Some notes on 21 under 40, an anthology of short stories by south Asian women, published by Zubaan Books. I'm not overly interested in readings/discussions that don't include salmon canapes but the Delhi launch of this book at Habitat Centre was very enjoyable. It began with Anita Roy, commissioning editor, Zubaan, explaining why the launch was called “What’s New Pussycat?” (in addition to the more solemn “Words of Women”): “We wanted a name that would reflect the naughtiness and cavalierness of this collection,” she said, “There are lots of varied voices in this book, and I imagine any reader will hate some of these stories, be baffled or even horrified by some...and hopefully, enchanted by some as well.”
There were readings by two of the contributing writers and a discussion moderated by Jeet Thayil (who began by averring, to the immense relief of all present, that he was in fact a man). The discussion was lighthearted to begin with: Anita related anecdotes about getting submissions from “68-year-old white men” who demanded to know why they were being excluded (despite the publishers’ specification that the writers had to be women, under 40 and south Asian), and about an audience member at an earlier launch who kept asking, "yes, but what is the Purpose of this collection?" (“After a point,” Anita said in her inimitable, giddy-headed manner, “I felt like throwing my hands up and saying, ‘I just wanted to publish a book, that’s all!’ ”)
Among the more serious topics discussed were whether stories written by women are still being looked at in terms of convenient labels, "feminist writing", for instance. "Why can one not simply be a 'writer' and be done with it?" Anita asks in her Introduction, but she continues: "As anyone who has set pen to paper will tell you, there's nothing simple about being a writer. And for many of these young women, writing at all has required a large degree of courage."
That courage notwithstanding, the participating writers acknowledge their debt to an earlier generation of scribes who laid the foundation that has enabled young women of today to write with greater confidence and freedom. "Some battles have already been fought for us," one of the participants said. Another point of discussion was that some of the stories in the current collection manage to be funny and feminist at the same time, which might not have been a realistic option for Indian women writers of an earlier time – they would have felt constrained to employ a tone of gravitas when it came to discussing burning issues.
Mostly, though, 21 Under 40 is good storytelling. "If this collection is representative of anything other than the editors' own quirky sensibilities," Anita says, "it demonstrates that young south Asian women are boldly experimenting with form, style and subject matter." Even a quick glance through some of the stories bears this out. I’ve read only around 10-12 so far, but I enjoyed nearly all of those. Among my favourites is Paromita Chakravarti’s "Instant Honeymoon, or Love in the Time of Television", an acerbic satire of reality television but also of the traditional Indian marriage (where a close examination often reveals cracks in the façade of “normality”) – and perhaps, at a wider level, of the institution of marriage itself (with even the cosiest, most traditional family set-ups comprising individuals whose interior lives are built on self-interest).
Then there’s Nisha Susan's "Broadband and the Bookslut", a very assured and witty account of a bibliophile's attempts to find love – and more importantly, to deal with it – online (parts of the story reminded me of Woody Allen’s “The Whore of Mensa”). Diana Romany's "Ferris Wheel" is a dark, cringe-inducing tale about perversion and the relationship between sex and power. (Anita mentioned that she had second thoughts about including it, and little wonder; the story’s cool, detached tone, much like the narrator’s voice in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, is very unsettling.) There are quieter, more introspective pieces by Sumana Roy (who shows a fine ear for the sort of awkward, pause-filled conversation most of us are familiar with – in this case, between a well-known author and a fan, who gets to meet him for lunch after winning a contest) and Annie Zaidi (whose “ECG”, though a particularised account of a woman’s experience with lack of privacy, also plays on our common fears about hospitals). There’s a graphic story by Epsita Halder and even an engrossing Mughal-Era detective yarn by Madhulika Liddle. Yes, this is a varied collection alright, and much of it is pretty good.
It's worth noting that most of the best stories don't give the impression of trying too hard. At the launch, Anita mentioned that some of the submissions she had rejected read like the writers had pre-determined what type of story was most likely to appeal to a feminist publishing house, and tailored their work accordingly – which meant a compromise on spontaneity. Inevitably, the ones that did make the grade are, above all, examples of good writing and solid storytelling – independent of discussions about the gender divide.
P.S. There’s a related discussion on at this blog. In my view, N (the blogger) has either misunderstood or oversimplified Anita’s position on the issue of feminist writing (I don’t think she’s ever "denied the need for any writing that deals with social/gender issues"). Still, I’ll avoid holding forth too much on this subject, because 1) For obvious reasons, I can’t put myself in the shoes of an oppressed woman living in a traditional society, or any woman for that matter, and 2) My selfish and nihilistic side has trouble relating to a statement like this one: “…writers must give a true picture not just of themselves but of their milieu; they must give voice not just to their own thoughts but also to those of others who cannot do so themselves” Personally speaking, it’s hard enough for me just to get my own thoughts in order, without taking on other people’s burdens as well.
Anyway, do go through the post as well as the comments, especially the one by Anjum Hasan (one of the contributors to the anthology), N’s reply and Nilanjana’s comment further down.
In a measured column written for a World Cup supplement that accompanied today’s Times of India, Steve Waugh comments on the recent slugfest between Sunil Gavaskar and Ricky Ponting. An extract:
“Arrogance is a very subjective thing. Indians might find our addressing seniors by their first names, and jokingly moving a senior official from a picture frame (for which Ponting was reprimanded by Cricket Australia and apologised later) thoroughly unacceptable, but that is our culture and not a manifestation of arrogance. Many of us view the Indians’ inability to carry their own bags from the team bus to the dressing room as evidence of class distinction, but with repeated trips to this part of the world we understand that this is the way here. Many Indians are at sea outside because they can’t adjust to the do-it-yourself culture abroad, and as a result are reluctant to move out of their hotel rooms. I feel this is why Indians were such poor travelers for so long. But young players are adjusting better these days...”
The full piece is thankfully non-acrimonious, especially given Gavaskar’s extremely foolish reference to the death of David Hookes. I enjoy Waugh’s writing, most of which really is his, not ghost-written. His tour diaries as well as his doorstop of a book Out of My Comfort Zone (which I wrote about here) are fine portraits of his personal growth – from a callow, insular young Australian with little knowledge of the world outside the Sydney suburb he lived in to a true global citizen, an ambassador for his country and for the game. Cricket lovers (especially those who have plenty of unforeseen free time now that India’s out of the WC) really should pick that book up. It’s a bit unwieldy in parts (what 800-pager wouldn’t be?) but more than worth it.
(Via separate emails from Shakti Bhatt, editor of Bracket Books, and writer/journalist/blogger Nisha Susan)
Toto Funds the Arts, Delhi Chapter, invites entries for its flash fiction contest. The winner will get a cash prize of Rs 3,000 and two runners-up will be awarded Rs 1,000 each. A public event will be organised for the winners to read their stories along with an established author.
Submission guidelines
1. You cannot be older than 30 on June 1, 2007. Include a statement confirming your date of birth and that the story is original and unpublished.
2. The contest is limited to young Indians residing in Delhi and the NCR.
3. Only one submission is allowed per person.
4. The story cannot exceed 500 words.
5. Entries can be either sent by e-mail to tfadelhi@gmail.com or by snail mail to:
TFA Contest, D 377, 2nd Floor,
Defence Colony,
New Delhi-110024
6. The deadline is 20 April 2007. Please mention your name and contact details separately, not on the entry itself.
(Toto Funds the Arts is a non-profit trust based in Bangalore, set up to encourage and promote the talent of creative young Indians.)
It’s still way too early to make strong pronouncements, but signs are that the desi graphic novel is coming of age. When Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor, widely marketed as the first Indian entry in the medium, was published in 2004, the response was mixed: it was widely felt that though Corridor was clever, and good for a few belly-laughs, it didn't break new ground – the drawings in particular didn’t meet the high standards fans of international graphic novels have come to expect.
But with his second book, a much more substantial work titled The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, there's more to cheer about for aficionados. This is a sprawling story that covers many time-periods and places but is, for the most part, set in 18th century Calcutta – a place populated by a number of colourful character types, and Banerjee does them all justice in a work that is a definite pointer to his artistic growth. The droll humour of Corridor is still in place and the illustrations are more assured: just flip through a few pages of Corridor and then do the same with a few pages of The Barn Owl's…, you'll see the difference. (Thanks to Shamya for alerting me to the book; I would probably have delayed reading it otherwise.)
Last year, Banerjee and Anindya Roy co-founded Phantomville, a publishing house exclusively for graphic novels (and a brave venture for the Indian market). Their first publication was The Believers, a poignant but unspectacular story about a Muslim man returning from Edinburgh to the small Kerala town he grew up in and discovering that his older brother has become involved with a terrorist operation. This was not much more than a moderately engrossing tale told in (moderately well-drawn) pictures; what it had going for it was the price (Rs 150), very low by graphic novel standards.
But with Phantomville's second publication, the bar has once again been raised. Kashmir Pending, written by Naseer Ahmed and drawn by Saurabh Singh, is – visually at least – a more ambitious work than its predecessor. For me, the interesting thing about this book is that content takes a backseat to form. This is a welcome sign because the Indian graphic novel is always in danger of becoming pedantic, attaching too much importance to depth of subject matter and message, and not enough to how that message is conveyed. Internationally, the medium has developed to the extent that the genre of the stories being told is not a big issue. What matters is the execution: if the writing and artwork are intelligent, provocative and play off each other well, even a Batman story can attain the level of High Art. In India, that level of comfort will take some time to achieve. (During a chat with Anindya Roy last year I got the impression that there was a conservatism at work – that he was overly concerned with the potential of comics to spread awareness about social and political issues. "Most people are uncomfortable enough with the format in the first place,” he told me, “so giving them, say, fantasy stories in this format will mean setting up a double barrier. In the initial stages we will concentrate on human stories – dramatic narratives about some of the issues facing the country, which people can relate to.”)
Given all this, I was impressed by the quality of the drawings in Kashmir Pending. The plot itself is fairly straightforward: it’s about unrest in the Valley, about confused and easily manipulated youngsters becoming pawns in the hands of larger forces, the subtext being that it falls to individual conscience to end the cycle of violence in Kashmir. But the real highlight of this book is Saurabh Singh's artwork, in particular the many tenebrous images of prisoners sitting in shadowy cells, praying, passing cigarettes to each other, recounting their experiences, their sunken faces only half-visible (the artist makes very effective use of red and black). The storyboarding is also more complex than it was in The Believers, with panels bleeding into each other, and effective use of cinematic devices such as cross-cutting and sudden movement from long-shots to close-ups. [Note: the image shown here isn’t among the better examples – will try to replace it later.]
One of the challenges that Phantomville faces is supervising what can be a torturous artistic collaboration. The best graphic novels seek to attain a perfect balance between the written word and the visual, and this requires just the right synergy between writer and illustrator. Though I’m sure there are many fine writers and artists in India, most of them would still be unfamiliar with that collaborative process, at least when it comes to working on a book-length project. Hopefully this will change soon, so the medium can build on the promise shown by the last couple of titles.
(Next on Phantomville's catalogue is a collection of four short stories dealing with life in contemporary India, including issues of sexuality. Looking forward to how that turns out.)
Another of my crazy little theories. I was deeply impressed by a newspaper photograph of ruffians tearing down Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s under-construction house in Ranchi, and looking carefully at the expressions of the men it struck me that they were all blissfully happy. This didn’t seem like a group of anguished cricket fans at all, it was merely a bunch of people who were thrilled about having a good pretext to break things. Particularly noteworthy was one man towards the left of the frame, his foot raised like a Ziegfield Follies girl, his face the image of primal ecstasy. (Do try to locate the pic, I couldn’t find it on the Net or I would have put it up.) The thought that went through my mind when I saw him was, “This chap is probably not even very interested in cricket, he watches Godzilla movies instead.”
Ah yes, my theory. It’s this: India being an exceptionally religious country, most of us (humans, I mean) are conditioned to believe that we are shaped in the Divine Image. Darwin's we-came-from-monkeys thesis isn't especially popular here, never mind that one of our most revered deities is, in fact, a monkey. Suggesting that man might be more animal than divine would amount to denying the Gods (and if you do that, you fully deserve to have your house torn down, you atheist scum!).
But the burden of being celestial is too heavy for most of us to bear. We need occasional breathers. Every now and again, we need to stomp on the bricks of half-constructed houses. And by treating cricket as religion or as a symbol of national pride (and under-performing cricketers as fallen Gods or betrayers of national pride), we give ourselves the right to be sanctimonious and indulge our animal emotions at the very same time. This can take many forms: vicious water-cooler conversations in office, a banner that says “Reach Barbados or stay forever in Trinidad” or something more tangible, such as what the people in the photograph were doing. Cricket is the great liberator, allowing us to return to our caveman selves without feeling guilty about it. No wonder we love it so much! QED
(On a more serious note, some excellent pieces that demand to be read: Mukul Kesavan on the desi fan, Sambit Bal on cricket needing a reality check [I nod in vigorous agreement with Bal’s thesis that it might be a good thing if India were to be knocked out in the first round] and this older piece by Amit Varma, “Do we really love cricket?”)
P.S. “Wouldn’t you be this happy if you got the chance to break down someone else’s house?” I asked my mother, showing her the grinning man in the newspaper photo. The question was half-facetious, so I don’t know whether to be pleased or worried that she thought about it for a few seconds and then said “Yes.” The human condition strikes again...
Just a note about the tragic passing away of Rekha Shankar, a photographer at my occasional workplace Business Standard. She died at Safdarjung hospital yesterday, a few hours after her two-wheeler was hit by a truck near Dhaula Kuan. We went for the cremation today and understandably most people in office are very shaken up.
What makes the whole thing even more terrible is that Rekha was a single mother (her husband died, also in an accident, a few months after their marriage) raising a seven-year-old boy. No grandparents in the picture either, and this is going to be harder on the child than most of us can even imagine. (He was brought to the crematorium today and made to participate in a few of the ceremonies – many of us were incensed by this, but that’s another story.) Business Standard will set up a fund of some sort for him, but one never knows how these things pan out, especially if distant relatives get involved.
I never interacted much with Rekha – just the odd joint assignment here and there – but the couple of times that we got to chat for a while (mostly while waiting for an interviewee to show up) all she ever talked about was her kid: about his being the centre of her existence; about how she had to keep balancing the time constraints of her job (there was no option but to work full-time, because of her financial circumstances) with her responsibilities as a single parent and needing to spend as much time with him as possible. Don’t know what must be going through his mind now – or more to the point, how he’ll cope once the initial numbness wears off.
At that age, how do you react on being told that you’ll never see your mother again? The only frames of reference I can draw upon are very scattered memories from when I was seven, built on associations with the year 1984. Getting off the school van on the day Indira Gandhi was shot and calmly assuring my mum that it was all right, the PM merely had a stomach ache and would be okay soon (that’s what the teacher had told us – death had to be soft-pedalled for us at that age, even when a distant figure was involved). My mother buying me the Sharaabi audio-cassette with Amitabh on the cover. Class two Maths homework, and a chart that she drew for a class assignment while I watched Star Trek on TV on a Sunday morning. When this kid grows up he’ll have such memories too, but I’m not sure he’ll know how to make sense of them – they’ll seem suspended in time, with no bridge connecting them to his present, and bearing little relevance to his life as it is then. Hope things work out for him as best as they can.
(a new series)
Item 1
Overheard on 95 FM:
“Sehwag, Ganguly, Yuvraj and Tendulkar played the innings of their careers yesterday!”
[yes of course, because this could only be the logical culmination of the 30,000-odd runs they have between them]
Item 2
Someone telling the Picador editor at the Home Products book launch on Thursday: “This guy Amit is so cool! He’s a Bihari, so he writes his name as ‘Amitva’ on his book?!”
Item 3
Times of India headline yesterday:
“India take shorts off Bermuda”
[and here we were thinking the hyperbole might die down, at least for a few days. The HT headline was a more palatable “Bermuda bullied”]
Item 4
An email (part of an Orkut joint message) from someone I don’t know all that well (not that it would have made a difference even if it had come from a friend). Here it is, reproduced without comment:
It's "World Best Friends Week" send this to all ur good friends.
Even me, if I am one of them. See how many u get back.
If u get more than 5 u r really a lovable person.............I am waiting
F- Few
R- Relations
I - In
E - Earth
N -Never
D- Die
(to be continued)
[Warning: schizophrenic post, probably confused and varying in tone – which can happen if you’re meeting a friend for lunch and a chat but also end up writing it out as an interview for a newspaper, and then blogging it at even greater length. I first met Amitava Kumar in 2004 when his book Husband of a Fanatic was published. In the last couple of years we’ve corresponded regularly on email and through our blogs, and would have caught up anyway when he visited Delhi a few days ago for the launch of Home Products. But Business Standard’s “Lunch with BS” section provided the opportunity to mix work with pleasure. This is a longer, more casual version of the piece that appeared in the paper today.]
“Let’s go to Karim’s,” Amitava Kumar suggested in his email when we were fixing up this lunch. “One or two greasy parathas and an oily rogan josh will be the proper cure for my jet-lag.” Unfortunately, when the day comes, we need to find a place closer to the guesthouse where he’s staying, so we opt for the Gulati restaurant in Pandara Road – not as iconic as Karim’s but distinguished enough, and more likely to be quiet and have empty tables. Besides, we can always put in a special request for extra oil in the food.
On the way to the restaurant, he asks me to stop the car so he can take photographs of some faded posters of wanted criminals and terrorists on a nearby wall. “I’m working on something about arrests and entrapment,” he says, “and I’m interested in the language used to describe terrorists, and how we are expected to recognise them – after all the 9/11 hijackers were anonymous in appearance, they didn’t look like stereotypes.” (We joke about the descriptions on the posters. “Wears shirt and pant and carries China pistol,” says one helpfully. So if you’re a terrorist and in the Golf Links area, wear shorts. And don’t carry a China pistol.)
Settling into the cosy north Indian family atmosphere of Gulati, we order a non-veg kebab platter, some yellow daal, and a half-portion of tandoori chicken – the last in honour of a passage in the book that Amitava had mailed me a few days earlier. He draws my attention to the song playing in the background, “Aage bhi jaane na tu” from the classic Waqt. “Does it occur to you that this music is quintessentially for a restaurant like this, with its associations of a woman in a green sari, singing in a ballroom…”
An established essayist, writer of non-fiction and Professor of English at Vassar College, NY, Amitava is in India for the launch of his first novel, Home Products. He likes channelling his small-town Bihari side when he talks, throwing in a juicy colloquial cuss word, for instance, in the middle of a serious discussion on post-colonial theory. At other times he speaks with a careful, almost exaggerated politeness, and it’s fun to watch the contrast between these two sides; to anticipate the shifts in tone. I take out my tape recorder (because you can’t eat kakori kebabs with one hand and take notes with the other) and he comments on journos who have an aversion to taking notes – “Mere bache mere paas laut ke aayenge aur unki shakalen bilkul alag hongi.” (“My own children, the sentences I have spoken, will come back to me with new faces. They won’t look like me.”)
A while later, as I start to respond to something he said, he picks up the tape recorder and turns the recording side towards me. It’s a quick, matter-of-fact gesture but it bespeaks a meticulousness that reminds me of one of the things I admire most about his non-fiction: the attention to detail, the level of engagement with things around him. In his essays and books this often takes the form of nuanced commentaries on the writing process, and careful analyses of what other writers are trying to do.
In the preface to his celebrated literary memoir Bombay-London-New York, Amitava wrote: “This book bears witness to my struggle to become a writer.” Today he is a well-known literary figure but one gets the sense that the struggle to write, to understand how to write, is an ongoing process for him. This theme finds echo in Home Products, the story of a journalist, Binod, trying to write a film script about a murdered poet, but exploring a number of other stories in the process.
Recounting a line by James Baldwin (“Every writer has only one story to tell”), Amitava says, “I’m convinced now that the only story I have to tell is the story of how to find the words to put down on the page, or how to tell your own story – the story of how you came to be. My idea is that at the end of Home Products, the reader should find that the book Binod was trying to write is this very one, the one the reader is holding.”
[If this sounds confusing, read some of Amitava’s articles here, especially this one.]
Another striking feature of his writing, also reflected in his personality, is the natural, unforced humility. This is markedly different from the show-offish attempts at self-deprecation sometimes seen in other writers. Reading Amitava’s work I often get the impression that that famous quality, the Writer’s Ego, is entirely absent in him; one waits for cracks to appear in what is – surely has to be? – a façade of self-effacement, but it never happens.
For example, in one of his articles, he mentions contacting Rahul Bhattacharya, the talented young cricket writer and author of Pundits from Pakistan, and asking him to elaborate on something he had written. At 44, Amitava is nearly a couple of decades senior to Bhattacharya, and writers are famous for getting more guarded and less accessible as they grow older; it’s difficult to imagine many others of his age and stature openly showing such interest in the work of a much younger man.
Amitava makes no attempt to hide that he’s flattered when I mention this. “Tum aur tumhara pyaar!” he says before getting serious: “The humility, as you put it, may have come from my longtime admiration for George Orwell. I was very much influenced by his honesty and candour, and I wanted to be like that.” Relating the genesis of Home Products, he says he was impressed by a similar candour in the actor Manoj Bajpai. “He told me that he used to wet his bed as a child,” he says, “and that reminded me of Orwell, who was equally unflinching in his descriptions of his own weaknesses.”
In the book, the character of Neeraj Dubey, a small-town actor who makes it big, is based on Bajpai. What prompted Amitava to move away from his comfort zone and tell this story as fiction? “I started off wanting to do a non-fiction book about Bajpai, but then I realised that the guy has told me about wetting his bed but would he tell me if he had a relationship with his aunt? So one has to make that up. Because there are other rooms in the house, and only a fiction writer will enter those rooms.”
Besides, writing fiction carries its own sense of power. “It gave me a thrill,” he says, “to create a wedding night scene where the guy starts talking to his wife about her Geography marks. Making up a conversation like that was a huge delight, and I wish others the same.” The leap from non-fiction was interesting in other ways. “A non-fiction writer wants to explain everything, but the fiction writer must be more restrained. For a long time, I thought fiction meant that one needed to add dramatic details to what had already been collected through travel and research. What I learnt, however, is that writing fiction is more about taking things away and letting the silences stand.”
Does he think of himself primarily as an academic, an essayist or a member of that much-discussed club, the Indian Writer in English? “I’m opposed to the IWE acronym,” he says, chewing on a mutton burrah. “Recently a friend told me that the language in my book seemed to melt away into Hindi. That felt good – I can’t really think of myself as an Indian writer in English.”
“Academics make a profession of knowing things and I don’t want to be the person who always knows. Everything doesn’t come accompanied with footnotes. Academia is about being politically correct – offending no one – but in a world full of offences it’s sometimes good to admit that you carry hate in your heart. My conscious choice in writing has been to admit incorrectness, to make space for faults.”
“So I guess I’m left with being an essayist – or just a writer! Have some burrah,” he adds, “it’s lovely.” And then a non-sequitur – “When you write your article you must include this sentence: ‘While I was praising Amitava Kumar, he exploited the situation and ate up all the kebabs’.”
As people stream in and the decibel levels in the restaurant rise, our talk becomes more general. We touch on his love for Indian food (“Nothing like a warm roti,” he says, “Do you know how to make rotis? Neither my wife nor I know – big disadvantage”), his hometown Patna (“it’s changing fast – Gurgaon isn’t the only megapolis in India!”) …and Salman Rushdie who, displeased by some of the things Amitava has written about him, refused to share the stage with him when he was invited to speak at Vassar College. (Amitava blogged about the incident here.)
Does he think of the Rushdie of today as more a P3 celebrity than a serious writer? “I do, yes,” says Amitava, “and that’s the short answer. The long answer is: he’s a very important figure for us (contemporary Indian authors working in English). Baap hai woh. Aur baap ko gaali dena buri baat hai.” A meaningful pause, and I can anticipate what’s coming next. “Lekin chutiya baap hai. Baap agar roz daaru peeke ghar aayega toh aap usko kitna respect denge?”
[I’m not translating the above into English. You get the spirit of the thing only in the original.]
After a hurriedly consumed fruit cream dessert, it’s time to go – Amitava’s book launch is in the evening and he’d like to grab some shut-eye before then. “When I was living in Delhi as a student,” he says, “I would walk across to Pragati Maidan to watch Shyam Benegal saab’s films. And now he’s going to be releasing my book!” You’d normally expect these words from a first-time author, a launch virgin, but coming from Amitava Kumar they don’t seem at all unnatural.
-------------
A few more quotes that I couldn’t fit in:
On his use of the first-person in essays about other people’s work
The “I” is linked with the “eye”, which is looking at the world. When one of my students comes into class and says he wants to write a story about a guy who goes to the moon and meets a dog and such-and-such happens, I said to him, ‘Whoa! How about coming down to earth and looking at the lives of people around you – there are so many fascinating stories there. Find out what happened to your mother when she was a waitress at that restaurant.’
On post-colonial studies
I have benefited from it, and I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but allow me (he says very deliberately), allow me to at least bark at the hand that feeds me. Post-colonial theory has analytical value – in terms of studying inequalities and so on – but it is also very narrow and not willing to change. In fact I tried to call it by a new name, “World Bank literature”. This could refer to the “literature” produced by the WB itself – the reports etc – which we could consider Literature! Or it could refer to the literature in the countries where the WB exists.
More on moving away from the political correctness of academia
If you’ve read my recent piece on rape – it’s a disturbing thought that a woman should run away with her rapist, and it’s awkward to even discuss such a thing. But these things happened during Partition – there were women who didn’t want to leave the promise of a new life.
Quote of the day
“When my mother was giving me the milk, I was watching Boris win Wimbledon, and now he’s giving me this trophy!”
(Novak Djokovic, after accepting the runner-up prize from Boris Becker at the Pacific Life Open)
Staying up till 2.30 AM paid off. The Great and Glorious Nadal won his first title in eight months, and a big one at that (this is among the highest-profile events outside the four Slams). Very one-sided match to begin with (Nadal took 14 of the first 16 points), got more competitive in the second set, but experience counted in the end – this was Djokovic’s first Masters Series final, while Rafa has been in seven.
Nadal has been seriously good throughout the tournament. I won’t go out on a limb and say he would have beaten Federer if they’d met in the final, but he’s near his best again. I watched the delayed coverage of his semi-final against Andy Roddick too, and on current evidence the gap between world numbers 2 and 3 is as wide as that between numbers 1 and 2. Nadal has been number 2 for something like 85 consecutive weeks now (by far a record) and if he had been playing in any other era he would certainly have got at least a taste of the top position by now. At one point last year his ATP points tally was nearly as high as Sampras’s when he was world number one in the late 1990s.
(Earlier post on Nadal here)
What of cricket, you ask? The reason I enjoy matches like this one so much is that watching the news channels afterwards (and being a fly on the wall when I go to office later in the week) becomes very entertaining. Anguished-looking anchors asking anguished-looking People on the Street “aapko kaisa lag raha hai?” (yes, that most incisive of questions, patented by Indian Journalism). One idiotic message after another displaying on the news tickers. (Imagine how much the telecom companies are making, what with morons around the country messaging their inane thoughts to “123” and “2424” and what-have-you.) People saying “keep the faith countrymen, we will surely bring back the Cup, it is in our destiny”. People saying “the players should be lined up against a wall and shot”.
On SET Max Mandira Bedi's lips tremble but she puts on a brave smile and her eyes shine with quiet defiance, much like Nargis in that poster with the plough across her shoulder. Charu Sharma gulps and makes statements like, "Uh, well, what can one say? Um, er, ulp, um...and now let's look at some Super Sixes." And on NDTV I think it was, someone came up with this heart-stopping insight after the news of Bob Woolmer’s death: “We were thinking this tournament is going to be all about playing games and having fun but then something like this happens and you realise that Life is more important and it’s so much bigger than the game blah blah.”
(One question: How does India losing to Bangladesh count as a bigger upset than Pakistan losing to Ireland, as many “TV experts” were claiming? Is it because India being a much larger country than Pakistan, there are so many more people to upset? My angst is bigger than yours...)
“Nooo, not another song!!”
(*Collective groan*) “Arre, yeh naach-gaana band bhi karo!”
Just two of the many such exclamations I overheard in the movie hall while watching Dreamgirls. Remember, this is a musical, a Broadway-inspired film about the fortunes of an R&B band of the 1960s, with many instances of characters singing the dialogue instead of speaking it during even the dramatic scenes. All this has been well advertised; anyone who had heard anything about the film, or seen even a short trailer, would have cottoned on. Yet here was a significant proportion of the audience protesting the musical segments. (Just to clarify, the protests weren’t about the quality of the songs but about their very existence.)
At the ticket counter earlier in the day, I watched with delight as a gaggle of young girls queued up for the Mayan-language tribal drama Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson; going by the excited murmurings, they thought the hunky actor was in the movie and happy hours of ogling lay ahead. Isn’t he’s old enough to be their granddad? Never mind – I had a good day just thinking about their expressions as the film unfolded. (Have I mentioned before that most viewers at Delhi’s multiplexes develop a nasty rash at the mere glimpse of a subtitle?)
Perhaps it’s my middle-class sensibility at work but I’m always gobsmacked by how eager people are to spend vast amounts of money on films that they have no idea about (here’s an earlier post about this phenomenon). But if you have to reveal yourself as a dimwit in public, at least avoid paying your own way for the experience. Take a cue from a former colleague who enthusiastically went for a preview screening of Brokeback Mountain, convinced – by a perfunctory glance at the brochure – that it was an epic love story, very traditional, in the Gone with the Wind mould. Her eyes were still wide with shock when she returned, her delicate heterosexual sensibilities having been ripped to shreds, but at least it was a press invite. Even the popcorn was free.
Just finished the magnificent first half of Irene Némirovsky’s two-part Suite Française, written in 1941-42 during the German invasion of France but published for the first time last year. What I’ve read is part one, “Storm in June”, which traces the progress of a number of characters from different classes of French society as they flee their homes. Némirovsky and her family were part of this exodus; being Jewish (and a writer who continued to denounce the Nazi regime in her work), she spent those years under constant threat and eventually died in Auschwitz in August 1942 – but her urgently scribbled notes survived, and 60 years later we have the first two segments of what was originally meant to be a thousand-page epic in five parts.
Reading Suite Française with this back-story in mind, I was astonished by the depth of Némirovsky’s achievement. With great writing that comes out of an author’s personal experiences in troubled times, we expect a certain amount of time to have elapsed between the experience and the writing process – so the writer can distance herself from her more extreme emotions and make full use of what Graham Greene called “the sliver of ice in a novelist’s soul”. But Suite Française was written by someone who was living through and simultaneously chronicling one of the darkest periods in human history. Imagine Némirovsky, 38 years old, a Jewish woman in a France that had surrendered to the Nazis, fearful for her own and her children’s safety, and creating this beautifully observed work in those conditions. The shadow of death and deprivation hangs over nearly every character in the book, the author herself would die in tragic circumstances just a few months after she began working on it - and yet each page throbs with life, and with a compassion for humanity and a historical perspective that is stunning given the circumstances. (In this situation, any writer might have been excused for not being able to look beyond their own backyard.)
“Storm in June”, written in 31 short chapters, follows four or five separate groups of Parisians as they come to terms with the sudden upheaval in their lives and the dissolution of the comforts they had taken for granted. Némirovsky gives the most space to a cultured, upper-class family headed by the resolute Charlotte Pericand who, along with her younger children, her senile father-in-law and a few servants, must leave Paris for her mother’s house in Burgundy. Her husband, a respected museum curator, stays behind, as does their eldest son Philippe, a priest.
The second son, the 16-year-old Hubert, is a young man with wildly romantic notions about war, and Némirovsky uses him for some of her sharpest observations about the foolish jingoism of the period: Hubert’s voice breaks with emotion when he asks a group of soldiers if he can join them; he’s so busy preening that he can’t see how weary and disinterested they are. (Later, even when it’s obvious that the French have been defeated, he expects to see a fresh battalion appear on the horizon, shouting patriotic war cries.) But the great quality of Némirovsky’s writing is that Hubert isn't a mere object of ridicule - this is also a sympathetic picture of a young boy growing uncertainly into a man, dealing with his responsibilities and trying to reconcile a naïve worldview with the harsh realities around him.
Others on the canvas include an effete, self-absorbed writer named Gabriel Corte, his mistress Florence, and the middle-aged Michauds, out of home and employment and worried about their soldier son. The chapters alternate between these characters and some stories are more fleshed out than others, which is probably indicative of the hurried, unstructured writing process. (Sandra Smith’s excellent English translation throws up repeated reminders that Suite Française was a work in progress.) But such is the economy of the writing, it doesn’t matter. Time and again, Némirovsky captures a whole way of life (and the crumbling of a whole way of life) in a few sentences.
“Storm in June” is a stunning portrait of people stripped down to their essence – in some cases surviving on nothing more than the reassurance of their loved ones’ presence – but still clutching desperately at things they have been conditioned to believe in, such as class distinctions. It’s also about the delusions they must maintain to keep their sanity intact. When Madame Pericand learns of her eldest son’s death, she consoles herself with the idea that he was a martyr, sacrificing himself for a noble cause and to benefit others; but we have already seen in the previous chapter how utterly mundane and meaningless Philippe’s death was. The book itself repeatedly eschews the idea of a Grand Scheme, a Larger Picture that might make sense of all the senselessness. The only thing worth clinging to is whatever humanity can be found in the present moment.
The recurring theme that grand ideals and beliefs quickly fall away in times of extreme crisis is made most explicit in a passage that begins with Charlotte encouraging her children to share their food with others:
“Jacqueline, you have some lollipops in your bag,” said Madame Pericand, with a discreet gesture and a look which meant, “You know very well you should share with those who are less fortunate than you. Now is the time to put into practice what you have learnt at catechism.” She got a feeling of great satisfaction from seeing herself as possessing such plenty and, at the same time, being so charitable.
But soon after this she finds that all food shops in the vicinity are out of stock, and this discovery effects a big change in her attitude to charity. “Get back inside,” she now tells her children. “I forbid you to touch the food.”
Grabbing the two stunned culprits firmly by the hand, she dragged them away. Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilisation, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more.
This is a one-of-a-kind work. As I mentioned before, most great books about the Holocaust or about wartime experiences are written at a certain distance from the events they speak of. Among the exceptions, there’s Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, written shortly after his experiences in 1940s Warsaw, a book that was suppressed by the Polish government and republished 50 years later (and made into a fine film by Roman Polanski). But the first thing that strikes you about The Pianist is how cool and detached it is (if I remember right, an epilogue suggested that this was because Szpilman was still in a state of shock when he wrote it and had not yet processed the magnitude of his tragedy). On the other hand, there’s nothing remotely cool or detached about Suite Française. It’s warm, passionate, full of a deep, unforced humanity, with empathy for its characters and their foibles.
Where she might easily have contented herself with reportage-oriented writing (she had experience of journalistic work), Némirovsky even finds the time to be playful and experimental. In one delightful chapter, the protagonist is Albert, the Pericands’ cat, whom we follow as he goes hunting outside while the family sleeps (“He was a very young cat who had only ever lived in the city, where the scent of such June nights was far away...the smell rose up to his whiskers and took hold of him, making his head spin”). Structurally, there is little justification for this chapter in the midst of all the others that deal strictly with human movement (though one must remember that Némirovsky never got a chance to fine-tune her work anyway; perhaps she would have dropped or modified these passages) – but it’s a demonstration of the joy she took in her writing, even in these dire times. Here and in many other places, one also gets the sense that the things she was seeing daily, the constant reminders of death all around her, must have intensified her love for life in all its forms.
P.S. around the same time I read “Storm in June”, I was also browsing through the new Granta: War Zones. In his introduction to this collection, veteran Granta editor Ian Jack points out that wars had a remarkably good press among civilians until some years into the 20th century – people cheered and looked forward to armed conflict, with its promise of heroic deeds and the vanquishing of the Faceless Enemy. But this changed with the events of 1914-1918:
After the First World War, the prospect of fighting between nations made people morbid, anxious and fearful. Ten million dead had knocked sense into them...it was no longer possible for even the most gullible patriot to regard modern warfare as a brave adventure where death, in the unlikely event it came, would arrive as a nice clean bullet through the heart. The foundation was laid for a new and realistic appreciation of war – the constant cruelty and frequent stupidity of it – that has coloured attitudes ever since.
Cricket buffs know the old stories about Don Bradman’s failures and dismissals making more news than his centuries and double centuries did – newspaper headlines in England that went “HE’S OUT!” in size 60 font, and so on.
In contemporary sport, this is the equivalent. "He Loses!" would have sufficed.
Federer was just six wins away from breaking the Open-era record of 46 consecutive victories. Oh well, guess he’ll just have to start over and maybe get there later this year!
(Don’t miss the photo on this page. How often does one get to see ol’ Roger being given a consolation pat after a match? These are the images that must be treasured as reminders of the strange times we lived in.)
While writing a mini-review of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1990 album Behaviour for India Uncut’s Rave Out, I came across a very pleasing bit of trivia: Axl Rose, the Guns 'n Roses frontman, was a Pet Shop Boys fan and credited their song “My October Symphony” as an inspiration for “November Rain”.
Now Rose’s opinions and tastes aren’t of personal importance to me (though I admired a lot of his work as singer/lyricist), but what a happy testament this is to the power of great music to break through the walls of insularity. Here’s a case of influences travelling so far that the foul-mouthed frontman of a scabrous hard-rock band could appreciate the work of a genteel British pop duo whose stock in trade was lush synthesizer-dominated melodies. (Could there be a greater contrast between two bands? And not to make too fine a point of it, but Rose is by most accounts homophobic – while much of PSB’s best work hinges on the experience of being gay in the Thatcher era.)
Anyway, Jabberwock khush hua at this minor blow for inclusiveness. I have very wide-ranging tastes in books, films and music and am often surprised by how keen people are to closet themselves off by pre-defining their tastes – this is the kind of stuff I like and this is what I don’t like, and no extending the line please – so that even if there’s a chance that they might grow to appreciate something over time, they’ve already limited their vision. (It frequently happens that someone remarks, “Oh, you like Author A/Director A and Author B/Director B as well? That’s strange! It’s normally one or the other.”)
In the context of music, I know many people who say they can’t stand pop/romantic ballads/what-have-you, thus placing an entire genre outside their ambit; naturally this disallows the examination of an individual work on its own terms without bothering about what category it belongs to. Effectively, you erect a mental barrier for yourself and then your ego puts you in a position where it’s impossible to even peek over the fence. Standing adamantly by your “worldview” becomes more important than opening yourself to a new experience that might just prove to be rewarding.
(And yes, this applies to many other things too, but that’s for another discussion.)
Quick note about my love for the Pet Shop Boys’ music, which I discovered in 1992 when cable TV had just come in and videos from their album Very were being aired on MTV. I bought the album but within a few days my favourite songs weren’t the popular singles (“Can You Forgive Her” and the Village People cover “Go West”) but the ones no one else knew about: “Dreaming of the Queen”, “The Theatre” and “Young Offender”. I loved the gentleness of these tracks, the distinct melodies, the disciplined stillness of Neil Tennant’s voice (which would make his sporadic displays of vulnerability, or his occasional clowning about, so much more effective) …and the lyrics, some of which were very simple in keeping with the requirements of this sort of music, but some that cut deep.
Over the next few weeks I devoured all of PSB’s earlier albums. As a very lonely youngster who felt like an outsider in most groups, I was drawn to their more introspective work, and this is telling, because at the time I knew hardly anything about the subtext of their music – about the more oblique references in some of their lyrics, for instance. For all I knew, there was no difference between the Pet Shop Boys and the regular “boy-bands” of the early 1990s, such as Take That and East 17. But I felt an instinctive kinship with their reflective songs: the languorous “Being Boring”, about misspent youth, and the passing of old friends (having heard this song over 15 years, I think it comes to mean more as the listener gets older); the delicate ballad “Nervously” (a song that resonated strongly with the very shy adolescent I was); and the relatively fast-paced “Left to My Own Devices” with its references to a child who creates his own worlds at the back of his garden (the album, appropriately titled Introspective, featured another song called “I Want a Dog”, the lyrics of which I strongly disagreed with: Don’t want a cat,/Giving no love and getting fat/Oh, (oh oh) you can get lonely/And a cat’s no help with that).
There were many other songs, too many to list here. Incidentally, it was in those glorious MTV-influenced years, 1992-93, that I realised my interest lay more in entire albums than in singles. Singles are useful as an entry point – helping you discover a new band or album in the first place – but once that bit of business has been achieved I relish exploring the whole work and mining the less-known songs on it, the ones that don’t make it to radioplay or get turned into music videos. The Pet Shop Boys did a lot to stoke this interest – there isn’t a song on their 12 albums (not counting the B-side compilations or occasional special remixes) that I can’t hum the tune of at a moment’s notice. (Of course, in the months that followed, I developed similar obsessions for the work of other, very different bands, starting with REM, Aerosmith and Stone Temple Pilots. More on that some other time.)
My old buddy Shamya Dasgupta – one-time soulmate, now a sports journalist of good standing with Headlines Today – is in the West Indies for the next 50 or so days, covering this world cup thing that’s rumoured to be happening there. He’s started a World Cup Diary in his very entertaining, conversational (and carelessly irreverent/non-politically correct) style – first couple of posts here and here. I’m sure we can expect a few more, even after he gets busy with the matches, so keep checking the site or add it to your Bloglines or Google Reader subscriptions.
(Note: Shamya is also the only person I know who would describe a long, exhausting, soul-annihilating journey from Delhi-London and London-Montego Bay [including a few hours spent at Heathrow between flights] as “fantastic flying”. WTF does that term even mean?)
Ask Sudhir Kakar how he feels about having been named “one of the 25 major thinkers of the world” by French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and the psychoanalyst-writer waves his hands in a self-deprecating gesture, looks mildly embarrassed. “Oh well,” he says when pressed further, “it was nice to be one of two Indians on the list.”
This is an apposite reaction, given that one of the aspects of “Indian-ness” Kakar examines in his new book The Indians: Portrait of a People is the subsuming of individual identity to group interests. “A Westerner,” he says, “is more likely to say ‘I want to achieve this’ – whereas in India individual achievement gets tied up with family pride or, at a wider level, with community.”
A casual glance at The Indians, co-written with his wife Katarina Kakar, might suggest a collection of generalisations about a country that’s too vast to be defined in easy terms. But the painting of all Indians with one brush-stroke is not the book's intention. What Kakar is trying to do here – and he shows his hand in a lucid Introduction – is provide “a necessary and legitimate short cut to a more complex reality”. His thesis is that without the big picture – whatever its flaws of inexactness – the smaller, local pictures, however accurate, will be myopic, “a mystifying jumble of trees without the pattern of the forest”.
So what are the vital characteristics of Indian-ness, as he defines it? "A key aspect,” he says, “is how connected we are to each other as a people. Compared to Westerners, Indians are generally more ready to embrace the pain that accompanies too much closeness - one reason why the family structure is still very strong compared to many other cultures.”
But surely individualism is on the rise, I ask. “Yes, and it started in the 1960s and 1970s – in fact I would argue it was more pronounced in India back then – but either way it’s a restricted sort of individualism: the sort that is practiced in negotiation with the family structure, rather than by rebelling against it.”
Another important quality is that this is a profoundly hierarchical society. “Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the largest democracy,” he writes at one point. “What I mean by this,” he explains, “is that one Indian typically looks at another through a variety of filters – including gender, caste, religion, class – all aimed at answering the question, ‘Is this person superior or inferior to me?’ The difference in status between a chief executive and an office peon is the highest in our country.”
And yet, there is also what he calls a “connected hierarchy, based on a humane orientation” – which means that our leaders tend to be authoritative but not autocratic, and usually benevolent. “Once a leader has been accepted, he is looked upon as a father figure and his subordinates tend to be very loyal to him. We have this culture of people willing to work regularly even on weekends. The flip-side is that this can result in sycophancy and a lack of critical feedback.”
The Indians is a very cerebral analysis of a very emotional people; one often gets a sense of the authors taking a microscope to the Indian character the way scientists in a laboratory might do with a culture sample, and this can be discomfiting. But the approach follows naturally from Kakar’s profession, and its advantage is that his book never adopts a sanctimonious tone. The idea isn’t to pass judgement but to understand the long and complex process of societal and genetic conditioning that makes one people different from another.
Aren’t some of the qualities he mentions – especially the ones relating to family closeness – getting diluted in the urban parts of the country? “Yes, that process is underway,” he says. “But also, very often, what we have is the illusion of modernity. Centuries of conditioning and generational ‘wisdom’ still underlie most of our attitudes.” He points out, for instance, that the average college girl in Delhi, even one who dresses in jeans or skirts, will hesitate to break into loud laughter at the antics of a boy who’s trying to attract her attention. At some level, despite the surface liberalness, she is still aware of traditional folk-wisdom pertaining to male-female interactions, which she has absorbed from her community – in this case, the saying, “jo hansi, woh phansi” (“if a girl laughs, she is already in the net”). It's something most of us who have grown up in India can relate to; we've all had epiphanic moments which reveal that we're not quite free of tradition's shackles.
Even the idea of the ever-increasing generation gap, Kakar says, is part of a canon of Western psychology that we – especially those of us who have grown up reading English – too easily accept. “But in India, even in the less conservative families, the generational bond tends to be stronger than the generational conflict.”
Kakar admits to speaking of Indian-ness in terms of a pre-eminently Hindu civilisation that has contributed the major share to what he calls the “cultural gene pool” of India’s peoples. What about the contribution of other cultures like the Mughals and the British? “There have been many positive and negative contributions,” he says, “but they have been gradually assimilated over centuries – it isn’t a clear-cut process. Thinking of examples offhand, I believe the Indian character has benefited greatly from the Brotherhood Ideal that is prevalent in Islam."
This brings us to a nuanced chapter on Hindu-Muslim conflict, where Kakar says we will have to give up Gandhi’s dream of “lasting heart unity” between the two communities. “The differences won't go away,” he says, “and even if it were possible, there will always be someone ready to exploit communal tensions.” What then is his best-case scenario for the future? “An achievable ideal is increased tolerance for the Other, even if one disagrees with their beliefs and lifestyles. We might have to content ourselves with the creation of a common public realm while regarding the other community with benign indifference in private.”
[Did this for Business Standard]
I’ve blogged before about my habit of drifting off into an alternate universe when a film becomes very dull – so that, even as the visuals continue to unfold before my glazed eyes, I impose my own mini-scripts on top of them. I’m no scriptwriter, but this little exercise is usually more purposeful than the original film could be.
This is what happened with Eklavya: The Royal Guard, a film that exists for little purpose other than to present a series of self-consciously beautiful images and more varieties of plump pigeons than you’d ever have thought could exist in Rajasthan. (As if to put the seal on his obsession with these birds, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra also shows us a pigeon-filled scene from one of his earlier films, Parinda.)
Anyway, I watched as one gloomy conversation followed another, as Boman Irani fumed and looked intense, Jackie Shroff snarled and looked intense and Amitabh’s eyes grew increasingly blood-shot and he looked intense. Then, midway through the film, Vidya Balan walked into a room with a large golden oval-shaped object protruding from her forehead. This was the moment I had been waiting for. “She’s wearing a microphone!” I exclaimed to my long-suffering girlfriend, “It’s a bug planted by the policeman so he can listen in on her conversations with Saif and solve all the murders.” I was very pleased by this development because the mystery angle of the film had been going nowhere.
The girlfriend tried to explain that the microphone was one of those tikka things that new brides wear, but this made no sense. Over the next several minutes I watched fascinated as the thing bobbed about menacingly, making Ms Balan look like a Star Trek alien with bad make-up. (The Boman Irani character was a Klingon anyway, so it fit the theme.) And in a powerful climax, Saif ran howling from the mansion, blood streaming from his head, after a kissing attempt was thwarted by the point at the end of the golden globe.
These developments changed the tone of Eklavya for me and made it much more tolerable than it might otherwise have been. “Nice film,” I said, as we emerged blinking into the sunlight outside the hall, “though I didn’t understand why Amitabh didn’t simply beam that evil Jackie Shroff back to his home planet.” It seemed the only question worth asking.
P.S. Apologies to all the little boys around the country who are besotted with Vidya Balan because “she’s the kind of girl you can take home to your mother” (what, your mother’s a lesbian with bad taste? I have to ask whenever I hear this phrase), but each of those pigeons has a wider gamut of facial expressions than this girl does.
Call me slow on the uptake but it took me a long time to get a fix on Jessica Hines’s Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me. I was reading on, puzzled about where this book was headed, and it was page 253 (of 286) and the author was still going on about how “I have to start writing this baby, with or without the help of the Almighty Amitabh…at this rate the first draft should be done by Christmas”.
That was when it hit me. This isn’t a biography of Amitabh Bachchan, a serious attempt to examine his legend or a dissertation on modern Bollywood. It’s a book about Hines attempting to write such a book but eventually giving up and opting to write about herself instead. This is meta-fiction taken to an elaborate new level.
It’s also self-indulgence on such a vast, unapologetic scale that you can’t help but be impressed. We live in an age of opinion pornography where everything is about the expression of the self; where the idea of Objective Truth is more brittle than it has ever been before; where millions of us monkeys are banging away on keyboards around the world, putting our experiences and views on the Internet. But even by those high standards, the narcissism on display here is awe-inspiring. The book jacket (including spine and back cover) has six photos of Amitabh Bachchan and one of Jessica Hines. It should have been the other way round. And the “Me” in the sub-title should have been in a font size 40 points larger.
Hines, who did an M.A. in Film Art at the BFI, is best known in India for her controversial affair with Aamir Khan a few years ago. If you decide to read this book for whatever reason, take one thing as a given: she’s on air-kissing terms with many people who matter in Bollywood. Don’t bother about the whys and hows, just accept the name-dropping interludes.
The first half of Looking for the Big B isn’t bad; Hines really does make a stab at looking for the Big B. She speaks to Shobha De, Yash Chopra and Shashi Kapoor, among others, though rarely gleaning anything that could be considered a major insight (with Kapoor, you get the impression that she’s really collecting notes for a future book about him). There’s a nice pen-portrait of Prakash Mehra, the director of Bachchan’s star-making Zanjeer, now fallen on bad days. And she spends vast amounts of time with the Big B himself, accompanying him to location shoots, having numerous meals with him, watching films with him, tiring him out with wacky questions and comments, introducing him to her publisher.
Hines has a decent turn of phrase and makes a few interesting points about Bachchan's career: about his natural flair for action scenes, for instance (discussing Bombay to Goa, made in his pre-stardom days, she notes how he transformed from awkward “cheeky-chappie hero” to an assured, focused leading man once the fight scene began). There are also some cutting observations about Bollywood and its audiences, such as this one about the failure of Silsila, based on AB’s real-life affair with Rekha: Silsila was not a success. It was almost as if they had all decided to give the public what it appeared to want. The endless stream of gossip had reached a torrent by this time; surely a film about it would go down a treat? But of course no one likes to be confronted with their own snoopy behaviour. It’s fun to twitch curtains and make judgements from afar, but really embarrassing to be presented with someone’s underwear drawer and told it’s okay to rifle through it.
Things promise to get exciting when Rekha agrees to talk to her (don’t miss the surreal phone conversation between them – it’s on page 180, so you can leaf through it quickly at a bookstore), but the interview fizzles out, and by this time so has the book. Amitabh vanishes for long stretches and what we get instead is Life of Jessica, written in tedious dear-diary style. Jessica doing yoga, Jessica in a beauty parlour, Jessica battling mosquitoes in the Pune Boat Club, Jessica flirting with a butler, Jessica in a luxurious suite in Dubai’s Burj hotel, imagining that the huge mirror above her bed is beaming videos of her to some website. (This is ironic, because the book itself is a part-exercise in exhibitionism.) Jessica being affectedly cute, self-deprecating and witty in turn, going out on a limb to make herself as likable as possible, hopping from one foot to the other behind Amitabh as he unsuccessfully tries to make her an omelette (don’t ask).
In scattered passages – too few, unfortunately – Looking for the Big B does provide a fresh, startlingly candid view of Amitabh Bachchan. One wouldn’t have thought this possible, given how ubiquitous the man has been in our lives in the last three decades (and especially in the last few years, with the overexposure jading even his most devoted fans). But Hines has the advantage of the outsider’s perspective; she doesn’t bear the burden of adoration that the average Indian does, and this in turn seems to make her subject more relaxed when he’s in her presence. She speaks of Bachchan with an offhand flippancy that we haven’t encountered before in thousands of pages of magazine articles and books; it’s almost as if she were – perish the thought – describing a Regular Guy. She writes of him fixing her in a stare that’s “a cross between a monitor lizard and Paddington Bear”. Trying to make small talk with him when he’s broody and closed, she says, “is like trying to convince Mr Kurtz to leave the jungle”. In the more inspired passages of this sort, she gives us the unlikely spectre of a smaller-than-life Amitabh, watching her balefully, trying to figure out how he ever got involved with such a nutcase.
On the rare occasions that Looking for the Big B works, it’s because of this demystification: the novelty value comes from the way Hines takes the Star of the Millennium, the cynosure of a billion pairs of eyes, and coolly turns him into a supporting player. The problem – and it’s a big problem, one that prevents the book from achieving any lasting worth – is that the lead role isn’t played by someone more interesting.
(An earlier post on the Ubiquitousness of Amitabh here)
Manish Vij of Ultrabrown has some nice camera-phone photos of the Kitab festival, especially the reading/launch held at Good Earth. Disclaimer: the one of me with the Sula has clearly been tampered with - I never look that beatific while consuming wine and listening to poetry. (I'm also in a couple of the more indistinct pics near the bottom, chatting with poet Vivek Narayanan, who hates being photographed. Careful, Manish.)
It used to be said of the Mahabharata that “what is not there is nowhere to be found”.
In the age of Wikipedia, this is clearly no longer true.
During pon farr (mating cycle), the brain is thrown into a neurochemical imbalance and loss of logic and emotional control. The individual may stop eating and sleeping. As the condition progresses, the Vulcan undergoes the plak tow, or blood fever, and becomes unable to speak or think clearly - thoughts of mating overwhelm them.
(Link. Also see Kolinahr)
(When is a battle-axe more than a battle-axe?)
Warning note: if you think human children are adorable little angels, run along now, because this column is based on the understanding that they are Evil Incarnate.
The condom failed but at least there’s berth control
As a child I remember thinking adults were all part of some secret club, privy to information about life's mysteries that I would miraculously learn the day I joined their ranks (it had to be a specific day). Nothing of the sort happened, of course, but today I feel the same way about children, except there's no chance of joining their ranks if one doesn't believe in reincarnation. I'm convinced they are Satan's minions, their minds forever bent towards the task of making my life intolerable.
Not having a fondness for children (the human variety, that is – I do like kittens, and even baby crocodiles can be tolerable when they aren't teething), I can't be bothered to give them sweet smiles or say sentences like "So what's your name?" or "Coochie coo gumchie gumchie." And even if I were inclined to break the ice, I lack the comfortable smugness, the natural sense of superiority, that many adults feel when in a toddler's presence. (Maybe I never grew up.) So I avoid eye contact altogether, hoping the thing will toddle away and leave me alone.
But it never does. One thing I learnt on recent train journeys was that children can't stand it if you don't acknowledge their presence.
"What is that man doing?" one of these creatures asked its parent loudly. In fact, I was doing nothing more obtrusive than reclining by the window with a book in my hand, alternately reading and looking outside – but this was unacceptable to the child, for I was paying it no attention. It fixed me in a vise-like stare.
In Enid Blyton books one routinely comes across parents telling their children not to stare at strangers, it's rude. But India is a country of starers (we call it "being warm and neighbourly and interested in other people"), so no parent here would dream of issuing such a command. Instead the mother started glaring at me too.
When I continued to pay no notice, the child came up to me, placed a finger in its half-open mouth in that sinister way children have, and commenced kicking my shin. I ignored this for several minutes but then the wound began to fester and throb, so I moved my foot away delicately (still without making eye contact), whereupon the reproachful eyes of both parents burnt into the side of my head. Who is this man, they seemed to ask, and how dare he be so heartless as to resist our oiley-woiley's charms?
I thought I had won the mini-skirmish, but train journeys are tricky things, and over the next few hours the child exacted its diabolical revenge. It screamed incomprehensible satanic verses into my ear while its parents looked on fondly. (Briefly, I considered reprising an episode of Beavis and Butthead where the scatalogical Beavis gives a nonsense-burbling infant some of its own medicine.) It overturned a tray into my lap just as I had finished pouring out my tea. I returned from the toilet to find my magazine in shreds. And then it resorted to the oldest trick in the book - howling loudly to gain the sympathy of its parents and fellow passengers. For a few alarming moments, I feared I would be ejected from the train on the grounds of hurting people’s sentiments.
Eventually, on getting home, I discover that our Railway Minister has presented a shockingly timorous Budget - no special provision for sealed compartments with cages for all the little humans. I propose this measure be incorporated with immediate effect. Protesting parents can be put there too, and preferably chained to the wall and made to sleep upright. On balance this would be better for humanity than that Garib Rath everyone’s going on about.
Mostly, though, 21 Under 40 is good storytelling. "If this collection is representative of anything other than the editors' own quirky sensibilities," Anita says, "it demonstrates that young south Asian women are boldly experimenting with form, style and subject matter." Even a quick glance through some of the stories bears this out. I’ve read only around 10-12 so far, but I enjoyed nearly all of those. Among my favourites is Paromita Chakravarti’s "Instant Honeymoon, or Love in the Time of Television", an acerbic satire of reality television but also of the traditional Indian marriage (where a close examination often reveals cracks in the façade of “normality”) – and perhaps, at a wider level, of the institution of marriage itself (with even the cosiest, most traditional family set-ups comprising individuals whose interior lives are built on self-interest).
