Okay, to the film now (after the previous post about Sriram Raghavan). Can’t put a structured review here, because I’m doing one for Tehelka and that will only be published next week, but here are some notes.
- I thought it was a solid, very gripping film that, despite Raghavan’s wide range of influences, managed to avoid being “inspired” (in the euphemistic sense that that word is normally used for Hindi movies). It’s notable that the one time he did lift something directly, he not only acknowledged his source movie (the early Amitabh Bachchan curio Parwana) but let a scene from that source movie play for a while, to demonstrate the exact nature of the inspiration.
- There’s been speculation that Johnny Gaddaar is a whodunit – an “identify the mole” story a la Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante. It’s no such thing. We know who the “gaddaar” is right from the beginning (the Neil Mukesh character, Vikram). The suspense here is of the Hitchcockian variety – deeper, more satisfying than can be provided by a simple twist or revelation at the end. The tension comes from our knowing things that the characters onscreen don’t know, and from watching how this plays out: the cat-and-mouse games, the second-guessing, the chance encounters and tiny pangs of conscience that briefly (but crucially) lead to missteps.
- I liked the urgency Raghavan brought to scenes that are often treated as stock footage in heist/caper movies: like the one where the Zakir Husain character is tearing a flat upside down to find stolen money – his grunts of frustration (complemented by a sigh of triumph at the end), the palpable desperation of his movements, the way he knocks on the walls to check for hollow spaces or takes a bean-bag apart, spraying bits of Styrofoam all over the apartment.
- Also, Raghavan uses some inventive techniques to bridge unrelated scenes. For instance, there’s a scene where one of the conmen, Prakash (Vinay Pathak), is trying to convince his wife to sell her beauty parlour so he can help finance a “get rich quick” con-job. Parwana is playing on the TV screen at the time and Prakash makes an observation about how gawky the young Amitabh looked, but then pointedly adds – for his wife’s benefit – that the guy at least grabbed the opportunity he had to make it big. We then cut to Vikram watching a later scene in the same film and being inspired by it in a very different way.
- Among the performances, Vinay Pathak and Zakir Husain come off best. Dharmendra looks weary (as he has done in many of his recent films) but has his moments – I giggled when he growled the line “Go get a drink, you’ll be alright” in the middle of a very stressful scene. Impressive debut for Neil Mukesh, though time will tell whether he can sustain the promise in different types of roles. He’s perfectly cast here. I think I remember Raghavan saying in an interview that Vikram is meant to be similar to Patricia Highsmith’s amoral Tom Ripley. Though the characters in Johnny Gaddaar aren’t fleshed out enough to justify such comparisons, Neil Mukesh combines steely-eyed determination with confused vulnerability in a way that’s reminiscent of some of the actors (Alain Delon in particular) who have played Ripley onscreen. He’s sympathetic despite his misdemeanors and you genuinely want him to get away with most of what he does. (There’s even a car-dumping shot that briefly recalls the “root for the murderer” swamp scene in Psycho.) Besides, he’s a Grade-A hunk, as my slavering wife observed at least 12 times during the screening.
- Unfortunately, unless some serious word-of-mouth happens, this film could vanish in two or three weeks (the hall we saw it in – a first-day show, Friday evening – was barely 20 per cent full). Pity if that happened.
Never thought I’d be linking to a Rediff.com article, but here’s an interesting slideshow with director Sriram Raghavan discussing the films that he cites as influences for his latest, Johnny Gaddaar. There’s already been some speculation that Johnny Gaddaar is “inspired” by Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (or by Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante, which in turn was “inspired” by the Tarantino) - but this slideshow suggests that Raghavan’s influences are much more wide-ranging. They include Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, the Coen Brothers’ superb Blood Simple, Vijay Anand’s Johnny Mera Naam (which he describes as “a movie that gives me multiple orgasms” - take another bow, Devsaab) and a few solid French films. (I love that he refers to Jean Gabin as “the Dharmendra of France”!) He doesn’t mention Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, but his film’s title sounds like a nod at the cult Western.
From what I know of Raghavan, he's another of the young lot of Hindi film directors (Vishal Bhardwaj and Farhan Akhtar being among the others) who know their cinema very well, have an enormous collection of DVDs of films from around the world, and who are genuinely catholic in their tastes. None of this will automatically make Johnny Gaddaar a good film - for all I know, it could turn out to be a confused mess - but it’s a welcome sign that a young director can unselfconsciously discuss Huston and Vijay Anand, or Teesri Manzil and Bob Le Flambeur in the same breath, instead of being restricted by a specific cinematic idiom.
(I’m watching Johnny Gaddaar this evening. More on it later.)
I’ve only skimmed through it so far, and on current evidence I’m almost convinced that it really was written by Dev Anand himself - sentence by sentence, with only basic editorial interference. This would not be very hard to believe anyway, if you know about the pride he takes in doing things himself and being active on various fronts at his advanced age (often to the point of lunatic stubborn-mindedness). But the book bears it out: it’s full of the cheerful floridity that marks everything the man does, and that no ghostwriter would have been able to simulate. Every page I’ve randomly opened has contained gems like these:
For every second of my life that I have breathed, I have been moving on, speeding ahead, faster than the American missiles in Iraq.
Those I am closest to, those who like and love me and I them, call me “Dev”, just “Dev”, short and sweet and possessive, godly and sexy, and intimate to the extreme, in bedrooms, in drawing rooms...
The evening sun that was still aglow threw the special ray it reserved for me in my direction. It brightened my face anew.
On his first sexual encounter (with an older woman, in a train):
She had now completely uncovered her femininity. I closed my eyes.
“Come, here!” She offered me the opening to her ecstasy.
And I came.
“You young boys of today!” she gasped frustratedly. Did you see that man who got off at the last station? That Anglo-Indian? They are strong! What a capacity. And you..."
On trying to escape an army of female fans:
Hands struggled, and a sensuous mouth lunged forward to rub her lipstick on my laughing but bashful face, with a smooch that engraved the moment forever in my memory.
But what an actor, and what a star! It’s been a long time since I’ve seen most of his old films, but from what I remember his best work holds up better than that of the other two superstars of his time, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. He integrated panache with substance more adeptly than most other Hindi-film actors have been able to, which is just one reason why his early work remains appealing to modern audiences. And despite most of his films of the last 20 years being targets of mirth (or, at best, acquiring cult-movie status among viewers who believe 1980s Bollywood can only be appreciated for its kitsch quotient), it’s hard not to marvel at the conviction and self-assurance when he casually informs us that turkeys like Awwal Number and Censor were “ahead of their time”.
I’ve been reading Eleven, a collection of some of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories (two of which I’d read before in other horror anthologies). Highsmith is an author I’ve long admired, but often from a distance. Even for people with a cynical view of human nature, her work can be discomfiting, or downright unpleasant, and this is perhaps truer of her short stories, which by their very nature are more intense than her novels (such as The Talented Mr Ripley and its sequels). Unsettling as the full-length books are, they have breathers that allow the reader to sit back and reflect on the plot convolutions or simply soak in a place description. But the shorter pieces, being more concentrated, offer fewer escape routes.
Other masters of the macabre (an obvious example being Roald Dahl, a contemporary of Highsmith) have a – dare one say it – feel-good style that makes their stories easy to savour, or at least chuckle at, even if you aren’t in a particularly wicked mood. Some of Dahl’s best work is marked by the twist in the tale, which means the reader can first anticipate a delicious ending and later feel the satisfaction of having experienced a neatly rounded-off story. Highsmith usually doesn’t provide such comforts. In contrast, the horror in much of her work comes from the fact that there isn’t a twist in the tale or a definite ending; that things simply continue to be as they are – bleak, unresolved. I’m thinking in particular of “The Cries of Love”, about two elderly women living together in what we assume is an old person’s home (or possibly a house for the mentally ill) – their mutual co-dependence, their inability to sleep in separate rooms, and the little acts of petulance and cruelty they direct at each other (destroying a precious cardigan, chopping off a braid of hair), which are natural offshoots of this lonely, parasitic existence. In such a story, the reader might expect a twist at the end – perhaps an act of supreme, unforeseen viciousness – but the story simply closes on an almost mundane note, with one of the women looking forward to Christmas (so she can damage the gifts that her roommate receives). It’s very depressing, because one sees then that the horror lies not in the specifics of the women’s actions but in the continuing banality of their lives: this endless cycle of vindictiveness, childlike sulking, recrimination and making up is all they have.
This isn’t to say that Highsmith doesn’t trade in more conventional thriller endings, but when she does it’s usually subtle and drawn-out – the effect isn’t so much of something suddenly springing out at the reader as he turns a corner but more that we are dragged along, reluctantly, towards the corner and to what lies beyond it.
There’s a definite mollusc fetish on view in Eleven, with two very creepy stories featuring people who become obsessed, in different ways, with snails: “The Snail-Watcher”, in which a seemingly innocuous hobby leads, in just a few short pages, to horrific consequences (the stunning matter-of-factness of the resolution has to be read to be believed); and “The Quest for Blank Claveringi”, about a professor visiting an island in the hope of sighting giant snails with shell-diameters of 20 feet. (While on shelled creatures, there’s also “The Terrapin”, about a little boy, his bad-tempered mother and the doomed terrapin that has been brought home for dinner.)
Highsmith’s writing can be savage and malicious at times. If you want to test your morbidity-endurance, try out the collection Little Tales of Misogyny, the opening story of which begins with the sentence “A young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, and received it in a box – her left hand.” Don’t feel sorry for the young lady, she’s rotten to the core, as many of the women (and most of the men) in this book are. Highlights include “Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman” (who was constantly pregnant and had never experienced the onset of puberty, “her father having had at her since she was five, and after him, her brothers. Even in late pregnancy she was interfered with and men waited impatiently the half-hour or so it took her to give birth before they fell on her again”); “The Prude” (who wants her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters to “Be Pure in Every Way”); “The Breeder”, about a woman who has 17 children after nine years of marriage; and “The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife”. The stories are subversively funny, as their titles suggest, but their critique of social conventions is so sharp-edged, bitter, even gratuitous at times, that the reader feels uncomfortable about participating in it. Highsmith seems to actively dislike many of her characters and relish their misfortunes, which is not the sort of thing one is accustomed to in satire. My response to this is ambivalent: like I said, I admire her work but I can’t read too much of it at one go.
But having mentioned the seeming heartlessness of some of her work, I’d like to recommend a very affecting, empathetic story that also features in Eleven. “When the Fleet Was in at Mobile” is a little masterpiece about a timid woman named Geraldine escaping her louse of a husband and trying to reclaim her freedom. We learn about her past in bits and pieces, and through allusions, as the story proceeds. There is an unforced gentleness in Highsmith’s writing as she makes us care for this damaged, perhaps mentally unstable woman, and it all leads up to a devastating conclusion.
Incidentally Graham Greene wrote the Foreword to Eleven, and he astutely captures the moral disorder in Highsmith’s fiction:
She is a writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder, even with a certain reluctance, for these are cruel pleasures we are going to experience…it is not the world as we once believed we knew it, but it is frighteningly more real to us than the house next door. Her characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realise how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train…from Miss Highsmith’s side of the frontier, we realise that our world was not really as rational as all that. Suddenly with a sense of fear we think “Perhaps I really belong here”…she is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably.
And a nice piece about Highsmith here, by John Gray:
In making Tom Ripley attractive – sensitive to beauty, considerate to others in his everyday dealings, courageous and resourceful and endowed with an acute awareness of mood and place – Highsmith was not romanticising villainy; she was presenting a fact of life that moralists prefer to forget. The qualities that enable people to live an interesting and fulfilling life – and that make them valuable to others – are not all of one piece, and what are usually seen as the distinctively moral virtues are not always among them. Moral virtue is only a part of what makes life worth living, and not always the most important part.
P.S. At least three wonderful films – Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil and the John Malkovich-starrer Ripley’s Game – are based on Highsmith novels. Maybe David Cronenberg should adapt one of the snail stories!
You can’t fault our newspaper supplements for not trying, even after years of asking authors such questions as “So, what is your novel all about?” and “So, how does it feel to write a book?” and (in cases where the brain cells of the journo conducting the interview sparked very briefly before going out) “But how can you say it is not autobiographical when it is written in first-person?”. Today's HT City has a Q&A with Mohsin Hamid where the opening question is:
Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip are top favourites [for the Booker]. Can you give them a fight?
To which Mohsin (no doubt biting his knuckles hard to keep from guffawing) replies:
"It’s not like cricket where I can bowl a really fast one and dismiss Mister Pip."
Game, set and match to Hamid. Oh wait, wrong sport.
A squirrel sneaks his way into a feed-bowl while the stern-expressioned parrot on guard is looking the other way.
(Click to enlarge) Yes yes, I know the photo is grainy and unfocused – a camera upgrade is in order and I definitely need a better Zoom option (I bought a very basic digicam two years ago – wasn’t comfortable with the technology so figured it was better to be cautious – and am still using it). But I still like the sneaky Brer Rabbit/Brer Fox feel of the scene. This was taken at the Diggi Palace lawn in Jaipur, where the wife and I had a very nice...was going to say weekend, but it was more like a day and a half, of which 10 hours were spent on the highway. A friend called us to Jaipur for a dinner party and we grabbed the opportunity to get out for a while; we’ve been planning an outing for what has seemed like forever but it just hasn’t happened, what with continuing family illnesses and general work-related stuff. (In fact, with various deadlines whooshing at and past me all of last week, it wasn’t until Thursday that I knew for sure I could go.)
Perhaps because we were so keen to make the most of even the shortest getaway, we ended up having a really good time – no small thanks to the Diggi Palace, which is a wonderful place to stay in. I’m familiar with it, having attended the last two editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival there (some posts here, here and here), but I’d never actually stayed there before. Strongly recommended for anyone visiting the Pink City: very conveniently located, lots of greenery, good rooms at reasonable rates, and deckchairs (which Amit, Chandrahas, Space Bar, Nilanjana and Nikhil will no doubt remember from our Lit visits). And the owner’s little pup was gamboling about the lawn, which made for an excellent stress-buster.
Also can’t help but share this picture. Maybe Doris (apropos this old post by Amit) is the rickshaw-driver's wife?
(There was also a sign on the highway for a restaurant called "The German Café" that said "Only Vegetarian Food. With Authentic Desi Ghee." But no photo – you’ll have to take our word for it.)
Question for the day: from which great mythological story does the following sentence come?
“Never had such a battle been fought outside a bathing room.”
Answer: from the account of the birth of Ganesha as told in the Svetavaraha, or the kalpa of the White Boar. (There are different versions for different kalpas, including one where Shiva and Parvati are so excited by the sight of elephants mating that they assume pachydermic form themselves and go at it vigorously right there in the jungle; the son subsequently born has an elephant’s head etc.)
The bare bones of the Svetavaraha version (familiar to most Amar Chitra Katha readers but well worth reading in a more elaborate, uncensored form) is that Parvati, annoyed by Shiva’s frequent intrusions into her bathing chambers, decides to create a son of her own who can be a loyal dwarapalaka (unlike Shiva’s pot-smoking ganas, who think it’s quite all right if a husband wants to enter the room where his wife is bathing, even if it’s only to peer at the naked sakhis who are bathing with her). Anyway, the valiant boy is fashioned out of the dirt she has washed from her body (it’s been a really long time since her last bath) and he proceeds to not only keep Shiva at bay but single-handedly defeat all the devas, ganas and other celestial beings who come to his aid (for the collective storming of the bathing room, one must pause to wonder?). Eventually, he is killed by deceit (Vishnu comes forth to wrestle with him, while Shiva lops off his head from behind), whereupon Parvati turns into the demoness Bhadrakaali, rolls her eyes horribly and threatens to destroy the world unless her son is revived. So they attach the head of a white elephant onto the headless trunk, and when Ganesha comes to life all the Gods are so relieved that they decide he will be worshipped before any of them.
It being Ganesha Chaturthi and all, I revisited the relevant chapter in one of my favourite books, Ramesh Menon’s vivid translation of the Siva Purana, and discovered many sentences (like the one at the top of this post) that are quite amusing when read in isolation. Examples:
“And I must bow to the whim of an arrogant obstinate woman who is my own wife? Thrash the boy. Kill him if you have to, or they will say Siva is henpecked.”
With his mother’s danda, he smashed the gana force like eggshells, laughing all the while in his clear, fresh voice.
And my favourite:
Her terrifying karalis, hunchbacked kubjakas, lame kanjas and long-headed lambasirsas set about their task like fire in dry grass. They picked up deva and asura, rakshasa and Sivagana, and flung them into yawning maws like bits of candy.
Stop gaping with your yawning maws. Go buy this book.
Update: given some of the enthusiastic early reactions to this post, I feel impelled to throw in a bonus from the Menon book. The section dealing with the birth of Karttikeya (who is destined to kill the tyrant Tarakasura) is even more exciting and contains the following passage, with the Gods waiting impatiently for the birth (or at least the conception) of Shiva's son:
Vishnu said, "The time has come and the constellations around the earth have reached their destined places. The heavens tremble with the mating of Siva and Parvati, yet he does not spill his seed. How will Rudra have a son unless he emits the flaming gold of his loins? Come, let us climb Kailasa."
How will Rudra have a son unless he emits the flaming gold of his loins? Wouldn't you just know that cheeky fellow Vishnu would say something like this? (For a taste of what happens next, check this old post. And for more on scriptural seed-spilling, see this one about wondrous births in the Mahabharata.)
Have been meaning to write about David Davidar’s The Solitude of Emperors for some time now, but I’m doing a long review for a magazine and can’t put the structured piece up here until it appears in print (probably a month from now). But here are some observations, along with excerpts from a recent interview I did with Davidar.
I didn’t think much of the book when I read it a few weeks ago, but then I was asked to do the review and had to revisit it to make notes. The second time around, it’s been easier to appreciate its strong points (to write an 1,800-word review, you have to closely examine the good and bad), though I still have many reservations. It’s very trite in places, and full of annoying over-exposition: for instance, in an early passage, we are told that the protagonist, a small-town boy named Vijay, feels as circumscribed as the fish that live in a local tank. “They should have been gliding through some fast-flowing river instead of circling sluggishly within the confines of the tank,” Vijay thinks to himself. “They seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with [this town].” The analogy (itself a pat one) might have felt less forced if the reader had been allowed to register the thought at a subconscious level, instead of being force-fed that last sentence. And there are many other such examples through the book. The Solitude of Emperors has some interesting things to say about the nature of secularism in India and the things that help fuel communal violence, but the way it chooses to express them is often problematic – potentially complex characters and themes are stifled by simple-minded treatment.
A quick synopsis: Vijay, restless and disaffected, finds a window to the outside world when he writes an article about a young boy being recruited by a right-wing Hindu organisation for the building of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The article results in an interview with Rustom Sorabjee, the aging editor of a small Bombay-based magazine called The Indian Secularist, and Vijay is offered a job at the paper. Sorabjee becomes his mentor and things chug along more or less comfortably for a while, but after a horrifying personal experience during the December 1992 riots, Vijay is sent to a town called Meham in the Nilgiris to recuperate. This is to be a working holiday: Sorabjee asks him to gather information about a controversy surrounding a shrine called the Tower of God, possibly another Babri Masjid-in-the-making.
In Meham, Vijay spends his nights reading a series of essays written by Sorabjee, about three great “emperors of men”, Ashoka, Akbar and Mahatma Gandhi – “the greatest Indians who ever lived…the only ones with a soaring vision for this country that transcended caste and creed”. Much of the criticism of Davidar’s book has, quite rightly, been directed at these essays – not at their content but at the way they disrupt the flow of the story. They take the form of five chapters, each a few pages long, instructive in tone (Sorabjee has written them to teach high-school students about intolerance) and scattered at regular intervals through the book, so that we read them in the same way as Vijay does. Most of the Big Ideas in The Solitude of Emperors are contained in these essays.
I asked Davidar about the didactic tone of Sorabjee’s writings and the decision to present them separately from the main narrative. His reply:
“It was a deliberate decision to write it that way. Sorabjee makes it very clear to Vijay that he is writing the essays for a teenage audience, making it as simple as possible for them to understand and be inspired by the lives of these great men.”
But this is an unsatisfying answer, for it is Davidar the novelist who has given Sorabjee this motivation in the first place. And this authorial decision doesn’t work – the effect is jarring, and it makes the book seem more ponderous than it is. As a reader, one can’t escape the suspicion that Davidar took the easy way out here – by first writing these long, admittedly thoughtful and nuanced essays and then building a novel around them; presenting them as the discrete work of one of his characters, instead of finding a way to weave his ideas more naturally into the story.
“I had read so much on Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi myself,” Davidar told me, “that I could have chosen to write the book in a hundred different ways. But I deliberately chose this functional, stripped-down style.” I don’t think it was the right choice. In its final form The Solitude of Emperors is an undoubtedly readable work, but more as a textbook or a pamphlet than as a fully realised novel.
What’s frustrating is that there were some interesting possibilities here. At a time when intellectuals are becoming increasingly apathetic towards religion, Davidar has the gumption to make the point that the discarding (or undermining) of religion can never be a practical or workable solution for India, where it permeates every aspect of daily life. He also points out that it is in periods of great economic volatility that a country is most vulnerable; which is why millions of Indian youngsters, frustrated by the gap between the haves and the haves-not, easily become puppets in the hands of vote-seeking politicians who promise them security in the name of religion. And that most of these politicians are not really deeply religious themselves, they are simply clever opportunists who know how to sway public feeling.
But for all its potential, The Solitude of Emperors is full of little irritants – e.g., a non-believer naming his dog Godless and telling Vijay meaningfully “It reflects his master’s outlook on life” – that mar its overall effect.
[Will post the full review here later]
Apart from the launch of his novel, Davidar had another good reason for being in Delhi recently: the 20th anniversary celebration for Penguin India, which he helped set up in 1987. Excerpts from the Q&A:
What were your hopes for Penguin India when you started out? For the first 5-6 years it was a very small operation and there were no major expectations. We knew it was a low-margin industry; publishing isn’t like cement, it’s accretionery, you can’t just produce the new Vikram Seth. Also, you have to remember that we were looking for good writers on the one hand and simultaneously trying to create favourable publishing conditions in India. It was a confused process and we made lots of mistakes. Publishers today have it relatively easy.
Do you still see gaps in the Indian publishing scene? We have the writers now and we have world-class publishers based in Delhi, but we don’t have big investment in retail beyond the big cities. What we need is the equivalent of an Amazon.com, where an impatient consumer can order a book on his computer and have it delivered the same evening. Once that happens, the definition of a bestseller in the Indian market can rise from 7,000 to 70,000 copies, and I see India becoming the third-largest market in the world (after the US and the UK). We have the readers for it.
From the writing perspective, we have great writers in literary fiction, but a culture of genre writing needs to be developed – we don’t have much good writing in detective fiction or science-fiction, for example, though it’s happening slowly.
Coming to The Solitude of Emperors, which is very different, both in size and in its writing style, from your first book (the sprawling House of Blue Mangoes): were you aiming for a more journalistic style here?Yes, I wanted it to be as pared down as possible. I felt the subject – fundamentalism, communal violence – was so disturbing in itself that the writing didn’t need any ornamentation or gimmickry. Also, I was inspired by some of the work of Coetzee and Orwell, which have a journalistic quality. At the same time, it IS very much a novel. Vijay’s life has a few similarities with my own – for instance, I worked as a journalist, for a secular paper called Himmat - but this isn’t autobiographical.
So there was no specific catalyst for this book? If you mean had I experienced riots firsthand – no, I hadn’t. Nothing like that. Besides, novels take time to germinate. But one question I wanted to address through this book was: when are we able to transcend ourselves and become, as Sorabjee in the book puts it, Emperors of the Everyday? To do things that can make a positive difference.
The book suggests that economic disparity plays a big part in encouraging communal tensions. Yes, and coincidentally I was speaking to Niall Ferguson, the historian, recently and he pointed out that countries are most vulnerable when there is economic volatility – when some people are racing ahead and others are left behind. In the Indian context, this sort of unrest makes it much easier for politicians to get youngsters worked up about their groups – their religion, their community, their differences with other groups, etc. India really is on the brink, in more ways than we realise.
There’s a line in the book: “No atheist or agnostic could have a vision for this country that would endure.” What do you mean by this? India is so steeped in religion that the people who can make a real difference, inspire the masses, would have to be men of faith, like Akbar and Gandhi – people who are secularists in the sense of treating all religions equally, rather than being indifferent to religion altogether. Atheists can seem just as fundamentalist in their views as those they oppose.
Have been reading Thant Myint-U’s The River of Lost Footsteps:Histories of Burma. To be honest I haven’t been able to maintain full concentration throughout the book – especially in the passages dealing with contemporary politics – but there are some compelling old tales here that should be of interest to both the amateur historian and the engaged traveller; when you visit a place where prominent tourist attractions include big statues of very impressive-looking kings and generals from ancient and medieval times, knowledge of the back-stories helps heighten the experience.
One of the things I found intriguing was Thant’s observation that in Burma dwellings are frequently torn down and reconstructed to look as recent as possible. This is in contrast to most cities around the world, where one sees tangible pride in a sense of history; in signboards proclaiming the age and significance of a very old building, for instance. Thant says the opposite is very often true in his land, where a “Built in 1991” is more desirable than a “Built in 1921”. “One can travel the length and breadth of the country and be hard-pressed to find a single nonreligious structure more than a hundred years old.”
This might seem paradoxical for a place with such a rich history, but Burma is a complex country as this book repeatedly reminds us – full of contradictions, constantly struggling to reconcile its past with its present, “isolated yet always with the possibility of connection”. “Isolated” because of the great horseshoe-shaped arc of highlands bordering the Irrawady River valley, the daunting mountain ranges and the pestilential jungles. “With the possibility of connection” because from the earliest recorded times, people have found their way to this land, and a way to make use of it. Burma has never been completely out of things – it was, as Thant points out, a component of the Buddhist world that linked Afghanistan and the dusty oasis towns of the Silk Road with Cambodia, Java and Sumatra, with scholar-officials in every Chinese province, and with students and teachers across India – but it has had to make a constant effort to stay in touch with the outside world, especially in the last century. (The outside world, in turn, has sometimes found it convenient to forget Burma altogether.)
“There were times,” Thant notes, “when Burma and the Burmese were a part of things, engaged, learning and contributing, and there were times, like now, when the country stood nervously on the margins, looking from far away at growth and creativity elsewhere...Now the conversation was shrinking. Burma would be left largely to talk to itself.” He believes it is necessary to examine the past to make sense of present-day crises and his book begins with a landmark event in Burmese history, the British takeover of 1885 (involving subterfuge and pretext-finding of the sort that also marked the recent US invasion of Iraq) - but he then takes us back in time to the foundation of the very first kingdom thousands of years ago by an Indian prince named Abhiraja, who headed east with his people after defeat by a neighboring kingdom.
The chapters that follow give us not just an outline of a country's history but glimpses into a personal history as well – the story of some of the members of Thant’s own family over the last hundred or so years. (His maternal grandfather went from being a small-town schoolmaster to becoming the Secretary-General of the UN in the 1960s, while many of his father’s ancestors were courtiers who served at the Court of Ava for nearly two centuries.) I enjoyed the candid yet restrained way in which Thant mingles the personal with the larger picture; it makes for a friendly approach to a text that might otherwise have become very academic and alienated readers who don’t have a strong interest in the country. While his book doesn’t offer easy solutions to Burma’s problems or a clear vision for its future, it’s elegant, mostly easy to read and as informative as any single-volume history of a country can be.
Discussing New York City's traffic problems on one of his stand-up shows, comedian Jerry Seinfeld wondered aloud why car showrooms didn't have empty pedestals for visitors to look at (in addition to the ones on which latest models of cars are displayed). "I don't need another big car," he quipped, "but I'd be happy to dole out money for a brand new parking space."
Delhi is on a similar track. In most of the posher residential colonies, menacingly moustached guards sit outside houses for no purpose other than to wave batons at people who park where they shouldn’t. And when you go shopping, it's common (even in the once-idyllic Khan Market) to spend more time in the parking queue than in any of the shops.
When my wife and I moved into our new flat, we found there were two parking spaces inside the gate – one for us and one for the gentleman who lived upstairs. However, one car had to be parked behind the other, which was inconvenient because we usually come home very late at night while our neighbour leaves very early in the morning. "Let's each keep copies of the keys of both cars so we don't have to disturb each other at odd hours," he proposed, but though he's a pleasant-looking man this was much too homely a suggestion for my liking. As a compromise, I decided to park my car outside the gate, along the wall but within the borders of our own building so we weren't encroaching on anyone else's space.
It worked for a few days, but one night I returned to find an unfamiliar car sprawled carelessly across most of the wall as well as part of our gate. No driver in sight, of course. It had been a very long, very tiring day and as I contemplated this rogue vehicle barring the entrance to my castle, scenes from films flashed through my mind: a sweet Iranian lady having a nervous breakdown and smashing the windows of an SUV with her jack; Robert De Niro and the baseball bat-brain splatter in The Untouchables. After a few deep breaths I phoned our neighbour to politely ask if the car belonged to someone visiting him, but it didn't. He came downstairs and we stood there for a while, muttering half-sentences, fuming at the interloper. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and said: "Oh well, there's only one thing to do. Let's puncture two of the tyres."
I wasn't too taken by this idea, not because of ethical considerations but because it seemed obvious to me that if the owner of the vehicle returned to find his tyres punctured and my car freshly parked near the gate, he would put two and two together – and perhaps retaliate in kind. I voiced this thought to my neighbour, who was looking around for a long, sharp pin.
"But what if he deflates my car's tyres for revenge?"
"Oh, that's okay," he replied, not missing a beat, "You can always get it fixed early tomorrow morning. The important thing is that he will have learnt his lesson. It's a small sacrifice."
While I was gaping at him in astonishment, a small man came running around the corner, brushed between the two of us, leapt into the offending car and drove off before either of us could react. "I should have punched his face in," my neighbour said, looking at the receding taillights. "Yes," I replied, "and if he had punched you back you could have had your nose fixed in the morning. But at least he would have learnt his lesson."
However, I fear that this Gandhian pragmatism may not work for much longer, and so I'm stocking up on sharp pins. As alien beings studying our dead civilisation a hundred years from now will learn, tyre-deflation is the cornerstone of any sufficiently advanced human society.
Okay, my first attempt to put a video up on this site has failed miserably, so I'll provide a link instead. IBN Live had interviewed me a few weeks ago for a story about indiscretion in the virtual world - Orkut stupidity, etc (something I also wrote about here). I never got to see the story telecast, because it didn't appear in the slot it was originally scheduled for - this is something that's happened with me before and it gets frustrating (especially when one has got ailing grandmothers all excited, waving cheerleader pom-poms at the TV screen). So I was pleased to discover a short video on this page on the IBN website. Take a look - I come on around the 1-minute mark.
Just finished two books that had a couple of things in common – they were both very quick reads (thank FSM for small mercies etc) and, in different ways, slightly naïve. But while David Davidar’s The Solitude of Emperors is didactic and often tiresome to read (more on that book later) despite the cleanness of its prose, Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is one of the more enjoyable things I’ve read recently. I picked it up as a break from some of the stuff I’m saddled with for reviewing, and finished it in just 2-3 hours. It’s a nice example of how an occasionally simple-minded book can be redeemed by a sharp sense of humour.
Torday is, at age 61, a first-time novelist and his book doesn’t waste much time on preliminaries. First, it announces itself with one of the most eye-catching titles of any recent work of fiction – right up there with last year’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (whose author Marina Lewycka, in what has to be a clever marketing move, supplied a blurb for this book). Then, as if to disabuse the reader of any idea that “salmon fishing in the Yemen” might be an obscure, allusive reference that has nothing to do with the story, it quickly casts the line: on the very first page, we learn of a project that does in fact seek to introduce salmon, and salmon fishing, into the wadis of the Yemen.
This project is the brainchild of His Excellency Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama, a man with a vision (or so he thinks). The sheikh’s intentions are splendidly noble: bringing the sport of angling to his people, he believes, will enable them to transcend class distinctions and the many other divisive forces in their lives; it will help them find inner tranquility and acquire the virtues of patience, solitude and tolerance that set salmon-fishers apart from the rest of mankind**. “They will feel the enchantment of this silver fish and the river it swims in… And then, when talk turns to what this tribe said or that tribe did, or what to do with the Israelis or the Americans, and voices grow heated, then someone will say, ‘Let us arise, and go fishing’.”
Thus we learn that the salmon are, in a manner of speaking, red herrings. For all the piscatorial information Torday’s book throws up at regular intervals (on spawning conditions, fishing techniques, the painstaking construction of holding basins for the displaced salmon), what it’s really about is the Power of Belief. Not belief in a particular religion, as its atheist protagonist Dr Alfred Jones (a bemused fisheries scientist who has been recruited to the daunting cause) comes to realise, but belief in belief itself; the idea that something that seems impossible can be achieved.
This is a slight idea in itself, and at times it threatens to take the tone of Torday’s novel close to that of the average self-help book. But what saves Salmon Fishing in the Yemen from the “If You are Sinking, Become a Submarine” variety of dreariness is its sense of humour – often deadpan, sometimes hysterical – along with its recognition that for every idealist with a grand vision for the world, there are dozens of self-serving cretins in high places, doing everything to screw that vision up. The most memorable character in this book is the unctuous Peter Maxwell, the director of communications (and spin-doctor) for the British Prime Minister, who realises that “the Salmon-Yemen project” is the perfect image-building exercise for the government after its many misadventures in the Middle East. Maxwell may at first appear to be a caricature, but for anyone with even a passing knowledge of the workings of contemporary politics, his sycophancy, single-minded obtuseness and determination to extract maximum mileage out of any situation are entirely believable. He’s so good at his job that soon he has the PM all but believing that the whole thing was his own idea.
Andrew Marr: Why is your government supporting such an apparently bizarre project? Prime Minister Jay Vent: Andy, I don’t think that’s the question you should be asking. AM: [inaudible] JV: I think the question you should be asking is, what can we do to improve the lives of those troubled people who live in the Middle East__ AM: [interrupts] Well, perhaps, Prime Minister, but that was not the question that I just asked. The question I___ JV: [interrupts] ...and you know, Andy, isn’t it just a little bit special that we’re sitting here talking about changing a Middle Eastern country, and the lives of its people, so much for the better without talking about sending out British troops and helicopters and fighter aircraft. Yes, we’ve done that in the past, because we’ve had to. But now it is different. This time we’re going to send out fish.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is written in the form of interviews like the above, as well as journal entries, press comments and correspondence (email and postal) between characters, and this makes it a very fast read. The story moves chronologically to begin with, but one-third of the way through we have the first of a series of “interrogations” of various characters, including Dr Jones and Maxwell, by a House of Commons committee; it’s easy to guess that these take place sometime in the future, after the completion of the salmon-Yemen project, and the stern tone of the interrogations makes it obvious that something has gone very wrong. That we don’t yet know what this is makes the whole thing darkly funny and heightens the reader’s anticipation of what is to come.
Torday has a good feel for workplace hegemonies, bureaucratic goof-ups and musical-chair games, strained personal relationships and faux-polite conversations that can quickly become menacing. I also enjoyed his knack for conveying little things about his characters through the tone of their correspondence. For instance, the first time we encounter Peter Maxwell is in an email that he sends to a scientist whom he’s never corresponded with before. It’s written in an ultra-informal style, as if they are on back-slapping terms, and this prompts the startled recipient to mail back “Have we met?” To which Peter, cheerful and clueless as ever, replies in classic PR style, “No, we haven’t met, but I look forward to it some day soon!”
On occasion, Torday secures easy laughs (e.g., in the chapters titled “Intercepts of al-Qaeda email traffic” and in a section, reminiscent of Yossarian's letter-censoring adventures in Catch-22, where a soldier’s mail is rendered incomprehensible by the Army), but the overall effect is so brisk and cheerful that it’s hard to be critical. There are more pronounced faults – a couple of characters are underdeveloped, at least one subplot is superfluous and the book skirts dangerously close to making pat observations about the Clash of Civilisations – but nothing that can be considered a crippling misstep. On the whole, there’s little to (sorry, can’t resist) carp about in this very entertaining read.
** Coincidentally, Davidar's novel also involves great visionaries linked by solitude, by the ability to look inward and rise above petty distinctions. But The Solitude of Emperors could have done with less sermon and more salmon.
From Pete Bodo’s immensely entertaining TennisWorld blog, a site I spend an increasing amount of time on (as much for the informed comment discussions as for the posts), a provocative question: “Does Roger Federer really exist?”
What if this "Federer" didn't really exist, except as some Jungian figment of the imagination of all those aesthetes who ever had to sit through a Luis Horna vs. Mariano Zabaleta match on clay... maybe he started out as an idea in the mind of some Sega Genesis game designer, but the algorithms just got out of hand and he leaped across the Great Divide like some character out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Or maybe he's just a good old-fashioned hologram, like on your credit card.
and
Q. From the time you were down Love-40 in the first game of the third set, you did not lose a point of your serve until that mishit. "Federer": That's awesome. What, that last game or what?
Okay, how could "Federer" not know? I submit to you that only a creature or fabrication without emotion or the power of abstraction (yet cleverly programmed to mimic a young human by frequently saying, "awesome!") could be so oblivious to what he/it had just accomplished.
The whole thing here. I know this doesn't fit my theory about Roger and Rafa, but what the heck - maybe they're both androids.
P.S. For fellow Nadal fans, as disappointed as I am about his exit from the US Open, here’s the latest version of his blog.
P.P.S. An earlier post on how to stop Federer here.
In his earlier work (including Maqbool and Omkara), Vishal Bhardwaj has shown a fine sense of shot-composition and the effective use of colour and music in film. These qualities are also on view in The Blue Umbrella/Chatri Chor, which he made in 2005 but which has only just been commercially released. It’s a very absorbing film, though perhaps 15 minutes too long. I’ve seen it described as a "children's movie", but this is slightly misleading: though it’s based on a gentle Ruskin Bond story, Bhardwaj’s treatment owes an equal debt to the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, an effect that’s underlined by Pankaj Kapur's superb performance as a very Himachali Big Bad Wolf.
The story is about how a vivid blue umbrella affects the lives of a number of people in a quiet hillside village. A young girl named Biniya gets it from a group of tourists in exchange for her lucky charm, a bear-claw locket; thereafter, she carries the umbrella around with her everywhere, mesmerising the rest of the villagers who have never seen anything like it before. Kapur plays Nandkishor, a covetous, honey-tongued shopkeeper who is feared by children because of his habit of selling goods supposedly on loan but holding on to treasured items as collateral and never returning them. Naturally, he can’t tear his greedy eyes away from Biniya’s new possession. He tries to wheedle it out of her using such enticements as a year’s supply of toffees and biscuits, but when she refuses, he resolves to have it anyway.
The film is a bit uneven in places, but some bits are brilliant. Especially notable is the way Bhardwaj subtly changes the tone and mood of the story, giving us a gradual movement from a bright, sunshine-y world to a dark, nightmarish one. With the umbrella, Biniya’s world is happy and secure - she poses with it for tourist photographs and there is even a surreal moment when she turns into a swashbuckling heroine figure, saving her pehlwan brother from a cobra. But after the umbrella goes missing she enters a twilight zone full of shadowy figures. Even the once-friendly faces from the village can no longer be trusted - everyone seems to be gloating at her misfortune, for the umbrella had become a catalyst for envy and discontent. There is a sense here of simple, idyllic lives being thrown into disarray by the introduction of an alien object; of unseemly feelings being introduced into a garden of Eden. (Not making an absolute comparison here, or likening the villagers to monkeys, but the look of wonder and awe on some of the faces reminded me of the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with pre-historic man contemplating the perfectly smooth monolith that will change his life - for good and for bad.) But the loss also awakens a new maturity in Biniya. Some of her later scenes show an intensity that belies her age: we see that she's learnt something about how the world works, and about the perils of getting too attached to something. (It’s worth recalling here that the Red Riding Hood story is sometimes seen as an allegory for a young girl's sexual awakening, though I doubt Bhardwaj - or Ruskin Bond - would have had this in mind!) Towards the end of the film, when Nandkishor has become an outcaste, it's fitting that the first person to reach out to him is the girl he stole from, who knows firsthand about the lure of the blue umbrella. P.S. Kapur’s snivelling, predatory Nandkishor reminded me of another character that is a stand-in for the Big Bad Wolf, from a 50-year-old film: Robert Mitchum’s preacher in The Night of the Hunter. Like Nandkishor, the preacher is menacing and comic at the same time: he is deliberately made to look grotesque in some scenes, such as the one where he trips and falls, arms outstretched and flailing, while chasing his stepchildren into a basement, and the image of his shadow on the wall makes him seem like a villain out of a speeded-up Disney feature. Similarly Nandkishor, for all his meanness, is a basically pathetic figure, aspiring for things that will forever stay out of his reach. By the film's end, however, he has achieved redemption on a minor scale, which is more than can be said for the Mitchum character.
It would be too much to say I had a good time watching Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag (the unintended humour was restricted to a few scenes; the film was mostly bad-bad rather than funny-bad), but there was an all-round camaraderie in the hall that I’ve rarely seen before at a crowded multiplex screening. Because the original Sholay features so heavily in our shared cultural consciousness, almost everyone in the audience was reacting to Varma’s besmirching of the scenes we know and love. Strangers exchanged looks and guffawed, jokes were generously shared, and when someone shouted a smart-aleck remark at the screen no one hushed him or made clucking sounds, they just chuckled in empathy. There was a splendid moment when everyone - everyone - in the hall burst into spontaneous laughter during a scene that wasn’t intrinsically funny: the first appearance of the young Muslim boy Ahmed. This character, whose fate makes for one of the most poignant scenes in the original film, is played here by the goofy-faced Gaurav Kapoor (formerly known as DJ Gaurav), who spends his early scenes tickling Nisha Kothari in the bosom region. (Later, after he dies, his blind abba rants incomprehensibly for five minutes and then sinks his face gratefully into Kothari’s blouse.)
For me, the most honest scene in this execrable vanity project is the one where the villainous Babban Singh (Amitabh Bachchan) swears revenge against the film’s heroes after they have taken out some of his men. “Sholay barsenge,” snarls the ganglord, using the word that had to be removed from this film’s title after the makers of the original, the Sippys, threatened a lawsuit – and then Amitabh’s voice drops to a whisper. “Sholay...Sholay...Sholay...” he intones, a tear rolling out of one eye. No doubt the intended meaning of this scene is that Babban is crying crocodile tears at the thought of his enemies’ fate, but I prefer my own interpretation: this is Amitabh privately repenting for helping to desecrate the memory of one of his – and our – most beloved films.
Varma’s “remake” has acquired cult status among Hindi-film enthusiasts ever since the earliest rumours, which had Abhishek Bachchan and Bobby Deol in the lead roles, but as news regularly came in of one or other cast member dropping out it become a source of mirth. Until the film’s release date was announced a couple of weeks ago, there were those of us who were convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate inside joke; that it would never actually get made but would remain an urban legend, like the supposed epic version of the Mahabharata (with a cast that includes everyone in Bollywood – Amitabh as Bheeshma, Shah Rukh as Arjuna, Aamir as Karna etc etc) that you can still sometimes find “information” about on IMDB.com.
But Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag (destined to be translated on DVD covers around the world as “The Fire from Ram Gopal Varma’s Hubristic Loins”) was made alright, and what an eye-poppingly bad film it is. Before walking into the hall, I chanted to myself: “Be open-minded, don’t compare, try to appreciate this movie for what it is.” But the mantra didn’t work, because RGV never lets us forget how good the original Sholay was. He takes all the famous setpieces, including the comic ones (Veeru’s “suicide” threat and his playing God at the temple, Jai’s intercession with Basanti’s mausi), and systematically “reworks” them, siphoning away every last drop of charm and integrity. Each time Ajay Devgan (a more than competent actor in certain contexts) appeared on screen as “Heero”, my soul cried paeans to Dharmendra.
The plot has small-time hoods Heero and Raj (newcomer Prashant Raj) being recruited by Inspector Narsimha (Mohanlal) in his personal battle against the dreaded Babban. From the station, auto-walli Ghungroo (Kothari, whose inability to enunciate a sentence without pausing at least twice suggests that she was raised by wolves before RGV discovered her while shooting Jungle) takes them to Kaliganj, the Mumbai suburb where Narsimha lives. In the house are his widowed sister Durga Devi (Sushmita Sen) and a grim-faced servant who tersely snaps, “Babban ne sab to maar diya” when asked what became of the rest of the household. No gradual exposition here, this film wants to get a move on.
Late at night, as the two mercenaries plot to take Narsimha’s money and run, they are startled to find that Durga is listening in. The viewer is equally startled to realise that Durga, with her intense faraway gaze and black cowl, closely resembles Anakin Skywalker just after he crosses over to the Dark Side. (Incidentally, we are often given the sinister information that she “works in a clinic”, but never told what sort of clinic this is; keeping her general demeanor in mind, I propose it’s the kind of place where Jedi heads are transplanted onto Sith bodies.)
And so it goes. Character names are changed from Saamba to Taambhe and from Kaalia to Dhania. Amitabh plays a harmonica in one scene (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) and later, in a moment of startling tastelessness, begins a sentence with “Kabhi kabhie mere dil mein khayaal aata hai”. The film is shrill, often vulgar, with painfully loud and uninvolving action sequences, and its tone lurches wildly: at times I wondered if RGV (perhaps miffed by the Sippys’ legal-action threat) had deliberately set out to parody the original, but most of it is shot dead straight – especially the scenes involving Mohanlal, who seems to have taken this project very seriously. The camera lurches wildly too – the shooting technique probably involved filling the cinematographer with hooch-liquor and making him stagger around the set with the equipment tied to his waist. (The only times it stays still is when RGV focuses it on Kothari’s bottom, which he does often.)
Bachchan as Gabbar/Babban? Some irony here. Sholay was a rare Hindi film that was much greater than the sum of its parts – Amitabh was just another member of the cast at the time, and the film would probably never have been so satisfying as a whole if it had been made during his superstar phase. Similarly, Gabbar Singh was brought to life by an actor (Amjad Khan) viewers barely knew anything about, and the surprise element added immeasurably to the effect. But RGV’s film is constructed around the gimmicky casting of Amitabh-the-Superstar as Gabbar-the-Iconic-Villain, and how can the result be anything but contrived and overblown? Especially given how over-exposed Amitabh has been in the last few years.
In the original, Gabbar exuded malevolence without seeming to try; there was a sense of unknowable currents flowing beneath his surface. Bachchan’s Babban, on the other hand, is all surface, there’s nothing at all underneath – so much so that he has to tell us that he is evil personified. Sneering, glaze-eyed, things dripping from his nose, he relates how a bully once smacked his little brother when they were kids and he retaliated by divesting him of his tongue: See, that’s how much of a bad-ass I am! (As if to reassure us that his own tongue is intact, Babban occasionally sticks it out and wiggles it around, in a poor imitation of the staple “bad boy” character type in a boy-band music video.) The Ultimate Villain charade doesn’t last long anyway, because AB can’t resist doing a cute little jig with AB Junior in the “Mehbooba” song – another one for the family video collection. (At least Junior preserved his integrity by restricting his involvement with this film to a cameo appearance. No such luck for the old man.)
Reviewers are often asked, frustratingly, to sum up a film in a line or two. I can do no better than to quote one spoken by Narsimha’s luckless wife in a flashback, as her husband sets out on another gangster-hunt: “Yeh Babban-Vabban nonsense kya hai, waste of time!” It’s the smartest line in the film.
P.S. Love this description of Durga Devi on the official website: “Stoic, dignified, silent, her demeanor hid an inner strength that at times raised itself beyond what one would expect from a woman.” And for Ghungroo: “She’d like you to believe she is a man. But deep inside, she is all woman.” Wonder who wrote these.
P.P.S. The ticket didn’t have space for the full title, so they abridged it to “Ramgopal ki Aag”. Homely.
One of the things I try to avoid talking about, because it invites abuse from people, is my ancient dislike of samosas. Actually it isn’t so much active dislike, more a general feeling that the greasy little things can very comfortably be avoided. I've never understood the near-universal reverence they inspire (especially the veg ones, which are of course the most commonly available ones – and even more especially the ones that are stuffed with hard peas, a vegetable I’ve never been able to clasp to my heart). Also, taste aside, samosas seem to encourage a very particular sort of social bonding that sends shivers down my spine.
This is why I was astonished to find myself munching frenziedly into a maha-samosa at the Delite Cinema cafeteria near Daryaganj a few days ago, while doing legwork for a story about various types of movie-watching experiences in the National Capital Region. Ten minutes earlier, when Shashank Raizada, the company MD, told me that their samosas were the best in town, my reaction was stoical at best, but it turned out this wasn't just PR talk. Besides being at least twice as big as any other samosa I've seen, the thing was crisp and firm on the outside, soft, warm and generously filled on the inside (no hard peas, thankfully) and made for a more-than-decent mini-lunch.
Samosas apart, this post is a plug for the recently revamped Delite: I strongly urge that anyone who lives within 7-8 km of the place should make it their movie-hall of choice; even if you’re at the opposite end of town, do try to visit it once or twice at least. The balcony tickets are priced at just Rs 85, half of what you’d pay at most multiplexes for a weekend show (including for seats that are just 3-4 rows from the screen), and the interiors are easily the best-looking of any movie-hall I've seen in or around Delhi. It was quite an eye-opener for the south Delhi chauvinist in me, used to thinking of the Asaf Ali Road area as a less-than-happening part of the city.
Raizada has spent a huge amount of money in renovating the old 980-capacity hall as well as inaugurating a new 148-seater, and when Delite reopened late last year, it had brocade-fabric seats, fancy woodwork and a striking hand-painted dome. Perfume dispensers line the auditorium walls and even the restrooms have a waiting area with lounge seating and expensive enameled glass on the doors. I know none of this is imperative to the movie-watching experience, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, especially given the way even the most shabbily maintained multiplexes continue to fleece us. Besides, the hospitality is top-notch: unlike most halls that won’t let you in until 10 minutes before a show begins, Delite has a special seating area near the cafeteria set aside for balcony ticket-holders to lounge in. And did I mention the maha-samosas?
P.S. Delite is a great surprise, but it's also an anomaly in a part of the city where movie theatres have rapidly been shutting down. It didn't take long for me to return to earth with a bump – or several bumps, along Old Delhi's broken roads. After a 15-minute auto ride, I reached the theatre quaintly known as "Moti Talkies", located near the Red Fort. Moti is a haven for (attention, Arnab) Bhojpuri-film lovers and I had a lot of fun studying the posters on the wall outside. Most of the movies shown had titles borrowed from old Hindi films – Ram Balram, Chacha Bhatija – which weren't stunningly classy to begin with. Written on the posters were evocative lines like "Tu hui daal-bhaat chokha, hum hai aam ke aachar" (the flavour is lost in translation, so don't ask for one) printed on pictures of buxom heroines, street-Romeo heroes trying to look cool in shades, and leering policemen twirling phallic batons. (Another tagline: " Hero Honda leke laagal ba humra peeche goonda." And a couple of others I won’t mention here but which I’ve been practicing on the wife.)
