Psycho. Also, he gets a couple of details wrong - the opening murder in Peeping Tom isn't an extended single-take, there's a quick cut when they reach the woman's apartment.
Some Sunday nostalgia on the Masters of the Universe cult. First, read this piece about rediscovering He-Man (link via Shruti). I love the references to the homo-eroticism – characters named Ram Man and Fisto and such. It reminds me of the Star Wars light sabres and the onanistic connotations of Han (Hand) Solo's name, as well as Sam and Frodo’s attempts to save their world by destroying the gigantic vagina in The Lord of the Rings.
Samit also writes about He-Man here, accurately pointing out that for many of us boylings in the mid-1980s, playing with those toys was a crucial first step towards metrosexuality years before the term was coined. (“You do realise they’re dolls, don’t you?” my mother would say. “They’re ACTION FIGURES!” I’d growl back.) I must disagree with the young duck on one point: Teela wasn’t hot. She-Ra (He-Man’s twin sister, separated at birth) …now she was some woman. She rode a unicorn named Swift Wind and could turn her sword into a lasso. Excellent!
I picked up my first He-Man toy around the age of eight and contented myself for some months with the few characters that were available in India (Prince Adam/He-Man, Man-at-Arms, Teela, Skeletor, the Sorceress, Beast-Man, a couple of others). But it was during a two-month vacation in London that true nirvana was obtained. In the Toys section on the fourth floor of Selfridges, I discovered why the West called itself the Developed World: here were dozens, perhaps even hundreds of Masters of the Universe characters that I’d never even heard of in India. My cousins and I bought huge numbers and spent hours playing with them, scripting and acting out stories. Each of the figures came accompanied by a 20-page comic book that explained the provenance of the character in question, and this helped us work out our plots. (Those comics, very cheap rip-offs of Tolkien and other sages, were my earliest introductions to a fantasy landscape outside of Enid Blyton’s Toyland and The Enchanted Wood, or the Indian mythology of Amar Chitra Katha.) I even picked up a couple of Masters of the Universe audio-books (to date the only books I've listened to on tape), including one about Mer-Man, lord of the deeps, with fantastic underwater sound effects.
Our favourite characters included the dastardly ssssnake men – like Tanglor, whose long pipe-like arms made him distinctly different in shape and size from any of the other figures; Mosquitor (who had a chest cavity that would fill with a slimy red liquid if you pressed a button at the back); the evil Hordak (who was an even bigger bad-ass than Skeletor), the stinky Stinkor (the toy gave off a faintly unpleasant smell), the awful Clawful and many others.
My appetite was whetted by the fact that a live-action film titled Masters of the Universe was coming out that summer. In London I picked up a promotional book about the film; it had a plot synopsis with movie stills, but more interestingly it had a page featuring info on all the main characters, with blanks where the mug-shots of the characters were supposed to be. You had to gradually fill those blanks by collecting stickers from candy stores – they came with purchases of specific chocolates. As you might guess, I made sure to accompany my aunt each time she went shopping to Tescos that summer. (I only got to watch the film months later on videocassette. It had Dolph Lundgren in the He-Man role and a decent-ish cast including a young Courtney Cox, 10 years before Friends.)
Needless to say, after returning to India with my prize collection I was for a while the star among my He-Man-obsessed friends, none of whom had more than 7-8 of the most basic toys. We set up elaborate games including knocking the figures down with darts and bows and arrows, and playing hide-and-seek with them (it was especially useful to hide the all-green Moss Man among plants in the garden; finding him could take hours).
Then, after a few months we lost interest, turned our attention to other things (the Ramayana/Mahabharata obsession was just setting in), and the toys were tucked into a plastic bag and consigned to the storeroom – until I retrieved them this morning and found that Stinkor still hasn’t lost his stink, nearly 20 years after I bought him.
He-Man memories. Such fun.
It’s been a long time since I checked the list of Google searches that lead people to this blog, and happily there’s been no change in the top three positions. Searches for “suhaag raat experience”, “Rahul Dravid biography” and “suhaag raat how was it” continue to nourish my site traffic, though so far there’s been no search along the lines of “Rahul Dravid suhaag raat” (what a clean-cut image that boy has really, no one’s even interested).
The major new additions to the list:
Wife swapping in Jaipur
Movies about giant frogs
Sexy spinster
Blind bloggers
Racist jokes against Mexicans
Turmeric powder definition?
Engelbert Humperdinck Indian blood
If you’ve ever fantasized about that perfect backpacker’s vacation (a few weeks spent traveling across the country, altering plans constantly, catching a train with seconds to spare, making last-minute accommodation arrangements or just bedding down at a local bus-stop) only to be discouraged by the shrill voice of practicality (where’s the money coming from? How to chalk a good itinerary without getting a tour operator involved?), do check out this “online reality contest" on the Ok Tata Bye Bye website. Applications are being invited until May 30 and the winner gets Rs 50,000 to travel for 15 days to seven destinations around India (there is a choice of destinations/routes). This distressingly lucky person will also be provided an Internet-enabled laptop and a digital camera to record his/her experiences along the way and post regular updates about the trip on a blog that is being specially created for the purpose.
Sidharth Rao of marketing/consulting firm Webchutney, one of the co-sponsors, tells me that the long-term idea behind the contest is the creation of a dedicated online travel community. “What we’re hoping to establish eventually is the equivalent of a Wikipedia for travel in India, with help from travel-enthusiastic bloggers,” he says. Whether or not that comes to fruition, this contest is certainly open here and now, so take a look. And buy a new haversack while you're at it.
Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon is a throwback to that cheesiest but most endearing of genres: the 1970s disaster movie. Starting with the original The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Hollywood was struck by a series of entertaining-to-middling disaster films: The Towering Inferno (burning skyscraper), The Swarm (deadly African bee attack), The Cassandra Crossing (passengers on a train exposed to a virus), Earthquake (earthquake), Meteor (meteor) – and the sequels to the original Airport, whose very titles signposted their lack of imagination (Airport '75, Airport '77, Airport '79 they were called).
Some of these were among my favourite movies when I was just discovering non-Hindi cinema. One quality they shared with Bollywood was that their "plots" were driven purely by convenience and the need to set up one paisa vasool scene after another; logic was never allowed to stick its foot in the door. Also, for all that these films involved people battling terrible calamities, there was always a reassuring cosiness about them, which was very appealing to a young viewer. Most of them featured ensemble casts (including a number of familiar character actors) and much of the pleasure came from watching these people strategising, bickering about 
options and eventually triumphing over large fires, bacterial attacks or plane bombers. As a viewer one knew that a couple of the characters would have to be bumped off as the story progressed. But nothing too bad would ever happen to the most likable people, and everything would work out all right in the end – though your definition of "all right" had to be a very broad one. As long as Paul Newman and Steve MacQueen made it down that burning elevator shaft fine, it was all goodwill. As long as Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner survived the deadly quake, it mattered little that the rest of Los Angeles had been levelled.
Some of the more recent disaster films (Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Day After Tomorrow) have been extremely watchable, but they haven't had the same charm – they've usually been more concerned with showing off spectacular special effects – and so I didn't expect much of the new Poseidon. On the whole I was pleasantly surprised. This is partly a homage to the disarming simplicity of the original, but it's also a surprisingly gripping film in its own right.
For starters, it has the no-complications format down pat. There's the brief set-up that introduces us to the protagonists, all of whom must be readily identifiable character types: the intrepid gambler who will take the initiative when something different needs to be done; the cynical ex-fireman; his feisty teenage daughter; her hunky but sensitive boyfriend; the single mother and her precocious little son; the mousy stowaway. There's the disaster, in the form of a 150-foot "rogue wave" that strikes the luxury liner these people are travelling on. The ship neatly flips over and the survivors, who just a few moments earlier were air-kissing, ballroom dancing, cooing oohs and ahs and generally being upper-crust sophisticates, now find themselves in the much less dignified position of staggering about amidst giant chandeliers (the room being upside down). Most of them are content to stay in the unbreached grand ballroom and wait for rescuers, but our band decides to be more pro-active. They start to work their way up to the "bottom" of the ship (the part that's now above water).
This leads to a series of harrowing adventures where the characters get a chance to play out (or transcend) their basic natures, make unexpected displays of heroism and romantic pronouncements. (Note to viewers unfamiliar with the requirements of this genre: don't expect to understand every plot detail. You don't need to know your starboard from your port, or the precise location of every escape hatch. This film must be appreciated on a sequence-by-sequence basis - where do these guys need to get next, what are the possible obstacles in their way and how will they overcome them?) Petersen, aided by reasonably competent actors, does a good job of maintaining tension most of the way through. And thankfully he doesn't depend too much on fancy special effects, though there are a few spectacular shots (not least the giant wave right at the beginning, which had me thinking of Herman Melville's observation that we're all still on Noah's Ark – since two-thirds of the planet is covered by water).
Best of all, Poseidon has the ending I was eagerly waiting for. Our heroes have escaped the sinking leviathan, clambered safely onto lifeboats and succeeded in attracting rescue helicopters, and now we're pumping our fists along with them. Never mind the thousand others who have just gone down with the ship.
P.S. I’ve been accused of giggling my way through much of the film, but in my defence it was mainly nervous giggling - except for the time near the end when the characters had almost made it to the top (read bottom) of the ship and I imagined another giant wave suddenly appearing and turning the thing the right way up again.
Director Jean Cocteau once observed of Carl Dreyer’s great silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc that it plays like “a historical document from an era in which cinema didn’t exist”. Certain films (including some I’ve blogged about before: The Seventh Seal, Aguirre, Eraserhead) give that impression – they are so self-contained that they seem to come to us as special messages from another world. It’s difficult to define the nature of this effect. It isn’t that these movies are “realistic” in a documentary-like sense – quite the contrary, many of them put cinematic tricks to great use. But they carry a conviction that makes it hard to think of them as existing outside the world they describe; when the lights go on it feels unreal to actually find a reel of film (or a DVD) with the movie’s title on it.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is leagues ahead of the others in this respect. Watching this 1928 masterpiece, the impression one gets is that Dreyer hopped into a time machine, flew back to 1431 France, recorded the Joan of Arc trial from many different angles simultaneously, returned to the present and then edited it for maximum cinematic effect. And he forgot to carry a sound recorder with him – which is just as well, for as Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard, “We didn’t need dialogues [in silent films]. We had faces.”
The most widely discussed aspect of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (and, with full respect to Dreyer and his great vision, the aspect most worth discussing) is the face and the performance of Maria Falconetti in the title role. Falconetti’s Joan is wide-eyed, tired beyond description, tears often running down her sunken cheeks. The haunted expression on her face could represent the unwavering conviction of a girl who has experienced divinity firsthand - but it could just as easily be the face of someone who has been driven to madness and is no longer sure of anything. This isn’t, after all, a film about the rabble-rousing heroine who led French troops to war on the strength of her visions, God firmly by her side every step of the way. It’s the story of a frightened, exhausted, lonely, even confused young girl being repeatedly questioned and cross-questioned by a group of tyrannical inquisitioners.
There are moments where Joan attempts to live up to her image as the fearless heroine, but falters. Threatened with torture if she refuses to admit that she received her instructions from the Devil, she initially declaims, “Even if you separate my soul from my body, I will say nothing.” But then, as she sees a machine of torture up close – a large revolving wheel with serrated blades along its circumference – terror crosses her face; she holds up a trembling finger and adds, “And even if I do confess, later I’ll say I was forced into it.”
When watching silent-screen performances we usually have to suspend our disbelief, keep in mind how different the theories of acting were back then: that cinema was still a young form, most of its early stars had cut their teeth on the theatre and were unprepared for this new medium. Falconetti’s Joan is the most notable of exceptions – it’s a performance that would have any modern audience in complete thrall.**
Dreyer’s use of close-ups for both Joan and her judges is rightly famous – it almost seems like we can see every pore, every little scar, on their faces, and this adds to the sense of claustrophobia. (Credit must be given to the mid-1980s restoration of the film, based on a well-preserved print that was serendipitously discovered in a broom closet in a mental institution!) But he also extracts a lot of power from the smaller moments, the ones that might otherwise be considered “breathers”. Like the shot where Joan gazes at a skull lying in a graveyard, worms slithering in and out of its nostrils. Dreyer seems to invite us to ask what she is thinking about at that moment. Is she merely contemplating the here and now – that she herself might be dead in a few moments – or is she considering that her visions might be delusions after all, the possibility that the afterlife is a vast unknown? (I don’t think it’s coincidental that much of the imagery of this scene – including a gravedigger shoveling mud – is evocative of Hamlet, of “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler may return” and “your worm is your only emperor for diet”.)
My DVD of The Passion of Joan of Arc has two audio options – one silent, the other featuring the haunting “Voices of Light” choral soundtrack created especially for the film in the 1990s. Initially I tried to watch the film with the sound off, but the images were so stark and powerful that I needed an element of artifice, of manufactured drama. So I switched the soundtrack on after a few minutes – feeling slightly guilty until I remembered that when the film was originally screened in 1928 there would have been an accompanying score in the movie-hall anyway. I suggest anyone who gets hold of the DVD watches it with “Voices of Light” switched on. At least the first time.
** This is Falconetti’s only surviving film, which of course adds to the mystique surrounding her performance. Parallels can be drawn in this respect with the enigmatic German actor Max Shreck, who played the rodent-like vampire in F W Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu. So iconic is Shreck’s performance, and so little is known of him outside of that film, that it was possible 80 years later for a movie screenplay to suggest that he really was a vampire! The jury is still out on whether Falconetti was a saint in real life…
[Images from Wikipedia]
Cellphones, I’m pleased to report, are set to cross the final frontier and enter swimming pools with the rest of us muscular, fitness-conscious types. There I was this morning, shark-hunting in my favourite Olympic-sized tank at the local sports complex, when a genuflecting assistant-like person carries just such a phone to the edge of the pool and deposits it into the waiting hands of an elderly lady contained therein.
Lady (after wiping her left ear dry with a hand-towel thoughtfully provided by the genuflector): Haan, bolo.
(Pause)
L: Arre, main pool mein hoon, pool mein.
(Pause)
L: Kya bol rahe ho? Lagta hai signal kharaab hai. Main pool mein hoon!
(Pause, during which two boisterous and ill-mannered boys splash noisily past a line of us)
L: Arre, paani ki awaaz kaise nahin aayegi? Aakhir yeh pool hai!
(Significantly longer pause, which raises my hopes that the conversation might finally be headed for more productive avenues)
L: Sweeming pool!
(Nervous-looking man paddling nearby requests lady to kindly remove the phone from pool region, “because if it falls into the water we will all catch radiation poisoning”. Or be electrocuted. Or something.)
L: Achha? Achha! Theek hai, bye-bye.
(Hands phone back to assistant, smiles winsomely: “She was just calling to say hi.”)
I envision a day when people carry cellphones in the little pockets in their Speedo costumes. Swimming goggles will come equipped with hands-free wires, face masks will become integral to swimming gear so that underwater conversations may be facilitated. Special satellites will be installed on pool floors in collusion with cellular service providers, permitting experienced swimmers to SMS their friends in the shallow end. Then the monopoly will be complete and years from now, as we sit in the movie hall and take calls from friends eager to chit-chat with us in between laps, we will marvel at the thought that cellphones were ever considered a nuisance.
[In other news, I watched two great films yesterday: Carl Dreyer’s magnificent The Passion of Joan of Arc, which has variously been described as “the most powerful silent film ever made”, “a masterful study of the human face” and “a historical document from an era in which the cinema didn’t exist”; and the Mithun Chakraborty classic Disco Dancer, which is none of the above but contains the famous “Jimmy Jimmy” song (which did so much to improve Indo-Russian relations), the always-edifying sight of Rajesh Khanna bobbing his head to the tune of a guitar, and many other delights. Will blog about the first film soon; in matters Mithun, I defer to GreatBong.]
It seems almost improbable that Manju Kapur’s Home should be as stimulating as it is. This is the simplest of stories – the life of a joint family running a cloth business in Delhi’s busy Karol Bagh area – told in the simplest of ways. The style is conversational and there’s nothing too out-of-the-ordinary about the plot. Even when there is strong dramatic tension, it’s presented dispassionately. Besides, this is a fast read (it took me two shortish sessions to get through), and aren’t we taught to believe that page-turners mustn’t be taken too seriously?
What raises Home far above its seemingly commonplace concerns is Kapur’s understanding of the inconstancy of human beings and their relationships; of our self-delusions, our manipulating of situations to suit our own viewpoints, the instinct for gossip-mongering and groupism, and how the joint family system provides the perfect setting for the playing out of all these qualities. But this book’s biggest strength is Kapur’s refusal to stand in a position of judgement on these universal human foibles.
Without fuss, without any preamble (except for a short introductory para about the workings of the typical lower-middle class business family: “Their marriages augmented, their habits conserved. From an early age children are taught to maintain the foundation on which these homes rest…”), Home draws us into the lives of two sisters, Sona and Rupa. Sona is married to Yashpal, the eldest son in the Banwari Lal clan (in a story about individual needs being repeatedly subsumed by group interests, this family is effectively the book’s protagonist). For the first 10 years of her marriage she is childless, which makes her a subject of resentment and pity (and some gloating) among the other women in the house – it being understood that a woman’s prime function is to serve as the vessel that will bring forth the next generation.
When she finally does conceive, her mother-in-law (known only as “Maji”, never by name – an indication of her status as nothing more significant than the patriarch’s wife) promptly starts doting on her – which in turn creates a bridge between Sona and Rupa (who all these years had been her sister’s confidant in gossip about the mother-in-law). Kapur observes these little details masterfully, rarely playing them up but making sure they stick in the reader’s mind. The shifts in relationships, the power struggles within a family, the suppressing of individuality, the selective thinking that can allow a woman to feel threatened and aggrieved by her son’s bride while completely forgetting her own experiences as a daughter-in-law 25 years earlier –all these things are set down with great economy.
In a parallel thread, the sad fate of Yashpal’s sister Sunita creates more complications. When she reached marriageable age, Sunita was disposed of as all daughters must be. The stars were favourable but her husband was an abusive lout and now, after her death in a kitchen “accident”, her young son Vicky is brought to Delhi to stay with the Banwari Lals. Confused and uncared for, he is destined to become the family’s black sheep, and he takes his first steps in this direction by sexually abusing his little cousin Nisha.
Kapur’s handling of this passage is stunningly matter-of-fact. One minute Vicky and Nisha, brother and sister, are playing together and bantering on the terrace; the next minute he is touching her private parts and then using her little fist to aid in jerking himself off. But what’s even scarier than the actual incident is its aftermath. Some of the elders figure out what might have happened, but bringing it into the open is so unthinkable that the possibility isn’t even discussed; instead they decide to let the traumatised Nisha live with her aunt a few houses away. It’s just something that has to be done; family honour must be preserved at all costs.
[Situations like this will no doubt sound improbable to those who have no insider’s knowledge of what can happen behind the veil of the joint family system. A close friend recently told me how shaken she was when, as an adolescent, she was sexually harassed by her cousin brother. She told her mother about it immediately but the matter never went beyond the two of them. A subtle distancing did take place between the two families, but for a couple of years after the incident my friend had to continue, for appearance’s sake, to tie “rakhi” on the brother’s wrist. Naturally, even today, at infrequent get-togethers they go through the hi-hello formalities, though the incident hasn’t left her mind and she still feels exploited.]
High-quality fiction can give you insights into lives that are built on value systems completely different from your own. It can make you empathise (if only briefly) with those lives and their foundations; understand the long process, spread over many generations, that has made these people what they are. Home had that effect on me in places. At one point Nisha asks Rupa Masi: “What do you think of love marriages?” and Rupa replies, matter-of-factly and without missing a beat, “They are very bad. Require too much adjustment.” For that one moment, and in spite of everything I personally believe in, I could see the lady’s point – founding a marriage on a single passion that might easily ebb with time can be an imprudent thing to do in a situation where the couple is married as much to the family as to each other.
Kapur brings out some disturbing home truths in this novel, yet she does it from an exceptionally mature, detached perspective – suggesting that many of the things that go wrong stem naturally from the human condition rather than from the flaws in any one way of life. She makes her characters believable and sympathetic, and even when we shudder at the repressive ancientness of their beliefs, we can recognise them as being not all that different in their essence from us. P.S. I had a problem with the unevenness of Home’s narrative structure. The book’s first 150-200 pages are freeflowing. Some characters (like Sona and Rupa) are more important than others, but by and large the effect is that of an omniscient narrator wandering into each of the rooms in the large house in turn, spending time with each of the characters; we are privy to the thoughts and personal conflicts of a number of people. But then, in the second half, Kapur decides to focus her narrative on Nisha and this slightly diminishes the effect. Nisha’s story – a failed affair, her struggle for emancipation – is interesting and well-observed enough in its own right, but it feels strange to be suddenly cut off from some of the earlier threads (Vicky’s sudden disappearance is particularly jarring).
Ah yes, the Kaavya Viswanathan thing. I don’t want to express any thoughts on the plagiarism issue - partly because there’s been enough opinion pornography on the subject already, and partly because it turns out I don’t have as many thoughts as you’d think (oops, plagiarised that line from Joey). But one of the side-issues that I find interesting is the suggestion that Viswanathan and Megan McCafferty weren’t the real authors of the books that carried their names - that they were just the fronts and the books were put together in assembly-line style by a packaging syndicate; and that the repeated passages might have been a natural result of this process.This reminds me of a couple of old pieces, which I highly recommend:1) A Roald Dahl story titled "The Great Automatic Grammatizer". This is a cautionary tale about the invention of a machine that mass-produces entire stories. An engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section and arrange for them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.
Eventually, this puts all human writers out of business (they all end up signing contracts relinquishing their right to create any more original work, and in some cases agreeing to have their names on the machine-produced stories). One of the best things about the story is Dahl’s sly commentary on the writing process. For instance, there’s a passage where the machine’s inventor is explaining some of the tricks of writing to his sceptical boss:"There’s a trick nearly every writer uses, of inserting one long, obscure word into every story. This makes the reader think the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.""Where?""In the word-memory section," he said epexegetically.Love the playfulness Dahl shows in throwing that "epexegetically" in, out of nowhere. If you haven’t read the story, get hold of it. Quite funny and very relevant to much of what’s happening in the modern publishing industry.2) Also, this illuminating piece from the New Yorker about Edward Stratemeyer, the man who started the publishing syndicate that produced, among other series, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Don’t miss the comparison of Stratemeyer's revolutionising of children's books with what Henry Ford did for the auto industry.Stratemeyer could not keep up with the demand for his stories. This prompted his second big idea: he would form a literary syndicate, which would produce books assembly-line style. From his days of working at Good News, he was acquainted with the best juvenile writers, and knew that "any one of them could have built up a 70,000-word novel from a comma, if required," as one such writer put it. By the time the Stratemeyer Syndicate was incorporated, in 1910, he was putting out ten or so juvenile series by a dozen writers under pseudonyms, and had more series in development.
Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and—slam-bang!—send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb "said" with "exclaimed," "cried," "chorused," and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter—usually framed as a question or an exclamation. Each series was published under a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned. As Fortune later noted, it was good business for children to become attached to a name, but it would be bad business for that name to leave the syndicate with the ghostwriter.
Full piece here.
P.S. Please read what poor Samit had to go through as a result of being misquoted on the Kaavya topic by Tehelka. Another good reason to keep quiet about the whole thing.
For some time now I’ve been toying with the idea of doing write-ups on classics from American and British cinema (time frame: anywhere between the 1920s and the 1960s). I greedily watched many hundreds of those films as a teenager, they were the first steps in my movie education, and lately I’ve been rediscovering some of them on DVD. Don’t know whether the idea is sustainable but there’s a chance I’ll soon be working on a column featuring snippets/DVD reviews of old movies, and this could be good practice.
Thought I’d start with Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, which I watched again recently. This was one of the tightest, sparest movies to be made by a major American studio (MGM) in the 1950s, and this is partly suggested by the simplicity of its mise en scene: 12 jurors sitting in a small room over the course of a long, hot afternoon, debating whether or not to convict a young man who has been accused of killing his father. This description probably doesn’t make the film sound very exciting, especially when you understand that it isn’t a murder mystery (I’m not giving anything away by disclosing that we never find out if the accused is guilty). But despite not being a conventional thriller or a suspense movie, despite not even being cinematic in any obvious, flashy way, Twelve Angry Men is the definition of an edge-of-your-seat film. It gets its power from the taut exchanges between 12 ordinary men – each with his own set of biases, prejudices and life experiences – who have been placed in an extraordinary situation.
If they all vote Guilty, the defendant gets the death sentence. If they vote Not Guilty, he goes free. (The verdict must be 12-0 either way, otherwise the case will have to be re-tried.) Initially, everyone seems to think it’s an open-and-shut case. A poll is taken and there is only one verdict of “Not Guilty” – it comes from juror number 8 (we don't learn the men’s names), played by Henry Fonda. The others immediately start browbeating him.
Fonda, who also produced the film, fits this role perfectly. He was the least starry of Hollywood’s major leading men, the one with the most nondescript screen persona; he was better than any of his contemporaries at melting into the background, at not overwhelming a film with his presence. And though he gave a number of outstanding performances playing men of integrity and forthrightness (young Abe Lincoln, Wyatt Earp, Tom Joad and Clarence Darrow among others), there was always an element of 
hesitance, introspection; he played reluctant heroes, not supermen. Likewise, Juror 8 isn’t a hero with some special insight or moral superiority that the others lack. He calls “Not Guilty” not because he’s convinced that the defendant is innocent but because he thinks there is a reasonable doubt, and that they must at least discuss the case at length before pronouncing a verdict that will send a young boy to his death. There is more than one scene in this film where he seems a little unsure of his case.
Fonda’s role does of course stand out by its very nature, but if you were a little green man watching this film with no information about the actors, you wouldn’t know he was the “star” – most of the players have equal screen time. The cast comprises some of the finest American character actors of the era, including E G Marshall, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Joseph Sweeney and best of all, Lee J Cobb and Ed Begley, superb as the two most obstreperous of the jurors (Cobb’s loudmouthed character is the least likable of the Guilty-sayers, but by the end of the film we see him in a different light – a reminder that this is not a movie about heroes and villains). Not everyone in the cast is a Method actor (Fonda least of all) but the nature of the acting – especially the edginess and the improvisation – is what you’d expect from one of Lee Strasberg’s workshops.
Lumet (an underappreciated director who had a very impressive filmography), scriptwriter Reginald Rose and the actors pack an incredible amount of tension into this simple story. The thinking of the jurors, their attitude to the case, is determined by a number of things, including deep-rooted racism (the defendant belongs to an unspecified ethnic minority). But trivial factors are also at play (it’s muggy, some of them are sweating profusely and tempers are running high; there are ego clashes over tangential issues; one juror wants to be free in time to attend an important baseball game, another needs to get back to work; one has a nasty summer cold and is irritable). This is, of course, exactly as it would be with any of us when we are taking important decisions. But as the film progresses and the jurors start to reexamine all the evidence – to the point where they are practically trying the case all over again – we see them questioning their pre-conceptions and overcoming the little irritations; we sense that they are evolving as people, becoming worthy of this great responsibility that has been placed upon them.
12 Angry Men is about the nature of democracy, about the importance of debate (it’s only when the men get around to discussing the case in detail that they see little holes in the prosecution’s case) and about human fallibility. It’s about a group of people who, with all their failings, have temporarily been asked to play God, and who must now deal with this bizarre situation – by casting a long, hard look at themselves, setting aside their prejudices and relying on reason. What happens in this jury room is a microcosm for how any decision should be taken by people who are in a position of authority. But it’s also, of course, about the power of the common man. At the end of the film, the Fonda character runs into one of the other jurors, an old man, outside the courthouse. They’ve just participated in an intense debate involving life and death, they’ve been quarries and allies in turn. But now they simply exchange names, shake hands awkwardly and part ways. The job is done; now they can go back to being anonymous faces in the crowd.
Zubaan Books is in the process of putting together an anthology of new short fiction by young Indian women writers. Stories must be in English and can be of any length, ideally between 2,000 and 5,000 words. For the full concept note and details of submission, go here.
Gautam Malkani’s debut novel begins with a scene of visceral violence: four young British Asians are pummeling a white kid for calling them “Pakis” – a word that, like “nigga”, you’re allowed to use only if you’re on the inside (“Can’t be callin someone a Paki less you also call’d a Paki, innit”). The actual beating is being done by Hardjit, the brawny gangleader, but the others – Amit, Ravi and our narrator Jas (presumably short for Jaswinder) – are also participants in what is really an elaborate bit of role-playing. As it turns out, the white boy had never actually abused Hardjit and his gang, but that isn’t the point. The point is that our Asian “rudeboys” need a pretext to assert their identity and their machismo. 
