Notes from the Bombay trip

At risk of falling into the usual Bombay-vs-Delhi generalisations, even the stray dogs in Bombay are better behaved than their counterparts in my city. They keep their eyes lowered, speak when spoken to and don’t stare uncouthly the way dogs and humans in Delhi constantly do. (It bears remembering that many of Delhi’s mongrels are half-breeds descended from the foxes that once roamed the jungles near the ruins of Mehrauli. When the city’s southward expansion began and the forests began to fall, these animals, knowing their time was up, decided to breed with the local dogs in order to pass on a genetic legacy. No doubt the feral gene is still active in the current generation.)

Anyway, zoological dissertations aside, I had a superb time. It was a mistake to keep the trip so short, but managed to pack in a lot into my two-and-a-half days there. A short list:

The nostalgia angle: I hadn’t been to Bombay in 20 years (used to go once or twice each year until I was 10) and the actual memories were dim and scattered, but I’ve always felt like I know the place – especially Churchgate, where my mum lived up to the age of 24. She still has an idealised picture of the city in her head – or at least the way south Bombay used to be in the 1960s and early 1970s – and I’ve heard lots of stories from her and my nani over the years: about idyllic evenings spent at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) and the Racecourse, long walks down Marine Drive, nightlong parties with film personalities and their families dropping by.

The uncle I stayed with, a family friend, has lived in the same house in Churchgate for 60 years. We were watching TV, a song from the Dev Anand film Hum Dono came on, and he recalled music director Jaidev composing the tune while sitting in the apartment below his, more than 45 years ago. Two buildings away is where my mother’s cousin and her family live, and one of the apartments in between is where mum grew up, the place she still thinks of as “home” despite having left it decades ago. I took photographs, walked a lot, including in the CCI ground where mum and her friends spent hundreds of their childhood evenings. Luckily many of the Kitab festival venues were in and around Churchgate, so traveling was quick and easy (not something one associates with Bombay). Much of this area is still so charming and old-world that for long stretches of time it was possible to forgot about the city’s staggering population density and its growing reputation as a huge urban slum.

Also drove along the Queen’s Necklace at midnight, went to Malabar Hill and past the Hanging Gardens.

Kitab was a mixed bag. A couple of good panel discussions, some boring ones. But had a fine time in the company of Amit, Chandrahas, Manish, Saket, PrufrockTwo and Aditya, and also met the usual suspects from the lit-circle over cocktails and canapés at the Taj Palace hotel (from where I walked along the waterfront to the Radio Club, where relatives were waiting for me for dinner) and at Good Earth. (More notes on the festival soon.)

Food
Had an excellent lunch with eM at Café Churchill in Colaba: a beef steak with lots of mushrooms, consumed beneath a large, indistinct portrait of Sir Winston looking very much like a goodly chunk of ham himself. The steak was so big I could barely finish it (not something that often happens when I eat out and eat good). Good value for money, and it was such a pleasure to see a menu with B-E-E-F clearly spelt out on it, instead of a shifty-eyed waiter coming up to you and whispering “you want my tender loin, sir?”.

Other outstanding meals included:

– Crab butter pepper garlic, prawn gassi and appams at Mahesh Lunch Home.

– Nasi Goreng rice (with chicken, shrimps and a tender fried egg on top) at the Japengo Café. The dishes were very aesthetically arranged, which really sets up the foodie mood (of course they have to be well made too – but that’s a given in most Bombay restaurants).

– A large, eclectic Chinese lunch at the Pearl of the Orient, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Ambassador Hotel (from where I saw several splendid views of the city, including the CCI with the Brabourne Stadium just beneath us).

– Delectable ham sandwiches, some very heady rum cake and poha (not all at once) at the home of the uncle I was staying with.

Sidenote: eating out with people who are genuine foodies is a delightfully intense experience. From several minutes before you even reach the restaurant, you’re discussing the food, anticipating the aroma of each dish. Then you sit at the table, study the menu lovingly, talk about past meals, exchange notes, place the order and continue to talk food. No one even thinks of making the conversation more general. And then the dishes arrives and a monk-like silence prevails for the next several minutes, punctuated only by the cracking of prawn shells.

So excellent trip overall. But in a subsequent post I will deal with the thesis that nostalgia mustn’t be carried too far. Never doing the Rajdhani thing again, which I had romantically imagined would be a train journey into the past. Nothing of the sort: it was besmirched by the presence of small satanic children and their fondly indulgent parents. (More on that soon, in a post titled “So you didn’t use a condom, now at least practise berth control”.)

The sky's the limit

[From a lightweight column I do for Metro Now. This week they used a dummy name and photo instead of mine, which was annoying, but it’s okay, I’ve been on the other side of these goof-ups too – most notably in a famous incident many years ago when I released a page with the dummy headline “Give head, give head”]

New security measures were recently put in place at various airports around the country, but who's going to save us from the Crybaby Indian Passenger? A typical specimen of this creature comes equipped not with the usual paraphernalia of terrorism but with a perpetual willingness to be offended and to shrilly proclaim it to the world. I was returning from Dubai on Air-India a few weeks ago and everything went smoothly until the very last step of the process – the boarding counter – where, after a couple of hurried consultations between the officials, it was decided that everyone would have to go through a second security check. Handbags open. Shoes off.

Going by the strained looks on the faces of the airport staff, and the general briskness on view, this wasn't a routine drill – it was clear that something serious (an anonymous tip-off?) had happened. Now agreed, being tickled all over by stern-faced security officers can be a trying experience at 1 AM when all you want to do is grab a quick nap mid-flight or maybe slur "whishky, shoda and lotsh of aish" at the nearest air-hostess. But surely a little inconvenience is nothing when weighed against security? Especially when you're about to spend a few hours 30,000 feet above the ground, hurtling through space at 600 miles/hour. Yes, that's what I thought too. But this mattered little to the wailing passengers who treated each extra precaution as a personal slight, a welcome pretext to take offence.

"Joote utaarne ko keh rahe hain!" shrieked a lady with the general air of Draupadi being undraped in the Kuru sabha. Elderly gents gasped when asked to raise their arms, as if they were being asked to participate in a beef-eating competition. Some of the bolder youngsters started picking brawls. "This is racist behaviour! They only do this to us because we are Indian and don't say anything," snarled one man, who had, ironically, not been silent for more than three seconds at a stretch.

A brief pause, and then someone who had been quiet thus far went up to an officer and asked conversationally, "So what happened, was there a terrorism threat?" Now there are some phrases you simply don't utter within earshot of people who are about to get into an aircraft. "Terrorism threat" is high up on this list, along with "bombs", "technical problems" and "we're out of Black Label". Predictably, pandemonium ensued. But it wasn't the frightened, "we're all going to die!" sort of pandemonium I had anticipated. "Now they will accuse us of being terrorist?" a lady asked, her lips quivering like a Bedouin in the tundra. The angst was so palpable you could reach out and wring its neck.

I skipped the in-flight movie. Nothing could have lived up to the drama that had gone before.

Eddie Campbell and the From Hell scripts

A reminder for comic lovers about Eddie Campbell’s superb blog The Fate of the Artist. It’s a real treasure-trove for fans of From Hell (though there's plenty else too) - Eddie has been putting up pages from that book along with the panel-by-panel scripts sent to him by Alan Moore. (Some examples here, here, here and here - well worth looking at even if you know nothing about From Hell.) Read some of Moore’s visualisations for each page, you’ll be astonished at the intensity and vividness of the descriptions (remember that this wasn’t written for publication, it was a personal exchange between a writer and a cartoonist. And the finished book ran to nearly 600 pages).
I also liked this post where Eddie discusses “the problem of the cinematic principle” when it comes to creating graphic novels – namely “the idea that we’re always looking through a camera. In a comic book script it shows itself in ways that we have long stopped being conscious of. For instance, we will tend to automatically describe a view as being in long-shot or close-up. We have forgotten that these are movie terms…My idea was to take ‘cutting’ away and replace it with a keen observation of body language.”

For a demonstration, see this page – read Alan Moore’s descriptions of how each panel should look and then see how Eddie does the drawings his own way, showing the same view of the two figures throughout (instead of cross-cutting between them) but subtly altering their body language and their relationship to each other as the conversation progresses.

On being offline, and general notes about reviewing

It’s very relaxing to be away from the Internet for four days at a stretch, especially when the intervening period is as enjoyable as my Bombay trip was (more on that soon) – I didn’t have time to even think about the Net or worry about trolls leaving impolite comments in my absence. But as the time came for me to get online again I felt a growing terror of the hundreds of emails to be tackled (most of them spam, to be carefully sifted out and deleted, but also at least a couple of dozen to be read and replied to) as well as the innumerable news and Bloglines updates.

Thankfully, it took just a couple of hours to catch up with events. On my last day in Bombay Amit had told me about the Indibloggies results. Congratulations to the winners, especially to Falstaff, Baradwaj and Arnab – and while I’m at it, to Martin Scorsese and Helen Mirren, who apparently won Oscars around the same time I was battling evil children on the Rajdhani (more on this later).

I enjoyed this acceptance-speech post written by Baradwaj, because it clarifies some of my own thoughts about the reviewing process (which I’ve brought up at various times on this blog). Baradwaj and I have very similar attitudes to reviewing and we’ve discussed the subject over email a lot. Essentially, what we’re interested in is the review as a form of self-expression, almost as autobiography, written not to tell the reader “Watch this” or “Don’t watch this” but to provide a single perspective (though hopefully an articulate, informed one) on a film; a perspective that frankly might not chime with anyone else’s, but which will, at the very least, say: “this is how a certain sort of person might respond to this particular work – and the response is worth taking seriously even if he’s in a minority of one”.

Talking about his movie reviews, Baradwaj writes:

I’m often told that a reader doesn’t know what to do after reading a review of mine: go see the film, or not. And that’s really how it should be, for I am not in the business of giving endorsements, nor am I a mind-reader...sometimes I feel like adding a disclaimer at the bottom: Thou shalt not make your life – or at least, your movie-viewing – decisions based on the opinions of ONE writer whose thoughts merely reflect what he felt AT THAT POINT IN TIME, and the author reserves his rights to change his views upon subsequent viewings, and so on.

This approach will seem uncomfortably open-ended to many people (as I often discover while talking about reviewing with friends). It also seems like a cop-out – and maybe, on some level, it is. Speaking for myself, I’m not very good at holding strong, fixed opinions about most things – and is that necessarily bad? Is it as bad, for instance, as establishing your Worldviews at an early age and then stubbornly sticking by them all your life?

Incidentally, during an informal panel discussion at the Kitab festival on Saturday, Chandrahas made a related point about reviewing when he mentioned that good reviews (book reviews, in this case) should be seen as a sub-set of literature and held up to the same standards. Here too, the underlying assumption is that reviews need to be recognised as things written by individuals with distinct perspectives and biases of their own.

This might seem like a very obvious point to make, but it isn’t. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has said to me “Reviews must be objective” – a sentence I can never understand (I’m not sure I understand what the word “objective” means anyway). In India, there are major misconceptions about the nature and purpose of film reviewing. People often seem to want reviewers (who supposedly are Higher Beings with some secret, cosmic insight into whether a film is Good or Bad) to tell them in clear terms whether or not they should go and see something. And if they happen to strongly disagree with the reviewer's assessment, well, that's the cue for personal abuse/imputing of ulterior motives. Everything has to be centred on Evaluation. Four stars or two-and-a-half stars or three-and-a-quarter stars?

P.S. One of the accumulated mails I had to deal with today was from a friend informing me about two conflicting reviews of a new book and asking me which one he should "believe". I was in a crabby mood and replied with a simple: "They're both lying."

Pushpak, then and now

I have a surprisingly vivid memory of watching the Kamal Haasan-starrer Pushpak in the Uphaar cinema hall sometime in 1988. Surprising because most of my other movie-watching experiences from that time are a blur. On revisiting old childhood favourites, I often find that a scene which I was certain was in one film actually came from another – this happens even with movies I thought I knew by heart.

With Pushpak, it's been different. It was a very striking film, full of vignettes that stuck in the mind: over the years, whenever I’ve thought about it, I’ve been able to recall specific scenes with clarity. Even as an 11-year-old, I knew it was special – and not just because of its unique selling point, much-advertised at the time, which was that it was a silent movie (silent in the sense of no dialogue between the principals; there were plenty of background sounds).

It was interesting to watch it again on TV after nearly 20 years. Books and films change as we return to them at different points in our lives (this is one reason why I don’t take reviews too seriously from the point of view of evaluation, preferring to see them as a form of self-expression) and the gap between an 11-year-old viewer and a 30-year-old viewer is especially wide. The Pushpak I saw a couple of days ago was clumsier and more disjointed than the one I watched as a child. Some of the slapstick bits (which had provided great belly-laughs all those years ago) were embarrassing, though a couple of the comedy scenes held up well. There were minor missteps when it came to specifics: the faces of some peripheral characters weren’t as I remembered them, and I was startled to discover that the small but significant role of a roadside beggar was not, as I had thought all these years, played by a young Nana Patekar. But on the whole the film was as I had remembered it.
This is a modern-day morality tale with one easy-to-digest lesson that seems slightly out of place in middle-class India today: if you want the good life, be prepared to work hard for many years. Start at the bottom and move slowly, very slowly to the top. (There were no call centres back then. Nor – insert personal rant here – was Indian journalism in the ridiculous state it is in today, where new magazines and papers are being launched on a weekly basis and demand so outstrips supply that 20-year-olds with no writing or editing skills can be assured of heavy pay-cheques.)

The “shortcuts don’t work” theme runs through the film, but it’s encapsulated in a scene where an old, wheelchair-bound hotelier gazes at a series of photographs that trace his progress over the decades – from a humble tea-seller with a little stall to the manager of a small restaurant to the proud owner of a luxury hotel called Pushpak. This hotel (named for the chariot commandeered by the Hindu God of wealth, Kubera) is an imposing symbol of achievement and status, which makes it an apt setting for most of the film’s action. It’s here that a down-on-his-luck youngster (played by Kamal Haasan; we never learn the character’s name), frustrated by his life in a dirty chawl, the endless waits in employment queues and a long line of “No Vacancy” signs, unexpectedly gets a free ticket to the Good Life. Circumstances allow him to assume a rich man’s identity and take his place in a room at the hotel, where he quickly settles into five-star luxury and falls in love with a magician’s daughter (Amala). But he also has to abase himself considerably (there’s a scene involving the rich man’s enema – not what you’d call tasteful humour, but it serves its purpose in showing us the lengths to which the Haasan character has to go in order to live his dream) and further trouble comes in the form of a bumbling hitman (Tinnu Anand), hired to dispose of the man our hero is impersonating.

Pushpak has layers of symbolism – most of its characters can be seen either in aspirational or cautionery terms vis-à-vis their relationship with the “hero” – but this doesn’t affect the film’s charm or lightness of touch. There are many fine sight gags, made more effective by the absence of dialogue: Haasan’s little game of one-upmanship with the beggar, who turns out to have lots of money concealed under his blanket; his tape-recording of the chawl sounds, without which he can’t sleep at night, even in the comfortable hotel room; the magician’s bag of tricks, including those he uses in his own household; and best of all, the hitman’s paranoid insistence on using ice-daggers instead of a more palpable, difficult-to-dispose weapon – which sets up some delightfully silly scenes where he has to lug a thermos around with him everywhere and look for a place to set it down each time his prey is within sight.
The slapstick is complemented by some nicely understated moments, especially in the relationship between the Haasan and Amala characters. As he’s often done throughout his career, Haasan uses his intelligence as an actor to bring integrity and purpose to scenes that might otherwise not have worked. Best of all, the film is so artless, so unforced, that one never thinks of the lack of sound as a gimmick. If anything, it suits this story – it’s a parable anyway, and an over-earnest scriptwriter might easily have ruined it.

P.S. Puskpak is a cult film in the truest sense. It was a critical success when it was released but was never very widely watched, at least outside of south India. It hasn’t yet been “rediscovered” – and tellingly, there’s very little about it on the Internet – but from conversations with friends I know it has a small but very loyal following.

Kitab 2007

The Kitab Festival is being held in Mumbai between February 23-25; details here. I’ll be there on all three days, mainly for the fest but also because a trip to Mumbai was long overdue – have been promising family and friends I’ll be coming across soon, and plans just haven’t taken shape. (Btw, eating-out recommendations in the Churchgate area would be appreciated.)

Check the Kitab schedule – there are many promising discussions on offer. I’m part of the same panel Chandrahas is on, and must sorrowfully inform him that at last year’s Kitab there was a long table in front of the panelists. But this is good in a way, for you can kick off your shoes and socks and not worry about pedicures and suchlike.

Orkut, the killer wail

(I’ve made a mini-career of ranting against the evil online forum Orkut in lighthearted – but sincerely meant – stories/columns. Here’s a composite)

I’ve developed a sudden respect for email as a form of communication. This was completely unanticipated: back in 1998, when I was so much older and wiser, I numbered among the technophobes who made sad clucking sounds about the imminent demise of good old-fashioned letter-writing and the general depersonalisation of human interaction. (Note: this was purely theoretical. In practice I preferred to avoid all human company anyway.)

But the relentless march of progress makes fools of us all. Where email was once the enemy, the harbinger of a cold dystopian age where people would talk to their computers instead of to each other, it now seems positively warm and personal compared to some of the stuff that goes down on the Internet. These days, when I receive an email – personally addressed to me – from a friend or acquaintance, my eyes brim over with tears of gratitude. “At last!” my wounded heart cries, “Private, one-to-one communication!”

The reason for this change in attitude is the advent in my life of something called Orkut. Even if you aren’t Net-savvy, you’ve no doubt heard of this ghastly social-networking forum: it’s been in the news a lot, what with controversies about online hate communities with such names as “Slap Gandhi’s other Cheek” (or similar names, at any rate).

My problem isn't with the hate-communities, it's with these intensely annoying things called “scrapbooks”, the virtual messageboards on which Orkutters scribble things at each other. These are public forums – anyone with an Orkut account can see anyone else’s scrapbook – but going by some of the things I’ve witnessed, no one seems to realise this. Lovers cootchie-coo and send personal notes of the sort that would in an earlier, more genteel age (that is, two years ago) have been restricted to private email or SMS. Colleagues sitting three feet from each other in that long-forgotten parallel universe we once knew as “the real world” use their scrapbooks to bitch about other colleagues (who probably have Orkut accounts too) and even bosses.

There are too many other examples to list – and most of them make you wonder if man deserves to be at the top of the food chain – but one that caught my eye recently was an ex-colleague leaving her telephone number on a friend’s scrapbook, with the hushed message “please don’t give this number to M” – completely unmindful that the said M was on the friend’s Orkut list as well. All this suggests one of three things: 1) a deep-rooted need for exhibitionism, 2) a touching – and foolish – faith in the idea that people respect other people’s privacy enough to avoid reading scraps that don’t directly concern them, or 3) plain cluelessness about how technology works.

Female friends routinely express annoyance about the many strange men who hit on them after seeing their profiles. There are random testosterone-charged alpha-males trawling this community, they tut-tut; they put up photographs of their flexed biceps and leave messages like “Hi! Wanna make fransip?” or something less refined like "wanna make sexies?". But with due respect to all ladies who dislike being harassed thus, I must proffer this observation: of all the people I’ve seen using the Orkut scrapbook to communicate, these desperate Romeos are easily among the most purposeful. At least they know exactly what they want and are trying wholeheartedly to get it (and despite their inane and ungrammatical methods some of them might even succeed, there being nearly as many stupid girls in cyberspace as there are horny guys). I can’t say the same for most of the Orkut users I personally know; the chief purpose of their existence seems to be the accumulation of as many scraps, “fans” and “testimonials” as can possibly be collected in a single cyber-lifetime.

When friends discover my Orkut profile (which, I must quickly clarify, was created purely to research for a story) and send me scraps saying “Yo dude! Wassup?” and suchlike, I politely convey that I would rather use email than communicate by scrapbook. But it doesn’t work. I answer a friend’s scrap with a mail, but instead of simply clicking on “Reply” he posts another scrap. And so it goes.

Well, if you can’t beat them, join them – so maybe I’ll form a “I hate Orkut” community. Meanwhile, in the interests of fairness (because that's so important to me), here’s the other side of the story; the transcript of a Gmail chat I had with a friend, an avid Orkut user (name withheld):

“Orkut is like life: pointless”

Jabberwock: Why do you love Orkut scrapping so much? Is it because you’re young, foolish and impressionable?

Orkut Lover: Um. It’s an amusing and pointless waste of time. It doesn’t work the same way email does, because other people are seeing and responding to our messages to each other...it’s more like a messageboard.

J: So most of your friends know each other?

OL: Most of my friends on Orkut know at least some of my other friends on Orkut.

J: While scrapping, do you ever slap yourself on the forehead and think “Look what I’m doing! I am SO jobless!!!”

OL: Of course. That’s why it’s fun...we’re all completely aware of how pointless it all is. It’s a bit like life in general.

J: You realise that while you’re pretending to be so clever and “deliberately pointless”, you’re really just as addicted to the evil thing as anyone else is?

OL: Um. No, not really.

J: Well, it’s time you did.

OL: No, I refuse! How dare you try to make me self aware?
It could be worse! I could be religious!

J: What do you have against religious people? Have you ever started a community called “I Hate Religion”?

OL: No...should I?
Orkut is just like...reading a Mills and Boon novel after a day of studying :P

J: I’ll use that quote. “This precocious teenager likens scrapbooking to reading an M&B after college. However, she still refuses to admit that she’s an addict, preferring to hide behind a veneer of delusional pretentious intellectualism.”

OL: I may never speak to you again!

J: Sure, why speak when you can, duh, SCRAP?

A new cut

Amit Varma has launched the new India Uncut and it looks great, despite the absence of a sub-section named “Cows Uncut” (or even “Cow cuts”) - we were all looking forward to that. Anyway, I’m one of the contributors doing mini-reviews for the Rave Out section, and keeping in mind this comment by Neela, who fears “an overdose of Sartre, Kafka, some unknown Israeli author and a few suicidal Eastern European filmmakers”, I think I’ll use the space to exult about things I haven’t yet discussed on Jabberwock: such as the deeper resonances of the Evil Dead films, my five favourite Pet Shop Boys albums, and a cherished book that examines the history and social significance of American daytime soaps. (And before you know it, Amit will have booted me out.)

More about the new site here.

The Peacock Throne (long rambling post about long rambling book)

So here we all were, waiting for the Great Delhi Novel, an epic that would capture the spirit and ethos of our city (yes yes, Delhi does have those things!) the way Shantaram, Sacred Games and Maximum City did for Mumbai. And then Sujit Saraf’s The Peacock Throne slipped in through the back door. This isn’t the Great Delhi Novel but it is indubitably the Great Chandni Chowk Novel – though “great” only in the sense of Very, Very Large (and ambitious).

There are three things about The Peacock Throne that astonished me. First, its determined placing of Chandni Chowk at the centre of the universe and its refusal to step outside the bylanes of this celebrated north Delhi colony for more than a couple of its 750 pages (so much so that late in the book when a chapter opens with a brief description of a drive around the Safdarjung airport/AIIMS flyover, I had a mild attack of agoraphobia).

Second, the fact that someone with a full-time job (Saraf works as a research scientist in California) and a family had the energy to take the often-tedious interactions of 8-9 characters and expand them into a tome of this size. And third, that his editor didn’t see fit to cut this laborious book by at least 50 per cent.

It's also worrying that so much care and hard work should have gone into creating something that ends up spectacularly mediocre. In a couple of earlier posts (including this one on Sacred Games) I’ve touched on the dangers of writing an epic: an author can get so involved with the minutiae of several different lives, so intent on exploring each strand in detail, that it’s difficult to know when (or how, or if) to stop. Parts of Sacred Games exhausted me as a reader though I thought very highly of that book on the whole. I felt that exhaustion many times over while plodding through The Peacock Throne. (Full disclosure: I had to speed-read the final 200 pages. Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones does have a point in this essay about how far a reviewer must take his responsibilities.)

The Peacock Throne uses Chandni Chowk and its Hindu, Muslim and Sikh inhabitants (including an unassuming tea-seller, a one-handed Bangladeshi boy who becomes a pawn in political games, an idealistic young woman running a school for street children, the prostitutes of the legendary G B Road, and a few wealthy traders – members of the local IPP party – involved in power struggles) as a microcosm of Indian society, specifically the lower-middle class. Covering a period between 1984 (when Indira Gandhi was assassinated) and 1998 (the year the BJP, replaced here by the IPP, came to power), it touches on such key events as the Mandal Commission riots of 1990 and the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. The shifting equations between the book’s main characters reflect the subtle social and political changes that resulted from these incidents.

This is a promising idea (though also suspiciously like writing a history textbook disguised as a novel) and it’s well executed in the first dozen or so chapters. Saraf shows an eye for character and detail, especially in noting the relationship between “little people” – concerned with nothing more than their day-to-day existence – and the big events they find themselves reluctantly caught up in. “Will people stop drinking tea because Indira Gandhi is dead?” Gopal the chai-wallah wonders aloud, as he attempts to do business on a day when the entire area is in a state of panic. In another part of the market on the same day, a young paratha-stealer named Gauhar thinks police jeeps have assembled in the area for no other purpose than “to catch him and confiscate his paratha”.

The author is also good at evoking the terrifying shifts in mood that occur when the individual melts away and the mob takes over, and how, at such times, trying to work out “what really happened” becomes an exercise in pointlessness. In the 1984 segment an episode involving Kartar Singh, a middle-aged Sikh attempting to get away from an incensed crowd, grows in the telling until one version has it that he lobbed a bomb at a group of people. A little later his wife and son don’t know whom to trust, the unfamiliar tea-seller who has come to their house with news of danger, or the trusted acquaintance who is knocking hard on the door. People don’t even know their own minds: a man refers to the deceased prime minister as a whore and then, just a few moments later, as “our mother”, depending on convenience.

The plot has many strands but the central one concerns Gopal’s discovery of a large sum of money, his storing it away in steel trunks at the back of a shop but then finding himself unable to access it for years. This story, which winds through the book’s many other narratives, soon becomes symbolic of a certain type of fatalism commonly found in India: quiet acceptance, seeking reassurance in the idea that “this must be how God wants it”, that one must allow things to happen at their own pace (and so what if it isn’t in this lifetime, there are so many more to follow).

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way it transpires that this is what the book expects of its reader too; page after page, the same set of characters continue going through the motions, and tedium quickly sets in. A point came when I forgot about the story and simply started counting the number of paragraphs/chapter subsections that began with sentences such as “Gauhar dreams.” Or “Inderlal Jha stands, hands behind his back.” Or “Gopal raises the lid of his box.” “Ibrahim lugs a sack up the stairs.” “The Naari Niketan building sits at the far side of G B Road.” The alarming thing is, if you skip a couple of paragraphs you’ll usually find that not much progress has occurred. Gauhar is still dreaming, the box lid is still raised, the building is still sitting about, and the plot has hardly moved at all. Even a rookie sub-editor would be able to identify the chunks that could be excised with hardly any damage done (unless this narrative style is meant to be an elaborate homage to Waiting for Godot). A story about static lives doesn’t have to be static itself. Nor does it help that the writing is stilted in places – some of the conversations seem like literal translations of what these characters would be saying to each other in Hindi, which may be good for authenticity but doesn’t do much for literary value.

I’m not sure what kind of reader The Peacock Throne was aimed at. At times it reads like a novelistic introduction to modern Indian history meant for the western reader (or perhaps for young NRIs) – but the setting is so specific, the story so localised, and there’s so much attention to detail in describing the nooks and crannies of Chandni Chowk, complete with shop names and histories: surely this comfortable familiarity would alienate a reader who didn’t know much about the area (or about Delhi).

The particular can of course be used to illustrate the universal – it’s done all the time in good fiction – but The Peacock Throne doesn’t quite manage this. Only very rarely do its characters come alive in such a way that they can be seen as representative of a certain type of people or section of society, and the good bits don’t provide enough of a payoff for the time invested by the reader.

P.S. On Saraf’s website, there’s a link to an article about The Peacock Throne, in which he describes Gopal as being “a worn-out version of R K Laxman’s common man. He thrashes wide-eyed through opaque concepts such as liberalism, secularism, fundamentalism, communalism and casteism, saying little, understanding less, serving the ends of men more calculating than he while making not the slightest difference… no man better represents the soul of modern India than a bumbling, half-blind tea-seller with a heart of gold, trying to snatch everything that comes his way.” (Read the full thing here.)

And here’s a Chandni Chowk website.

Innocent question

Is it accepted practice to shorten Valentine's Day to "VD" when sending text messages/emails? Example: "May your VD be luminous and joyful" or "May every day be VD for you", or "VD well, little brother". More importantly, will the recipient get the joke?

It's all useless anyway

Via Anurag Bansal, I just saw this great quote by the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky:

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It's ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good...Art can only give food - a jolt - the occasion - for psychical experience.

Award alerts

The nominations for the Indibloggies have been announced. You might baulk at the number of nominees in some categories, but on the whole I think it’s a stronger, more satisfying list than last year’s. As a one-time humanitarian I’m especially pleased to see so many strong contenders in the Humanities category this time, though it’s a personal disappointment that Alok’s blog didn’t make it to the final list – especially since he writes about books and films you won’t see discussed anywhere else in the Indian blogosphere.

Public polling begins tomorrow, check the site for details.

(Meanwhile, may I also direct you to the recently announced Indifloggies, which invites nominations for sites run by incestuous male bloggers in such categories as “Blogger most likely to not have interacted with the female of the species ever, except for his mother” and “Dukhi atma of the year”. I think I have a 40 per cent chance of being nominated for both.)

Invisible novelist: thoughts on Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s nuanced and very moving The Brooklyn Follies reminded me of something an Auster fan told me once. “He’s one of the very few writers I know,” he said, “who can get you so involved in the story that you forget there is a novelist’s voice behind the narrator’s.”

Reading this book, I saw what he meant. By the time I was on the third or fourth page, Auster was out of my mind and as far as I was concerned the story really was written by its narrator, Nathan Glass, a retired insurance agent. One reason is that compared with most other writers Auster doesn’t have an obvious, easily identifiable style. The writing is so functional, so centred on taking the story forward that the novelist’s methods are invisible.

I’m not talking here about the distinction that’s commonly made between simple, lucid writing (e.g. Vikram Seth) vs writing that draws attention to itself (e.g. Salman Rushdie’s fiction). Even authors who belong to the former category, whose work we think of as narrative-driven, do usually have a distinct style that marks their writing as the work of a particular person (a contemporary example being Kazuo Ishiguro, one of my favourites). But Auster’s writing in The Brooklyn Follies is so completely integrated with his narrator’s personality that one has no trouble in believing that Nathan himself wrote it all.

This is less common than one might think. In most first-person stories narrated by characters who are not professional wordsmiths, the reading process entails a minor suspension of disbelief (though we tend not to dwell on it). There’s an implicit understanding that though the thoughts and experiences are the narrator’s, the story is being ghost-written by an accomplished novelist: he’s clarifying the narrator’s ideas, polishing the language, supplying order and structure. (While reading Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, for instance, narrated by the butler Stevens, we understand that if Stevens were to himself sit down and write the story his prose would not be anywhere near as elegant as Ishiguro’s, nor his writing as organised.)

It’s different when the narrator himself is a writer by profession. Philip Roth’s frequent narrator Nathan Zuckerman is a successful novelist – in fact there’s very little that separates him from Roth – and so the striking prose of books such as American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain doesn’t seem incongruous. One is aware that Zuckerman’s own writing could be this proficient, or close enough.

Auster’s Nathan on the other hand, though an intelligent, well-read man, has never been a writer – until, very late in life, he starts jotting down notes for a book, more for amusement than anything else. And the narrative of The Brooklyn Follies fits what one would expect of such a character. Nathan is self-conscious about the writing process and about his own limitations: he plays around with sentences, comments on his stylistic choices, begins one chapter on an experimental note, deliberately avoids all forms of description in another chapter. He introduces his nephew Tom by flamboyantly (and awkwardly) bestowing the title Hero of this Book on him. And he fumbles for the right words, as in this passage where his car has just stalled:

...the engine coughed forth one of the most peculiar noises in automotive history. I have sat here thinking about that noise for the past 20 minutes, but I still haven’t found the correct words to describe it, the one unforgettable phrase that would do it justice. Raucous chortling? Hiccupping pizzicati? A pandemonium of guffaws? I’m probably not up to the task – or else language is too feeble an instrument to capture what I heard, which resembled something that might have come from the mouth of a choking goose or a drunken chimpanzee.

Later, after an unpleasant phone conversation with his ex-wife, he decides to stop referring to her by name, which leads to the use of phrases like “(Name Deleted)” at points in the narrative; this could have been annoying and gimmicky, but it’s true to Nathan’s playfulness and his growing confidence about his role as a storyteller.

Note: I’m not saying that if Nathan Glass existed he actually would have been able to write this very novel, just that we are given that impression – which is one of Auster’s great achievements. He’s a deceptively good writer and a lot of craft must go into the seeming effortlessness of his work.

[Will review The Brooklyn Follies soon]

Nanook of the North: Flaherty and the human spirit

On my DVD of Robert J Flaherty’s pioneering 1922 quasi-documentary Nanook of the North, about the lives of the Arctic Inuit, I just saw a special feature I’d overlooked: a short black-and-white TV interview (probably recorded sometime in the 1950s) with Frances Flaherty, the director’s widow and occasional screenwriter. Though only 7-8 minutes long, it has some interesting material, especially in light of later controversies about the methods Flaherty used to depict the Inuit’s day-to-day existence.

The interviewer is himself a documentary filmmaker, I forget his name, and the exchange is recorded in the studiedly informal style typical of the period. Gazing somewhere off-camera, Mrs Flaherty speaks in a measured voice.

Interviewer: What are your thoughts on your late husband being called the father of the documentary film? Is that title misleading?

Frances Flaherty: It has become misleading now, because the term documentary has come to be associated with short 16-mm films that are made for very specific sets of viewers. But Robert made his films as features, and for theatrical audiences – back then, remember, there were only theatrical screens.

Int: Was Nanook of the North a commercial success?

FF: Yes it was, and that’s the amazing thing about it, because it was simply a story about ordinary people doing ordinary things. And yet, it became so popular that when Nanook died two years later the news was published in places as far away as Tokyo and Singapore. In Malaya, there was a new word for “strong man” – Nanook. In Germany 10 years later I bought an Eskimo pie called Nanook with a smiling Nanook face on the wrap.”

Int: Your husband started making films quite late in life, didn’t he?

FF: Yes. He thought of himself as an explorer first and a filmmaker much, much afterwards. All art, he used to say, is a kind of exploring.

Int: What kind of exploration was he interested in?

FF: His great search was for the spirit of people and their relationship with their environment, which is why he lived with the Inuit for long periods. He became fascinated with their lives. He used to say, “with fewer resources than any other people on earth, and living in a country where no other race could survive, they were still the happiest people I’ve met”.

It’s difficult to miss the romanticism of this last remark, especially given that the real-life Nanook died battling a snowstorm (and starvation) shortly after the film was released. And sure enough, Nanook of the North is unabashedly idealised in places, starting with the first title card superimposed on a postcard image of the Arctic: “The mysterious, barren lands – desolate, boulder-strewn, wind-swept – the illimitable spaces which top the world.” (Love that “illimitable”!) But it’s also a deeply humanistic work, a genuine attempt to reach places that the “civilised world” knew very little of and to present distant lives in such a way that they became immediately familiar.

Nanook begins by introducing us to its protagonist, the proud Itivimuit chief, in an unforgettable close-up (the shot prefigures Hollywood’s golden age and the cult of the movie star; this could be John Wayne posing heroically for the camera). We meet Nanook’s family: Nyla the Smiling One, the children, Comock the dog and a few baby huskies. We follow them on their summer journey to a trading post, “the white man’s big igloo”, and watch as polar bear and Arctic fox skins are exchanged for knives, beads and coloured candy. A series of disjointed episodes follow: Nanook negotiates perilous ice floes, catches fish with his harpoon, killing the bigger ones with his teeth; a walrus stakeout culminates in a ferocious tug-of-war between man and beast before the “Tiger of the North” is finally reeled in; the building of an igloo is capped by a luminous scene where Nanook makes a window for the house by carefully measuring and cutting an ice slab from the ground; the family goes to bed, rises, children are taught how to use a bow and arrow; a seal is captured; and the group narrowly escapes death in a terrible blizzard.

The film was acclaimed as the first full-length documentary, a claim that later led to controversy – for there were elements of artifice in the actual shooting. For starters, Flaherty’s intention was not to present these people as they really were at the time the film was made but at an earlier, more primitive time when they had not yet acquired shotguns and motor-operated kayaks. Accordingly, these modern tools were kept out of the camera’s range. At one point during the tug-of-war with the walrus, when things get difficult, you can briefly see one of the hunters turning around and shouting something at the camera. (“Throw me that gun, you idiot director”?) Even a casual viewer can make out that a couple of scenes (such as the seal-hunting one) could easily have been staged, and apparently some of the members of Nanook’s family were paid actors (though equally importantly they were real Inuit, who did live in these conditions).

I don’t see how any of this affects the film’s essential integrity; you’d have to be a rabid literalist to condemn it on these grounds. None of the artifice can detract from the larger, more important truths about Nanook of the North: that Flaherty took his bulky shooting equipment to this inhospitable (and at the time, extremely difficult to access) part of the world, spent months living with and observing the Inuit, and constructed a (partly fictitious) narrative around the very real possibilities of their lives. The Arctic landscape isn’t a giant prop. The dangers of hunting are real, as are the hunting methods, the savage dogs and the details of communal living. And that really IS an igloo being built from the ground up (though the interior shots were filmed inside a specially constructed igloo with one side missing, so Flaherty’s camera would get the light it required).

For me, the most telling part of the interview with Frances Flaherty is where she relates that her husband had made another Eskimo film before Nanook, “but he said it was a bad film. He had learnt to explore but he didn’t yet know how to reveal. He knew the people whose lives he was studying, but he didn’t know his camera.”

It was then that Flaherty hit upon the idea of using a single character and his family as representative of the Inuit, and so Nanook, a film with a definite narrative trajectory, came into being. The implication is clear: at some point, Flaherty had to choose between unblemished authenticity on the one hand and the requirements of good filmmaking on the other. He had to sacrifice a few literal truths for deeper, more poetic truths.

The results of his decision are there for anyone to see today. You can’t deny the simple power of some of these visuals, more than 80 years after they were captured on film. My favourite scenes include the Inuit family emerging one by one from a kayak’s underwater interior, Nanook reaching into an underground trap and pulling out a white fox, the droll shot of the “sentinel walrus” looking about for signs of danger while its mates sleep, and the haunting images of the dogs howling in a snowstorm at the very end.

Flaherty’s tireless quest for the spirit of a people comes through in every scene. “I have a theory about the film’s success,” his wife says at one point in the interview, “I believe that when Nanook and Nyla and the other Inuit smile at us from the screen, we smile back – at that moment all the differences between us fall away and we become one with all people.” This is again a slightly ingenuous remark (I’m not sure that all cosmopolitan viewers around the world would have felt deep kinship during the scenes where Nanook and his family bite into raw seal meat and grin up at the camera with blubber on their lips), but it’s a remark that fits in with Flaherty’s own idealism. The film is a testament to his faith in the deep connections between people everywhere, and his then-revolutionary attempt to use the movie camera to bridge cultures.

P.S. Here's an essay by Flaherty: How I Filmed Nanook of the North.

Lunch with Kiran Desai

[A shortened version of this appears in today’s Business Standard. It’s my second interview with Kiran Desai in a little over a year, though this was in the "Lunch with..." format]


Kiran Desai is on a tight schedule – she's leaving for a four-city tour the next day – so we economise on time by going to good old Chopsticks in the Siri Fort Complex, a stone's throw from the Penguin India office. "This place is an old favourite, isn't it," says the Booker Prize winner; she spent some of her childhood years in the capital and remembers a time when "Indian Chinese" was all the rage and sweet corn chicken soup a staple for diners, years before the food revolution began.

There's a buffet on, which suits us – what we want is a quick, functional meal. After lading our plates with hakka noodles, Hunan lamb sauce, garlic fish and other delectable things I'm too lazy to make a note of, we return to our table. "I eat just about everything," she says, "I was very happy at the big literary festival in Sri Lanka recently, the food was great: spicy coconut sambhar, amazing seafood, jackfruit." She would have liked to attend the cooking classes held in the Diggi Palace during the Jaipur Heritage Festival last month, but there was no time.

Kiran was one of the two major draws (along with Salman Rushdie) at the three-day literary fest in Jaipur, and though she was warm and gregarious during her session – a conversation with NDTV's Barkha Dutt – she never quite gave the impression of being comfortable with the high media presence. This could be an offshoot of her long seclusion while working on The Inheritance of Loss: for most of the seven years she spent on the book, she was cooped up in her mother, author Anita Desai's home just outside of New York.

"All that time," she says, "I was simply writing. I wasn't part of the literary party scene; my mother's life is not remotely connected to any of that, which has probably been good for me." When you walk into a literary party in New York, she says, it almost feels like you're in the banking field. "There's this carefully constructed hierarchy, you have to know about publishers and editors and different sets of relationships. And gossip flows both ways. Journalists and critics talk about writers, but the writers discuss them too – who wrote what, etc – and then you come to these events and realise that everyone knows everyone. It's strange."

Having interviewed Kiran before, I'm struck again by how friendly and unaffected she is; one has to strain for a glimpse of the writer who struggled over her manuscript for years and had a frustrating time trying to get it published. "It wasn't an easy book to classify," she says, "and it was incredibly hard to find anyone to edit it." Compared to her debut novel, the enjoyable but very lightweight Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, The Inheritance of Loss is a complex work. Though centred on three people – an irascible old judge, his 17-year-old granddaughter Sai and the household cook – living together in an ancient house in Kalimpong in the 1980s, the novel moves in time and space to tell stories about different types of immigrant experiences: from the judge's youth in Cambridge decades earlier to the present-day travails of the cook's son in the US.

The original draft ran close to 1,500 pages, but in its published form the book is just over 300 pages long. This meant the jettisoning of various characters and subplots...and a few lengthy cuisine descriptions in restaurant scenes. "I had a long meditation on why pasta has to take so many forms when it tastes the same," she laughs. "I must think a lot about food! Anyway, all that had to go."

Given that there is so much anticipation around the "Big Books" – the 800- and 900-pagers variously referred to as the Literary Epic of the Year or the Great Indian Novel (or, less politely in private, the Doorstop) – does she regret having cut her manuscript so much? "I had one really bad year when nothing seemed to work," she explains, "and in that mood I chopped ruthlessly. My mother thinks The Inheritance of Loss should have been longer. Salman [Rushdie], on the other hand, advises me to write many short books instead of one big one – because you get paid the same amount!"

The epic novels (one thinks of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram in recent years) tend to be written by male authors. A case for gender discrimination? "It is seen as a girlie thing to write small, slender, poetic books and leave the Big Issues to the guys," Kiran agrees, "But what's that phrase used by James Wood to describe sprawling works – 'hysterical realism'? I like that. It takes away the macho-ness of the whole thing!"

"When you're writing a book with so many different strands and characters, there's always an argument for extending it in all directions. But you also have to know when to stop."

What practical difference did winning the Booker make? "Well, really just that I know I can write! Also, the book is selling much more than before. Also, more pirated copies than before!" The publicity wasn't all good though. She was on the receiving end of protests from Kalimpong, directed at her depiction of the town and its people, especially the Nepalese majority. There were even rumours about book-burning. It's typical of Kiran that she bursts out laughing. "Did they really burn books?" she asks. "I spoke to my aunt [who lives in Kalimpong] and she kept telling me, nothing is happening here."

She was surprised by the controversy, however. "I thought my portrayal was sympathetic," she says. "But when you write about a certain group of people, the old argument immediately surfaces: do you have an obligation to portray someone in a heroic way? Of course you doesn't. It really comes down to free speech in the end – if you believe in that, you have to accept things. I mean, I get loads of criticism all the time and I could just as easily be offended by that."

And almost immediately, she lightens the conversation by joking about a letter she got from a Kalimpong tailor's shop mentioned in the book: "You said our stripes are horizontal instead of vertical!"

By this time we're onto a quick dessert and the talk is going in all directions. We discuss the growing tendency in the Indian media to treat young authors as page-3 celebrities ("in NY too you'll regularly see authors in gossip columns. A writer friend of mine was moving from one apartment to another, and even that found its way into the papers"); the need for better children's literature in India ("we all grew up with British writers – there was no one with iconic status who was writing about Indian children. Except R K Narayan, who provided the sweet vision of being Indian"); and the funny, sometimes sinister, letters and emails she gets. There was one – and here she cracks up as she mimicks a possibly deranged letter-writer – that simply went, "Dear… ma'am...I wonder what…will be your...inheritance ... OF LOSS!!!!"

I think I noticed a couple of the diners staring at Kiran a while earlier. Authors, even the high-profile ones, don't usually get mobbed by adoring fans, but she was all over TV channels following the Booker win; does she get recognised in public? "There was this incident a couple of days ago," she says, "I was out walking and someone came and caught hold of me and shouted 'Congratulations!' It was quite scary." And then she giggles, as if amused by the thought that such a private endeavour – working on a book, all alone, for years on end – could lead to her becoming public property.

Indibloggies

I'm very late on this, but the nomination process for the 2006 Indibloggies is on till February 5 - so if you'd like to nominate your own blog or someone else's in any of the 16 categories, here's the step-by-step process. (Friendly warning: it involves the use of the dreaded bookmarking service del.icio.us)

I'm on the jury by the way - it's useful because it keeps this site out of the competition. (Having proved last year that I'm a humanitarian, I have nothing left to achieve.)

Now go nominate.

Nature-nurture in bell-bottoms: Manmohan Desai's Parvarish

For a serious student of 1970s cinema there can be few things more fulfilling than watching Shabana Azmi and Neetu Singh in colourful bell-bottoms, merrily knocking their ample hips together while Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna ride motorcycles in circles around them. I experienced this and much more while watching Manmohan Desai's Parvarish last night. (Other highlights include Vinod Khanna lifting his trousers to show off a very hairy leg that, much to Amitabh's astonishment, doesn't have a bullet wound in it. Later, VK discloses that he was wearing a stocking that hid the wound. Borrowed from Helen, no doubt.)

Given that it's from Amitabh's golden period, Parvarish isn't a hugely popular film (hell, it's probably Manmohan Desai's fourth most popular film of 1977, a year in which he hit the jackpot with Amar Akbar Anthony, Dharam-Veer and Chacha Bhatija). But it's a rollicking entertainer: extremely fast-paced, with good action scenes for its time (notwithstanding the repeated close-ups of a toy submarine in a bathtub), fine performances by two very charismatic leading men – and, naturally, dollops of unintended humour (though nothing to equal the Gay Dosti of Dharam-Veer). The only serious flaws are the mediocre music and Shammi Kapoor's heavily gelled beard, though Shabana and Neetu's bell-bottomed dancing compensates at least for the former.

The plot is complicated: it begins with the rotund but fearless Inspector Shamsher (Shammi Kapoor) arresting Mangal Singh (Amjad Khan), a bandit. Mangal's wife dies in childbirth but not before calling Shamsher "mere bhaiya" (it works every time) and asking him to ensure that her baby boy has a good upbringing, away from his father's shadow. Shamsher takes the baby to his palatial home where his wife (we never learn her name, it doesn't matter) is waiting, and they decide to raise the child themselves, as a brother to their own infant son.

Flash-forward a few years and Kishan, the inspector's real son, is a bit of a prankster while Amit, the adopted boy, is goody-goody. This leads to one of the more disturbing scenes in the film. The inspector smacks Kishan hard, locks him in his room without supper and then says to his wife (as a tanpura plays mournfully in the background), "Kitni afsos ki baat hai! Daku ka beta itna shareef hai par hamara apna beta shaitan nikla." ("Immense tragedy abounds! The bandit's son is decent but our own boy is the Devil.") What, you might reasonably ask at this point, was the 10-year-old's great crime? Answer: he bunked school to watch a movie. Models of good parenting, these people...

Anyway, to cut a long story short, a bitter Kishan (Vinod Khanna) grows up under the mistaken belief that he is the adopted son, which is why he’s being treated like a pariah. Though still living in the Inspector's house and working as a teacher at a blind school during the day, he throws in his lot with Mangal Singh and aids him in nefarious underground activities. Meanwhile the steadfast Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) becomes a policeman, unaware that his own brother is part of the smuggling operation he has been trying to crack.

Parvarish is a classic example of the Manmohan Desai approach to movie-making – using a plot simply to string along one audience-pleasing setpiece after another, with no concern for such trivialities as character development or credible relationships. Another filmmaker, for instance, might have used this intricate story to at least briefly touch on the nature-nurture debate. But not Desai. (The big mystery is how either of the boys grows up to be well-rounded given the insipidity of their parents and the garishness of the house's living room.)

Also, the character played here by Vinod Khanna is, in theory at least, a strong anti-hero – he comes from a long tradition of characters (going back to Karna in the Mahabharata) whose righteous indignation about being discriminated against and never getting their due leads them into morally ambiguous terrain. In this case, though Kishan is a small-time crook and Khanna's handsome sneer suggests a studied cynicism, we can see that his heart is uncorrupted – as indicated by the important plot device of the blind school where he works. (If this were a film made by a Serious Director, how much fun we'd have psycho-analysing the function of the blind students! One would have to make the point that Kishan's secret guilt requires him to spend most of his time around people who can't look into his eyes.)

Even within the limitations of mainstream Hindi cinema, this sort of character has been treated with a measure of complexity in other films – the obvious example being Amitabh's brooding role in Shakti, as a policeman's son who feels unwanted and deliberately moves as far as possible from his father's moral compass. But Parvarish being a Desai film, there's no pretence of exploring the nuances of Kishan's character. In fact, the whole thing quickly turns into a friendly in-joke: given the easygoing relationship the grown-up Kishan has with his parents, there is little motivation for his wrongdoings at all (except the most important motivation of all: allowing Vinod Khanna to come up against Amitabh's upright policeman so there can be some friction between the two heroes).

But Parvarish is a joyous work that deserves to be seen for many other reasons, including the spiky walls and the quicksand in the villains' den, and the sight of Kishan cowering behind a plush sofa while the trigger-happy Inspector fires about the house in fatherly wrath. Best of all: a young and callow Tom Alter as a henchman named Jackson who strips off and puts on a scuba mask when he has to dive and check for bombs on the outside of the submarine.

P.S. In another Manmohan Desai film released in 1977, Amar Akbar Anthony, Bachchan and Khanna reversed roles: AB played the loveable rogue, while VK donned the police uniform. That's probably Desai's version of expanding his repertoire.

Earlier posts on Bollywood kitsch: The Turning Brain, Insaaf Kaun Karega, homo-erotica in Dharam-Veer and Bollywood's Keystone Kops