Hospital adventures - 1

I’ve wanted to donate blood ever since I saw Amar Akbar Anthony at age 5. This morning I finally got my chance, but it wasn’t as dramatically heroic as I had hoped. (It’s difficult to be dramatically heroic when one has to hold a green rubber ball in one’s palm and squeeze it at regular intervals.) Anyway, once the thing was over I was shown into an antechamber containing a sad-faced attendant who asked me if I would like tea, coffee or Real fruit juice. Sipping the juice, I noticed a sign that said:

“Do not think of the refreshment as a replacement for the blood. It is simply a gesture of goodwill.”

What did they think one would do, cut open a vein and pour the stuff in?

The profane side of motherhood

Via Amit, a link to an excellent piece by Mrinal Pande: Busting the myth of the sacred mother, about the very one-sided portrayals of motherhood (as an unequivocally hallowed and rewarding experience) that have been handed down through human history. Well worth reading for a number of reasons, and I find Pande’s views on women writers interesting since she herself is the daughter of the renowned Hindi writer Shivani, who balanced her personal and professional lives at a time when this was much more of a struggle for Indian women. (Incidentally Mrinal’s sister Ira wrote this wonderful book about their mother.)

Very pressed for time just now, but I’ll try to update this post with accounts of some of the discussions I’ve had with women friends (both those who are mothers and those who never intend to have children) on the subject. Meanwhile, here’s an old review I wrote of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, a very powerful book about a woman who just can’t bring herself to love her firstborn child.

Updates

Blogging might be sporadic for a while (warning: whenever I’ve said this in the past, it’s been immediately followed by a flood of longer-than-usual posts). Things have been quite tough in the last few weeks – major illness in family, which has meant lots of hospital trips, general unrest, and having to balance work, personal life and other things. Without going into too much detail, it’s my grandmother – she’s in a lot of pain and the whole thing has also been very stressful for my mother, who’s not in tip-top physical condition herself. We’re hoping things settle down but the forecast isn’t good. More hospital stays likely in the coming weeks.

Doesn’t seem like the best time to be announcing good news, but my longtime girlfriend Abhilasha and I are tying the knot sometime in July – it will be a metaphorical knot, since it 's going to be a registered court-wedding thingie. Had wanted it that way from the beginning anyway, but it’s turned out for the good – if we had planned a big ceremony of some sort, it would almost certainly have had to be postponed, given the current situation with my grandmother. This way we get it done in a quiet, no-fuss way.

On other fronts...reading has been very slow: I’m currently moving between Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, Mukul Kesavan’s Men in White and the English translation of Manna Dey’s autobiography. Movie-wise: apart from the usual, soul-nurturing doses of 1970s kitsch on TV channels, I finally saw the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn starrer Holiday, which I’ll try to write about sometime. Also A Scanner Darkly, which I wrote about in the post before this. Not much else. More later.

P.S. Whenever I visit a state bank or a public office, I'm reminded of Salvador Dali's surrealist painting "The Persistence of Memory", with its landscape of melting clocks all folded up, signifying the endless stretching out of a moment, or a place where time has become irrelevant. At the district court, when we went to submit the wedding-application papers, we watched a notary prodding away at a typewriter that looked like it had come into existence in the 1950s. It took him 15 minutes to produce one copy of our affidavit, after which he stoically got down to the business of typing out another version – exactly the same as the previous one in all details, except that a couple of names had to be interchanged. It was like stumbling into The Land that Time Forgot. Given even a 1995 version of MS Windows, it would have taken a few seconds to print the first version, change the names on the same file and then print it a second time. But this was a world where computers didn't exist. And it wasn't a corner of an anonymous village in the hinterlands (the type of place that is sometimes described to us urban bums as "the Real India"), it was a district court in a posh colony in the nation's capital. In this setting, Mr Dali would have been a Realist.

Nor is unnecessary duplication of effort the only way to stretch out time; the language used in official documents is equally crucial. All my years of working as a sub-editor have taught me nothing, for I now find that one should never make do with a simple word like "force" when you can also use five of its synonyms in the same sentence ("...without any undue force, coercion, duress, pressure, restraint or persuasion"). Also, Abhilasha and I find to our dismay that we will now be expected to provide each other with "fooding and lodging to the best of our resources". Who knew?

Quick notes on A Scanner Darkly

I don’t know what it says about A Scanner Darkly that I kept thinking about Keanu Reeves-related jokes while watching it (“What’s the best way to make Keanu Reeves look animated?”). The technique used in this film is rotoscoping, wherein scenes are first shot in the conventional way, with real actors in real settings, and then handed over to animators who trace over the material, frame by frame. (I first saw the technique in the music video of A-Ha’s “Take on Me” in the mid-1980s.) What results is an eerie twilight zone between animation and live-action where you're never quite sure where an actor's facial expressions end and the illustrator's imagination takes over, and for a performer of Reeves’ limitations this is a godsend. The film is full of reaction shots – close-ups of Reeves taking in information and mulling over it, a thoughtful look in his eyes – and I have to think that the animation made these moments more effective than they would have been with the blank-expressioned actor doing it entirely on his own.


Of course, it’s too much to suggest that this is the reason why the film was made this way. The twilight effect created by rotoscoping is particularly well-suited to a movie version of a Philip K Dick novel, for Dick – one of the true visionaries of the last century – specialised in creating hallucinatory worlds where dream and reality merge into each other. (For a good example of this, read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, one of the most thrillingly unsettling books ever written.) I haven’t read A Scanner Darkly, but the film version does just about enough to suggest that rotoscoping is an appropriate technique for this story.

The setting is a dystopian world where an illegal drug called Substance D has turned a large part of the population into walking zombies. Droopy-eyed Bob Arctor (Reeves) doubles up as an undercover agent for the police, spying on the activities of his junkie friends, including his girlfriend Donna (Winona Ryder). But Arctor’s own use of Substance D starts to cause serious communication problems between his left and right brain, which makes it difficult for him to distinguish between his two identities. Adding to the general air of distrust and paranoia is the fact that Arctor and his police contact both wear shape-shifting outfits that make it impossible for either of them to know the other’s identity. (These outfits, incidentally, are another reason why it would have been very difficult to film this story in pure live-action.)

By its very nature any rotoscoped film will seem a little self-indulgent, and it's possible to argue that the technology – which has the viewer straining to catch little visual details in each scene, and looking closely for the shifts in angles that make the image look more like live-action – can distract from the narrative; I lost the plot thread/missed dialogue a couple of times and had to rewind. I can’t unqualifiedly endorse A Scanner Darkly – it was a bit too soporific for my liking (or at least my liking at the time I saw it) and the animation not consistently compelling – but at its best it creates a rich shadow world, with some morbidly funny scenes, and does some justice to a multi-layered story. I just hope this isn’t what all films of the future are going to look like, because then all actors could turn out to be Keanu Reeves clones.

More from the notable-sentences-in-newspapers department

"A fake gay can’t resist himself when a hot babe passes by"

and

"He won’t abuse in a macho manner"

[from a story in HT City titled “How to Spot a Faux Gay”. Love the "can't resist himself" bit - conjures up visions of a battalion of fake gays dry-humping each time a "hot babe" passes by]

Interviewer: It is believed that Shantaram is a fictional autobiography.
Gregory David Roberts: It was believed that the world was flat but it isn’t. Similarly, Shantaram is not an autobiography but a novel.
Interviewer: But it is written in first person.

[Interviewer should read Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World and other such works that were also written in the first person.]

And from a 2-column snippet on Priyanka Chopra in Delhi Times:

"Incredibly, she loves sci-fi and horror movies too. So, the next time you hear earth-shattering screams from Priyanka’s house, you’ll know the reason, right?"

[Um… because she’s reading the Delhi Times?]

You've Got Mush; or, Lucy in the Sky with Diabetes

[A version of a snarky column I wrote for Metro Now. Am hoping to get as much troll-mail from Meg Ryan fans as I do from lovers of Julia Roberts and Sanjeev Kumar]

Fear of flying is manifest in different ways. There’s the nervousness about the technology involved (despite all the reassurances about aircraft being the safest mode of travel, no one who hasn’t taken a five-year course in aerodynamics will ever understand how the thing can even stay up in the air the way it does); the vaguely Icarian sense that one is defying the Fates by engaging in an activity that man was never intended for; the feeling of complete loss of control, of putting one’s life in the hands of a drunk engineer, a malfunctioning vertical stabilizer (I’ve been reading up on these things) or a brooding pilot who lost at cards the previous evening.

But the most terrifying thought of all, the thought that really chills the soul, is this: if something were to go wrong, one might die while watching a Meg Ryan film. And wouldn't one then be condemned to repeat those final moments through eternity?

I’ve come to think of Ms Ryan as a personal nemesis, for her movies – two, three of them at once – have featured on the in-flight entertainment system of every long-haul plane I’ve been on in the past few years. It’s easy to understand why her films are a wet dream for an airline’s entertainment programmer. In-flight movies must be chosen with care. They should be soft and gooey so as to soothe potentially frayed nerves. There must be no scenes that might unsettle a viewer or ring close to the perceived dangers of the flying experience. For example, a documentary about 9/11 would not be the correct choice. A film about a hijacking or deadly turbulence that rips a plane to shreds would be similarly inappropriate. And as we now know, Richard Branson cameos must be censored lest they should cause passengers to think violent thoughts.

But surely there are alternatives to films that turn you into a blob of sucrose in your seat or make you want to throw the window open and barf into the troposphere. In case you’ve stubbed Meg Ryan out of your memory, she was the archetype of the all-American sweetheart, a Betty Cooper made flesh and blood, the star of numerous “meet cute” romantic comedies such as Prelude to a Kiss, You’ve Got Mail and French Kiss (what kind of person stars in two films with the word “kiss” in the title?). These were movies that caused a cumulative rise in blood-sugar levels in the northern hemisphere through the 1990s, and though some of them weren’t exactly bad, little Meg had the same bland, unthreatening cuteness in all of them – the sort of quality that would appeal to a 14-year-old boy with a poet’s soul, looking for a girl to hold hands with or an ethereal, inaccessible older cousin to heroine-worship from afar. (Okay, so I admit to having had a minor crush on her myself when I saw Sleepless in Seattle at 15, but one grows out of these things, right? Part of the joy of getting older is becoming cynical and world-weary, and less tolerant of people who are uncomplicatedly sweet.)

Such was the unholy wholesomeness of her screen persona that even when she tried to stretch her range by playing a career-savvy smart-Alice (in Against the Ropes) or an alcoholic (When a Man Loves a Woman; one of four Meg Ryan films that had the word “love” in the title) or rocker Jim Morrison’s long-suffering girlfriend (The Doors), all you wanted to do was to pinch her cheeks and feed her a bowl of Cerelac. As the square said to the circle, “Where’s the edge?”

As the passenger said to the air-steward, “Give me whishky, shoda and lotsh of Russ Meyer. Or at least some Rajkumar Kohli.”

Ensemble classics of my boyhood

Not having been to a movie hall in weeks, I suddenly find that the “ensemble film” is hot property in Bollywood, with the release of Salaam-e-Ishq, Honeymoon Travels and Life in a Metro. Haven’t seen any of these yet but I did see – and write about – Naseeruddin Shah’s directorial debut Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota, which had converging narratives about a number of Indians travelling to the US for different reasons.

But this isn’t Bollywood’s first tryst with the ensemble movie. The masala Hindi film has always been episodic by its very nature, requiring pre-formatted doses of comedy, drama, romance and action, neatly measured and sprinkled together like the garnishings on a Burmese dish. So any such film with a large star-cast becomes an ensemble movie by default: if there are three heroes, you know the songs and fight sequences will be divided equally between them. When I was growing up in that magnificently kitschy decade, the 1980s, such films used to be referred to, much more naively, as multi-starrers. Quick notes on some old favourites I’ve rediscovered on TV.

Nagin
Rajkumar Kohli was a master at the forgotten art of gathering a number of heavyweights/has-beens together, giving them the money that might otherwise have been wasted on a script (along with the promise of ego-massaging credits such as “Friendly Guest Appearance By Sanjay Khan”), and convincing them they were participating in something future generations would never forget. In a way, he was right; no one who sees Nagin will ever forget this classic, which begins with Jeetendra, dressed in a short skirt (he’s an ichadaari naag – a snake that turns into a man whenever it wishes to sing Laxmikant-Pyarelal songs – and that’s just how they dress). When he is cruelly shot down by a group of friends (Sunil Dutt, Feroz Khan, Kabir Bedi and other friendly guests) who figured he was just a regular snake in a mini-skirt, his bereaved spouse (Reena Roy) goes on the revenge-trail. This means finding new and innovative ways to dispose of each culprit, but the hardest task is that she occasionally has to disguise herself as her victims’ girlfriends – which means simulating the facial expressions of Rekha, Mumtaz and Yogeeta Bali. Would you wish such a fate on a girl?

Jaani Dushman
Another Kohli epic, billed as India’s first big-budget horror film. A werewolf (we think; it’s hard to tell under all that makeup) goes on a killing spree each time he sees a young bride (dressed in those knee-length frocks that village belles always wore in the 1980s). Since the village people don’t have enough sense to stop holding large weddings, a series of murders occur — until Sunil Dutt, Shatrughan Sinha and others take on the beast in his own backyard, and he turns out to be Sanjeev Kumar, in another of those character roles that he played because he wanted to be “an actor, not a hero”. (Here, as in many of his other films, he’s neither.) Don’t miss the opening scene with Amrish Puri reading a book of “supernatural stories” before abruptly sprouting hair on his back, and the title card that reads “And above all, Jeetendra”.

Kranti
Manoj Kumar’s florid tribute to the patriotic men and women who fought against the evil British Empire in the early 1800s (never mind that the idea of nationalism didn’t even exist back then in the way it does today; people were probably too busy killing each other over caste, state or mohalla to bother with country-love). Kumar plays the anarchist Bharat, whose eagerness to die for the country is indicated by his waggling eyebrows, twitching lower lip, and the way he keeps smearing soil all over his face. Dilip Kumar is his father, “senior Kranti”**, Hema Malini contributes her bit to the cause by writhing about the deck of a boat during a rain-storm while evil British captors, crosses dangling from their necks, leer at her, and Shashi Kapoor is a dashing prince who switches allegiance. Just when you think the British Raj couldn’t possibly deal with any more star power, in struts the ubiquitous Shatrughan Sinha as a brave Pathan who plans to sabotage the Empire’s collective stomach by selling them chana jor garam. Eventually, our stars sing patriotic songs and die heroically ever after. Jeetendra is nowhere to be seen; they couldn’t meet the requirements of his contract, which specified white shoes and/or a snake-dance.

(To be continued)

** In an earlier Manoj Kumar-as-Bharat film, Purab aur Paschim, Dilip Kumar’s real-life missus Saira Banu played a West-corrupted Indian girl who smokes and wears mini-skirts. Bharat redeems this fallen angel, restoring her to the Bharatiya ideal of the pallu-clad bahu (and in the process fulfilling the archetypal Indian male fantasy of possessing a woman by getting her to cover up rather than the other way around). Unconfirmed reports suggest that Dilip Kumar’s appearance in Kranti was a gesture of gratitude.

[Also see this post on The Burning Train]

Meeting Ebrahim Alkazi, and memories of a surreal Delhi

A few weeks ago I met Ebrahim Alkazi, the former theatre director, for a profile for Harmony magazine. This isn’t exactly my beat but I had some idea of Alkazi’s standing as a flagbearer of the theatrical tradition from the 1950s through the 1970s. Initially in Bombay and later in Delhi, he developed quite a reputation as a director who brought a new sense of realism and purpose to Indian drama, and as a teacher who nurtured some of the leading talents of the era – including Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Rohini Hattangady and Manohar Singh.

Though he walks with a barely noticeable stoop, there’s little else to suggest that Alkazi is 82 years old. He still comes to his office, the Art Heritage Gallery in the Triveni Kala Sangam basement, at 11 AM each day, after spending an hour at the Alkazi Foundation in Greater Kailash-II. His steady, clipped voice could easily belong to a man 25 years younger and he rarely pauses for breath. There’s a natural storytelling talent on view when he talks about his life, beginning with his boyhood in Bombay and Pune; he has an impressive memory for specifics and his descriptions are vivid. “When Alkazi described a performance, we could imagine it unfolding before our eyes,” theatre director Bansi Kaul, one of his students in the 1970s, told me on the phone later. “He was a great teacher, very charismatic.”

Though Alkazi retired from the National School of Drama (NSD) 30 years ago, he has remained active in the artistic sphere – collecting and documenting old photographs and paintings, conceptualising and curating exhibitions. Recently, he’s been busy with an exhibition of old photographs of Lucknow, from the time of the 1857 Mutiny. At our meeting he showed me an elegantly produced book titled Lucknow, City of Illusions, edited by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, and featuring a number of images from the collection he has built up over the years. Flipping through the book's pages, he analysed and explained the photographs, talking about the camera angles and other details of each shot – the exact geographical locations of parts of the city that were destroyed during the Mutiny - and in the process, gave me a firsthand sense of how he must have created imaginary worlds for his students back in his prime. “I developed a visual approach to the theatre,” he likes to say, “as opposed to just a literary approach. I was very concerned with how the stage would look, and with the overall design.”

What I found most fascinating about my conversation with Alkazi were his memories of the vibrant cultural scene in Bombay in the 1950s (something I often hear about from my mother and grandmother) and the not-so-impressive state of Delhi in the early 1960s, which was when he moved here to help set up a national school of drama. Delhi was an unsettling place in 1962, he said – “a peculiar, retarded, feudal world; like a village when compared to Bombay.” (Some would argue that hasn’t changed, 40 years on.)

In a few earlier posts, including this chat with Lalit Nirula, I’ve mentioned my interest in the growth of Delhi, especially south Delhi, over the decades. Alkazi had a few memories to share too. “Kailash Colony, where we set up our base in a shabby building owned by tent-wallahs, was so far out that no taxi would go there,” he said. Chuckling, he recounted one of his earliest experiences in the city: seeing two men hoisting a dead donkey onto a scooter by the side of the road. “This was my introduction to Delhi! It was surreal, like something out of a Luis Bunuel film.” [Note: Un Chien Andalou has that famous image of dead donkeys being dragged along on a piano.]

The upside of being in Delhi as a theatre-person looking for new opportunities was the realisation that the city’s ancient monuments would be fantastic sites. Initially, of course, he had to make do with more mundane settings. “There was an open space behind the tent-wallah’s house, we picked up stones and built a little makeshift stage there, lined with cowdung and with a thatched roof.” Later they would move to a more sophisticated venue – the Rabindra Bhavan building near Mandi Chowk – but those early days were heady ones.

The breakthrough came one memorable evening at the Ferozshah Kotla stadium, where he got permission from the Archaeological Survey of India to stage Andha Yug, a powerful drama set in the immediate aftermath of the Mahabharata War. “Pandit Nehru came to watch it, and naturally this meant a coterie of diplomats and huge crowds followed him.” So makeshift was the setting that at one point in the play, when a group of characters are required to move towards the audience, Nehru’s bodyguards came forward to counter the threat. It was an extremely successful performance on the whole, even though it ended with the Prime Minister gravely warning Alkazi to “watch out for snakes” when he staged his productions near old monuments!


Alkazi believes his greatest strength as a director was his desire to keep adding to his knowledge: “The thing to know is that you don’t know enough.” This is a remarkable philosophy for someone of his age and experience to adopt, but he still follows it tirelessly; much of his time is spent reading, researching, learning new things about his areas of interest. “He was always extremely well-read, a walking library,” director Vijay Kashyap, who worked with him on such productions as Tughlaq and Razia Sultan, told me, “and yet he never used high-flowing words – he explained everything in very simple language.”

His liberal background (fostered by his schooling at a Jesuit institute “that had a wide and comprehensive view of education”, and childhood exposure to a wide range of books and magazines from around the world, subscribed to by his father) and interest in a number of different forms also helped. While the NSD under his supervision primarily represented Indian theatre, it was open to traditions from other countries – for instance, he once got a Japanese director to stage a production in the classical Noh tradition. “We designed the stage in the Noh style,” he said, showing me an old photograph from his large and impressive portfolio. “The form is not very different from our own Kathakali, and we were able to explore that connection.”

One reminiscence followed another as Alkazi discussed his productions – including translations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Shakespeare’s Othello – and his little bouts with critics: once, after a reviewer likened an actress’s performance to a “cackling hen”, Alkazi wrote a letter to the Times of India editor Sham Lal, ending by saying the critic’s writing was “like the cackling of a hen no cock would look at twice”. (The letter was published in its entirety.)

He also showed me an impeccably maintained collection of photographs from his theatre ventures: stills of the elegant set designs that he personally invested so much time and effort into; rehearsals with actors, including a young Om Puri wearing a Japanese mask; a long shot of the Purana Qila, where he discovered that Nehru had been right, there were indeed snakes around. (When he first went to the site, he recalls being told that he couldn’t use the ground because it was sacred. “It’s already being used as a public lavatory!” he retorted, “I’m only cleaning it up.”)

I need to visit the Alkazi Foundation soon to see more of those old photographs – some of them were superb. Will put some up here if I get access to them.

(Click pics to enlarge)

Blogger interviews

Should have mentioned this before. Gaurav Mishra of Gauravonomics was kind enough to include Jabberwock in his "Desi Blog of the Day" section a couple of weeks ago, and then to invite me into his Desi Blogging Cafe to answer a few questions. Here's the link.

Another mini-Q&A session I participated in recently, but one that I’m feeling embarrassed about now, can be found here – it was for an online magazine that wanted to discuss Bollywood. Going through my responses again, I see that some of them come across as trite (partly because they involve explaining Hindi cinema and its mass audience to someone who isn't Indian) and patronising. My views on Hindi films are much more complex than this exchange suggests, and it's unsettling to see one's carelessly spoken/written words set in stone like this – helps me empathise with people who get interviewed frequently and then have to see their quotes in print in the clear light of day.

P.S. Recently, I’ve had reason to think about what my writing conveys about my attitude towards mainstream Hindi films. A few weeks ago, a blog-acquaintance with whom I’ve had many rewarding email discussions made an offhand reference to my “contempt for current Bollywood”. This was startling to hear. I’m certainly very ambivalent about Bollywood, I did “grow out of it” around the age of 14, returning to it only a decade later, and the film pedant in me gets annoyed with people who have only been exposed to Hindi films and love them indiscriminately – but “contempt” is a word I would never use in this context. Even when I don't think highly of a mainstream Hindi film, I usually don't regret having seen it – maybe because I've grown up with these movies and their presence still makes me feel secure on some level. Or maybe there’s a deep-rooted cultural connection that one isn’t consciously aware of. (Related posts here and here.)

Tennis again

Just watched a great match, the Rome semi-final between Nadal and Davydenko. Three hours 40 minutes, with the first two sets decided on tie-breaks – not because neither player could break the other’s serve but because they broke each other consistently. (Note to self: should have used a Broke-back Mountain pun in the last post.) Stunning stuff all the way through. Davydenko was superb – he played Nadal on clay better than anyone I’ve seen, pushed and bullied him all around the court, and looked the better player for a large part of the match. For once I wouldn’t have minded if Nadal had lost.

But he won, and this match was a reminder of what an extraordinary achievement his clay-court winning streak is. It's so common to see him pull off seemingly effortless straight-sets wins on this surface that we forget the levels of discipline and stamina required for each match. (A similar epiphany occurs on those rare occasions when Federer loses, on any surface.) Btw, read this excellent piece by Rohit Brijnath on Nadal.

The downside is, Rafa has looked weary at various times in this tournament, and after this marathon I doubt he’ll have enough left in him to beat Fernando Gonzalez in the final (Gonzalez won his semi-final in just over an hour). More importantly, is he going to be burnt out for the French Open, and if so, could that be Federer’s big opportunity?

P.S. A nugget of wisdom for Nadal fans, from personal experience: soundproof your rooms. If you watch every match he plays, your family will eventually start to wonder about the grunting sounds that emanate from your room. (This is also where I request the ATP to arrange an exhibition match between Nadal and Maria Sharapova. Then we can close our eyes and imagine we’re listening to rhinoceros porn.)

Mixed singles

The comments section of this blog has started to resemble the Rediff.com message boards. Just got this comment on an old post about a Rahul Dravid biography:

Anonymous said:
No doubt that Rahul Dravid is the sexiest sportsman in India today. He has those gorgeous lips and marks on his cheeks add to his sexiness. Not only girls but also boys feel him to be sexy. Even I being a boy would like to deeply kiss him.

For reasons I can’t put my finger on, this makes me think of Federer and Nadal. What are the odds that if they meet in the Rome Masters or French Open final, the start of the match will be delayed because our two champs are busy holding hands and looking deep into each other’s eyes? Or that they take off on a cruise down the Seine together after the tournament?

There’s no doubt this is a great rivalry. But it's something more. When was the last time you saw Borg and McEnroe doing this?

(Who's got the adoption papers then?)

Oops sorry, the last one (courtesy Turbanhead) wasn't part of the series. Don't know how that happened...

A conversation with Mohsin Hamid

[A discussion with the Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, whose new book The Reluctant Fundamentalist I wrote about in this post. Transcribing our conversation, I realised at what great length Hamid had spoken (nearly 6,000 words in a little over an hour, if you’re interested in such quantifiers). He gave elaborate, detailed answers to each question, which was creditable considering that he had been on the talking end of more than 30 interviews in the 4-5 days prior to our meeting. Book tours are stressful things even for that rare beast, the sociable writer.

Since it was a lengthy discussion, covering a number of topics, I’ve used some editorial license – streamlining and dividing it into broad sub-heads.]


PRELUDE

Hamid arrived for the interview directly after registering at the police station, something he had to do because of his Pakistani citizenship.

It must be unnerving that the police station has to be your first stop at every city that you tour.

It’s not very nice. On my first day in Delhi last week, I took along the photocopies I was told I’d require, but they said they needed passport photographs. Then I went to Bombay, where at the police station they said we don’t need photographs, we need photocopies. Then, when I got back to Delhi I had to re-register. So basically I’ve been in India for five days, I’ve made three visits to the police station and I’ve spent several hours doing this.

It’s particularly incongruous because in the morning you’re giving haziri at the police station and in the evening you’re on the national TV network giving an interview. Obviously, I don’t hold this against Indians; I recognise it’s a bureaucratic thing. But it shows the absurdity and the completely backward nature of Indo-Pak relations. At the official, state-sponsored level, there’s this mutual suspicion: there’s a “you are a criminal until proved innocent” approach to one another. And yet, the people I’ve met privately have all been extremely friendly, engaged and interested. One encounters great generosity at the personal level.

I think it’s no longer sufficient for us to say, “Oh, you know it’s funny that our countries behave in this way but we as people don’t.” By dissociating individual relations from the state policy, we are complicit in all this. Pakistanis and Indians should not require visas to visit each other in the first place. And if they do need visas, at the most there should be a 30-day stamp. There shouldn’t be any police registration. We all know that anyone who wants to sneak across the border and make mischief can do so, in either direction – they aren’t going to go and register at police stations. If I wanted to lose myself in Delhi, I could very easily do so. This isn’t an effective security measure.

THE DIVIDED SELF

The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes the form of a dramatic monologue by a Pakistani, addressed to an American. In an essay you wrote that a novel can be a divided man’s conversation with himself. Is that what this book is?

Yes, even though the very nature of the dramatic monologue indicates a bias. In this case, you only hear the Pakistani side – the American who is being addressed never gets to speak – and so the novel makes very obvious its biased nature. But in me internally, that other party, the American side, was speaking very much, and I was thinking about his responses.

Unlike your protagonist Changez, who gets increasingly paranoid and defensive about his identity as a Muslim man living in the US, you’re comfortable with your two sides?

More comfortable than Changez, yes, but not entirely comfortable. Even for those of us who have never left our homelands, the forces of globalisation ensure that we’re at least slightly uncomfortable with ourselves, slightly divided. But for many of us it’s still manageable.

With the people who get very strongly affected, it depends on the extent to which international circumstances and politics act upon them. Those actions can be more or less strong. For someone in Iraq or in Palestine, they can be incredibly strong. For a Muslim man in New York, they are moderately strong. For someone chilling out in Club Med they are probably weak.

Every human being has a series of cracks or fissures inside, and these moderate to strong external forces combine with the particular nature of fissures inside an individual. I had a greater feeling of security than Changez has, I was older and had been in America longer. What happens to him is not what happened to me. So yes, I am much more comfortable than Changez. But this doesn’t mean I have no fissures inside me.

I’d like to say something here about autobiographical elements in my work, which is something I often get asked about. In my fiction I tend to write what I know about, which means that everything I write can appear autobiographical. Did I know people who grew up smoking charas and hanging out at rave parties and who became addicted to heroin? [An allusion to his first book, Moth Smoke] Yes. Have I been to Princeton? Yes. Have I worked in corporate New York? Yes. But am I these characters? No.

You’ve been living in London for years now [Hamid moved there from New York in July 2001, just two months before the 9/11 attacks] and you’ve referred to that city as being a geographical and cultural midpoint between NY and Lahore, America and Pakistan. Does living there – and therefore being at a remove from both Pakistan and the US – make you more comfortable about your divided selves?

London was a good place to go to, to become comfortable. As a person now I’m quite comfortable with my politics, with my relationship with both Pakistan and America. But now I have to look at London from a different standpoint: “Is this the place I want to call home?” And I really don’t know. When I go to New York I feel a strong passion for the city. When I go to Lahore I feel a similar strong passion. But I feel only a platonic affection for London.

Which is safer than passion, and usually more durable.

Yes, it is – I think the best relationships are often built on that foundation. But I don’t know if I might turn out to be a passion-junkie (laughs) who needs to settle down in a place that makes him feel much more extreme.

London has one big disadvantage, which is its price. In being so expensive it drives career and economic decisions in a way that many other cities don’t do. Cabs are ridiculously expensive; even in New York they are half the price. You can have a meal in NY for half the price. And what that means is that while NY becomes a collective living room for its inhabitants, in London you can’t eat out as often – so your living room becomes your living room. And as a result people are more reluctant to engage socially.

In Lahore or Delhi your living room is much bigger, and you probably have someone to clean it up. In London if you’ve invited six people home, to your tiny little flat, you have to think twice about whether to call a seventh or eighth person. One tends not to mix as much.

ON THE LITERARY MIND, AND STAYING GROUNDED

Since you’re talking about social interactivity, a related question: How do you divide your time between your writing and your decidedly un-writerly job as a consultant?

I work three days a week – the rest of my time I spend writing. Consultancy is my primary source of income – you need to pay the rent if you’re writing a novel!

In India, there has been a recent trend of books written by people who have full-time jobs that are unconnected to writing. But these authors tend not to receive great critical praise. Instead mass-market-friendly epithets such as lad-lit are used to describe their work. You, on the other hand, are an example of a working professional who has won acclaim and been categorized as a literary writer.

Well, I wouldn’t characterize that as a part-time/full-time or a working/non-working distinction. I mean, even Kafka had a job. About the writers who have full-time jobs and are not taken very seriously as writers: my question would be, “Do they want to be taken seriously?” I mean, much of the writing in the world has the good sense not to try to be literary – because “literary” at the end of the day is defined as books that sell very little! No one cares whether Harry Potter is literary or not; he reaches more readers than all of south Asian writing put together ever has.

The other thing is that there is something about the desire to get literary acclaim that has to do with the glory of writing, separate from the economics of writing. And it may be that people who have no other source of income are trying more desperately to achieve that glory, because they are worse off.

The third thing is that literary novels require a certain kind of mindset – a thought process, a psychological make-up which tends to fit very poorly with the work-world. And the reason for this is that the mind best suited for the construction of very large and complex internal universes (which is how the literary novel is constructed), such a mind tends not to be particularly gregarious.

Such a mind also tends not to be suited to the typical 9-to-6 routine.

Well, yes, it’s unsuited to the routine, but it is also unsuited to the level of social interaction. Many very talented writers are socially incompetent. And even if they are competent enough to deal with the regularity of the 9 to 6 job – or, as it’s now become worldwide, the 9 to 9 job – there’s another problem. The very process of drafting, revising, questioning everything that you’re presented with, which is what the literary writer does, means that when you step into a standard working environment, you recognise it as a ridiculous, arbitrary environment.

You become too much of a detached observer, on the outside of the system looking in...

Exactly. And you say to yourself, “I don’t want to do this, it’s ridiculous.” You reject it as being just a pawn in the system.

But it's obvious that you understand the workings of such a mind, and yet you’ve managed to continue operating in a standard working environment. How do you achieve this balance, which is so difficult for the “serious writer”?

I still think of writing full-time, and I might well do that in the near future, particularly now that this novel is a bestseller. But the financial viability of full-time writing isn’t the only aspect I have to consider. There are other implications. To be honest I’m a little frightened by the idea of living my life in my room by myself, just writing.

Which is why I say, thank God I’m married! I’ll tell you honestly, I could never dream of being a full-time writer and not being married. At the end of the day the fact that I have my time with my wife, we have dinner together, hang out, travel together...these things keep me grounded, keep me socially interactive. Similarly, I think families can do that...having your parents and families around, your social network in place.

The full-time writer who lives where his social network is, is much more likely to be at ease than, say, the diasporic writer. It would be much easier for me to be a full-time writer in Lahore than in London.

SERIOUS NARRATIVES IN A PLAYFUL FRAME

I was struck by the playfulness of the writing in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Little things like the names – Erica/America, Underwood Samson/US and Changez (who “changes” over the course of the story). Then there’s the partly deferential, partly sardonic tone, which gives the dramatic monologue such an edge. Were these choices made to inject a lightness of tone, to offset the seriousness of the big issues that the book deals with?

I think the effort to achieve lightness, to balance out the heaviness or darkness of the subject matter, is essential for writers. At a physical level it helps produce a book that doesn’t weigh very much – this one was chiseled down until it was as short as it could be [The Reluctant Fundamentalist is under 180 pages long]. The idea is not to remove the complexity of ideas but to reduce the weight of the reading process.

I’m glad you say that it’s playful, because so few people tend to say that. People often get literalist about these things. They ask me, “Could Changez really have spent 3-4 hours talking to this American tourist in Anarkali Bazaar, with the other guy just sitting there and listening?” and the answer is NO, of course he couldn’t have! Basically what’s happening here is that you’ve walked into a darkened theatre and there’s one actor on the stage taking you through the play.

I’ve often been told that Moth Smoke was a gritty, realistic story about a drug dealer, but what people tend to forget is that the frame of the book involves zipping into the Mughal Era – you’re in this strange courtroom where you’re the judge and all these characters start testifying to you. It’s a theatrical setting, which is what I’ve reached for in the new book as well. And the idea that both of those gritty narratives exist in a frame that is formally playful is very important to me. Because the idea of art as artifice, and art as frame, and art as something not real, is very important.

I’m not among those writers who have magical realistic sympathies. For me personally – not for other writers but for me personally – it’s a rather dull exercise. What interests me is realism. But how do you deliver realism is the question. And I think we often deliver realism in playful ways. The way in which a film is encountered is quite interesting in that sense. You walk into a dark room with your popcorn, the credits roll, the movie begins...there’s this whole process of entering that experience. Similarly, in a book, which is a packaged good, why can you not have an intermediary who allows you as a reader to move from your own world into the world of the narrative, and to discuss that movement.

In my book I hope this has the effect of positioning the reader’s mind slightly differently – rather than my telling the reader “you are encountering my wisdom”, it makes us joint players in a game.

INFLUENCES

This brings me to the inevitable question about the writers whose styles you were influenced by as a young reader. You mentioned that you were never into magic realism.

I think magic realism can be beautiful – it had its moment, Midnight’s Children was a great book, Love in the Time of Cholera was a fantastic book – but I’m just not sure where you go with it. In my writing I suppose there’s an element of magic realism too – but the realism is in the story while the magic is in the narrator’s relationship with the reader. I’m not sure how magic in the narrative can be used to advance things. Maybe some writers are doing it, I don’t know.

The modernist experiments I’ve personally been influenced by include Borges’ short fiction, or by how Italo Calvino – or Nabokov in Pale Fire for that matter – deliberately makes the relationship between reader and reading central to the book. Camus’ The Fall. Then there’s the American tradition which I love because it’s so crafted from knowledge. Take Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, or Hemingway – these guys knew what they were talking about, they were intimately familiar with their subjects. I was talking about the chiseling process earlier, and I liked the way both of these guys chiseled their books – Hemingway, of course, is a master of taking things away.

Then there are the African-American novelists – James Baldwin, Toni Morrison – which are important to me because here is the response of a “suspect class”, under suspicion for being of a particular group vis-à-vis the American system of power. And as a Muslim writer today how can you not refer to that?

I don’t have many favourites in contemporary British writing, though I love Ishiguro’s work: the precision of the prose, the way his voice creates a character in Remains of the Day, the slow realisation of the reader about what is going on. More recently Never Let Me Go – I don’t think it got the attention it should have received, it’s a masterpiece, a slightly tangential view of our world, which illuminates a great deal about us.

Asian writers?

I love Manto, as well as some of the ideas in Sufi poetry. But among the current lot I’d place Haruki Murakami over anyone from south Asia – for his deeply fractured characters, his ability to take you through a series of incredible, absurd situations in a way that never lets you go.

It occurred to me that Erica in The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a woman who’s pining away for a dead boyfriend, living in the past rather than the present – is similar to Naoko in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Yes. And it’s a peculiarly Asian thing – our traditional conception of love as this all-consuming thing, where the first love is everything and you would happily die for it. Love as mental illness. Even the notion of Sati, for example stems from it – I’m not getting into the politics of it here, but the idea that there is something wonderful about such love. And what I did in my book was to embody that in an American woman – someone living in a society that would normally laugh at such an idea, or send you off for therapy or something.

INDIAN (AND PAKISTANI) WRITING IN ENGLISH

You’ve often expressed your dissatisfaction with the widespread international perception of Pakistan as a hidebound, conservative society. For many of us who read Moth Smoke years ago, the effect it had was to reveal a hitherto unseen side of the country – the rave parties, the cosmopolitan elements of the major cities. Why do we not hear more such voices coming out of Pakistan?

Well, from my generation we have Kamila Shamsie and Uzma Aslam Khan among others. The thing to remember is that neither India nor Pakistan has the sort of market for writing in English that can sustain an author’s livelihood. I’m told bestsellers here are defined as 10,000 copies sold. Let’s say such a book is priced at Rs 500 and the author gets a 10 per cent commission (sidelong glance at the Penguin Books representative, also in the room). That amounts to Rs 5 lakh for a book that may have taken five years to write – in other words, an income of Rs 1 lakh a year. And we’re talking here about the best-case scenarios – there might be only three or four authors who fit in this category. It’s fundamentally unviable, as you can see.

And yet the reason why it has taken off is that India has produced superstar writers in the past two decades - with the emergence of Rushdie, Vikram Seth and later Arundhati Roy. And we’re seeing the results of that, which is a wonderful outpouring of literary fiction. Pakistan didn’t have that – we had Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri and a few others but no one who reached the level of international stardom that Rushdie or Seth did. So in many ways Pakistani writers of my generation have been the first stirrings of that. I’m not saying we are in the Rushdie-Seth league but we are at least getting noticed internationally, becoming bestsellers in some countries.

The Indian experience has been an unusual one – an external success that has led to a domestic indigenous literary movement. Pakistan has lagged behind, but that’s set to change, I think. Recently a number of young writers have been in touch with me, emailing me, sending in their manuscripts. I think we will see a blossoming of Pakistani writing in the coming years.

That’s encouraging, because writing has the potential to change the international perception of a country.

Other things have the ability to change perceptions too. In pop music Pakistan is way ahead of India. There’s a reason for this: in India, because of the phenomenal success of Bollywood, Hindi film music has become the driver of economics. Pakistan, with a complete absence of a film industry of Bollywood’s standing, has developed a strong rock scene instead. And these bands are the superstars there, they get all the advertising money.

I’m pleased to see that Pakistani rock bands are very popular here. Bollywood is very popular in Pakistan and so are Indian writers. And some Pakistani writers have been published for the first time not in their country but by Indian publishing houses. This level of cultural interaction is great.

What are your general impressions of present-day Indian Writing in English, or IWE as it’s called?

I think there’s a bit of a lull in Indian writing in English, when one looks at the groundbreaking nature of Indian fiction that came before – whether it was the gritty social realism of Rohinton Mistry or the magical realism of Rushdie or the vastness of scope of Vikram Seth or the early whimsical beauty and later politicized polemic of Arundhati Roy – each of these is a major trailblazer. Of course, today there are fine writers like Suketu Mehta, Pankaj Mishra, Kiran Desai – I admire them all greatly. But on the whole it’s a less exciting time in terms of the quality. Maybe IWE is at a point where new techniques and subject matters are waiting to be discovered – so that we’ll see the second blossoming of IWE the way we’re seeing the first blossoming of Pakistani writing in English. But one shouldn’t be overly congratulatory about what’s happening right now.

ON HYPER-NATIONALISM AND PERSONAL INSECURITY

“Overly congratulatory” is a phrase you’ve used when discussing your discomfort with the chest-thumping aspect of Indian nationalism. What about that most disturbs you?

The notion of jingoism is troubling to me. You see it in America today and you also associate it with France: the hyper-nation state kind of approach. It’s been happening in India too in recent years, and I don’t think it’s traditional to India. The official state policy of India used to have a humility associated with it. The abandonment of that for this “we are so great” and “India Shining” talk is a bit disturbing. There are a lot of good things happening here that you should be proud of – I feel proud of these things as a neighbour – but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that more than half of the country doesn’t get enough food. That is “India Starving”, and these glib pronouncements overlook this.

In Pakistan, on the other hand, there seems to be a perpetual cynicism about where the country is going. And this equally tends to mask the fact that Pakistan isn’t doing as badly as one might think. Malnourishment in Pakistan is less than in India, for instance.

We should remain critical of the idea of the nation-state and of nationalism. These countries that we all show so much allegiance to don’t actually exist. When we get to the border there is no line on the ground, it’s something you can see only on the map. When we cross it we find that we have identical DNA, that we are biologically indistinguishable from the people on the other side.

This idea of the nation-state is a reaction to a deep-rooted sense of personal insecurity in the face of an increasingly global and impersonal world. Human beings today have an exposure to levels of wealth far beyond their own, and this is particularly true of the middle class in developing countries. We turn on our TV sets and we see The Bold and the Beautiful. And while some of us can afford nice flats and cars, which is pretty damn good, it still doesn’t compare with the people on these TV shows. And we respond to these feelings of personal inadequacy with hyper-nationalism, by saying “Our group is great”.

In India, we saw the hyperbole and its consequences recently in the cricket world cup – where the disproportionate and jingoistic build-up of what was essentially a mediocre team was followed by a ludicrous overreaction when they underperformed. Before the match against Bangladesh, the “we are great” stance went hand in hand with a sneering dismissal of the other team – a refusal to acknowledge how much they had improved in recent years. And as a result, losing to them became so difficult to digest.

Yes, it’s somewhat similar in Pakistan. The idea that India and Pakistan are the Brazil and Argentina of world cricket is a ridiculous one. In terms of passion, undoubtedly, they are. But they are ordinary teams. This colossal sense of our own importance, particularly on the Indian side, is disturbing.

You don’t believe Pakistan is hyper-nationalist to the same degree?

Since we’re talking cricket, let me give you an example of the subtle differences. When the Indian cricket team came to Pakistan the first time after the resumption of ties, and they won the one-day series, the reaction in Pakistan was a fairly good-natured one. But when the Pak team was winning a match in Kolkata, people were burning the stadium and throwing stuff onto the field. This behaviour comes from hyper-nationalism. The same Pakistani players, if they met Indian cricket fans, would be treated very well, asked for autographs, chatted to for hours. I’ve been in India for some time now and everyone has been so wonderful to me personally. It’s only when people start to think in terms of the group, in terms of India-vs-Pakistan, that their attitude changes. The national dynamic comes in, it manifests itself in this way, and yes, it is different from the way it manifests itself in Pakistan.

While there are so many things Pakistan can learn from India – the vibrant democracy, the successful economy and so forth – India could also learn a bit about not being so aggressive in its nationalism; about being a little more humble about individual success; and also being aware of the universal human insecurities that drive this behaviour in the first place.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that insecurities of this sort afflict only India. In the Muslim world, broadly speaking, the recourse to militant Islam is being driven by a similar insecurity. The effective emasculation of entire populations has resulted in a hyper-masculine response. Suicide bombing, for instance, is the ultimate response to fearfulness: it's perceived as the ultimate “masculine” response.

‘PAKISTAN NEED A CONVERSATION BETWEEN ALL OF ITS PARTS’

You’ve talked about being comfortable in your Pakistani skin, but what are the things about modern Pakistan you're uncomfortable with? You’ve written before about your ambivalence towards the Musharraf regime.

Yes, I’ve always been ambivalent about them. For a while I thought they were doing some very good things: media liberalisation, a very strong peace overture with India, a very difficult change of foreign policy from sponsoring and supporting the Taliban to moving against them. And in recent years Pakistan has seen an economic growth that was less than India’s but still quite spectacular.

However, now we see a desire to cling to power regardless of the political cost, and decidedly undemocratic gestures in terms of undermining the judiciary and moving against the press. What one was able to feel ambivalently positive about in the Musharraf administration was Realpolitik coupled with progressive agenda – but now we’re seeing Realpolitik divorced from progressive agenda.

Musharraf could have laid the ground for a democratic transition in Pakistan, but that didn’t happen, and with that one saw the quote-unquote “rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan”. But that’s an idea I’m very sceptical about.

You don’t think religious fundamentalism has increased in the last few years?

Certainly there is a minority of Pakistanis who are strongly conservative in their religious inclinations, and within that there is a tiny minority that would actually consider using violence as a way of asserting their religious beliefs. But I don’t believe the size of this minority has changed in the last couple of years.

There is another minority which is a deeply secular, deeply progressive minority with a lot of economic power. It’s part of the burgeoning middle class in Pakistan – which, by the way, despite the impression many people have in India, is quite large. Importantly, in between these minorities are a huge majority of Pakistanis, who are pragmatic rural farmers. These farmers don’t get much from the state, and they need a pragmatic approach. Being preoccupied with the daily grind of life, with making ends meet for themselves and their families, they are not very susceptible to calls for dramatic and theoretical changes. And this is the ballast that keeps Pakistan relatively centred.

In the areas where you don’t have that ballast – in the deserts of Balochistan, in the nomadic and semi-arable terrain near the border of Afghanistan – one finds more extreme behaviour. But these are tiny minorities of the country. And the idea that they are increasing in number and becoming more threatening strikes me as an awfully convenient claim – it provides a pretext for the stifling of the judiciary and for curtailing press freedom and rolling back democratic reforms.

I’m not saying there isn’t a threat, but that it’s been greatly overstated.

What is the political solution?

If we had a more democratically legitimate government we would be able to pursue both a more successful policy of eliminating extremism and also a less subservient policy towards America. What Pakistan really needs is a conversation between all of its parts: between the secular progressive minority, the religious conservative minority and the vast, relatively moderate, pragmatic and quietly religious majority of farmers. And the army, which is a very important constituent and which must be engaged in this conversation.

Musharraf could have been well-placed to do this. Imagine a scenario in which he had said “I will step down as chief of army staff but remain as president for one more term.” We would be back to a constitutional form where you could perhaps have an opposition comprised of the more religious-minded parties, a progressive leading party and a president who is no longer in uniform. Such a scenario could deliver the internal dialogue that the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular needs, to figure out what it should be doing as a nation. The signs are that we are slipping away from that trajectory.

SEEKING PATTERNS

In many parts of the world Islam is seen as a religion that lends itself to being misused and manipulated to suit fundamentalist interests. Your views on this? Also, are you religious yourself?

I prefer not to talk about my personal relationship with religion. But when it comes to the perception of Islam, the first thing that occurs to me is this: there are over a billion different Muslims. How do we generalise about a fifth of the world’s population? The very effort to do so says more about us, the generalisers, than it does about those being generalised.

Did you know that the number one talk-show host in Pakistan, Begum Nawazish Ali, is a transvestite? Conservative politicians appear on his show, are grilled by him...and even flirt with him. That is part of the complexity, which makes it unfortunate that many perceptions of the Muslim world are so one-sided. What do we call the young kids who are doing Ecstasy at rave parties in Lahore? What do we call the fishermen who don’t even know their prayers? What do we call the guy who is deaf, dumb and mute and has the mental level of a four-year-old? It’s such a diverse group of people These attempted characterisations are problematic and ultimately there’s no usefulness in any of this. You could just as easily define Christianity in terms of the Holocaust experience.

What we are really asking is: What is my personal relationship to the Idea of Muslims? It comes from the human need to look for patterns, to label everything. The hopefulness I see in all this is that the civilisations we think are clashing don’t even exist. That’s a reason for optimism.

[Read some of Mohsin Hamid's essays here.]

In which Kate and Larry turn 100: two mini-reviews

This month sees the hundredth birth anniversaries of two iconic actors of the last century, both of whom also happen to be personal favourites. I became closely interested in the careers of Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn around 16 years ago, when I first started watching old American and British films. My interest in birth dates being just as strong back then, I knew Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, but I’d always thought of Hepburn as being a November-child and was confused by the subsequent revision of her birthday to May 12 (you expect actors to change years, not months!). There’s an explanation in the Wikipedia entry: apparently, for much of her life she passed off her long-deceased brother Tom’s birthday as her own and revealed the truth only recently.

Hepburn and Olivier were friends, or at least close associates (in fact Hepburn was the impromptu maid-of-honour at the hush-hush late-night wedding ceremony of Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1940) and their long acting careers came close to intersecting on a couple of occasions, especially after Olivier overcame his initial disdain for cinema. However, they acted together only once, late in their careers, in a lightweight made-for TV movie titled Love Among the Ruins. It’s probably just as well; too much star power can cause film stock to ignite.

As expected, these centenaries are being celebrated with the release of special DVD box-sets (if only I’d had more time in that HMV store last week...) as well as screenings and festivals in many parts of the world. To mark the occasion in my own small way, here are notes on two cherished, dog-eared books.

Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir
by Garson Kanin

“We do not remember chronologically but in disordered flashes,” says playwright/screenwriter Garson Kanin in the Preface to this tender, wonderfully personal account of his long friendship with Hepburn and her favourite leading man Spencer Tracy. What Kanin achieves in this book is astonishing, especially considering that it isn’t a structured account of two lives. Instead, he hands the page over to his free-flowing memories of Hepburn and Tracy over a 30-year association with them. This results in a collection of seemingly patternless anecdotes that add up to much more than the sum of their parts, with the two giants coming alive in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in most conventional biographies.

As a friend and confidant, Kanin was uniquely placed to comment on the quirkier aspects of Hepburn’s personality, the things that made her a willing misfit among the media-savvy, politically correct movie stars of her time. (She was designated “The Most Uncooperative Actress of the Year” by the Hollywood Women’s Press Club a number of times, which, given the nature of celebrity journalism then as now, we can take as a high compliment.) This vantage point also allowed him to relate delightful little stories such as the one where she raises her hand dramatically and swears on her mother’s life while telling a blatant lie (to Cary Grant), and later coolly says to Kanin: “It’s an arrangement I have with my mother. She swears on my life too. All the time.”

What eventually emerges is a picture of an very private person living, usually on her own terms, in the public gaze; a maverick in the truest, most un-put on sense of the word – this was a woman who wore trousers and smoked on Hollywood sets (unheard of for an actress in the 1930s) without turning it into a statement – and, of course, an outstanding actress.

Laurence Olivier: A Biography
by Donald Spoto

But if we’re talking conventional biographies, they don’t come much better than Spoto’s comprehensive, well-researched but compact account of Olivier’s life and career. This book is equal parts a life history and a psychological profile of a very complex man who was always trying to raise the bar for himself and for his profession. Almost by default, it’s also an illuminating portrait of the English theatre (and, to an extent, Hollywood) in the 20th century, especially between the 1920s and the 1960s.

Spoto is particularly good at contrasting “Larry” with “Lord Olivier” – that is, setting the humbleness of Olivier’s origins against his eventual status as a revered public figure and a knight of the British Empire. In making this contrast, he captures the man’s deep-rooted insecurities about being under-educated (which led him to indulge in much grandstanding later in his life - making florid, often incomprehensible speeches at ceremonies under the belief that this was how a Peer was expected to talk), his obsessive need to be the very best in his field and his often churlish attitude towards his great rival John Gielgud, who was of more genteel stock.

In fact, Olivier’s unorthodox approach – spitting out Shakespeare’s words instead of reciting them mellifluously; interpreting Iago as a homosexual driven by his feelings for Othello – probably came from the need to defy the classical tradition that Gielgud was a flagbearer for. Here’s an account of the famous 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Gielgud (an established actor at the time) and Olivier (still the young upstart) alternated the roles of Romeo and Mercutio:

The settled tradition was to stress the poetic lyricism of Shakespeare’s verse. But from the first reading, Olivier spoke his lines as if they sprang from blunt feeling and were not lines of venerable iambic pentameter: he was clearly preparing to play Romeo as a hot-blooded adolescent seething with sexual eagerness. Cast and director heard the verse as if it were not verse at all, but a spontaneous rush of passionate desire, impossible to suppress. “He felt that I was too verse-conscious and exhibitionist,” Gielgud reflected years later. “Of course, he was a great exhibitionist himself, but in quite a different way – daring, flamboyant and iconoclastic.”

Rereading these books, I realised that this was what Hepburn and Olivier had in common apart from the levels of excellence they achieved: they were both nonconformists, both way ahead of their time. It’s hard to believe they would have been turned hundred this month, so fresh are their legacies and personal styles.

P.S. John Wayne was yet another Hollywood legend born in May 1907. I admired a lot of his work – especially in Red River, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man – without being a big fan. Coincidentally, Hepburn’s only film appearance with Wayne (in Rooster Cogburn) was the same year in which she did Love Among the Ruins with Olivier. Wayne and Olivier never acted together – indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a film of any quality that could accommodate both of them, though they each appeared in bloated multi-cast war dramas late in their careers.