Dominique Lapierre’s Once Upon a Time in the Soviet Union, an account of a historic road trip across the USSR in 1956, has just been published in India by Full Circle Books. This isn’t an in-depth travelogue or a sociological study of the unimaginably vast enigma that was the former Soviet Union: that much should be clear from the size of the book (it’s less than 200 pages of text in the double-space format, which makes it more like 120 regular pages). But it’s a friendly starting point if you want a flavour of Russian life in the 1950s and aren’t yet ready for something of the scale of, say, Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium.
The story of this amazing road trip began in early 1956 when the seed of a crazy idea entered the minds of two young French journalists, Lapierre and Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini, reporter and photographer respectively for the newsmagazine Paris Match: what if they obtained permission for a motorcar trip across the Soviet Union, to observe the world within the Iron Curtain in a way no citizen of a capitalist country had yet done? Given the political divide between the USSR and the western world at the time, this seemed about as achievable a task as hitchhiking to the moon – and yet, through a combination of enterprise and good fortune (and much to their own astonishment), they got the go-ahead from none other than Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party. (Khrushchev had recently denounced the crimes of the Stalin regime in a famous speech that caused an uproar in the USSR; the young Frenchmen get a sense of the shock-waves left behind by this speech at various points during their journey.)
What followed was a 13,000-kilometre road trip for Lapierre and Pedrazzini in the company of their wives and a young Russian journalist named Slava. Once Upon a Time in the Soviet Union is about some of the highlights of this long journey. The first thing to note is that it’s written in a very breezy style. The predominant tone here is that of the wonder of discovery; of young people who have taken individual freedoms for granted trying to grasp the workings of a very unfamiliar way of life. The joy of the experience comes across in much of the writing – there are descriptions (and photos) of people gaping at the colourful French car on their roads (“we were being scrutinized like exotic fish at the bottom of an aquarium”) and a running joke about how difficult it was for them to obtain high-quality fuel (he calls it “Muscovite elixir”) for the pampered vehicle.
A more melancholic note is struck by anecdotes about an elderly lady begging them to let down a tyre so she “could breathe the air of Paris” and about an Armenian refugee unable to return home. There are also pen-portraits of a railway worker from Minsk, a sales assistant from Moscow, a factory worker in Gorki, a Ukrainian peasant and a Tiflis surgeon, whom the young journalists hold up as examples of the Soviet Everyman. Lapierre also conveys something of the confusion and despair that followed de-Stalinisation, reflected in a popular (and very downbeat!) lullaby that asked, "Was Stalin good?", answered "Bad, little girl...very bad" and then continued:
Is Khrushchev good?
We shall know when he is dead, so sleep, little girl, sleep.
(What a stoical, resigned group of people!)
Despite his claim that “these pages are an entirely objective account of the lives of Soviet citizens who spontaneously welcomed and opened their doors to us”, Lapierre doesn’t refrain from voicing his views about the subtle brainwashing, “the lack of any spirit of criticism” that was integral to the working of the socialist system; the hand-to-mouth existence of people not permitted to own land or start private businesses; and the belief, sustained by deep-rooted idealism, that the Soviet Union would last forever. This is most noticeable in his good-natured arguments with Slava, who is a member of the Communist Party.
“Slava, how is it that the hotels in the USSR are generally so disgustingly filthy?” I asked him one day point-blank.
“When they are dirty it is the fault of the person in charge,” he replied in a similar sharp vein.
“But why does the person in charge not set his heart on making sure their establishment is clean?”
“Because they are bad at being in charge!”
“But why? Because the person put in charge of a hotel or a roadside petrol station is never going to work quite like someone who owns his own business. By suppressing private ownership your system has killed individual initiative and the competitive spirit...Why should the hotel manager in Sukhumi put himself out when the hotel is the only one in town approved by Intourist, it’s always full and he has no reason to increase his clientele? It isn’t so much a question of mistakes or problems but of the system, isn’t it?”
“Come back in ten years’ time, Dominique,” he said with conviction. “In 10, 15, maybe 20 years’ time, my country will have caught up with America’s living standards!”
I was struck by the bond that develops between Slava and Lapierre despite their seemingly irreconcilable clash of ideologies and despite the things that happened after the trip ended. In February 1957, when the Paris Match published Lapierre’s long report of the journey along with Pedrazzini’s photos, Slava was taken to task by Soviet authorities who had expected him to keep a stern eye on the foreigners and were unhappy about the amount of information leaked out. Slava responded by writing a fiercely critical article about Lapierre in a Russian paper, also publishing a photograph he had surreptitiously taken (and which is included in this book) of Lapierre scaling the gates of the Livadia Palace during off-hours. Despite this attempt at redemption, Slava was exiled to Siberia for three years, and yet, Lapierre relates that when the two men met again in 1962, “we hugged each other with a joy that showed we had both buried our grievances”.
All that remained, in other words, was the memory of the fine time they had had together during the journey, the shared conversations and adventures. It’s reflective of how people manage to sustain close personal relationships despite strong differences in beliefs or backgrounds, and it reminded me of some of the points Amartya Sen made in Identity and Violence. (Another example of this is a touching little episode about a forest-keeper near Brest-Litovsk who hosts Lapierre and Pedrazzini and then, at farewell time, asks them to pass on his greetings to “all the forest wardens in France”.)
[Did a shorter version of this for Outlook Traveller]
Just a pointer to Siyahi, a new literary consultancy founded by Mita Kapur, who has done a fine job of organising and overseeing the Jaipur Literature Festival for the past three years. Mita told me recently that the mission of the new project is to bring literature in regional languages to the forefront by ensuring cross-language translations globally. The genesis of Siyahi was her many interactions with discontented Indian writers. “Every time I spoke to writers from languages other than English,” she says, “there was a sense of discontent – invariably they felt they hadn’t been represented well enough in the mainstream.”
The Jaipur festival itself has made a conscious effort to incorporate writers from around the country, but there can only be limited results at an event attended largely by people whose first language is English. Besides, in a country as vast as India – connected more by English than by any other single language – it becomes all too easy for pockets of insularity to form, denying readers of one region the chance to savour the literature of another: as Mita points out, the average reader in Gujarat or Rajasthan would not even have heard of a major Malayalam writer like O V Vijayan, much less had access to his work. Those of us working on the literary beat for English-language media are always aware that there's a huge lacuna in our understanding of Indian literature, that what we get to experience and write about is only the tip of a very large iceberg, since there is little or no access to high-quality translations of work in other languages.
“I felt more needed to be done in terms of giving regional languages a chance to compete on an equal footing,” Mita says. Hence Siyahi, which is intended as a forum for authors, poets, researchers, translators and publishers. The next five years will see the consultancy facilitate the publication of 10 to 12 books each year through mainstream publishers, nationally and internationally. They have signed up two writers, Sampurna Chattarji and Karthika Nair, with Harper Collins, and have also begun work on translation. (One of the books is Kissa-e-Rangeen Guftaar, a hand-written Urdu novel by Ajmat Ullah Niyaj Dehli, first published in 1817, which is being translated into Hindi and later, possibly, into English as well.) They are also tying up with publishers in the South.
To provide a platform for writers and publishers, Sihayi will have literature-based events in the form of festivals and seminars. A keynote event will be the “Translating Bharat” conference, to be held in Jaipur in January, just before the literature festival. Since Translating Bharat will take place on January 21 and 22, and the regular fest will follow from the 23rd to the 27th, the authorities have decided to call it the Jaipur Literature Week. Highlights will include a session on the North-Eastern languages, including a Mizo reading (the audience will be given papers with an English translation), a dastaangoi enactment by Mahmoud Farooqui and a performance of “Kabir ke Dohe” by singer Tipaniya ji (who, Mita notes regretfully, has performed in the US but never before in Jaipur – despite being Rajasthani).
Mita spends much of her time these days traveling with her laptop, arranging meetings with publishers, authors and potential translators, or having prolonged online discussions with her co-directors and editors, and she looks appropriately frazzled through it all, but she also admits that Siyahi was born out of “laughter and insanity”. Her original name for the consultancy was the tongue-in-cheek “Rejection Note” (a reference to the predicament of many promising regional-language writers, whose manuscripts good publishers often don’t have time for) before deciding to change it to something more austere. She’s pragmatic too, knowing that nothing will get done in a hurry. “We’ll have to build things up gradually,” she says. “For instance, I want translations to be of a very high quality – which hasn’t historically been the case in India – so I’m looking at samples of 2-3 chapters before hiring anyone.” Siyahi will also consider drawing up separate contracts for translators, rather than paying them on a measly Rs 1-2 per word basis, which she believes has the effect of encouraging assembly-line work.
Do keep an eye out for details of the Translating Bharat conference in January – they should be available online soon. And Mita Kapur's contact details are here.
[Some posts about the past two editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival: 1, 2, 3, 4]
Much chuckling and bwahahaha-ing was induced by the designation given on this press invite that came in today:
I suppose it was inevitable. I often meet people at book events/conferences who think of me primarily as “that blogger” and sympathetically ask questions like, “So, are you still only writing for your website or do you work elsewhere too?” Of course, some of these people are non-bloggers who use restricting terms like “blogging community”, possibly think of bloggers as an exotic sub-species that dropped out of the sky a few years ago, and still find it hard to process the idea that journalists can also be dedicated bloggers on the side: hence questions like "How did you get this publication to print your article?" Or there’s the acquaintance, unaware that I was a journo for years before I started blogging, who will come up and excitedly say, “You’ve broken into the mainstream, huh? I just saw your byline in such-and-such magazine.” It’s a bit annoying at times, but mostly fun.
It’s easy to understand too. Before Jabberwock started, things were very low-profile. The dubious highlight of my early career came at Living Media’s daily tabloid, where my main job was to put together the World page, fill it with offbeat stories and sexy photos and give cheesy captions: at one of the weekly meetings, I received an informal citation for my “achievement” in selecting a picture of a model in a tiny black teddy and captioning it “Wah wah black slip”. (That this is arguably still the highlight of my journalistic career is another matter, of course, and one I prefer not to discuss.) I was very bored in those days: once, when I was working the graveyard shift for the group’s 24-hour website, updates from the 2001 Bonn conference – which I wasn't all that interested in – were hogging the front page. At one point, four of the six news items on the homepage were Bonn-related, so I amused myself by giving them straps like “Bonn again” and “Still Bonn”, which didn’t go down well with some of the editors. (Because it was a serious current-affairs topic, apparently.) And then there's the incident of the dummy headline "Please Give Head", which is too painful to recall here.
Anyway, long diversion there. The point is, as a journo I was mostly doing very workmanlike things, stuff I wasn’t inherently interested in, and this coupled with my natural lack of ambition meant that things simply chugged along for a long time. It was only after I started blogging (and simultaneously working on the literary beat more purposefully than before) that people in other publications noticed my work and I got a few attractive job offers and feelers for individual assignments – all of which eventually allowed me to trade in the ball-and-chain routine at Business Standard for a retainership deal that would allow me to write for others and work out of home. Essentially, whatever standing I have as a feature writer/reviewer is more closely tied to the blogging than to the journalistic work that preceded it. And I continue to put up more extensive versions of my journalistic pieces on this site. So it isn’t surprising that many people who have come to know me only in the past 2-3 years persist in the “what do you do besides blogging?” line of questioning.
But this press invite I wasn’t expecting (especially since it involves an art exhibition - something I've never covered on the blog or elsewhere). I wonder if I should ask Blogspot for a contract now.
[A related post: Jabberwock turns One]
Didn’t think much of Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal; in fact I can’t remember the last time I found it so hard to sit through a film (no wait, that would be this one, which was even harder). However, the film was partly redeemed by the best scene involving a human nose since Woody Allen's Sleeper.
Notes
– John Abraham’s character Sunny Bhasin, a cocky young football star, has one of the most persuasive lines in the film, though it’s a line the film itself doesn’t pay adequate attention to. “I play football, I don’t perform in a circus,” he snaps when asked to join a Southall club comprising various potbellied men who kick a ball around to prove that their sense of community, their “Hindustaniyat”, is intact despite their having left Hindustan years ago. (Now this sense of community is under threat because moneyed people want to build an entertainment park or something such on their beloved club ground. To deflect these plans, they must rapidly get their act together, hire a washed-up former player as a coach and rise up the ranks of the British football league; hence the film.)
But as it turns out, Sunny's derisive “circus” is an apt description of this motley band of buffoons (who collectively go “YAYYY!” when they discover money sent by an anonymous benefactor and realise that there is one other person who believes in them), and the problem is that it remains an apt description despite their climb towards glory in the second half of the movie. Even the soppiest underdog-has-his-day film must reach for credibility at some point, but the transformation of these dawdlers to a league-topping side is never remotely believable.
At the heart of this story are some very simple-minded conceits: that the human spirit (in this case, the Hindustani spirit) can substitute for other deficiencies like basic incompetence (and potbellies) even in a sport as physically demanding as football; that sheer will to win (as if other teams aren’t equally determined) can override all the other factors that go into a sporting victory; that only the team we’re meant to be supporting responds to the thunderous pep talks delivered by its coach (inevitably a man with demons in his closet, trying to redeem himself) while the opposition is content to play supporting role on the big stage.
Now, to an extent, all inspirational sports movies have to engage with such simplifications. Even Chak De India, a much superior film to Goal, laboured at times to convince us that its team of underprivileged, faction-ridden Indian girls could win a world championship against the war-hardened, ruthlessly efficient Australians. But where Chak De succeeded was in the attention it paid to the staging of its sports sequences and in the behind-the-scenes training given to its actors, so that they at least looked like competent hockey players, and what we saw up there on the screen looked like a professional hockey match (it helped also that the climactic decider in that film was a tie-break, which is more about skill and strategy than brute force). In Goal, on the other hand, we never get a sense of the nuances of football, of strategies or manouevres – in fact, with some of the players in the Southall club, we never get the sense that they can do anything other than trot up to a ball and kick it at some point within the 0 to 180-degree arc in front of them. The result is akin to a slapstick National Lampoon feature (I don’t remember now whether there was a movie called National Lampoon’s Football Academy, though on this evidence there should have been) rather than to a rousing Remember the Titans-type film (which is what Goal was trying to be).
– It could still have been a very funny movie (unintentionally, that is) if it weren’t so loud, shrill and prolonged, and so reprehensibly manipulative in its depiction of racism. There’s the Aston Villa skinhead, a stand-in for the average Brit player who doesn’t want a south Asian on his team: he tells star player Sunny, “Go home, Paki.” (I’m still undecided whether Sunny gets offended by this because it’s a pejorative in general or because he doesn’t care to be mistaken for a Pakistani). There’s the Evil White Woman who wants to take over the Southall ground (personally, I thought she might put it to better use than we see the footballers doing) and who will eventually be forced to extend the lease, much the same way the British in Lagaan are forced to defer taxes for three years. The perpetually scheming, contemptuous look on this woman’s face and her frequent exclamations of “Shit!” when her diabolical plans are foiled are so overdone, it would be enough to make Lagaan’s Captain Russell break out into a hearty rendition of “Jana Gana Mana”, like the gora lad in Loins of Punjab Presents.
– When the whites do unsporting things on the field (e.g. faking a tumble to earn a penalty), they exchange meaningful looks, leer and perform high-fives – our cue to feel sorry for our persecuted desi heroes. Essentially, we’re in this strange zone where an Indian team is supposed to be competing on equal footing with tough foreigners, but at the same time we’re expected to shake our heads, cluck our tongues and feel wronged every time someone from the opposition shows a bit of the tough-guy spirit. It’s like the shameless, play-to-the-gallery scene in Lagaan where the little boy sent in as a runner for one of the players is caught backing up too far by the Brit bowler, who then runs him out: tears streaming down the kid’s face, expressions of disgust and betrayal on the faces of the villagers, and suddenly we aren’t playing a hard sport anymore, we’re just nurturing our victim mentality.
– But oh, just to balance things out, there’s a superfluous beach scene featuring skimpily dressed white women, thrown in to show us that goras can be put to some good use as well.
– I laughed out loud at the scene where Shaan (Arshad Warsi) says that Sunny’s playing for a British league team amounts to spitting in the plate that he’s eaten from (“jis thali se khaata hai, usi mein thookta hai”) – that’s a rich analogy coming from an Indian who voluntarily migrated to a foreign country and who has, by most accounts, had a good life there; he might want to rethink what the “thali” is in this case. I’m not getting into Tebbit Test territory here, but given the circumstances of these people’s lives, this “thali mein thook” business reeks of self-righteousness. As does Shaan’s remark, made in a different context, that “the British had all the guns and cannons, and yet we got them out of our country without even lifting a hand”. (Right, right, and then you missed them so much that you migrated to their country a couple of decades later.)
The nose
– Thankfully, Goal does manage to be funny (unintentionally, of course) in parts, notably in an ending that extracts every possible drop of dramatic tension from the fate of – hold your breath – John Abraham’s nose. That’s right: while a match is on, a doctor checks an X-Ray and discovers that Sunny has a hairline fracture in his proboscis! The opposition team finds out and decides to cash in! (Because they’re evil racist goras!) They elbow him in the nose – once, twice! (They never get penalised, the referee is a racist gora too!) The nose gets the worst of the climactic goal too, calamity looms and there is a heart-stopping moment where we don’t know whether the felled Sunny will open his eyes again (except that he’s John Abraham, and Bipasha Basu is waiting in the wings, and this is a feel-good film, so we really do know, don’t we?).
If Goal had known it was a comedy at heart, it might have had the good sense to end with a shot of Sunny’s long-suffering nose ascending to heaven while the ghosts of football heroes past stand about in the clouds tossing marigolds at it and chanting "We dig John's nose". But no, it chooses instead to give this lame-brained subplot all the tragic resonance of Amitabh blowing himself up along with the bridge at the end of Sholay. Will the nose live to sniff another day? Of course it will, and if this film does well with NRI communities all over the world (who see in it their own lifetime struggles to preserve “Hindustaniyat”), who nose, there’ll probably be a sequel too.
P.S. John Abraham is probably the best thing about the film: the role suits him and he does the brattish grin-and-squint thing better than most other actors. (Bipasha is hardly there: the highlight of her role is a scene where she looks deep into his eyes and seductively whispers "Asshole" - much the same thing the film is doing to its audience all along.)
Veteran actor Manoj Kumar – he who turned the trembling lower lip, the twitching eyebrow and the martyred expression into an art form – is upset about how he was parodied in Om Shanti Om. Now we can’t have a veteran actor (much less one who by his own admission is a living embodiment of patriotism) feeling humiliated, so here, by way of compensation for Shah Rukh Khan and Farah Khan’s insensitivity, are a few of my favourite moments from Manoj Kumar’s films:
- From Kranti: this multi-starrer has countless fabulous setpieces, including the timeless song sequence “Zindagi ki na toote ladi” where a slithering Hema Malini donates her cleavage to the revolutionary cause. But my favourite scene is the one where Manoj Kumar and Dilip Kumar have been captured by the British and made to stand precariously, nooses tied around their necks, on two ends of a weighing scale-like instrument. With their lives and the future of their country thus at stake, our heroes unexpectedly begin singing a song that includes the lyrics: “Mera channa hai apni marzee ka” (rough translation: “My chickpea has a mind of its own”). Perhaps it’s because the scale makes them feel like legumes in a bazaar, though I’d be more inclined to think of two giant chunks of ham.
- From Purab aur Paschim: The upright Mr Bharat visits decadent London (it’s a – shudder! Lip tremble! – Western city) and is shocked by how Indians abroad have forgotten the values of their motherland. Particularly the haughty Saira Banu, who smokes cigarettes (!) and wears a mini-skirt (!!). Bharat is dismayed, though the twitching of Manoj Kumar's thespian eyebrows as he looks down at her uncovered legs suggests that this isn’t the only emotion he’s feeling. Eventually he converts her to the pallu-covered Good Indian Girl, but not before taking a few more peeks beneath the pallu.
Note: contrast Kumar’s approach in this film with that of Dev Anand, who coincidentally was also parodied in Om Shanti Om. In Des Pardes, which Anand directed and starred in, his character actively encourages Tina Munim to strip, saying the equivalent of “When in Rome, wear what the Romans do!” Manoj Kumar would have covered his face and looked away. (To paraphrase Tolstoy, "Every Bollywood legend is a legend in his own way, and they can all be parodied regardless.")
- From Gumnaam: in this 1960s thriller based on Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (alternative title: Mr Bharat and Nine Other Indians), there’s a blink-and-miss moment when the alluring Miss Kitty (Helen) comes a little too close to the dashing pilot played by Manoj Kumar. Watch how he recoils; it’s like he’s been bitten by a cobra! (This lends credence to the belief that Kumar preferred not to get too close to women onscreen because Priapism and Patriotism don’t mix well.) Later he tells heroine Nanda not to drink alcohol because then she will be no different from Kitty (whose only fault, as far as we can see, has been to dance about in a swimsuit). This film was made before Kumar’s patriotic ventures, but he was already primed for a career in fending off the depraved westernised woman.
- From Kalyug aur Ramayan: In a case of inspired casting, Manoj Kumar plays a monkey in this latter-day film - a safari-suited modern-day incarnation of Hanuman-ji, returned to earth to check out what’s been happening since the Treta Yuga; are discos still in vogue, for example? During a prayer meeting a pandit alternatively shouts “Jai Shri Ram!” and “Jai Hanuman!”, but the Kumar character joins in the chorus only when the name of Lord Rama is being hailed (he does this by covering his face with one hand – presumably to conceal his orgiastic glee – and pumping the other fist in the air). When the cry of “Jai Hanuman!” goes up, he remains silent (he does this by covering his face with one hand – presumably to conceal his orgiastic humility – and keeping the other hand down). Because you see, being Hanuman himself, how can he participate in self-worship?
Perhaps the real-life Mr Bharat should have taken a cue from the above scene.
“Dogs produce pups, but a lioness delivers cubs.”(Manoj Kumar, when asked why he didn’t direct films more often)
Roger Ebert writes a letter to Werner Herzog:
You often say this modern world is starving for images. That the media pound the same paltry ideas into our heads time and again, and that we need to see around the edges or over the top. When you open “Encounters at the End of the World” by following a marine biologist under the ice floes of the South Pole, and listening to the alien sounds of the creatures who thrive there, you show me a place on my planet I did not know about, and I am richer. You are the most curious of men. You are like the storytellers of old, returning from far lands with spellbinding tales.
[...] you speak of “ecstatic truth,” of a truth beyond the merely factual, a truth that records not the real world but the world as we dream it.
[...] You have the audacity to believe that if you make a film about anything that interests you, it will interest us as well. And you have proven it.
Read the full piece.
(Earlier post on Herzog here)
It’s difficult to track exactly how one gravitates towards certain types of writing over a period of time (in some cases it’s a deliberate seeking out of genres/distinct writing styles, in others it’s a subconscious process, or even just serendipity), but it occurs to me that I’ve developed a certain affinity for Japanese fiction of late, and for some of the themes that run through it. As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’m a big Kazuo Ishiguro fan – I know he can’t really be called a Japanese writer (he’s lived in Britain since the age of five), but some of his work (notably The Unconsoled and A Pale View of Hills, my two favourites among his books) blurs the border between the real world and a dream-world in a way that I’ve now come to associate with much of Japanese writing.
One quality that runs through much of the Japanese fiction I’ve recently read is the juxtaposing of old-world mysticism with the banality of modern-day existence: the present in perpetual conflict with the past. It's a mistake, of course, to generalise too much about a national character, but a cursory look at Japanese pop culture in the last century suggest the ghosts of a complex past constantly shifting beneath the orderly modern face of the country. A not-very-subtle example is the Godzilla story, one of Japan's best-known contributions to 20th-century paranoia, wherein radiation from atom bombs results in the birth of a giant primordial lizard that then sets about wreaking vengeance on a metropolis. (As an allegory for primitive impulses clashing with the tenuous securities of modern life, the image of Godzilla weaving his way around Tokyo's skyscrapers is as striking as that of King Kong thumping his chest after scaling the Empire State Building.)
Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and An Artist of the Floating World and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle both touch on Japan's ambivalence about its past: feelings of guilt about the country's strident military history coexist with a nostalgic longing for a time when a distinct cultural identity had not yet been subsumed into a globalised world based on the Western model. This conflict is often expressed through slightly withdrawn, introspective protagonists whose reflections on the nature of the world take them across an invisible barrier and into a shadowy twilight zone where everything is uncertain. This is on view in most of Murakami’s fiction: in Dance Dance Dance, for instance, a typically passive narrator returns to the site of a tiny dump of a hotel he had once been to, and finds that in its place stands a "gleaming, 26-storey Bauhaus Modern-Art Deco symphony of glass and steel". Later, as the narrative turns increasingly bizarre, he discovers that the past is still alive in a hidden corner of this building. A weary creature called the Sheep Man – a relic from a lost age? – says to him, "Everything's getting more complicated. Everything's speeding up. So tell us, what's the world outside? We don't get much news in here." (Of course, this could be taking place inside the narrator's mind, but even that would suggest the atavistic impulses that lie buried in our subconscious – in the reptile brain, so to speak.)
Some of the manga I’ve read has explored these themes too, notably Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira series and the books of Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka's most popular work in India, for obvious reasons, is his eight-part series on the Buddha, which employs modern language and slang and cheeky visual gags in telling an old story, even while treating the holy man's life and teachings with respect. But I would also strongly recommend the medical thriller Ode to Kirihito, a poignant tale set in 1970s Japan about a strange disease that transforms people into dog-like beasts. In sophisticated hospitals, doctors struggle to understand the nature of this ailment in terms of modern science (while also taking part in elaborate corporate power struggles on the side), but the protagonist Dr Kirihito, himself afflicted by the disease, spends most of the story in the countryside, trying to come to terms with his own humanity and that of the other unfortunates (and assorted weirdos) he encounters. Needless to say, some very strange things happen in this book, but Tezuka presents them matter of factly, with all the rigour of realistic fiction.
The Ring cycle
Some of these thoughts resurfaced while I was reading Koji Suzuki’s Ring series, which presents many common motifs of Japanese fiction within the bounds of fast-paced thriller writing – making it a good entry point for someone who isn’t yet ready for literary fiction or interested in manga. Though Suzuki’s books have some of the limitations of genre fiction – occasionally clunky writing, sketchy characterisations, a reluctance to spend too much time on descriptions – they are solid page-turners that mix horror, sci-fi, scientific fact and medical gobbledygook with philosophical musings about the evolution and nature of life on our planet and the possible future of artificial intelligence. I also found them genuinely moving in places. Here’s a quick book-by-book primer:
Ringu (Ring)
When a reporter named Asakawa learns that four youngsters mysteriously died at exactly the same time, in separate places, of an inexplicable seizure, he begins a private investigation and discovers that they had stayed in the same mountain cabin exactly a week earlier. On finding and watching a videotape that the youngsters had viewed that night, Asakawa realises that his own life could be in danger. According to the tape, he has exactly a week to live; the word “deadline” suddenly acquires more sinister overtones than it ever did during his journalistic assignments.
With the help of an old high-school classmate, Ryuji Takayama, Asakawa finds that the tape was created by a woman named Sadako Yamamura, a long-dead psychic who is making some very innovative use of modern technology to facilitate her return to the world of the living. (Anyone familiar with the popular film versions of this book will know about the viscerally creepy scene of a pallid, zombie-like girl emerging from a montage of black-and-white images, slowly walking towards the very edge of the frame – towards the person viewing the tape – before crawling out of the screen and into the real world. The scene, strictly speaking, doesn't come from the novel, but it’s a nice visual encapsulation of Suzuki's ideas about the supernatural communing with modern technology.)
Rasen (Spiral)
Rasen is my personal favourite among the three books, and I think the English title is apt on more than one level: the seemingly straightforward events of the first book really do spiral out of control here. To begin with, there's an unusual shift in perspective. Without giving much away, the first book had ended with Asakawa still looking ahead to an uncertain future but convinced that he had at least tied together most of the loose ends concerning the videotape, Sadako and the Ring Virus. The second book begins its narrative around the point where the first left off, but Asakawa is no longer our point of entry into the story; instead, the central character is a man named Ando, a pathologist struggling with feelings of guilt about the accidental drowning of his little son. A series of events get Ando involved with the story of the videotape and we follow him as he gradually discovers things that we already know from having read Ring (well done, this can be a very suspenseful device – there are times when one wants to shout out that novel’s secrets to him). However, at the same time, we ourselves discover things that the first book didn’t tell us, and the effect is an unsettling one: by providing us a different narrator’s perspective to view events we thought we knew all about, Suzuki makes the familiar unfamiliar.
As it turns out, there was much more to the nature of the Ring virus than Asakawa and Ryuji had figured out. Spiral is more a medical thriller than the first book was, and it expands the scope of the original story: here, we learn that the very future of the human race might be at stake thanks to a rogue gene that has found a far more effective way to duplicate itself than the videotape could provide.
Rupu (Loop)
Despite many good moments, Loop is the least accessible of the three novels – especially because if you come to it immediately after racing through Ring and Spiral and hankering for more of the same, you won’t see how the story connects with the first two books. It isn’t until halfway through that we find out what the connection is, and even then it seems a little random and forced. Which means that to appreciate this book, you need to read it on its own terms.
This is an artificial-intelligence thriller that evokes Plato's Allegory of the Cave – it looks back to our past (raising questions about our genetic codes and the precise nature of evolution on the planet) and ahead to our future (with a Matrix-like exploration of virtual reality and the possibility that our understanding of the universe is as limited as that of the foetus in the womb, unable to guess at the nature of the outside world). The story, set in the near future, involves a young man named Kaoru, whose father, a medical researcher, had worked on a virtual reality project that replicated evolution on earth. The project had to be shelved years earlier, but now Kaoru’s father has fallen victim to a mysterious, hitherto unknown strain of cancer, which has started affecting living organisms everywhere. To understand this mystery, Kaoru must travel to the Mojave desert in America, where (SPOILER ALERT) he will have an encounter strongly reminiscent of the climactic scene in The Truman Show (it even involving a character named Cristoff, who plays God).
[Note: Rupu was first published in 1998, which was also the year in which The Truman Show was released; The Matrix was released in 1999. I'm not sure how the book could have been influenced by either of the films, or vice-versa.]
The jacket blurb on Ring tells us that “Suzuki blends Murakami with Stephen King”. This is an exaggerated claim (indeed, if you read the Independent review from where the blurb came, you’ll find that the original sentence has been shortened to sound more complimentary), but it’s true that at his best Suzuki touches the strengths of both writers. He has Murakami’s flair for the passive, withdrawn protagonist (notably Ando in Spiral and Kaoru in Loop) reflecting on the whimsies of our existence. And he has King’s ability to explore the dark undersides of seemingly normal lives within the constraints of genre fiction, and to create genuine, under-the-skin terror: for an example of this, read the heart-stopping (but also, in retrospect, saddening) passage where Ando explores a missing woman’s apartment in Spiral.
Related posts: Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and Never Let Me Go, Murakami's Norwegian Wood and After the Quake, Tezuka's Buddha series
[If anyone has ideas for other Japanese authors whose work I might find interesting, recommendations welcome]
At the A R Rahman concert in Rajouri Garden last night: after one song had ended and before the next began, the maestro walked to the edge of the stage, gave an admonishing look to the audience and said in a very strained voice, “Please do stop taking videos with your cellphones and cameras. The next thing we know, you’ll be putting these videos up on YouTube. The exclusive rights for this show are with [such-and-such channel], so kindly cooperate. Thank you.”
Then he walked back to the side of the stage where he’d been standing at what we thought was a keyboard – but clearly he’d been surfing the net all along, checking YouTube updates.
Jokes aside, I understand the position Rahman is in (as an artiste with copyright issues to deal with in the problematic age of the Internet, and probably facing pressure from his corporate partners) and why he needed to give that warning. But something about the incident – the slightly grouchier-than-necessary tone and the way it disrupted the flow of the proceedings (we were looking forward to the next song, and after this tear in the curtain between the performer and the audience it took us some time to get back into the zone) – made it representative of the show for me. The concert was good on the whole, but it wasn’t spectacular. Something was missing, the vital connect between the star and his audience that live-music buffs sometimes call The Vibe. Rahman looked a little bored and distanced at times, and I’m not sure this could be put down to his natural introversion; he seemed not to be entirely satisfied about something. (He did cheer up towards the end, though maybe that was because the show was ending!)
Also, there was a coordination problem in some of the group numbers – some members of the troupe, Aslam Khan for instance, didn’t appear to be in sync with the others. The songs – all very good in their own right, of course – came and went randomly and there wasn’t much of an effort to maintain a flow from one to the next; the conclusion of nearly every number was followed by a 30-40-second pause while the musicians prepared for the next. (This was in stark contrast to the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy show at Qutab last year.) There also wasn’t much of an effort to extract maximum mileage out of the songs that are obvious crowd-pleasers: for instance, “Paathshala” (from Rang de Basanti) came and went in the blink of an eye, and so did “Chaiya Chaiya”. (Personally speaking, I was divided between relief that everyone around me wasn’t waving their arms around and leaping up and down – very phobic about these situations – and the feeling that things were a little too subdued. I know Rahman’s best work is more the grow-on-you variety than S-E-L’s instant-appeal chartbusters, but some attempt at a buildup would have been nice.)
Anyway, some of the good things now: a great solo performance by percussionist Sivamani, some excellent singing by Hariharan, K S Chithra, Sadhana Sargam, Kailash Kher and Neeti Mohan (a relatively new member of the Rahman troupe), and Rahman’s own rendition of the rousing orchestra piece from the Guru soundtrack, “Jaage Hain”. (Though his oeuvre is too large and varied for him to fit all his career highlights into a three-hour-show, I did miss one of my all-time favourites, “Ae Ajnabi” from Dil Se.) Also, the visuals on the screen in the centre of the stage were consistently freaky: a montage of sinister-looking flowers opening and closing their buds as if to devour any living being that got within reach, a goofy silent-movie scene of a couple necking ardently (when the romantic songs played), sundry other colourful things.
P.S. We were in two minds about going for the concert – it meant a one-and-a-half hour trip each way at a time of year when Delhi’s traffic is worse than usual, and these shows are often chaotic affairs, even if you have what are amusingly referred to as “VIP passes” (once the show is in full sway and people start standing up and moving around, any privileges that come with a Rs 5,000 ticket as opposed to a Rs 500 one quickly disappear – must have something to do with music being a great leveller). But once we’d made up our minds, we decided to do the Delhi Metro thing. Parked the car at Connaught Place, took the train to Rajouri Garden. It was very pleasing to see the well-maintained underground station; could even appreciate the cliche often used by Metro-travellers about the experience making them “feel proud of the city”. Also chuckled at the London Tube-style “Mind the Gap” and the recurring warnings to keep away from the doors. All we need now is posters of Phantom of the Opera and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
P.P.S. Gobsmacking sentence of the day, uttered by rapper Blaaze after Rahman performed “Pray for me Brother”, the proceeds from which are going to charity:
“Poverty has no colour. We have to colour poverty and make it extinct.”
Earlier today, a sudden epiphany made clear to me the purpose behind Tusshar Kapoor’s seemingly pointless existence. The answer lies buried in an old folk-tale I read in an Amar Chitra Katha long years ago.
I don’t remember all the details but here’s the gist of the story. A fisherman and his young son supplement their daily living by rowing groups of people from one bank of the river to the other. For some reason – overcharging, probably – the customers resent the fisherman and speak badly of him behind his back. The son is deeply disturbed by this criticism and takes it upon himself to improve his father’s image. This he does by redirecting the censure to himself: when he gets to man the boat alone for a few days (because his dad is indisposed), he behaves obnoxiously with the travellers, pushes a few elderly people into the water and such. Soon the customers are cursing the son instead, and praying for the father’s quick return.
Moral of the story: it falls to children to redeem their parents’ reputations, even if they do this at the cost of their own.
Hence Tusshar Kapoor. The man is so gut-churningly dreadful in everything he does (onscreen, at least) that it becomes possible for us to retrospectively appreciate the brilliance of Jeetendra’s career – something we could never do at the time. The dancing on giant pots with Sridevi? The badminton song in Humjoli? The short skirt in Nagin? The white shoes? Even the pencil moustache? All of it looks like High Art now.
See, this is another reason why people have children, and why they get so sensitive about the subject. We should all have Tusshar Kapoors.
[Earlier posts involving Jeetendra’s films and progeny: Dharam-Veer, Nagin/Jaani Dushman, The Turning Brain, Ekta Kapoor’s soaps]
From an unidentified commentator on DD National after one of Sachin's cover drives in the Gwalior ODI:
"Sheer pottery in motion!"
(And no, this doesn't mean I've started watching cricket again. But I did see just enough of Sachin's innings to make it a very good day, with two of my favourite sportsmen doing very well: the other was Nadal, who played a superb match against Novak Djokovic at the year-end Shanghai Masters.
Tip for moderately enthusiastic tennis fans who think Grand Slams are the only things that matter but would like to expand their horizons: this is a good time to catch up with the men's game, which has suddenly become very interesting. The likes of Djokovic, Andy Murray and the two Davids, Ferrer and Nalbandian, are challenging the duopoly at the top, which means we might see a time very soon - hopefully within the next 2-3 years - when a Grand Slam is actually won by someone not named Federer or Nadal.)
...Koji Suzuki’s “Ring” novels, the English translations of which are now available in Indian bookstores: Ringu (Ring), Rasen (Spiral) and Rupu (Loop). Even if you’re familiar with the basic Ring story through the Japanese and American movie versions, these books are worth reading – very fast-paced, though they cover a much wider canvas than the films do, mixing horror, science-fiction, medical and evolutionary science with philosophical musings about the origin and nature of life on our planet, and the possible future of artificial intelligence. The first two books are particularly good and make for solid back-to-back reading, with some fine examples of the sort of horror that gradually creeps up on you and gets under your skin. (As someone put it once, a good horror film has a natural, visceral advantage over a good horror novel, because “no one ever jumped out of their chair and screamed while reading a book”. True enough, but a couple of passages in Spiral brought me closer than I’ve ever been to not wanting to turn the page to see what comes next.)
Loop has its moments but it meanders and makes what feels like a random connection with the events related in the earlier novels: it’s more like a combination of The Truman Show and The Matrix than a solid horror/suspense page-turner. But you probably won’t be able to stop yourself from reading it if you like the first two books.
Will do a detailed review of the trilogy soon.
[Lots of messy, off-tangent notes on a messy, off-tangent film]
Disclaimer first: despite just having written a review for Tehelka, I’m well aware that reviewing this film as a “should you or shouldn’t you watch it” index is just as pointless as reviewing the last Harry Potter book. Regardless of what anyone writes about it, Om Shanti Om has a readymade audience: Shah Rukh Khan’s pre-release claim that this Diwali would be his was more a knowing, matter-of-fact statement than a pompous one. I watched OSO with my wife and mother, neither of whom is particularly discerning when it comes to Hindi movies. Both of them agreed that stretches of the film, especially in the second half, were very dull; and yet each of them has told her friends that “it’s a film you have to see at least once”. Doubtless millions of other movie-buffs around the country will do the same. In this context, Farah Khan’s observation that critics are idiots is spot-on – but of course that isn’t going to stop me from writing this post, so here goes:
The SRK Factor: OSO has been touted as an affectionate tribute to/parody of 1970s Bollywood, but what the pre-publicity didn’t tell us was that it’s just as much a tribute to/parody of the present-day film industry. And who better to headline such a project than that industry’s biggest star? This movie is simultaneously a massive ego project for Shah Rukh Khan – one that will prove he can make just about anything work at the box-office – and an opportunity for him to send up the Bollywood he lords over, even make digs at the roles that got him where he is today. In the second half, when junior artiste Om Prakash is reincarnated as Om Kapoor, reigning superstar, he wins Filmfare Awards with monotonous regularity but everyone in the industry still loves him; all the big names gather and dance at a post-award party in his honour. Hell, he could be Shah Rukh Khan for all you know – except that Om is a privileged star-son, which is possibly a dig at some of the other leading men in the industry.
If you’ve never personally connected with SRK’s screen persona, it’s easy to be contemptuous of his success, to dismiss him as a ham with the same set of mannerisms recycled in film after film. But that personality, complete with all those mannerisms, has struck an immediate chord with millions of Indian filmgoers, and there’s no dismissing the strength of such star-audience synergy – it’s as old as cinema itself. In films like Swades and Chak De India, SRK has shown (as if for the record) that he really can “act” (in the more rigorously – and, in my view, narrowly – defined sense of that word) when he wants to. But that’s not what he’s really interested in. In Om Shanti Om he does what he does best: playing to the masses, chewing up the scenery (in fact, in one funny scene where his character is struck wordless by the beautiful Shantipriya, the phrase “chewing up the scenery” is an apt description of his facial contortions). And there’s little doubt that all this will work for the film.
“Fun film”? “Masala entertainer”? Uh-huh. “Convenient labelling”
Farah Khan’s attitude to movie-making is summed up in the scene where a camera assistant goes on about how a particular shot has been set up according to the “Bimal Roy angle”, the “Satyajit Ray angle” and the “Guru Dutt angle”, and then someone snaps “Don’t forget the Manmohan Desai angle” in a tone that suggests that’s the only angle that really matters. Khan has made no secret of her admiration for the wholehearted entertainers made by the likes of Desai and Subhash Ghai (even though a ghostly twist at the end of this film comes from Bimal Roy’s Madhumati). She does inverse-snobbery with more gusto and good-naturedness than anyone else – though you have to remember that inverse snobbery of this sort goes with the self-serving idea that it isn’t possible for someone to be genuinely entertained by a Satyajit Ray or Guru Dutt film; that people who claim to enjoy those movies are either fooling themselves or have wasted too much time in film school.
And so, one problem with Om Shanti Om is that it’s the sort of film that comes with a contrived, inbuilt defence mechanism: it’s insulated against criticism because, you see, it’s supposed to be a “masala entertainer” – in other words, if you don’t like it, that means you’re a square or a pseudo-intellectual. But this is hardly fair, for there are good masala films, mediocre masala films and bad masala films. I have a lot of fondness for movies that do the fun stuff well, that don’t give a whiff about “plot” and focus on execution instead (“It doesn’t have a proper story” is a close second to “all style, no substance” in my personal list of most irritating lines spoken in film discussions). Also, I’m a *gasp* Shah Rukh fan. And yet, OSO didn’t quite work for me.
To label something as a “fun film” simply because it has feel-good moments where we get to see big-name stars dance with each other, make sporting jibes at each other, do the “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” thing (which is what SRK and Govinda literally do to each other during their little jig in the “Deewangi” song) – in short, ostentatiously have “fun” under Khan’s large-hearted direction – is to greatly simplify the definition. Even for someone who’s genuinely affectionate about mainstream Hindi cinema, it’s possible to see that there are times when everyone is trying a little too hard to enjoy themselves (and to make sure the viewer does too). Or that the Filmfare Award scene here, despite a hilarious Akshay Kumar moment, isn’t as engaging as a similar scene at the beginning of Jaan-e-Mann. Or that the ensemble song is longer than it needed to be and could have done with more discernment in its choice of guest stars and pairings. (Personally, given that this scene had to be done at all, I would have enjoyed a shot of Dharam paaji shaking his booty with Shabana Azmi; now there’s the pair of my dreams!)
And in its worse moments (that is, when the reincarnated Om Kapoor recalls his past life and the film promptly forgets its pre-interval breeziness and starts taking its non-plot seriously), Om Shanti Om is every bit as boring and “not fun” as one imagines the typical art-house film would be to Farah Khan’s sensibilities. (Back to my old rule: any good film is a “fun” film, whether it’s made by Manmohan Desai or Ingmar Bergman.) The second half is leaden, forced and carries on endlessly: the one good thing about the dramatic scenes involving the murder-reincarnation is that they give Deepika Padukone a chance to show her acting chomps, which are impressive for a newcomer.
Of course, for the true-blue Bollywood lover, there’s much to enjoy. There’s a hilarious scene with Shah Rukh as Quick Gun Murugan, battling a stuffed tiger: you have to be soul-dead (note how I’m doing the inverse-snobbery thing now!) if you don’t crack up when he goes “naati pussy”. In the first half, there are hits and misfires cluttered together in nearly every scene. And I enjoyed the tribute to the “little person” in the movie-making process, especially the charming end credits sequence where everyone involved in the making of this film, down to the spotboys, gets to walk the red carpet – though Farah Khan’s showing up in an auto-rickshaw at the end of the credits is just a bit of faux-modest showboating.
But I do hope this film is the last of its kind for some time to come. The Hindi-film industry is often a self-indulgent, incestuous mess (everyone – except for Aamir Khan – is part of one big happy family that squabbles and makes up with equal felicity; everyone makes friendly appearances in everyone else’s films and on TV talent shows; even movie titles are derived from songs in earlier films) and Om Shanti Om spoofs this phenomenon reasonably well (while simultaneously being part of it), but you have to think the self-referencing has reached a saturation point. Despite my affection for Old and New Bollywood, this is about as much back-patting as I can stand.
P.S. A small defence of an aspect of OSO which had drawn negative reactions long before the movie was even released: Shah Rukh’s six-pack-abs. When the first publicity photos of his new bod appeared in print a few weeks ago, I was as put off as most people were. But watch the scene in context (in the “Dard-e-Disco” song) and you’ll see that at least part of the point is that you’re meant to be put off; this isn’t so much Shah Rukh showing us a side of himself that we’ve never seen before (and never wanted to see), it’s more a commentary on the emaciated “sex appeal” of the modern male star. (Contrast the physique of the hot young star Om Kapoor – the role SRK plays in the second half – with the stock footage of a bare-chested Sunil Dutt in the 1977 sequences. Hell, even an established macho man like Dharmendra never sported this “all muscle, no fat” look in those days.)
P.P.S. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Farah Khan got Shabana Azmi (playing herself, naturally) to say “This [Filmfare Award] ceremony is being held on land where a slum was destroyed, so I’m only here to protest”.
[Did a shorter version of this for the Sunday Business Standard]
The first thing I see on entering Kishwar Desai’s Safdarjung Enclave house is a Mother India poster on the wall facing the door: the still of Nargis carrying a plough, the weight of the world seemingly on her shoulders. (Apropos of nothing, I suddenly remember that Mother India was released in the year – 1957 – that Atlas Shrugged was published.) Kishwar herself is sitting at a table, signing copies of her book Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt – copies that are to be sent to Mumbai for Namrata, Priya and Sanjay Dutt, the children of this book’s subjects – and her expression suggests that a massive weight has been lifted off her back. “Signing copies is such a relief,” she smiles, “it’s a constant reminder that the hard work is behind me – that the book is out and I don’t have to think about it any more.”
Kishwar had long thought about doing a Nargis biography but began seriously discussing the project with her husband, the economist-politician Lord Meghnad Desai (also a film buff, author of Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India), only a couple of years ago. During her research, she realised that the most gripping parts of the story didn’t belong to Nargis alone: this had to be a book about the actress’s relationship with Sunil Dutt, whom she famously fell in love with after he rescued her from a fire on the Mother India sets and whom she was married to for over 20 years, until cancer ended her life in 1981.
In the movie buff’s imagination, Nargis remains inextricably linked with Raj Kapoor, being the leading lady and Muse in his seminal early films, involved with him in real life, even immortalised in the “RK Studios” logo, which was based on their famous clinch for a publicity still for Barsaat. But in Kishwar’s view, the real love story, the one that got short shrift, was the one between Nargis and Dutt. “Nobody played their story up, which was so unfair – I felt people hadn’t appreciated Sunil Dutt enough, because he was such a low-key, unassuming man. I wanted to show that this was the real couple.”
She was helped immeasurably by all the written material left behind by the Dutts, which Namrata and Priya allowed her to access after Sunil’s death in 2005. “Nargis used to write every day, and very eloquently too,” says Kishwar. “Her journals were a treasure-house for any biographer – there was just so much in there.” Darlingji is full of transcriptions of this material: from the letters written by Nargis and Sunil to each other (with the use of endearments such as “Pia” and “Hey There”, “Elvis Presley” and “Marilyn Monroe” and, of course, “Darlingji”) to a diary maintained by Nargis for the one-year-old Sanjay, written as if in his own hand (“Today I traveled with my mother to Madras in an aeroplane – I was crawling all over the place and the hostess took me into the cockpit but I was soon sent back as I was becoming inquisitive and wanted to operate the plane myself”).
And Kishwar’s favourite, a short piece Nargis wrote for Filmfare, speaking of the Mother India fire as a cleansing rite of sorts, where she was reborn and became a different person. “Little wonder too,” says Kishwar, “She was in front of the camera since the age of 5 – she didn’t really have a childhood – and was playing adult roles at 14, when she wanted to study. It’s understandable that she was tired of this life by the late 1950s, and wanted some stability. It was also why she didn’t want her children to visit film studios while they were growing up.”
What emerges from this wealth of primary material is the portrait of a relationship that began on shaky ground but eventually became a standard for love, respect and stability. “To my mind, the Nargis-Sunil Dutt story is in many ways a template for two people getting into a relationship, especially if they are from different backgrounds,” Kishwar says, pointing out that the year before they got married was an extremely difficult time. For starters, they had to keep their relationship under wraps until after Mother India released, because they had played mother and son in the film. Dutt was from a relatively conservative background while Nargis was a liberated, cosmopolitan woman who “swore like a trooper” (it’s possible to liken her to Katharine Hepburn in 1930s Hollywood), and he felt insecure because she was a much bigger star than him: “Though a very decent man, and progressive in his own way, he was after all from a patriarchal background and it must have pinched.” The widely circulated gossip about her affair with Kapoor caused further tension during this delicate phase – and yet, as Kishwar points out, “Despite all the difficulties, the two of them never stopped communicating with each other, never stopped talking. Instead of problems surfacing after they got married, they resolved all their differences beforehand. As a result, by the time they settled down, they were completely secure.”
Traces still remain in Darlingji of the Nargis biography that was originally planned: some of the book’s most involving sections are the early chapters that deal with the lives of her grandmother Dilipa Devi (widowed at thirteen, she defied her orthodox Brahmin community by eloping with a Muslim sarangi player) and mother Jaddanbai (a fine singer, a practitioner of the Benarsi thumri, who also had a controversial personal life before settling down in Bombay and producing/acting in some of the early “talking pictures”). The trajectories of these lives and how they led to Jaddanbai’s little daughter joining Hindi films as Baby Rani (years before she attained stardom) tell us a lot about what made Nargis the person she was, but they also provide glimpses into Hindi cinema’s early years. “Women like Jaddanbai were true pioneers who paved the way for other women to enter this profession,” says Kishwar, “I also think it was such a dynamic time. So many of the early women artistes were Muslim – there were many Anglo-Indians working in the industry, there was a German-Italian co-production, Himanshu Rai was releasing films in London. Many different communities worked together; it was only once Partition took place that people became chary about identities.”
Her fascination with the period reflects in the projects she is currently working on: a biography of writer Saadat Hasan Manto, the script for Shyam Benegal’s film about the life of British spy Noor Inayat Khan, another book about Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai. “I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with the 1930s and 1940s,” she laughs. “Maybe because my husband is a 1950s fan, I’ve decided to go back even earlier in time!”
"We haven’t taken cinema seriously,” she says, reflecting on the lack of high-quality biographies and film books in India, “and this will become a real problem as we go along. We need to archive more – every copy of every film ever made should go to the National Archives. And we need books. A filmmaker like Raj Kapoor, for instance, should have had so many good books written on him, from different perspectives. Yet there’s almost nothing of worth. I hope that changes soon.” Darlingji, an elegantly written, well-researched memoir, is a small step in the right direction.
For the past week, our letterbox has been clinging feebly to the building wall, its sides twisted out of shape and blown outward, the flap dangling at an odd angle, the interiors clearly visible. From a certain perspective, especially at twilight, it looks aesthetic – a possible entry for an abstract-art exhibition under the title “Yawning Steel Maw Contemplates the Futility of Life” – but it’s no longer equipped to do what it was built for, so we’ll have to junk it and get a new one.
And all because late one night, some ruffian stuck a little bomb inside and then stood back watching as the thing exploded. This happens every year around the same time, and since the sound is always loud enough to make us spring up horizontally from our beds at 3 AM, we have come to see it as our annual Diwali wake-up call. Halloween has nothing on our Festival of Frights.
Diwali is said to mark Lord Rama’s return to Ayodhya after his long forest-exile and victory over Ravana, and in keeping with tradition I spend my nights dreaming disjointed dreams about the missing letterboxes and postal misadventures that played a key but unrecorded role in Valmiki's epic. For example, the following little-known scene:
Flashback The Lankan monarch Ravana trembles to learn that an army of monkeys, bears and squirrels is marching towards his palace, growling and chirruping with great ferocity. Even worse, Ramanand Sagar is outside with a video-camera.
Ravana: Vibheeshana, what’s all this? Didn’t Rama get my note?
Vibheeshana: What note was that, bhaiya?
Ravana: The one where I told him Sita was being too querulous to have a decent conversation with and could he please send someone to collect her at the earliest.
Vibheeshana: Bhaiya, my spies tell me that some of the monkeys were playing around with firecrackers. They blew up Rama’s letterbox with the note still inside, so he never got to see it.
Ravana: What! Why wasn’t I told about this earlier?
Vibheeshana: I sent you a telegram as soon as I heard. Didn’t you get it?
(In the background, unseen by Ravana and his brother, two courtiers from the Lanka postal department exchange glances and giggle. Outside, war-cries, conch sounds and lugubrious tunes from the Sagar TV music factory can be heard.)
Thus a needless (and, one has to say, boring) battle was fought.
Note: most of the above never would have happened in the first place if King Dasharatha had succeeded in sending Rama a letter recalling him from exile after just a few months - but unfortunately he couldn't because the devious Kaikeyi stole his notepad. Just as well, because this would have made the Ramayana shorter and less dramatic (not that it’s a very dramatic epic anyway, especially compared to this one).
But back to the present, and letterboxes aren’t the only things at risk in our colony at this time of year. In our makeshift parking lot last Diwali, I found an unmonitored child carefully placing an anaar just beneath my car. “But uncle,” the blossoming terrorist said when pressed for an explanation, “iss se aapki car helicopter ke jaise ban jayegi.” I clipped him on the ear and sent him off, but it was difficult to get much sleep for the rest of the night. Troubled dreams came again.
Flashback 2 In the final battle, as Rama draws closer, Ravana tries to make a getaway in the flying chariot he stole from his brother Kubera (who was the God of Wealth, so it’s okay, he could always buy another one). Valmiki’s original draft included the following exchange between Ravana and his charioteer, now forever lost to human knowledge:
Ravana (in growing desperation): why isn’t this chariot taking off, saarthi?
Charioteer: Maharaj, the engineer forgot to bring an anaar to light under it.
Ravana (as the first of Rama’s arrows finds its mark): Aarggh, my leftmost head! (Falls, vanquished)
Joyous monkey: Yay, now we can go back home and invent a new festival. Back to the bridge, quick, before someone decides to use it as an alternate trading route. And don’t forget the firecrackers – I hear Ayodhya is full of nice letterboxes.
