I watched Anurag Kashyap ’s No Smoking late on Friday, just before going out of town for the weekend, and was very impressed by it. Though I had to review it for Tehelka, it wasn’t on a very pressing deadline and this meant I had time to think about the film for a while. For good or for bad, it also meant that I ended up scanning a couple of other reviews (something I normally avoid doing until I’ve written my own), and I wasn’t surprised at the way it was savaged by most newspapers. This is a very strange film, difficult to process even if you’ve seen and enjoyed movies like Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, which have similar addled-mind visuals. And if you go in expecting a linear or realistic (in the deadest sense of that word) narrative or because of the Bipasha Basu item number, your brain cells could easily short-circuit by the halfway point.
But for viewers who are willing to open themselves to it, No Smoking is a daring, imaginative, often brilliant film, one that marries a very personal vision with a keen visual sense and some of the best cinematography recently seen in Bollywood. It takes some time for this to become obvious, however. Notwithstanding a surreal opening sequence set in a snowy landscape, most of the early scenes are routine, even amateurish. John Abraham (as a chain smoker named K) shows off his chiseled upper body in a bathroom mirror and exchanges sophomore lines with his wife Anjali, played by Ayesha Takia (Shrill question: “Tum bathroom mein cigarette kyun peete ho?” Petulant answer: “Tum bedroom mein kyun soti ho?”). Cutesy thought and speech bubbles pop up now and again.
None of this prepares you for what is to come. Prompted by a friend, K descends into the creepy subterranean world of a prayogshala to meet a Baba (Paresh Rawal, excellent, even when mouthing gobbledygook) who will help him quit smoking, and it’s here that the film signals its movement from the real world into a dream zone where anything can happen – a world of bleached colours, grotesque character types and a shift from real-world logic (the Baba watches scenes from K’s life on mouldy videocassettes and has the power to control the destinies of his loved ones; effectively – Faust alert here – he buys K’s soul).
Some of what follows can be described in simplistic plot-synopsis terms (e.g. “K tries to cheat the deal but the Baba seems to know his every move and makes his family suffer”), but beyond a point the idea of a conventional storyline is irrelevant here. Far more compelling is the way Kashyap and cinematographer Rajeev Ravi draw us into the interior world of an addict who is much farther gone than he realises. Soon it becomes impossible to tell exactly how much of this is going on inside K’s head. Perhaps the whole thing is a dream.
Bleak though No Smoking is, both visually and thematically, it’s also a darkly funny film. I particularly enjoyed the speeded-up childhood flashback (played to the tune of the Gene Raskin classic “Those were the Days”) of K and his buddy Abbas (Ranvir Sheorey) smoking in a bathroom; the hilarious Newton moment in Cuba (don’t ask!); the nod to Cabaret in a musical scene set in a nightclub called The Bob Fosse; and the caricature of a loudmouthed, drunken boor who begins a conversation with K by slurring, “Arre, aap zyaada baat nahin karte. Lagta hai sochne waale types ho?” (So familiar! This could be a swipe at mainstream critics or at viewers who turn inverse snobbery into an art form by puffing their chests out and saying "Hum toh films sirf entertainment ke liye dekhte hain".) All this is the work of a director who knows how to have fun even while he exorcises a few personal demons, which is clearly what Kashyap is doing here.
I’ll probably never be a John Abraham fan, but apart from an unintentional chuckle-out-loud moment early on (desperately feigning intensity, he hollers “What’s loving your wife got to do with smoking?!”), he doesn’t do anything particularly wrong here, which is as much as I expect from him. What’s more interesting is the way Kashyap uses Abraham’s alpha-male screen image to discomfit the viewer, to sweep the carpet out from under our feet. An early scene juxtaposes him admiring his physique in a mirror with a shot of emaciated concentration-camp victims from Schindler’s List; later, there will be another chilling gas-chamber connection, and by the film’s end the hunky Abraham persona has been considerably deglamorised. Which is why it’s a bit incongruous that the Bipasha-John song (superb though it is) comes on after the credits roll.
The Cell
After watching No Smoking, I’ve been thinking a lot about Tarsem Singh’s underappreciated 2000 film The Cell, with its sci-fi premise of a “coma-therapy psychologist” (Jennifer Lopez) entering the mind of a serial killer in an attempt to discover the location of his last victim. Unlike in the usual serial-killer film, there is no physical threat to the protagonist here; the killer has already been apprehended and is in a comatose state. The threat comes from what your mind can make your body believe, and this danger is what the Lopez character must face.
No Smoking has a few obvious things in common with The Cell. Both movies use hypnotic, unsettling visuals to explore the mental landscapes of disturbed people. (The look of the prayogshala scenes in No Smoking reminded me of the scenes set inside the killer’s mind in The Cell.) Both movies are heavily (and often magnificently) stylised, which inevitably leads to the all-argument-ends-here criticism that goes “all style, no substance” or “it looks very impressive and beautiful, but where’s the story/what’s it trying to say?” Both are largely unconcerned with the “real world”, so much so that one flaw in both films is that the waking-life scenes are half-heartedly done; the director doesn’t seem too interested in them.
Both movies also suffer from star presence. As Baradwaj Rangan points out in his excellent review of No Smoking, many viewers will walk into the hall thinking this film is standard popcorn fare, because that’s what you associate John Abraham with. But it’s equally true that Abraham’s very presence will reflexively turn off a certain type of “serious viewer”, much the same way as Jennifer Lopez’s presence in The Cell turned off a lot of people who are pre-programmed to dislike her or any project she is associated with.
Also – and it may be too early to say this – the critical reception given to both films is similar, suggesting a timid, safety-first attitude to movie-watching. Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who championed The Cell when it released, and I liked this bit from his review:
We live in a time when Hollywood shyly ejects weekly remakes of dependable plots, terrified to include anything that might confuse the dullest audience member. The new studio guidelines prefer PG-13 cuts from directors, so now we get movies like "Coyote Ugly" that start out with no brains and now don't have any sex, either. Into this wilderness comes a movie like "The Cell," which is challenging, wildly ambitious and technically superb, and I dunno: I guess it just overloads the circuits for some people.
Mentioning that Tarsem Singh is of Indian origin, Ebert writes:
Tarsem comes from a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side. In the 1970s, Pauline Kael wrote that the most interesting directors were Altman, Scorsese and Coppola because they were Catholics whose imaginations were enriched by the church of pre-Vatican II, while most other Americans were growing up on Eisenhower's bland platitudes. Now our whole culture has been tamed by marketing and branding, and mass entertainment has been dumbed down. Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?
“Rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls” is highly debatable, as anyone who has experienced life in an Indian city will know. Some of the reactions I’ve seen to No Smoking are equally indicative of a lack of imagination, and a simplistic idea of what a good film “must be”. I’m not saying No Smoking is unblemished – as I mentioned before, the real-world scenes are half-heartedly done, and the second half goes on for too long, much like the second half of Kashyap’s still-unreleased Paanch did – but it’s a film I’m glad a director had the talent, courage and resources to make.
P.S. Time hasn’t permitted it, but I’ve been wanting to do a series called “Favourite Films I feel Protective/Defensive About”. Included here would be movies that rank very highly on my personal list, but which I feel awkward bringing up in the film-buff’s equivalent of Polite Society – because these films have been vehemently dismissed by a majority of respected critics. Occupying a high position on this list would be films that are vulnerable to the “all style, no substance” accusation that I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of – films by the great visual artists such as Brian DePalma, for instance. And of course The Cell, a film I have a real soft spot for.
I've been reading Irawati Karve's Yuganta, a collection of essays on the Mahabharata and its characters. Had read a couple of these essays as an adolescent when I was heavily into Mahabharata-related literature (straightforward translations as well as analytical works by Krishna Chaitanya and others) and I remember feeling a mild annoyance towards them at the time. Karve's approach is very much that of the anthropologist – mercilessly practical, often giving the impression that she has the characters and their motivations under a microscope in a lab. Though she speaks of the Mahabharata with genuine fondness ("I am indeed fortunate that I can read today a story called Jaya, which was sung three thousand years ago, and discover myself in it"), her treatment of the characters is at the other end of the spectrum from that of Kamala Subramanian, whose tender, empathetic Mahabharata was my favourite version of the epic for many years, and who did her best to present the best qualities and personal struggles of most of the characters.
It's important to note that Karve's approach is a historical one, based on the belief that the seed of the story was an actual event that took place around 1000 BC; this is, of course, tempered by the idea that the epic in its original form was vastly different from the embellished, repeatedly reworked version we have today. Her thesis is that the original work was one of the last examples of a pragmatism in Indian literature that was subsequently lost. In her essays she doesn’t at all deal with the religious aspects of the Mahabharata, treating them as a later interpolation: she makes the point that the Krishna of the original epic – a powerful and shrewd Yadava king who was indeed the prime mover for many of the key events in the story – bore little resemblance to the Krishna who emerged in subsequent centuries ("the flute-playing lover of milkmaids, the divine child") as Indian literature became more sentimental, more centered around what she calls "the dreamy escapism of the Bhakti tradition". (Some of the phrases she uses in this context are pleasingly irreverent: "in later times, when Godhead had been thrust upon Krishna..." and "later authors made Bhishma speak the banalities of the Shantiparva".)
Note: In my readings of the Mahabharata I've personally been interested in Krishna much more as a conflicted avatar, not always fully aware of his role, struggling to reconcile his human feelings and attachments with the Big Picture (a bit like Gandalf in the Tolkien Universe, having only a dim recollection that he is an incarnation of Olorin, the powerful Maia) than as a cocky God-figure manipulating the other characters like puppets. But this is one of the first times that I've come across a Mahabharata-Krishna who can be defined in strictly human terms, without raising the question of his divinity at all.
Bheeshma and Karna
Though I find Karve's essays much more stimulating now, I can't help being simultaneously amused and discomfited by her treatment of two of the Mahabharat's most complex and esteemed characters: Bheeshma and Karna. In the essay titled "The Final Effort", she makes the provocative point that Bheeshma, by sacrificing conjugal happiness and his rights to the throne, put himself in a position where he acquired moral superiority over the other characters (who led more conventional lives) – so that it was never possible for them to question his actions. And that, under the pretext of being responsible for the house of the Kurus, he far overstayed his welcome – continuing to dodder about as a granddaddy/great-granddaddy figure to generations of princes long after he should properly have given up worldly life and retired to the forest with his step-mother Satyavati. "That is what a Kshatriya was supposed to do...but this rule applied to ordinary family men immersed in their own affairs. Did Bhishma think he was immune because he belonged to that category of men who sacrifice the self and live only for others?...In the last chapter of his life it looks as if he deliberately sought out responsibilities that were not even his."
In this context, Karve makes another astute observation:
Bhishma was famed as a man who was completely unselfish...a man who lived for the good of his clan, not himself. When a man does something for himself, his actions are performed within certain limits – limits that are set by the jealous scrutiny of others. But let a man set out to sacrifice himself and do good to others, and the normal limits vanish. He can become completely ruthless in carrying out his objectives. The injustices done by idealists, patriots, saints and crusaders can be far greater than those done by the worst tyrants.
In her view, almost all the significant women characters in the epic are victims of Bheeshma's injustices – notably Kunti, Gandhari and Madri, princesses of noble houses who were all married off to undeserving and/or cursed men and yoked to the house of Hastinapur where they found nothing but unhappiness.
However, she's even harsher with poor Karna. Though she admits at one point that he appears to be "a noble person and a true friend", she casually dismisses the episodes that most of his fame is built on, and which are such crucial parts of Indian folklore: when he promised Kunti that he would not kill any of his brothers except Arjuna, she says he was motivated not by generosity or love but by contempt; the giving away of his kavacha and kundalas to Indra was apparently nothing but a self-conscious attempt to prove himself better than others; and he was an overrated warrior and a poor military strategist, given to running away from the battlefield. Incidentally, Karve treats Karna’s tirade about the immorality of the Madraka women, mentioned in this post, as a later addition to the text. It makes no sense, she says, because people routinely ate beef in those days, and the standards of "morality" in this passage are defined more by contemporary standards than those prevalent at the time of the epic. (The RSS can start sharpening their tridents again.)
There's much more to say about Yuganta but I'm pressed for time now (going out of town for a few days) and will save it for another post. But do pick the book up if you're interested in a perspective on the Mahabharata that runs against the conventional wisdom handed down to us through Amar Chitra Kathas, grannies' tales and TV serials – and especially if you've ever wondered what the epic might have been like in its original form, and the nature and purpose of the alterations that crept into it over the centuries. Whether or not you agree with Karve’s interpretations, Yuganta is certainly a valuable look at how different the Mahabharata is when sentimentality/melodrama (of the sort that in Karve's view became popular long after the original epic was written) have been siphoned out of it. (I'm not making any judgement call about which form is better, but they are notably different.)
Related post: Old tales, new renderings
...for winning the Bastiat Prize. Being nominated was an achievement in itself, but this is great news. Met him a few weeks ago when he was passing through Delhi and had my fingers crossed when I learnt he was going to NY, so very happy for him. A nod to Mint as well, for allowing him the space and the freedom for a column that has often touched on subjects/voiced opinions that mainstream media tends to be queasy about.
It's difficult to know how to write about David Leavitt’s new novel. The book is brilliant in places, and often very moving – at any rate I was involved enough to stick with it over a 10-day period when reading time was limited (and when there were slimmer, more accessible books lying about waiting for their turn). But I also think The Indian Clerk would have been more satisfying if it had been either a hundred pages shorter (with some of the loose ends/subplots pared away) or a couple of hundred pages longer (with the subplots explored more fully, making for a more indepth, sweeping historical fiction). As it stands, this is a work that throws too many balls up in the air at once and doesn't quite sustain the juggling act. I would definitely still recommend it to the patient reader though, especially one who’s interested in the period and the setting.
In essence this is a fictionalised account of the real-life collaboration between G H Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan in the years 1913-1919, a collaboration that led to some of the most important mathematical advances of the century. Their unusual relationship began with the renowned British mathematician receiving a letter from Ramanujan, a Madras-based clerk who claimed to have made breakthroughs in the field of prime numbers. Convinced that he was dealing with raw genius, Hardy overcame resistance from the Cambridge authorities and from Ramanujan’s own family in India (his religion forbade him from crossing the ocean), and arranged for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge on a scholarship to study under him. In this, he received valuable help from an acquaintance named Eric Neville and his wife Alice, who happened to be visiting Madras at the time and who hosted Ramanujan in their house for the first few months of his stay in England. But Ramanujan was never completely at ease in this new country, his health deteriorated over the years and eventually he died, aged just 32, shortly after returning to India.
Srinivasa Ramanujan is a fascinating historical figure, familiar even to Indians who don’t particularly care for math, but readers expecting him to figure prominently in this narrative will be disappointed; he makes his appearance only around halfway into the book, and even then remains a nebulous figure. What’s more important here is the effect his presence has on the other characters, notably Hardy and Alice Neville, who find themselves in a quiet, unacknowledged tussle for proprietary rights to the “Hindoo calculator”. Hardy, no doubt looking at Ramanujan through the prism of his own worldviews, believes that the Indian is a rationalist, an agnostic, at heart; that even his vegetarianism derives not from religious strictures but personal revulsion for meat. Alice, on the other hand, having spent time in India, has a better understanding of Ramanujan’s background and moral conditioning (she recognises the significance of the little Ganesha statue he has brought with him to England as “the god of success and education, of new enterprises and auspicious starts, of literature”, whereas when Hardy enters Ramanujan’s room late in the book, we immediately sense the cultural distance: “From the hearth an elephant-headed figure gazes at him. He has four arms. A rat sits at his feet”) and she is more concerned with him at a personal level. But even she tries, unsuccessfully, to use him to fill the empty spaces in her own life.
Despite its title, The Indian Clerk is really G H Hardy’s story - not a biography but an account of a crucial period in his life. The most moving sections of the book are the interludes where Leavitt lets Hardy share his innermost thoughts directly with the reader (via an “imaginary lecture” that runs alongside the real one he gave at Harvard in 1936). Here we get a sense of a conflicted man, even when he doesn’t admit it to himself. He remains confused about matters of faith, confounded by the fact that his discipline doesn’t always conform to the order expected of a science (“Once again, mathematics had tantalized us with a pattern, only to snatch it away. Really, it was rather like dealing with God”). Nor is he really comfortable about his sexuality (“a non-practising homosexual”, a colleague once called him), and as if all this weren’t enough, he is guilt-ridden about his sister (whose eye he damaged in an accident when they were children) and about a former lover who committed suicide. (The ghost of this ex-lover occasionally visits him, further undermining his sense of himself as a rationalist.)
But given that Hardy is the book’s emotional centre and its most interesting character, a problem with the narrative is that it doesn’t consistently stay with him. There are whole chapters that give us events through other characters' viewpoints (though significantly, never that of Ramanujan, whom we always see through someone else's eyes). There’s Hardy’s sister Gertrude, a poet, burdened with the responsibility of looking after their ailing mother and intermittently escaping to a rented flat in London (a room of her own, one might call it); his collaborator Littlewood, caught in a difficult affair with a married woman; Alice Neville, equally trapped by “the dull repetitiveness” of her marriage, and her feelings (first protectiveness, then love) for Ramanujan.
Seen out of context, most all these personal struggles and frustrations are well-handled, and each of them tells us something about the society these people live in; about the fading of social mores, about a country on the cusp of momentous change (this is the time of the Great War, a deeply disillusioning period for Britain, which marked the beginning of its decline as a superpower). But they also have a diluting effect. Narrative to-and-fro-ing of this sort would be better used in a much larger novel, one that clearly spelt out its intention to be a sprawling sociological work. The book also meanders because of the many asides about Hardy’s colleagues, the Cambridge secret society known as The Apostles, which included such intellectuals of the time as Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Leavitt gives too much space to Russell’s run-ins with the authorities (his pacifism landed him in a good deal of trouble at a time when the government was trying to romanticise war and sell the British people cosy fantasies about soldiers living in underground bunkers that resembled holiday camps) and while all this is undoubtedly interesting in its own right, one doesn’t get the sense that it belongs in this book.
That The Indian Clerk still works as well as it does is testament to Leavitt’s ability to bring the milieu alive and to make us feel for his principal characters. Reading this story about a very lonely man (possibly two very lonely men, though Hardy's loneliness is more fully explored) and the stifling times he lived in, it’s possible to appreciate the sentiments behind Hardy’s famous remark that his association with Ramanujan was “the one romantic incident” in his life.
[A couple of extracts in this earlier post]
Spotted outside a DDA flat in Saket:
Get it? C-1 = She-1. So did these guys decide to open a “beauty destination” only because they couldn’t resist punning on their address? Hard to say. But it’s an inventive bit of brand naming, and maybe the residents of nearby flats will follow suit. C-8 ("She Ate") could be a ladies-only restaurant. B-21 could become a rejuvenation centre with the tagline “Be 21 again”. D-80 could become “The 80”, a club for senior citizens. And C-420 ("She 420") could be a school for con-women. So many possibilities...
[From my Metro Now column]
Back when Hutch was still Hutch and not Vodafone, I was puzzled by the ad featuring the boy and the pug - the one in which the ugly little dog (a stand-in for the cellular operator, one assumes) follows the surly little kid around everywhere, even into a changing room, and the boy's expressions make it obvious that he isn't pleased about this invasion of privacy. What kind of message was this sending out to potential customers, I wondered. (I stopped wondering when I noticed that colleagues in the men’s room frequently talk into their phones while they are communing with the toilet bowl.)
Now Vodafone has billboards featuring the same dog but with a much more sinister expression on its wrinkled face. The one where it sits at the entrance of its kennel, looking malevolently out at us, sends shivers down my spine, especially since the boy is nowhere to be seen. The only reasonable conclusion one can draw is that his half-chewed remains lie in the dark interiors of the kennel, behind the evilly grinning animal.
Moral of the story: eventually, your cellphone will eat you alive.
Not long ago, a sweet-natured acquaintance got concerned that I was too anti-social for my own good. "Here’s a good tip," she said, at which point my attention began to wander, “Go to your cellphone contacts list every day, scroll to a random letter of the alphabet and pick one person whom you haven't spoken to in a while. Dial their number, say hi, chat a little. It’s a nice feeling.”
She must have meant well, but I can’t think of anything I'd be less inclined to do with my time. The world is way too full of people as it is – constantly clamouring for attention, impinging on one's personal space and time, sending emails, Facebook sheep and SMS jokes that one might never be able to (or want to) acknowledge. Why would I willingly add to this clutter, especially since a randomly chosen number from my address book might easily be that of an annoying PR person whose details I forgot to delete back in 2002?
No, I have private cellphone rules of my own, and I’m religious about them in a way I could never be religious about religion. First among these rules is: Ignore three out of every four calls you receive. (If the fourth call is from a PR person, I ignore that as well, and make up the numbers in the next batch.) This might be conscience-pricking at first, but remember that we no longer live in the age of antiquated circular-dial phones, when dialing a number required physical effort and was therefore an act invested with significance. The person who is calling you and whom you are now rebuffing merely had to press a couple of keys on his cellphone, and chances are he doesn't have anything important to say anyway; he's probably doing this because he’s bored, or because a well-meaning idiot friend advised him to scroll through his contacts list and make random calls each day.
There was a recent news item about research showing that there are cases of "ringxiety" among cellphone-addicts who think they hear their phone ringing even when it’s silent. My advice is: be ahead of the curve on this one. When you get a call, don't bother to check your phone; just assume the sound is in your head. That way sanity lies.
Special note here for married couples/generic lovebirds: successfully following the “ignore 3 calls out of 4” rule means that it’s important that you do not give your better half permission to answer your phone. [This is something you should abide by anyway - you're only married to each other, you haven't magically become interchangeable organisms, and it's entirely conceivable that someone might be calling up in the hope of speaking specifically to the person whose phone it is. In such a situation there’s nothing more annoying than to have his wife/her husband answer the phone instead, with a delighted squeal of "Hey, how are you?! Long time! So, what's happening...blah blah blah..." Not sharing cellphones or email passwords is another of the tips for a successful marriage I mentioned in this post.]
Another important cellphone rule: if you call someone back after having missed one of their calls, NEVER start the conversation by apologising profusely and going into a lengthy explanation about why you couldn’t talk to them earlier. It isn’t worth it. Really. All explanations get monotonous, insincere and pointless after a while, and the basic demands of etiquette can just as easily be met by a terse “Sorry about before, was busy. Now let’s see if you have something worth saying.” Anyone who lives in our lunatic world should be able to understand that there’s just no way every call can be attended to immediately. (If they don’t understand this it probably means they live in a tree, in which case they shouldn’t be using cellphones anyway, the radiation is bad for the leaves.)
I’m thinking about two scenes at either end of Jagmohan Mundhra’s Provoked, a film based (very, very loosely as it happens) on the real-life story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a London-based Punjabi woman who killed her husband after suffering violence and abuse at his hands for 10 years. In the first of these two scenes Kiran, played here by Aishwarya Rai, is brought, disoriented and frightened, to jail just after her arrest. Nearly everyone she encounters is an ogre. With deliberate, eye-rolling relish, more than one person mispronounces her name – not so much mispronouncing it actually as dwelling gleefully on it (Aloo…walli…yaalaa) before shaking their heads and sneering like the villains in a Gilbert & Sullivan melodrama. Kiran is callously told to strip for a body search, bullied by a racist commanding officer, served beef in the cafeteria and later picked on by burly inmates. Everything about her spells Victim; the world is conspiring against her and the film helpfully gives us a series of signposts that say, “This is where you feel sorry for poor Kiran. Go on, you can do it. No, no, try harder!”
In the other scene, three years of prison and many earnest reels of film later, Kiranjit is on her way to becoming an icon for oppressed women everywhere. Before going to court for the hearing that will end in a landmark judgement, she gets a makeover – a smarter haircut, a nicely fitted pantsuit. As she steps out of her prison cell she looks just a little more like Aishwarya Rai than she did at the beginning – dare one say this, she looks fit for a Miss World contest, or at least a Loreal advertisement (“Provogued?” muttered the wag). Surrounding her are admirers, the subservient expressions on their faces suggesting that they are resigned to their role as bit-players in The Inspirational Story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia. They are the back-up dancers gyrating behind the hero and heroine in a Bollywood song sequence; everything in their own insignificant little lives thus far has amounted to preparation for this moment where they can stand about applauding as Aishwarya, sorry Kiranjit, descends the prison stairwell in slow motion. She is now a Beater of Odds and the signposts are saying “Go ahead, cheer her on. No, TRY HARDER!”
And you do have to try very hard if you have a hope in hell of extracting a droplet of genuine emotion out of this film. Provoked is well-intentioned alright, but many of its key scenes are irredeemably fake. The script is full of caricatures and shortcuts; it’s so prettified and so manipulative that I didn’t feel the slightest guilt about chuckling when Kiranjit’s boorish, one-dimensional husband pushes her down a flight of steps. There was no conviction to the thing, no sense of real people involved or real feelings at stake; it felt like, well, someone pushing a simpering Aishwarya Rai down a flight of stairs – and face it, wouldn’t you want to do that?
Okay, I’m being unnecessarily nasty to Aish now. Much as it pains me to say it, she isn’t terrible in this film. She isn’t good either, but it’s clear that she made an effort for the role, and I suspect at least some of the hilarity induced by her Punjabi dialogues comes from our knowledge of who she is and the pre-association with a certain type of star personality (I wrote about this in the last post too). In the past she’s shown a certain aptitude for acting, especially when she’s in the right director’s hands; I thought she was quite decent in Guru, for instance. But I doubt she’ll ever be much good in this sort of role, where she has to spend most of her time looking thoughtful and/or traumatized and/or saintly.
Now that I’ve got the spleen out, the (relatively) good part: the film’s second half isn't too bad. It’s better paced and there are watchable performances by Miranda Richardson as the Sympathetic Cellmate, Robby Coltrane as the big-name counsel who comes to the rescue and Nandita Das as a member of the Southall Black Sisters (who, incidentally, have criticised the film. I think Pragna Patel’s observation that “people should rise to the challenge of reflecting real life better” is the least that could be said about this movie’s script).
Just by and by, was Jagmohan Mundhra using this film as practice for returning to his soft-porn roots? A couple of the early prison scenes were reminiscent of that genre of exploitative women’s prison flicks of the 1980s, the ones that involved sadistic lesbian-wardens and prolonged shower sequences. Wouldn’t have minded seeing Aish and Miranda Richardson (a much younger version) soaping each other down in a hot tub.
Rediff on Anne Enright’s Booker win:
The little-known author's award has come as a shock to India as the country was pinning its hopes on Indra Sinha's Animal People, a novel about the Bhopal gas tragedy...
Really, if a competitive-award announcement (with all its vagaries) should come as a “shock” to anyone, one would think it would be Lloyd Jones or Ian McEwan, who were the betting favourites. But what to do, after Kiran Desai’s win last year the Booker is right up there with the Oscar nominations as an opportunity for "India" to “pin its hopes” on something. Or for high-strung writers to claim that’s the case.
Via Bright Lights, a link to an engrossing blog post about Hitchcock’s North by Northwest: speculation on the film’s title, little-known facts and a tribute to Saul Bass’s superb title sequence design. And while on Bass, here’s a collection of videos of other title sequences designed by him for films like The Man With the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, Vertigo, Psycho, West Side Story, Spartacus, Goodfellas and Casino. Excellent stuff. I have fond adolescent memories of how well his visuals worked in conjunction with Bernard Herrmann's music in the Hitchcock films - would spend a lot of time watching just those 2-3 minutes over 
and over again. (In fact, though I wasn't crazy about North by Northwest the first time I saw it, I loved the opening - right from the opening frame, with the MGM lion disappearing into a lurid green background as the first strains of Herrmann's rousing score appear on the soundtrack and Bass's lines begin to move right to left across the screen. Modern movies are often too self-conscious to provide such excitements.)
Don’t you get sick of those single-format Q&A columns featuring minor “celebrities” that appear regularly in the pages of weekend newspaper supplements? The trite, unimaginative questions are bad enough, but the yawn-inducingly politically correct answers are worse. I hereby propose a short list of alternate answers that would really brighten up our Sunday mornings (and give us even more to look forward to in terms of responses from the conservative brigade).
Question: What quality puts you off in other people?
Stock answer: Hypocrisy. I can’t stand people who are hypocrites.
(Note: there’s something very vivid about this sentence; it immediately conjures up the image of the speaker sitting up straight, hands clasped on knee, eyebrows raised in distaste, shuddering slightly in revulsion as he thinks of all the people in the world who aren't as straight-talking and honest as he is.)
Answer I’d like to see: I get put off by people who say they can’t stand hypocrisy. Self-deluding fools! Hypocrisy is the very fount of our social existence – unless you’re a hermit spending his life alone on a mountain-top, it’s something you practice on a daily basis. I can’t stand people who deny that they and everyone they love are hypocrites.
Q: What don’t you like about yourself?
Stock answer: I am too trusting/too kind-hearted for my own good.
(Note: this is a hangover from those Competition Refreshers that advise people to turn tricky questions to their advantage at job interviews, e.g. if the interviewer asks “What are your weak points?” you’re supposed to say something idiotic like “I’m TOO serious about my work”. In a way, this does make sense: if your potential employer is the sort of person who gets impressed by such transparent baloney, you deserve each other and will probably have a good working relationship for life.)
Answer I’d like to see: I befriend trusting people, invite them out, mix poison in their drink, watch as they die convulsing, and then decamp with all their valuables. Then I resurface in another town with a new identity and repeat the process. I know it’s wrong but I can’t help myself. By the way, how about a coffee this evening?
Q: What do you like most about yourself?
Stock answer: I am very modest and humble. (This from the person who’s answered “I am too kind-hearted for my own good” to the previous question.)
Answer I’d like to see: That I am demonstrably superior in every way to the rest of my species, who pale before my brilliance as a glowworm does before the Sun. Stop gaping, kiss my feet.
Q: Who would you want to be alone on a desert island with?
Stock answer: Who else but my lovely wife!
Answer I’d like to see: Who else but Kylie Minogue! But can my wife come along too? We’ll need someone to catch the fish, clean out their innards and cook them over a fire.
Q: What is your ideal of female beauty?
Stock answer: Madhubala’s eyes. I can lose myself in them forever.
Answer I’d like to see: Kylie’s butt.
Q: What is your favourite food?
Stock answer: Nothing to beat maa ke haathon ka rajma-chawal/daal-roti with aam ka achar on the side.
Answer I’d like to see: Liver of a squirrel freshly strangled by maa ke haath. With aam ka achar on the side.
Q: Do you pray? To whom?
Stock answer: I pray to God. He resides in my heart. I believe that God is One and all religions are equal.
Answer I’d like to see: I do pray! I pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose noodly appendages hold the world in place and who fills my plate with meatballs every day. He is the one true God and anyone who claims otherwise will be submerged in hot gooey pasta sauce for eternity. I disrespect all other religions equally.
For a couple of years in the early 1990s my movie-watching centred on American and British classics from the 1930s and 1940s – I gorged myself on the work of directors such as John Ford, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Carol Reed, William Wyler and Leo McCarey, and actors such as Cary Grant, Charles Laughton, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne and James Cagney, watching up to three or four films from that period each week. Those were memorable days and inevitably when I watch or re-watch those films today it’s with nostalgia – as much for my own adolescence as for Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Recently I watched George Stevens’ 1942 The Talk of the Town, a film I knew a lot about but – to my own astonishment – had never actually seen. It’s a wonderfully skilful comedy, only slightly marred by a verbose, overplayed ending. Three very charismatic actors are in the central roles: Ronald Colman as the stuffy law professor Michael Lightcap, interested more in the theory of law than its practical applications; Cary Grant as political activist and rabble-rouser Leopold Dilg who has been implicated in a case of arson but escapes from jail and hides out in the cottage that the professor is renting for the summer; and Jean Arthur as schoolteacher Nora Shelley, the cottage’s former owner, who finds herself caught between the two men.
The film works best as a witty comedy of errors, especially the first half with Nora trying, unsuccessfully, to keep Leopold hidden in the attic while Lightcap tries, equally unsuccessfully, to work in seclusion. The scene where the two men meet for the first time is a great chuckle-out-loud moment. Lightcap is dictating an article to Nora, whom he’s reluctantly employed as a secretary; his piece is full of heavy-handed pontificating about legal theory and Leopold, who’s been sneaking about in the kitchen, can’t help overhearing. So he steps out, munching an apple, and matter-of-factly informs the learned professor that everything he’s saying is hogwash, that none of it is relevant in any way to the man on the street. “Who is this?” the startled professor asks Nora with as much dignity as he can muster. “The gardener,” she replies, quick as a flash.
Under this new guise, Leopold soon forms an unlikely friendship with the professor, though the former's need to overturn conventional ideas and “correct” people’s perceptions is, of course, the very reason he keeps getting into trouble. “It’s a form of self-expression,” he tells Nora later. “Some people write books, others write music, I make speeches at street corners.”
The Talk of the Town is highlighted by writing that stands up with the best of screwball-comedy (“How do you propose we thaw him, Leopold, with a blow-torch?”) and some fine sight gags (a confused Nora trying to peer into a room using the light of a candle that she herself blew out seconds before; a pack of sniffer dogs, mostly harmless-looking cocker spaniels, creating a ruckus; an eye-popping two-wheel contraption driven by the local postman; Nora dropping a fried egg on a newspaper to cover up a “Wanted” photograph of Leopold before the professor sees it). Then there’s the running joke about Lightfoot’s beard, which becomes a symbol of his inability to loosen up and have some fun. When he finally decides to shave it off, there’s a superb faux-maudlin close-up of his faithful man-servant, deeply distressed by his master’s decision, watching with tears glistening in his eyes - even the soundtrack goes all violin!
I’m a lifetime member of the Cary Grant Adoration Club and also have high regard for Jean Arthur, who was a superb comedienne in films like The More the Merrier – but good as they both are here, they come off second-best to Ronald Colman. Words like “debonair”, “urbane” and “suave” could well have been invented to describe Colman’s screen personality (you’ll find a combination of them in almost any description of his career), but we are reminded here that dry wit and aloof elegance weren’t his trademarks; these qualities, when they showed up in his performances, were balanced by a quiet, genteel kindliness. Watch the scene where he pretends to flirt with a girl who might provide a key to the Dilg case: though you can see flashes of the dashing heartthrob of 1920s films (perhaps an older, warmer version of Clark Gable), you also see a charmingly vulnerable social misfit who’s out of his depth in this situation. (“Your physical coordinations are remarkable,” he tells her after they dance together.) This is an excellent performance in what starts off as a character role but ends up dominating the movie. Though Colman was 51 when The Talk of the Town was made, he also more than holds his own in the love triangle that subtly emerges as the film goes on (and it’s a genuine triangle – at times the bond between the two men seems deeper than either of their relationships with Nora).
The film isn’t as effective when it gets serious about the conflict between the two approaches to law (the academic approach, tied up with rigid rulebooks, and the practical, humane approach involving the effect of the law on the common man) – one problem being that most of the arguments are too context-specific, another that they seem out of place in this genre. But thankfully it never gets too serious, and it’s possible to simply enjoy the banter between Lightfoot and Leopold; to appreciate, in a more general sense, the proletariat-plebeian friction between them and the way each of them grudgingly learns from the other - even if the lesson is simply that borscht "tastes best with an egg in it”.
(The Talk of the Town is available on DVD as part of the Cary Grant Box Set, which also contains the popular classics The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and Only Angels Have Wings, in addition to the superb, under-watched Grant/Katharine Hepburn-starrer Holiday.)
[Movie stills from this fine site about Ronald Colman]
It hasn’t been anywhere near smooth going on the family front in the last 4-5 months, but until a few days ago things had settled down in a manner of speaking. Nani was still going to the hospital for two days each week for chemotherapy and the house was still messy and chaotic, with attendants bustling all over the place - but at least the pain levels had reduced and she had even started using the walker for a few minutes each day. However, it looks like she’s definitely on her last legs now, and given her condition that's probably for the best: she had a terrible reaction to the last dose of chemo, has had to be readmitted in hospital, and the internal organs are all packing up, we're told. Members of the family have flown in from London and other places since the doctor has gently indicated that it might be final-farewell time. No doubt it’s going to be a bit anti-climactic, even disappointing, for some of them if she continues to linger for a few weeks – especially considering there’s a lot of tension between various branches of the family and the hospital room is now frequently populated by people who would much rather not see each other’s faces. But c’est la vie etc.
My main concern in these last few months has been my mother, who hasn’t had anything like a proper night’s sleep in weeks; some of her own medical problems have been exacerbated and she’s aged a decade over this period. Nani was never an easy patient to look after, even in much less difficult times: she’s loud, boisterous, very extroverted, derives a great deal of her energy from the constant presence of other people (to the extent of repeatedly calling out for someone who might be resting in the next room, even when there isn’t anything specific to be done) – and in the past this has often caused frustration for my mom who, like me, needs a lot of time to herself every day, a lot of personal space. Of course, in the present situation, with an 82-year-old woman in pain and discomfort, all this is academic – there’s no question of mum expecting to have her own time and space now. But it still is very difficult at times, especially when she has to simultaneously deal with relatives who specialise in the ancient arts of Giving Advice, Delegating Instructions and Passing Judgement from a Safe Distance before getting back to their own lives.
Meanwhile, a proper trip together continues to elude Abhilasha and me. Many cancellations and rethinks have already happened. Around a month ago, when things looked like they would be relatively stable for a while, we had almost confirmed a plan to go to Egypt for 8-9 days. We were supposed to leave on October 5 but postponed it thinking we’d wait till after Ramzan – and this turned out to be providential because, scarily, nani’s condition deteriorated on the night of the 4th, which means that if we’d stuck with the original plan we would have had to cancel at the last minute. In the present circumstances planning a foreign trip beforehand is much too big a risk financially, so we’ve decided to put it off for now and content ourselves with weekend getaways whenever possible.
P.S. There’s much more to be said here – about old, ailing grandparents (of which I have three); about watching the physical breakdown of a woman who led such a vibrant life (even driving herself to the local club for cards sessions every day, past the age of 80); about first-generation NRIs having to cope with the guilt and frustration of not being around for aged parents, and how this manifests itself in strained relationships with the people who stayed back in India – but at this point I don’t know how to say it without making it clichéd and maudlin, or repeating the things that have been written many times before in these situations. More updates will follow whenever.
A couple of early passages from David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk, about the relationship between the great British mathematician G H Hardy and the untrained genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom Hardy invited to study under him at Cambridge in 1913. The first passage is from Hardy’s childhood, with a young vicar attempting to teach him the importance of religious faith.
“As I have been trying to explain to your son,” the vicar said, “belief must be cultivated as tenaciously as any science. We must not allow ourselves to be reasoned out of it.”
“Harold is very good at mathematics,” his mother said. “At three he could already write figures into the millions.”
“To calculate the magnitude of God’s glory, or the intensities of hell’s agonies, one must write out figures far larger than that.”
“How large?” Harold asked.
“Larger than you could work out in a million lifetimes.”
“That’s not very large, mathematically speaking,” Harold said. “Nothing’s very large, when you consider infinity.”
The vicar helped himself to some cake. “Your child is gifted,” he said, once he had swallowed. “He is also impudent.” Then he turned to Harold and said, “God is infinity.”
“God is infinity”: the linking of a mathematical concept with something that is built on faith rather than reason. This is interesting, given that most people see math as a cold, staunchly rational science based on numbers that confer a sense of order. Not much scope here for the “what if”, it would seem. But as this next passage suggests, the very conflict between rationalism and faith can be expressed in mathematical terms.
Often the simplest theorems to state were the most difficult to prove. Take Fermat’s last theorem, which held that for the equation x^n + y^n = z^n, there could be no whole number solutions greater than 2. You could feed numbers into the equation for the rest of your life, and show that for the first million n’s not one n contradicted the rule. Perhaps, if you had a million lifetimes, you could show that for the first billion n’s, not one contradicted the rule – and still, you would have shown nothing. For who was to say that far, far down the number line, far past the magnitude of God’s glory and the intensity of hell’s agonies, there wasn’t that one n that did contradict the rule? Who was to say there weren’t an infinite number of n’s that contradicted the rule?
In a way I think this is a good encapsulation of the agnostic dilemma – the minuscule doubt that continues to exist in the face of all reason; the impossibility of reaching a definite conclusion (or the unwillingness to reach a definite conclusion).
(Will write about the book at length once I’ve finished it - it’s been very absorbing so far, though Ramanujan hasn’t made an appearance yet and most of the early chapters deal with the Cambridge Apostles, a society that Hardy was a member of and that included, at the time, such intellectuals as Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Apparently they spent much of their off-time in lengthy discussions of subjects such as “Should a Picture be Intelligible?” and “Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?”, and in the contemplation of sodomy.)
[Yes, I know this is the fourth post in the last 10 days involving the Dev Anand biography. Yes, I’m obsessed. But want to put the full-length review up here anyway; this appeared in Business Standard last week.]
There’s so much fun to be had with Dev Anand’s new memoir (assuming, of course, that you have a basic interest in the man’s life and work) that it’s almost pointless to read the book chronologically. Instead, you can randomly flip pages to chuckle at the elaborate prose, marvel at Anand’s many blithe descriptions of being chased around by crazed fans, mainly pretty young girls (“a sensuous mouth lunged forward to rub her lipstick on my laughing but bashful face”), or the conviction with which he continues to defend the turkeys that he’s directed in the last couple of decades (the early Aamir Khan-starrer Awwal Number was apparently “ahead of its time” because it alluded to LTTE terrorism a year before the Rajiv Gandhi assassination; further, its cricket theme “found some resonance years later in the Oscar-nominated Lagaan, which Aamir produced”).
You can also scan sex scenes that incongruously combine Mills-and-Boon-style soft porn with a quaint, old-world reticence (“she offered me the opening to her ecstasy”) while noting how these passages are always about anonymous women (his candour is selective; when it comes to public figures, he doesn’t kiss and tell to the same degree, which makes this a disappointing book for stardust-collectors). And you can roll your eyes while reading passages such as the one where, during the shooting of Heera Panna, the red cap he was wearing flew away to land – where else? – on “the bulging breasts of a village belle”.
Romancing with Life is a carelessly structured, overwritten and often meandering book (especially in its many conversation-driven passages, where it’s common to see 20 sentences used where five or six would have sufficed), but it has one thing going for it that most other star autobiographies in India lack: this is almost without question Dev Anand’s own work. It’s full of the cheerful, uninhibited floridity that marks everything the man does, and that no ghostwriter would have been able to simulate. (How could anyone but Dev Anand himself have produced a sentence like this one: “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, in the streets and in public squares.”) The reviewer’s stock complaint “it should have been better edited” would be completely irrelevant here, for Romancing with Life is an immediate representation of Dev Anand on the page in a way that a better written, better edited book could never be.
Which is just as well, for no one is going to read it for its literary merits anyway. This is a memoir meant for Anand fans or for those who have, at least sporadically, admired certain things he has stood for over his career: the flamboyant screen persona (watch his best early films to see how his mix of style and substance often holds up better than the heavy-handed work of his two great contemporaries Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, both of whom were taken more seriously by critics at the time); the determination to keep going in the face of dissuasion and mockery; the willingness to throw his arms around the world, even when the world didn’t particularly want to be embraced.
And of course, the eternal optimism. A reader casually skimming through this book might get the impression that Anand has received nothing but love and adulation from everyone he’s ever met in his life, but it would be short-sighted to see it as a mere litany of the peaks that he conquered (or imagined he conquered). Look closely and you’ll realise that he’s equally open about his failures, but since his default mode is sanguinity, since he so insistently looks at the bright side of things, the downbeat passages are brief and it’s easy to gloss over them. When a beautiful girl he’s made an impromptu date with – for New Year’s Eve at Times Square, no less – doesn’t show up, he handles this with the same savoir-faire that he would any of his conquests. And though he cast himself in all his films as the "Heera" who was irresistible to the "Pannas" (even if the Panna in question was a hot model, 30 years his junior), he has no qualms admitting that in real life he was the one infatuated by Zeenat Aman, and that he felt humiliated when she left his production house for Raj Kapoor's.
Or take the much-anticipated (and disappointing, for it tells us nothing we haven’t read in film magazines before) chapter about his relationship with Suraiya, which was ended by her domineering grandmother. Anand makes it clear that this was one of the most traumatic incidents in his life, but even here he ends on a positive note, with his elder brother Chetan telling him that the episode would make him stronger for battles ahead. (The effect is also leavened, though unintentionally, by a friend's declaration that "Shakespeare will be reborn to give this tragic love story immortality in a play that will beat Romeo and Juliet”.) The recurring imagery of a “special ray” that the sun reserves for Anand (“it brightened my face anew”) when things are looking down would be unbearably trite elsewhere, but it almost (almost) works here, because you can believe that the man is being sincere; this really is the way he’s lived most of his life.
Is Romancing the Life worth the Rs 695 it’s priced at? Not unless you’re a rabid fan (or one of the apparently millions of nubile young girls still lining up to be cast in his next film or plant smooches on him in public). But if you get it as a gift, it’s as entertaining in its own goofy way as his mid-period movies were.
Bollywood celebrities, we are repeatedly told, are in vogue all over the world, what with Shilpa Shetty slaying racists on British reality TV and Salman Khan slaying the English language in an American-produced film. Now Madame Tussaud’s, that grossly overpriced wax museum, is in felicitation mode, planning a statue of Salman to go with its existing ones of Amitabh, Aishwarya and Shah Rukh. But I think this is a serious waste of money and effort when other candidates exist who are already in an advanced state of ossification.
I speak in particular of Jeetendra, whom I last saw more than a decade ago, when he was over 50 but modeling for something called “30-plus”. So it was immensely surprising to find that he was one of the judges on a dance show called “Jhalak Dikkhla Jaa” and that, remarkably, his appearance didn’t seem to have changed at all from those Sadaa Suhagan/Sindoor/Tohfa days spent in the company of Jaya Prada-Sridevi-Baby Guddu. But as the show progressed, I began to suspect that something was wrong. This Jeetendra looked human all right, especially in the long-shots, but close-ups revealed that only his eyes moved and the rest of him was stiff (if well-preserved). Obviously, parts of his face had been carefully worked on by Norman Bates (“needles, thread, sawdust…the chemicals are the only things that cost anything”). The only other possibility is that the show’s producers have cleverly put together a remote-controlled robot to fill in for him, but this is too far-fetched. (Still, it’s fitting somehow that his daughter has spent the better part of the last decade providing us with homegrown versions of the Stepford Wives.)
And then there’s Dev Anand who, as recent posts may have indicated, has been haunting my dreams for days now. The DVD accompanying his book features him bounding about a room, nodding his head manically and saying things like “Helloooo, dear friends, it’s meeee, Dev Anand, saying hiii to all his fans!”, trying very hard to look alive but not succeeding. The man is still 16 years old in spirit and one must commend this spirit etc, but the evidence of our eyes reminds us that his corporeal bits turned 16 in the month that the Second World War began. And they’re falling apart now. (His corporeal bits, not our eyes.)
I’m not sure whether this refusal to look old is vanity or a collective hormonal imbalance, but either way Madame Tussaud’s can afford to downsize some of their sculptors. All they need to do with these gentlemen is overlay a thin coating of wax and stand them upright in the “Bollywood” section. That way, they can turn their attentions to Salman 40 years hence.
To paraphrase a black-haired Dharmendra in Johnny Gaddaar, "It's not the age, it's the dotage!"
[Note: family members advised me against writing this, saying, “Be respectful of elders.” But since the people mentioned here are so young at heart, I’m sure they won’t mind. Besides, they have no strands of white hair and I have several.]
Given the choice I prefer not to simultaneously read a number of books, but have to do it these days because the things have been piling up at a faster rate than ever: some for review, others that arrived in the mail with no strings attached (but which are too enticing for me to toss onto The Ten-Foot-Tall Pile at the foot of the bed), and even a few that I’ve actually picked up from bookstores. Quick list of the ones I’ve got started on:
The Autobiography of a Sex Worker – Nalini Jameela
English translation of Jameela’s controversial Njan, Laingikatozhilaali, first published in Malayalam in 2005. The most notable thing about this book is the matter-of-factness of its tone - Jameela’s casual acceptance of sex as a service she provides to meet “men’s needs” has the effect of deglamorizing sex, turning it into something banal and quotidian (which means this is as far from erotic writing as it’s possible to get). The accent in “sex work” is firmly on “work”; prostitution is treated as a branch of domestic labour. (When the author is first advised to take it up to help support her children, she thinks of it as an agreement where moneyed men “use the woman, the same way the husband does” – tellingly, her first thoughts are that her deceased husband could never have spent so much money on her and that another man she knew earlier “used to give only paddy, two measures of grain, a few coconuts. I was struck with wonder when I tried to imagine a man who could give money”.)
Lots of moral ambiguity here, many glimpses of what lies beneath the seemingly respectable face of society. (Some good points made in this post by Manjula Padmanabhan – an author who herself has frequently plumbed the darkness that underlies many of our polite social facades.) Reading this book and its account of lives that follow very different codes from those we are accustomed to, one is repeatedly reminded that conventional morality (the sort that would regard sexual promiscuity as evidence of “bad character”) is usually a conceit that only privileged people can indulge in.
Other Colours: Essays and a Story – Orhan Pamuk
The Nobel Prize winner on “Living and Worrying”, “Books and Reading” and “Politics, Europe and Other Problems of Being Oneself”. Also, a short story and an interview by the Paris Review. So far I’ve read a few of the essays. From the first one, titled “The Implied Author”:
A writer who is as dependent on literature as I am can never be so superficial as to find happiness in the beauty of the books he has already written, nor can he congratulate himself on their number or what these books achieved. Literature does not allow such a writer to pretend to save the world; rather, it gives him a chance to save the day. And all days are difficult. Days are especially difficult when you don’t do any writing...Let me explain what I feel on a day when I’ve not written well, am unable to lose myself in a book. The world changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, abominable. Those who know me can see it happening, for I myself come to resemble the world I see around me.
Divisadero – Michael Ondaatje
Am rereading Ondaatje's The English Patient before taking this on. Found his prose a little difficult to get into when I read it the first time, but am still interested enough to give this an honest try.
Ode to Kirihito – Osamu Tezuka
Have heard a lot from graphic-novel buffs about this 800-page book by “the Godfather of Manga” (whose Buddha I wrote about in this post), so picked it up without a second thought when I saw it at the Gurgaon Landmark. Medical thriller about a disease that transforms people into dog-like creatures, and a young doctor’s investigations.
And well, there's the Dev Anand book, which I’m still reading with eye-popping glee. Many more quotable passages have been discovered, but I’ll spare you those for now. One observation though: the book should have carried a statutory warning for passive smokers. It’s full of descriptions of someone either holding a cigarette in a stylish manner or puffing smoke into someone else’s face or doing other cigarettey things. In a single page, about the young Dev’s first meeting with his idol Ashok Kumar, we have the following:
“He looked very authoritative, with his trademark cigarette in his hand.”
“He exhaled smoke in a fashion typically his, and laughed...”
“He put the cigarette again to his lips, puffed out smoke and smilingly said...”
Ashok Kumar, amused, stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. He took another cigarette out of the pack...
“Don’t embarrass me, Dadamoni. You just make a good actor out of me,” I said in all humility. Ashok Kumar puffed out smoke, very happy with me.
And a while later: “Guru Dutt let out the smoke in short measured puffs with a broad smile straight on my face. I inhaled it, for it smelt of a coming success.”
Given that Anand appears to have spent most of his early life inhaling second-hand nicotine, it's surprising that he's still around and writing books at age 84. There must be a twisted lesson in this somewhere.
P.S. Vintage Books has a thoughtfully produced series called Classic Twins, where an established literary classic is paired with a more modern work, based on a similarity of theme or ideas. Examples: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry; Dante’s Inferno and Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre; Fielding’s Tom Jones and Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. Superb concept. I’ve bought two of the pairings – Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels/Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment/Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game.
(One of those instances of delicious serendipity: just a few days after buying the Dostoevsky/Highsmith, I saw an interview with Sriram Raghavan where he mentions that the protagonist of Johnny Gaddaar is inspired by Raskolnikov and Tom Ripley!)
But for viewers who are willing to open themselves to it, No Smoking is a daring, imaginative, often brilliant film, one that marries a very personal vision with a keen visual sense and some of the best cinematography recently seen in Bollywood. It takes some time for this to become obvious, however. Notwithstanding a surreal opening sequence set in a snowy landscape, most of the early scenes are routine, even amateurish. John Abraham (as a chain smoker named K) shows off his chiseled upper body in a bathroom mirror and exchanges sophomore lines with his wife Anjali, played by Ayesha Takia (Shrill question: “Tum bathroom mein cigarette kyun peete ho?” Petulant answer: “Tum bedroom mein kyun soti ho?”). Cutesy thought and speech bubbles pop up now and again.
After watching No Smoking, I’ve been thinking a lot about Tarsem Singh’s underappreciated 2000 film The Cell, with its sci-fi premise of a “coma-therapy psychologist” (Jennifer Lopez) entering the mind of a serial killer in an attempt to discover the location of his last victim. Unlike in the usual serial-killer film, there is no physical threat to the protagonist here; the killer has already been apprehended and is in a comatose state. The threat comes from what your mind can make your body believe, and this danger is what the Lopez character must face.
No Smoking has a few obvious things in common with The Cell. Both movies use hypnotic, unsettling visuals to explore the mental landscapes of disturbed people. (The look of the prayogshala scenes in No Smoking reminded me of the scenes set inside the killer’s mind in The Cell.) Both movies are heavily (and often magnificently) stylised, which inevitably leads to the all-argument-ends-here criticism that goes “all style, no substance” or “it looks very impressive and beautiful, but where’s the story/what’s it trying to say?” Both are largely unconcerned with the “real world”, so much so that one flaw in both films is that the waking-life scenes are half-heartedly done; the director doesn’t seem too interested in them.
